HTY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF HELENE V. CURR, 1927 JUSTIN MCCARTHY. A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. FROM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA TO THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880. By justin McCarthy, m.r A NEW EDITION WITH AN APPENDIX OF EVENTS TO THE END OF 1880. COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. NEW YORK: A. L. BURT, PUBLISHER. v.l ^ CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME PAGE I. The King is Dead ! Long Live the Queen ? 1 II. Statesmen and Parties 17 III. Canada and Lord Durham 31 IV. Science and Speed . . 52 V. Chartism 64 VI. Question de Jupons 81 VII. The Queen's Marriage, a 91 VIII. The Opium War 105 IX. Decline and fall of the Whig Ministry 117 X. Movements in toe Churches 131 XI. The Disasters of Cabul 143 XII. The Repeal Year 173 XIII. Peel's Adminstration 193 XIV. Free Trade and the League 200 XV. Famine Forces Peel's Hand „ 229 XVI. Mr. Disraeli 244 XVII. Famine, Commercial Trouble, and Foreign In- trigue 263 XVIII. Chartism and Young Ireland 278 XIX. Don Pacifico 304 XX. The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill 326 iv CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER PAGE XXI. The Exhibition in Hyde Park 344 XXII. Palmerston 356 XXIII. Birth of the Empire ; Death of "the Duke,".. 384 XXIV. Mr. Gladstone 408 XXV. The Eastern Question 417 XXVI. Where was Lord Palmerston ? 445 XXVII. The Invasion of the Crimea 468 XXVIII. The Close of the War 487 XXIX. The Literature of the Reign. First Survey. . 506 XXX. The Lorcha Arrow 541 XXXI. Transportation 556 XXXIL TheSepoy 568 XXXIII. The Hundredth Anniversary of Plassey 583 CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. CHAPTER PAGE XXXIV. CAWNPORE 1 XXXV. Reconquest 13 XXXVI. The End op " John Company" 22 XXXVII. The Orsini Bombs Explode in Paris and London 35 XXXVIII. " On the True Faith of a Christian " 52 XXXIX. The Ionian Islands 68 XL. The Tory Diogenes Rolling his Tub 76 XLI. The French Treaty and the Paper Duties 93 XLII. Troubles in the East 115 XLIII. The Civil War in America 130 XLIV. The Cruise of the Alabama 145 XLV. Palmerston's Last Victory 167 XLVI. Ebb and Flow 196 XLVII. The Death of Lord Palmerston 216 XLVIII. The New Government 228 LXIX. The Troubles in Jamaica 243 L. Driven Back across the Rubicon 261 LI. The Reform Agitation 276 LII. The Leap in the Dark 287 LIII. The Fenian Movement 305 LIV. Trades-Unions 325 LV. The Example of the New Dominion 345 LVI. "Bkgins wrni Soi. dan, knds with Pkkster John" 359 LVH. The Irish Church 375 LVIII. "IRISH [dkas" 391 LIX. " Reformation in a Flood" 411 iv CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME. CHAPTER PAGE LX. The Black Sea Clause: the Alabama Arbi- tration 434 LXI. The Tide on the Turn 452 LXII. The Fall of the Great Administration 468 LXIII. " Conservative Reaction" installed in office. 487 LXI V. The Eastern Question Again 503 LXV. The Congress of Berlin 524 LXVI. The Anti-Climax of Imperialism 542 LXVII. The Literature of the Reign: Second Survey 557 APPENDIX 584 INDEX 589 A History of our Own Times. CHAPTER I. THE KING IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! Before half-past two o'clock on the morning of June 20, 1837, William IV. was lying dead in Windsor Castle, while the messengers were already hurrying off to Kensing- ton Palace to bear to his successor her summons to the throne. The illness of the king had been but short, and at one time, even after it had been pronounced alarming, it seemed to take so hopeful a turn that the physicians began to think it would pass harmlessly away. But the king was an old man — was an old man even when he came to the throne, and when the dangerous symptoms again exhibited themselves, their warning was very soon followed by fulfill- ment. The death of King William may be fairly regarded as having closed an era of our history. With him, we may believe, ended the reign of personal government in England. William was indeed a constitutional king in more than mere name. He was to the best of his lights a faithful representative of the constitutional principle. He was as far in advance of his two predecessors in understanding and acceptance of the principle as his successor has proved her- self beyond him. Constitutional government has developed itself gradually, as everything else has done in English politics. The written principle and code of its system it would be as vain to look for as for the British constitution itself. King William still held to and exercised the right to dismiss his ministers when he pleased and because he pleased. His father had held to the right of maintaining favorite ministers in defiance of repeated votes of the House of Commons. It would not be easy to find any written rule or declaration of constitutional law pronounc- ing decisively that either was in the wrong. But in our 2 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. day we should believe that the constitutional freedom of England was outraged, or at least put in the extremest danger, if a sovereign were to dismiss a ministry at mere pleasure, or to retain it in despite of the expressed wish of the House of Commons. Virtually, therefore, there was still personal government in the reign of William IV. With his death the long chapter of its history came to an end. We find it difficult now to believe that it was a living principle, openly at work among us, if not openly acknowledged, so lately as in the reign of King William. The closing scenes of King William's life were undoubt- edly characterized by some personal dignity. As a rule, sovereigns show that they know how to die. Perhaps the necessary consequence of their training, by virtue of which they come to regard themselves always as the central figure in great state pageantry, is to make them assume a manner of dignity on all occasions when the eyes of their subjects may be supposed to be on them, even if the dignity of bear- ing is not the free gift of nature. The manners of William IV. had been, like those of most of his brothers, somewhat rough and overbearing. He had been an unmanageable naval officer. He had again and again disregarded or dis- obeyed orders, and at last it had been found convenient to withdraw him from active service altogether, and allow him to rise through the successive ranks of his profession by a merely formal and technical process of ascent. In his more private capacity he had, when younger, indulged more than once in unseemly and insufferable freaks of tem- per. He had made himself unpopular while Duke of Clar- ence by his strenuous opposition to some of the measures which were especially desired by all the enlightenment of the country. He was, for example, a determined opponent of the measures for the abolition of the slave trade. He had wrangled publicly, in open debate, with some of his brothers in the House of Lords; and words had been inter- changed among the royal princes which could not be heard in our day even in the hottest debates of the more turbu- lent House of Commons. But William seems to have been one of the men whom increased responsibility improves. He was far better as a king than as a prince. He proved that he was able at least to understand that first duty of a constitutional sovereign which, to the last day of his active life, his father, George III., never could be brought to com- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 3 prehend — that the personal predilections and prejudices of the king must sometimes give way to the public interest. Nothing perhaps in life became him like to the leaving of it. His closing days were marked by gentleness and kindly consideration for the feelings of those around him. When he awoke on June 18 he remembered that it was the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. He expressed a strong, pathetic wish to live over that day, even if he were never to see another sunset. He called for the flag which the Duke of Wellington always sent him on that anniver- sary in homage for Strathfleldsaye, and he laid his hand upon the eagle which adorned it and said he felt revived by the touch. He had himself attended since his accession the Waterloo banquet; but this time the Duke of Welling- ton thought it would perhaps be more seemly to have the dinner put off, and sent accordingly to take the wishes of his majesty. The king declared that the dinner must go on as usual, and sent to the duke a friendly, simple mes- sage, expressing his hope that the guests might have a pleasant day. He talked in his homely way to those about him, his direct language seeming to acquire a sort of tragic dignity from the approach of the death that was so near. He had prayers read to him again and again, and called those near him to witness that he had always been a faith- ful believer in the truths of religion. He had his despatch- boxes brought to him, and tried to get through some busi- ness with his private secretary. It was remarked with some interest that the last official act he ever performed was to sign with his trembling hand the pardon of a con- demned criminal. Even a far nobler reign than "his would have received new dignity if it closed with a deed of mercy. When some of those around him endeavored to encourage him with the idea that he might recover and live many years yet, he declared, with a simplicity which had some- thing oddly pathetic in it, that he would be willing to live ten years yet for the sake of the country. The poor king was evidently under the sincere conviction that England could hardly get on without him. His consideration for his country, whatever whimsical thoughts it may suggest, is entitled to some at least of the respect which \vc give to the dying groan of a Pitt or a Mirabeau, who fears, with too much reason, that he leaves a blank nut easily to he filled. "Young royal tarry-brecks," William had been joe- 4 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. rilarly called by Robert Burns fifty years before, when there was yet a popular belief that he would come all right and do brilliant and gallant things, and become a stout sailor in whom a seafaring nation might feel pride. He disap- pointed all such expectations; but it must be owned that when responsibility came upon him he disappointed expec- tation anew in a different way, and was a better sovereign, more deserving of the complimentary title of patriot-king, than even his friends would have ventured to anticipate. There were eulogies pronounced upon him after his death in both Houses of Parliament as a matter of course. It is not necessary, however, to set down to mere court homage or parliamentary form some of the praises that were bestowed on the dead king by Lord Melbourne and Lord Brougham and Lord Grey. A certain tone of sincerity, not quite free perhaps from surprise, appears to run through some of these expressions of admiration. They seem to say that the speakers were at one time or another considerably surprised to find that, after all, William really was able and willing on grave occasions to subordinate his personal likings and dislikings to considerations of state policy and to what was shown to him to be for the good of the nation. In this sense at least he may be called a patriot-king. AVe have advanced a good deal since that time, and we require somewhat higher and more positive qualities in a sovereign now to excite our political wonder. But we must judge William by the reigns that went before, and not the reign that came after him; and, with that con- sideration borne in mind, we may accept the panegyric of Lord Melbourne and of Lord Grey, and admit that on the whole he was better than his education, his early oppor- tunities, and his early promise. William IV. (third son of George III.) had left no chil- dren who could have succeeded to the throne, and the crown passed therefore to the daughter of his brother (fourth son of George), the Duke of Kent. This was the Princess Alexandrina Victoria, who was born at Kensington Palace • on May 24, 1819. The princess was therefore at this time little more than eighteen years of age. The Duke of Kent died a few months after the birth of his daughter, and the child was brought up under the care of his widow. She was well brought up; both as regards her intellect and her character her training was excellent. She was taught to be self-reliant, brave, and systematical. Prudence and A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 5 economy were inculcated on her as though she had been born to be poor. One is not generally inclined to attach much importance to what historians tell us of the education of contemporary princes or princesses; but it cannot be doubted that the Princess Victoria was trained for intelli- gence and goodness. " The death of the king of England has everywhere caused the greatest sensation. . . . Cousin Victoria is said to have shown astonishing self-possession. She under- takes a heavy responsibility, especially at the present mo- ment, when parties are so excited, and all rest their hopes on her." These words are an extract from a letter written on July 4, 1837, by the late Prince Albert, the prince consort of so many happy years. The letter was written to the prince's father, from Bonn. The young queen had indeed behaved with remarkable self-possession. There is a pretty description, which has been often quoted, but will bear citing once more, given by Miss Wynn of the manner in which the young sovereign received the news of her accession to a throne. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Howley, and the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquis of Conyngham, left Windsor for Kensington Palace, where the Princess Victoria had been residing, to inform her of the king's death. It was two hours after midnight when they started, and they did not reach Kensington until five o'clock in the morn- ing. " They knocked, they rang, they thumped for a con- siderable time before they could rouse the porter at the gate; they were again kept waiting in the courtyard, then turned into one of the lower rooms, where they seemed forgotten by everybody. They rang the bell, and desired that the attendant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform her royal highness that they requested an audi- ence on business of importance. After another delay, and another ringing to inquire the cause, the attendant was summoned, who stated that the princess was in such a sweet sleep that she could not venture to disturb her. Then they said, 'We are come on business of state to the queen, and even her sleep must give way to that.' It did; and to prove that she did not keep them waiting, in a few minutes she came into the room in a loose white nightgown and shawl, her nightcap thrown off, and her hair falling upon her shoulders, her feet in slippers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected and dignified." The Prime Minis- 6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ter, Lord Melbourne, was presently sent for, and a meeting of the privy council summoned for eleven o'clock, when the lord chancellor administered the usual oaths to the queen, and her majesty received in return the oaths of allegiance of the cabinet ministers and other privy coun- cillors present. Mr. Greville, who was usually as little dis- posed to record any enthusiastic admiration of royalty and royal personages as Humboldt or Varnhagen von Ense could have been, has described the scene in words well worthy of quotation. " The king died at twenty minutes after two yesterday morning, and the young queen met the council at Ken- sington Palace at eleven. Never was anything like the first impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which it raised about her manner and behavior; and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordin- ary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to see how she would act on this trying occasion, and there was a considerable assemblage at the palace, notwith- standing the short notice which was given. The first thing to be done was to teach her her lesson, which for this pur- pose Melbourne had himself to learn. . . . She bowed to the lords, took her seat, and then read her speech in a clear, distinct, and audible voice, and Avithout any appear- ance of fear or embarrassment. She was quite plainly dressed, and in mourning. After she had read her sjaeech, and taken and signed the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, the privy councillors were sworn, the two royal dukes first by themselves; and as these two old men, her uncles, knelt before her, swearing allegiance and kissing her hand, I saw lrer blush up to the eyes, as if she felt the contrast between their civil and their natural relations, and this was the only sign of emotion which she evinced. Her manner to them was very graceful and engaging; she kissed them both, and rose from her chair and moved toward the Duke of Sussex, who was farthest from her, and too infirm to reach her. She seemed rather bewildered at the multi- tude of men who were sworn, and who came, one after another, to kiss her hand, but she did not speak to anybody, nor did she make the slightest difference in her manner, or show any in her countenance, to any individual of any A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. rank, station or party. I particularly watched her when Melbourne and the ministers, and the Duke of Wellington and Peel approached her. She went through the whole ceremony, occasionally looking at Melbourne for instruc- tion when she had any doubt what to do, which hardly ever occurred, and with perfect calmness and self-possession, but at the same time with a graceful modesty and propriety particularly interesting and ingratiating." Sir Robert Peel told Mr. Greville that he was amazed at "her manner and behavior, at her apparent deep sense of her situation, and at the same time her firmness." The Duke of Wellington said in his blunt way that if she had been his own daughter he could not have desired to see her perform her part better. "At twelve," says Mr. Gre- ville, "she held a council, at which she presided with as much ease as if she had been doing nothing else all her life; and though Lord Lansdowne and my colleague had con- trived between them to make some confusion with the council papers, she was not put out by it. She looked very well; and though so small in stature, and without much pretension to beauty, the gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give her on the whole a very agreeable appearance, and with her youth inspire an excessive interest in all who approach her, and which I can't help feeling myself. . . In short, she appears to act with every sort of good taste and good feel- ings, as well as good sense ; and as far as it has gone nothing can be more favorable" than the impression she has made, and nothing can promise better than her manner and con- duct do; though," Mr. Greville somewhat superfluously adds, " it would be rash to count too confidently upon her judgment and discretion in more weighty matters." The interest or curiosity with which the demeanor of the young queen was watched was all the keener because the world in general knew so little about her. Not merely was the world in general thus ignorant, but even the states- men and officials in closest communication with court circles were in almost absolute ignorance. According to Mr. Greville, whose authority, however, is not to be taken too implicitly except as to matters which he actually saw, the young queen had been previously kept in such seclusion by her mother — "never," he says, "having slept out of her bedroom, nor been alone with anybody but herself and the 8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Biironess Lehzen" — that "not one of her acquaintance, none of the attendants at Kensington, not even the Duchess of Northumberland, her governess, have any idea what she is or what she promises to be." There was enough in the court of the two sovereigns who went before Queen Victoria to justify any strictness of seclusion which the Duchess of Kent might desire for her daughter. George IV. was a Charles II. without the education or the talents; William IV. was a Frederick William of Prussia without the genius. The ordinary manners of the society at the court of either had a full flavor, to put it in the softest way, such as a decent taproom would hardly exhibit in a time like the present. No one can read even the most favorable descrip- tions given by contemporaries of the manners of those two courts without feeling grateful to the Duchess of Kent for resolving that her daughter should see as little as possible of their ways and their company. It was remarked with some interest that the queen sub- scribed herself simply "Victoria," and not, as had been expected, "Alexandrina Victoria." Mr. Greville mentions in his diary of December 24, 1819, that "the Duke of Kent gave the name of Alexandrina to his daughter in compli- ment to the emperor of Russia. She was to have had the name of Georgiana, but the duke insisted upon Alexan- drina being her first name. The regent sent for Lieven" (the Russian ambassador, husband of the famous Princess de Lieven), "and made him a great many compliments, en le persiflant, on the emperor's, being godfather, but informed him that the name of Georgiana could be second to no other in this country, and therefore she could not bear it at all." It was a very wise choice to employ simply the name of Victoria, around which no ungenial associations of any kind hung at that time, and which can have only grateful associations in the history of this country for the future. It is not necessary to go into any formal description of the various ceremonials and pageantries which celebrated the accession of the new sovereign. The proclamation of the queen, her appearance for the first time on the throne in the House of Lords when she prorogued Parliament in person, and even the gorgeous festival of her coronation, which took place on June 28, in the following year, 1838, may be passed over with a mere word of record. It is A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 9 worth mentioning, however, that at the coronation proces- sion one of the most conspicions figures was that of Mar- shal Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, the opponent of Moore and Wellington in the Peninsula, the commander of the Old Guard at Liitzen, and one of the strong arms of Napoleon at Waterloo. Soult had been sent as ambassador extraordinary to represent the French government and people at the coronation of Queen Victoria, and nothing could exceed the enthusiasm with which he was received by the crowds in the streets of London on that day. The white-haired soldier was cheered wherever a glimpse of his face or figure could be caught. He appeared in the pro- cession in a carriage, the frame of which had been used on occasions of state by some of the princes of the house of Conde, and which Soult had had splendidly decorated for the ceremony of the coronation. Even the Austrian am- bassador, says an eye witness, attracted less attention than Soult, although the dress of the Austrian, Prince Ester- hazy, " down to his very boot heels sparkled with diamonds." The comparison savors now of the ridiculous, but is remark- ably expressive and effective. Prince Esterhazy's name in those days suggested nothing but diamonds. His diamonds may be said to glitter through all the light literature of the time. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wanted a com- parison with which to illustrate excessive splendor and brightness, she found it in "Governor Pitt's diamonds." Prince Esterhazy's served the same purpose for the writers of the early years of the present reign. It was therefore, perhaps, no very poor tribute to the stout old moustache of the republic and the empire to say that at a London pageant his war-worn face drew attention away from Prince Esterhazy's diamonds. Soult himself felt very warmly the genuine kindness of the reception given to him. Years after, in a debate in the French Chamber, when M. Guizot was accused of too much partiality for the English alliance, Marshal Soult declared himself a warm champion of that alliance. " I fought the English down to Toulouse,*' he said, "when I fired the last cannon in defense of the national independence; in the meantime 1 have been in London, and France knows the reception which I had there. The English themselves cried, 'Vive Soult!' — they cried, 'Soult for ever!' I had learned to estimate the English on the field of battle; I have learned to estimate them in peace; 10 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and I repeat that I am a warm partisan of the English alliance." History is not exclusively made by cabinets and professional diplomatists. It is highly probable that the cheers of a London crowd on the day of the queen's corona- tion did something genuine and substantial to restore the good feeling between this country and France, and efface the bitter memories of Waterloo. It is a fact well worthy of note amid whatever records of court ceremonial and of political change, that a few days after the accession of the queen, Mr. Montefiore was elected sheriff of London, the first Jew who had ever been chosen for that office; and that he received knighthood at the hands of her majesty when she visited the city on the fol- lowing Lord Mayor's day. He was the first Jew whom royalty had honored in this country since the good old times when royalty was pleased to borrow the Jew's money, or order instead the extraction of his teeth. The expansion of the principle of religious liberty and equality which has been one of the most remarkable characteristics of the reign of Queen Victoria, could hardly have been more becomingly inaugurated than by the compliment which sovereign and city paid to Sir Moses Montefiore. The first signature attached to the Act of Allegiance presented to the queen at Kensington Palace was that of her eldest surviving uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The fact may be taken as an excuse for introducing a few words here to record the severance that then took place between the interests of this country, or at least the reign- ing family of these realms, and another state, which had for a long time been bound up together in a manner seldom satisfactory to the English people. In the whole history of England it will be observed that few things have pro- voked greater popular dissatisfaction than the connection of a reigning family with the crown or rulership of some foreign state. There is an instinctive jealousy on such a point, which even when it is unreasonable is not unnatural. A sovereign of England had better be sovereign of England, and of no foreign state. Many favorable auspices attended the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne; some at least of these were associated with her sex. The country was in general disposed to think that the accession of a woman to the throne would somewhat clarify and purify the atmosphere of the court. It had another good effect as A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. \\ well, and one of a strictly political nature. It severed the connection which had existed for some generations between this country and Hanover. The connection was only per- sonal, the successive kings of England being also by suc- cession sovereigns of Hanover. The crown of Hanover was limited in its descent to the male line, and it passed on the death of William IV. to his eldest surviving brother, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The change was in almost every way satisfactory to the English people. The indirect connection between England and Hanover had at no time been a matter of gratification to the public of this country. Many cooler and more enlightened persons than honest Squire Western had viewed with disfavor, and at one time with distrust, the division of interests which the ownership of the two crowns seemed almost of necessity to create in our English sovereigns. Besides, it must be owned that the people of this country were not by any means sorry to be rid of the Duke of Cum- berland. Not many of George III.'s sons were popular; the Duke of Cumberland was probably the least popular of all. He was believed by many persons to have had some- thing more than an indirect, or passive, or innocent share in the Orange plot, discovered and exposed by Joseph Hume in 1835, for setting aside the claims of the young Princess Victoria and putting himself, the Duke of Cumberland, on the throne; a scheme which its authors pretended to justify by the preposterous assertion that they feared the Duke of Wellington would otherwise seize the crown for himself. His manners were rude, overbearing, and some- times even brutal. He had personal habits which seemed rather fitted for the days of Tiberius, or for the court of Peter the Great, than for the time and sphere to which he belonged. Rumor not unnaturally exaggerated his defects, and in the mouths of many his name was the symbol of the darkest and fiercest passionsand even crimes. Some of the popular reports with regard to him had their foundation only in the common detestation of his character and dread of his influence. But it is certain that he was profligate, selfish, overbearing and quarrelsome. ^ A man with these qualities would usually be described in fiction as, at all events, bluntly honest and outspoken; but the Duke of Cumberland was deceitful and treacherous. He was outspoken in his abuse of those with whom he quar 12 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. relied, and in his style of anecdote and jocular conversation; but in no other sense. The Duke of Wellington, whom he hated, told Mr. Greville that he once asked George IV. why the Duke of Cumberland was so unpopular, and the king replied, " Because there never was a father well with his son, or husband with his wife, or lover with his mis- tress, or friend with his friend, that he did not try to make mischief between them." The first thing he did on his accession to the throne of Hanover was to abrogate the constitution which had been agreed to by the estates of the kingdom, and sanctioned by the late king, William IV. "Radicalism," said the king, writing to an English noble- man, " has been here all the order of the day, and all the lower class appointed to office were more or less imbued with these laudable principles. . . . But I have cut the wings of this democracy." He went indeed pretty vigorously to work, for he dismissed from their offices seven of the most distinguished professors of the University of Gottingen, because they signed a protest against his arbi- trary abrogation of the constitution. Among the men thus pushed from their stools were — Gervinus, the celebrated historian and Shakespearian critic, at that time professor of history and literature; Ewald, the orientalist and theolo- gian; Jacob Grimm; and Frederick Dahlmann, professor of political science. Gervinus, Grimm and Dahlmann were not merely deprived of their offices, but were actually sent into exile. The exiles were accompanied across the frontier by an immense concourse of students, who gave them a triumphant Geleit in true student fashion, and converted what was meant for degradation and punishment into a procession of honor. The offense against all rational prin- ciples of civil government in these arbitrary proceedings on the part of the new king was the more flagrant because it could not even be pretended that the professors were inter- fering with political matters outside their province, or that they were issuing manifestoes calculated to disturb the public peace. The University of Gottingen at that time sent a representative to the estates of the kingdom, and the pro- test to which the seven professors attached their names was addressed to the academical senate, and simply declared that they would take no part in the ensuing election, because of the suspension of the constitution. All this led to some- what serious disturbances in Hanover, which it needed the employment of military force to suppress. A ItlSTOMT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 13 It was felt in England that the mere departure of the Duke of Cumberland from this country would have made the severance of the connection with Hanover desirable, even if it had not been in other ways an advantage to us. Later times have shown how much we have gained by the separation. It would have been exceedingly inconvenient, to say the least, if the crown worn by a sovereign of England had been hazarded in the war between Austria and Prussia in 1866. Our reigning family must have seemed to suffer in dignity, if that crown had been roughly knocked off the head of its wearer who happened to be an English sov- ereign; and it would have been absurd to expect that the English people could engage in a quarrel with which their interests and honor had absolutely nothing to do, for the sake of a mere family possession of their ruling house. Looking back from this distance of time and across a change of political and social manners far greater than the distance of time might seem to explain, it appears difficult to understand the passionate emotions which the accession of the young queen seems to have excited on all sides. Some influential and prominent politicians talked and wrote as if there were really a possibility of the Tories attempting a revolution in favor of the Hanoverian branch of the royal family; as if some such crisis had again come round as that which tried the nation when Queen Anne died. On the other hand, there were heard loud and shrill cries that the queen was destined to be conducted by her constitutional advisers into a precipitate pathway leading sheer down into popery and anarchy. The Times insisted that "the antic- ipations of certain Irish Roman Catholics respecting the success of their warfare against church and state under the auspices of these not untried ministers into whose hands the all but infant queen lias been compelled by her unhappy condition to deliver herself and her indignant people are to be taken for nothing, and as nothing, but the chimeras of a band of visionary traitors." The Times even thought it necessary to point out that for her majesty to turn papist, to marry a papist, "or in any manner follow the footsteps of the Coburg family whom these incendiaries describe as papists," would involve an "immediate forfeit- ure of the British crown." On the other hand, some of the Radical, and more especially Irish papers talked in the plainest terms of Tory plots to depose or even to assassinate 14 A msTOllY Oh' OUR OWN TIMES. the queen and put the Duke of Cumberland in her place. O'Connell, the great Irish agitator, declared in a public speech that if it were necessary he could get " five hundred thousand brave Irishmen to defend the life, the honor, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom England's throne is now filled." Mr. Henry Grattan, the son of the famous orator, and like his father a Protestant, declared at a meeting in Dublin, that "if her majesty were once fairly placed in the hands of the Tories, I would not give an orange peel for her life." He even went on to put his rhetorical declaration into a more distinct form ; "if some of the low miscreants of the party got round her majesty and had the mixing of the royal bowl at night, I fear she would have a long sleep." This language seems almost too absurd for sober record, and yet was hardly more absurd than many things said on what may be called the other side. A Mr. Bradshaw, Tory member for Canterbury, declared at a public meeting in that ancient city that the sheet-anchor of the Liberal Ministry was the body of " Irish papists and rapparees whom the priests return to the House of Commons." "These are the men who represent the bigoted savages, hardly more civilized than the natives of New Zealand, but animated with a fierce, undying hatred of England. Yet on these men are bestowed the counte- nance and support of the queen of Protestant England. For, alas ! her majesty is queen only of a faction, and is as much of a partisan as the lord chancellor himself." At a Conservative dinner in Lancashire, a speaker denounced the queen and her ministers on the same ground so vehem- ently, that the commander-in-chief addressed a remon- strance to some military officers who were among the guests at this excited banquet, pointing out to them the serious responsibility they incurred by remaining in any assembly when such language was uttered and such sentiments were expressed. No one, of course, would take impassioned and inflated harangues of this kind on either side as a representation of the general feeling. Sober persons all over the country must have known perfectly well that there was not the slightest fear that the young queen would turn a Roman Catholic, or that her ministry intended to deliver the coun- try up as a prey to Pome. Sober persons everywhere, too, must have known equally well that there was no longer A HISTORY OF OCR OWN TIMES. 15 the slightest cause to feel any alarm about a Tory plot to hand over the throne of England to the detested Duke of Cumberland. We only desire in quoting such outrageous declarations to make more clear the condition of the public mind, and to show what the state of the political world must have been when such extravagance and such delusions were possible. We have done this partly to show what were the trials and difficulties under which her majesty came to the throne, and partly for the mere purpose of illustrating the condition of the country and of political education. There can be no doubt that all over the country passion and ignorance were at work to make the task of constitutional government peculiarly difficult. A vast num- ber of the followers of the Tories in country places really believed that the Liberals were determined to hurry the sovereign into some policy tending to the degradation of the monarchy. If any cool and enlightened reasoner were to argue with them on this point and endeavor to convince them of the folly of ascribing such purposes to a number of English statesmen, whose interests, position, and honor were absolutely bound up with the success and the glory of the state, the indignant and unreasoning Tories would be able to cite the very words of so great and so sober-minded a statesman as Sir Robert Peel, who in his famous speech to the electors of Tamworth promised to rescue the consti- tution from being made the "victim of false friends," and the country from being " trampled under the hoof of a ruthless democracy." If, on the other hand, a sensible person were to try to persuade hot-headed people on the opposite side that it was absurd to suppose the Tories really meant any harm to the freedom and the peace of the coun- try and the security of the succession, he might be invited with significant expression to read the manifesto issued by Lord Durham to the electors of Sunderland, in which that eminent statesman declared that "in all circumstances, at all hazards, be the personal consequences what they may," he would ever be found ready Avhen called upon to defend the principles on which the constitution of the country was then settled. We know now very well that Sir Robert Peel and Lord Durham were using the language of innocent metaphor. Sir Robert Peel did not really fear much the hoof of the ruthless democracy; Lord Durham did not actually expect to be called upon at any terrible risk to 16 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. himself to fight the buttle of freedom on English soil. But when those whose minds had- been bewildered and whose passions had been inflamed by the language of the Times on the one side, and that of O'Connell on the other, came to read the calmer and yet sufficiently impassioned words of responsible statesmen like Sir Eobert Peel and Lord Durham, they might be excused if they found rather a confirmation than a refutation of their arguments and their fears. The truth is, that the country was in a very excited con- dition, and that it is easy to imagine a succession of events which might in a moment have thrown it into utter con- fusion. At home and abroad things were looking ominous for the new reign. To begin with, the last two reigns had, on .the whole, done much to loosen not only the personal feeling of allegiance, but even the general confidence in the virtue of monarchical rule. The old plan of personal gov- ernment had became an anomaly, and the system of a gen- uine constitutional government, such as we know, had not yet been tried. The very manner in which the Eeform Bill had been carried, the political stratagem which had been resorted to when further resistance seemed dangerous, was not likely to exalt in popular estimate the value of what was then gracefully called constitutional government. Only a short time before the country had seen Catholic emancipation conceded, not from a sense of justice on the part of ministers, but avowedly because further resistance must lead to civil disturbance. There was not much in all this to impress an intelligent and independent people with a sense of the great wisdom of the rulers of the coun- try, or of the indispensable advantages of the system which they represented. Social discontent prevailed almost every- where. Economic laws were hardly understood by the country in general. Class interests were fiercely arrayed against each other. The cause of each man's class filled him with a positive fanaticism. He was not a mere selfish and grasping partisan, but he sincerely believed that each other class was arrayed against his, and that the natural duty of self-defense and self-preservation compelled him to stand firmly by his own. A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 17 CHAPTER II. STATESMEN AND PARTIES. Lord Melbourne was the first minister of the crown when the queen succeeded to the throne. He was a man who then and always after made himself particularly dear to the queen, and for whom she had the strongest regard. He was of kindly, somewhat indolent nature; fair and even generous toward his political opponents; of the most genial disposition toward his friends. He was emphatically not a strong man. He was not a man to make good grow where it was not already growing, to adopt the expression of a great author. Long before that time his eccentric wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, had excused herself for some of her follies and frailties by pleading that her husband was not a man to watch over anyone's morals. He was a kindly counsellor to a young queen; and, happily for herself, the young queen in this case had strong clear sense enough of her own not to be absolutely dependent on any counsel. Lord Melbourne was not a statesman. His best qualities, personal kindness and good nature apart, were purely nega- tive. He was unfortunately not content even with the reputation for a sort of indolent good nature which he might have well deserved. He strove to make himself appear hopelessly idle, trivial, and careless. When he really was serious and earnest he seemed to make it his business to look like one in whom no human affairs could call up a gleam of interest. He became the fanfaron of levities which he never had. We have amusing pictures of him as he occupied himself in blowing a feather or nursing a sofa-cushion while receiving an important and perhaps highly sensitive deputation from this or that commercial "interest." Those who knew him insisted that he really was listening with all his might and main; that lie had sat up the whole night before, studying the question which he seemed to think so unworthy of any attention; and that so far from heing, like Horace, wholly absorbed in his trifles, he was at very greal pains to keep up the appearance of a trifler. A brilliant critic has made a lively and amus- ing attack on this alleged peculiarity. "If the truth must be told," says Sydney Smith, "our viscount is somewhat of an impostor. Everything about him seems to betoken 18 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. careless desolation; any one would suppose from his man- ner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with human hap- piness; that he was always on the heel of pastime; that he would giggle away the great charter, and decide by the method of teetotum whether my lords the bishops should or should not retain their seats in the House of Lords. All this is but the mere vanity of surprising, and making us believe that he can play with kingdoms as other men can with ninepins. . . I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings, and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gaiety he has reared; but I accuse our minister of honesty and diligence; I deny that he is careless or rash; he is nothing more than a man of good understanding and good_ principle, disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation of a political roue." Such a masquerading might perhaps have been excusable, or even attractive in the case of a man of really brilliant and commanding talents. Lookers-on are always rather apt to be fascinated by the spectacle of a man of well-recog- nized strength and force of character playing for the mo- ment the part of an indolent trifler. The contrast is charming in a brilliant Prince Hal or such a Sardanapalus as Byron drew. In our own time a considerable amount of the popularity of Lord Palmerston was inspired by the amusing antagonism between his assumed levity and his well-known force of intellect and strength of will. But in Lord Melbourne's case the affectation had no such excuse or happy effect. He was not by any means a Palmerston. He was only fitted to rule in the quietest times. He was a poor speaker, utterly unable to encounter the keen pene- trating criticisms of Lyndhurst or the vehement and remorseless invectives of Brougham. Debates were then conducted with a bitterness of personality unknown, or at all events very rarely known, in our days. Even in the House of Lords language was often interchanged of the most virulent hostility. The rushing impetuosity and fury of Brougham's style had done much then to inflame the atmosphere which in our days is usually so cool and moderate. It probably added to the warmth of the attacks on the ministry of Lord Melbourne that the prime minister was supposed to be an especial favorite with the young queen. When Victoria came to the throne the Duke of Wellington A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 19 gave frank expression to his feelings as to the future of his party. He was of opinion that the Tories would never have any chance with a young woman for sovereign. " I have no small talk," he said, "and Peel has no manners." It had probably not occurred to the Duke of Wellington to think that a woman could be capable of as sound a consti- tutional policy and could show as little regard for personal predilections in the business of government as any man. All this, however, only tended to embitter the feeling against the Whig government. Lord Melbourne's con- stant attendance on the young queen was regarded with keen jealousy and dissatisfaction. According to some critics the prime minister was endeavoring to inspire her with all his own gay heedlessness of character and tempera- ment. According to others, Lord Melbourne's purpose was to make himself agreeable and indispensable to the queen; to surround her with his friends, relations and creatures, and thus to get a lifelong hold of power in England, in defiance of political changes and parties. It is curious now to look back on much that was said in the political and personal heats and bitterness of the time. If Lord Melbourne had been a French mayor of the palace, whose real object was to make himself virtual ruler of the state and to hold the sovereign as a puppet in his hands, there could not have been greater anger, fear and jealousy. Since that time we have all learned on the very best author- ity that Lord Melbourne actually was himself the person to advise the queen to show some confidence in the Tories — to "hold out the olive branch a little to them," as he ex- pressed it. He does not appear to have been greedy of power, or to have used any unfair means of getting or keep- ing it. The character of the young sovereign seems to have impressed him deeply. His real or affected levity gave way to a genuine and lasting desire to make her life as happy and her reign as successful as he could. The queen always felt the warmest affection and gratitude for him, and showed it long after the public had given up the suspicion that she could be a puppet in the hands of a minister. Still, it is certain that the queen's prime minister was by no means a popular man at the time of her accession. Even observers who had no political or personal interest whatever in the condition of cabinets were displeased to see the open- 20 A HISTOIi Y OF OUR WN. TIMES. ing of the new reign so much to all appearance tinder the influence of one who either was or tried to be a mere lounger. The deputations went away offended and dis- gusted when Lord Melbourne played with feathers or dan- dled sofa-cushions in their presence. The almost fierce energy and stenuousnessof a manlike Brougham showed in overwhelming contrast to the happy-go-lucky airs and graces of the premier. It is likely that there was quite as much of affectation in the one case as in the other; but the affec- tation of a devouring zeal for the public service told at least far better than the other in the heat and strength of debate. When the new reign began, the ministry had two enemies or critics in the House of Lords of the most for- midable character. Either alone would have been a trouble to a minister of far stronger mold than Lord Melbourne; but circumstances threw them both for the moment into a chance alliance against him. One of these was Lord Brougham. No stronger and stranger a figure than his is described in the modern his- tory of England. He was gifted with the most varied and striking talents, and with a capacity for labor which some- times seemed almost superhuman. Not merely had he the capacity for labor, but he appeared to have a positive pas- sion for work. His restless energy seemed as if it must stretch itself out on every side seeking new fields of con- quest. The study that was enough to occupy the whole time and wear out the frame of other men was only recrea- tion to him. He might have been described as one possessed by a very demon of work. His physical strength never gave way. His high spirits never deserted him. His self- confidence was boundless. He thought he knew everything and could do everything better than any. other man. He delighted in giving evidence that he understood the busi- ness of the specialist better than the specialist himself. His vanity was overweening, and made him ridiculous almost as often and as much as his genius made him ad- mired. The comic literature of more than a generation had no subject more fruitful than the vanity and restless- ness of Lord Brougham. He was beyond doubt a great parliamentary orator. His style was too diffuse and some- times too uncouth to suit a day like our own, when form counts for more than substance, when passion seems out of place in debate, and not to exaggerate is far more the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 21 object than to try to be great. Brougham's action was wild and sometimes even furious; his gestures were singu- larly ungraceful ; his manners were grotesque; but of his power over his hearers there could be no doubt. That power remained with him until a far later date; and long after the years when men usually continue to take part in political debate, Lord Brougham could be impassioned, impressive, and even overwhelming. He was not an orator of the highest class; his speeches have not stood the test of time. Apart from the circumstances of the hour and the personal power of the speaker, they could hardly arouse any great delight, or even interest; for they are by no means models of English style, and they have little of that profound philosophical interest, that pregnancy of thought and meaning, and that splendor of eloquence, which make the speeches of Burke always classic, and even in a certain sense always popular among us. In truth no man could have done with abiding success all the things which Brougham did successfully for the hour. On law, on poli- tics, on literature, on languages, on science, on art, on industrial and commercial enterprise, he professed to pro- nounce with the authority of a teacher. "If Brougham knew a little of law," said O'Connell when the former be- came lord chancellor, "he would know a little of every- thing." The anecdote is told in another way too, which perhaps makes it even more piquant. " The new lord chan- cellor knows a little of everything in the world — even of law." Brougham's was an excitable and self-asserting nature. He had during many years shown himself an embodied influence, a living speaking force in the promotion of great political and social reforms. If his talents were great, if his personal vanity was immense, let it be said that his ser- vices to the cause of human freedom and education were simply inestimable. As an opponent of slavery in the colo- nies, as an advocate of political reform at home, of law reform, of popular education, of religious equality, he had worked with indomitable zeal, with resistless passion, and with splendid success. But his career passed through two remarkable changes which to a great extent interfered with the full efficacy of his extraordinary powers. The first was when from popular tribune and reformer he became lord chancellor in 1830; the second was when he was left 22 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. out of office on the reconstruction of the Whig ministry in April, 1835, and he passed for the remainder of his life into the position of an independent or unattached critic of the measures and policy of other men. It has never been clearly known why the Whigs so suddenly threw over Brougham. The common belief is that his eccentricities and his almost savage temper made him intolerable in a cabinet. It has been darkly hinted that for a while his intellect was actually under a cloud, as people said that of Chatham was during a momentous season. Lord Brougham was not a man likely to forget or for- give the wrong which he must have believed that he had sustained at the hands of the Whigs. He became the fiercest and most formidable of Lord Melbourne's hostile critics. The other opponent who has been spoken of was Lord Lyndhurst. Lord Lyndhurst resembled Lord Brougham in the length of his career and in capacity for work, if in nothing else. Lyndhurst, who was born in Boston the year before the tea ships were boarded in that harbor and their cargoes flung into the water, has been heard address- ing the House of Lords in all vigor and fluency by men who are yet far from middle age. He was one of the most effective parliamentary debaters of a time which has known such men as Peel and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bright and Cobden. His style was singularly and even severe- ly clear, direct and pure ; his manner was easy and graceful ; his voice remarkably sweet and strong. Nothing could have been in greater contrast than his clear, correct, nervous argument, and the impassioned invectives and overwhelm- ing strength of Brougham. Lyndhurst had, as has been said, an immense capacity for work, when the work had to be done; but his natural tendency was as distinctly toward indolence as Brougham's was toward unresting activity. Nor were Lyndhurst's political convictions ever very clear. By the habitude of associating with the Tories, and receiv- ing office from them, and speaking for them, and attacking their enemies with argument and sarcasm, Lyndhurst finally settled down into all the ways of Toryism. But nothing in his varied history showed that he had any particular preference that way; and there were many passages in his career when it would seem as if a turn of chance decided what path of political life he was to follow. As a keen A HISTORY OF OUR WW TIMES. 23 debater he was perhaps hardly ever excelled in parliament; but he had neither the passion nor the genius of the orator ; and his capacity was narrow indeed in its range when compared with the astonishing versatility and omnivorous mental activity of Brougham. As a speaker he was always equal. He seemed to know no varying moods or fits of mental lassitude. Whenever he spoke he reached at once the same high level as a debater. The very fact may in itself perhaps be taken as conclusive evidence that he was not an orator. The higher qualities of the orator are no more to be summoned at will than those of the poet. These two men were without any comparison the two leading debaters in the House of Lords. Lord Melbourne had not at that time in the Upper House a single man of first class or even of second class debating power on the bench of the ministry. An able writer has well remarked that the position of the ministry in the House of Lords might be compared to that of a water-logged wreck into which enemies from all quarters are pouring their broad- sides. The accession of the queen made it necessary that a new parliament should be summoned. The struggle between parties among the constituencies was very animated, and was carried on in some instances with a recourse to manoeuvre and stratagem such as in our time would hardly be possible. The result was not a very marked alteration in the condi- tion of parties; but on the whole the advantage remained with the Tories. Somewhere about this time, it may be remarked, the use of the word " conservative" to describe the latter political party first came into fashion. Mr. Wilson Croker is credited with the honor of having first employed the word in that sense. In an article in the Quarterly lieview, some years before, he spoke of being decidedly and conscientiously attached "to what is called the Tory, but which might with more propriety be called the Conservative party." During the elections for the new parliament, Lord John Russell, speaking at a public dinner at Stroud, made allusion to the new name which his oppo- nents wore beginning to affect for their party. "If that," he said, "is the name that pleases them; if they say that the old distinction of Whig and Tory should no longer be . kept up, I am ready, in opposition to their name of Con- servative, to take the name of Reformer, and to stand by that opposition," 24 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. The Tories or Conservatives, then, had a slight gain as the result of the appeal to the country. The new parlia- ment on its. assembling seems to have gathered in the Com- mons an unusually large number of gifted and promising men. There was something too of a literary stamp about it, a fact not much to be observed in parliaments of a date nearer to the present time. Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece sat for the city of London. The late Lord Lytton, then Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer, had a seat, an advanced Radical at that day. Mr. Disraeli came then into parlia- ment for the first time. Charles Buller, full of high spirits, brilliant humor, and the very inspiration of keen good sense, seemed on the sure way to that career of renown which a premature death cut short. Sir William Moles- worth was an excellent type of the school which in later days was called the Philosophical Eadical. Another dis- tinguished member of the same school, Mr. Roebuck, had lost his seat, and was for the moment an outsider. Mr. Gladstone had been already five years in parliament. The late Lord Carlisle, then Lord Morpeth, was looked upon as a graceful specimen of the literary and artistic young nobleman who also cultivates a little politics for his intellec- tual amusement. Lord John Russell had but lately begun his career as leader of the House of Commons. Lord Pal- merston was foreign secretary, but had not even then got the credit of the great ability which he possessed. Not many years before Mr. Greville spoke of him as a man who " had been twenty years in office and had never distin- guished himself before." Mr. Greviile expresses a mild surprise at the high opinion which persons who knew Lord Palmerston intimately were pleased to entertain as to his ability and his capacity for work. Only those who knew him very intimately indeed had any idea of the capacity for governing parliament and the country which he was soon afterward to display. Sir Robert Peel was leader of the Conservative party. Lord Stanley, the late Lord Derby, was still in the House of Commons. He had not long be- fore broken definitively with the Whigs on the question of the Irish ecclesiastical establishment, and had passed over to that Conservative party of which he afterward became the most influential leader and the most powerful parliament- ary orator. O'Connell and Sheil represented the eloquence of the Irish national party. Decidedly the House of Com- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 25 mons first elected during Queen Victoria's reign was strong in eloquence and talent. Only two really great speakers have risen in the forty years that followed who were not members of parliament at that time, Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. Mr. Cobden had come forward as a candidate for the borough of Stockport, but was not successful, and did not obtain a seat in parliament until four years after. It was only by what may be called an accident that Macaulay and Mr. Roebuck were not in the parliament of 1837. It is fair to say, therefore, that, except for Cobden and Bright, the subsequent forty years have added no first class name to the records of parliamentary eloquence. The ministry was "not very strong in the House of Com- mons. Its conditions indeed hardly allowed it to feel itself strong even if it had had more powerful representatives in either house. Its adherents were but loosely held together. The more ardent reformers were disappointed with minis- ters; the free trade movement was rising into distinct bulk and proportions, and threatened to be formidably indepen- dent of mere party ties. The government had to rely a good deal on the precarious support of Mr. O'Connell and his followers. They were not rich in debating talent in the Commons any more than in the Lords. Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the opposition, was by far the most powerful man in the House of Commons. Added to his great qualities as an administrator and a parliamen- tary debater, he had the virtue, then very rare among conservative statesmen, of being a sound and clear finan- cier, with a good grasp of , the fundamental principles of political economy. His high, austere character made him respected by opponents as well as by friends. He had not perhaps many intimate friends. His temperament was cold, or at least its heat was self-contained; he threw out no genial glow to those around him. He was by nature a reserved and shy man, in whose manners shyness took the form of pompousness and coldness. Something might be said of him like that which Richter said of Schiller;' he was to strangers stony and like a precipice from which it was their instinct to spring back. It is certain that he had warm and generous feelings, but his very sensitiveness only led him to disguise them. The contrast between his emotions and his lack of demonstrativeness created in hirn a constant artificiality which often seemed mere awk- 26 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. wardness. It was in the House of Commons that his real genius and character displayed themselves. The atmos- phere of dehate was to him what Macaulay says wine was to Addison, the influence which broke the spell under which his fine intellect seemed otherwise to lie imprisoned. Peel was a perfect master of the House of Commons. He was as great an orator as any man could be who addresses him- self to the House of Commons, its ways and its purposes alone. He went as near perhaps to the rank of a great orator as anyone can go who is but little gifted with imag- ination. Oratory has been well described as the fusion of reason and passion. Passion always carries something of the imaginative along with it. Sir Robert Peel had little imagination, and almost none of that passion which in eloquence sometimes supplies its place. His style was clear, strong, and stately; full of various argument and apt illustration drawn from books and from the world of politics and commerce. He followed a difficult argument home to its utter conclusions; and if it had in it any lurk- ing fallacy, he brought out the weakness into the clearest light, often with a happy touch of humor and quiet sar- casm. His speeches might be described as the. very perfec- tion of good sense and high principle clothed in the most impressive language. But they were something more pecu- liar than this, for they were so constructed, in their argu- ment and their style alike, as to touch the very core of the intelligence of the House of Commons. They told of the feelings and the inspiration of parliament as the ballad- music of a country tells of its scenery and its national sen- timents. Lord Stanley was a far more energetic and impassioned speaker than Sir Robert Peel, and perhaps occasionally in his' later career, came now and then nearer to the height of genuine oratory. But Lord Stanley was little more than a splendid parliamentary partisan, even when, long after, he was prime minister of England. He had very little indeed of that class of information which the modern world requires of its statesmen and leaders. Of political economy, of finance, of the development and the discoveries of modern science, he knew almost as little as it is possible for an able and energetic man to know who lives in the throng of active life and hears what people are talking of around him. He once said good-humoredly of himself, that he was, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 21 brought up in the pre-scientific period. His scholarship was merely such training in the classic languages as allowed him to have a full literary appreciation of the beauty of Greek and Roman literature. He had no real and deep knowledge of the history of the Greek and the Roman people, nor probably did he at all appreciate the great difference between the spirit of Roman and of Greek civilization. He had, in fact, what would have been called at an earlier day an elegant scholarship; he had a considerable knowledge of the politics of his time in most European countries, an energetic intrepid spirit, and with him, as Macaulay well said, the science of parliamentary debate seemed to be an instinct. There was no speaker on the ministerial benches at that time who could for a moment be compared with him. Lord John Russell, who had the leadership of the party in the House of Commons, was really a much stronger man than he seemed to be. He had a character for daunt- less courage and confidence among his friends; for bound- less self-conceit among his enemies. Every one remembers Sydney Smith's famous illustrations of Lord John Russell's unlimited faith in his own power of achievement. Thomas Moore addressed a poem to him at one time, when Lord John Russell thought or talked of giving up political life, in which he appeals to " thy genius, thy youth, and thy name," declares that the instinct of the young statesman is the same as " the eaglet's to soar with his eyes on the sun," and implores him not to "think for an instant thy country can spare such a light from her darkening horizon as thou." Later observers, to whom Lord John Russell appeared probably remarkable for a cold and formal style as a debater, and for lack of originating power as a states- man, may find it difficult to reconcile the poet's picture with their own impressions of the reality. But it is certain that at one time the reputation of Lord John Russell was that of a rather reckless man of genius, a sort of Whig Shelley. He had in truth much less genius than his friends and admirers believed, and a great deal more of practical strength than either friends or foes gave him credit for. He became, not indeed an orator, but a very keen debater, who was especially effective in a cold irri- tating sarcasm which penetrated the weakness of an oppo- nent's argument like some dissolving acid. In the poem 28 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. from which we have quoted, Moore speaks of the eloquence of his noble friend as "not like those rills from a height, which sparkle and foam and in vapor are o'er; but a cur- rent that works out its way into light through the filter- ing recesses of thought and of lore." Allowing for the exaggeration of friendship and poetry, this is not a bad description of what Lord John Russell's style became at its best. The thin bright stream of argument worked its way slowly out and contrived to wear a path for itself through obstacles which at first the looker-on might have felt assured it never could penetrate. Lord John Russell's swordsmanship was the swordsmanship of Saladin, and not that of stout King Richard. But it was very effective sword-play in its own way. Our English system of government by party makes the history of parliament seem like that of a succession of great political duels. Two men stand constantly confronted dur- ing a series of years, one of whom is at the head of the gov- ernment, while the other is at the head of the opposition. They change places with each victory. The conqueror goes into office; the conquered into opposition. This is not the place to discuss either the merits or the probable duration of the principle of government by party; it is enough to say here that it undoubtedly gives a very animated and varied complexion to our political troubles, and invests them indeed with much of the glow and passion of actual warfare. It has often happened that the two leading oppo- nents are men of intellectual and oratorical powers so fairly balanced that their followers may well dispute among themselves as to the superiority of their respective chiefs, and that the public in general may become divided into two schools not merely political, but even critical, accord- ing to their partiality for one or the other. We still dispute as to whether Fox or Pitt was the greater leader, the greater orator; it is probable that for a long time to come the same question will be asked by political students about Gladstone and Disraeli. For many years Lord John Rus- sell and Sir Robert Peel stood thus opposed. They will often come into contrast and comparison in these pages. For the present it is enough to say that Peel had by far the more original mind, and that Lord John Russell never obtained so great an influence over the House of Commons as that which his rival long enjoyed. The heat of political A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 29 passion afterward induced a bitter critic to accuse Peel of lack of originality, because he assimilated readily and turned to account the ideas of other men. Not merely the criti- cism, but the principle on which it was founded, was alto- gether wrong. It ought to be left to children to suppose that nothing is original but that which we make up, as the childish phrase is, "out of our own heads." Originality in politics, as in every field of art, consists in the use and application of the ideas which we get or are given to us. The greatest proof Sir Eobert Peel ever gave of high and genuine statesmanship was in his recognition that the time had come to put into practical legislation the principles which Cobden and Yilliers and Bright had been advocating in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell was a born reformer. He had sat at the feet of Fox. He was cradled in the principles of Liberalism. He held faithfully to his creed; he was one of its boldest and keenest champions. He had great advantages over Peel, in the mere fact that he had begun his education in a more enlightened school. But he wanted passion quite as much as Peel did, and remained still farther than Peel below the level of the gen- uine orator. Russell, as we have said, had not long held the post of leader of the House of Commons when the first parliament of Queen Victoria assembled. He was still, in a manner, on trial; and even among his friends, perhaps especially among his friends, there were whispers that his confidence in himself was greater than his capacity for leadership. After the chiefs of ministry and of opposition, the most conspicuous figure in the House of Commons was the colossal form of O'Connell, the great Irish agitator, of whom we shall hear a good deal more. Among the fore- most orators of the house at that time was O'Connell's im- passioned lieutenant, Richard Lalor Sheil. It is curious how little is now remembered of Sheil, whom so many well- qualified authorities declared to be a genuine orator. Lord Beaconsfield, in one of his novels, speaks of Shed's eloquence in terms of the highest praise, and disparages Canning. It is bat a short time since Mr. Gladstone selected Sheilas one of three remarkable illustrations of great success as a speaker achieved in spite of serious defects of voice and delivery; the other two examples being Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Newman. Mr. Gladstone described Sheil's voice as 30 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. hke nothing but the sound produced by " a tin kettle bat- tered about from place to place," knocking first against one side and then against another. "In anybody else," Mr. Gladstone went on to say, " I would not if it had been in my choice, like to have listened to that voice; but in him I would not have changed it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody ever felt it painful while listening to it. He was a great orator, and an orator of much preparation, I believe, carried even to words, with a very vivid imagination and an enormous power of lan- guage and of strong feeling. There was a peculiar charac- ter, a sort of half wildness in his aspect and delivery; his whole figure, and his delivery and his voice and his matter were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed a great parliamentary picture; and although it is now thirty-five years since I heard Mr. Sheil, my recollection of him is just as vivid as if I had been listening to him to-day." This surely is a picture of a great orator, as Mr. Gladstone says Sheil was. Nor is it easy to understand how a man without being a great orator could have persuaded two experts of such very different schools as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, that he deserved such a name. Yet the after years have in a curious but unmistakable way denied the claims of Sheil. Perhaps it is because, if he really was an orator, he was that and nothing more, that our practical age, finding no mark left by him on parliament or politics, has declined to take much account even of his eloquence. His career faded away into second-class ministerial office, and closed at last, somewhat prematurely, in the little court of Florence, where he was sent as the representative of England. He is worth men- tioning here because he had the promise of a splendid repu- tation ; because the charm of his eloquence evidently lingered long in the memories of those to whom it was once familiar, and because his is one of the most brilliant illustrations of that career of Irish agitator, which begins in stormy oppo- sition to English government and subsides after awhile into meek recognition of its title and adoption of its ministerial uniform. O'Connell we have passed over for the present, because we shall hear of him again; but of Sheil it is not necessary that we should hear any more. This was evidently a remarkable parliament, with Eussell for the leader of one party, and Peel for the leader of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 31 another; with O'Connell and Sheil as independent sup- porters of the ministry; with Mr. Gladstone still compara- tively new to public life, and Mr. Disraeli to address the Commons for the first time; with Palmerston still unrecog- nized and Stanley lately gone over to Conservatism, itself the newest invented thing in politics; with Grote and Bul- wer, and Joseph Hume and Charles Buller; and Ward and Villiers, Sir Francis Burdett and Smith O'Brien and the Radical Alcibiades of Finsbury, " Tom" Duncombe. CHAPTER III. CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. The first disturbance to the quiet and good promise of the new reign came from Canada. The parliament which we have described met for the first time on November 20, 1837, and was to have been adjourned to February 1, 1838; but the news which began to arrive from Canada was so alarming, that the ministry were compelled to change their purpose and fix the re-assembling of the Houses' for Jan- uary 10. The disturbances in Canada had already broken out into open rebellion. The condition of Canada was very peculiar. Lower or Eastern Canada was inhabited for the most part by men of French descent, who still kept up in the midst of an active and moving civilization most of the principles and usages which belonged to France before the Revolution. Even to this day, after all the changes, political and social, that have taken place, the traveler from Europe sees in many of the towns of Lower Canada an old-fashioned France, such as he had known otherwise only in books that tell of France before '89. Nor is this only in small sequestered towns and villages which the impulses of modern ways have yet failed to reach. In busy and trad- ing Montreal, with its residents made up of Englishmen, Scotchmen and Americans, as wel! as the men of French descent, the visitor is more immediately conscious of the presence of what may be called an old-fashioned Catholi- cism than he is in Paris, or even indeed in Rome. In Quebec, a city which for picturesqueness and beauty of situation is not equaled by Edinburgh or Florence, the 32 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. curious interest of the place is further increased, the novelty of the sensations it produces in the visitor is made more piquant by the evidences he meets with everywhere, through its quaint and steepy streets, and under its antiquated arch- ways, of the existence of a society which has hardly in France survived the great revolution. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign, the undiluted character of this French medievalism was of course much more remarkable.^ It would doubtless have exhibited itself quietly enough if it were absolutely undiluted. Lower Canada would have dozed away in its sleepy picturesqueness, held fast to its ancient ways, and allowed a bustling giddy world, all alive with commerce and ambition, and desire for novelty and the terribly disturbing thing which unresting people call progress, to rush on its wild path unheeded. But its neigh- bors and its newer citizens were not disposed to allow Lower Canada thus to rot itself in ease on the decaying wharfs of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. In the large towns there were active traders from England and other countries, who were by no means content to put up with old-world ways and to let the magnificent resources of the place run to waste. ' Upper Canada, on the other hand, was all new as to its population, and was full of the modern desire for commercial activity. Upper Canada was peopled almost exclusively by inhabitants from Great Britain. Scotch settlers, with all the energy and push of their country; men from the northern province of Ireland, who might be described as virtually Scotch also, came there. The emi- grant from the south of Ireland went to the United States because he found there a country more or less hostile to England, and because there the Catholic Church was under- stood to be flourishing. The Ulsterman went to Canada as the Scotchman did, because he saw the flag of England flying and the principle of religious establishment which he ad- mired at home still recognized. It is almost needless to say that Englishmen in great numbers were settled there, whose chief desire was to make the colony as far as possible a copy of the institutions of England. When Canada was ceded to England by France, as a consequence of the victories of Wolfe, the population was nearly all in the lower province, and therefore was nearly all of French origin. Since the cession the growth of the population of the other province had been surprisingly rapid, and had been almost A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 33 exclusively the growth, as we have seen, of immigration from Great Britain, one or two of the colonizing states of the European continent, and the American republic itself. It is easy to see on the very face of things some of the difficulties which must arise in the development of such a system. The French of Lower Canada would regard with .almost morbid jealousy any legislation which appeared likely to interfere with their ancient ways and to give any advantage or favor to the populations of British descent. The latter would see injustice or feebleness in every measure which did not assist them in developing their more ener- getic ideas. The home government in such a condition of things often has especial trouble with those whom we may call its own people. Their very loyalty to the institutions of the old country impels them to be unreasonable and exacting. It is not easy to make them understand why they should not be at the least encouraged, if not indeed actually enabled, to carry boldly out the Anglicizing policy which they clearly see is to be for the good of the colony in the end. The government has all the difficulty that the mother of a household has when, with the best intentions and the most conscientious resolve to act impartially, she is called upon to manage her own children and the children of her husband's former marriage. Every word she says, every resolve she is induced to acknowledge, is liable to be regarded with jealousy and dissatisfaction on the one side as well as on the other. •" You are doing everything to favor your own children," the one set cry out*. "You ought to do something more for your own children," is the equally querulous remonstrance of the other. It would have been difficult, therefore, for the home gov- ernment, however wise and far-seeing their policy, to make the wheels' of any system run smoothly at once in such a colony as Canada. Hut their policy certainly does not seem to have been either wise or far-seeing. The plan of government adopted looks as if it were especially devised to bring out into sharp relief all the antagonisms that were natural to the existing state of things. By an act called the Constitution of 1791, Canada was divided into two prov- inces, the upper and the lower. Each province had a separate system of government, consisting of a governor, an executive council appointed by the crown, and supposed in some way to resemble the privy council of this country ; 34 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. a legislative council, the members of which were appointed by the crown for life; and a representative assembly, the members of which were elected for four years. At the same time the clergy reserves were established by parlia- ment. One-seventh of the waste lands of the colony was set aside for the maintenance of the Protestant clergy, a fruitful source of disturbance and ill-feeling. When the two provinces were divided in 1791, the inten- tion was that they should remain distinct in fact as well as in name. It was hoped that Lower Canada would remain altogether French, and that Upper Canada would be ex- clusively English. Then it was thought that they might be governed on their separate systems as securely and with as little trouble as we now govern the Mauritius on one system and Malta on another. Those who formed such an idea do not seem to have taken any counsel with geogra]3hy. The one fact, that Upper Canada can hardly be said to have any means of communication with Europe and the whole eastern world except through Lower Canada, or else through the United States, ought to have settled the ques- tion at once. It was in Lower Canada that the greatest difficulties arose. A constant antagonism grew up between the majority of the legislative council, who were nominees of the crown, and the majority of the representative assem- bly, who were elected by the population of the province. The home government encouraged and indeed kept up that most odious and dangerous of all instruments for the supposed management of a colony — a "British party" devoted to the so-called interests of the mother country and obedient to the word of command from their masters and patrons at home. The majority in the legislative council constantly thwarted the resolutions of the vast majority of the popular assembly. Disputes arose as to the voting of supplies. The government retained in their ser- vice officials whom the representative assembly had con- demned, and insisted on the right to pay them their salaries out of certain funds of the colony. The representative assembly took to stopping the supplies, and the government claimed the right to counteract this measure by appropriat- ing to the purpose such public moneys as happened to be within their reach at the time. The colony — for indeed on these subjects the population of Lower Canada, right or wrong, was so near to being of one mind that we may A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 35 take the declarations of public meetings as representing the colony — demanded that the legislative council should be made elective, and that the colonial government should not be allowed to dispose of the moneys of the colony at their pleasure. The House of Commons and the govern- ment here replied by refusing to listen to the proposal to make the legislative council an elective body, and authoriz- ing the provincial government, without the consent of the colonial representation, to appropriate the money in the treasury for the administration of justice and the main- tenance of the executive system. This was in plain words to announce to the French population, who made up the vast majority, and whom we had taught to believe in the representative form of government, that their wishes would never count for anything, and that the colony was to be ruled solely at the pleasure of the little British party of officials and crown nominees. It is not necessary to sup- pose that in all these disputes the popular majority were in the right and the officials in the wrong. No one can doubt that there was much bitterness of feeling arising out of the mere differences of race. The French and the English could not be got to blend. In some places, as it was after- ward said in the famous report of Lord Durham, the two sets of colonists never publicly met together except in the jury-box, and then only for the obstruction of justice. The British residents complained bitterly of being subject to French law and procedure in so many of their affairs. The tenure of land and many other conditions of the system were antique French, and the French law worked, or rather did not work, in civil affairs side by side with the equally impeded British law in criminal matters. At last the rep- resentative assembly refused to vote any further supplies or to carry od any further business. They formulated their grievances against the home government. Their com- plaints were of arbitrary conduct on the part of the gov- ernors; intolerable composition of the legislative council, which they insisted ought to be elective; illegal appropria- tion of the public money; and violent prorogation of the provincial parliament. One of the leading men in the movement which after- ward became rebellion in Lower Canada was Mr. Louis Joseph Papineau. This man had risen to high position by his talents, his energy, and his undoubtedly honorable char- 36 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. acter. He had represented Montreal in the representative assembly of Lower Canada, and he afterward became speaker of the house. He made himself leader of the movement to protest against the policy of the governors, and that of the government at home by whom they were sustained. He held a series of meetings, at some of which undoubtedly rather strong language was used, and too frequent and significant appeals were made to the example held out to the population of Lower Canada by the suc- cessful revolt of the United States. Mr. Papineau also planned the calling together of a great convention to dis- cuss and proclaim the grievances of the colonies. Lord G-osford, the governor, began by dismissing several militia officers who had taken part in some of these demonstra- tions; Mr. Papineau himself was an officer of this force. Then the governor issued warrants for the apprehension of many members of the popular assembly on the charge of high treason. Some of these at once left the country; others against whom warrants were issued were arrested, and a sudden resistance was made by their friends and sup- porters. Then, in the manner familiar to all who have read anything of the history of revolutionary movements, the resistance to a capture of prisoners suddenly trans- formed itself into open rebellion. The rebellion was not in a military sense a very great thing. At its first outbreak the military authorities were for a moment surprised, and the rebels obtained one or two trifling advantages. But the commander-in-chief at once showed energy adequate to the occasion, and used, as it was his duty to do, a strong hand in putting the move- ment down. The rebels fought with something like des- peration in one or two instances, and there was, it must be said, a good deal of blood shed. The disturbance, how- ever, after awhile extended to the upper province. Upper Canada too had its complaints against its governors and the home government, and its protests against having its offices all disposed of by a "family compact;" but the rebellious movement does not seem to have taken a gen- uine hold of the province at any time. There was some discontent; there was a constant stimulus to excitement kept up from across the American frontier by sympathizers with any republican movement; and there were some excit- able persons inclined for revolutionary change in the prov- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 37 ince itself whose zeal caught fire when the flame broke out in Lower Canada. But it seems to have been an exotic movement altogether, and so far as its military history is concerned, deserves notice chieflv for the chivalrous eccen- tricity of the plan by which the governor of the province undertook to put it down. The governor was the gallant and fanciful soldier and traveler, Sir Francis, then Major, Head. He, who had fought at Waterloo and seen much service besides, was quietly performing the duties of assis- tant poor law commissioner for the county of Kent, when he was summoned, in 1835, at a moment's notice, to assume the governorship of Upper Canada. When the rebellion broke out in that province, Major Head proved himself not merely equal to the occasion, but boldly superior to it. He promptly resolved to win a grand moral victory over all rebellion then and for the future. He was seized with a desire to show to the whole world how vain it was for any disturber to think of shaking the loyalty of the province under his control. He issued to rebellion in general a challenge not unlike that which Shakespeare's Prince Harry offers to the chiefs of the insurrection against Henry IV. He invited it to come on and settle the controversy by a sort of duel. He sent all the regular soldiers out of the province to the help of the authorities of Lower Canada; he allowed the rebels to mature their plans in any way they liked ; he permitted them to choose their own day and hour; and when they were ready to begin their assaults on constituted authority, he summoned to his side the militia and all the loyal inhabitants, and with their help he com- pletely extinguished the rebellion. It was but a very trifling affair; it went out or collapsed in a moment. Major Head had his desire. He showed that rebellion in that province was not a thing serious enough to call for the. intervention of regular troops. The loyal colonists were for the most part delighted with the spirited conduct of their leader and his new-fashioned way of dealing with rebellion. No doubt the moral effect was highly imposing. The plan was almost as original as that described in Herodotus and introduced into one of Massinger's plays, when the moral authority of the masters is made to assert itself over the rebellious slaves by the mere exhibition of the symbolic whip. But the authorities at home took a somewhat more prosaic view of the policy of Sir Francis 38 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Head. It was suggested that if the fears of many had been realized and the rebellion had been aided by a large force of sympathizers from the United States, the moral authority of Canadian loyalty might have stood greatly in need of the material presence of regular troops. In the end Sir Francis Head resigned his office. His loyalty, courage and success were acknowledged by the gift of a baronetcy; and he obtained the admiration not merely of those who approved his policy, but even of many among those who felt bound to condemn it. Perhaps it may be mentioned that there were some who persisted to the last in the belief that Sir Francis Head was not by any means so rashly chivalrous as he had allowed himself to be thought, and that he had full preparation made, if his moral demonstration should fail, to supply its place in good time with more commonplace and effective measures. The news of the outbreaks in Canada created a natural excitement in this country. There was a very strong feel- ing of sympathy among many classes here — not, indeed, with the rebellion, but with the colony which complained of what seemed to be genuine and serious grievances. Public meetings were held at which resolutions were passed ascribing the disturbances in the first place to the refusal by the government of any redress sought for by the colo- nists. Mr. Hume, the pioneer of financial reform, took the side of the colonists very warmly, both in and out of par- liament. During one of the parliamentary debates on the subject, Sir Robert Peel referred to the principal leader of the rebellion in Upper Canada as "a Mr. Mackenzie." Mr. Hume resented this way of speaking of a prominent colo- nist, and remarked that "there was a Mr. Mackenzie as there might be a Sir Eobert Peel," and created some amuse- ment by referring to tbe declarations of Lord Chatham on the American Stamp Act, which he cited as the opinions of "a Mr. Pitt." Lord John Russell on the part of the government introduced a bill to deal with the rebellious province. The bill proposed in brief to suspend for a time the constitution of Lower Canada, and to send out from this country a governor-general and high commissioner, with full powers to deal with the rebellion, and to remodel the constitution of both provinces. The proposal met Avith a good deal of opposition at first on very different grounds. Mr Roebuck, who was then, as it happened, out A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 39 of parliament, appeared as the agent and representative of the province of Lower Canada, and demanded to be heard at the bar of both the houses in opposition to the bill. After some little demur his demand was granted, and he stood at the bar, first of the Commons, and then of the Lords, and opposed the bill on the ground that it unjustly suspended the constitution of Lower Canada in consequence of disturbances provoked by the intolerable oppression of the home government. A critic of that day remarked that most orators seemed to make it their business to conciliate and propitiate the audience they desired to win over, but that Mr. Roebuck seemed from the very first to be deter- mined to set all his hearers against him and his cause. Mr. Roebuck's speeches were, however, exceedingly argumenta- tive and powerful appeals. Their effect was enhanced by the singularly youthful appearance of the speaker, who is described as looking like a boy hardly out of his teens. It was evident, however, that the proposal of the gov- ernment must in the main be adopted. The general opinion of parliament decided not unreasonably that that was not the moment for entering into a consideration of the past policy of the government, and that the country could do nothing better just then than send out some man of commanding ability and character to deal with the exist- ing condition of things. There was an almost universal admission that the government had found the right man when Lord John llussell mentioned the name of Lord Durham. Lord Durham was & man of remarkable character. It is a matter of surprise how little his name is thought of by the present generation, seeing what a strenuous figure he seemed in the eyes of his contemporaries, and how striking a part he played in the politics of a time which has even still some living representatives. He belonged to one of the oldest families in England. The Lambtons had lived on their estate in the north, in uninterrupted succession, since the Conquest. The male succession, it is stated, never was interrupted since the twelfth century. They were not, however, a family of aristocrats. Their wealth was derived chiefly from coal mines, and grew up in later days; the property at first, and for a long time, was of inconsiderable value. For more than a century, however, the Lambtons had come to take rank among the gentry of 40 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the county, and some member of the family had repre- sented the city of Durham in the House of Commons from 1727 until the early death of Lord Durham's father in December, 1797. William Henry Lambton, Lord Durham's father, was a staunch Whig, and had been a friend and associate of Fox. John George Lambton, the son, was born at Lambton Castle in April, 1792. Before he was quite twenty years of age, he made a romantic marriage at Gretna Green with a lady who died three years after. He served for a short time in a regiment of Hussars. About a year after the death of his first wife, he married the eldest daughter of Lord Grey. He was then only twenty-four years of age. He had before this been returned to parliament for the county of Durham, and he soon distinguished himself as a very advanced and energetic reformer. While in the Commons he seldom addressed the House, but when he did speak, it was in support of some measure of reform, or against what he conceived to be antiquated and illiberal legislation. He brought out a plan of his own for parliamentary reform in 1821. In 1828 he was raised to the peerage with the title of Baron Durham. When the ministry of Lord Grey was formed, in November, 1830, Lord Durham became Lord Privy Seal. He is said to have had an almost complete control over Lord Grey. He had an impassioned and energetic nature, which sometimes drove him into outbreaks of feeling which most of his colleagues dreaded. -Various highly colored descriptions of stormy scenes between him and his companions in office are given by writers of the time. Lord Durham, his enemies, and some of his friends said, bullied and browbeat his opponents in the cabinet, and would sometimes hardly allow his father-in-law and official chief a chance of putting in a word on the other side, or in mitigation of his tempestuous mood. He was thorough in his reform- ing purposes, and would have rushed at radical changes with scanty consideration for the time or for the temper of his opponents. He had very little reverence indeed for what Carlyle calls the majesty of custom. Whatever he wished he strongly wished. He had no idea of reticence, and cared not much for the decorum of office. It is not necessary to believe all the stories told by those who hated and dreaded Lord Durham, in order to accept the belief that he really was somewhat of an enfant terrible to the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 41 stately Lord Grey, and to the easy-going colleagues who were by no means absolutely eaten up by their zeal for reform. In the powerful speech which he delivered in the House of Lords on the reform bill, there is a specimen of his eloquence of denunciation which might well have startled listeners even in those days when the license of speech was often sadly out of proportion with its legalized liberty. Lord Durham was especially roused to anger by some observations made in the debate of a previous night by the Bishop of Exeter. He described the prelate's speech as an exhibition of " coarse and virulent invective, malig- nant and false insinuation, the grossest perversions of his- torical facts decked out with all the choicest flowers of pamphleteering slang." He was called to order for these words, and a peer moved that they be taken down. Lord Durham was by no means dismayed. He coolly declared that he did not mean to defend his language as the most elegant or graceful, but that it exactly conveyed the ideas regarding the bishop which he meant to express; that he believed the bishop's speech to contain insinuations which were as false as scandalous; that he had said so; that he now begged leave to repeat the words, and that he paused to give any noble lord who thought fit, an opportunity of taking them down. No one, however, seemed disposed to encounter any farther this impassioned adversary, and when he had had his say, Lord Durham became somewhat mollified, and endeavored to soften the pain of the impres- sion he had made. He begged the House of Lords to make some allowance for him if he had spoken too warmly; for, as he said with much pathetic force, his mind had lately been tortured by domestic loss. He thus alluded to the recent death of his eldest son — "a beautiful boy," says a writer of some years ago, " whose features will live for ever in the well-known picture by Lawrence." The whole of this incident, the fierce attack and the sudden pathetic expression of regret, will serve well enough to illustrate the emotional, uncontrolled character of Lord Durham. He was one of the men who, even when they are thoroughly in the right, have often the unhappy art of seeming to put themselves completely in the wrong. He was the most advanced of all the reformers in the reform- ing ministry of Lord Grey. His plan of reform in 1821 proposed to give four hundred members to certain districts 42 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of town and country, in which every householder should have a vote. When Lord Grey had formed his reform ministry, Lord Durham sent for Lord John Kussell and requested him to draw up a scheme of reform. A com- mittee was formed on Lord Durham's suggestion, consist- ing ,of Sir James Graham, Lord Duncannon, Lord John Russell, and Lord Durham himself. Lord John Russell Irew up a plan, which he published long after with the Iterations which Lord Durham had suggested and written .n his own hand on the margin. If Lord Durham had had iiis way, the ballot would at that time have been included in the programme of the government; and it was indeed understood that at one period of the discussions he had won over his colleagues to his opinion on that subject. He was in a word the Radical member of the cabinet, with all the energy which became such a character; with that "mag- nificent indiscretion" which had been attributed to a greater man, Edmund Burke; with all that courage of his opinions which, in the Frenchified phraseology of modern politics, is so much talked of, so rarely found, and so little trusted or successful when it is found. Not long after Lord Durham was raised in the peerage and became an earl. His influence over Lord Grey con- tinued great, but his differences of opinion with his former colleagues — he had resigned his office — became greater and greater every day. More than once he had taken the pub- lic into his confidence in his characteristic and heedless way. He was sent on a mission to Russia, perhaps to get him out of the way, and afterward he was made ambassador at the Russian court. In the interval between his mission and his formal appointment he had come back to England and performed a series of enterprises which in the homely and undignified language of American politics would prob- ably be called "stumping the country." He was looked to with much hope by the more extreme Liberals in the coun- try, and with corresponding dislike and dread by all who thought the country had gone far enough, or much too far, in the recent political changes. None of his opponents, however, denied his great ability. He was never deterred by conventional beliefs and habits from looking boldly into the very heart of a great political difficulty. He was never afraid to propose what in times later than his have been called heroic remedies. There A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 43 was a general impression, perhaps even among those who liked him least, that he was a sort of "unemployed Cassar," a man who only required a field large enough to develop great qualities in the ruling of men. The difficulties in Canada seemed to have come as if expressly to give him an opportunity of proving himself all that his friends declared him to be, or of justifying for ever the distrust of his enemies. He went out to Canada with the assurance of every one that his expedition would either make or mar a career, if not a country. Lord Durham went out to Canada with the brightest hopes and prospects. He took with him two of the men best qualified in England at that time to make his mission a success — Mr. Charles Buller and Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He understood that he was going out as a dic- tator, and there can be no doubt that his expedition was regarded in this light by England and by the colonies. We have remarked that people looked on his mission as likely to make or mar a career, if not a country. What it did, however, was somewhat different from that which anyone expected. Lord Durham found out a new alterna- tive. He made a country and he marred a career. He is distinctly the founder of the system which has since worked with such gratifying success in Canada; he is the founder even of the principle which allowed the quiet development of the provinces into a confederation with neighboring- colonies under the name of the Dominion of Canada. But the singular quality which in home politics had helped to mar so much of Lord Durham's personal career was in full work during his visit to Canada. It would not be easy to find in modern political history so curious an example of splendid and lasting success combined with all the appear- ance of ntter and disastrous failure. The mission of Lord Durham' saved Canada. It ruined Lord Durham. At the moment it seemed to superficial observers to have been as injurious to the colony as to the man. Lord Durham arrived in (Quebec at the end of May, 1838. He at once issued a proclamation, in style like that of a dictator. It was not in any way unworthy of the occasion, which especially called for the intervention of a brave and enlightened dictatorship. He declared that he would unsparingly punish any who violated the laws, hut he frankly invited the co-operation of the colonies to form 44 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. a new system of government really suited to their wants and to the altering conditions of civilization. Unfortu- nately, he had hardly entered on his work of dictatorship when he found that he was no longer a dictator. In the passing of the Canada Bill through parliament the powers which he understood were to be conferred upon him had been considerably reduced. Lord Durham went to work, however, as if he were still invested with absolute authority over all the laws and conditions of the colony. A very Csesar laying clown the lines for the future government of a province could hardly have been more boldly arbitrary. Let it be said also that Lord Durham's arbitrariness was for the most part healthy in effect and just in spirit. But it gave an immense opportunity of attack on himself and on the government to the enemies of both at home. Lord Durham had hardly begun his work of reconstruction when his recall was clamored for by vehement voices in parliament. Lord Durham began by issuing a series of ordinances intended to provide for the security of Lower Canada. He proclaimed a very liberal amnesty, to which, however, there were certain exceptions. The leaders of the rebellious movement, Papineau and others, who had escaped from the colony, were excluded from the amnesty. So likewise were certain prisoners who either had voluntarily confessed themselves guilty of high treason, or had been induced to make such an acknowledgment in the hope of obtaining a mitigated punishment. These Lord Durham ordered to be transported to Bermuda; and for any of these, or of the leaders who had escaped, who should return to the colony without permission, he proclaimed that they should be deemed guilty of high treason and condemned to suffer death. It needs no learned legal argument to prove that this was a proceeding not to be justified by any of the ordinary forms of law. Lord Durham had no power to transport any one to Bermuda. He had no authority over Bermuda; he had no authority which he could delegate to the officials of Bermuda enabling them to detain political prisoners. Nor had he any power to declare that persons who returned to the colony were to be liable to the punish- ment of death. It is not a capital offense by any of the laws of England for even a transported convict to break bounds and return to his home. All this was quite illegal; that is to say, was outside the limits of Lord Durham's A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 45 legal authority. Lord Durham was well aware of the fact. He had not for a moment supposed that he was acting in accordance with ordinary English law. He was acting in the spirit of a dictator, at once bold and merciful, who is under the impression that he has been invested with extra- ordinary powers for the very reason that the crisis does not admit of the ordinary operations of law. For the decree of death to banished men returning without permission, he had indeed the precedent and authority of acts passed already by the colonial parliament itself; but Lord Durham did not care for any such authority. He found that he had on his hands a considerable number of prisoners whom it would be absurd to put on trial in Lower Canada with the usual forms of law. It would have been absolutely impossible to get any unpacked jury to convict them. They would have been triumphantly acquitted. The authority of the crown would have been brought into greater contempt than ever. So little faith had the colonists in the impartial working of the ordinary law in the gov- ernor's hands, that the universal impression in Lower Canada was that Lord Durham would have the prisoners tried by a packed jury of his own officials, convicted as a matter of course, and executed out of hand. It was with amazement people found that the new governor would not stoop to the infamy of packing a jury. Lord Durham saw no better way out of the difficulty than to impose a sort of exile on those who admitted their connection with the rebellion, and to prevent by the threat of a severe penalty the return of those who had already fled from the colony. His amnesty measure was large and liberal; but he did not see that ho could allow prominent offenders to remain unrebuked in the colony; and to attempt to bring them to trial would have been to secure for them, not punishment, but public honor. Another measure of Lord Durham's was likewise open to the charge of excessive use of power. The act which appointed him prescribed that he should be advised by a council, and that every ordinance of his should be signed by at least five of its members. There was already a coun- cil in existence nominated by Lord Durham's predecessor, Sir J. Colborne; a sort of provisional government put together to supply for the moment the place of the sus- pended political constitution. This council Lord Durham 46 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. set aside altogether, and substituted for it one of his own making, and composed chiefly of his secretaries and the members of his staff. In truth this was but a part of the policy which he had marked out for himself. He was resolved to play the game which he honestly believed he could play better than anyone else. He had in his mind, partly from the inspiration of the gifted and well-instructed men who accompanied and advises him, a plan which he was firmly convinced would be the salvation of the colony. Events have proved that he was right. His disposal of the prisoners was only a clearing of the decks for the great action of remodeling the colony. He did not allow a form of law to stand between him and his purpose. Indeed, as we have already said, he regarded himself as a dictator sent out to reconstruct a whole system in the best way he could. When he was accused of having gone beyond the law, he asked with a scorn not wholly unreasonable; " What are the constitutional principles remaining in force where the whole constitution is suspended? What prin- ciple of the British Constitution holds good in a country where the people's money is taken from them without the people's consent; where representative government is anni- hilated; where martial law has been the law of the land and where trial by jury exists only to defeat the ends of justice, and to provoke the righteous scorn and indignation of the community?" Still there can be no doubt that a less impetuous and impatient spirit than that of Lord Durham might have found a way of beginning his great reforms without pro- voking such a storm of hostile criticism. He was, it must always be remembered, a dictator who only strove to use his powers for the restoration of liberty and constitutional government. His mode of disposing of his prisoners was arbitrary only in the interests of mercy. He declared openly that he did not think it right to send to an ordinary penal settlement, and thus brand with infamy, men whom the public feeling of the colony entirely approved, and whose cause, until they broke into rebellion, had far more right on its side than that of the authority they complained of could claim to possess. He sent them to Bermuda sim- ply as into exile; to remove them from the colony, but nothing more. He lent the weight of this authority to the colonial act, which prescribed the penalty of death for A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 47 returning to the colony, because he believed that the men thus proscribed never would return. But his policy met with the severest and most unmeasured criticism at home. If Lord Durham had been guilty of the worst excesses of power which Burke charged against War- ren Hastings, he could not have been more fiercely denounced in the House of Lords. He was accused of having promul- gated an ordinance which would enable him to hang men without any trial or form of trial. None of his opponents seemed to remember, that whether his disposal of the prisoners was right or wrong, it was only a small and incidental part of a great policy covering the readjustment of the whole political and social system of a splendid colony. The criticism went on as if the promulgation of the Quebec ordinances was the be-all and the end-all of Lord Durham's mission. His opponents made great complaint about the cost of his progress in Canada. Lord Durham had undoubt- edly a lavish taste and a love for something like Oriental display. He made his goings about in Canada like a gor- geous royal progress; yet it was well-known that he took no remuneration whatever for himself, and did not even accept his own personal traveling expenses. He after- ward stated in the House of Lords that the visit cost him personally ten thousand pounds at least. Mr. Hume, the advocate of economy, made sarcastic comment on the sud- den fit of parsimony which seemed to have seized, in Lord Durham's case, men whom he had never before known to raise their voices against any prodigality of expenditure. The ministry was very weak in debating power in the House of Lords. Lord Durham had made enemies there. The opportunity was tempting for assailing him and the ministry together. Many of the criticisms were undoubt- edly the conscientious protests of men who saw danger in any departure from the recognized principles of constitu- tional law. Eminent judges and lawyers in the House of Lords naturally looked above all things to the proper ad- ministration of the law as it existed. But it is hard to doubt that political or personal enemity influenced some of the attacks on Lord Durham's conduct. Almost all the leading men in the House of Lords were against him. •Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst were for the time leagued in opposition to the government and in attack on the Canadian policy. Lord Brougham claimed to be con- 48 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. sistent. He had opposed the Canada coercion from the beginning, he said, and he opposed illegal attempts to deal with Canada now. It seems a little hard to understand how Lord Brougham could really so far have misunderstood the purpose of Lord Durham's proclamation as to believe- that he proposed to hang men without the form of law. However Lord Durham may have broken the technical rules of law, nothing could be more obvious than the fact that he did so in the interest of mercy and generosity, and not that of tyrannical severity. Lord Brougham inveighed against him with thundering eloquence, as if he were denouncing another Sejanus. It must be owned that his attacks lost some of their moral effect because of his known hatred to Lord Melbourne and the ministry, and even to Lord Durham himself. People said that Brougham had a special reason for feeling hostile to anything done by Lord Durham. A dinner was given to Lord Grey by the Be- formers of Edinburgh, in 1834, at which Lord Brougham and Lord Durham were both present. Brougham was called upon to speak, and in the course of his speech he took occa- sion to condemn certain too zealous reformers who could not be content with the changes that had been made, but must demand that the ministry should rush forward into wild and extravagant enterprises. He enlarged upon this subject with great vivacity and with amusing variety of humorous and rhetorical illustration. Lord Durham assumed that the attack was intended for him. His assump- tion was not unnatural. When he came in his turn to speak, he was indiscreet enough to reply directly to Lord Brougham, to accept the speech of the former as a personal challenge, and in bitter words to retort invective and sar- casm. The scene was not edifying. The guests were scandalized. The effect of Brougham's speech was wholly spoiled. Brougham was made to seem a disturber of order by the indiscretion which provoked into retort a man notoriously indiscreet and incapable of self-restraint. It is not unfair to the memory of so fierce and unsparing a political gladiator as Lord Brougham, to assume that when he felt called upon to attack the Canadian policy of Lord Durham, the recollection of the scene at the Edinburgh dinner inspired with additional force his criticism of the Quebec ordinances. The ministry were weak and yielded. They had in the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 49 first instance approved of the ordinances, but they quickly gave way and abandoned them. They avoided a direct attempt on the part of Lord Brougham to reverse the policy of Lord Durham by announcing that they had deter- mined to disallow the Quebec ordinances. Lord Durham learned for the first time from an American paper that the government had abandoned him. He at once announced his determination to give up his position and to return to England. His letter announcing this resolve crossed on the ocean the despatch from home disallowing his ordi- nances. With characteristic imprudence he issued a proc- lamation from the Castle of St. Lewis, in the city of Quebec, which was virtually an appeal to the public feel- ing of the colony against the conduct of her majesty's gov- ernment. When the news of this extraordinary proclama- tion reached home, Lord Durham was called by the Times newspaper, "the Lord High Seditioner." The representa- tive of the sovereign, it was said, had appealed to the judg- ment of a still rebellious colony against the policy of the sovereign's own advisers. Of course Lord Durham's recall was unavoidable. The government at once sent out a despatch removing him from his place as governor of British North America. Lord Durham had not waited for the formal recall. He returned to England a disgraced man. Yet even then there was public spirit enough among the English people to refuse to ratify any sentence of disgrace upon him. When he landed at Plymouth, he was received with acclama- tion by the population although the government had prevented any of the official honor usually shown to return- ing governors from being offered to him. Mr. John Stuart Mill has claimed with modest firmness and with perfect justice a leading share in influencing public opinion in favor of Lord Durham. "Lord Durham," he says in his auto- biography, "was bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by enemies, given up by timid friends; while those who would willingly have defended him did not know what to say. He appeared to be returning a defeated and dis- credited man. I had followed the Canadian events from the beginning; I had been one of the prompters of his prompters; his policy was almost exactly what mine would have been, and I was in a position to defend it. I wrote and published a manifesto in the Westminster Bevieu', in 50 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. which I took the very highest ground in his behalf, claim- ing for him not mere acquittal, but praise and honor. Instantly a number of other writers took up the tone'. I believe there was a portion of truth in what Lord Durham, soon after, with polite exaggeration, said to me, that to this article might be ascribed the almost triumphal recep- tion which he met with on his arrival in England. I be- lieve it to have been the word in season which at a critical moment does much to decide the result; the touch which determines whether a stone set in motion at the top of an eminence shall roll down on one side or on the other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as a politician soon vanished; but with regard to Canadian and generally to colonial policy the cause was gained. Lord Durham's report, written by Charles Buller, partly under the inspira- tion of Wakefield, began a new era; its recommendations, extending to complete internal self-government, were in full operation in Canada within two or three years, and have been since extended to nearly all the other colonies of European race which have any claim to the character of important communities." In this instance the victa causa pleased not only Cato, but in the end the gods as well. Lord Durham's report was acknowledged by enemies as well as by the most impartial critics to be a masterly docu- ment. As Mr. Mill has said, it laid the foundation of the political success and social prosperity not only of Canada but of all the other important colonies. After having ex- plained in the most exhaustive manner the causes of discon- tent and backwardness in Canada, it went on to recommend that the government of the colony should be put as much as possible into the hands of the colonists themselves, that they themselves should execute as well as make the laws, the limit of the imperial government's interference being in such matters as affect the relations of the colony with the mother country, such as the constitution and form of government, the regulation of foreign relations and trade, and the disposal of the public lands. Lord Durham pro- popsed to establish a thoroughly good system of municipal institutions; to secure the independence of the judges; to make all provincial officers, except the governor and his secretary, responsible to the colonial legislature; and to repeal all former legislation with respect to the reserves of land for the clergy. Finally, he proposed that the prov- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 51 inces of Canada should be reunited politically and should become one legislature, containing the representatives of both races and of all districts. It is significant that the report also recommended that in any act to be introduced for this purpose, a provision should be made by which all or any of the other North American colonies should on the application of their legislatures and with the consent of Canada be admitted into the Canadian Union. Thus the separation which Fox thought unwise was to be abolished, and the Canadas were to be fused into one system, which Lord Durham would have had a federation. In brief, Lord Durham proposed to make the Canadas self-governing as regards their internal affairs, and the germ of a federal union. It is not necessary to describe in detail the steps by which the government gradually introduced the recommendations of Lord Durham to parliament and carried them to success. Lord Glenelg, one of the feeblest and most apathetic of colo- nial secretaries, had retired from office, partly, no doubt, be- cause of the attacks in parliament on his administration of Canadian affairs. He was succeeded at the Colonial office by Lord Normanby, and Lord Normanby gave way in a few months to Lord John Russell, who was full of energy and earnestness. Lord Durham's successor and disciple in the work of Canadian government, Lord Sydenham — best known as Mr. Charles Poulett Thomson, one of the pioneers of free trade — received Lord John Russell's cordial co- operation and support. Lord John Russell introduced into the House of Commons a bill which he described as intended to lay the foundation of a permanent settlement of the affairs of Canada. The measure was postponed for a session because some statesmen thought that it would not be accepta- ble to the Canadians themselves. Some little sputterings of the rebellion had also lingered after Lord Durham's return to this country, and these for a short time had directed atten- tion away from the policy of reorganization. In 1840, how- ever, the act was passed which reunited Upper and LoAver Canada on the basis proposed by Lord Durham. Further legislation disposed of the clergy reserve lands for the general benefit of all churches and denominations. The way was made clear for that scheme which in times nearer to our own has formed tint Dominion of Canada. Lord Durham did not live to see the success of the policy 52 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. he had recommended. We may anticipate the close of his career. Within a few days after the passing of the Canada government bill he died at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on July 28, 1840. He was then little more than forty-eight' years of age. He had for some time been in failing health, and it cannot be doubted that the mortification attending his Canadian mission had worn away his strength. His proud and sensitive spirit could ill bear the contradictions and humiliations that had been forced upon him. He was an eager and a passionate nature, full of that sceva indig- natio which by his own acknowledgment tortured the heart of Swift. He wanted to the success of his political career that proud patience which the gods are said to love, and by virtue of which great men live down misappreciation, and hold out until they see themselves justified, and hear the reproaches turn into cheers. But if Lord Durham's personal career was in any way a failure, his policy for the Canadas was a splendid success. It established the prin- ciples of colonial government. There were undoubtedly defects in the construction of the actual scheme which Lord Durham initiated, and which Lord Sydenham, who died not long after him, instituted. The legislative union of the two Canadas was in itself a makeshift, and was only adopted as such. Lord Durham would have had it other- wise if he might; but he did not see his way then to any- thing like the complete federation scheme afterward adopted. But the success of the policy lay in the broad principles it established, and to which other colonial sys- tems as well as that of the Dominion of Canada owe their strength and security to-day. One may say with little help from the merely fanciful, that the rejoicings of eman- cipated colonies might have been in his dying ears as he sank into his early grave. CHAPTER IV. SCIENCE AND SPEED. The opening of the reign of Queen Victoria coincided with the introduction of many of the great discoveries and ap- plications in science, industry and commerce which we con- sider specially representative of modern civilization. A A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 53 reign which saw in its earlier years the application of the electric current to the task of transmitting messages, the first successful attempts to make use of steam for the busi- ness of transatlantic navigation, the general development of the railway system all over these countries, and the introduction of the penny post, must be considered to have obtained for itself, had it secured no other memorials, an abiding place in history. A distinguished author has lately inveighed against the spirit which would rank such im- provements as those just mentioned with the genuine triumphs of the human race, and has gone so far as to insist that there is nothing in any such which might not be expected from the self-interested contrivings of a very inferior animal nature. Amid the tendency to glorify beyond measure the mere mechanical improvements of modern civilization, it is natural that there should arise some angry questioning, some fierce disparagement of all that it has done. There will always be natures to which the philosophy of contemplation must seem far nobler than the philosophy which expresses itself in mechanical action. It may, however, be taken as certain that no people who were ever great in thought and in art willfully neglected to avail themselves of all possible contrivances for making life less laborious by the means of mechanical and artificial con- trivance. The Greeks were to the best of their oppor- tunity, and when at the highest point of their glory as an artistic race, as eager for the application of all scientific and mechanical contrivances to the business of life as the most practical and boastful Manchester man or Chicago man of our own day. We shall afterward see that the reign of Queen Victoria came to have a literature, an art, and a philosophy distinctly its own. For the moment we have to do with its industrial science; or at least with the first remarkahle movements in that direction which accompanied the opening of the reign. This at least must be said for them, that they have changed the conditions of human life for us in such a manner as to make the history of the past forty or fifty years almost absolutely distinct from that of any preceeding period. In all that part of our social life which is affected by industrial and mechanical appliances, the man of the latter part of the eighteenth century was less widely removed from the Englishman of the days of the Pastou Letters than we are removed from the ways of 54 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the eighteenth century. The man of the eighteenth cen- tury traveled on land and sea in much the same way that his forefathers had done hundreds of years before. His communications by letter with his fellows were carried on in very much the same method. He got his news from abroad and at home after the same slow uncertain fashion. His streets and houses were lighted very much as they might have been when Mr. Pepys was in London. His ideas of drainage and ventilation were equally elementary and simple. We see a complete revolution in all these things. A man of the present clay suddenly thrust back fifty years in life, would find himself almost as awkwardly unsuited to the ways of that time as if he were sent back to the age when the Romans occupied Britain. He would find him- self harassed at every step he took. He could do hardly anything as he does it to-day. Whatever the moral and philosophical value of the change in the eyes of thinkers too lofty to concern themselves with the common ways and doings of human life, this is certain at least, that the change is of immense historical importance, and that even if we look upon life as a mere pageant and show interesting to wise men only by its curious changes, a wise man of this school could hardly have done better, if the choice lay with him, than to desire that the lines of his life might be so cast as to fall into the earlier part of this present reign. It is a somewhat curious coincidence, that in the year when Professor Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke took out their first patent "for improvements in giving signals and sounding alarms in distant places by means of electric cur- rents transmitted through metallic circuit." Professor Morse, the American electrician, applied to congress for aid in the construction and carrying on of a small electric telegraph to convey messages a short distance, and made the application without success. In the following year he came to this country to obtain a patent for his invention ; but he was refused. He had come too late. Our own countrymen were beforehand with him. Very soon after we find experiments made with the electric telegraph between Euston Square and Camden Town. These experi- ments were made under the authority of the London and Northwestern Railway Company, immediately on the taking out of the patent by Messrs. Wheatstone and Cooke. Mr, Robert Stephenson was one of those who came to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 55 watch the operation of this new and wonderful attempt to make the currents of the air man's faithful Ariel. The London and Birmingham Railway was opened through its whole length in 1838. The Liverpool and Preston line was opened in the same year. The Liverpool and Birming- ham had been opened in the year before ; the London and Croydon was opened the year after. The act for the trans- mission of the mails by railways was passed in 1838. In the same year it was noted as an unparalleled, and to many an almost incredible triumph of human energy and science over time and space, that a locomotive had been able to travel at a speed of thirty-seven miles an hour. " The prospect of traveling from the metropolis to Liver- pool, a distance of two hundred and ten miles, in ten hours, calls forcibly to mind the tales of fairies and genii by which we were amused in our youth, and contrasts forcibly with the fact, attested on the personal experience of the writer of this notice, that about the commencement of the present century, this same journey occupied a space of sixty hours." These are the words of a writer who gives an interesting account of the railways of England during the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria. In the same volume from which this extract is taken an allusion is made to the pos- sibility of steam communication being successfully estab- lished between England and the United States. " Prepara- tions on a gigantic scale," a writer is able to announce, " are now in a state of great forwardness for trying an experi- ment in steam navigation which has been the subject of much controversy among scientific men. Ships of an enor- mous size, furnished with steam power equal to the force of four hundred horses and upward, will, before our next volume shall be prepared, have probably decided the ques- tion whether this description of vessels can, in the present state of our knowledge, profitably engage in transatlantic voyages. It is possible that these attempts may fail, a result which is indeed predicted by high authorities on tins subject. We are more sanguine in our hopes; but should these be disappointed, we cannot, if we are to judge from our past progress, doubt that longer experience and a further application of inventive genius will at no very dis- tant day render practicable and profitable by this means the longest voyages in which the adventurous spirit of man wilt lead him to embark," The experiment thus alluded 56 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to was made with perfect success. The Sirins, the Great Western, and the Royal William accomplished voyages between New York and this country in the early part of 1838; and it was remarked, that "transatlantic voyages by means of steam may now be said to be as easy of accom- plishment, with ships of adequate size and power, as the passage between London and Margate. " The Great Western crossed the ocean from Bristol to New York in fifteen days. She was followed by the Sinus, which left Cork for New York, and made the passage in seventeen days. The con- troversy as to the possibility of such voyages, which was settled by the Great Western and the Sirius, had no refer- ence to the actual safety of such an experiment. During seven years the mails for the Mediterranean had been despatched by means of steamers. The doubt was as to the possibility of stowing in a vessel so large a quantity of coal or other fuel as would enable her to accomplish her voyage across the Atlantic, where there could be no stopping place and no possibility of taking in new stores. It was found, to the delight of all those who believed in the practica- bility of the enterprise, that the quantity of fuel which each vessel had on board when she left her port of departure proved amply sufficient for the completion of the voyage. Neither the Sirius nor the Great Western was the first vessel to cross the Atlantic by means of steam propulsion. Nearly twenty years before, a vessel called the Savannah, built at New York, crossed the ocean to Liverpool, and some years later an English-built steamer made several voyages between Holland and the Dutch West Indian colonies as a packet vessel in the service of that govern- ment. Indeed, a voyage had been made round the Cape of Good Hope more lately still by a steam ship. These expe- ditions, however, had really little or nothing to do with the problem which was solved by the voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western. In the former instances the steam power was employed merely as an auxiliary. The vessel made as much use of her steam propulsion as she could, but she had to rely a good deal on her capacity as a sailor. This was quite a different thing from the enterprise of the Sirius and the Great Western, which was to cross the ocean by steam propulsion and steam propulsion only. It is evident that so long as the steam power was to be used only as an auxiliary, it would be impossible to reckon on A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 5? speed and certainty of arrival. The doubt was whether a steamer could carry, with her cargo and passengers, fuel enough to serve for the whole of her voyage across the Atlantic. The expeditions of the Sirius and the Great Western settled the whole question. It was never again a matter of controversy. It is enough to say that two years after the Great Western went out from Bristol to New York the Cunard line of steamers was established. The steam communication between Liverpool and New York became thenceforth as regular and as unvarying a part of the business of commerce as the journeys of the trains on the Great Western Railway between London and Bristol. It was not Bristol which benefited most by the transatlantic voyages. They made the greatness of Liverpool. Year by year the sceptre of the commercial marine passed away from Bristol to Liverpool. No port in the world can show a line of docks like those of Liverpool. There the stately Mersey flows for miles between the superb and massive granite walls of the enclosures within whose shelter the ships of the world are arrayed as if on parade for the admiration of the traveler who has hitherto been accustomed to the irregular and straggling arrangements of the docks of Lon- don or of New York. On July 5, 1839, an unusually late period of the year, the chancellor of the exchequer brought forward his annual budget. The most important part of the financial state- ment, so far as later times are concerned, is set out in a resolution proposed by the finance minister, which perhaps represents the greatest social improvement brought about by legislation in modern times. The chancellor proposed a resolution declaring that "it is expedient to reduce the postage on letters to one uniform rate of one penny charged upon every letter of a weight to be hereafter fixed by law; parliamentary privileges of franking being abolished and official franking strictly regulated; this house pledging itself at the same time to make good any deficiency of revenue which may be occasioned by such an alteration in the rates of the existing duties." Up to this time the rates of postage had been both high and various. Tiny were varying both as to distance and as to the weight and even the size or the shape of a letter. The district or London post was a separate branch of the postal depart- ment; and the charge for the transmission of letters was 58 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. made on a different scale in London from that which pre- vailed between town and town. The average postage on every chargeable letter throughout the United Kingdom was sixpence farthing. A letter from London to Brighton cost eight -pence; to Aberdeen one shilling and three pence half -penny ; to Belfast one shilling and four pence. Nor was this all ; for if the letter were written on more than one sheet of paper, it came under the operation of a higher scale of charge. Members of parliament had the privilege of franking letters to a certain limited extent ; members of the government had the privilege of franking to an unlimited extent. It is perhaps as well to mention, for the sake of be- ing intelligible to all readers in an age which has not, in this country at least, known practically the beauty and liberality of the franking privilege, that it consisted in the right of the privileged person to send his own or any other person's letters through the post free of charge by merely writing his name on the outside. This meant, in plain words, that the letters of the class who could best afford to pay for them went free of charge, and that those who could least afford to pay had to pay double — the expense, that is to say, of carrying their own letters and the letters of the privileged and exempt. The greatest grievances were felt everywhere because of this absurd system. It had along with its other disadvan- tages that of encouraging what may be called the smug- gling of letters. Everywhere sprang up organizations for the illicit conveyance of correspondence at lower rates than those imposed by the government. The proprietors of almost every kind of public conveyance are said to have been engaged in this unlawful but certainly not very unnatural or unjustifiable traffic. Five-sixths of all the letters sent between Manchester and London were said to have been conveyed for years by this process. One great mercantile house was proved to have been in the habit of sending sixty-seven letters by what we may call this under- ground postoffice, for every one on which they paid the government charges. It was not merely to escape heavy cost that these stratagems were employed. As there was an additional charge when a letter was written on more sheets than one, there was a frequent and almost a con- stant tampering by officials with the sanctity of sealed letters for the purpose of ascertaining whether or not they A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 55 ought to be taxed on the higher scale. It was proved that in the years between 1815 and 1835, while the population had increased thirty per cent., and the stage-coach duty had increased one hundred and twenty-eight per cent., the post office revenues had shown no increase at all. In other countries the postal revenue had been on the increase steadily during that time; in the United States the revenue had actually trebled, although then and later the postal sys- tem of America was full of faults which at that day only seemed intelligible or excusable when placed in comparison with those of our own system. Mr. (afterward Sir Rowland) Hill is the man to whom this country, and indeed all civilization, owes the adoption of the cheap and uniform system. His plan has been adopted 'by every state which professes to have a postal system at all. Mr. Hill belonged to a remarkable family. His father, Thomas Wright Hill, was a teacher, a man of advanced and practical views in popular education, a devoted lover of science, an advocate of civil and religious liberty, and a sort of celebrity in the Birmingham of his day, where he took a bold and active part in trying to defend the house of Dr. Priestley against the mob who attacked it. He had five sons, every one of whom made himself more or less con- spicious as a practical reformer in one path or another. The eldest of the sons was Matthew Davenport Hill, the philanthropic recorder of Birmingham, who did so much for prison reform and for the reclamation of juvenile oft'en- ders. The third son was Rowland Hill, the author of the cheap postal system. Rowland Hill when a little weakly child began to show some such precocious love for arith- metical calculations as Pascal showed for mathematics. His favorite amusement as a child was to lie on the hearth- rug and count up figures by the hour together. As he grew up he became teacher of mathematics in his father's school. Afterward he was appointed secretary to the South Australian Commission, and rendered much valuable service in the organization of thecolonvof South Australia. His early love of masses of figures it may have been which in the first instance turned his attention to the number of letters passing through the post office, the proportion they bore to the number of the population, the cost of carrying them, and the amount which the post office authorities charged for the conveyance of a single letter. A pictur- 60 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. esque and touching little illustration of the veritable hard- ships of the existing system seems to have quickened his interest in a reform of it. Miss Martineau thus tells the story : "Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight she showed Coleridge how his money had been wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself that as long as all went well with him he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter; and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most persons would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It struck Mr. Eowland Hill that there must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare." Mr. Hill gradually worked out for himself a comprehen- sive scheme of reform. He put it before the world early in 1837. The public were taken by surprise when the plan came before them in the shape of a pamphlet which its author modestly entitled "Post Office Reform; its import- ance and practicability." The root of Mr. Hill's system lay in the fact, made evident by him beyond dispute, that the actual cost of the conveyance of letters through the post was very trifling, and was but little increased by the dis- tance over which they had to be carried. His proposal was therefore that the rates of postage should be diminished to the minimum ; that at the same time the speed of conveyance should be increased, and that there should be much greater frequency of despatch. His principle was, in fact, the very opposite of that which had jjrevailed in the calculations of the authorities. Their idea was that the higher the charge for letters the greater the return to the revenue. He started on the assumption that the smaller the charge the greater the profit. He therefore A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 61 recommended the substitution of one uniform charge of one penny the half-ounce, without reference to the distance within the limits of the United Kingdom which the letter had to be carried. The post office authorities were at first uncompromising in their opposition to the scheme. The postmaster-general, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of Lords, that of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever heard of, it was the wildest and most extravagant. "The mails," he said, "will have to carry twelve times as much weight, and therefore the charge for transmission instead of £100,000, as now, must be twelve times that amount. The walls of the post office would burst, the whole area in which the building stands would not be large enough to receive the clerks and the letters." It is impos- sible not to be struck by the paradoxical peculiarity of this argument. Because the change would be so much wel- comed by the public, Lord Lichfield argued that it ought not to be made. He did not fall back upon the then familiar assertion that the public would not send anything like the number of letters the advocates of the scheme expected. He argued that they would send so many as to make it troublesome for the post office authorities to deal with them. In plain words, it would be such an immense accommodation to the population in general, that the officials could not undertake the trouble of carrying it into effect. Another post office official, Colonel Maberley, was at all events more liberal. "My constant language," he said afterward, " to the heads of the departments was — This plan we know will fail. It is your duty to take care that no obstruction is placed in the way of it by the heads of the department, and by the post office. The allegation, I have not the least doubt, will be made at a subsequent period, that this plan lias failed in consequence of the unwillingness of the government to carry it into fair execu- tion. It is our duty as servants of the government to take care that no blame eventually shall fall on the government through any unwillingness of ours to carry it into proper effect." It is, perhaps, less surprising that the routine mind of officials should have seen no future but failure for the scheme, when so vigorous and untrammeled a thinker as Sydney Smith spoke with anger and contempt of the fact that "a million of revenue is given up in the nonsensical penny post scheme, to please my old, excellent, 62 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and universally dissentient friend, Noah Warburton." Mr. Warburton was then member for Bridport, and with Mr. Wallace, another member of parliament, was very active in supporting and promoting the views of Mr. Hill. " I ad- mire the Whig Ministry," Sydney Smith went on to say, "and think they have done more good things than all the ministries since the Kevolntion; but these concessions are sad and unworthy marks of weakness, and fill reasonable men with alarm." It will be seen from this remark alone that the ministry had yielded somewhat more readily than might have been ex- pected to the arguments of Mr. Hill. At the time his pamphlet appeared a commission was actually engaged in inquiring into the condition of the post office depart- ment. Their attention was drawn to Mr. Hill's plan, and they gave it a careful consideration, and reported in its favor, although the post office authorities were convinced that it must involve an unbearable loss of revenue. In parliament Mr. Wallace, whose name has been already men- tioned, moved for a committee to inquire into . the whole subject, and especially to examine the mode recommended for charging and collecting postage, in the pamphlet of Mr. Hill. The committee gave the subject a very patient consideration and at length made a report recommending uniform charges and prepayment by stamps. That part of Mr. Hill's plan which suggested the use of postage stamps was adopted by him on the advice of Mr. Charles Knight. The government took up the scheme with some spirit and liberality. The revenue that year showed a deficiency, but they determined to run the further risk which the proposal involved. The commercial community had naturally been stirred greatly by the project which promised so much relief and advantage. Sydney Smith was very much mistaken indeed when he fancied that it was only to please his old and excellent friend, Mr. War- burton, that the ministry gave way to the innovation. Petitions from all the commercial communities were pour- ing in to support the plan, and to ask that at least it should have a fair trial. The government at length determined to bring in a bill which should provide for the almost immediate introduction of Mr. Hill's scheme, and for the abolition of the franking system except in the case of official letters actually sent on business directly belonging A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 63 to her majesty's service. The bill declared, as an introduc- tory step, that the charge for postage should be at the rate of four pence for each letter under half an ounce in weight, irrespective of distance, within the limits of the United Kingdom. This, however, was to be only a beginning; for on January 10, 1840, the postage was fixed at the uniform rate of one penny per letter of not more than half an ounce in weight. The introductory measure was not, of course, carried without opposition in both houses of par- liament. The Duke of Wellington in his characteristic way declared that he strongly objected to the scheme, but as the government had evidently set their hearts upon it, he recommended the House of Lords not to offer any oppo- sition to it. In the House of Commons it was opposed by Sir Kobert Peel and Mr. Goulburn, both of whom strongly condemned the whole scheme as likely to involve the coun- try in vast loss of revenue. The measure, however, passed into law. Some idea of the effect it has produced upon the postal correspondence of the country may be gathered from the fact that in 1839, the last year of the heavy postage, the number of letters delivered in Great Britain and Ire- land was a little more than eighty-two millions, which in- cluded some five millions and a half of franked letters returning nothing to the revenues of the country ; whereas, in 1875, more than a thousand millions of letters were delivered in the United Kingdom. The population during the same time has not nearly doubled itself. It has already been remarked that the principle of Sir Rowland Hill's reform has since been put into operation in every civilized country in the world. It may be added that before long we shall in all human probability see an inter-oceanic post- age established at a rate as low as people sometimes thought Sir Rowland Hill a madman for recommending as appli- cable to our inland post. The time is not far distant when a letter will be carried from London to San Fran- cisco, or to Tokio in Japan, at a rate of charge as small as that which made financiers stare and laugh when it was suggested as profitable remuneration for earning a letter from London to the town of Sussex or Hertfordshire. Thie "penny post," let it be said, is an older institution than that which Sir [lowland Hill introduced. A penny post for the conveyance of letters had been set up in Lon- don so long ago as 1083; and it was adopted or annexed 64 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. by the government some years after. An effort was even made to set up a half-penny post in London, in opposition to the official penny post, in 1708; but the government soon crushed this vexatious and intrusive rival. In 1738 Dr. Johnson writes to Mr. Cave " to entreat that you will be pleased to inform me, by the penny post, whether you resolve to print the poem." After awhile the government changed their penny post to a twopenny post, and gradually made a distinction between district and other postal systems, and contrived to swell the price for deliveries of all kinds. Long before even this time of the penny post, the old records of the city of Bristol contain an account of the pay- ment of one penny for the carriage of letters to London. It need hardly be explained, however, that a penny in that time, or even in 1683, was a payment of very different value indeed from the modest sum which Sir Kowland Hill was successful in establishing. The ancient penny post resembled the modern penny only post in name. CHAPTER V. CHARTISM. It cannot, however, be said that all the omens under which the new queen's reign opened at home were as auspicious as the coincidences which made it contemporary with the first chapters of these new and noble developments in the history of science and invention. On the contrary, it began amid many grim and unpromising conditions in our social affairs. The winter of 1837-8 was one of unusual severity and distress. There would have been much dis- content and grumbling in any case among the class described by French writers as the proletairej but the complaints were aggravated by a common belief that the young queen was wholly under the influence of a frivolous and selfish minister, who occupied her with amusements while the poor were starving. It does not appear that there was at any time the slightest justification for such a belief; but it prevailed among the working classes and the poor very generally, and added to the sufferings of genuine want the bitterness of imaginary wrong. Popular education was little looked after; so far as the state was concerned, might A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 65 be said not to be looked after at all. The laws of political economy were as yet only within the appreciation of a few, who were regarded not uncommonly, because of their theories, somewhat as phrenologists or mesmerists might be looked on in a more enlightened time. Some writers have made a great deal of the case of Thorn and his dis- ciples as evidence of the extraordinary ignorance that pre- vailed. Thorn was a broken-down brewer, and in fact a madman, who had for some time been going about in Canterbury and other parts of Kent bedizened in fantastic costume, and styling himself at first Sir William Courtenay of Powderham Castle, knight of Malta, king of Jerusalem, king of the gipsy races, and we know not what else. He announced himself as a great political reformer, and lor awhile he succeeded in getting many to believe in and sup- port him. He was afterward confined for some time in a lunatic asylum, and when he came out he presented him- self to the ignorant peasantry in the character of a second Messiah. He found many followers and believers again, among a humbler class indeed than those whom he had formerly won over. Much of his influence over the poor Kentish laborers was due to his denunciations of the new poor law, which was then popularly hated and feared with an almost insane intensity of feeling. Thorn told them he had come to regenerate the whole world, and also to save his followers from the new poor law; and the latter anouncement commended the former. He assem- bled a crowd of his supporters, and undertook to lead them to an attack on Canterbury. With his own hand he shot dead a policeman who endeavored to oppose his movements, exactly as a savior of society of bolder pretensions and greater success did at Boulogne not long after. Two com- panies of soldiers came out from Canterbury to disperse the rioters. The officer in command was shot dead by Thorn. Thorn's followers then charged the unexpecting soldiers so fiercely that for a moment there was some confusion; but the second company fired a volley which stretched Thorn and several of his adherents lifeless on the field. That was an end of the rising. Several of Thorn's followers were afterward tried for murder, convicted and sentenced; but some pity was felt for their ignorance and their delusion, and they were not consigned to death. Long after the fall of their preposterous hero and saint, many of Thorn's dis- 66 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ciples believed that he would return from the grave to carry out the promised work of his mission. All this was lamen- table, but could hardly be regarded as specially characteris- tic of the early years of the present reigm The Thorn delusion was not much more absurd than the Tichborne mania of a later day. Down to our own time there are men and women among the Social Democrats of cultured Germany who still cherish the hope that their idol Ferdi- nand Lassalle will come back from the dead to lead and guide them. But there were political and social dangers in the open- ing of the present reign more serious than any that could have been conjured up by a crazy man in a fantastic dress. Tliere were delusions having deeper roots and showing a more inviting shelter than any that a religious fanatic of the vulgar type could cause to spring up in our society. Only a few weeks after the coronation of the queen a great Radical meeting was held in Birmingham. A mani- festo was adopted there which afterward came to be known as the Chartist petition. With that movement Chartism began to be one of the most disturbing influences of the political life of the country. It is a movement which, although its influence may now be said to have wholly passed away, well deserves to have its history fully written. For ten years it agitated England. It sometimes seemed to threaten an actual uprising of all the proletaire against what were then the political and social institutions of the country. It might have been a very serious danger if the state had been involved in any external difficulties. It was backed by much genuine enthusiasm, passion, and intelligence. It appealed strongly and naturally to what- ever there was of discontent among the working classes. It afforded a most acceptable and convenient means by which ambitious politicians of the self-seeking order could raise themselves into temporary importance. Its fierce and fitful flame went out at last under the influence of the clear, strong and steady light of political reform and educa- tion. The one great lesson it teaches is, that political agi- tation lives and is formidable only by virtue of what is reasonable in its demands. Thousands of ignorant and miserable men all over the country joined the Chartist agitation who cared nothing about the substantial value of its political claims. They were poor, they were over- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 67 worked, they were badly paid, their lives were altogether wretched. They got into their heads some wild idea that the people's charter would give them better food and wages and lighter work if it were obtained, and that for that very reason the aristocrats and the officials would not grant it. No political concessions could really have satisfied these men. If the charter had been granted in 1838, they would no doubt have been as dissatisfied as ever in 1839. But the discontent of these poor creatures would have brought with it little danger to the state if it had not become part of the support of an organization which could show some sound and good reason for the demands it made. The moment that the clear and practical political grievances were dealt with the organization melted away. Vague discontent, however natural and excusable it may be, is only formidable in politics when it helps to swell the strength and the numbers of a crowd which calls for some reform that can be made and is withheld. One of the vulgarest fallacies of statecraft is to declare that it is of no use grant- ing the reforms which would satisfy reasonable demands, because there are still unreasonable agitators whom these will not satisfy. Get the reasonable men on your side, and you need not fear the unreasonable. This is the lesson taught to statesmen by the Chartist agitations. A funeral oration over Chartism was pronounced by Sir John Campbell, then attorney-general, afterward Lord Chief Justice Campbell, at a public dinner at Edinburgh on October 24, 1839. He spoke at some length and with much complacency of Chartism as an agitation which had passed away. Some ten days afterward occurred the most formidable outburst of Chartism that had been known up to that time, and Chartism continued to ho an active and a disturbing influence in England for nearly ten years after. If Sir John Campbell had told his friends and constituents at the Edinburgh dinner that the influence of Chartism was just about to make itself really felt, he would have shown himself a somewhat, more acute politician than we now understand him to be. Seldom has a public man set- ting up to be a political authority made a worse hit than he did in that memorable declaration. Campbell was in- deed only a clever shrewd lawyer of the hard and narrow class. He never made any pretension to statesmanship, or even to great political knowledge; and his unfortunate 68 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. blunder might be passed over without notice were it not that it illustrates fairly enough the manner in which men of better information and judgment than he were at that time in the habit of disposing of all inconvenient political problems. The attorney-general was aware that there had been a few riots and a few arrests, and that the law had been what he would call vindicated ; and as he had no man- ner of sympathy with the motives which could lead men to distress themselves and their friends about imaginary char- ters he assumed that there was an end of the matter. It did not occur to him to ask himself whether there might not be some underlying causes to explain if not to excuse the agitation that just then began to disturb the country, and that continued to disturb it for so many years. Even if he had inquired into the subject, it is not likely that he would have come to any wiser conclusion about it. The dramatic instinct, if we may be allowed to call it so, which enables a man to put himself for the moment into the con- dition and mood of men entirely unlike himself in feelings and conditions, is an indispensable element of real states- manship; but it is the rarest of all gifts among politicians of the second order. If Sir John Campbell had turned his attention to the Chartist question, he would only have found that a number of men, for the most part poor and ignor- ant, were complaining of grievances where he could not for himself see any substantial grievances at all. That would have been enough for him. If a solid, wealthy and rising lawyer could not see any cause for grumbling, he would have made up his mind that no reasonable persons worthy the consideration of sensible legislators would continue to grumhle after they had been told by those in authority that it was their business to keep quiet. But if he had, on the other hand, looked with the light of sympathetic intelli- gence, of that dramatic instinct which has just been men- tioned, at the condition of the classes among whom Chart- ism was then rife, he would have seen that it was not likely the agitation could be put down by a few prosecutions and. a few arrests, and the censure of a prosperous attorney- general. He would have seen that Chartism was not a cause but a consequence. The intelligence of a very ordin- ary man who approached the question in an impartial mood might have seen that Chartism was the expression of a yague discontent with very positive grievances and eyi|§. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. f,9 We have in our time outlived the days of political ab- stractions. The catch-words which thrilled our forefathers with emotion on one side or the other fall with hardly any meaning on our ears. We smile at such phrases as " the rights of man." We hardly know what is meant by talking of " the people" as the words were used long ago when " the people" was understood to mean a vast mass of wronged persons who had no representation and were oppressed by privilege and the aristocracy. We seldom talk of " liberty ;" anyone venturing to found a theory or even a declamation on some supposed deprival of liberty would soon find him- self in the awkward position of being called on to give a scientific definition of what he understood liberty to be. He would be as much puzzled as were certain English workingmen, who desiring to express to Mr. John Stuart Mill their sympathy with what they called in the slang of continental democracy " the Revolution, "were calmly bidden by the great liberal thinker to ask themselves what they meant by "the Revolution," which revolution, what revolu- tion, and why they sympathized with it. But perhaps we are all a little too apt to think that because these abstrac- tions have no living meaning now, they never had any liv- ing meaning at all. They convey no manner of clear idea in England now, but it does hot by any means follow that they never conveyed any such idea. The phrase which Mr. Mill so properly condemned when he found it in the mouths of English workingmen had a very intelligible and distinct meaning when it first came to be used in France and throughout the continent. "The Revolution" expressed a clear reality, as recognizable by the intelligence of all who heard it as the name of Free Trade or of Ultramontanism to men of our time. "The Revolution" was the principle which was asserting all over Europe the overthrow of the old absolute power of kings, and it described it just as well as any word could do. It is meaningless in our day for the very reason that it was full of meaning then. So it was with " the people" and " the rights of the people" and the "rights of labor," and all the other grandiloquent phrases which seem to us so empty and so meaningless now. They are empty and meaningless at the present hour; but they have no application now chiefly because they had applica- tion then. The reform bill of 1832 had been necessarily and perhaps 70 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. naturally a class measure. It had done great things for the constitutional system of England. It had averted a revolution which without some such concession would probably have been inevitable. It had settled forever the question which was so fiercely and so gravely debated dur- ing the discussions of the reform years, whether the English Constitution is or is not based upon a system of popular representation. To many at present it may seem hardly credible that sane men could have denied the existence of the representative principle. But during the debates on the great reform bill such a denial was the strong point of many of the leading opponents of the measure, including the Duke of Wellington himself. The principle of the constitution, it was soberly argued, is that the sovereign invites whatever communities or interests he thinks fit to send in persons to parliament to take counsel with him on the affairs of the nation. This idea was got rid of by the reform bill. That bill abolished fifty-six nomination or rotten boroughs, and took away half the representation from thirty others; it disposed of the seats thus obtained by giving sixty-five additional representatives to the coun- ties, and conferring the right of returning members on Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and some thirty-nine large and prosperous towns which had previously had no representation; while, as Lord John Eussell said in his speech when he introduced the bill in March, 1831, "a ruined mound," sent two representatives to parliament; "three niches in a stone wall," sent two representatives to parliament; "a park where no houses were to be seen," sent two representatives to parliament. The bill intro- duced a £10 household qualification for boroughs, and ex- tended the county franchise to leaseholders and copyholders. But it left the working classes almost altogether out of the franchise. Not merely did it confer no political eman- cipation on them, but it took away in many places the peculiar franchises which made the working men voters. There were communities — such, for example, as that of Preston, in Lancashire — where the system of franchise ex- isting created something like universal suffrage. All this was smoothed away, if such an expression may be used, by the reform bill. In truth the reform bill broke down the monopoly which the aristrocracy and landed classes had enjoyed, and admitted the middle classes to a share of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 71 the law-making power. The representation was divided between the aristocracy and the middle class, instead of being, as before, the exclusive possession of the former. The working class, in the opinion of many of their ablest and most influential representatives, were' not merely left out but shouldered out. This was all the more exas- perating because the excitement and agitation by the strength of which the reform bill was carried in the teeth of so much resistance were kept up by the workingmen. There was besides, at the time of the reform bill, a very high degree of what may be called the temperature of the French Revolution still heating the senses and influencing the judgment even of the aristocratic leaders of the move- ment. What Richter calls the " seed-grains" of the revolu- tionary doctrines had been blown abroad so widely that they rested in some of the highest as well as in most of the lowliest places. Some of the reform leaders, Lord Dur- ham for instance, were prepared to go much farther in the way of Radicalism than at a later period Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright would have gone. There was more than once a sort of appeal to the workingmen of the country which, however differently it may have been meant, certainly sounded in their ears as if it were an intimation that in the event of the bill being resisted too long it might be necessary to try what the strength of a popular uprising could do. Many years after, in the defense of the Irish state prisoners at Clonmel, the counsel who pleaded their cause insisted that they had warrant for their conduct in certain proceedings which were in preparation during the Reform agitation. He talked with undisguised significance of the teacher being in the ministry and the pupils in the dock; and quoted Captain Macheath to the effect that if laws were made ecjually for every degree, there might even then be rare company on Tyburn tree. It is not necessary to attach too much importance to assertions of this kind, or to accept them as sober contributions to history. But they are very instructive as a means of enabling us to under- stand the feeling of soreness which remained in the minds of large masses of the population when after the passing of the reform bill they found themselves left out in the cold. Rightly or wrongly they believed that their strength had been kept in reserve or in terrorem to secure the carrying of the reform bill, and that when it was carried they were, 72 A 1IIST0RY OF OUR WN TIMES. immediately thrown over by those whom they had thus helped to pass it. Therefore at the time when the young sovereign ascended the throne, the working classes in all the large towns were in a state of profound disappointment and discontent, almost indeed of disaffection. _ Chartism was beginning to succeed to the reform agitation. The leaders who had come from the ranks of the aristocracy had been discarded or had withdrawn. In some cases they had withdrawn in perfect good faith, believing sincerely that they had done the work which they undertook to do, and that that was all the country required. Men drawn more immediately from the working class itself, or who had in some way been dropped down by a class higher in the social scale, took up the popular leadership now. Chartism may be said to have sprung definitively into existence in consequence of the formal declarations of the leaders of the Liberal party in parliament that they did not intend to push reform any farther. At the opening of the first parliament of Queen Victoria's reign the question was brought to a test. A Eadical member of the House of Commons moved as an amendment to the address a reso- lution declaring in favor of the ballot and of shorter dura- tion of parliaments. Only twenty members voted for it; and Lord John Eussell declared distinctly against all such attempts to reopen the reform question. It was impossible that this declaration should not be received with disap- pointment and anger by great masses of the people. They had been in the full assurance that the reform bill itself was only the means by which greater changes were to be brought about. Lord John Russell said in the House of Commons that to push reform any farther then would be a breach of faith toward those who helped him to carry it. A great many outside parliament not unnaturally regarded the refusal to go any farther as a breach of faith toward them on the part of the Liberal leaders. Lord John Rus- sell was right from his point of view. It would have been impossible to carry the reform movement any farther just then. In a country like ours where interests are so nicely balanced, it must always happen that a forward movement in politics is followed by a certain reaction. The parlia- mentary leaders in parliament were already beginning to feel the influence of this law of our political growth. It would have been hopeless to attempt to get the upper and A HTSTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 73 middle classes at such a time to consent to any further changes of considerable importance. But the feeling of those who had helped so materially to bring about the reform movement was at least intelligible when they found that its effects were to stop just short of the measures which alone could have any direct influence on their politi- cal position. A conference was held almost immediately between a few of the Liberal members of parliament who professed Radical opinions and some of the leaders of the working- men. At this conference the programme, or what was always afterward known as the " Charter" was agreed upon and drawn up. The name of " Charter" appears to have been given to it for the first time by O'Connell. " There's your Charter," he said to the secretary of the Working Men's Association; "agitate for it, and never be content with anything less." It is a great thing accomplished in political agitation to have found a telling name. A name is almost as important for a new agitation as for a new novel. The title of "The People's Charter" would of itself have launched the movement. Quietly studied now, the People's Charter does not seem a very formidable document. There is little smell of gun- powder about it. Its "points," as they were called, were six. Manhood suffrage came first. It was then called uni- versal suffrage, but it only meant manhood suffrage, for the promoters of the movement had not the slightest idea of insisting on the franchise for women. The second was annual parliaments. Vote by ballot was the third. Aboli- tion of the property qualification (then and for many years after required for the election of a member to parliament) was the fourth. The payment of members was the fifth and the division of the country into equal electoral dis- tricts, the sixth of the famous points. Of these proposals some, it will be seen, were perfectly reasonable. Not one was so absolutely unreasonable as to be outside the range of fair and quiet discussion among practical politicians. Three of the points — half, that is to say, of the whole num- ber — have already been made part of our constitutional sys- tem. The existing franchise may be virtually regarded as manhood suffrage. We have for years been voting by means of a written paper dropped in a ballot-box. The property qualification for menihers of parliament could. 74 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. hardly be said to have been abolished. Such a word seems far too grand and dignified to describe the fate that befell it. We should rather say that it was extinguished by its own absurdity and viciousness. It never kept out of parlia- ment any person legally disqualified, and it was the occasion of incessant tricks and devices which would surely have been counted disreputable and disgraceful to those who engaged in them, but that the injustice and folly of the system generated a sort of false public conscience where it was concerned, and made people think it as lawful to cheat it, as at one time the most respectable persons in private life thought it allowable to cheat the revenue and wear smuggled lace or drink smuggled brandy. The pro- posal to divide the country into equal electoral districts is one which can hardly yet be regarded as having come to any test. But it is almost certain that sooner or later some alteration of our present system in that direction will be adopted. Of the two other points of the charter, the pay- ment of members may be regarded as decidedly objection- able; and that for yearly parliaments as embodying a propo- sition which would make public life an almost insufferable nuisance to those actively concerned in it. But neither of these two proposals would be looked upon in our time as outside the range of legitimate political discussion. Indeed, the difficulty any one engaged in their advocacy would find just now would be in getting any considerable body of lis- teners to take the slightest interest in the argument either for or against them. The Chartists might be roughly divided into three classes — the political Chartists, the social Chartists, and the Char- tists of vague discontent who joined the movement because they were wretched and felt angry. The first were the regular political agitators who wanted a wider popular rep- resentation ; the second were chiefly led to the movement by their hatred of the "bread-tax." These two classes were perfectly clear as to what they wanted; some -of their demands were just and reasonable ; none of them were with- out the sphere of rational and peaceful controversy. The disciples of mere discontent naturally swerved alternately to the side of those leaders or sections who talked loudest and fiercest against the law makers and the constituted au- thorities. Chartism soon split itself into two general divisions — the moral force and the physical force Chartism. Nothing A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 75 can be more unjust than to represent the leaders and promo- ters of the movement as mere factious and self-seeking dema- gogues v " Some of them were men of great ability and elo- quence; some were impassioned young poets drawn from the class whom Kingsley has described in his " Alton Locke" ; some were men of education ; many were earnest and devoted fanatics; and, so far as we can judge, all, or nearly all, were sincere. Even the man who did the movement most harm, and who made himself most odions to all reasonable outsiders, the once famous, now forgotten, Feargus O'Connor, appears to have been sincere and to have personally lost more than he gained by his Chartism. Four or five years after the collapse of what may be called the active Chartist agitation, a huge white-headed, vacuous-eyed man was to be seen of mornings wandering through the arcades of Covent Gar- den Market, looking at the fruits and flowers, occasionally taking up a flower, smelling at it, and putting it down with a smile of infantile satisfaction; a man who might have reminded observers of Mr. Dick in Dickens' "David Copperfield;" and this was the once renowned, once dreaded and detested Teargus O'Connor. For some time before his death his reason had wholly deserted him. Men did not know at first in the House of Commons the meaning of the odd pranks which Feargus was beginning to play there to the bewilderment of the great assembly. At last it was seen that the fallen leader of Chartism was a hopeless mad- man. It is hardly to be doubted that insanity had long been growing on him, and that soma at least of his political follies and extravagances were the result of an increasing disorder of the brain. In bis day be had been the very model for a certain class of demagogues. He was of com- manding presence,great stature ami almost giganticstrength. He had education; he had mixed in good society; he be- longed to an old family, and indeed boasted his descent from a line of Irish kings, not without some ground for the claim. He had been a man of some fashion at one time and had led a life of wild dissipation in his early years. He had a kind of eloquence which told with immense power on a mass of half-ignorant hearers; and indeed men who had no manner of liking for him or sympathy with his doctrines have declared that lie was the most effective mob orator they had ever heard. lie was ready, if needs were, to fight his way single-handed through a whole mass of 76 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Tory opponents at a contested election. -Thomas Cooper, the venerable poet of Chartism, has given an .amusing description, in his autobiography, of Feargus O'Connor who was then his hero, leaping from a wagon at a Notting- ham election into the midst of a crowd of Tory butchers, and with only two stont Chartist followers fighting his way through all opposition, " flooring the butchers like nine- pins." "Once," says Mr. Cooper, " the Tory lambs fought off all who surrounded him and got him down, and my heart quaked — for I thought they would kill him. But in a very few moments his red head emerged again from the rough human billows, and he was fighting his way as before." There were many men in the movement of a nobler moral nature than poor huge, wild Feargus O'Connor. There were men like Thomas Cooper himself, devoted, impassioned, full of poetic aspiration and no scant measure of poetic inspiration as well. Henry Vincent was a man of unimpeachable character and of some ability, an effective popular speaker, who has since maintained in a very unpre- tending way a considerable reputation. Ernest Jones was as sincere and self-sacrificing a man as ever joined a sinking cause. He had proved his sincerity more in deed than word. His talents only fell short of that height which might claim to be regarded as genius. His education was that of a scholar and a gentleman. Many men of education and ability were drawn into sympathy if not into actual co-operation with the Chartists by a conviction that some of their claims were well-founded, and that the grievances of the working classes, which were terrible to contemplate, were such as a parliament better representing all classes would be able to remedy. Some of these men have since made for themselves an honorable name in parliament and out of it; some of them have risen to high political position. It is necessary to read such a book as Thomas Cooper's autobiography to understand how genuine was the poetic and political enthusiasm which was at the heart of the Chartist movement, and how bitter was the suffering which drove into its ranks so many thousands of stout working- men who, in a country like England, might well have expected to be able to live by the hard work they were only too willing to do. One must read the Anti-Corn-Law Rhymes of Ebenezer Elliott to understand hqw the " bread- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 7? tax" became identified in the minds of the very best of the working class, and identified justly, with the system of political and economical legislation which was undoubt- edly kept up, although not of conscious purpose for the benefit of a class. In the minds of too many, the British Constitution meant hard work and half-starvation. A whole literature of Chartist newspapers sprang up to advocate the cause. The Northern Star, owned and con- ducted by Feargus O'Connor was the most popular and influ- ential of them; but every great town had its Chartist press. Meetings were held at which sometimes very violent lan- guage was employed. It began to be the practice to hold torchlight meetings at night, and many men went armed to these, and open clamor was made by the wilder of the Chartists for an appeal to arms. A formidable riot took place in Birmingham, where the authorities endeavored to put down a Chartist meeting. Ebenezer Elliott and other sensible sympathizers endeavored to open the eyes of the more extreme Chartists to the folly of all schemes for meas- ures of violence; but for the time the more violent a speaker was, the better chance he had of becoming popular. Efforts were made at times to bring about a compromise with the middle-class liberals and the anti-corn -law leaders; but all such attempts proved failures. The Chartists would not give up their charter; many of them would not renounce the hope of seeing it carried by force. The government began to prosecute some of the orators and leaders of the charter movement; and some of these were convicted, im- prisoned, and treated with great severity. Henry Vin- cent's imprisonment at Newport, in Wales, was the occa- sion of an attempt at rescue which bore a very close resemblance- indeed to a scheme of organized and armed rebellion. Newport had around it a large mining population, and the miners were nearly all physical force Chartists. It was arranged among them to march in three divisions to a certain rendezvous, and when they had formed a junction there, which was to be two hours after midnight, to march into Newport., attack the jail, and effect the release of Vincent and other prisoners. The attempt w r as to be under the chief command of Mr. Frost, a trader of New- port, who had been a magistrate, but was deprived of the commission of the peace for violent political speeches — a 78 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. man of respectable character and conduct up to that time. This was on November 4, 1839. There was some misun- derstanding and delay, as almost invariably happens in such enterprises, and the divisions of the little army did not effect their junction in time. When they entered Newport, they found the authorities fully prepared to meet them. Frost entered the town at the head of one division only, another following him at some interval. The third was nowhere, as far as the object of the enterprise was concerned. A conflict took place between the rioters and the soldiery and police, and the rioters were dispersed with a loss of some ten killed and fifty wounded. In their flight they encountered some of the other divisions coming up to the enterprise all too late. Nothing was more remarkable than the courage shown by the mayor of Newport, the magis- trates, and the little body of soldiers. The mayor, Mr. Phillips, received two gunshot wounds. Frost was arrested next day along with some of his colleagues. They were tried on June 6, 1840. The charge against them was one of high treason. There did really appear ground enough to suppose that the expedition led by Frost was not merely to rescue Vincent, but to set going the great rebellious move- ment of which the physical force Chartists had long been talking. The Chartists appear at first to have numbered some ten thousand — twenty thousand indeed, according to other accounts — and they were armed with guns, pikes, swords, pickaxes and bludgeons. If the delay and misun- derstanding had not taken place, and they had arrived at their rendezvous at the appointed time, the attempt might have led to very calamitous results. The jury found Frost and two of his companions, Williams and Jones, guilty of high treason, and they were sentenced to death ; the sen- tence, however, was commuted to one of transportation for life. Even this was afterward relaxed, and when some years had passed away, and Chartism had ceased to be a disturbing influence, Frost was allowed to return to England, where he found that a new generation had grown up, and that he was all but forgotten. In the meantime the corn- law agitation had been successful ; the year of revolutions had passed harmlessly over; Feargus O'Connor's day was done. But the trial and conviction of Frost, Williams, and Jones did not put a stop to the Chartist agitation. Oa A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 79 the contrary, that agitation seemed rather to wax and strengthen and grow broader because of the attempt at Newport, and its consequences. Thomas Cooper, for exam- ple, had never attended a Chartist meeting, nor known any- thing of Chartism beyond what he read in the newspapers, until after the conviction of Frost and his companions. There was no lack of what were called energetic measures on the part of the government. The leading Chartists all over the country were prosecuted and tried, literally by hundreds. In most cases they were convicted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The imprisonment served rather to make the Chartist leaders popular, and to adver- tise the movement, than to accomplish any purpose the government had at heart. They helped to make the gov- ernment very unpopular. The working classes grew more and more bitter against the Whigs, who they said had pro- fessed Liberalism only to gain their own ends, and were really at heart less Liberal than the Tories. Now and then an imprisoned representative of the Chartist movement got to the end of his period of sentence, and came out of dur- ance. He was a hero all over again, and his return to pub- lic life was the signal for fresh demonstrations of Chartism. At the general election of 1841, the "Vast majority of the Chartists, acting on the advice of some of their more ex- treme leaders, threw all their support into the cause of the Tories, and so helped the downfall of the Melbourne ad- ministration. Wide and almost universal discontent among the working classes in town and country still helped to swell the Char- tist ranks. The weavers and stockingers in some of the manufacturing towns were miserably poor. Wages were low everywhere. In the agricultural districts the complaints against the operation of the new poor law were vehement and passionate; and although they were unjust in principle and sustained by monstrous exaggerations of statement, they were not the less potent as recruiting agents for Chartism. There was a profound distrust of the middle class and their leaders. The anti-corn-law agitation which was then springing up, and which, one might have thought, must find its most strenuous support among the poor arti- sans of the towns, was regarded with dee]) disgust by some of the Chartists, and with downright hostility by others. A very temperate orator of the Chartists put the feeling 80 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of himself and his fellows in clear terms. " We do not ob- ject to the repeal of the corn laws," he said; "on the con- trary. When we get the charter we will repeal the corn laws and all the bad laws. But if you give up your agita- tion for the charter to help the free traders, they will never help you to get the charter. Don't be deceived by the middle classes again ! You helped them to get the reform bill, and where are the fine promises they made you? Don't listen to their humbug any more. Stick to your charter. Without your votes you are veritable slaves." The Chartists believed themselves abandoned by their natural leaders. All manner of socialist doctrines began to creep in among them. Wild and infidel opinions were proclaimed by many. Thomas Cooper tells one little anecdote which he says fairly illustrates the feeling of many of the fiercer spirits among the artisan Chartists in some of the towns. He and his friends were holding a meeting one day in Leicester. A poor religious stockinger said : " Let us be patient a little longer; surely God Almighty will help us soon." "Talk to us no more about thy Goddle Mighty," was the fierce cry that came in reply from one of the audience ; " there isn't one! If there was one, he wouldn't let us suffer as we do !" About the same time a poor stockinger rushed into Cooper's house, and throwing himself wildly on a chair, ex- claimed, " I wish they would hang me. I have lived on cold potatoes that were given me these two days, and this morning I've eaten a raw potato for sheer hunger. Give me a bit of bread and a cup of coffee or I shall drop." Thomas Cooper's remark about this time is very intelligible and simple. It tells a long clear story about Chartism. "How fierce," he says, "my discourses became now in the market place on Sunday evenings ! My heart often burned with indignation I knew not how to express. I began from sheer sympathy to feel a tendency to glide into the depraved thinking of some of the stronger but coarser spirits among the men." So the agitation went on. We need not follow it through all its incidents. It took in some places the form of indus- trial strikes; in others, of socialistic assemblages. Its fanaticism had in many instances a strong flavor of noble- ness and virtue. Some men under the influence of thought- ful leaders pledged themselves to total abstinence from intoxicating drinks, in the full belief that the agitation A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 81 would never succeed until the working classes had proved themselves by their self-control to be worthy of the gift of freedom. In other instances, as has been already remarked, the disappointment and despair of the people took the form of infidelity. There were many riots and disturbances; none, indeed, of so seemingly rebellious a nature as that of Frost and his companions, but many serious enough to spread great alarm and to furnish fresh occasion for gov- ernment prosecutions and imprisonments. Some of the prisoners seem to have been really treated with a positively wanton harshness and even cruelty. Thomas Cooper's account of his own sufferings in prison is painful to read. It is not easy to understand what good purpose any govern- ment could have supposed the prison authorities were serving by the unnecessary degradation and privation of men who, whatever their errors, were conspicuously and transparently sincere and honest. It is clear that at that time the Chartists, who repre- sented the bulk of the artisan class in most of the large towns, did in their very hearts believe that England was ruled for the benefit of aristocrats and millionaires who were absolutely indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. It is equally clear that most of what are called the ruling class did really believe the English workingmen who joined the Chartist movement to be a race of fierce unmanageable and selfish communists who, if they were allowed their own way for a moment, would prove themselves determined to overthrow throne, altar, and all established securities of society. An ignorant panic prevailed on both sides. England was indeed divided then, as Mr. Disraeli's novel described it, into two nations, the rich and t he poor, in towns at least ; and each bated and feared the other with all that unthinking hate and fear which hostile nations are capable of showing even amid all the influences of civilization. CHAPTER VI. QUESTION D.E JUPOXS. Meanwhile things were looking ill with the Melbourne ministry. Sir Robert Peel was addressing great meetings of his followers, and declaring with much show of justice 82 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. that he had created anew the conservative party. The position of the Whigs would in any case have been difficult. Their mandate, to use the French phrase, seemed to be exhausted. They had no new thing to propose. They came into power as reformers, and now they had notbhig to offer in the way of reform. It may be taken as a cer- tainty that in English politics reaction must always follow advance. The Whigs must just then have come in for the effects of reaction. But they had more than that to con- tend with. In our own time, Mr. Gladstone had no sooner passed his great measures of reform than he began to ex- perience the efforts of reaction. But there was a great difference between his situation and that of the Whigs under Melbourne. He had not failed to satisfy the demands of his followers. He had no extreme wing of his party clamoring against him on the ground that he had made use of their strength to help him in carrying out as much of his programme as suited his own coterie, and that he had then deserted them. This was the condition of the Whigs. The more advanced liberals and the whole body of the Chartists, and the working classes generally, detested and denounced them. Many of the Liberals had had some hope while Lord Durham still seemed likely to be a political power, but with the fading of his influence they lost all interest in the Whig ministry. On the other hand the support of O'Connell was a serious disadvantage to Mel- bourne and his party in England. But the Whig ministers were always adding by some mistake or other to the difficulties of their position. The Jamaica Bill put them in great perplexity. This was a measure brought in on April 9, 1839, to make temporary provision for the government of the island of Jamaica, by setting aside the house of assembly for five years, and dur- ing that time empowering the governor and council with three salaried commissioners to manage the affairs of the colony. In other words, the Melbourne ministry proposed to suspend for five years the constitution of Jamaica. No body of persons can be more awkwardly placed than a Whig ministry proposing to set aside a constitutional gov- ernment anywhere. Such a proposal may be a necessary measure; it may be unavoidable; but it always comes with a bad grace from Whigs or Liberals, and gives their enemies a handle against them which they cannot fail to use to A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 83 some purpose. What indeed, it may be plausibly asked, is the raison iVctre of a liberal government if they have toV return to the old Tory policy of suspended constitutions/ and absolute law? When Rabagas, become minister, tells his master that the only way to silence discontent is by •the liberal use of the cannon, the Prince of Monaco remarks very naturally, that if that was to be the policy he might as well have kept to his old ministers and his absolutism. So it is with an English Liberal ministry advising the sus- pension of constitutions. In the case of the Jamaica Bill there was some excuse for the harsh policy. After the abolition of slavery, the for- mer masters in the island found it very hard to reconcile themselves to the new condition of things. They could not all at once understand that their former slaves were to be their equals before the law. As we have seen much more lately in the southern states of America after the civil war and the emancipation of the negroes, there was still a per- tinacious attempt made by the planter class to regain in substance the power they had had to renounce in name. This was not to be justified or excused; but as human nature is made it was not unnatural. On the other hand, some of the Jamaica negroes were too ignorant to under- stand that they had acquired any rights; others were a little too clamorous in their assertion. Many a planter worked his men and whipped his women just as before the emancipation, and the victims did not understand that they had any right to complain. Many negroes, again, were ignorantly and thoughtlessly "bumptious," to use a vulgar expression, in the assertion of their newly-found equality. The imperial governors and officials were gener- ally and justly eager to protect the negroes; and the result was a constant quarrel between the Jamaica house of assembly and the representatives of the home government. The assembly became more insolent and offensive every day. A bill, very necessary in itself, was passed by the imperial parliament for the better regulation of prisons in Jamaica, and the house of assembly refused to submit to any such legislation. Under these circumstances the Melbourne ministry proposed the suspension of the constitution of the island. The measure was opposed, not only by Peel and the Conservatives, but by many Radicals. It was argued that there were many courses open to the ministry 'short of the 84 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. highhanded proceeding they proposed; and in truth there , was not that confidence in the Melbourne ministry at all which would have enabled them to obtain from parliament a majority sufficient to carry through such a policy. The ministry was weak and discredited; anybody might now throw a stone at it. They only had a majority of five in. favor of their measure. This, of course, was a virtual de- feat. The ministry acknowledged it and resigned. Their defeat was a humiliation; their resignation an inevitable submission ; but they came back to office almost immediately under conditions that made the humiliation more hum- bling, and rendered their subsequent career more difficult by far than their past struggle for existence had been. The return of the Whigs to office— for they cannot be said to have returned to power — came about in a very odd way. Gulliver ought to have had an opportunity of telling- such a story to the king of the Brobdingnagians, in order the better to impress him with a clear idea of the logical beauty of constitutional government. It was an entirely new illustration of the old cherchez kifemme principle, the f'emme in this case, however, being altogether a passive and innocent cause of trouble. The famous controversy known as the " bedchamber question" made a way back' for the Whigs into place. When Lord Melbourne resigned, the queen sent for the Duke of Wellington, who advised her to apply to Sir Robert Peel, for the reason that the chief diffi- culties of a Conservative government would be in the House of Commons. The queen sent for Peel, and when he came, told him with a simple and girlish frankness that she was sorry to have to part with her late ministers, of whose conduct she entirely approved, but that she bowed to constitutional usage. This must have been rather an astonishing beginuiug to the grave and formal Peel; but he was not a man to think any worse of the candid young sovereign for her outspoken ways. The negotiations went on very smoothly as to the colleagues Peel meant to recom- mend to her majesty, until he happened to notice the composition of the royal household as regarded the ladies most closely in attendance on the queen. For example, he found that the wife of Lord Normanby and the sister of Lord Morpeth were the two ladies in closest attendance on her majesty. Now it has to be borne in mind — it was pro- claimed again and again during the negotiations — that the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 85 chief difficulty of the conservatives would necessarily be in Ireland, where their policy would be altogether opposed to that of the Whigs. Lord Normanby had been lord lieu- tenant of Ireland under the Whigs, and Lord Morpeth, whom we can all remember as the amiable and accomplished Lord Carlisle of later time, Irish secretary. It certainly could not be satisfactory for Peel to try to work a new Irish policy while the closest household companions of the queen were the wife and sister of the displaced statesmen who directly represented the policy he had to supersede. Had this point of view been made clear to the sovereign at first, it is hardly possible that any serious difficulty could have arisen. The queen must have seen the obvious reasonableness of Peel's request; nor is it to be supposed that the two ladies in ques- tion could have desired to hold their places under such cir- cumstances. But unluckily some misunderstanding took place at the very beginning of the conversations on this point. Peel only desired to press for the retirement of the ladies holding the higher offices; he did not intend to ask for any change affecting a place lower in official rank than that of lady of the bedchamber. But somehow or other he conveyed to the mind of the queen a different idea. She thought he meant to insist, as a matter of principle, upon the removal of all her familiar attendants and household associates. Under this impression she consulted Lord John Russell, who advised her on what he understood to be the state of the facts. On his advice the queen stated in reply that she could not "consent to a course which she conceives to be contrary to usage and is repugnant to her feelings." Sir Robert Peel held firm to his stipulation; and the chance of his then forming a ministry was at an end. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to be recalled; and at a cabinet meeting they adopted a minute declaring it reasonable " that the great offices of the court and situations in the household held by members of parlia- ment should be included in the political arrangements made on a change in the administration; but they are not of opinion that a similar principle should be applied or ex- tended to the offices held by ladies in her majesty's house- hold." The matter was naturally made the subjectof explanation in both bouses of parliament. Sir Robert IVel was undoubt- edly right in his view of the question, and if he had been 86 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. clearly understood the right could hardly have been dis- puted ; but he defended his position in language of what now seems rather ludicrous exaggeration. He treated this question tie jupons as if it were of the last importance not alone to the honor of the ministry, but even to the safety of the realm. "I ask you," he said, "to go back to other times: take Pitt or Fox, or any other minister of this proud country, and answer for yourselves the question, is it fitting that one man shall be the minister, responsible for the most arduous charge that can fall to the lot of man, and that the wife of the other — that other his most for- midable political enemy — shall, with his express consent, hold office in immediate attendance on the sovereign?" "Oh, no!" he exclaimed, in an outburst of indignant elo- quence. "I felt that it was impossible; I could not con- sent to this. Feelings more powerful than reasoning told me that it was not for my own honor or for the public interests that I should consent to be minister of England." This high-flown language seems oddly out of place on the lips of a statesman who of all his contemporaries was the least apt to indulge in bursts of overwrought sentiment. Lord Melbourne, on the other hand, defended his action in the House of Lords in language of equal exaggeration. "I resume office," he said, " unequivocally and solely for this reason, that I will not desert my sovereign in a situation of difficulty and distress, especially when a demand is made upon her majesty with which I think she ought not to comply; a demand inconsistent with her personal honor, and which, if acquiesced in, would render her reign liable to all the changes and variations of political parties, and make her domestic life one constant scene of unhappiness and discomfort." In the country the incident created great excitement. Some Liberals bluntly insisted that it was not right in such a matter to consult the feelings of the sovereign at all, and that the advice of the minister, and his idea of what was for the good of the country, ought alone to be considered. On the other hand, O'Oonnell burst into impassioned language of praise and delight, as he dwelt upon the decision of the queen, and called upon the powers above to bless "the young creature — that creature of only nineteen, as pure as she is exalted," who consulted not her head but "the overflowing feelings of her young heart." A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. " Those excellent women who had been so long attached to her, who had nursed and tended to her wants in her child- hood, who had watched over her in her sickness, whose eyes beamed with delight as they saw her increasing daily in beauty and in loveliness — when they were threatened to be forced away from her — her heart told her that she could as well part with that heart itself as with those whom it held so dear." Feargus O'Connor went a good deal further, however, when he boldly declared that he had excellent authority for the statement, that if the Tories had got the young queen into their hands by the agency of the new ladies of the bedchamber, they had a plan for putting her out of the way and placing " the bloody Cumberland" on the throne in her stead. In 0' Conn ell's case, no mystery was made of the fact that he believed the ladies actually surrounding the young queen to be friendly to what he considered the cause of Ireland ; and that he was satisfied that Peel and the Tories were against it. For the wild talk represented by the words of Feargus O'Connor, it is only necessary to say that, frenzied and foolish as it must seem now to us, and as it must even then have seemed to all rational beings, it had the firm acceptance of large masses of people throughout the country, who persisted in seeing in Peel's pleadings for the change of the bedchamber women the positive evidence of an unscrupulous Tory plot to get possession of the queen's person, not indeed for the purpose of violently altering the succession, but in the hope of poisoning her mind against all Liberal opinions. ^ — Lord Brougham was not likely to lose so good an oppor- tunity of attacking Lord Melbourne and his colleagues. He insisted that Lord Melbourne had sacrificed Liberal^ principles and the interests of the country to the private feelings of the sovereign. "I thought," he declared in a burst of eloquent passion, " that we belonged to a country in which the government by the crown and the wisdom of parliament was everything, and the personal feelings of the sovereign were absolutely not to be named at the same time. ... I little thought to have lived to hear it said by the Whigs of L839, 'Let us rally round the queen; never mind the House of Commons; never mind measures; throw principles to the dogs; leave pledges unredeemed; but for God's sake rally round the throne.' Little did 1 think the day would come when I should hear such 88 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. language, not from the unconstitutional, place-hunting, king-loving Tories, who thought the public was made for the king, not the king for the public, but from the Whigs themselves! The. Jamaica Bill, said to be a most important measure, had been brought forward. The government staked their existence upon it. They were not able to carry it; they therefore conceived they had lost the con- fidence of the House of Commons. They thought it a measure of paramount necessity then. Is it less necessary now? Oh, but that is altered! The Jamaica question is to be new fashioned ; principles are to be given up, and all because of two ladies of the bedchamber." Nothing could be more undesirable than the position in which Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had allowed the sovereign to place herself. The more people in general came to think over the matter, the more clearly it was seen that Peel was in the right, although he had not made him- self understood at first, and had, perhaps, not shown all through enough of consideration for the novelty of the young sovereign's position, or for the difficulty of finding a conclusive precedent on such a question, seeing that since the principle of ministerial responsibility had come to be recognized among us in its genuine sense, there never before had been a woman on the throne. But no one could delib- erately maintain the position at first taken up by the Whigs ; and in point of fact they were soon glad to drop it as ouickly and quietly as possible. The whole question, it -may be said at once, was afterward settled by a sensible compromise which the prince consort suggested. It was agreed that on a change of ministry the queen would listen to any representation from the incoming prime minister as to the composition of her household, and would arrange for the retirement "of their own accord" of any ladies who were so closely related to the leaders of opposition as to render their presence inconvenient. The Whigs came back to office utterly discredited. They had to tinker up somehow a new Jamaica Bill. They had declared that they could not remain in office unless they were allowed to deal in a certain way with Jamaica; and now that they were back again in office, they could not avoid trying to do something with the Jamaica business. They therefore introduced a new bill which was a mere compromise put together in the hope of its being allowed to pass. It was A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 89 allowed to pass, after a fashion ; that is, when the opposi- tion in the House of Lords had tinkered it and amended it at their pleasure. The bedchamber question in fact had thrown Jamaica out of perspective. The unfortunate island must do the best it could now; in this country states- men had graver matter to think of. Sir Robert Peel could not govern with Lady Normanby; the Whigs would not govern without her. It does not seem by any means clear, however, that Lord Melbourne and his colleagues deserved the savage censure of Lord Brougham merely for having returned to office and given up their original position with regard to the Jamaica Bill. What else remained to be done? If they had refused to come back, the only result would have been that Peel must have become prime minister, with a distinct minority in the House of Commons. Peel could not have held his ground there, except by the favor and mercy of his opponents; and those were not merciful days in politics. He would only have taken office to be called upon at once to resign it by some adverse vote of the House of Commons. The state of things seems in this respect to be not unlike that which existed when Mr. Gladstone was defeated on the Irish University Bill in 1873. Mr. Gladstone resigned; or rather tendered his resignation; and by his advice her ma- jesty invited Mr. Disraeli to form a cabinet. Mr. Disraeli did not see his way to undertake the government of the country with the existing House of Commons; and as the conditions under which he was willing to undertake the duty were not conveniently attainable, the negotiation came to an end. The queen sent again for Mr. Gladstone, who consented to resume his place as prime minister. If Lord Melbourne returned to office with the knowledge that he could not carry the Jamaica Bill which he had declared to be necessary, Mr. Gladstone resumed his place at the head of his ministry without the remotest hope of being- able to carry his Irish University measure. No one ever found fault with Mr. Gladstone for having, under the circumstances, done the best he could and consented to meet the request of the sovereign and the convenience of the public service by again taking on himself the responsi- bility of government, although the measure on which he had declared he would stake the existence of his ministry had been rejected by the House of Commons. 90 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Still it cannot be denied that the Melbourne government were prejudiced in the public mind by these events, and by the attacks for which they gave so large an opportunity. The feeling in some parts of the country was still senti- mentally with the queen. At many a dinner table it be- came the fashion to drink the health of her majesty with a punning addition, not belonging to an order of wit any higher than that which in other days toasted the king "over the water;" or prayed of heaven to "send this crumb well down." The queen was toasted as the sovereign of spirit who "would not let her belles be peeled." But the ministry were almost universally believed to have placed themselves in a ridiculous light, and to have crept again into office, as Mr. Molesworth puts it in his valuable "His- tory of England from 1830 to 1874," "behind the petticoats of the ladies in waiting." The death of Lady Flora Hast- ings, which occurred almost immediately, tended further to arouse a feeling of dislike to the Whigs. This melan- choly event does not need any lengthened comment. A young lady who belonged to the household of the Duchess of Kent fell under an unfounded, but in the circumstances not wholly unreasonable suspicion. It was the classic story of Calisto, Diana's unhappy nymph, reversed. Lady Flora was proved to be innocent; but her death, imminent probably in any case from the disease which had fastened on her, was doubtless hastened by the humiliation to which she had. been subjected. It does not seem that anyone was to blame in the matter. The ministry certainly do not appear to have done anything for which they could fairly be reproached. No one can be surprised that those who surrounded the queen and the Duchess of Kent should have taken some pains to inquire into the truth or falsehood of scandalous rumors, for which there might have appeared to be some obvious justification. But the whole story was so sad and shocking; the death of the poor young lady fol- lowed with such tragic rapidity upon the establishment of her innocence; the natural complaints of her mother were so loud and impassioned, that the ministers who had to answer the mother's appeals were unavoidably placed in an invidious and a painful position. The demands of the Marchioness of Hastings for redress were unreasonable. They endeavored to make out the existence of a cruel con- spiracy against Lady Flora, and called for the peremptory A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 91 dismissal and disgrace of the eminent court physician, who had merely performed a most painful duty, and whose report had been the especial means of establishing the injus- tice of the suspicions which were directed against her. But it was a damaging duty for a minister to have to write to the distracted mother, as Lord Melbourne found it neces- sary to do, telling her that her demand was " so unprece- dented and objectionable, that even the respect due to your ladyship's sex, rank, family and character would not justify me in more, if indeed it authorizes so much, than acknowl- edging that letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your ladyship that I have received it." The "palace scandal," as it was called, became known shortly before the dispute about the ladies of the bedchamber. The death of Lady Flora Hastings happened soon after it. It is not strictly in logical propriety that such events, or their rapid succes- sion, should tend to bring into disrepute the ministry who can only be regarded as their historical contemporaries. But the world must change a great deal before ministers are no longer held accountable in public opinion for any- thing but the events over which they can be shown to have some control. CHAPTER VII. THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. On January 1G, 1840, the queen, opening parliament in person, announced her intention to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha — a step which she trusted would be "conducive to the interests of my people as well as to my own domestic happiness." In the discus- sion which followed in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel observed that her majesty had "the singular good fortune to be able to gratify her private feelings, while she performs her public duty, and to obtain the best guarantee for happiness by contracting an alliance founded on affec- tion." Peel spoke the simple truth; it was indeed a mar- riage founded on affection. No marriage contracted in the humblest class could have been more entirely a union of love, and more free from what might he called selfish and worldly considerations. The queen had for a long time loved 92 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. her cousin. He was nearly her own age, the queen being the elder by three mouths and two or three days. Francis Charles Augustus Albert Emmanuel was the full name of the young prince. He was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-(Joburg-Saalfeld, and of his wife Louisa, daughter of Augustus, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Alteuburg. Prince Albert was born at the Rosenau, one of his father's resi- dences, near Coburg, on August 26, 1819. The court his- torian notices with pardonable comrdacency the " remark- able coincidence" — easily explained, surely — that the same accoucheuse, Madame Siebold, assisted at the birth of Prince Albert, and of the queen some three mouths before, and that the prince was baptized by the clergyman, Pro- fessor Genzler, who had the year before officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. A marriage between the Princess Victoria and Prince Albert had been thought of as desirable among the families on both sides, but it was always wisely resolved that nothing should be said to the young princess on the subject unless she herself showed a distinct liking for her cousin. In 1836, Prince Albert was brought by his father to England, and made the personal acquaintance of the princess, and she seems at once to have been drawn toward him in the manner which her family and friends would most have desired. Three years later the prince again came to England, and the queen, in a letter to her uncle, the King of the Bel- gians, wrote of him in the warmest terms. "Albert's beauty," she said, "is most striking, and he is most amiable and unaffected — in short, very fascinating." Not many days after she wrote to another friend and faithful coun- sellor, the Baron Stockmar, to say, " I do feel so guilty, I know not how to begin my letter; but I think the news it will contain will be sufficient to ensure your forgiveness. Albert has completely won my heart, and all was settled between us this morning." The queen had just before informed Lord Melbourne of her intention, and Lord Mel- bourne, it is needless to say, exj^ressed his decided approval. There was no one to disapprove of such a marriage. Prince Albert was a young man to win the heart of any girl. He was singularly handsome, graceful and gifted. In princes, as we know, a small measure of beauty and accomplishment suffices to throw courtiers and court ladies into transports of admiration; but had Prince Albert been A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. <)3 the sou of a farmer or a butler, he must have been admired for his singular personal attractions. He had had a sound aud a varied education. He had been brought up as if he were to be a professional musician, a professional chemist or botanist, and a professor of history and belles lettres and fine arts. The scientific and the literary were remarkably blended in his bringing-up; remarkably, that is to say, for some half-century ago, when even in Germany a system of education seldom aimed at being totus teres atque rotundus. .He had begun to study the constitutional history of states, and was preparing himself to take an interest in politics. There was much of the practical and busiuess-like about him, as he showed in after-life; he loved farming and took a deep interest in machinery and in the growth of indus- trial science. He was a sort of combination of the trouba- dour, the savant, and the man of business. His tastes were for a quiet, domestic and unostentatious life — a life of refined culture, of happy calm evenings, of art and poetry and genial communion with nature. He was made happy by the songs of birds, and delighted in sitting alone and playing the organ. But there was in him too a great deal of the political philosopher. He loved to hear political and other questions well argued out, and once observed that a false argument jarred on his nerves as much as a false note in music. He seems to have had from his youth an all-per- vading sense of duty. 80 far as we can guess, he was almost absolutely free from the ordinary follies, not to say sins, of youth. Young as he was when he married the queen, he devoted himself at once to what he conscientiously believed to be the duties of his station with a self-control and self- devotion rare even among the aged, and almost unknown in youth. He gave up every habit, however familiar and dear, every predilection no matter how sweet, every indul- gence of sentiment or amusement, that in any way threat- ened to interfere with the steadfast performance of the part he had assigned to himself. No man ever devoted himself more faithfully to the difficult duties of a high and a new situation, or kept more strictly to his resolve. _ It was no task to him to be a tender husband and a loving father. This was apart of his sweet, pure and affectionate nature. It may well be doubted whether any other queen ever had a married life so happy as that of Queen Victoria. The marriage of the queen and the prince took place on 94 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. February 10, 1840. The reception given by the people in general to the prince on his landing in England a few days before the ceremony, and on the day of the marriage, was cordial and even enthusiastic. But it is not certain whether there was a very cordial feeling to the prince among all classes of politicians. A rumor of the most absurd kind had got abroad in certain circles that the young Albert was not a Protestant — that he was in fact a member of the Church of Rome. In a different circle the belief was curiously cherished that the prince was a free-thinker in matters of religion and a radical in politics. Somewhat unfortunately, the declaration of the intended marriage to the privy council did not mention the fact that Albert was a Protestant prince. The cabinet no doubt thought that the leaders of public opinion on all sides of politics would have had historical knowledge among them to teach them that Prince Albert belonged to that branch of the Saxon family which since the Reformation had been conspicuously Protestant. " There has not," Prince Albert himself wrote to the queen on December 7, 1839, " been a single Catholic princess introduced into the Coburg family since the appear- ance of Luther in 1521. Moreover the Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony was the very first Protestant that ever lived." No doubt the ministry thought also that the constitutional rule which forbids an English sovereign to marry with a Roman Catholic under penalty of forfeiting the crown, would be regarded as a sufficient guarantee that when they announced the queen's approaching marriage it must be a marriage with a Protestant. All this assumption, however reasonable and natural, did not find warrant in the events that actually took place. It would have been better of course if the government had assumed that parliament and the public geneially knew nothing about the prince and his ancestry, or the constitutional penalties for a mem- ber of the royal family marrying a Catholic, and had formally announced that the choice of Queen Victoria had happily fallen on a Protestant. The wise and farseeing Leopold, King of the Belgians, had recommended that the fact should be specifically mentioned; but it was perhaps a part of Lord Melbourne's indolent good nature to take it for granted that people generally would be calm and reason- able, and that all would go right without interruption or cavil. He therefore acted on the assumption that any A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 05 trmal mention of Prince Albert's Protestantism would be aperfluous; and neither in the declaration to the privy council, nor in the announcement to parliament, was a word said upon the subject. The result was that in the debate on the address in the House of Lords a somewhat unseemly altercation took place, an altercation the more to be regretted because it might have been so easily spared. The question was bluntly raised by no less a person than the Duke of Wellington whether the future husband of the queen was or was not a Protestant. The Duke actually charged the ministry with having purposely left out the word " Protestant" in the announcements in order that they might not offend their Irish and Catholic supporters, and by the very charge did much to strengthen the popular feeling against the statesmen who were supposed to be kept in office by virtue of the patronage of O'Connell. The duke moved that the word " Protestant" be inserted in the con- gratulatory address to the queen, and he carried his point, although Lord Melbourne held to the opinion that the word was unnecessary in describing a prince who was not only a Protestant but descended from the most Protestant family in Europe. The lack of judgment and tact on the part of the ministry was never more clearly shown than in the original omission of the word. Another disagreeable occurrence was the discussion that took place when the bill for the naturalization of the prince was brought before the House of Lords. The bill in its title merely set out the proposal to provide for the natural- ization of the prince; but it contained a clause to give him precedence for life "next after her majesty, in parliament or elsewhere, as her majesty might think proper." A great deal of objection was raised by the Duke of Welling- ton and Lord Brougham to this clause on its own merits; hut, as was natural, the objections were infinitely aggravated by the singular want of judgment, and even of common propriety, which could introduce a clause conferring on the sovereign powers so large and so new into a mere nat uraliza- tion bill, 'without- any previous notice to parliament. The matter was ultimately settled by allowing the bill to remain a simple naturalization measure, and leaving the question of precedence to be dealt with by royal prerogative. Both the great political parties concurred without further diffi- culty in an arrangement by which it was provided in letters 90 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. patent that the prince should henceforth upon all occasions, and in all meetings, except when otherwise provided by act of parliament, have precedence next to the queen. There never would have been any difficulty in the matter if the ministry had acted with any discretion; but it would be absurd to expect that a great nation, whose constitu- tional system is built up of precedents, should agree at once and without demur to every new arrangement which it might seem convenient to a ministry to make in a hurry. Yet another source of dissatisfaction to the palace and the people was created by the manner in which the ministry took upon themselves to bring forward the proposition for the settlement of an annuity on the prince. In former cases — that for example, of Queen Charlotte, Queen Ade- laide, and Prince Leopold on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte — the annuity granted had been £50,000. It so happened, however, that the settlement to be made on Prince Albert came in times of great industrial and com- mercial distress. The days had gone by when economy in the House of Commons was looked upon as an ignoble principle, and when loyalty to the sovereign was believed to bind members of parliament to grant without a murmur of discussion any sums that might be asked by the ministry in the sovereign's name. Parliament was beginning to feel more thoroughly its responsibility as the guardian of the nation's resources, and it was no longer thought a fine thing to give away the money of the tax-payer with mag- nanimous indifference. It was therefore absurd on the part of the ministry to suppose that because great sums of money had been voted without question on former occasions, they would be voted without question now. It is quite possible that the whole matter might have been settled without controversy if the ministry had shown any judg- ment whatever in their conduct of the business. In our day the ministry would at once have consulted the leaders of the opposition. In all matters where the grant of money to anyone connected with the sovereign is concerned, it is now understood that the gift shall come with the*full con- currence of both parties in parliament. The leader of the House of Commons would probably, by arrangement, pro- pose the grant, and the leader of the opposition would second it. In the case of the annuity to Prince Albert, the ministry had the almost incredible folly to bring for- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES, 97 ward their proposal without having invited in any way the concurrence of the opposition. They introduced the pro- posal without discretion; they conducted the discussion on it without temper. They answered the most reasonable ob- jections with imputations of want of loyalty; and they gave some excuse for the suspicion that they wished to provoke the opposition into some expression that might make them odious to the queen and the prince. Mr. Hume, the economist, proposed that the annuity be reduced from £50,000 to £21,000. This was negatived. There- upon Colonel Sibthorp, a once famous Tory fanatic of the most eccentric manners and opinions, proposed that the sum be £30,000 and he received the support of Sir Kobert Peel and other eminent members of the opposition ; and the amendment was carried. These were not auspicious incidents to prelude the royal marriage. There can be no doubt that for a time the queen, st ill more than the prince, felt their influence keenly. The prince showed remarkable good sense and appreciation of the condition of political arrangements in England, and readily comprehended that there was nothing personal to himself in any objections which the House of Commons might have made to the proposals of the ministry. The question of precedence was very easily settled when it came to be discussed in reasonable fashion; although it was not until many years after, 1857, that the title of Prince Consort was given to the husband of the queen. A few mou t lis after the marriage, a bill was passed pro- viding for a regency in the possible event of the death of the queen, leaving issue. With the entire concurrence of the leaders of the opposition, who were consulted this time, Prince Albert was named regent, following the precedent which had been adopted in the instance of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold. The Dukeof Sussex, uncle of the queen, alone dissented in the House of Lords, and recorded his protest against the proposal. The passing of this bill was naturally regarded as of much importance to Prince Albert. It gave liini to some extent the status in the country which he had not had before. It also proved that the prince himself had risen in the estimation of the Tory party during the few months that elapsed since the debates on the annuity and the question of precedence. No one could have started with a more resolute deter- 98 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. urination to stand clear of party politics than Prince Albert. He accepted at once his position as the husband of the queen of a constitutional country. His own idea of his duty was that he should be the private secretary and unofficial counsellor of the queen. To this purpose he devoted himself unswervingly. Outside that part of his duties, he constituted himself a sort of minister, without portfolio, of art and education. He took an interest, and often a leading part, in all projects and movements relating to the spread of education, the culture of art, and the pro- motion of industrial science. Yet it was long before he was thoroughly understood by the country. It was long before he became in any degree popular; and it may be doubted whether lie ever was thoroughly and generally popular. Not perhaps until his untimely death did the country find out how entirely disinterested and faithful his life had been, and how he had made the discharge of duty his business and his task. His character was one which is liable to be regarded by ordinary observers as possessing none but negative virtues. He was thought to be cold, formal, and apathetic. His manners were somewhat shy and constrained, except when he was in the company of those he loved, and then he commonly relaxed into a kind of boyish freedom and joyousness. . But to the public in general he seemed formal and chilling. It is not only Mr. Pendennis who conceals his gentleness under a shy and pompous demeanor. With all his ability, his anxiety to learn, his capacity for patient study, and his willingness to welcome new ideas, he never perhaps quite understood the genius of the English political system. His faithful friend and counsellor, Baron Stockmar, was not the man best calculated to set him right on this subject. Both were far too eager to find in the English Constitution a piece of symmetrical mechanism, or to treat it as a written code from which one might take extracts or construct summaries for constant reference and guidance. But this was not in the beginning the cause of any coldness toward the prince on the part of the English public. Prince Albert had not the ways of an Englishman, and the tendency of English- men, then as now, was to assume that to have manners other than those of an Englishman was to be so far unwor- thy of confidence. He was not made to shine in common- place society. He could talk admirably about something, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 99 but he had riot the gift of talking about nothing, and prob- ably would not have cared much to cultivate such a faculty. He was fond' of suggesting small innovations and improve- ments in established systems, to the annoyance of men with set ideas, who liked their own ways best. Thus it hap- pened that he remained for many years, if not exactly unappreciated, yet not thoroughly appreciated, and that a considerable and very influential section of society was always ready to cavil at what he said, and find motive for suspicion in most things that he did. Perhaps he was best understood and most cordially appreciated among the poorer classes of his wife's subjects. He found also more cordial approval generally among the Radicals than among the Tories, or even the Whigs. One reform which Prince Albert worked earnestly to bring about, was the abolition of dueling in the army, and the substitution of some system of courts of honorable arbi- tration to supersede the barbaric recourse to the decision of weapons. He did not succeed in having his courts of honor established. There was something too fanciful in the scheme to attract the. authorities of our two services; and there were undoubtedly many practical difficulties in the way of making such a system effective. But he suc- ceeded so far, that he induced the Duke of Wellington and the heads of the services to turn their attention very seriously to the subject, and to use all the influence in their power for the purpose of discouraging and discrediting the odious practice of the duel. It is carrying courtly politeness too far to attribute the total disappearance of the dueling sys- tem, as one biographer seems inclined to do, to the personal efforts of Prince Albert. It is enough to his honor that he diil his best, and that the best was a substantial contribu- tion toward so great an object. Put nothing can testify more strikingly to the rapid growth of a genuine civiliza- tion in Queen Victoria's reign than the utter discontinuance of the dueling system. When the queen came to the throne, and for years after, it was still in full force. The duel plays a conspicuous part in the fiction and the drama of the sovereign's earlier years. It was a common incident of all political controversies. It was an episode of most con- tested elections. It was often resorted to for the purpose of deciding the right or wrong of a half-drunken quarrel over a card table. It formed as common a theme of gossip 100 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. as an elopement or a bankruptcy. Most of the eminent statesmen who were prominent in the earlier part of the queen's reign had fought duels. Peel and O'Connell had made arrangements for a "meeting." Mr. Disraeli had challenged O'Connell or any of the sons of O'Connell. The great agitator himself had killed his man in a duel. Mr. Roebuck had gone out; Mr. Cobden at a much later period had been visited with a challenge, and had had the good sense and the moral courage to laugh at it. At the present hour a duel in England would seem as absurd and barbarous an anachronism as an ordeal by touch or a witch- burning. Many years have passed since a duel was last talked of in parliament; and then it was only the subject of a reprobation that had some work to do to keep its coun- tenance while administering the proper rebuke. But it was not the influence of any one man, or even any class of men, that brought about in so short a time this striking change in the tone of public feeling and morality. The change was part of the growth of education and of civilization ; of the strengthening and broadening influence of the press, the platform, the cheap book, the pulpit, and the less restricted intercourse of classes. This is perhaps as suitable a place as any other to intro- duce some notice of the attempts that were made from time to time upon the life of the queen. It is proper to say something of them, although not one possessed the slightest political importance, or could be said to illustrate anything more than sheer lunacy, or that morbid vanity and thirst for notoriety that is nearly akin to genuine madness. The first attempt was made on June 10, J 840, by Edward Ox- ford, a potboy of seventeen, who fired two shots at the queen as she was driving up Constitution Hill with Prince Albert. Oxford fired both shots deliberately enough, but happily missed in each case. He proved to have been an absurd creature, half crazy with a longing to consider him- self a political prisoner and to be talked of. When he was tried, the jury pronounced him insane, and he was ordered to be kept in a lunatic asylum during her majesty's pleasure. The trial completely dissipated some wild alarms that were felt, founded chiefly on absurd papers in Oxford's posses- sion, about a tremendous secret society called " Young England," having among its other objects the assassination of royal personages. It is a not uninteresting illustration A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 101 of the condition of public feeling, that some of the Irish Catholic papers in seeming good faith denounced Oxford as an agent of the Duke of Cumberland and the Orange- men, and declared that the object was to assassinate the queen and put the duke on the throne. Tlie trial showed that Oxford was the agent of nobody, and was impelled by nothing but his own crack-brained love of notoriety. The finding of the jury was evidently something of a compromise, for it is very doubtful whether the boy was insane in the medical sense, and whether he was fairly to be held irre- sponsible for his actions. But it was felt perhaps that the wisest course was to treat him as a madman ; and the result did not prove unsatisfactory. Mr. Theodore Martin, in his "Life of the Prince Consort," expresses a different opinion. He thinks it would have been well if Oxford had been dealt with as guilty in the ordinary way. "The best commen- tary," he says, "on the lenity thus shown was pronounced by Oxford himself, on being told of the similar attempts of Francis and Bean in 1842, when he declared that if he had been hanged there would have been no more shooting at the queen." It may be reasonably doubted whether the authority of Oxford as to the general influence of criminal legislation is very valuable. Against the philosophic opinion of the half-crazy young potboy on which Mr. Martin places so much reliance, may be set the fact, that in other coun- tries where attempts on the life of the sovereign have been punished by the stern award of death, it has not been found that the execution of one fanatic was a safe protection against the murderous fanaticism of another. On .May 30, 18-42, a man named John Francis, son of a machinist in Drury Lane, fired a pistol at the queen as she was driving down ('(institution Hill, on the very spot where Oxford's attempt was made. This was a somewhat serious attempt, for Francis was not more than a few feet from the carriage, which fortunately was driving at a very rapid rate. The queen showed great composure. She was in some measure prepared for the attempt, for it seems cer- tain that the same man had on the previous evening pre- sented a pistol at the royal carriage, although he did not- then fire it. Francis was arrested and put on trial. He was only twenty-two years of age, and although at first he endeavored to brazen it out and put on a sort of melo- dramatic regicide aspect, yet when the sentence of death for 102 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. high treason was passed on him he fell into a swoon and was carried insensible from the court. The sentence was not carried into effect. It was not certain whether the pis- tol was loaded at all, and whether the whole performance was not a mere piece of brutal play-acting done out of a longing to be notorious. Her majesty herself was anxious that the death sentence should not be carried into effect, and it was finally commuted to one of transportation for life. The very day after this mitigation of punishment became publicly known another attempt was made by a hunchbacked lad named Bean. As the queen was passing from Buckingham Palace to the Chapel Royal, Bean pre- sented a pistol at her carriage, but did not succeed in firing it before his hand was seized by a prompt and courageous boy who was standing near. The pistol was found to be loaded with powder, paper closely rammed down, and some scraps of a clay pipe. It may be asked whether the argu- ment of Mr. Martin is not fully borne out by this occur- rence, and whether the fact of Bean's attempt having been made on the day after the commutation of the capital sen- tence in the case of Francis is not evidence that the leniency in the former instance was the cause of the attempt made in the latter. But it was made clear, and the fact is recorded on the authority of Prince Albert himself, that Bean had announced his determination to make the attempt several days before the sentence of Francis was commuted, and while Francis was actually lying under sentence of death. With regard to Francis himself, the prince was clearly of opinion that to carry out the capital sentence would have been nothing less than a judicial murder, as it is essential that the act should be committed with intent to kill or wound, and in Francis' case to all appearance this was not the fact, or at least it was open to grave doubt. In this calm and wise way did the husband of the queen, who had al- ways shared with her whatever of clanger there might be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they ought to be dealt with. The ambition which fired most or all of the miscreants who thus disturbed the queen and the country was that of the mountebank rather than of the assassin. The queen herself showed how thoroughly she understood the significance of all that had happened, when she declared, according to Mr. Martin, that she expected a rejaetition of the attempts on her life so long as the law remained unal- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 103 tered by which they could be dealt with only as acts of high treason. The seeming dignity of martyrdom had something fascinating in it to morbid vanity or crazy fanaticism, while on the other hand it was almost certain that the martyr's penalty would not in the end be inflicted. A very appropriate change in the law was effected by which a punishment at once sharp and degrading was provided even for mere mountebank attempts against the queen ; a punishment which was certain to be inflicted. A bill was introduced by Sir Robert Peel making such attempts pun- ishable by transportation for seven years, or by imprison- ment for a term not exceeding three years, "the culprit to be publicly or privately whipped as often and in such man- ner as the court shall direct, not exceeding thrice." Bean was convicted under this act and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment in Millbank Penitentiary. This did not, however, conclude the attacks on the queen. An Irish bricklayer, named Hamilton, fired a pistol, charged only with powder, at her majesty, on Constitution Hill, on May 19, 1849, and was sentenced to seven years' trans- portation. A man named Robert Pate, once a lieutenant of Hussars, struck her majesty on the face with a stick as she was leaving the Duke of Cambridge's residence in her carriage on May 27, 1850. This man was sentenced to seven years' transportation, but the judge paid so much attention to the plea of insanity set up on his behalf, as to omit from his punishment the whipping which might have been ordered. Finally, on February 29, 1872, a lad of seventeen, named Arthur O'Connor, presented a pistol at the queen as she was entering Buckingbam Palace after a drive. The pistol, bowever, proved to be unloaded — an antique and useless or harmless weapon, with a flint lock Avhicli \\;is broken, and in the barrel a piece of greasy red rag. The wretched lad held a paper in one hand which was found to be some sort of petition on behalf of the Fenian prisoners. When he came up for trial a plea of insanity was put in on his behalf, but he did not seem to be insane in the sense of being irresponsible for his actions or incap- able of understanding the penalty they involved, and he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment and a whipping. We have hurried over many years for the pur- pose of completing this painful and ludicrous catalogue of the attempts made against the queen. It will be seen that 104 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. in not a single instance was there the slightest political significance to be attached to them. Even in our own softened and civilized time it sometimes happens that an attempt is made on the life of a sovereign which, however we may condemn and reprobate it on moral grounds, yet does seem to bear a distinct political meaning, and to show that there are fanatical minds still burning under some sense of national or personal wrong. But in the various attacks which were made on Queen Victoria nothing of the kind was even pretended. There was no opportunity for any vaporing about Brutus and Charlotte Corday. The impulse, where it was not that of sheer insanity, was of kin to the vulgar love of notoriety in certain minds which sets on those whom it pervades to mutilate noble works of art and scrawl their autographs on the marble of immortal monuments. There was a great deal of wisdom shown in not dealing too severely with most of these offenses and in not treating them too much au serieux. Prince Albert himself said that " the vindictive feeling of the common people would be a thousand times more dangerous than the madness of individuals. " There was not indeed the slightest danger at any time that the " common people" of England could be wrought up to any sympathy with assassination; nor was this what Prince Albert meant. But the queen and . her husband were yet new to power, and the people had not quite lost all memory of sovereigns who, well- meaning enough, had yet scarcely understood constitutional government, and there were wild rumors of reaction this way and revolution that way. It might have fomented a feeling of distrust and dissatisfaction if the people had seen any disposition on the part of those in authority to strain the criminal law for the sake of enforcing a death penalty against creatures like Oxford and Bean. The most alarm- ing and unnerving of all dangers to a ruler is that of assassination. Even the best and most blameless sovereign is not wholly secure against it. The hand of Oxford might have killed the queen. Perhaps, however, the best protec- tion a sovereign can have is not to exaggerate the clanger. There is no safety in mere severity of punishment. Where the attempt is serious and desperate, it is that of a fanati- cism which holds its life in its hand, and is not to be de- terred by fear of death. The tortures of Ravaillac did not deter/jIJamiens. The birch in the case of Bean and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. If 5 O'Connor may effectively discountenance enterprises which are born of the mountebank's and not the fanatic's spirit. CHAPTER VIII. THE OPIUM WAR. The opium dispute with China was going on when the queen came to the throne. The Opium War broke out soon after. On March 3, 1843, five huge wagons, each of them drawn by four horses, and the whole under escort of a detachment of the Sixtieth Regiment, arrived in front of the Mint. An immense crowd followed the wagons. It was seen that they were filled with boxes; and one of the boxes having been somewhat broken in its journey, the crowd were able to see that it was crammed full of odd- looking silver coins. The lookers-on were delighted, as well as amused, by the sight of this huge consignment of treasure; and when it became known that the silver money was the first instalment of the China ransom, there were lusty cheers given as the wagons passed through the gates of the Mint. This was a payment on account of the war indemnity imposed on China. Nearly four millions and a half sterling was the sum of the indemnity, in addition to one million and a quarter which had already been paid by the Chinese authorities. Many readers may remember that for some time "China money" was regularly set down as an item in the revenues of each year with which the chancellor of the exchequer had to deal. The China War, of which this money was the spoil, was not perhaps an event of which the nation was entitled to be very proud. It was the precursor of other wars; the policy on which it was con- ducted has never since ceased altogether to be a question of more or less excited controversy ; but it may safely be asserted that if the same events were to occur in our day it would be hardly possible to find a ministry to originate a war, for which at the same time it must be owned that the vast majority of the people, of all politics and classes, were only too ready then to find excuse and even justification. The wagon-loads of silver conveyed into the Mint amid the cheers of the crowd were the spoils of the famous Opium War. 106 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Reduced to plain words, the principle for which we fought iu the China War was the right of Great Britain to force a peculiar trade upon a foreign people in spite of the protestations of the government and all such public opinion as there was of the nation. Of course this was not the avowed motive of the war. Not often in history is the real and inspiring motive of a war proclaimed in so many words by those who carry it on. Not often, indeed, is it seen, naked and avowed, even in the minds of its promoters themselves. As the quarrel between this country and China went on, a great many minor and incidental subjects of dispute arose which for the moment put the one main and original question out of people's minds; and in the course of these discussions it happened more than once that the Chinese authorities took some steps which put them decidedly in the wrong. Thus it is true enough that there were particular passages of the controversy when the English government had all or nearly all of the right on their side so far as the immediate incident of the dispute was concerned; and when, if that had been the whole matter of quarrel, or if the quarrel had begun there, a patriotic minister might have been justified in thinking that the Chinese were determined to offend England, and deserved humiliation. But no consideration of this kind can now hide from our eyes the fact that in the beginning and the very origin of the quarrel we were distinctly in the wrong. We asserted, or at least acted on the assertion of, a claim so unreasonable and even monstrous that it never could have been made upon any nation strong enough to render its assertion a matter of serious responsibility. The most important lessons a nation can learn from its own history are found in the exposure of its own errors. His- torians have sometimes done more evil than court flatterers when they have gone about to glorify the errors of their own people, and to make wrong appear right, because an English government talked the public opinion of the time into a confusion of principles. The whole principle of Chinese civilization, at the time when the Opium War broke out, was based on conditions which to any modern nation must seem erroneous and unreasonable. The Chinese governments and people desired to have no political relations or dealings whatever with any other state. They were not so obstinately set against pri- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 107 vate and commercial dealings; but they would have no political intercourse with foreigners, and they would not even recognize the existence of foreign peoples as states. They were perfectly satisfied with themselves and their own systems. They were convinced that their own systems were not only wise but absolutely perfect. It is superfluous to say that this was in itself evidence of ignorance and self- conceit. A belief in the perfection of their own systems could only exist among a people who knew nothing of any other systems. But absurd as the idea must appear to us, yet the Chinese might have found a good deal t« say for it. It was the result of a civilization so ancient that the oldest events preserved in European history were but as yesterday in the comparison. Whatever its errors and defects, it was distinctly a civilization. It was a system with a litera- ture and laws and institutions of its own; it was a coherent and harmonious social and political system which had on the whole worked tolerably well. It was not very unlike in its principles the kind of civilization which at one time it was the whim of men of genius, like Rousseau and Diderot, to idealize and admire. The European, of whatever nation, may be said to like change, and to believe in its necessity. His instincts and his convictions alike tend this way. The sleepiest of Europeans — the Neapolitan who lies with his feet in the water on the Chiaja; the Spaniard, who smokes his cigar and sips his coffee as if life had no active business whatever; the fldneur of the Paris boulevards; the beggar who lounged from cabin to cabin in Ireland a generation ago — all these, no matter how little inclined for change themselves, would be delighted to hear of travel and enter- prise, and of new things and new discoveries. But to the Chinese, of all eastern races, the very idea of travel and change was something repulsive and odious. As the thought of having to go a day unwashed would be to the educated Englishman of our age, or as the edge of a preci- pice is to a nervous man, so was the idea of innovation to the Chinese of that time. The ordinary Oriental dreads and detests change; but the Chinese at that time went as far beyond the ordinary Oriental as the latter goes beyond an average Englishman. In the present day h considerable alteration has taken place in this respect. The Chinese have had innovation after innovation forced on them, until at last they have taken up with the new order of things, 108 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. like people who feel that it is idle to resist their fate any longer. The emigration from China has been as remark- id )le as that from Ireland or Germany; and the United States finds itself confronted with a question of the first magnitude when it asks itself what is to be the influence and operation of the descent of the Chinese populations along the Pacific slope. Japan has put on modern and European civilization like a garment. Japan effected in a few years a revolution in the political constitution and the social habits of her people, and in their very way of looking at things, the like of which no other state ever accomplished in a century. But nothing of all this was thought of at the time of the China War. The one thing which China asked of European civilization and the thing called Modern Progress was to be let alone. China's prayer to Europe Avas that of Diogenes to Alexander — "Stand out of my sunshine." It was, as we have said, to political relationships rather than to private and commercial dealings with foreign peoples that the Chinese felt an unconquerable objection. They did not indeed like even private and commercial dealings with foreigners. They would much rather have lived with- out ever seeing the face of a foreigner. But they had put up with the private intrusion of foreigners and trade, and had had dealings with American traders, and with the East India Company. The charter and the exclusive rights of the East India Company expired in April, 1834; the charter was renewed under different conditions, and the trade with China was thrown open. One of the great branches of the East India Company's business with China was the opium trade. When the trading privileges ceased this traffic was taken up briskly by private merchants, who bought of the company the opium which they grew in India and sold it to the Chinese. The Chinese governments, and all teachers, moralists, and persons of education in China, had long desired to get rid of or put down this trade in opium. They considered it highly detrimental to the morals, the health and the prosperity of the people. Of late the destructive effects of opium have often been dis- puted, particularly in the House of Commons. It has been said that it is not on the average nearly so unwholesome as the Chinese governments always thought, and that it does not do as much proportionate harm to China as the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 10'J use of brandy, whisky, and gin does to England. It seems to this writer hardly possible to doubt that the use of opium is, on the whole, a curse to any nation ; but, even if this were not so, the question between England and the Chinese governments would remain just the same. The Chinese governments may have taken exaggerated views of the evils of the opium trade; their motives in wishing to put it down may have been mixed with considerations of interest as much political as philanthropic. Lord Palmerston insisted that the Chinese government were not sincere in their professed objection on moral grounds to the traffic. If they were sincere, he asked, why did they not prevent the growth of the poppy in China? It was, he tersely put it, an " exportation of bullion question, an agricultural pro- tection question;" it was a question of the poppy interest in China, and of the economists who wished to prevent the exportation of the precious metals. It is curious that such arguments as this could have weighed with any one for a moment. It was no business of ours to ask ourselves whether the Chinese government were perfectly sincere in their professions of a lofty morality, or whether they, unlike all other governments that have ever been known, were influenced by one sole motive in the making of their regu- lations. All that had nothing to do with the question. States are not at liberty to help the subjects of other states to break the laws of their own governments. Especially when these laws even profess to concern questions of morals, is it the duty of foreign states not to interfere with the regulations which a government considers it necessary to impose for the protection of its people. All traffic in opium was strictly forbidden by the governments and laws of China. Yet our English traders carried on a brisk and profitable trade in the forbidden article. Nor was this merely an ordinary smuggling, or a business akin to that of the blockade running during the American civil war. The arrangements with the Chinese government allowed the existence of all establishments and machinery for carry- ing on a general trade at Canton and Macao; and under cover of these arrangements the opium traders set up their regular headquarters in these towns. Let us find an illustration intelligible to readers of the present day, to show how unjustifiable was this practice. The state of Maine, as every one knows, prohibits the cum- 110 A HISTOR Y OF OUR WN TIMES. mon sale of spirituous liquors. Let us suppose that several companies of English merchants were formed in Portland and Augusta, and the other towns of Maine, for the pur- pose of brewing beer and distilling whisky, and selling both to the public of Maine in defiance of the state laws. Let us further suppose that when the authorities of Maine proceeded to put the state laws in force against these intruders, our government here took up the cause of the whisky sellers, and sent an ironclad fleet to Portland to compel the people of Maine to put up with them. It seems impossible to think of any English government taking such a course as this; or of the English public enduring it for one moment. In the case of such a nation as the United States, nothing of the kind would be possible. The serious responsibilities of any such undertaking would make even the most thoughtless minister pause, and would give the public in general some time to think the matter over; and before any freak of the kind could be attempted the con- science of the nation would be aroused, and the unjust policy would have to be abandoned. But in dealing with China the ministry never seems to have thought the right or wrong of the question a matter worthy of any considera- tion. The controversy was entered upon with as light a heart as a modern war of still graver moment. The people in general knew nothing about the matter until it had gone so far that the original point of dispute was almost out of sight, and it seemed as if the safety of English subjects and the honor of England were compromised in some way by the high-handed proceedings of the Chinese government. The English government appointed superintendents to manage our commercial dealings with China. Unluckily these superintendents were invested with a sort of political or diplomatic character, and thus from the first became objectionable to the Chinese authorities. One of the first of these superintendents acted in disregard of the express instructions of his own government. He was told that he must not pass the entrance of the Canton river in a vessel of war, as the Chinese authorities always made a marked distinction between ships of war and merchant vessels in regard to the freedom of intercourse. Misunderstandings occurred at every new step of negotiation. These misun- derstandings were natural. Our people knew hardly any- thing about the Chinese. The limitation of our means oi A HISTOR T OF OUR OWN TIMES. Ill communication with them made this iguorance inevitable, but certainly did not excuse our acting as if we were in possession of the fullest and most accurate information. The manner in which some of our official instructors went on was well illustrated by a sentence in the speech of Sir James Graham, during the debate on the whole subject in the House of Commons in April, 1840. It was, Sir James Graham said, as if a foreigner who was occasionally per- mitted to anchor at the Nore, and at times to land at "Wapping, being placed in close confinement during his con- tinuance there, were to pronounce a deliberate opinion upon the resources, the genius, and the character of the British Empire. Our representatives were generally disposed to be unyield- ing; and not only that, but to see deliberate offense in every Chinese usage or ceremony which the authorities endeavored to impose on them. On the other hand, it is clear that the Chinese authorities thoroughly detested them and their mission, and all about them, and often made or counte- nanced delays that were unnecessary, and interferences which were disagreeable and offensive. The Chinese be- lieved from the first that the superintendents were there merely to protect the opium trade and to force on China political relations with the West. Practically this was the effect of their presence. The superintendents took no steps to aid the Chinese authorities in stopping the hated trade. The British traders naturally enough thought that the British government were determined to protect them in carrying it on. Indeed the superintendents themselves might well have had the same conviction. The govern- ment at home allowed .Captain Elliott, the chief superin- tendent, to make appeal after appeal for instructions with- out paying the slightest attention to him. Captain Elliott saw that the opium traders were growing more and more reckless and am acious; that they were thrusting their trade under the very eyes of the Chinese authorities. He also saw as every one on the spot must have seen, that the authorities, who had been so apathetic for a long time, were now at last determined to go any lengths to put down the traffic. At length the English government announced to Captain Elliott, the decision which they ought to have made known months, not to say years before, that "her majesty's government could not interfere for the purpose 112 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of enabling British subjects to violate the laws of the coun- try with which they trade;" and that "any loss therefore which such persons may suffer in consequence of the more effectual execution of the Chinese laws on this subject must be borne by the parties who have brought that loss on themselves by their own acts." This very wise and proper resolve came, however, too late. The British traders had been allowed to go on for a long time under the full con- viction that the protection of the English government was behind them and wholly at their service. Captain Elliott, himself seems to have now believed that the announcement of his superiors was but a graceful diplomatic figure of speech. When the Chinese authorities actually proceeded to insist on the forfeiture of an immense quantity of the opium in the hands of British traders, and took other harsh, but certainly not unnatural measures to extinguish the traffic, Captain Elliott sent to the governor of India a request for as many ships of war as could be spared for the protection of the life and property of Englishmen in China. Before long British ships arrived; and the two countries were at war. It is not necessary to describe the successive steps by which the war came on. It was inevitable from the moment that the English superintendent identified him- self with the protection of the opium trade. The English believed that the Chinese authorities were determined on war, and only waiting for a convenient moment to make a treacherous beginning. The Chinese were convinced that from the first we had meant nothing but war. Such a condition of feeling on both sides would probably have made war unavoidable, even in the case of two nations who had far much better ways of understanding each other than the English and Chinese. It is not surprising if the English people at home knew little of the original causes of the controversy. All that presented itself to their mind was the fact that Englishmen were in danger in a foreign coun- try ; that they were harshly treated and recklessly impris- oned; that their lives were in jeopardy, and that the flag of England was insulted. There was a general notion too, that the Chinese were a barbarous and a ridiculous people who had no alphabet, and thought themselves much better than any other people, even the English, and that, on the whole, it would be a good thing to take the conceit out of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 113 them. Those who remember what the common feeling of ordinary society was at the time, will admit that it did not reach a much loftier level than this. The matter was, how- ever taken up more seriously in parliament. The policy of the government was challenged in the House of Commons, hut with results of more importance to the existing composition of the English cabinet than to the relations between this country and China. Sir James Graham moved a resolution condemning the policy of ministers, for having by its uncertainty and other errors brought about the war which, however, he did not then think it possible to avoid. A debate which continued for three days took place. It was marked by the same curious mixture of parties which we have seen in debates on China questions in days nearer to the present. The defense of the government was opened by Mr. Macaulay, who had been elected for Edinburgh and appointed secretary at war. The defense consisted chiefly in the argument that we could not have put the trade in opium down, no matter how earnest we had been, and that it was not necessary or possible to keep on issuing frequent instructions to agents so far away as our representatives in China. Mr. Macaulay actually drew from our experience in India an argument in support of his position. We cannot govern India from London, he insisted; we must, for the most part' govern India in India. One can imagine how Macaulay would in one of his essays have torn into pieces such an argument coming from any advocate of a policy opposed to his own. The reply, indeed, is almost too obvious to need any expo- sition. In India the complete materials of administration were in existence. There was a governor-general, there were councillors, there was an army. The men best quali- fied to rule the country were there, provided with all I he appliances and forces of rule. In China we had an agent with a, vague and anomalous office dropped down in the middle of a hostile people, possessed neither of recognized au- thority nor of power to enforce its recognition. It was proba- bly true enough that we could not, foavepui down the opium trade; that even with all the assistance of the Chinese gov- ernment we could have done no more than to drive it from one port in order to see it make its appearance at another. But what we ought to have done is, therefore, only the more clear. We ought to have announced from the first, 114 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and in the firmest tone, that we would have nothing to do with the trade; that we would not protect it; and we ought to have held to this determination. As it was, we allowed our traders to remain under the impression that we were willing to support them, until it was too late to undeceive them with any profit to their safety or our credit. The Chinese authorities acted after awhile with a high-handed disregard of fairness, and of anything like what we should call the responsibility of law ; but it is evident that they be- lieved they were themselves the objects of lawless intrusion and enterprise. There were on the part of the government great efforts made to represent the motion as an attempt to prevent the ministry from exacting satisfaction from the Chinese government, and from protecting the lives and interests of Englishmen in China. But it is unfortunately only too often the duty of statesmen to recognize the necessity of carrying on a war, even while they are of opinion that they whose mismanagement brought about the war deserve condemnation. When Englishmen are being imprisoned and murdered, the innocent just as well as the guilty, in a foreign country — when, in short, war is actually going on — it is not possible for English statesmen in oppo- sition to say, " We will not allow England to strike a blow in defense of our fellow-countrymen and our flag, because we are of opinion that better judgment on the part of our government would have spared us the beginning of such a war." There was really no inconsistency in recognizing the necessity of carrying on the war, and at the same time censuring the ministry who had allowed the necessity to be forced upon us. Sir Eobert Peel quoted with great effect, during the debate, the example of Fox, who declared his readiness to give every help to the prosecution of a war which the very same day he proposed to censure the ministry for having brought upon the country. With all their efforts, the ministers were only able to command a majority of nine votes as the result of the three days' debate. The war, however, went on. It was easy work enough so far as England was concerned. It was on our side nothing but a succession of cheap victories. The Chinese fought very bravely in a great many instances; and they showed still more often a Spartan-like resolve not to sur- vive defeat. When one of the Chinese cities was taken A HISTORY OF OUR OWN 1IMES. 115 by Sir Hugh Cough, the Tartar general went into his house as soon as he saw that all was lost, made his servants set fire to the building, and calmly sat in his chair until he was burned to death. One of the English officers writes of tbe same attack, that it was impossible to compute the loss of the Chinese, "for when they found they could stand no longer against us, they cut the throats of their wives and children, or drove them into wells or ponds, and then destroyed themselves. In many houses there were from eight to twelve dead bodies, and I myself saw a dozen women and children drowning themselves in a small pond, the clay after the fight." We quickly captured the island of Chusan, on the east coast of China; a part of our squad- ron went up the Peiho river to threaten the capital ; nego- tiations were opened, and the preliminaries of a treaty were made out, to which, however, neither the English govern- ment nor the Chinese would agree, and the war was reopened. Chusan was again taken by us; Ningpo, a large city a few miles in on the mainland, fell into our hands; Amoy, farther south, was captured; our troops were before Nankin, when the Chinese goverenment at last saw how futile was the idea of resisting our arms. Their women or their children might just as well have attempted to encoun- ter our soldiers. With all the bravery which the Chinese often displayed, there was something pitiful, pathetic, ludicrous, in the simple and childlike attempts which they made to carry on war against us. They made peace at last on any terms we chose to ask. We asked in the first instance the cession in perpetuity to us of the island of Hong-Kong. Of course we got it. Then we asked that five ports, Canton, Amoy, Foo-Chow-Foo, Ningpo, and Shanghai, should be thrown open to British traders, and that consuls should be established there. Needless to say that this too was conceded. Then it was agreed that the indemnity already mentioned should he paid by the Chinese govern- ment—some four millions and a half sterling, in addition to one million and a quarter as compensation for the destroyed opium. It was also stipulated, that correspond- ence between officials of the two governments was thence- forth to be carried on upon equal terms. The war was over for the present, and the thanks of both houses of parliament were voted to the fleet and army engaged in the operations. The Duke of Wellington moved the vote of thanks in tho 116 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. House of Lords. He could hardly help, one would think, forming in his mind as he spoke an occasional contrast between the services which he asked the house to honor, and the sort of warfare which it had been his glorious duty to engage in so long. The Duke of Wellington was a sim- ple-minded man, with little sense of hnmor. He did not probably perceive himself the irony that others might have seen in the fact that the conqueror of Napoleon, the victor in years of warfare against soldiers unsurpassed in his- tory, should have had to move a vote of thanks to the fleet and army which triumphed over the unarmed, help- less, childlike Chinese. The whole chapter of history ended, not inappropriately perhaps, with a rather pitiful dispute between the English government and the Englishtraders about the amountof com- pensation to which the latter laid claim for their destroyed opium. The government were in something of a difficulty ; for they had formally announced that they were resolved to let the traders abide by any loss which their violation of the laws of China might bring upon them. But, on the other hand, they had identified themselves by the war with the cause of the traders ; and one of the conditions of peace had been the compensation for the opium. The traders insisted that the amount given for this purpose by the Chinese government did not nearly meet their losses. The English government, on the other hand, would not admit that they were bound in any way further to make good the losses of the merchants. The traders demanded to be compensated according to the price of opium at the time the seizure was made; a demand which, if we admit any claim at all, seems only fair and reasonable. The govern- ment had clearly undertaken their cause in the end, and were hardly in a position either logical or dignified, when they afterward chose to say, " Yes, we admit that we did undertake to get you redress, but we do not think now that we are bound to give you full redress. " At last the matter was compromised; the merchants had to take what they could get, something considerably below their demand, and give in return to the government an immediate acquit- tance in full. It is bard to get up any feeling of sympathy with the traders who lost on such a speculation. It is hard to feel any regret even if the government which had done so much for them in the war treated them so shabbily A HIS TOUT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 117 when the war was over; but that they were treated shabbily in the final settlement seems to us to allow of no donbt. The Chinese war then was over for the time. But as the children say that snow brings more snow, so did that war with China bring other wars to follow it. CHAPTER IX. DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTKY. The Melbourne ministry kept going from bad to worse. There was a great stirring in the country all around them, which made their feebleness the more conspicuous. We sometimes read in history a defense of some particular sov- ereign whom common opinion cries down, the defense being a reference to the number of excellent measures that were set in motion during his reign. If we were to judge of the Melbourne ministry on the same principle, it might seem indeed as if their career was one of extreme activity and fruitfulness. Reforms were astir in almost every direction. Inquiries into the condition of our poor and our laboring classes were, to use a cant phrase of the time, the order of the day. The foundation of the colony of New Zealand was laid with a philosophical deliberation and thoughtful- ness which might have reminded one of Locke and the con- stitution of the Carolinas. Some of the first comprehensive and practical measures to mitigate the rigor and to correct the indiscriminateness of the death punishment were taken during this period. One of the first legislative enactments which fairly acknowledged the difference between an Eng- lish wife and a purchased slave, so far as the despotic power of the master was concerned, belongs to the same time. This was the Custody of Infants Bill, the object of which was to obtain for mothers of irreproachable conduct, who through no fault of theirs were living apart from their husbands, occasional access to their children, with the per- mission and under the control of the equity judges. It is curious to notice how long and how fiercely this modest measure of recognition for what may almost be called the natural rights of a wife and a- mother was disputed in par- liament, or at least in the House of Lords. It is curious too, to notice what a clamor was raised OTer 118 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the small contribution to the cause of national education which was made by the Melbourne government. In 1834 the first grant of public money for the purposes of elemen- tary education was made by parliament. The sum granted was twenty thousand pounds, and the same grant was made every year until 1839. Then Lord John Russell asked for an increase of ten thousand pounds, and proposed a change in the manner of appropriating the money. Up to that time the grant had been distributed through the Na- tional School Society, a body in direct connection with the Church of England, and the British and Foreign School Association, which admitted children of all Christian denominations without imposing on them sectarian teaching. The money was dispensed by the lords of the treasury, who gave aid to applicants in proportion to the size and cost of the school buildings and the number of children who attended them. Naturally, the result of such an arrangement was, that the districts which needed help the most got it the least. If a place was so poor as not to be able to do anything for itself, the lords of the treasury would do nothing for it. Naturally too, the rich and powerful Church of England secured the greater part of the grant for itself. There was no inspection of the schools; no reports were made to parliament as to the manner in which the system worked ; no steps were taken to find out if the teachers were qualified or the teaching was good. " The statistics of the schools," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, "were alone considered; the size of the .schoolroom, the cost of the building, and the num- ber of scholars." In 1839 Lord John Russell proposed to increase the grant, and an order in council transferred its distribution to a committee of the privy council composed of the president and not more than five members. Lord John Russell also proposed the appointment of inspectors, the founding of a model school for the training of teachers, and the establishment of infant schools. The model school and the infant schools were to be practically unsectarian. The committee of the privy council were to be allowed to depart from the principle of proportioning their grants to the amount of local contribution to establish in poor and crowded places schools not necessarily connected with either of the two educational societies, and to extend their aid even to schools where the Roman Catholic version of the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. HO Bible was read. The proposals of the government were fiercely opposed in both houses of parliament. The most various and fantastic forms of bigotry combined against them. The application of public money, and especially through the hands of the committee of privy council, to any schools not under the control and authority of the Church of England was denounced as a state recognition of popery and heresy. Scarcely less marvelous to us now are the speeches of those who promoted, than of those who opposed the scheme. Lord John Russell himself, who was much in advance of the common opinion of those among whom he moved, pleaded for the principles of his measure in a tone rather of apology than of actual vindication. lie did not venture to oppose point blank the claim of those who insisted that it was part of the sacred right of the established church to have the teaching all done in her own way or to allow no teaching at all. The government did not get all they sought for. They had a fierce fight for their grant, and an amendment moved by Lord Stanley, to the effect that her majesty be requested to revoke the order in council appointing the committee on education, was only negatived by a majority of two votes — two hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and seventy- three. In the lords, to which the struggle was transferred, the Archbishop of Canterbury actually moved and carried by a large majority an address to the queen praying her to revoke the order in council. The queen replied firmly that the funds voted by parliament would be found to be laid out in strict accordance with constitutional usage, the rights of conscience, and the safety of the established church, and so dismissed the question. The government therefore succeeded in establishing their committee of council on education, the institution by which our system of public instruction has been managed ever since. The ministry on the whole showed to advantage in this struggle. They took up a principle and they stood by it. If, as we have said, the speeches made by the promoters of the scheme seem amazing to any intelligent person of our time, because of the feeble, apologetic, and almost craven tone in which they assert the claims of a system of national education, yet it must be admitted that the principle was accepted by the government at some risk, and that it was not shabbily deserted iu the face of hostile pressure, It is worth UOtlC- 120 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ing that while the increased grant and the principles on which it was to be distributed were opposed by such men as Sir Eobert Peel, Lord Stanley, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli, it had the support of Mr. O'Connell and of Mr. Smith O'Brien. Both these Irish leaders only regretted that the grant was not very much larger, and that it was not appropriated on a more liberal principle. O'Connell was the recognized leader of the Irish Catholics and nationalists; Smith O'Brien was an aristocratic Protestant. With all the weakness of the Whig ministry, their term of office must at least be remarkable for the new departure it took in the matter of national education. The appoint- ment of the committee of council marks an epoch. Indeed the history of that time seems full of reform pro- jects. The parliamentary annals contain the names of various measures of social and political improvement which might in themselves, it would seem, bear witness to the most unsleeping activity on the part of any ministry. Measures for general registration ; for the reduction of the stamp duty on newspapers, and of the duty on paper; for the improvement of the jail system; for the spread of vaccination; for the regulation of the labor of children; for the prohibtion of the employment of any child or young person under twenty-one in the cleaning of chimneys by climbing; for the suppression of the punishment of the pillory; efforts to relieve the Jews from civil disabilities — these are but a few of the many projects of social and political reform that occupied the attention of that busy period, which somehow appears nevertheless to have been so .sleepy and do-nothing. How does it come about that we can regard the ministry in whose time all these things were done or attempted as exhausted and worthless? One answer is plain. The reforming energy was in the time, and not in the ministry. In every instance public opinion went far ahead of the inclinations of her majesty's ministers. There was a just and general conviction that if the government were left to themselves they would do nothing. When they were driven into any course of im- provement they usually did all they could to minimize the amount of reform to be effected. Whatever they under- took they seemed to undertake reluctantly, and as if only with the object of preventing other people from having any- thing to do with it. Naturally therefore, they got little A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 121 or no thanks for any good they might have done. When they brought in a measure to abolish in various cases the punishment of death, they fell so far behind public opinion and the inclinations of the commission that had for eight years been inquiring into the state of our criminal law, that their bill only passed by very narrow majorities, and impressed many ardent reformers as if it were meant rather to withhold than to advance a genuine reform. In truth, it was a period of enthusiasm and of growth and the minis- try did not understand this. Lord Melbourne seems to have found it hard to persuade himself that there was any real anxiety in the mind of any one to do anything in par- ticular. He had apparently got into his mind the convic- tion that the only sensible thing the people of England could do was to keep up the Melbourne ministry, and that being a sensible people they would naturally do this. He had grown into something like the condition of a pampered old hall-porter, who dozing in his chair begins to look on it as an act of rudeness if any visitor to his master presumes to knock at the door and so disturb him from his comfort- able rest. Any one who doubts that it was really a time of enthu- siasm in these countries has only to glance at its history. The Church of England and the Church of Scotland were alike convulsed by movements which were the offspring of a genuine and irresistible enthusiasm — enthusiasm of that strong far-reaching kind which makes epochs in the history of a church or a people. In Ireland Father Mathew, a pious and earnest frair, who had neither eloquence nor learning nor genius, but only enthusiasm and noble pur- pose* had stirred the hearts of the population in the cause of temperance as thoroughly as Peter the Hermit might have stirred the heart of a people to a crusade. Many of the efforts of social reform which are still periodically made among ourselves had their beginning then, and can scarcely be said fco have made much advance from that day to this. In July, 1840, Mr. Hume moved in the House of Commons for an address to the throne praying that the British .Museum and the National Gallery might he opened to the public after divine service «»n Sundays, "at such hours as taverns, beershops and ginshops are legally open." The motion was of course rejected ; but it is worthy of men- tion now as an evidence of the point to which the spirit of 122 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. social reform had advanced at a period when Lord Mel- bourne had seemingly made up his mind that reform had done enough for his generation, and that ministers might he allowed, at least during his time, to eat their meals in peace without being disturbed by the urgencies of restless Radicals or threatened with hostile majorities and Tory successes. The Stockdale case was a disturbance of ministerial repose which at one time threatened to bring about a col- lision between the privileges of parliament and the author- ity of the law courts. The Messrs. Hansard, the well- known parliamentary printers, had published certain parlia- mentary reports on prisons, in which it happened that a book published by J. J. Stockdale was described as obscene and disgusting in the extreme. Stockdale proceeded against the Hansards for libel. The Hansards pleaded the author- ity of parliament; but Lord Chief Justice Denman decided that the House of Commons was not parliament, and had no authority to sanction the publication of libels on indi- viduals. Out of this contradiction of authorities arose a long and often a very unseemly squabble. The House of Commons would not give up its privileges; the law courts would not admit its authority. Judgment was given by default against the Hansards in one of the many actions for libel which arose out of the affair, and the sheriffs of Lon- don were called on to seize and sell some of the Hansards' property to satisfy the demands of the plaintiff. The unhappy sheriffs were placed, as the homely old saying would describe it, between the devil and the deep sea. If they touched the property of the Hansards, they were acting in contempt of the privilege of the House of Com- mons and were liable to be committed to Newgate. If, on the other hand, they refused to carry out the orders of the court of queen's bench, that court would certainly send them to prison for the refusal. The reality of their dilemma in fact was very soon proved. The amount of the damages was paid into the sheriff's court, in order to avoid the scandal of a sale, but under protest; the House of Commons ordered the sheriffs to refund the money to the Hansards; the court of queen's bench was moved for an order to direct the sheriffs to pay it over to Stockdale. The sheriffs were finally committed to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms for contempt of the House of Commons. The court of queen's A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 123 bench served a writ of habeas corpus on the sergeant-at- arms, calling on him to produce the sheriffs in court. The house directed the sergeant-at-arms to inform the court that he held the sheriffs in custody by order of the Com- mons. The sergeant-at-arms took the sheriffs to the court of queen's bench and made his statement there; his ex- planation was declared reasonable and sufficient, and he marched his prisoners back again. A great deal of this ridiculous sort of thing went on which it is not now neces- sary to describe in any detail. The House of Commons, what with the arrest of the sheriffs and of agents acting on behalf of the pertinacious Stockdale, had on their hands batches of prisoners with whom they did not know in the least what to do; the whole affair created immense popular excitement mingled with much ironical laughter. At last the House of Commons had recourse to legislation, and Lord John Eussell brought in a bill on March 3, 1840, to afford summary protection to all persons employed in the publication of parliamentary papers. The preamble of the measure declared that " Whereas it is essential to the due and effectual discharge of the functions and duties of par- liament that no obstruction should exist to the publication of the reports, papers, votes, or proceedings of either house as such house should deem fit,' , it is to be lawful "for any person or persons against whom any civil or criminal pro- ceedings shall be taken on account of such publication to bring before the court a certificate under the hand of the lord chancellor or the speaker, stating that it was pub- lished by the authority of the house, and the proceedings should at once be stayed." This bill was run quickly through both houses — not without some opposition or at least murmur in the upper house- and it became law on April 14. It settled the question satisfactorily enough, although it certainly did not define the relative rights of parliament and the courts of law. No difficulty of the same kind has since arisen. The sheriffs and the other prisoners were discharged from custody after awhile, and the public ex- citement went out in quiet laughter. The question, however, was a very serious one; and it is significant that public opinion was almost entirely on the side of the law courts and the sheriffs. The ministry must have so fallen in public favor as to bring the House of Commons into disrepute along with them, or such a senti- 124 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ment could not have prevailed so widely out of doors. The public seemed to see nothing in the whole affair but a tyrannical House of Commons wielding illimitable powers against a few humble individuals, some of whom, the sheriffs for instance, had no share in the controversy except that imposed on them by official duty. Accordingly the sheriffs were the heroes of the hour, and were toasted and applauded all over the country. Assuredly it was an awk- ward position for the House of Commons to be placed in when it had to vindicate its privileges by committing to prison men who were merely doing a duty which the law courts imposed on them. It would have been better prob- ably if the government had more firmly asserted the rights of the House of Commons at the beginning, and thus allowed the public to see the real question which the whole controversy involved. Nothing can be more clear now than the paramount importance of securing to each house of parliament an absolute authority and freedom of pub- lication. No evil that could possibly arise out of the misuse of such power a could be anything like that certain to come of a state of things which restricted, by libel laws or otherwise, the right of either house to publish whatever it thought proper for the public good. Not a single measure for the reform of any great grievance, from the abolition of slavery to the passing of the factory acts, but might have been obstructed, and perhaps even prevented, if the free exposure of existing evils were denied to the houses of par- liament. In this country, parliament only works through the power of public opinion. A social reform is not carried out simply by virtue of the decision of a cabinet that some- thing ought to be done. The attention of the legislature and of the public has to be called to the grievance again and again by speeches, resolutions, debates and divisions, before there is any chance of carrying a measure on the subject. When public opinion is ripe, and is strong enough to help the government through with a reform in spite of prejudices and vested interests, then, and not till then, the reform is carried. But it would be hardly possible to bring the matter up to this stage of growth if those who were interested in upholding a grievance had the power of worry- ing the publishers of the parliamentary reports by legal proceedings in the earlier stages of the discussion. Nor would it be of any use to protect merely the freedom of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 125 debate in parliament itself. It is not through debate, but through publication, that the public opinion of the coun- try is reached. In truth, the poorer a man is, the weaker and the humbler, the greater need is there that he should call out for the full freedom of publication to be vested in the hands of parliament. The factory child, the climbing boy, the apprentice under colonial systems of modified slavery, the seaman sent to sea in the rotten ship; the woman clad in unwomanly rags who sings her " Song of a Shirt" ; the other woman almost literally unsexed in form, function and soul, who in her filthy trousers of sacking dragged on all fours the coal trucks in the mines — these are the tyrants and the monopolists for whom we assert the privilege of parliamentary publication. The operations which took place about this time in Syria belong perhaps rather to the general history of the Otto- man empire than to that of England. But they had so important a bearing on the relations between this country and France, and are so directly connected with subsequent events in which England bore a leading part, that it would be impossible to pass them over without some notice here. Mohammed Ali, pasha of Egypt, the most powerful of all the sultan's feudatories, a man of iron will and great capacity both for war and administration, had made him- self for a time master of Syria. By the aid of the warlike qualities of his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, he had defeated the armies of the porte wherever he had encountered them. Mohammed's victories had for the time compelled the porte to allow him to remain in power in Syria; but the sultan had long been preparing to try another effort for the reduc- tion of his ambitious vassal. In 1839 the sultan again de- clared war against Mohammed Ali. Ibrahim Pasha again obtained an overwhelming victory over the Turkish army. The energetic Sultan Mahmoud, a man not unworthy to cope with such an adversary as Mohammed Ali, died sud- denly; and immediately after his death the capitau pasha, or lord high admiral of the Ottoman fleet, went over to the Egyptians with all his vessels; an act of almost unexam- pled treachery even in the history of the Ottoman Empire. It was evident that Turkey was not able to hold her own against the formidable Mohammed and his successful Bon; and the policy of the western powers of Europe, and of England especially, had long been to maintain the Ottoman >l 26 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. empire as a necessary part of the common state system. The policy of Russia was to keep up that empire as long as it suited her own purposes; to take care that no other pcwer got anything out of Turkey; and to prepare the way for such a partition of the spoils of Turkey as would satisfy Russian interests. Russia therefore was to he found now defending Turkey, and now assailing her. The course taken by Russia was seemingly inconsistent; but it was only inconsistent as the course of a sailing ship may be which now tacks to this side and now to that, but has a clear ob- ject in view and a port to reach all the while. England was then and for a long time after steadily bent on preserving the Turkish empire, and in a great measure as a rampart against the schemes and ambitions imputed, to Russia her- self. France was less firmly set on the maintenance of Turkey, and France, moreover, had got it into her mind that England had designs of her own on Egypt. Austria was disposed to go generally with England; Prussia was little more than a nominal sharer in the alliance that was now tinkered up. It is evident that such an alliance could not be very harmonious or direct in its action. It was, however, effective enough to prove too strong for the pasha of Egypt. A fleet made up of English, Austrian and Turkish vessels bombarded Acre; an allied army drove the Egyptians from several of their strongholds. Ibrahim Pasha, with all his courage and genius, was not equal to the odds against which he now saw himself forced to con- tend. He had to succumb. No one could doubt that he and his father were incomparably better able to give good government and the chances of development to Syria than the porte had ever been. But in this instance as in others, the odious principle was upheld by England and her actual allies, that the Turkish empire must be maintained, at no matter what cost of suffering and degradation to its subject populations. Mohammed Ali was deprived of all his Asiatic possessions; but was secured in his government of Egypt. A convention signed at London on July 15, 1840, arranged for the imposition of those terms on Mohammed Ali. The convention was signed by the representatives of Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia, on the one part, and of the Ottoman porte on the other. The name of France was not found there. France had drawn back A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 12? from the alliance, and for some time seemed as if she were likely to take arms against it. M. Thiers was then her prime minister: he was a man of quick fancy, restless and ambitions temperament, and what we cannot help calling a vulgar spirit of national self-sufficiency — we are speaking- no w of the Thiers of 1840, not of the wise and capable statesman, tempered and tried by the fire of adversity, who reorganized France out of the ruin and welter of 1870. Thiers persuaded himself and the great majority of his countrymen that England was bent upon driving Mo- hammed Ali out of Egypt as well as out of Syria, and that her object was to obtain possession of Egypt for herself. For some months it seemed as if war were inevitable between England and France, although there was not, in reality, the slightest reason why the two states should quarrel. France was just as far away from any thought of a really disinterested foreign policy as England. England, on the other hand, had not the remotest idea of becoming the pos- sessor of Egypt. Fortunately, Louis Philippe and M. G-uizot were both strongly in favor of peace; M. Thiers resigned; and M. Guizot became minister for foreign affairs, and vir- tually head of the government. Thiers defended his policy in the French chamber in a scream of passionate and almost hysterical declamation. Again and again he declared that his mind had been made up to go to war if England did not at once give way and modify the terms of the convention of July. It cannot be doubted that Thiers carried with him much of the excited public feeling of France. But the king and M. Guizot were happily supported by the majority in and out of the chambers; and on July 13, 1841, the Treaty of London was signed, which provided for the settlement of the affairs of Egypt on the basis of the arrangement already made, and which contained, moreover, the stipulation, to be referred to more than once hereafter, by which the sultan declared himself firmly resolved to maintain the ancient principle of his empire — that no foreign ship of war was to be admitted into the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, with the exception of light vessels for which a firman was granted. The public of this country had taken but little interest in the controversy about Egypt, at least until it seemed likely to involve England in a war with France. Some of the episodes of the war were indeed looked upon with a 128 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. certain satisfaction by people here at home. The bravery of Charles Napier, the hot-headed, self -conceited commander was enthusiastically extolled, and his feats of successful audacity were glorified as though they had shown the genius of a Nelson, or the clever resource of a Cochrane. Not many of Napier's admirers cared a rush about the merits of the quarrel between the porte and the pasha. Most of them would have been just as well pleased if Napier had been fighting for the pasha and against the porte; not a few were utterly ignorant as whether he was fighting for porte or for pasha. Those who claimed to be more enlight- ened had a sort of general idea that it was in some way essential to the safety and glory of England that whenever Turkey was in trouble we should at once become her cham- pions, tame her rebels, and conquer her enemies. Unfounded as were the suspicions of Frenchmen about our designs upon Egypt, they can hardly be called very unreasonable. Even a very cool and impartial Frenchman might be led to the conclusion that free England would not without some direct purpose of her own have pledged herself to the cause of a base and a decaying despotism. Steadily meanwhile did the ministry go from bad to worse. They had greatly damaged their character by the manner in which they had again and again put up with defeat and consented to resume or retain office on any ex- cuse or pretext. They were remarkably bad administrators ; their finances were wretchedly managed. In later times we have come to regard the Tories as especially weak in the matter of finance. A well-managed revenue and a comfort- able surplus are generally looked upon as in some way or other the monopoly of a Liberal administration; while lavish expenditure, deficit and increased taxation are counted among the necessary accompaniments of a Tory government. So nearly does public opinion on both sides go to accepting these conditions, that there are many Tories who take it rather as a matter of pride that their leaders are not mean economists, and who regard a free- handed expenditure of the national revenue as something peculiarly gentlemanlike and in keeping with the honor- able traditions of a great country party. But this was not the idea which prevailed in the days of the Melbourne min- istry. Then the universal conviction was that the Whigs were incapable of managing their finances. The budget A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 129 of the chancellor of the exchequer, Mr. Baring, showed a deficiency of nearly two millions. This deficiency he pro- posed to meet in part by alteration in the sugar duties; but the House of Commons, after a long debate, rejected his proposals by a majority of thirty-six. It was then ex- pected, of course, that ministers would resign; but they were not yet willing to accept the consequences of defeat. They thought they had another stone in their sling. Lord John Russell had previously given notice of his inten- tion to move for a committee of the whole house to consider the state of legislation with regard to the trade in corn; and he now brought forward an announcement of his plan, which was to propose a fixed duty of eight shillings per quarter on wheat, and proportionately diminished rates on rye, barley, and oats. Except for its effect on the fortunes of the Melbourne ministry, there is not the slightest im- portance to be attached to this proposal. It was an experi- ment in the direction of the free traders who were just beginning to be powerful ; although they were not nearly strong enough yet to dictate the policy of a government. We shall have to tell the story of free trade hereafter; this present incident is no part of the history of a great movement; it is merely a small party dodge. It deceived no one. Lord Melbourne had always spoken with the uttermost contempt of the free trade agitation. "With characteristic oaths, he had declared that of all the mad things he had ever heard suggested free trade was the mad- dest. Lord John Russell himself, although far more enlightened than the prime minister, had often condemned and sneered at the demand for free trade. The conversion of the ministers into the official advocates of a moderate fixed duty was all too sudden for the conscience, for the very stomach of the nation. Public opinion would not endure it. Nothing but harm came to the Whigs from the attempt. Instead of any new adherents or fresh sympathy being won for them by their proposal, people only asked, " Will nothing then turn them out of office? Will they never have done with trying new tricks to keep in place?" Sir Robert Peel took, in homely phrase, the bull by the horns. He proposed a direct vote of want of confidence — a resolution declaring that ministers did not possess the confidence of the house sufficiently to enable them to carry through the measures which they deemed of essential im- 130 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. portance to the public welfare, and that their continuance m office under such circumstances was at variance with the spirit of the constitution. On June 4, 1841, the divi- sion was taken; and the vote of no-confidence was carried by a majority of one. Even the Whigs could not stand this. Lord Melbourne at last began to think that things were looking serious. Parliament was dissolved, and the result of the general election was that the Tories were found to have a majority even greater than they themselves had anticipated. The moment the new parliament was assem- bled amendments to the address were carried in both houses in a sense hostile to the government. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had to resign, and Sir Kobert Peel was entrusted with the task of forming an administration. We have not much more to do with Lord Melbourne in this history. He merely drops out of it. Between his expulsion from office and his death, which took place in 1848, he did little or nothing to call for the notice of any one. It was said at one time that his closing years were lonesome and melancholy; but this has lately been denied, and indeed it is not likely that one who had such a genial temper and so many friends could have been left to the dreariness of a not self-sufficing solitude and to the bitter- ness of neglect. He was a generous and kindly man; his personal character, although often assailed, was free of any serious reproach; he was a failure in office, not so much from want of ability, as because he was a politician without convictions. The Peel ministry came into power with great hopes. It had Lord Lyndhurst for lord chancellor; Sir James Graham for home secretary; Lord Aberdeen at the for- eign office; Lord Stanley was colonial secretary. The most remarkable man not in the cabinet, soon to be one of the foremost statesmen in the country, was Mr. W. E. Gladstone. It is a fact of some significance in the history of the Peel adminstration, that the elections which brought the new ministry into power brought Mr. Cobden for the first time into the House of Commons. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 131 CHAPTER X. MOVEMENTS IN THE CHUKCHES. While Lord Melbourne and his Whig colleagues, still in office, were fribbling away their popularity on the pleas- ant assumption that nobody was particularly in earnest about anything, the vice-chancellor and heads of houses held a meeting at Oxford and passed a censure on the cele- brated "No. 90," of "Tracts for the Times." The move- ment, of which some important tendencies were formally censured in the condemnation of this tract, was one of the most momentous that had stirred the Church of England since the Reformation. The author of the tract was Dr. John Henry Newman, and the principal ground for its censure by voices claiming authority was the principle it seemed to put forward — that a man might honestly sub- scribe all the articles and formularies of the English Church, while yet holding many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome, against which those articles were regarded as a neces- sary protest. The great movement which was thws brought into sudden question and publicity was in itself aii offspring of the immense stirring of thought which the French Revo- lution called up, and which had its softened echo in the English Reform Bill. The center of the religious move- ment was to be found in the University of Oxford. When it is in the right, and when it is in the wrong, Oxford has al- ways had more of the sentimental and of the poetic in its east of thought than its rival or colleague of Cambridge. There were two influences then in operation over England, both of which alike aroused the alarm and the hostility of certain gifted and enthusiastic young Oxford men. One was the tendency to rationalism drawn from the German theolo- gians; the other was the manner in which the connection of the church with the state in England was beginning to operate to the disadvantage of the church as a sacred insti- tution and teacher. The reform party everywhere were assailing the rights and property of the church. In Ireland especially experiments were made which every practical man will now regard with approval, whether he be church- man or not, but which seemed to the devoted ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught with danger to the freedom and influ- 132 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. ence of the church. Out of the contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive the authority of the church; to quicken her with a new vitality; to give her once again that place as guide and inspirer of the national life which her ardent votaries believed to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited only by the carelessness of her authorities and their failure to fulfill the duties of her heaven-assigned mission. No movement could well have had a purer source. None could have had more disinterested and high-minded pro- moters. It was borne in upon some earnest unresting souls, like that of the sweet and saintly Keble — souls " without haste and without rest," like Goethe's star — that the Church of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of enriching bishops. Keble could not bear to think of the church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him, or rather he suggested it by his influence and his example, that they should reclaim for the church the place which ought to be hers, as the true successor of the apos- tles. He claimed for her that she, and she alone, was the real Catholic Church, and that Borne had wandered away from the right path, and foregone the glorious mission which she might have maintained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose of Keble were Richard Hur- rell Fronde, the historian's elder brother, who gave rich promise of a splendid career, but who died while etill in comparative youth; Dr. Pusey, afterward leader of the school of ecclesiasticism which bears his name; and, most eminent of all, Dr. Newman. Keble had taken part in the publication of a series of treatises called " Tracts for the Times," the object of which was to vindicate the real mis- sion, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. This was the tractarian movement which had such various and memorable results. Newman first started the project of the tracts, and wrote the most remarkable of them. He had up to this time been distinguished as one of the most unsparing enemies of Rome. At the same time he was, as he has himself said, "fierce" against the "instruments" and the "manifestations" of "the Liberal cause." While he was at Algiers once a French vessel put in there, flying the tricolor; Newman would not even look at her. "On A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 133 my return, though forced to stop twenty-four hours at Paris, I kept indoors the whole time, and all that I saw of that beautiful city was what I saw from the diligence." He had never had any manner of association with Roman Catholics; had, in fact, known singularly little of them. As Newman studied and wrote concerning the hest way to restore the Church of England to her proper place in the national life, he kept the thought before him " that there was something greater than the established church, and that that was the Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, of which she was but the local presence and the organ. She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt with strongly or she would be lost. There was need of a second Reformation. At this time the idea of leaving the church never, Dr. Newman himself assures us, had crossed his imagination. He felt alarmed for the church between German rationalism and man-of-the-world liberalism. His fear was that the church would sink to be the servile instrument of a state, and a liberal state. The abilities of Dr. Newman were hardly surpassed by any contemporary in any department of thought. His position and influence in Oxford were almost unique. There was in his intellectual temperament a curious combina- tion of the mystic and the logical. He was at once a poetic dreamer and a sophist — in the true and not the corrupt and ungenerous sense of the latter word. It had often been said of him and of another great Englishman, that a change in their early conditions and training would easily have made of Newman a Stuart Mill, and of Mill a Newman. England in our time has hardly had a greater master of argument and of English prose than Newman. He is one of the keenest of dialecticians; and like Mill has the rare art that dissolves all the difficulties of the most abstruse or perplexed subject, and shows it bare and clear even to the least subtle of readers. His words dispel mists; and whether they who listen agree or not, they cannot fail to understand. A penetrating, poignant satirical humor is found in most of his writings; an irony sometimes piercing suddenly through it like a darting pain. On the other hand, a generous vein of poetry and of pathos informs his style; and there are many passages of his works in which lie rises to the height of a genuine and noble eloquence. In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator, 134 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Newman was strikingly deficient. His manner was con- strained, ungraceful and even awkward ; his voice was thin and weak. His bearing was not at first impressive in any way. A gaunt emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, a cold meditative eye rather repelled than attracted those who saw him for the first time. Singularly devoid of affecta- tion, Newman did not always conceal his intellectual scorn of men who made loud pretense with inferior gifts, and the men must have been few indeed whose gifts were not inferior to his. Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself; he despised it only when it gave itself airs. His influence while he was the vicar of St. Mary's at Oxford was profound. As Mr. Gladstone said of him in a recent speech, " without ostentation or effort, but by simple ex- cellence, he was continually drawing undergraduates more and more around him." Mr. Gladstone in the same speech gave a description of Dr. Newrhan's pulpit style which is interesting: "Dr. Newman's manner in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in its separate parts, would lead you to arrive at very unsatisfactory conclusions. There was not very much change in the inflection of the voice ; action there was none; his sermons were read and his eyes were always on his book; and all that you will say is against efficiency in preaching. Yes; but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him, there was a solemn music and sweetness in his tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his delivery such as I have described it, and though exclusively with written ser- mons, singularly attractive." The stamp and seal were indeed those which are impressed by genius, piety and earnestness. No opponent ever spoke of Newman but with admiration for his intellect and respect for his character. Dr. Newman had a younger brother, Francis W. Newman, who also possessed remarkable ability and earnestness. He too was distinguished at Oxford and seemed to have a great career there before him. But he was drawn one way by the wave of thought before his more famous brother had been drawn the other way. In 1830, the younger Newman found himself prevented by religious scruples from subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles for his master's degree. He left the university, and wandered for years in the east } endeavoring not very successfully per- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 135 haps to teach Christianity on its broadest base to Mohamme- tans; and then he came back to England to take his place among the leaders of a certain school of free thought. Fate had dealt with those brothers as with the two friends in Kichter's story; it "seized their bleeding hearts, and flung them different ways." When Dr. Newman wrote the famous tract " No. 90," for which he was censured, he bowed to the authority of his bishop if not to that of the heads of houses; and he discontinued the publication of such treatises. But he did not admit any change of opinion; and indeed soon after he edited a publication called "The British Critic," in which many of the principles held to be exclusively those of the Church of Rome were enthusiastically claimed for the English church. Yet a little and the gradual working of Newman's mind became evident to all the world. The brightest and most penetrating intellect in the Church of England was withdrawn from her service, and Newman went over to the Church of Rome. His secession was described by Mr. Disraeli a quarter of a century afterward as having "dealt a blow to the Church of England under which she still reels." To this result had the inquiry con- ducted him which had led his friend Dr. Pusey merely to endeavor to incorporate some of the mysticism and the symbols of Rome with the ritual of the English Protestant Church; which had brought Keble only to seek a more liberal and truly Christian temper for the faith of the Protestant; and which had sent Francis Newman into radicalism and rationalism. In truth, it is not difficult now to understand how the elder Newman's mind became drawn toward the ancient church which won him at last. We can see from his own candid account of his early sentiments how profoundly mystical was his intellectual nature, and how, long before In' was conscious of any such tendency, he was drawn toward the very symbolisms of the Catholic Church. Pascal's early and unexplained mastery of mathematical problems which no one had taught him is not more suggestive in its way than those early drawings of Catholic symbols and devices which, done in his childhood, Newman says, surprised ami were inexplicable to him when he came on them in years long after. No place could be better fitted to encourage und develop this tendency to mysticism in a thoughtful 136 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. mind than Oxford, with all its noble memories of scholars and of priests; with its picturesque and poetic surround- ings, and its never-fading medievalism. Newman lived in the past. His spirit was with mediaeval England. His thoughts were of a time when one church took charge of the souls of a whole united devout people, and stood as the guide and authority appointed for them by heaven. He thought of such a time until first he believed in it as a thing of the past, and next came to have faith in the pos- sibility of its restoration as a thing of the present and the future. When once he had come to this point the rest fol- lowed, " as by lot God wot. " No creature could for a moment suppose that that ideal church was to be found in the English establishment, submitted as it was to state-made doctrine, and to the decision of the lord chancellor, who might be an infidel or a free-liver. The question which Cardinal Manning tells us he asked himself years after at the time of the Gorham case must often have presented itself to the mind of Newman. Suppose all the bishops of the Church of England should decide unanimously on any question of doctrine, would any one receive the decision as infallible? Of course not. Such is not the genius or the principle of the English church. The Church of England has no pretension to be considered the infallible guide of the people in matters even of doctrine. Were she seriously to put forward any such pretension, it would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the na- tion. We are not discussing questions of .dogma, or the rival claims of churches here; we are merely pointing out that to a man with Newman's idea of a church, the Church of England could not long afford a home. That very logical tendency, which in the mind of Newman as of that of Pascal contended for supremacy with the tendency to devotion and mysticism, only impelled him more rigor- ously on his way. He could not put up with compromises, and convince himself that he ought to be convinced. He dragged every compromise and every doctrine into the light, and insisted on knowing exactly what it amounted to and what it meant to say. The doctrines and com- promises of his own church did not satisfy him. There are minds which in this condition of bewilderment might have been content to find "no footing so solid as doubt." New- man had not a mind of that class. He could not believe A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 137 in a world without a church, or a church without what he held to be inspiration; and accordingly he threw his whole soul energy, genius and fame into the cause of the Church of Rome. This, however, did not come all at once. We are antici- pating by a few years the passing over of Dr. Newman, Cardial Manning and others to the ancient church. It is clear tluit Newman was not himself conscious for a long time of the manner in which he was being drawn, surely although not quickly, in the direction of Rome. He used to be accused at one time of having remained a conscious Roman Catholic in the English church, laboring to make new converts. Apart from his own calm assurances, and from the singularly pure and candid nature of the man, there are reasons enough to render such a charge absurd. Indeed, fiat simple and childish conception of human nature which assumes that a man must always see the logical consequences of certain admissions or inquiries beforehand, because all raen can see them afterward, is rather confusing and out of place when we are considering such a crisis of thought and feeling as that which took place in Oxford, and such men as those who were principally concerned in it. For the p'esent, it is enough to say that the object of that movement was to raise the Church of England from apathy, from dull, easy-going acquiescence, from the per- functory discharge of formal duties, and to quicken her again with the spirit of a priesthood, to arouse her to the living work, spiritual and physical, of an ecclesiastical sov- ereignty. The impulse overshot itself in some cases and was misdirected ii others. It proved a failure on the whole as to its definite urns; and it sometimes left behind it only the ashes of a barren symbolism. But in its source it was generous, beneficent and noble, and it is hard to believe that there has no, been throughout the Church of England on the whole a higher spirit at work since the famous Ox- ford movement beajan. • Still greater was the practical importance, at least in de- fined results, of tie movement which went on in Scotland at about the same ime. A fortnight before the decision of the heads of horses at Oxford on Dr. Newman's tract, Lord Aberdeen announced in the House of Lords that he did not see his wiy to do anything in particular with regard to the dissensions in the Church of Scotland. He had 138 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tried a measure he said, the year before, and half ihe Church of Scotland liked it and the other half denounced it, and the government opposed it; and he, therefore, had nothing further to suggest in the matter. The perplexity of Lord Aberdeen only faintly typified the perplexity of the ministry. Lord Melbourne was about the last man in the world likely to have any sympathy with the spirit which animated the Scottish Reformers, or any notion of how to get out of the difficulty which the whole question presented. Differing as they did in so many other points, there was one central resemblance between the movement ir the Kirk of Scotland and that which was going on in the Church of England. In both cases alike the effort of the reforming party was to emancipate the church from the control of the state in matters involving religious doctrine and duty. In Scotland was soon to be presented the spfctacle of a great secession from an established church, not because the seceders objected to the principle of a church, but because they held that the establishment was not faidiful enough to its mission as a church. One of the seceders pithily ex- plained the position of the controversy when he said that lie and his fellows were leaving the Kirk of Scotland, not because she was too "churchy," but because she was not "churchy" enough. The case was briefly this. During the reign of Queen Anne an act was passed which took from the church courts in Scotland the free choice as to the appointment of pastors, by subjecting the power of presbytery to the control and interference of the law courts. Harley, Bolingbroke, and Swift, not one of whom cared a rush about the supposed sanctity of an ecclesiastical appointment, were the authors of this compromise, which was exactly of the kind that sensible men of the world everywhere night be supposed likely to accept and approve. In an immense number of Scotch parishes the minister was nominated by a lay patron ; and if the presbytery found notiing to condemn in him as to "life, literature and doctrine," they were com- pelled to appoint him, however unwelcome he might be to the parishioners. Now it is obvious that a man might have a blameless character, sound religious views, and an excellent education, and nevertheless be totally unfitted to undertake the charge of a Scottish parish. The South- wark congregation who appreciate and delight in the min- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 139 istrations of Mr. Spurgeon might very well be excused if they objected to having a perfectly moral Charles Honey- man, even though his religious opinions were identical with those of their favorite, forced upon them at the will of some aristocratic lay patron. The effect of the power conferred on the law courts and the patron was simply in a great number of cases to send families away from the Church of Scotland and into voluntaryism. The Scotch people are above all others impatient of any attempt to force on them the services of unacceptable ministers. Men clung to the national church as long as it was national — that is r as long as it represented and protected the sacred claims of a deeply religious people. Dissent, or rather voluntaryism, began to make a progress in Scotland that alarmed thought- ful churchmen. To get over the difficulty the general assembly, the highest ecclesiastical court in Scotland, and likewise a sort of church parliament, declared that a veto on the nomination of the pastor should be exercised by the congregation, in accordance with a fundamental law of the church that no pastor should be intruded on any congrega- tion contrary to the will of the people. The Veto Act, as this declaration was called, worked well enough for a short time, and the highest legal authorities declared it not incompatible with the Act of Queen Anne. But it diminished far too seriously the power of the lay patron to be accepted with- out a struggle. In the celebrated Auchterarder case the patron won a victory over the church in the courts of law, for having presented a minister whose appointment was vetoed by the congregation; he obtained an order from the civil courts deciding that the presbytery must take him on trial, in obedience with the Act of Queen Anne, as he was qualified by life, literature, and doctrine. This question, however, was easily settled by the general assembly of the church. They left to the patron's nominee his stipend und his house, and took no further notice of him. They did not recognize him as one of their pastors, but he might have, if he would, the manse and the money which the civil courts had declared to be his. They merely appealed to the legislature to do something which might make the civil law in harmony with the principles of the church. A more serious question, however, presently arose. This was the famous Strathbogie ease, which brought the author- ity of the church and that of the state into irreconcilable 1 40 A HISTOR Y OF UR WN TIMES. conflict. A minister had been nominated in the parish of Marnoch who was so unacceptable to the congregation that two hundred and sixty-one out of three hundred heads of families objected to his appointment. The general assem- bly directed the presbytery of Strathbogie, in which the parish lay, to reject the minister, Mr. Edwards. The presbytery had long been noted for its leaning toward the claims of the civil power, and it very reluctantly obeyed the command of the highest authority and ruling body of the church. Another minister was appointed to the parish. Mr. Edwards fought the question out in the civil court and obtained an interdict against the new appointment, and a decision that the presbytery were bound to take himself on trial. Seven members constituting the majority of the presbytery determined, without consulting the general assembly, to obey the civil power, and they admitted Mr. Edwards on trial. The seven were brought before the bar of the general assembly, and by an overwhelming majority were condemned to be deposed from their places in the ministry. Their parishes were declared vacant. A more complete antagonism between church and state is not pos- sible to imagine. The church expelled from its ministry seven men for having obeyed the command of the civil laws. It was on the motion of Dr. Chalmers that the seven ministers were deposed. Dr. Chalmers became the leader of the movement which was destined within two years from the time we are now surveying to cause the disruption of the ancient Kirk of Scotland. No man could be better fitted for the task of leadership in such a movement. He was beyond comparison the foremost man in the Scottish church. He was the greatest pulpit orator in Scotland, or, indeed, in Great Britain. As a scientific writer, both on astronomy and on political economy, he had made a great mark. From having been in his earlier days the minister of an obscure Scottish village congregation, he had suddenly sprung into fame. He was the lion of any city which he happened to visit. If he preached in London, the church was crowded with the leaders of politics, science and fashion, eager to hear him. The effeot he produced in England is all the more surprising seeing that he spoke in the broadest Scottish accent conceivable, and, as one admirer admits, mispronounced almost every word. We have already quoted what Mr. Gladstone said about the style of Dr. Newman; A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 141 let us cite also what he says about Dr. Chalmers. " I have heard," said Mr. Gladstone, "Dr. Chalmers preach and lecture. Being a man of Scotch blood, I am very much attached to Scotland, and like even the Scotch accent; but not the Scotch accent of Dr. Chalmers. Undoubtedly the accent of Dr. Chalmers in preaching and delivery was a considerable impediment to his success; but, notwithstand- ing all that, it was overborne by the power of the man in preaching — overborne by his power, which melted into har- mony with all the adjuncts and incidents of the man as a whole, so much so, that although I would have said that the accent of Dr. Chalmers was distasteful, yet in Dr. Chalmers himself I would not have had it altered in the smallest degree." Chalmers spoke with a massive eloquence in keeping with his powerful frame and his broad brow and his commanding presence. His speeches were a strenuous blending of argument and emotion. They appealed at once to the strong common sense and to the deep religious convictions of his Scottish audiences. His whole soul was in his work as a leader of religious movements. He cared little or nothing for any popularity or fame that he might have won. Some strong and characteristic words of his own have told what he thought of passing renown. He called it "a popularity which rifles home of its sweets; and by elevating a man above his fellows places him in a region of desolation, where he stands a conspicuous mark for the shafts of malice, envy and detraction; a popularity which with its head among storms and its feet on the treacherous quicksands, has nothing to lull the agonies of its tottering existence but the Hosannahs of a driveling generation." There is no reason to doubt that these were Chalmer's genuine .sentiments; and scarcely any man of his time bad come into so sudden and great an endowment of popularity. The reader of to-day must not look for ad equ ate illustration of the genius and the influence of Chalmers in his pub- lished works. These do indeed show him to have been a strong reasoner and a man of original mind. But they do not show the Chalmers of Scottish controversy. That Chalmers must be studied through the traces, lying all around, of his influence upon the mind and the history of the Scottish people. The free church of Scotland is his monument. He did not make that- church. It was not the work of one man, or, strictly speaking, of one genera- 142 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tiou. It grew naturally out of the inevitable struggle between church and state. But Chalmers did more than any other man to decide the moment and the manner of its coming into existence, and its success is his best monument. For we may anticipate a little, in this instance as in that of the Oxford movement, and mention at once the fact that on May 18, 1843, some five hundred ministers of the Church of Scotland, under the leadership of Dr. Chalmers, seceded from the old kirk and set about to form the free church. The government of Sir Robert Peel had made a weak effort at compromise by legislative enactment, but had declined to introduce any legislation which should free the Kirk of Scotland from the control of the civil courts, and there was no course for those who held the views of Dr. Chalmers but to withdraw from the church which admitted that claim of state control. Opinions may differ as to the neces- sity, the propriety of the secession — as to its effects upon the history and the character of the Scottish people since that time; but there can be no difference of opinion as to the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the step was taken. Five hundred ministers on that memorable day went deliberately forth from their positions of comfort and honor, from home and competence, to meet an uncertain and a perilous future, with perhaps poverty and failure to be the final result of their enterprise, and with misconstruction and misrepresentation to make the bitter bread of poverty more bitter still. In these pages we have nothing to do with the merits of religious controversies; and it is no part of our concern to consider even the social and political effects pro- duced upon Scotland by this great secession. But we need not withhold our admiration from the men who risked and suffered so much in the cause of what they believed to be their church's true rights; and we are bound to give this admiration as cordially to the poor and nameless ministers, the men of the rank and file, about whose doings history so little concerns herself, as to the leaders like Chalmers, who, whether they sought it or not, found fame shining on their path of self-sacrifice. The history of Scotland is illustrated by many great national deeds. No deed it tells of surpasses in dignity and in moral grandeur that secession — to cite the words of the protest — "from an establishment which we loved and prized, through interference with conscience, the dishonor done to Christ's crown, and the rejection of his sole and supreme authority as king in his church." A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 143 CHAPTEE XL THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. The earliest days of the Peel ministry fell upon trouble, not indeed at home, but abroad. At home the prospect still seemed bright. The birth of the queen's eldest son was an event welcomed by national congratulation. There was still great distress in the agricultural districts; but there was a general confidence that the financial genius of Peel would quickly find some way to make burdens light, and that the condition of things all over the country would begin to mend. It was a region far removed from the knowledge and the thoughts of most Englishmen that sup- plied the news now beginning to come into England day after day, and to thrill the country with the tale of one of the greatest disasters to English policy and English arms to be found in all the record of our dealings with the East. There are many still living who can recall with an impression as keen as though it belonged to yesterday the first accounts that reached this country of the surrender at Cabul, and the gradual extinction of the army that tried to make its retreat through the terrible pass. This grim chapter of history had been for some time in preparation. It may be said to open with the 'reign itself. News traveled slowly then; and it -was quite in the ordin- ary course of things that some part of the empire might be torn with convulsion for months before London knew that the even and ordinary condition of things had been dis- turbed. In this instance, the rejoicings at the accession of the young queen were still going on when a series of events had begun in Central Asia destined to excite the profoundest emotion in England, and to exercise the most powerful influence upon our foreign policy down to the present hour. On September 20, 1837, Captain Alexander Burnes arrived at Cabul, the capital of the state of Cabul, in the north of Afghanistan, and the ancient capital of the Emperor Baber, whose tomb is on a hill outside the city. Burnes was a famous orientalist and traveler, the Burton or Burnaby of his day; lie had conducted an expedition into Central Asia; had published his travels in Bokhara, and had been sent on a mission by the Indian government, in whose ser- 144 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. vice he was to study the navigation of the Indus. He was, it may be remarked, a member of the family of Robert Burns, the poet himself having changed the original spell- ing of the name which all the other members of the family retained. The object of the journey of Captain Burnes to Cabul in 1837 was in the first instance to enter into com- mercial relations with Dost Mohammed, then ruler of Cabul, and with other chiefs of the western regions. But events soon changed his business from a commercial into a political and diplomatic mission; and his tragic fate would make his journey memorable to Englishmen forever, even if other events had not groAvn out of it which give it a place of more than personal importance in history. The great region of Afghanistan, with its historical boundaries as varying and difficult to fix at certain times as those of the old Dukedom of Burgundy, has been called the land of transition between Eastern and Western Asia. All the great ways that lead from Persia to India pass through that region. There is a proverb which declares that no one can be king of Hindostan without first becom- ing lord of Cabul. The Afghans are the ruling nation, but among them had long been settled Hindoos, Arabs, Armenians, Abyssinians, and men of other races and religions. The Afghans are Mohammedans of the Shunite sect, but they allowed Hindoos, Christians, and even the Persians, who are of the hated dissenting sect of the Shiites, to live among them, and even to rise to high position and influence. The founder of tbe Afghan empire, Ahmed Shah, died in 1773. He had made an empire which stretched from Herat on the west to Sirhind on the east, and from the Oxus and Cashmere on the north to the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Indus on the south. The death of his son, Timur Shah, delivered the kingdom up to the hostile factions, intrigues, and quarrels of his sons; the leaders of a powerful tribe, the Barukzyes, took advantage of the events that arose out of this condition of things to dethrone the descendants of Ahmed Shah. When Captain Burnes visited Afghanistan in 1832, the only part of all their great inheritance which yet remained with the descendants of Ahmed Shah was the principality of Herat. The remainder of Afghanistan was parceled out between Dost Mohammed and his brothers. Dost Mohammed was a man of extraordinary ability and energy. He would prob~ A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 145 ably have made a name as a soldier and a statesman any- where. He had led stormy youth, but had put away with maturity and responsibility the vices and follies of his earlier years. There seems no reason to doubt that although he was a usurper he was a sincere lover of his country, and on the whole a wise and just ruler. When Captain Burnes visited Dost Mohammed, he was received with every mark of friendship and favor. Dost Mohammed professed to, and no doubt at one time was, a sincere friend of the English government and people. There was, however, at that time a quarrei going on between the shah of Persia and the prince of Herat, the last enthroned representative, as has been already said, of the great family on whose fall Dost Mahommed and his brothers had mounted into power. So far as can now be judged, there does seem to have been serious and genuine ground of complaint on the part of Persia against the ruler of Herat. But it is probable too that the Persian shah had been seeking for, and in any case, would have found, a pretext for making war; and the strong impression at the time in England, and among the authorities in India, was that Persia herself was but a puppet in the hands of Russia. A glance at the man will show the meaning of this suspi- cion and the reasons which at once gave it plausibility, and would have rendered it of grave importance. If Persia were merely the instrument of Russia, and if the troops of the shah were only the advance guard of the czar, then undoubtedly the attack on Herat might have been regarded as the first step of a great movement of Russia toward our Indian dominion. There were other reasons, too, to give this suspicion some plausibility. Mysterious agents of Russia, officers in her service and others, began to show themselves in Central Asia at the time of ( 'aptain Burnes'visit to Dost Mohammed. Undoubtedly, Russia did set herself tor some reason to win the friendship and alliance of Dost Mohammed; and Captain Burnes was for his part engaged in the same endeavor. All considerations of merely commerical nature had long since been put away, and Bnrnes was freely and earnestly nego- tiating with Dost Mohammed for his alliance. Burnes always insisted that Dost Mohammed himself was sincerely anxious to become an ally of England, and that he offered more than once on his own free part to dismiss the Russian 146 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. agents even without seeing them, if Burnes desired him to do so. But for some reason Burnes' superiors did not share his confidence. In Downing street and in Simla the profoundest distrust of Dost Mohammed prevailed. It was again and again impressed on Burnes that he must regard Dost Mohammed as a treacherous enemy and as a man play- ing the part of Persia and of Russia. It is impossible now to estimate fairly all the reasons which may have justified the English and the Indian governments in this conviction. But we know that nothing in the policy afterward followed out by the Indian authorities exhibited any of the judg- ment and wisdom that would warrant us in taking any- thing for granted on the mere faith of their dictum. The story of four years— almost to a day the extent of this sad chapter of English history — will be a tale of such misfort- une, blunder and humiliation as the annals of England do not anywhere else present. Blunders which were indeed worse than crimes, and a principle of action which it is a crime in any rulers to sanction, brought things to such a pass with us that in a few years from the accession of the queen we had in Afghanistan soldiers who were positively afraid to fight the enemy, and some English officials who were not ashamed to treat for the removal of our most formidable foes by purchased assassination. It is a good thing for us all to read in cold blood this chapter of our history. It will teach us how vain is a policy founded on evil and ignoble principles; how vain is the strength and courage of men when they have not leaders fit to command. It may teach us also not to be too severe in our criticism of other nations. The failure of the French invasion of Mexico under the Second Empire seems like glory when compared with the failure of our attempt to impose a hated sovereign on the Afghan people. Captain Burnes then was placed in the painful difficulty of having to carry out a policy of which he entirely dis- approved. He believed in Dost Mohammed as a friend, and he was ordered to regard him as an enemy. It would have been better for the career and for the reputation of Burnes if he had simply declined to have anything to do with a course of action which seemed to him at once unjust and unwise. But Burnes was a young man, full of youth's energy and ambition. He thought he saw a career "of dis- tinction opening before him, and he was unwilling to close A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. U7 it abruptly by setting himself in obstinate opposition to his superiors. He was, besides, of a quick mercurial tem- perament, over which mo-^d followed mood in rapid suc- cession of change. A slight contradiction sometimes threw him into momentary despondency; a gleam of hope elated him into the assurance that all was won. It is probable that after awhile he may have persuaded himself to acquiesce in the judgment of his chiefs. On the other hand, Dost Mohammed was placed in a position of great diffi- culty and danger. He had to choose. He could not remain absolutely independent of all the disputants. If England would not support him, he must for his own safety find alliances elsewhere; in Russian statecraft, for example. He told Burnes of this again and again, and Burnes endeavored without the slightest success to impress his superiors with his own views as to the reasonableness of Dost Mohammed's arguments. Runjeet Singh, the daring and successful adventurer who had annexed the whole province of Cash- mere to his dominions, was the enemy of Dost Mohammed and the faithful ally of England. Dost Mohammed thought the British government could assist him in coming to terms with Runjeet Singh, and Burnes had assured him that the British government would do all it could to establish sat- isfactory terms of peace between Afghanistan and the Pun- jaul), over which Runjeet Singh ruled. Burnes wrote from Cabul to say that Russia had made substantial offers to Dost Mohammed ; Persia had been lavish in her biddings for his alliance ; Bokhara and other states had not been back- ward ; " yet in all that has passed, or is daily transpiring, the chief of Cabul declares that he prefers the sympathy and friendly offices of the British to all these offers, how- ever alluring they may seem, from Persia or from the emperor; which places his good sense in a light more than prominent, and in my humble judgment proves that by an earlier attention to these countries we might have escaped the whole of these intrigues and held long since a stable influence in Cabul." Burnes, however, was unable to impress his superiors with any belief either in Dost Mohammed or in the policy which he himself advocated, and the result was that Lord Auckland, the governor-general of India, at length resolved to treat Dost Mohammed ;is an enemy and to drive him from Cabul. Lord Auckland, therefore, entered into a treaty with Runjeet Singh and 148 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, the exiled representative of what we may call the legitimist rulers of Afghanistan, for the restoration of the latter to the throne of his ancestors, and for the destruction of the power of Dost Mohammed. It ought to be a waste of time to enter into any argu- ment in condemnation of such a policy in our days. Even if its results had not proved in this particular instance its most striking and exemplary condemnation, it is so grossly and flagrantly opposed to all the principles of our more modern statesmanship that no one among us ought now to need a warning against it. Dost Mohammed was the accepted, popular and successful ruler of Cabul. No mat- ter what our quarrel with him, we had not the slightest right to make it an excuse for forcing on his people a ruler whom they had proved before, as they were soon to prove again, that they thoroughly detested. Perhaps the nearest parallel to our policy in this instance is to be found in the French invasion of Mexico, and the disastrous attempt to impose a foreign ruler on the Mexican people. Each ex- periment ended in utter failure, and the miserable death of the unfortunate puppet prince who was put forward as the figure-head of the enterprise. But the French em- peror could at least have pleaded in his defense that Maxi- milian of Austria had not already been tried and rejected by the Mexican people. Our protege had been tried and rejected. The French emperor might have pleaded that he had actual and substantial wrongs to avenge. We had only problematical and possible dangers to guard against. In any case, as has been already said, the calamities entailed on French arms and counsels by the Mexican intervention read like a page of brilliant success when compared with the immediate result of our enterprise in Cabul. Before pass- ing away from this part of the subject, it is necessary to mention the fact that among its many unfortunate incidents the campaign led to some peculiarly humiliating debates and some lamentable accusations in the House of Commons. Years after Burnes had been flung into his bloody grave, it was found that the English government had presented to the House of Commons his despatches in so mutilated and altered a form, that Burnes was made to seem as if he actually approved and recommended the policy which he especially warned us to avoid. It is painful to have to record such a fact but it is indispensable that it should be A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 149 recorded. It would be vain to attempt to explain how the principles and the honor of English statesmanship fell for the hour under the demoralizing influence which allowed such things to be thought legitimate. An Oriental atmos- phere seemed to have gathered around our official leaders. In Afghanistan they were entering into secret and treach- erous treaties; in England they were garbling despatches. When years after Lord Palmerston was called upon to de- fend the policy which had thus dealt with the despatches of Alexander Burnes, he did not say that the documents were not garbled. He only contended that as the govern- ment had determined not to act on the advice of Burnes, they were in no wise bound to publish those passages of his despatches in which he set forth assumptions which they believed to be unfounded, and advised a policy which they looked upon as mistaken. Such a defense is only to be read with wonder and pain. The government was not accused of suppressing passages which they believed rightly or wrongly to be worthless. The accusation was that by suppressing passages and sentences here and there, Burnes was made to appear as if he were actually recommending the policy against which he was at the time most earnestly protesting. Burnes was himself the first victim of the policy which he strove against, and which all England has since condemned. No severer word is needed to condemn the mutilation of his despatches than to say that he was actually made to stand before the country as responsible for having recommended that very policy. "It should never be forgotten," says Sir J. W. Kaye, the historian of the Afghan War, "by those who would form a correct esti- mate of the character and career of Alexander Burnes, that both have been misrepresented in those collections of state papers which are supposed to furnish the best materials of history, but which are often in reality only one-sided compilations of garbled documents — ■counterfeits, which the ministerial stamp forces into currency, defrauding a present generation, and handing down to posterity a chain of dangerous lies." Meanwhile the Persian attack on Herat had practically failed, owing mainly to the skill and spirit of a young English officer, Kid red Pottinger, who was assisting the prince in his resistance to the troops of the Persian shah. Lord Auckland, however, ordered the assemblage of a 150 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. British force for service across the Indus, and issued a famous manifesto, dated from Simla, October 1, 1838, in which he set forth the motives of his policy. The governor- general stated that Dost Mohammed had made a sudden and unprovoked attack upon our ancient ally, Runjeet Singh, and that when the Persian army was besieging Herat, Dost Mohammed was giving undisguised support to the designs of Persia. The chiefs of Candahar, the brothers of Dost Mohammed, had also, Lord Auckland declared, given in their adherence to the plans of Persia. Great Britain regarded the advance of Persian arms in Afghan- istan as an act of hostility toward herself. The governor- general had, therefore, resolved to support the claims of the Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, whose dominions had been usurped by the existing rulers of Cabul, and who had found an honorable asylum in British territory; and " whose popularity throughout Afghanistan" — Lord Auck- land wrote in words that must afterward have read like the keenest and cruelest satire upon his policy — "had been proved to his lordship by the strong and unanimous testi- mony of the best authorities." This popular sovereign, this favorite of his people, was at the time living in exile, without the faintest hope of ever again being restored to his dominions. We pulled the poor man out of his ob- scurity, told him that his people were yearning for him, and that we would set him on his throne once more. We entered for the purpose into the tripartite treaty already mentioned Mr. (afterward Sir W. H.) Macnaghten, sec- retary to the government of India, was appointed to be envoy and minister at the court of Shah Soojah ; and Sir Alexander Burnes (who had been recalled from the court of Dost Mohammed and rewarded with a title for giving the advice which his superiors thought absurd) was deputed to act under his direction. It is only right to say that the policy of Lord Auckland had the entire approval of the British government. It was afterward stated in parlia- ment on the part of the ministry that . a despatch recom- mending to Lord Auckland exactly such a course as he pur- sued crossed on the way his despatch announcing to the government at home that he had already undertaken the enterprise. We conquered Dost Mohammed and dethroned him. He made a bold and brilliant, sometimes even a splendid A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 151 resistance. We took Ghuznee by blowing up one of its gates with bags of gunpowder, and thus admitting the rush of a storming party. It was defended by one of the sons of Dost Mohammed, who became our prisoner. We took Jellalabad, which was defended by Akbar Khan, another of Dost Mohammed's sons, whose name came afterward to have a hateful sound in all English ears. As we approached Cabul, Dost Mohammed abandoned his capital and fled with a few horsemen across the Indus. Shah Soojah en- tered Cabul accompanied by the British officers. It was to have been a triumphal entry. The hearts of those who believed in his cause must have sunk within them when they saw how the shah was received by the people who, Lord Auckland was assured, were so devoted to him. The city received him in sullen silence. Few of its people con- descended even to turn out to see him as he passed. The vast majority stayed away and disdained even to look at him. One would have thought that the least observant eye must have seen that his throne could not last a moment longer than the time during which the strength of Britain was willing to support it. The British army, however, withdrew, leaving only a contingent of some eight thous- and men, besides the shah's own hirelings, to maintain him for the present. Sir W. Macnaghten seems to have really believed that the work was done, and that Shah Soojah was as safe on his throne as Queen Victoria. He was destined to be very soon and very cruelly undeceived. Dost Mohammed made more than one effort to regain his place. He invaded Shah Soojah 's dominions, and met the combined forces of the shall and their English ally in more than one battle. On November 2, 1840, he won the admiration of the English themselves by the brilliant stand he made against them. With his Afghan horse he drove our cavalry before him, and forced them to seek the shelter of the British guns. The native troopers would not stand against him; they fled and left their English officers, who vainly tried to rally them. In this battle of Purwandurrah victory might not unreasonably have been claimed for Dost Mohammed. He won at least his part of the battle. No tongues have praised him louder than those of English historians. Hut Dost Mohammed had the wisdom of a statesman as well as the genius of a soldier. He knew well that he could not hold out against the strength 152 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of England. A savage or semi-barbarous chieftain is easily puffed up by seeming triumph over a great power, and is led to his destruction by the vain hope that he can hold out against it to the last. Dost Mohammed had no such igno- rant and idle notion. Perhaps he knew well enough too that time was wholly on his side; that he had only to wait and see the sovereignty of Shah Soojah tumble into pieces. The evening after his brilliant exploit in the field Dost Mohammed rode quietly up to the quarters of Sir W. Mac- naghten, met the envoy, who was returning from an even- ing ride, and to Macnaghten's utter amazement announced himself as Dost Mohammed, tendered to the envoy the sword that had flashed so splendidly across the field of the previous day's fight and surrendered himself a prisoner. His sword was returned; he was treated with all honor; and a few days afterward he was sent to India, where a resi- dence and a revenue were assigned to him. But the withdrawal of Dost Mohammed from the scene did nothing to secure the reign of the unfortunate Shah Soojah. The shah was hated on his own account. He was regarded as a traitor who had sold his country to the foreigners. Insurrections began to be chronic. They were going on in the very midst of Cabul itself. Sir W. Mac- naghtenwas warned of danger, but seemed to take no heed. Some fatal blindness appears to have suddenly fallen on the eyes of our people in Cabul. On November 2, 1841, an insurrection broke out. Sir Alexander Burnes lived in the city itself. Sir W. Macnaghten and the military commander, Major-General Elphinstone, were in cantonments at some little distance. The insurrection might have been put down in the first instance with hardly the need even of Napoleon's famous "whiff of grapeshot." But it was allowed to grow up without attempt at control. Sir Alex- ander Burnes could not be got to believe that it was any- thing serious even when a fanatical and furious mob were besieging his own house. The fanatics were especially bit- ter against Burnes, because they believed that he had been guilty of treachery. They accused him of having pretended to be the friend of Dost Mohammed, deceived him, and brought the English into the country. How entirely inno- cent of this charge Burnes was we all now know; but it would be idle to deny that there was much in the external aspect of events to excuse such a suspicion in the mind of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 153 an infuriated Afghan. To the last Burnes refused to be- lieve that he was in danger. He had always been a friend to the Afghans, he said, and he could have nothing to fear. It was true. He had always been the sincere friend of the Afghans. It was his misfortune, and the heavy fault of his superiors, that he had been made to appear as an enemy of the Afghans. He had now to pay a heavy penalty for the errors and the wrong-doing of others. He harangued the raging mob and endeavored to bring them to reason. He does not seem to have understood up to the very last moment that by reminding them that he was Alexander Burnes, their old friend, he was only giving them a new reason for demanding his life. He was mur- dered in the tumult. He and his brother and all those with them were hacked to pieces with Afghan knives. He was only in his thirty-seventh year when he was murdered. He was the first victim of the policy which had resolved to intervene in the affairs of Afghanistan. Fate seldom showed with more strange and bitter malice her proverbial irony than when she made him the first victim of the policy adopted in despite of his best advice and his strongest warnings. The murder of Burnes was not a climax; it was only a beginning. The English troops were quartered in canton- ments outside the city, and at some little distance from it. These cantonments were in any case of real difficulty prac- tically indefensible. The popular monarch, the darling of his people, whom we had restored to his throne, was in the Bala Hissar, or citadel of Cabnl. From the moment when the insurrection broke out he maybe regarded as a prisoner or a besieged man there. He was as utterly unable to help our people as they were to help him. The whole country threw itself into insurrection against him and us. The Afghans attacked the cantonments and actually compelled the English to abandon the forts in which all our commis- sariat was stored. We were thus threatened with famine even if we could resist the enemy in arms. We were strangely unfortunate in our civil and military leaders. Sir W. Macnaghten was a man of high character and good purpose, but he was weak and credulous. The commander, General Elphinstone, was old, infirm, tortured by disease, broken down both in mind and body, incapable of forming a purpose of his own, or of holding to one suggested by 154 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. anybody else. His second in command was a far stronger and abler man; but unhappily the two could never agree. "They were both of them," says Sir J. W. Kaye, " brave men. In any other situation, though the physical in- firmities of the one and the cankered vanity, the dogmatical perverseness of the other, might have in some measure de- tracted from their efficiency as military commanders, I be- lieve they would have exhibited sufficient courage and con- stancy to rescue an army from utter destruction, and the British name from indelible reproach. But in the Cabal cantonments they were miserably out of place. They seem to have been sent thereby superhuman intervention, to work out the utter ruin and prostration of an unholy policy by ordinary human means." One fact must be mentioned by an English historian ; one which an English historian has happily not often to record. It is certain that an officer in our service entered into negotiations for the murder of the insurgent chiefs who were our worst enemies. It is more than probable that he believed in doing so he was acting as Sir W. Macnaghten would have had him do. Sir W. Macnaghten was innocent of any complicity in such a plot, and was incapable of it. But the negotiations were opened and carried on in his name. A new figure appeared on the scene, a dark and a fierce apparition. This was Akbar Khan, the favorite son of Dost Mohammed. He was a daring, a clever, an unscrupu- lous young man. From the moment when he entered Cabul he became the real leader of the insurrection against Shah Soojah and us. Macnaghten, persuaded by the military commander that the position of things was hopeless, con- sented to enter into negotiations with Akbar Khan. _ Before the arrival of the latter the chiefs of the insurrection had offered us terms which made the ears of our envoy tingle. Such terms had not often been even suggested to British soldiers before. They were simply unconditional surren- der. Macnaghten indignantly rejected them. Everything went wrong with him, however. We were beaten again and again by the Afghans. Our officers never faltered in their duty; but the melancholy truth has to be told that the men, most of whom were Asiatics, at last began to lose heart and would not fight the enemy. So the envoy was compelled to enter into terms with Akbar Khan and the other chiefs, Akbar Khan received him at first with con- A I1IST0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 155 temptuous insolence — as a haughty conqueror receives some ignoble and humiliated adversary. It was agreed that the British troops should quit Afghanistan at once; that Dost Mohammed and his family should be sent back to Afghan- istan; that on his return the unfortunate Shah Soojah should be allowed to take himself off to India or where he would; and that some British officers should he left at Cabul as hostages for the fulfillment of the conditions. The evacuation did not take place at once, although the fierce winter was setting in, and the snow was falling heavily, ominously. Macnaghten seems to have had still some lingering hopes that something would turn up to relieve him from the shame of quitting the country; and it must he owned that he does not seem to have had any intention of carrying out the terms of the agreement if by any chance he could escape from them. On both sides there were dallyiugs and delays, At last Akbar Khan made a new and startling proposition to our envoy. It was that they two should enter into a secret treaty, should unite their arms against the other chiefs, and should keep Shah Soojah on the throne as nominal king, with Akbar Khan as his vizier. Macnaghten caught at the proposals. He had entered into terms of negotiation with the Afghan chiefs together; he now consented to enter into a secret treaty with one of the chiefs to turn their joint arms against the others. It would be idle and shameful to attempt to defend such a policy. We can only excuse it by consider- ing the terrible circumstances of Maenagh ten's position; the manner in which his nerves and moral fibre had been shaken and shattered by calamities; and his doubts whether he could place any reliance on the promises of the chiefs. He had apparently sunk into that condition of mind which Macaulay tells us that Clive adopted so readily in his deal- ings with Asiatics, and under the influence of which men naturally honorable and high-minded come to believe that it is right to act treacherously with those whom we believe to be treacherous. All this is but excuse, and rather poor excuse. When it has all been said and thought of, we must still be glad to believe that there are not many Englishmen who would, under any circumstances, have consented even to give a hearing to the proposals of Akbar Khan. Whatever Macnaghten's error, it was dearly expiated, lie went out at noon next day to confer with Akbar Khan 156 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. on the banks of the neighboring river. Three of his officers were with him. Akbar Khun was ominously surrounded by friends and retainers. These kept pressing round the unfortunate envoy. Some remonstrance was made by one of the English officers, but Akbar Khan said it was of no consequence, as they were all in the secret. Not many words were spoken; the expected conference had hardly begun when a signal was given or an order issued by Akbar Khan, and the envoy and the officers were suddenly seized from behind. A scene of wild confusion followed, in which hardly anything is clear and certain but the one most hor- rible incident. The envoy struggled with Akbar Khan, who had himself seized Macnaghten; Akbar Khan drew from his belt one of a pair of pistols which Macnaghten had presented to him a short time before and shot him through the body. The fanatics who were crowding round hacked the body to pieces with their knives. Of the three officers one was killed on the spot; the other two were forced to mount Afghan horses and carried away as prisoners. At first this horrible deed of treachery and blood shows like that to which Clearchus and his companions, the chiefs of the famous ten thousand Greeks, fell victims at the hands of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap. But it seems certain that the treachery of Akbar, base as it was, did not contemplate more than the seizure of the envoy and his officers. There were jealousies and disputes among the chiefs of the insurrection. One of them in especial had got his mind filled with the conviction, inspired no doubt by the unfortunate and unparalleled negotiation already mentioned, that the envoy had offered a price for his head. Abkar Khan was accused by him of being a secret friend of the envoy and the English. Akbar Khan's father was a captive in the hands of the English, and it may have been thought that on his account and for personal purposes Akbar was favoring the envoy and even intriguing with him. Akbar offered to prove his sincerity by making the envoy a captive and handing him over to the chiefs. This was the treacherous plot which he strove to carry out by entering into the secret negotiations with the easily deluded envoy. On the fatal day the latter resisted and struggled; Akbar Khan heard a cry of alarm that the English soldiers were coming out of cantonments to rescue the envoy; and, wild with passion, he suddenly drew his pistol and fired. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 157 This was the statement made again and again by Akbar Khan himself. It does not seem an improbable explanation for what otherwise looks a murder as stupid and purpose- less as it was brutal. The explanation does not much relieve the darkness of Akbar Khan's character. It is given here as history, not as exculpation. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that Akbar Khan would have, shrunk from auy treachery or any cruelty which served his purpose. His own explanation of his purpose in this instance shows a degree of treachery which could hardly be surpassed even in the East. But it is well to bear in mind that the suspicions of perfidy under which the English envoy labored, and which was the main impulse of Akbar's Khan's move- ment, had evidence enough to support it in the eyes of sus- picious enemies; and that poor Macnaghten would not have been murdered had he not consented to meet Akbar Khan and treat with him on a proposition to which an English official should never have listened. . A terrible agony of suspense followed among the little English force in the cantonments. The military chiefs afterward stated that they did not know until the follow- ing day that any calamity had befallen the envoy. But a keen suspicion ran through the cantonments that some fearful deed had been done. No step was taken to avenge the death of Macnaghten even when it became known that his hacked and mangled body had been exhibited in triumph all through the streets and bazaars of Cabul. A paralysis seemed to have fallen over the councils of our military chiefs. On December 24, 1841, came a letter from one of the officers seized by Akbar Khan, accompanying proposals for a treaty from the Afghan chiefs. It is hard now to understand how any English officers could have con- sented to enter into terms with the murderers of Macnaghten before his mangled body could well have ceased to bleed. It is strange that it did not occur to most of them that there was an alternative; that they were not ordered by fate to accept whatever the conquerors chose to offer. We ran all see the difficulty of their position. General Elphin- stone and his second in command, Brigadier Shelton, were convinced that it would be equally impossible to stay where they were or to cut their way through the Afghans. But it might have occurred to many thai they were nevertheless not bound to treat with the Afghans, They might have 158 A HTSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. remembered the famous answer of the father in Corneille's immortal drama, who is asked what his son could have done but yield in the face of such odds, and exclaims in generous passion that he could have died. One English officer of mark did counsel his superiors in this spirit. This was Major Eldred Pottinger, whose skill and courage # in the defense of Herat we have already mentioned. Pot- tinger was for cutting their way through all enemies and difficulties as far as they could, and then occupying the ground with their dead bodies. But his advice was hardly taken into consideration. It was determined to treat with the Afghans; and treating with the Afghans now meant accepting any terms the Afghans chose to impose on their fallen enemies. In the negotiations that went on some written documents were exchanged. One of these, drawn up by the English negotiators, contains a short sentence which we believe to be absolutely unique in the history of British dealings with armed enemies. It is an appeal to the Afghan conquerors not to be too hard upon the van- quished; not to break the bruised reed. "In friendship, kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering the weak with sufferings!" In friendship — we appealed to the friendship of Macnaghten*s murderers; to the friend- ship, in any case, of the man whose father we had dethroned and driven into exile. Not overpowering the weak with sufferings! The weak were the English! One might fancy he was reading the plaintive and piteous appeal of some forlorn and feeble tribe of helpless half-breeds for the mercy of arrogant and mastering rulers. "Suffolk's imperious tongue is stern and rough," says one in Shakespeare's pages when he is bidden to ask for consideration at the hands of captors whom he is no longer able to resist. The tongue with which the English force at Cabul addressed the Afghans was not imperious or stern or rough. It was bated, mild and plaintive. Only the other day, it would seem, these men had blown up the gates of Ghuznee and rushed through the dense smoke and the falling ruins to attack the enemy hand to hand. Only the other day our envoy had received in surrender the bright sword of Dost Mohammed. Now the same men who had seen these things could only plead for a little gentleness of consideration, and had no thought of resistance, and did not any longer seem to know how to die, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 159 We accepted the terms of treaty offered to us. Nothing else could be done by men who were not prepared to adopt the advice of the heroic father in Corneille. The English were at once to take themselves off out of Afghanistan, giving up all their guns except six, which they were allowed to retain for their necessary defense in their mournful jour- ney home; they were to leave behind all the treasure, and to guarantee the payment of something additional for the safe conduct of the poor little army to Peshawur or to Jellalabad; and they were to hand over six officers as hos- tages for the due fulfillment of the conditions. It is of course understood that the conditions included the imme- diate release of Dost Mohammed and his family and their return to Afghanistan. When these should return, the six hostages were to be released. Only one concession had been obtained from the conquerors. It was at first demanded that some of the married ladies should be left as hostages; but on the urgent representations of the English officers this condition was waived — at least for the moment. When the treaty was signed, the officers who had been seized when Macnaghten was murdered were released. It is worth mentioning that these officers were not badly treated by Akbar Khan while they were in his power. On the contrary, he had to make strenuous efforts, and did make them in good faith, to save them from being mur- dered by bands of his fanatical followers. One of the officers has himself described the almost desperate efforts which Akbar Khan had to make to save him from the fury of the mob, who thronged thirsting for the blood of the English- man, up to the very stirrup of their young chief. " Akbar Khan," says this officer, "at length drew his sword and laid about him right manfully,'' in defense of his prisoner. When, however, he had got the latter into a place of safety, the impetuous young Afghan chief could not restrain a sneer at his captive and the cause his captive represented. Turning to the Knglish otticcr, he said more than once, "in a tone of triumphant derision," some words such as these: "So you are the man who came here to seize my country?" It must he owned that the condition of things gave bitter meaning to the taunt, if they did not actually excuse it. At a later period of this melancholy story it is told by Lady Sale that crowds of the fanatical (ihilzycs were endeavoring to persuade Akbar Khan to slaughter all 160 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the English, and that when he tried to pacify them they said that when Burnes came into the country they entreated Akbar Khan's father to have Burnes killed, or he would go back to Hindostan, and on some future day return and bring an army with him, "to take our country from us;" and all the calamities had come upon them because Dost Mohammed would not take their advice. Akbar Khan either was or pretended to be moderate. He might indeed safely put on an air of magnanimity. His enemies were doomed. It needed no command from him to decree their destruction. The withdrawal from Cabul began. It was the heart of a cruel winter. The English had to make their way through the awful pass of Koord Cabul. This stupendous gorge runs for some five miles between mountain ranges so narrow, lofty and grim, that in the winter season the rays of the sun can hardly pierce its darkness even at the noontide. Down the center dashed a precipitous mountain current, so fiercely that the stern frost of that terrible time could not stay its course. The snow lay in masses on the ground ; the rocks and stones that raised their heads above the snow in the way of the unfortunate travelers were slippery with frost. Soon the white snow began to be stained and splashed with blood. Fearful as this Koord Cabul Pass was, it was only a degree worse than the road which for two whole days the English had to traverse to reach it. The army which set out from Cabul numbered more than four thousand fighting men, of whom Europeans, it should be said, formed but a small proportion; ancl some twelve thousand camp followers of all kinds. There were also many women and children. Lady Macnaghten, widow of the murdered envoy; Lady Sale, whose gallant husband was holding Jellalabad at the near end of the Khyber Pass toward the Indian frontier; Mrs. Shirt, her daughter, soon to be widowed by the death of her young husband ; Mrs. Trevor and her seven children, and many other piti- able fugitives. The winter journey would have been cruel and dangerous enough in time of peace; but this journey had to be accomplished in the midst of something far worse than common war. At every step of the road, every opening of the rocks, the unhappy crowd of confused and heterogeneous fugitives were beset by bands of savage fanatics, who with their long guns and long knives were A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 161 murdering all they could reach. It was all the way a con- fused constant battle against a guerrilla enemy of the most furious and merciless temper, who were perfectly familiar with the ground, and could rush forward and retire exactly as suited their tactics. The English soldiers, weary, weak, and crippled by frost, could make but a poor fight against the savage Afghans. "It was no longer," says Sir J. W. Kaye, "a retreating army; it was a rabble in chaotic flight." Men, women, and children, horses, ponies, camels, the wounded, the dying, the dead, all crowded together in almost inextricable confusion among the snow and amid the relentless enemies. " The massacre" — to quote again from Sir J. W. Kaye, "was fearful in this Koord Cabul Pass. Three thousand men are said to have fallen under the fire of the enemy, or to have dropped down paralyzed and ex- hausted to be slaughtered by the Afghan knives. And amidst these fearful scenes of carnage, through a shower of matchlock balls, rode English ladies on horseback or in camel-panniers, sometimes vainly endeavoring to keep their children beneath their eyes, and losing them in the confu- sion and bewilderment of the desolating march." Was it for this, then, that our troops had been induced to capitulate? Was this the safe-conduct which the Afghan chiefs had promised in return for their accepting the igno- minious conditions imposed on them? Some of the chiefs did exert themselves to their utmost to protect the unfortunate English. It is not certain what the real wish of Akbar Khan may have been. He protested that he had no power to restrain the hordes of fanatical Ghilzyes, whose immediate chiefs had not authority enough to keep them from murdering the English whenever they got a chance. The force of some few hundred horsemen whom Akbar Khan had with him were utterly incapable, he declared, of maintaining order among such a lot of infur- iated and lawless savages. Akbar Khan constantly appeared on the scene during this journey of terror. At every open- ing or break of the long straggling flight he and his little band of followers showed themselves on the horizon; trying still to protect the English from utter ruin, as he declared; come to gloat over their misery and to see that it was surely accomplished, some of the unhappy English were ready to believe. Yet his presence was something that seemed to give a hope of protection. Akbar Khan at length startled 162 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the English by a proposal that the women and children who were with the army should be handed over to his cus- tody to be conveyed by him in safety to Peshawur. There was nothing better to be done. The only modification of his request or command that could be obtained, was that the husbands of the married ladies should accompany their wives. With this agreement the women and children were handed over to the care of this dreaded enemy, and Lady Macnaghten had to undergo the agony of a personal inter- view with the man whose own hand had killed her husband. Few scenes in poetry or romance can surely be more thrill- ing with emotion than such a meeting as this must have been. Akbar Khan was kindly in his language, and de- clared to the unhappy widow that he would give his right arm to undo, if it were possible, the deed that he had done. The women and children and the married men whose wives were among this party were taken from the unfor- tunate army and placed under the care of Akbar Khan. As events turned out, this proved a fortunate thing for them. But in any case it was the best thing that could be done. Not one of these women and children could have lived through the horrors of the journey which lay before the remnant of what had once been a British force. The march was resumed; new horrors set in; new heaps of corpses stained the snow; and then Akbar Khan presented himself with a fresh proposition. In the treaty made at Cabul between the English authorities and the Afghan chiefs there was an article which stipulated that " the English force at Jellalabad shall march for Peshawur before the Cabul army arrives, and shall not delay on the road." Akbar Khan was especially anxious to get rid of the little army at Jellalabad at the near end of the Khyber Pass. He desired above all things that it should be on the march home to India; either that it might be out of his way, or that he might have a chance of destroying it on its way. It was in great measure as a security for its moving that he desired to have the women and children under his care it is not likely that he meant any harm to the women and children ; it must be remembered that his father and many of the women of his family were under the control of the British government as prisoners in Hindostan. But he fancied that if he had the English women in his hands the army at Jellala- bad could not refuse to obey the conditions set down in the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 163 article of the treaty. Now that he had the women in his power, however, he demanded other guarantees, with openly acknowledged purposeof keeping these latter until Jellalabad should have been evacuated. He demanded that General Elphinstone, the commander, with his second in command, and also one other officer, should hand themselves over to him as hostages. He promised if this were done to exert himself more than before to restrain the fanatical tribes, and also to provide the army in the Koord Cabul Pass with provisions. There was nothing for it but to submit; and the English general himself became, with the women and children a captive in the hands of the inexorable enemy. Then the march of the army, without a general, went on again. 80011 it became the story of a general without an army ; before very long there was neither general nor army. It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere horrors. The straggling remnant of an army entered the Jugdulluk Pass — a dark, steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable toilers found that the fanatical, iriiplacable tribes bad barricaded the pass. All was over. The army of Cabul was finally extinguished in that barricaded pass. It was a trap; the British were taken in it. A few mere fugitives escaped from the scene of actual slaughter, and were on the road to Jellalabad, where Sale and his little army were holding their own. When they were within sixteen miles of Jellalabad the number was reduced to six. Of these six, live were killed by straggling marauders on the way. One man alone reached Jellalabad to tell the tale. Literally one man, Dr. Brydon, came to Jellalabad out of a moving host which had numbered in all some six- teen thousand when it set out on its march. The curious eye will search through history or fiction in vain for any picture more thrilling with the suggestions of an awful catastrophe than that of this solitary survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse, as lie appeared under the falls of Jellalabad, to hear the tidings of our Thermopyhe of pain and shame. This is tin- crisis of the story. With this at least the worst of the pain and shame were destined to end. The rest is all, so far as we are concerned, reaction and recov- ery. Our successes are common enough; we may tell their tale briefly in this instance. The garrison at Jellalabad had received before Dr. Brydon's arrival an intimation that 164 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. they were to go out and march toward India in accordance with the terms of the treaty extorted from Elphinstone at Cabul. They very properly declined to he hound by a treaty which, as General Sale rightly conjectured, had been " forced from our envoy and military commander with the knives at their throats." General Sale's determination was clear and simple. " I propose to hold this place on the part of government until I receive its order to the contrary. " This resolve of Sale's was really the turning point of the history. Sale held Jellalabad; Nott was at Candahar. Akbar Khan besieged Jellalabad. Nature seemed to have declared herself emphatically on his side, for a succession of earthquake shocks shattered the walls of the place, and produced more terrible destruction than the most formi- dable guns of modern warfare could have done. But the garrison held out fearlessly; they restored the parapets, re-established every battery, re-trenched the whole of the gates, and built up all the breaches. They resisted every attempt of Akbar Khan to advance upon their works and at length when it became certain that General Pollock was forcing the Khyber Pass to come to their relief, they deter- mined to attack Akbar Khan's army; they issued boldly out of their forts, forced a battle on the Afghan chief, and completely defeated him. Before Pollock, having gallantly fought his way through the Khyber Pass, had reached Jellalabad, the beleaguering army had been entirely defeated and dispersed. General Nott at Candahar was ready now to co-operate with General Sale and General Pollock for any movement on Cabul which the authorities might advise or sanction. Meanwhile the unfortunate Shah Soojah, whom we had restored with so much pomp of announce- ment to the throne of his ancestors, was dead. He was assassinated in Cabul, soon after the departure of the British, by the orders of some of the chiefs who detested him ; and his body, stripped of its royal robes and its many jewels, was flung into a ditch. Historians quarrel a good deal over the question of his sincerity and fidelity in his dealings with us. It is not likely that an Oriental of his temperament and his weakness could have been capable of any genuine and unmixed loyalty to the English strangers. It seems to us probable enough that he may at important moments have wavered and even faltered, glad to take advantage of any movement that might safely rid him of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 165 us, and yet on the whole preferring our friendship and our protection to the tender mercies which he was doomed to experience when our troops had left him. But if we ask concerning his gratitude to us, it may be well also to ask what there was in our conduct toward him which called for any enthusiastic display of gratitude. We did not help him out of any love for him, or any concern for the jus- tice of his cause. It served us to have a puppet, and we took him when it suited us. We also abandoned him when it suited us. As Lady Teazle proposes to do with honor in her conference with Joseph Surface, so we ought to do with gratitude in discussing the merits of Shah Soojah — leave it out of the question. What Shah Soojah owed to us was a few weeks of idle pomp and absurd dreams, a bit- ter awakening and a shameful death. During this time a new governor-general had arrived in India. Lord Auckland's time had run out, and during its latter months he had become nerveless and despondent be- cause of the utter failure of the policy which in an evil hour for himself and his country he had been induced to undertake. It does not seem that it ever was at heart a policy of his own, and he knew that the East India Com- pany were altogether opposed to it. The company were well aware of the vast expense which our enterprises in Afghanistan must impose on the revenues of India, and they looked forward eagerly to the earliest opportunity of bringing it to a close. Lord Auckland had been persuaded into adopting it against his better judgment, and against even the whisperings of his conscience; and now he too longed to be done with it; but he wished to leave Afghanis- tan as a magnanimous conqueror. He had in his own per- son discounted the honors of victory. He had received an earldom for the services he was presumed to have rendered to his sovereign and his country. He had therefore in full sight that mournful juxtaposition of incongruous objects which a great English writer has described so touchinglv and tersely — the trophies of victory and the battle lost. He was an honorable, kindly gentleman, and the news of all the successive calamities fell niton him with a crushing, an overwhelming weight. In plain language, the governor- general lost his head. He seemed t<> have no other idea than that of getting all our troops as quickly as might be out of Afghanistan and shaking the dust of the place off 106 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. our feet forever. It may be doubted whether, if we bad pursued such a policy as this, we might not as well have left India itself once for all. If we had allowed it to seem clear to the Indian populations and princes that we could be driven out of Afghanistan with humiliation and disaster, and that we were unable or afraid to strike one blow to redeem our military credit, we should before long have seen in Hindostan many an attempt to enact there the scenes of Cabul and Oandahar. Unless a moralist is prepared to say that a nation which has committed one error of policy is bound in conscience to take all the worst and most pro- tracted consequences of that error, and never make any attempt to protect itself against them, even a moralist of the most scrupulous character can hardly deny that we were bound, for the sake of our interests in Europe as Avell as in India, to prove that our strength had not been broken nor our counsels paralyzed by the disasters in Afghanistan. Yet Lord Auckland does not appear to have thought any- thing of the kind either needful or within the compass of our national strength. He was, in fact, a broken man. His successor came out with the brightest hopes of India and the world, founded on his energy and strength of mind. The successor was Lord Ellenborough, the son of that Edward Law,, afterward Lord Ellenborough, chief justice of the king's bench, who had been leading counsel for Warren Hastings when the latter was impeached before the House of Lords. The second Ellenborough was at the time of his appointment filling the office of president of the Board of Control, an office he had held before. He was therefore well acquainted with the affairs of India. He had come into office under Sir Robert Peel on the resignation of the Melbourne ministry. He was looked upon as a man of great ability and energy. It was known that his personal predilections were for the career of a sol- dier. He was fond of telling his hearers then and since that the life of a camp was that which he should have loved to lead. He was a man of great and, in certain lights, apparently splendid abilities. There was a certain Oriental- ism about his language, his aspirations and his policy. He loved gorgeousness and dramatic — ill-natured persons said theatric — effects. Life arranged itself in his eyes as a superb and showy pageant of which it would have been his ambition to form the central figure. His eloquence A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 167 was often of a lofty and noble order. Men who are still hardly of middle age can remember Lord Ellenborough on great occasions in the House of Lords, and can recollect their having been deeply impressed by him, even though they had but lately heard such speakers as Gladstone or Bright in the other house. It was not .easy, indeed, some- times to avoid the conviction that in listening to Lord Ellenborough one was listening to a really great orator of a somewhat antique and stately type, who attuned his speech to the pitch of an age of loftier and less prosaic aims than ours. When he had a great question to deal with, and when his instincts, if not his reasoning power, had put him on the right, or at least the effective side of it, he could speak in a tone of poetic and elevated eloquence to which it was impossible to listen without emotion. But if Lord Ellenborough was in some respects a man of genius, he was also a man whose love of mere effects often made him seem like a quack. There are certain characters in which a little of unconscious quackery is associated with some of the elements of true genius. Lord Ellenborough was one of these. Far greater men than he must be asso- ciated in the same category. The elder Pitt, the first Napoleon, Mirabeau, Bolingbroke, and many others, were men in whom undoubtedly some of the charlatan was mixed up with some of the very highest qualities of genius. In Lord Ellenborough this "blending was strongly, and some- times even startlingly apparent. To this hour there are men who knew him well in public and private on whom his weaknesses made so disproportionate an impression that they can see in him little more than a mere charlatan. This is entirely unjust. He was a man of great abilities and earnestness, who had in him a strange dash of the play-actor, who at the most serious moment of emergency always thought of how to display himself effectively, and who would have met the peril of an empire as poor Nar- eissa met death, with an overmastering desire to show to the best personal advantage. Lord Ellenborough's appointment was hailed by all parties in India as the most auspicious that could be made. Eere, people said, is surely the great stage lor a great actor; and now the great actor is coming. There would be something fascinating to a temper like his in the thought of redeeming the military honor of his country 168 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and standing out in history as the avenger of the shames of Cabul. But those who thought in this way found them- selves suddenly disappointed. Lord Ellenborough uttered and wrote a few showy sentences about revenging our losses and "re-establishing in all its original brilliancy our mili- tary character." But when he had done this he seemed to have relieved his mind and to have done enough. With him there was a constant tendency to substitute grandiose phrases for deeds; or perhaps to think that the phrase was the thing of real moment. He said these fine words, and then at once he announced that the only object of the government was to get the troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as might be, and almost on any terms. The whole of Lord Ellenborough's conduct during this crisis is inex- plicable except on the assumption that he really did not know at certain times how to distinguish between phrases and actions. A general outcry was raised in India and among the troops in Afghanistan against the extraordinary policy which Lord Ellenborough propounded. English- men, in fact, refused to believe in it ; took it as something that must be put aside. English soldiers could not believe that they were to be recalled after defeat; they persisted in the conviction that, let the governor-general say what he might, his intention must be that the army should retrieve its fame and retire only after complete victory. The governor-general himself after awhile quietly acted on this interpretation of his meaning. He allowed the mili- tary commanders in Afghanistan to pull their resources together and prepare for inflicting signal chastisement on the enemy. They were not long in doing this. They en- countered the enemy wherever he showed himself and defeated him. They recaptured town after town, until at length, on September 15, 1842, General Pollock's force entered Cabul. A few days after, as a lasting mark of retribution for the crimes which had been committed there, the British commander ordered the destruction of the great bazaar of Cabul, where the mangled remains of the unfort- unate envoy Macnaghten had been exhibited in brutal triumph and joy to the Afghan population. It is not necessary to enter into detailed descriptions of the successful progress of our arms. The war may be regarded as over. It is, however, necessary to say some- thing of the fate of the captives, or hostages, who were A IIISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 169 "hurried away that terrible January night at the command of Akbar Khan. One thing has first to be told which some may now receive with incredulity, but which is, neverthe- less, true — there was a British general who was disposed to leave them to their fate and take no trouble about them and who declared himself under the conviction, from the tenor of all Lord Ellenborough's despatches, that the recov- ery of the prisoners was " a matter of indifference to the government." There seems to have been some unhappy spell working against us in all this chapter of our history, by virtue of which even its most brilliant pages were destined to have something ignoble or ludicrous written on them. Better counsels, however, prevailed. General Pol- lock insisted on an effort being marie to recover the prisoners before the troops began to return to India, and he appointed to this noble duty the husband of one of the hostage ladies — Sir Robert Sale. The prisoners were recovered with greater ease than was expected — so many of them as were yet alive. Poor General Elphinstone had long before suc- cumbed to disease and hardship. The ladies had gone through strange privations. Thirty-six years ago the tale of the captivity of Lady Sale and her companions was in every mouth all over England; nor did any civilized land fail to take an interest in the strange and pathetic story. They were hurried from fort to fort as the designs and the fortunes of Akbar Khan dictated his disposal of them. They suffered almost every fierce alternation of cold and heat. They had to live on the coarsest fare; they were lodged in a manner which would have made the most wretched prison accommodation of a civilized country seem luxurious by comparison; they were in constant uncertainty and fear, not knowing what might befall. Yet they seem to have held up their courage and spirits wonderfully well, and to have kept the hearts of the children alive with mirth and sport at moments of the utmost peril. Gradually it became more and more suspected that the fortunes of Akbar Khan were falling. At last it was beyond doubt that he had been completely defeated. Then they were hurried away again, they knew not whither, through ever- ascending mountain passes, under a scorching sun. They were being carried oil' to the wild rugged regions of the Indian Caucasus. They were bestowed in a miserable fort at Bameean. They were now under the charge of one of 170 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Akbar Khan's soldiers of fortune. This man had begun to suspect that things were well-nigh hopeless with Akbar Khan. He was induced by gradual and very cautious approaches to enter into an agreement with the prisoners for their release. The English officers signed an agreement with him to secure him a large reward and a pension for life, if he enabled them to escape. He accordingly declared that he renounced his allegiance to Akbar Khan; all the more readily, seeing that news came in of the chief's total defeat and flight, no one knew whither. The prisoners and their escort, lately their jailer and guards, set forth on their way to General Pollock's camp. On their way they met the English parties sent out to seek for them. Sir Eobert Sale found his wife again. "Our joy," says one of the rescued prisoners, "was too great, too over- whelming, for tongue to utter." Descriptions, indeed, could do nothing for the effect of such a meeting but to spoil it. There is a very different ending to the episode of the English captives in Bokhara. Colonel Stoddart, who had been sent to the Persian camp in the beginning of all these events to insist that Persia must desist from the siege of Herat, was sent subsequently on a mission to the ameer of Bokhara. The ameer received him favorably at first, but afterward became suspicious of English designs of conquest, and treated Stoddart with marked indignity. The ameer appears to have been the very model of a melo- dramatic eastern tyrant. He was cruel and capricious as another Caligula, and perhaps, in truth, quite as mad. He threw Stoddart into prison. Captain Conolly was appointed two years after to proceed to Bokhara and other countries of the same region. He undertook to endeavor to effect the liberation of Stoddart, but could only succeed in sharing his sufferings, and, at last, his fate. The ameer had written a letter to the queen of England, and the answer was written by the foreign secretar}% referring the ameer to the governor-general of India. The savage tyrant redoubled the ill-treatment of his captives. He accused them of being spies and of giving help to his enemies. The Indian government were of opinion that the envoys had in some manner exceeded their instructions, and that Conolly in particular had contributed by indiscretion to his own fate. Nothing therefore was done to obtain A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 171 their release beyond diplomatic efforts, and appeals to the magnanimity of the ameer, which had not any particular effect. Dr. Wolff, the celebrated traveler and missionary, afterward undertook an expedition of his own in the hope of saving the unfortunate captives; but he only reached Bokhara in time to hear that they had been put to death. The moment and the actual manner of their death cannot be known to positive certainty ; but there is little doubt that they were executed on the same day by the orders of the ameer. The journals of Conolly have been preserved up to an advanced period of his captivity, and they relieve so far the melancholy of the fate that fell on the unfortu- nate officers by showing that the horrors of their hopeless imprisonment were so great that their dearest friends must have been glad to know of their release even by the knife of the executioner. It is perhaps not the least bitter part of the story, that in the belief of many, including the un- fortunate officers themselves, the course pursued by the English authorities in India had done more to hand them 'over to the treacherous cruelty of their captor than to re- lease them from his power. In truth, the authorities of India had had enough of intervention. It would have needed a great exigency indeed to stir them into energy of action soon again in Central Asia. This tli rilling chapter of English history closes with something like a piece of harlequinade. The curtain fell amid general laughter. Only the genius of Lord Ellen- borough could have turned the mood of India and of England to mirth on such a subject. Lord Ellenborough was equal to this extraordinary feat. The never-to-be- forgotten proclamation about, the restoration to India of the gates of the temple of Somnauth, redeemed at Lord Kllenhorougirs orders when Ghuznee was retaken by the English, was firs! received with incredulity as a practical joke; then with one universal burst of laughter; then with indignation; and then, again, when the natural anger had died away, with laughter again. "My brothers and my friends,"" wrote Lord Kllenhorough "to all the princes, chief s and people of India" — "Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan Mahmoud looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee. The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged. The gates of the tern- 172 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. pie of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory; the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus." No words of pompous man could possibly have put together greater absurdities. The brothers and friends were Mohammedans and Hindoos, who were about as likely to agree as to the effect of these symbols of triumph as a Fenian and an Orangeman would be to fraternize in a toast to the glorious, pious and immortal memory. To the Mohammedans the triumph of Lord Ellenborough was simply an insult. To the Hindoos the offer was ridiculous; for the temple of Somnauth itself was in ruins, and the ground it covered was trodden by Mohammedans. To finish the absurdity, the gates proved not to be genuine relics at all. On October 1, 1842, exactly four years since Lord Auck- land's proclamation announcing and justifying the inter- vention to restore Shah Soojah, Lord Ellenborough issued another proclamation announcing the complete failure' and the revocation of the policy of his predecessor. Lord Ellenborough declared that " to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British government;" that therefore they would recognize any government ap- proved by the Afghans themselves, that the British arms would be withdrawn from Afghanistan, and that the gov- ernment of India would remain "content with the limits nature appears to have assigned to its empire." Dost Mohammed was released from his captivity, and before long was ruler of Cabul once again. Thus ended the story of our expedition to reorganize the internal condition of Afghanistan. After four years of unparalleled trial and disaster, everything was restored to the condition in which we found it; except that there were so many brave Englishmen sleeping in bloody graves. The Duke of "Wellington ascribed the causes of our failure to making war with a peace establishment; making war without a safe base of operations; carrying the native army out of India into a strange and cold, climate; invading a poor country which was unequal to the supply of our wants; giv- ing undue power to political agents; want of forethought and undue confidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir W. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 173 Macnaghten; placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible places; great military neglect and mismanage- ment after the outbreak. Doubtless these were in a mili- tary sense the reasons for the failure of an enterprise which cost the revenues of India an enormous amount of treasure. But the causes of failure were deeper than any military errors could explain. It is doubtful whether the genius of a Napoleon and the forethought of a Wellington could have won any permanent success for an enterprise founded on so false and fatal a policy. Nothing in the ability or devotion of those entrusted with the task of carrying it out could have made it deserve success. Our first error of principle was to go completely out of our way for the pur- pose of meeting mere speculative dangers; our next and far greater error was made when we attempted, in the words of Lord Ellenborough's proclamation, to force a sovereign upon a reluctant people. CHAPTER XII. THE REPEAL YEAR. "The year 1843," said O'Connell, " is and shall be the great repeal year." In the year 1843, at all events, O'Connell and his repeal agitation are entitled to the foremost place. The character of the man himself well deserves some calm consideration. We are now, perhaps, in a condition to do it justice. We are far removed in sentiment and political association, if not exactly in years, from the time when O'Connell was the idol of one party, and the object of all the bitterest scorn and hatred of the other. No man of his time was so madly worshiped and so fiercely denounced. No man in our time was ever the object of so much abuse in the newspapers. Tbe fiercest and coarsest attacks that we can remember to have been made in English journals on Cobden and Bright during the heat of the anti-corn law agitation seem placid, gentle and almost complimen- tary when compared with the criticisms daily applied to O'Connell. The only vituperation which could equal in vehemence and scurrility that poured out upon O'Connell was that which O'Connell himself poured out upon Ins as- sailants, llis hand was against every man, if every man's 174 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. hand was against him. He asked for no quarter, and he gave none. We have outlived, not the times merely, but the whole spirit of the times so far as political controversy is con- cerned. We are now able to recognize the fact that a public man may hold opinions which are distasteful to the ma- jority, and yet be perfectly sincere and worthy of respect. We are well aware that a man may differ from us, even on vital questions, and yet be neither fool nor knave. But this view of things was not generally taken in the days of O'Connell's great agitation. He and his enemies alike acted in their controversies on the principle that a political opponent is necessarily a blockhead or a scoundrel. It is strange and somewhat melancholy to read the strictures of so enlightened' a woman as Miss Martineau upon O'Connell. They are all based upon what a humorous writer has called the "fiend-in-human-shape theory." Miss Martineau not merely assumes that O'Connell was insincere and untrust- worthy, but discourses of him on the assumption that he was knowingly and purposely a villain. Not only does she hold that his repeal agitation was an unqualified evil for his country, and that repeal, if gained, would have been a curse to it, but she insists that O'Connell himself was thor- oughly convinced of the facts. She devotes whole pages of lively and acrid argument to prove, not only that O'Connell was ruining his country, but that he knew he was ruining it, and persevered in his wickedness out of pure self-seeking. No writer possessed of one-tenth of Miss Martineau's intellect and education would now reason after that fashion about any public man. If there is any com- mon delusion of past days which may be taken as entirely exploded now, it is the idea that any man ever swayed vast masses of people, and became the idol and the hero of a nation, by the strength of a conscious hypocrisy and imposture. O'Connell in this repeal year, as he called it, was by far the most prominent politician in these countries who had never been in office. He had been the patron of the Mel- bourne ministry, and his patronage had proved baneful to it. One of the great causes of the detestation in which the Melbourne Whigs were held by a vast number of English people was their alleged subserviency to the Irish agitator. We cannot be surprised if the English public just then was A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 175 little inclined to take an impartial estimate of O'Connell. He had attacked some of their public men in language of the fiercest denunciation. lie had started an agitation which seemed as if it were directly meant to bring about a break-up of the imperial system so lately completed by the act of union. He was opposed to the existence of the state church in Ireland. He was the bitter enemy of the Irish landlord class— of the landlords, that is to say, who took their title in any way from England. He was familiarly known in the graceful controversy of the time as the " Big Beggarman." It was an article of faith with the general public that he was enriching himself at the expense of a poor and foolish people. It is a matter of fact that he had given up a splendid practice at the bar to carry on his agi- tation; that he lost by the agitation, pecuniarily, far more than he ever got by it; that he had not himself received from first to last anything like the amount of the noble tribute so becomingly and properly given to Mr. Cobden, and so honorably accepted by him ; and that he died poor, leaving his sons poor. Indeed, it is a remarkable evidence of the purifying nature of any great political cause, even where the object sought is but a phantom, that it is hardly possible to give a single instance of a great political agita- tion carried on in these countries and in modern times by leaders who had any primary purpose of making money. Hut at that time the general English public were firmly convinced that O'Connell was simply keeping up his agita- tion for the sake of pocketing "the rent." Some of the qualities, too, that specially endeared him to his Celtic countrymen made him particularly objectionable to English- men; and Englishmen have never been famous for readi- ness to enter into the feelings and accept the point of view of other peoples. O'Connell was a thorough Celt. He represented all the impulsiveness, the quick-changing emo- tions, the passionate, exaggerated loves and hatred, the heedlessness of statement, the tendency to confound im- pressions with facts, the ebullient humor — all the other qualities that are especially characteristic of the Celt. The Irish people were the audience to which O'Connell habitu- ally played. It may indeed be said that even in playing to this audience he commonly played to the gallery. As the orator of a popular assembly, as the orator of a monster meeting, he probably never had an equal in these countries. 1% A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. He had many of the physical endowments that are especially favorable to success in such a sphere. He had a herculean frame, a stately presence, a face capable of expressing easily and effectively the most rapid alternations of mood, and a voice which all hearers admit to have been almost unrivalled for strength and sweetness. Its power, its pathos, its pas- sion, its music have been described in words of positive rapture by men who detested O'Connell, and who would rather if they could have denied to him any claim on public attention, even in the matter of voice. He spoke without studied preparation, and of course had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition and into carelessness of construction; he was hurried away into exaggeration and sometimes into mere bombast. But he had all the peculiar success, too, which rewards the orator who can speak without preparation. He always spoke right to the hearts of his hearers. On the platform or in parliament, whatever he said was said to his audience, and was never in the nature of discourse delivered over their heads. He entered the House of Commons when he was nearly fifty-four years of age. Most persons supposed that the style of speaking he had formed, first in addressing juries, and next in rousing Irish mobs, must cause his fail- ure when he came to appeal to the unsympathetic and fas- tidious House of Commons. But it is certain that O'Con- nell became one of the most successful parliamentary orators of his time. Lord Jeffrey, a professional critic, declared that all other speakers in the house seemed to him only talking schoolboy-talk after he had heard O'Connell. No man we now know of is less likely to be carried away by any of the claptrap arts of a false demagogic style than Mr. Boebuck; and Mr. Boebuck has said that he considers O'Connell the greatest orator he ever heard in the House of Commons; Charles Dickens, when a reporter in the gal- lery, where he had few equals, if any, in his craft, put down his pencil once when engaged in reporting a speech of O'Connell's on one of the tithe riots in Ireland, and declared that he could not take notes of the speech, so moved was he by its pathos. Lord Beaconsfield, who cer- tainly had no great liking for O'Connell, has spoken in terms as high as any one could use about his power over the house. But O'Connell's eloquence only helped him to make all the more enemies in the House of Commons. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 177 He was reckless even there in his denunciation, although he took care never to obtrude on parliament the extrava- gant and unmeaning abuse of opponents which delighted the Irish mob meetings. O'Connell was a crafty and successful lawyer. The Irish peasant, like the Scottish, is, or at least then was remark- ably fond of litigation. He delighted in the quirks and quibbles of law, and in the triumphs won by the skill of lawyers over opponents. He admired O'Connell all the more when O'Connell boasted and proved that he could drive a coach and six through any act of parliament. One of the pet heroes of Irish legend is a personage whose cleverness and craft procure for him a sobriquet which has been rendered into English by the words "twists upon twists and tricks upon tricks." O'Connell was in the eyes of many of the Irish peasantry an embodiment of " twists upon twists and tricks upon tricks," enlisted in their cause for the confusion of their adversaries. He had borne the leading part in carrying Catholic emancipation. He had encountered all the danger and responsibility of the some- what aggressive movement by which it was finally secured. It is true that it was a reform which in the course of civili- zation must have been carried. It had in its favor all the enlightenment of the time. The eloquence of the greatest orators, the intellect of the truest philosophers, the pre- science of the wisest statesmen had pleaded for it and helped to make its way clear. No one can doubt that it must in a short time have been carried if O'Connell had never lived. But it was carried just then by virtue of O'Connell's bold agitation and by the wise resolve of the Tory government not to provoke a civil war. It is deeply to be regretted that Catholic emancipation was not con- ceded to the claims of justice. Had it been so yielded, it is very doubtful whether we should ever have heard much of the repeal agitation. Hut the Irish people! saw, and indeed all the world was made aware of the fact, that eman- cipation would not have been conceded just then at least hut for the fear of civil disturbance. To an Englishman looking coolly back from a distance the difference is clear between granting to-day rather than provoke disturbance that which every one sees must, he granted some time, and conceding what the vast majority of the English people be- lieve can never with propriety or even safety be granted at 178 A EISTO RY OF OUR WN TIMES. all. But we can hardly wonder if the Irish peasant did not make such distinctions. Ah 1 he knew was that 'Cou- ncil had demanded Catholic emancipation, and had been answered at first by a direct refusal ; that he had said he would compel its concession, and that in the end it was conceded to him. When, therefore, O'Connell said that he would compel the government to give him repeal of the union, the Irish peasant naturally believed that he could keep his word. Nor is there any reason to doubt that O'Connell himself believed in the possibility of accomplishing his purpose. AVe are apt now to think of the union between England and Ireland as of time-honored endurance. It had been scarcely thirty years in existence when O'Connell entered parliament. The veneration of ancient lineage, the majesty of custom, the respect due to the " wisdom of our ancestors" — none of these familiar claims could be urged on behalf of the legislative union between England and Ireland. To O'Connell it appeared simply as a modern innovation which had nothing to be said for it except that a majority of Englishmen had by threats and bribery forced it on a ma- jority of Irishmen. Mr. Lecky, the author of the " His- tory of European Morals," may be cited as an impartial authority on such a subject. Let us see what he says, in his work on " The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ire- land," with regard to the movement for repeal of the union, of which it seems almost needless to say he disapproves. "O'Connell perceived clearly," says Mr. Lecky, "that the tendency of affairs in Europe was toward the recognition of the principle that a nation's will is the one legitimate rule of its government. All rational men acknowledged that the union was imposed on Ireland by corrupt means contrary to the wish of one generation. O'Connell was prepared to show, by the protest of the vast majority uf the people, that it was retained without the acquiescence of the next. He had allied himself with the parties that were rising surely and rapidly to power in England — with the democracy, whose gradual progress is effacing the most venerable landmarks of the constitution — with the free traders, whose approaching triumph he had hailed and exulted in from afar. He had perceived the possibility of forming a powerful party in parliament, which would be free to co-operate with all English parties without coa- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 179 lescing with any, and might thus turn the balance of fac- tions and decide the fate of ministries. He saw, too, that while England in a time of peace might resist the expressed will of the Irish nation, its policy would be necessarily modified in time of war; and he predicted that should there be a collision with France while the nation was organized as in 1843, repeal would be the immediate and the inevitable consequence. In a word, he believed that under a constitutional government the will of four-fifths of a nation, if peacefully, perseveringly and energetically ex- pressed, must sooner or later be triumphant. If a war had broken out during the agitation — if the life of O'Connell had been prolonged ten years longer — if any worthy suc- cessor had assumed his mantle — if a fearful famine had not broken the spirit of the people — who can say that the agi- tation would not have been successful?" No one, we fancy, except those who are always convinced that nothing can ever come to pass which they think ought not to come to pass- At all events, if an English political philosopher, surveying the events after a distance of thirty years, is of opinion that repeal was possible, it is not surprising that O'Connell thought its attainment possible at the time when he set himself to agitate for it. Even if this be not con- ceded, it will at least be allowed that it is not very surpris- ing if the Irish peasant saw no absurdity in the movement. Our system of government by jmrty does not lay claim to absolute perfection. It is an excellent mechanism on the whole; it is probably the most satisfactory that the wit of man has yet devised for the management of the affairs of a state; but its greatest admirers will bear to be told that it has its drawbacks and disadvantages. One of these undoubt- edly is found in the fact that so few reforms are accom- plished in deference to the claims of justice, in comparison with those that are yielded to the pressure of numbers. A great English statesman in our own day once said that parliament had done many just tilings, but few things be- cause they were just. O'Connell and the Irish people saw that Catholic emancipation bad been yielded to pressure rather than to justice; it is not wonderful if they thought that pressure might prevail as well in the matter of repeal. In many respects O'Connell differed from more modern Irish Nationalists. lie was a thorough Liberal. lie was a devoted opponent of negro slavery; he was a staunch 180 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. free trader; he was a friend of popular education; he was an enemy to all excess; he was opposed to strikes; he was an advocate of religious equality everywhere; and he de- clined to receive the commands of the Vatican in his political agitation. "I am a Catholic, but I am not a Papist," was his own definition of his religious attitude. He preached the doctrine of constitutional agitation strictly, and declared that no political reform was worth the shed- ding of one drop of blood. It may be asked how it came about that with all these excellent attributes, which all critics now allow to him, O'Connell was so detested by the vast majority of the English people. One reason undoubt- edly is that O'Connell deliberately revived and worked up for his political purposes the almost extinct national hatreds of Celt and Saxon. As a phrase of political controversy, he may be said to have invented the word "Saxon." He gave a terrible license to his tongue. His abuse was out- rageous; his praise was outrageous. The very effusiveness of his loyalty told to his disadvantage. People could not understand how one who perpetually denounced "the Saxon" could be so enthusiastic and rapturous in his pro- fessions of loyalty to the Saxon's queen. In the common opinion of Englishmen, all the evils of Ireland, all the troubles attaching to the connection between the two coun- tries, had arisen from this unmitigated, rankling hatred of Celt and Saxon. It was impossible for them to believe that a man who deliberately applied all the force of his eloquence to revive it could be a genuine patriot. It appeared intol- erable that while thus laboring to make the Celt hate the Saxon he should yet profess an extravagant devotion to the sovereign of England. Yet O'Connell was probably quite sincere in his professions of loyalty. He was in no sense a revolutionist. He had 'from his education in a French college acquired an early detestation of the princi- ples of the French Eevolution. Of the Irish rebels of '98 he spoke with as savage an intolerance as the narrowest English Tories could show in speaking of himself. The Tones, and Emmetts, and Fitzgeralds, whom so many of the Irish people adored, were, in O'Connell's eyes, and in his words, only "a gang of miscreants." He grew angry at -the slightest expression of an opinion among his fol- lowers that seemed to denote even a willingness to discuss any of the doctrines of Communism. His theory and his A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 181 policy evidently were that Ireland was to be saved by a dic- tatorship entrusted to himself, with the Irish priesthood acting as his officers and agents. He maintained the authority of the priests, and his own authority by means of them and over them. The political system of the coun- try for the purposes of agitation was to be a sort of hier- archy; the parish priests occupying the lowest grade, the bishops standing on the higher steps, and O'Connell him- self supreme as the pontiff over all. He had a parliamentary system by means of which he proposed to approach more directly the question of repeal of the union. He got seats in the House of Commons for a number of his sons, his nephews, and his sworn retainers. "O'Conneirs tail" was the precursor of "the pope's brass band," in the slang of the House of Commons. He had an almost supreme control over the Irish constituencies, and whenever a vacancy took place he sent down the repeal candidate to contest it. He always inculcated and insisted on the necessity of order and peace. Indeed, as he pro- posed to carry on his agitation altogether by the help of the bishops and the priests, it was not possible for him, even were he so inclined, to conduct it oil any other than peace- ful principles. " The man who commits a crime gives strength to the enemy," was a maxim which he was never weary of impressing upon his followers. The temperance movement set on foot with such remarkable and sudden success by Father Mathew was at once turned to account by O'Connell. He was himself, in his later years at all events, a very temperate man, and he was delighted at the prospect of good order and discipline which the temperance movement afforded. Father Mathew was very far from sharing all the political opinions of O'Connell. The sweet and simple friar, whose power was that of goodness and en- thusiasm only, and who had but little force of character or intellect, shrank from political agitation, and was rather conservative than otherwise in his views. But he could not afford to repudiate the support of O'Connell, who on all occasions glorified the temperance movement, and called upon his followers to join it, and was always boasting of his "noble army of teetotalers." It was probably when he found that the mere fad of his having supported the Melbourne government did so much to discredit that gov- ernment in the eyes of Englishmen and to bring about its 182 A IITSTOR Y OF OUR WN TIMES. fall, that O'Oonnell went deliberately out of the path of mere parliamentary agitation, and started that system of agitation by monster meetings which has since his time been regularly established among us as a principal part of all politi- cal organization for a definite purpose. He founded in Dub- lin a Repeal Association which met in a place on BurghQuay, and which he styled Conciliation Hall. Around him in this association he gathered his sons, his relatives, his devoted followers, priestly and lay. The Nation newsf>aper, then in its youth and full of a fresh literary vigor, was one of his most brilliant instruments. At a later period of the agitation it was destined to be used against him, and with severe effect. The famous monster meetings were usually held on a Sunday, on some open spot, mostly selected for its historic fame, and with all the picturesque surroundings of hill and stream. From the dawn of the summer day the repealers were thronging to the scene of the meeting. They came from all parts of the neighboring country for miles and miles. They were commonly marshalled and guided by their parish priests. They all attended the ser- vices of their church before the meeting began. The influ- ence of his religion and of his patriotic feelings was brought to bear at once upon the impressionable and emotional Irish Celt. At the meeting O'Connell and several of his chosen orators addressed the crowd on the subject of the wrongs done to Ireland by "the Saxon," the claims of Ire- land to the restoration of her old parliament in College Green, and the certainty of her having it restored if Irish- men only obeyed O'Connell and their priests, were sober, and displayed their strength and their unity. O'Connell himself, it is needless to say, was always the great orator of the day. The agitation developed a great deal of literary talent among the younger men of education ; but it never brought out a man who was even spoken of as a possible successor to O'Connell in eloquence. His mag- nificent voice enabled him to do what no genius and no eloquence less aptly endowed could have done. He could send his lightest word thrilling to the extreme of the vast concourse of people whom he desired to move. He swayed them with the magic of an absolute control. He under- stood all the moods of his people; to address himself to them came naturally to him. He made them roar with laughter; he made them weep; he made them thrill with A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 183 indignation. As the shadow runs over a field, so the im- pression of his varying eloquence ran over the assemblage. He commanded the emotions of his hearers as a consum- mate conductor sways the energies of his orchestra. Every allusion told. When, in one of the meetings held in his native Kerry, he turned solemnly round and appealed to "yonder blue mountains where you and I were cradled;" or in sight of the objects he described he apostrophized Ire- land as the "land of the green valley and the rushing river" — an admirable characteristic and complete description; or recalled some historical association connected with the scene he surveyed — each was some special appeal to the instant feelings of his peculiar audience. Sometimes he indulged in the grossest and what ought to have been the most ridiculous flattery of his hearers-^- flattery which would have offended and disgusted the dullest English audience. But the Irish peasant, with all his keen sense of the ridiculous in others, is singularly open to the influence of any appeal to his own vanity. There is a great deal of the "eternal-womanly" in the Celtic nature; and it is not easy to overflatter one of the race. Doubtless O'Connell knew this and acted purposely on it; and this was a peculiarity of his political conduct which it would be hard indeed to command or even to defend. But in truth he adopted in his agitation the tactics he had employed at the bar. " A good speceh is a good thing," he used to say; "but the verdict is the thing." His flattery of his hearers was not grosser than his abuse of all those whom they did not like. His dispraise often had absolutely no meaning in it. There was no sense whatever in calling the Duke of Wellington "a stunted corporal;" one might as well have called Mont Blanc a molehill. Nobody could have shown more clearly than O'Connell did that he did not believe the Times to be "an obscure rag." It would have been as humorous and as truthful to say that there was no such paper as the Times. But these absurdities made an ignorant audience laugh for the moment, and O'Connell had gained the only point he just then wanted to carry. He would probably nave answered any one who remonstrated with him on the disingenuousness of such sayings as Mrs. Thrale says Burke once answered her when she taxed him with a want of literal accuracy, by quoting "Odds life, must one swear to the truth <>f a song?" But this recklessness of epithet and t\v- 184 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. scription did much to make 0' Conn ell distrusted and dis> liked in England, where,' in whatever heat of political con- troversy words are supposed to be the expressions of some manner of genuine sentiment. Of course many of O'Con- nelPs abusive epithets were not only full of humor, but did to some extent fairly represent the weaknesses at least of those against whom they were directed. Some of his his- torical allusions were of a more mischievous nature than any mere personalities could have been. " Peel and Welling- ton," he said at Kilkenny, "may be second Crom wells; they may get Cromwell's blunted truncheon, and they may — oh, sacred heavens ! — enact on the fair occupants of that gallery" (pointing to the ladies' gallery), "the murder of the Wexford women. Let it not be supposed that when I made that appeal to the ladies it was but a flight of my imagination. No! when . Cromwell entered the town of Wexford by treachery, three hundred ladies, the beauty and loveliness of Wexford, the young and the old, the maid and the matron, were collected round the Cross of Christ; they prayed to heaven for mercy and I hope they found it; they prayed to the English for humanity, and Cromwell slaughtered them. I tell you this; three hundred women, the grace and beauty and virtue of Wexford, were slaugh- tered by the English ruffians — sacred heaven ! " He went on then to assure his hearers that "the ruffianly Saxon .paper, the Times, in the number received by me to-day, presumes to threaten us again with such a scene." One would like to see the copy of the Times which contained such a threat, or indeed any words that could be tortured into a semblance of any such hideous meaning. But the great agitator, when he found he had excited enough the horror of his audience, proceeded to reassure them by the means of all others most objectionable and dangerous at such a time. "I am not imaginative," he said, "when I talk of the possibility of such scenes anew; but yet I assert that there is no danger to our women now, for the men of Ireland would die to the last in their defense." Here the whole meeting broke into a storm of impassioned cheering. "Ay," the orator exclaimed, when the storm found a mo- mentary hush, "we were a paltry remnant then; we are millions now." At Mullaghmast, O'Connell made an impassioned allusion to the massacre of Irish chieftains, said to have taken place on that very spot in the reign of A HISTOR Y OF OUR OWN TIMES. 185 Queen Elizabeth. " Three hundred and ninety Irish chiefs perished here ! They came, confiding in Saxon honor, rely- ing on the protection of the queen, to a friendly conference. In the midst of revelry, in the cheerful light of the ban- quet house, they were surrounded and butchered. None returned save one. Their wives were widows, their chil- dren fatherless. In their homesteads was heard the shrill shriek of despair — the cry of bitter agony. Oh, Saxon cruelty, how it cheers my heart to think that you dare not attempt such a deed again !" It is not necessary to point out what the effect of such descriptions and such allusions must have been upon an excitable and ignorant peasant audience — on men who were ready to believe in all sincerity that England only wanted the opportunity to re-enact in the reign of Queen Victoria the scenes of Elizabeth's or Cromwell's day. The late Lord Lytton has given, in his poem, " St. Stephens, "a picturesque descrijition of one of these meetings and of the effect produced upon himself by O'Connell's elo- quence. " Once to my sight," he says, " the giant thus was given; walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven." He describes " the human ocean" lying spread out at the giant's feet; its "wave on wave" flowing "into space away." Not unnaturally, Lord Lytton thought "no clarion could have sent its sound even to the center" of that crowd. And as I thought, rose the sonorous swell As from some church tower swings the silvery bell; Aloft and clear from airy tide to tide, It glided easy as a bird may glide. To the last verge of that vast audience sent. It played with each wild passion as it went; Now stirred the uproar— now the murmur stilled, And sobs of laughter answered as it willed. Then did I know what spells of infinite choice To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice. Then did I learn to seize the sudden clue To the grand troublous life antique — to view, Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes, Unstable Athens heave her noisy seas. The crowds who attended the monster meetings came in a sort of military order and with a certain parade of mili- tary discipline. At the meeting held on the Hill of Tara, where O'Connell stood beside the stone said to have been used for the coronation of the ancient monarchy of Ireland, 186 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. it is declared on the authority of careful and unsympathetic witnesses that a quarter of a million of people must have been present. The government naturally felt that there was a very considerable danger in the massing together of such vast crowds of men in something like military array and under the absolute leadership of one man, who openly avowed that he had called them together to show England what was the strength her statesmen would have to fear if they continued to deny repeal to his demand. It is cer- tain now that O'Connell did not at any time mean to employ force for the attainment of his ends. But it is equally certain that he wished the English government to see that he had the command of an immense number of men, and probably even to believe that he would, if needs were, hurl them in rebellion upon England if ever she should be embarrassed with a foreign war. It is certain, too, that many of O'Connell's most ardent admirers, especially among the young men, were fully convinced that some day or other their leader would call on them to fight, and were much disappointed when they found that he had no such intention. The government at last resolved to interfere. A meeting was announced to be held at Clontarf on Sunday, October 8, 1843. Clontarf is near Dublin, and is famous in Irish history as the scene of a great victory of the Irish over their Danish invaders. It was intended that this meeting should surpass in numbers and in earnestness the assemblage at Tara. On the the very day before the eighth the lord lieutenant issued a proclamation prohibiting the meeting as " calculated to excite reasonable and well- grounded apprehension," in that its object was "to accom- plish alterations in the laws and constitution of the realm by intimidation and the demonstration of physical force." O'Connell's power over the people was never shown more effectively than in the control which at that critical mo- ment he was still able to exercise. The populations were already coming in to Clontarf in streams from all the coun- try round, when the proclamation of the lord lieutenant was issued. No doubt the Irish government ran a terrible risk when they delayed so long the issue of their proclama- tion. With the people already assembling in such masses, the risk of a collision with the police and the soldiery, and of a consequent massacre, is something still shocking to contemplate. It is not surprising, perhaps, if O'Connell A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 187 and many of his followers made it a charge against the gov- ernment that they intended to bring about such a collision in order to make an example of some of the repealers and thus strike terror through the country. Some sort of col- lision would almost undoubtedly have occurred but for the promptitude of O'Connell himself. He at once issued a proclamation of his own to which the populations were likely to pay far more attention than they would to any- thing coming from Dublin Castle. O'Connell declared that the orders of the lord lieutenant must be obeyed; that the meeting must not take place; and that the people must return to their homes. The "uncrowned king," as some of his admirers loved to call him, was obeyed, and no meet- ing was held. From that moment, however, the great power of the repeal agitation was gone. The government had accom- plished far more by their proclamation than they could possibly have imagined at the time. They had, without knowing it, compelled O'Connell to show his hand. It was now made clear that he did not intend to have resort to force. From that hour there was virtually a schism between the elder repealers and the younger. The young and fiery followers of the great agitator lost all faith in him. It would in any case have been impossible to main- tain for any very long time the state of national tension in which Ireland had been kept. It must soon come either to a climax or to an anti-climax. It came to an anti-climax. All the imposing demonstrations of physical strength lost their value when it was made positively known that they were only demonstrations, and that nothing was ever to come of them. The eye of an attentive foreigner was then fixed on Ireland and on O'Connell; the eye of one destined to play a part in the political history of our time which none other has surpassed. Count Cavour had not long returned to his own country from a visit made with the express purpose of studying the politics and the general con- dition of England and Ireland. He wrote to a friend about the crisis then passing in Ireland. " When one is at a dis- tance," he said, "from the theater of events, it is easy to make prophecies which have already been contradicted by facts. But according to my view O'Connell's fate is sealed. On the first vigorous demonstration of his opponents he has drawn back; from that moment he has ceased to be 188 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. dangerous." Cavour was perfectly right. It was never again possible to bring the Irish people up to the pitch of enthusiasm which O'Connell had wrought them to before the suppression of the Clontarf meeting; and before long the Irish national movement had split in two. The government at once proceeded to the prosecution of O'Connell and some of his principal associates. Daniel O'Connell himself, his son John, the late Sir John Gray, and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, were the most conspicuous of those against whom the prosecution was directed. They were charged with conspiring to raise and excite dis- affection among her majesty's subjects, to excite them to hatred and contempt of the government and constitution of the realm." The trial was in many ways a singularly unfor- tunate proceeding. The government prosecutor objected to all the Catholics whose names were called as jurors. An error of the .sheriffs in the construction of the jury-lists had already reduced by a considerable number the roll of Catholics entitled to serve on juries. It therefore hap- pened that the greatest of Irish Catholics, the representa- tive Catholic of his day, the principal agent in the work of carrying Catholic emancipation, was tried by a jury com- posed exclusively of Protestants. It has only to be added that this was done in the metropolis of a country essentially Catholic; a country five-sixths of whose people were Catho- lics; and on a question affecting indirectly, if not directly, the whole position and claims of Catholics. The trial was long. O'Connell defended himself; and his speech was universally regarded as wanting the power that had made his defense of others so effective in former days. It was for the most part a sober and somewhat heavy argument to prove that Ireland had lost instead of gained by her union with England. The jury found O'Connell guilty along with most of his associates, and he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment and a fine of £2,000. The others received lighter sentences. O'Connell appealed to the House of Lords against the sentence. In the meantime he issued a proclamation to the Irish people commanding them to keep perfectly quiet and not to commit any offense against the law. "Every man," said one of his pioclama- tions, " who is guilty of the slightest breach of the peace is an enemy of me and of Ireland." The Irish people took liim at his word and remained perfectly quiet. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 189 O'Connell and his principal associates were committed to Richmond Prison, in Dublin. The trial had been delayed in various ways, and the sentence was not pronounced until May 24, 1844. The appeal to the House of Lords — we may pass over intermediate states of procedure — was heard in the following September. Five law lords were present. The lord chancellor (Lord Lyndhurst) and Lord Brougham were of opinion that the sentence of the court below should be affirmed. Lord Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord Campbell were of opposite opinion. Lord Den- man, in particular, condemned the manner in which the jury-lists had been prepared. Some of his words on the occasion became memorable, and passed into a sort of pro- verbial expression. Such practices, he said, would make of the law, "a mockery, a delusion and a snare." A strange and memorable scene followed. The constitution of the House of Lords then and for long after made no difference between law lords and others in voting on a question of appeal. As a matter of practice and of fairness, the lay peers hardly ever interfered in the voting on an appeal. But they had an undoubted right to do so; and it is even certain that in one or two peculiar cases they had exercised the right. If the lay lords were to vote in this instance, the fate of O'Connell and his companions could not be doubtful. O'Connell had always been the bitter enemy of the House of Lords. He had vehemently denounced its authority, its practices, and its leading members. Nor, if the lay peers had voted and confirmed the judgment of the court below, could it have been positively said that an injus- tice was done by their interference. The majority of the judges on the writ of error had approved the judgment of the court below. In the House of Lords itself the lord chancellor and Lord Brougham were of opinion that the judgment ought to be sustained. There would, therefore, have been some ground of maintaining that the substantial justice of the case had been met by the action of the lay peers. On the other hand, it would have afforded a ground for a positive outcry in Ireland if a cjuestion purely of law had been decided by the votes of lav peers against their bitter enemy. One peer, Lord Wharncliffe, made a timely appeal to the better judgment and feeling of his brethren, lie urged them not to take a course which might allow any one to say that political or personal feeling had prevailed 190 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. in a judicial decision of the House of Lords. The appeal had its effect. A moment before one lay peer at least had openly declared that he would insist on his right to vote. When the lord chancellor was about to put the question in the first instance, to ascertain in the usual way whether a division would be necessary, several lay peers seemed as if they were determined to vote. But the appeal of Lord Wharncliffe settled the matter. All the lay peers at once withdrew and left the matter according to the usual course in the hands of the law lords. The majority of these being against the judgment of the court below, it was accordingly reversed, and O'Connell and his associates were set at liberty. The propriety of a lay peer voting on a question of judicial appeal was never raised again so long as the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords was still exercised in the old and now obsolete fashion. Nothing could well have been more satisfactory and more fortunate in its results than the conduct of the House of Lords. The effect upon the mind of the Irish people would have been deplorable if it had been seen that O'Con- nell was convicted by a jury on which there were no Roman Catholics, and that the sentence was confirmed, not by a judicial, but by a strictly political vote of the House of Lords. As it was, the influence of the decision, which proved that even in the assembly most bitterly denounced by O'Connell he could receive fair play, was in the highest degree satisfactory. It cannot be doubted that it did some- thing to weaken the force of O'Counell'sown denunciations of Saxon treachery and wrong-doing. The influence of O'Connell was never the same after the trial. Many causes combined to bring about this result. Most writers ascribe it above all to the trial itself, and the evidence it afforded that the English government were strong enough to prose- cute and punish even O'Connell if he provoked them too far. It is somewhat surprising to find intelligent men like Mr. Green, the author of "A Short History of the English People," countenancing such a belief. If the House of Lords had, by the votes of the lay peers, confirmed the sen- tence on O'Connell, he would have come out of his prison at the expiration of his period of sentence more popular in id more powerful than ever. Had his strength and faculty of agitation lasted, he might have agitated thence- forth with more effect than ever. If the Clontarf meeting A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 191 had not disclosed to a large section of his followers that his policy after all was only to be one of talk, he might have come out of prison just the man he had been, the leader of all classes of Catholics and Nationalists. But the real blow given to O'Connell's popularity was given by O'Connell himself. The moment it was made clear that nothing was to be done but agitate, and that all the mon- ster meetings, the crowds and banners and bands of music, the marshaling and marching and reviewing, meant nothing more than Father Mathew's temperance meetings meant — that moment all the youth of the movement fell off from O'Connell. The young men were very silly, as after events proved. O'Connell was far more wise and had an infinitely better estimate of the strength of England than they had. But it is certain that the young men were disgusted with the kind of gigantic sham which the great agitator seemed to have been conducting for so long a time. It would have been impossible to keep up forever such an excitement as that which got together the monster meetings. Such heat cannot be brought up to the burning point and kept there at will. A reaction was inevitable. O'Connell was getting old, and had lived a life of work and wear and tear enough to break down even his constitution of iron. He had kept a great part of his own followers in heart, as he had kept the government in alarm, by leaving it doubtful whether he would not in the end make an appeal to the reserve of physical force which he so often boasted of having at his back. When the whole secret was out, he ceased to be an object of fear to the one and of enthusiasm to the other. It was neither the lord lieutenant's proclamation nor the prosecution by the government that impaired the influ- ence of O'Connell. It was O'Connell's own proclamation declaring for submission to the law that dethroned him. Prom that moment the political monarch had to dispute with rebels for his crown; and the crown fell olf in the struggle, like that which Uhland tells of in the pretty poem. For the Clontarf meeting had been the climax. There was all manner of national rejoicing when the decision of the House of Lords set O'Connell and his fellow-prisoners free. There were illuminations and banquets and meetings and triumphal processions, renewed declarations of allegiance to the great leader, and renewed protestations on his part, 192 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. that repeal was coming. But his reign was over. His death may as well be recorded here as later. His health broke down; and the disputes in which he became engaged with the young Irelanders, dividing his party into two hostile camps, were a grievous burthen to him. In Lord Beaconsfield's" Life of Lord George Bentinck,"a very touch- ing description is given of the last speech made by O'Con- nell in parliament. It was on April 3, 1846; "His appear- ance," says Mr. Disraeli, "was of great debility, and the tones of his voice were very still. His words indeed only reached those who were immediately around him, and the ministers sitting on the other side of the green table, and listening with that interest and respectful attention which became the occasion. " O'Connell spoke for nearly two hours. " It was 'a strange and touching spectacle to those who re- membered the former colossal energy and the clear and thrilling tones that had once startled, disturbed andcontrolled senates. . . . To the house generally it was a perform- ance in dumb show; a feeble old man muttering before a table; but respect for the great parliamentary personage kept all as orderly as if the fortunes of a party hung upon his rhetoric; and though not an accent reached the gallery, means were taken that next morning the country should not lose the last and not the least interesting of the speeches of one who had so long occupied and agitated the mind of nations." O'Connell became seized with profound melancholy. Only one desire seemed left to him, the desire to close his stormy career in Rome. The Eternal City is the capital, the shrine, the Mecca of the church to which O'Connell Avas undoubtedly devoted with all his heart. He longed to lie down in the shadow of the dome of St. Peter's and rest there, and there die. His youth had been wild in more ways than one, and he had long been under the influence of a profound penitence. He had killed a man in a duel and was through all his after life haunted by regret for the deed, although it was really forced on him, and he had acted only as any other man of his time would have acted in such conditions. But now in his old and sinking days all the errors of his youth and his strong manhood came back upon him, and he longed to steep the painful memories in the sacred influences of Rome. He hurried t-o Italy at a time when the prospect of the famine darken- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 193 inj; down upon his country cast an additional shadow across his outward path. He reached Genoa, and he went no farther. His strength wholly failed him there, and he died, still far from Rome on May 15, 1847. The close of his career was a mournful collapse; it was like the sudden crumbling in of some stately and commanding tower. The other day, it seemed, he rilled a space of almost unequaled breadth and height in the political landscape; and now he is already gone. " Even with a thought the rack dislimbs, and makes it indistinct, as water is in water." CHAPTER XIII. peel's administration. Some important steps in the progress of what may be described as social legislation are part of the history of Peel's government. The act of parliament which prohibited absolutely the employment of women and girls in mines and collieries was rendered unavoidable by the fearful ex- posures made through the instrumentality of a commission appointed to enquire into the whole subject. This commis- sion was appointed on the motion of the then Lord Ashley, since better known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, a man who during the whole of a long career has always devoted him- self — sometimes wisely and successfully, sometimes indis- creetly and to little purpose, always with disinterested and benevolent intention — to the task of brightening the lives and lightening the burdens of the working classes and the poor. The commission found many hideous evils arising from the employment of women and girls underground, and Lord Ashley made such effective use of their disclo- sures that he encountered very little opposition when he came to propose restrictive legislation. In some of the coal mines women were literally employed as beasts of burden. Where the seam of coal was too narrow to allow them to stand upright, they had to crawl back and forward on all fours for fourteen or sixteen hours a day dragging the trucks laden with coal. The trucks were generally fastened toachain which passed between the legs of the unfortunate women, and was then connected with a belt which was strapped round their naked waists. Their only clothing 194 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. often consisted of an old pair of trousers made of sacking; and they were uncovered from the waist up — uncovered, that is to say, except for the grime and filth that collected and clotted around them. All manner of hideous diseases were generated in these unsexed bodies. Unsexed almost literally some of them became; for their chests were often hard and flat as those of men ; and not a few of them lost all reproductive power: a happy condition truly under the circumstances, where women who bore children only went up to the higher air for a week during their confinement, and were then back at their work again. It would be superfluous to say that the immorality engendered by such a state of things was in exact keeping with the other evils which it brought about. Lord Ashley had the happiness and the honor of putting a stop to this infamous sort of labor forever by the act of 1842, which declared that, after a certain limited period, no woman or girl whatever should be employed in mines and collieries. Lord Ashley was less completely successful in his endeavor to secure a ten hours' limitation for the daily labor of women and young persons in factories. By a vigorous annual agitation on the general subject of factory labor, in which Lord Ashley had followed in the footsteps of Mr. Michael Thomas Sadler, he brought the government up to the point of undertaking legislation on the subject. They first introduced a bill which combined a limitation of the labor of children in factories with a plan for compulsory education among the children. The educational clauses of the bill had to be abandoned in consequence of a somewhat narrow-minded opposition among the dissenters, who feared that too much advantage was given to the church. After- ward the government brought in another bill, which be- came in the end the factories act of 1844. It was during the passing of this measure that Lord Ashley tried unsuc- cessfully to introduce his ten hours' limit. The bill dimin- ished the working hours of children under thirteen years of age, and fixed them at six and a half hours each day; ex- tended somewhat the time during which they were to be under daily instruction, and did a good many other useful and wholesome things. The principle of legislative inter- ference to protect youthful workers in factories had been already established by the act of 1833; and Lord Ashley's agitation only obtained for it a somewhat extended applica- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 195 tion. It has since that time again and again received further extension; and in this time, as in the former, there is a constant controversy going on as to whether its prin- ciples ought not to be so extended as to guard in almost every way the labor of adult women, and even of adult men. The controversy during Lord Ashley's agitation was always warm and often impassioned. Many thoroughly benevolent men and women could not bring themselves to believe that any satisfactory and permanent results could come of a legislative interference with what might be called the freedom of contract between employers and employed. They argued that it was idle to say the interference was only made or sought in the case of women and boys; for if the women and boys stop off working, they pointed out, the men must perforce in most cases stop off working too. Some of the public men afterward most justly popular among the English artisan classes were opposed to the measure on the ground that it was a heedless attempt to interfere with fixed economic laws. It was urged too, and with much semblance of justice, that the interference of the state for the protection or the compulsory education of children in factories would have been much better em- ployed, and was far more loudly called for in the case of the children employed in agricultural labor. The lot of a factory child, it was contended, is infinitely better in most respects than that of the poor little creature who is em- ployed in holloaing at the crows on a farm. The mill-hand is well cared for, well paid, well able to care for himself and his wife and his family, it was argued; but what of the miserable Giles Scroggins of Dorsetshire or Somerset- shire, who never has more in all his life than just enough to keep body and soul together; and for whom, at the close, the workhouse is the only haven of rest? Why not legislate for him — at- least for his wife and children? Neither point requires much consideration from us at present. We have to recognize historical facts; and it is certain that this country has made up its mind that for the present and for a long time to come parliament will interfere in whatever- way seems good to it with the conditions on which labor is carried on. There has been indeed a, very marked advance or retrogression, whichever men may please to call it, in public opinion since the ten hours' agitation. At that time compulsory education and 196 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the principles of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act would have seemed alike impossible to most persons in this coun- try. The practical mind of the Englishman carries to an extreme the dislike and contempt for what the French call les principes in politics. Therefore we oscillate a good deal, the pendulum swinging now very far in the direction of non-interference with individual action, and now still farther in the direction of universal interference and regu- lation — what was once humorously described as grand- motherly legislation. With our recent experiences we can only be surprised that a few years ago there was such a repugnance to the modest amount of interference with individual rights which Lord Ashley's extremest proposals would have sought to introduce. As regards the other point, it is certain that parliament will at one time or another do for the children in the fields something very like that which it has done for the children in the factories. It is enough for us to know that practically the factory legislation has worked very well, and that the non-interfer- ence in the fields is a far heavier responsibility on the con- science of parliament than interference in the factories. Many other things done by Sir Robert Peel's government aroused bitter controversy and agitation. In one or two remarkable instances the ministerial policy went near to producing that discord in the Conservative party which we shall presently see break out into passion and schism when Peel came to deal with the corn laws. There was, for example, the grant to the Roman Catholic College of May- nooth, a college for the education especially of young men who sought to enter the ranks of the priesthood. The grant was not a new thing. Since before the act of union a grant had been made for the college. The government of Sir Robert Peel only proposed to make that which was insuffi- cient sufficient; to enable the college to be kept in repair and to accomplish the purpose for which it was founded. As Macaulay put it, there was no more cpiestion of principle involved than there would be in the sacrifice of a pound instead of a pennyweight on some particular altar. Yet the ministerial proposition called up a very tempest of clamor- ous bigotry all over the country. What Macaulay described in fierce scorn as "the bray of Exeter Hall" was heard resounding every day and night. Peel carried his measure, although nearly half his own party in the House of Com- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 197 mons voted against it on the second reading. The whole controversy has little interest now. Perhaps it will be found to live in the memory of many persons, chiefly be- cause of the quarrel it caused between Macaulay and his Edinburgh constitutents, and of the annual motion for the withdrawal of the grant which was so long afterward one of the regular bores of the House of Commons. Many of us can well remember the venerable form of the late Mr. Spooner as year after year he addressed an apathetic, scanty and half-amused audience, pottering over his papers by the light of two candles specially placed for his convenience on the table in front of the speaker, and endeavoring in vain to arouse England to serious attention on the subject of the awful fate she was preparing for herself by her toleration of the principles of Rome. The Maynooth grant was abolished indeed not long after Mr. Spooner's death; but the manner of its abolition would have given him less comfort even than its introduction. It was abolished when Mr. Gladstone's government abolished the state church in Ireland. Another of Peel's measures which aroused much clamor on both sides was that for the establishment of what were afterward called the "godless colleges" in Ireland. O'Con- nell has often had the credit of applying this nickname to the new colleges; but it was in fact from the extremest of all no-popery men, Sir Robert Harry Inglis, that the ex- pression came. It was indeed from Sir Robert Inglis' side that the first note sounded of opposition to the scheme, although O'Connell afterward took it vigorously up, and the pope and the Irish bishops condemned the colleges. There was objection within the ministry, as well as with- out, to the Maynooth grant. Mr. Gladstone, who had been doing admirable work, first as vice-president, and afterward as president, of the board of trade, resigned his office be- cause of this proposal. He acted, perhaps, with a too sensitive chivalry. He had written a work, as all the world knows, on the relations of church and state, and he did not think the views expressed in that book left him free to co-operate in the ministerial measure. Some staid politi- cians were shocked, many more smiled, not a few sneered. The public in general applauded the spirit of disinterested- ness which dictated the young statesman's act. Mr. Gladstone, however, supported the Queen's College 198 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. scheme by voice and vote. The proposal of the govern- ment was to establish in Ireland three colleges — one in Cork, the second in Belfast, and the third in Galway — and to affiliate these to a new university to be called the "Queen's University in Ireland." The teaching in these colleges was to be purely secular. Nothing could be more admirable than the intentions of Peel and his colleagues. Nor could it be denied that there might have been good seeming hope for a plan which thus proposed to open a sort of neutral ground in the educational controversy. But from both sides of the house and from the extreme party in each church came an equally fierce denunciation of the proposal to separate secular from religious education. Nor surely could the claim of the Irish Catholics be said even by the warmest advocate of undenominational education to have no reason on its side. The small minority of Pro- testants in Ireland had their college and their university established as a distinctively Protestant institution. Why should not the great majority who were Catholics ask for something of the same kind for themselves? Peel carried his measure; but the controversy has gone on ever since, and we have yet to see whether the scheme is a success or a failure. One small installment of justice to a much injured and long-suffering religious body was accomplished without any trouble by Sir Robert Peel's government. This was the bill for removing the test by which Jews were excluded from certain municipal offices. A Jew might be high sheriff of a county, or sheriff of London; but, with an in- consistency which was as ridiculous as it was narrow- minded, he was prevented from becoming a mayor, an alder- man, or even a member of the common council. The oath which had to be taken included the words "on the true faith of a Christian." Lord Lyndhurst, the lord chan- cellor, introduced a measure to get rid of this absurd anomaly; and the House of Lords, who had firmly rejected similar proposals of relief before, passed it without any difficulty. It was of course passed by the House of Com- mons, which had done. its best to introduce the reform in previous sessions, and without success. The bank charter act, separating the issue from the banking department of the Bank of England, limiting the issue of notes to a fixed amount of securities, and requiring A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. I99 the whole of the further circulation to be on a basis of bul- lion, and prohibiting the formation of any new banks of issue, is a characteristic and an important measure of Peel's government. To Peel, too, we owe the establishment of the income tax on its present basis — a doubtful boon. The copyright question was at least advanced a stage. Kailways were regulated. The railway mania and railway panic also belong to this active period. The country went wild with railway speculation. The South Sea scheme was hardly more of a bubble or hardly burst more suddenly or disas- trously. The vulgar and flashy successes of one or two lucky adventurers turned the heads of the whole commu- nity. For a time it seemed to be a national article of faith that the capacity of the country to absorb new railway schemes and make them profitable was unlimited, and that to make a fortune one had only to take shares in anything. An odd feature of the time was the outbreak of what were called the Rebecca riots in Wales. These riots arose out of the anger and impatience of the people at the great increase of toll-bars and tolls on the public roads. Some one, it was supposed, had hit upon a passage in Genesis which sup- plies a motto for their grievance and their complaint. " And they blessed Rebecca and said unto her. . . let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them." They set about accordingly to possess very effectually the gates of those which hated them. Mobs assembled every night, destroyed turnpikes and dispersed. They met with little molestation in most cases for awhile. The mobs were always led by a man in woman's clothes, supposed to repre- sent the typical Rebecca. As the disturbances went on, it was found that no easier mode of disguise could be got than a woman's clothes, and therefore in many of the riots petti- coats might almost be said to be the uniform of the insur- gent foree. Night after night for months these midnight musteringstook place. Rebecca and her daughters became the terror of many regions. As the work went on it became more serious. Rebecca and her daughters grew bold. There were conflicts with the police and with the soldiers. It is to be feared that men and even women died for Rebecca. At last the government succeeded in putting down the riots, and had the wisdom to appoint a commission to in- quire into the cause of so much disturbance; and the com- mission, as will readily be imagined, found that there were. 200 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. genuine grievances at the bottom of the popular excitement. The farmers and the laborers were poor; the tolls were seriously oppressive. The government dealt lightly with most of the rioters who had been captured, and introduced measures which removed the grievances most seriously com- plained of. Kebecca and her daughters were heard of no more. They had made out their case, and done in their wild mumming way something of a good work. Only a short time before the rioters would have been shot down and the grievances would have been allowed to stand. Rebecca and her short career mark an advancement in the political and social history of England. Sir James Graham, the home secretary, brought himself and the government into some trouble by the manner in which he made use of the power invested in the adminis- tration for the opening of private letters. Mr. Duncombe, the Kadical member for Fihsbury, presented a petition from Joseph Mazzini and others complaining that letters addressed to them had been opened in the post office. Many of Mazzini's friends, and perhaps Mazzini himself, believed that the contents of these letters had been com- municated to the Sardinian and Austrian governments, and that as a result men who were supposed to be impli- cated in projects of insurrection on the continent had actually been arrested and put to death. Sir James Graham did not deny that he had issued a warrant authorizing the opening of some of Mazzini's letters; but he contended that the right to open letters had been specially reserved to the government on its responsibility, that it had always been exercised, but by him with special caution and moderation ; and that it would be impossible for any government abso- lutely to deprive itself of such a right. The public excite- ment was at first very great; but it soon subsided. The reports of parliamentary committees appointed by the two houses showed that all governments had exercised the right, but naturally with decreasing frequency and greater caution of late years; and that there was no chance now of its being seriously abused. No one, not even Thomas Carlyle, who had written to the Times in generous indignation at the opening of Mazzini's letters, went so far as to say that such a right should never be exercised. Carlyle admitted that he would tolerate the practice " when some new gun powder plot may be in the wind, some double-dyed high A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 201 treason or imminent national wreck not avoidable other- wise." In the particular case of Mazzini it seemed an odious trick, and every one was ashamed of it. Such a feeling was the surest guard against abuse for the future, and the matter was allowed to drop. The minister is to be pitied who is compelled even by legitimate necessity to have recourse to such an expedient; he would be despised now by every decent man if he turned to it without such justification. Many years had to pass away before Sir James Graham was free from innuendoes and attacks on the ground that he had tampered with the correspondence of an exile. One remark, on the other hand, it is right to make. An exile is sheltered in a country like England on the assumption that he does not involve her in responsi- bility and danger by using her protection as a shield behind which to contrive plots and organize insurrections against foreign governments. It is certain that Mazzini did make use of the shelter England gave him for such a purpose. It would in the end be to the heavy injury of all fugitives from despotic rule, if to shelter them brought such conse- quences on the countries that offered them a home. The Peel administration was made memorable by many remarkable events at home as well as abroad. It had, as Ave have seen, inherited wars and brought them to a close; it had wars of its own. Scinde was annexed by Lord Ellen- borough in consequence of the disputes which bad arisen between us and the ameers, whom we accused of having broken faith with us. Tbey were said to be in correspond- ence with our enemies, which may possibly have been true, and to have failed to pay up our tribute, which was very likely. Anyhow we found occasion for an attack on Scinde; and the result was the total defeat of the princes and their army, and the annexation of the territory. Sir Charles Napier won a splendid victory — splendid, that is, in a military sense — over an enemy outnumbering him by more than twelve to one at the battle of Meeanee; and Scinde was ours. I 'eel and his colleagues accepted the annexation. None of them liked it; but none saw how it could be undone. There was nothing to be proud of in the matter, except the courage of our soldiers, and the genius of Sir Charles Napier, one of the most brilliant, daring, successful, eccentric, and self -conceited captains who had ever fought in the service of England since the 202 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. days of Peterborough. Later on the Sikhs invaded our territory by crossing the Sutlej in great force. Sir Hugh Gough, afterward Lord Gough, fought several fierce battles with them before he could conquer them ; and even then they were only conquered for the time. We were at one moment apparently on the very verge of what must have proved a far more serious war much nearer home, in consequence of the dispute that arose between this country and France about Tahiti and Queen Pomare. Queen Pomare was sovereign of the island of Tahiti, in the South Pacific, the Otaheite of Captain Cook. She was a pupil of some of our missionaries, and was very friendly to England and its people. She had been induced or compelled to put herself and her dominion under the protection of France; a step which was highly displeasing to her subjects. Some ill-feeling toward the French resi- dents of the island was shown; and the French admiral, who had induced or compelled the queen to put herself under French protection, now suddenly appeared off the coast, and called on her to hoist the French flag above her own. She refused; and he instantly effected a landing on the island, pulled down her flag, raised that of France in its place, and proclaimed that the island was French territory. The French admiral appears to have been a hot-headed, thoughtless sort of man, the Commodore Wilkes of his day. His act was at once disavowed by the- French government, and condemned in strong terms by M. Guizot. But Queen Pomare had appealed to the queen of England for assist- ance. "Do not cast me away, my friend," she said; "I run to you for refuge, to be covered under your great shadow, the same that afforded relief to my fathers by your fathers, who are now dead, and whose kingdoms have descended to us 'the weaker vessels." A large party in France allowed themselves to become inflamed with the idea that British intrigue was at the bottom of the Tahiti peoples' dislike to the protectorate of France, and that England wanted to get Queen Pomare's dominions for her- self. They cried out therefore that to take down the flag of France from its place in Tahiti would be to insult the dignity of the French nation, and to insult it at the instance of England. The cry was echoed in the shrillest tones by a great number of French newspapers. Where the flag of France had once been hoisted, they screamed, it must A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 203 never be taken down ; which is about equivalent to saying that if a man's officious servant carries oft' the property of some one else and gives it to his master, the master's dignity is lowered by his consenting to hand it back to its owner. In the face of this clamor the French government, although they disavowed any share in the filibustering of their admiral, did not show themselves in great haste to undo what he had done. Possibly they found themselves in something of the same difficulty as the English govern- ment in regard to the annexation of Scinde. They could not perhaps with great safety to themselves have ventured to be honest all at once; and in any case they did not want to give up the protectorate of Tahiti. While the more hot- headed on both sides of the English Channel were thus snarling at each other, the difficulty was immensely com- plicated by the seizure of a missionary named Pritchard, who had been our consul in the island up to the deposition of Pomare. A French sentinel had been attacked, or was said to have been attacked, in the night, and in conse- quence the French commandant seized Pritchard in reprisal, declaring him to be "the only mover and instigator of dis- turbances among the natives." Pritchard was flung into •prison, and only released to be expelled from the island. He came home to England with his story; and his arrival was the signal for an outburst of indignation all over the country. Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen alike stig- matized the treatment of Pritchard as a gross and intoler- able outrage; and satisfaction was demanded of the French government. The king and M. Guizot were both willing that full justice should be done, and both anxious to avoid any occasion of ill-feeling with England. The king had lately been receiving with effusive show of affection a visit from our queen in France, and was about to return it. Hut so hot was popular passion on both sides, that it would have needed stronger and juster natures than those of the king and his minister to venture at once on doing the right tiling. It was on the last day of the session of 1844, September 5, that Sir Robert Peel was able to announce that the French government had agreed to compensate Pritchard for his sufferings and losses. Queen Pomare was nominally restored to power, but the French protection proved as stringent as if ii wew a sovereign rule. She might as well have pulled down her flag, for all the sover- 204 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. eign right it secured to her. She died thirty-four years after, and her death recalled to the memory of the English public the long-forgotten fact that she had once so nearly been the cause of a war between England and France. The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Treaty belong alike to the history of Peel's administration. The Ashbur- ton Treaty bears date August 9, 1842, and arranges finally the north-western boundary between the British Provinces of North America and the United States. For many years the want of any clear and settled understanding as to the boundary line between Canada and the state of Maine had been a source of some disturbance, and of much contro- versy. Arbitration between England and the United States had been tried and failed, both parties declining the award. Sir Robert Peel sent out Lord Ashburton, for- merly Mr. Baring, as plenipotentiary, to AVashington, in 1842, and by his intelligent exertions an arrangement was come to which appears to have given mutual satisfaction ever since, despite of the sinister prophesyings of Lord Palmerston at the time. The Oregon question was more complicated, and was the source of a longer controversy. More than once the dispute about the boundary line in the Oregon region had very nearly become an occasion for war between England and the United States. In Canning's time there was a crisis during which, to quote the words of an English statesman, war could have been brought about by the holding up of a finger. The question in dispute was as to the boundary line between English and American territory west of the Rocky Mountains. It had seemed a matter of little importance at one time, Avhen the country west of the Rocky Mountains was regarded by most persons as little better than a desert idle. But when the vast capacities and the splendid future of the Pacific slope began to be recognized, and the importance to us of some station and harbor there came to be more and more evident, the dispute naturally swelled into a question of vital interest to both nations. In 1818 an attempt at arrangement was made, but failed. The two governments then agreed to leave the disputed regions to joint occupation for ten years, after which the subject was to be opened again. When the end of the first term came near, Canning did his best to bring about a settlement, but failed. The dispute involved the ownership of the mouth of the Columbia A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 205 River, and of the noble island which bears the name of Vancouver, off the shore of British Columbia. The joint occupancy was renewed for an indefinite time; but in 184)5, the president of the United States somewhat peremptorily called for a final settlement of the boundary. The question was eagerly taken up by excitable politicians in the Ameri- can House of Representatives. For more than two years the Oregon question became a party cry in America. With a large proportion of the American public, including, of course, nearly all citizens of Irish birth or extraction, any president would have been popular beyond measure who had forced a war on England. Calmer and wiser counsels prevailed, however, on both sides. Lord Aberdeen, our foreign secretary, was especially moderate and conciliatory. He offered a compromise which was at last accepted. On June 15, 1846, the Oregon Treaty settled the question for that time at least; the dividing line was to be "the forty- ninth degree of latitude, from the Rocky Mountains west to the middle of the channel separating Vancouver's Island from the mainland; thence southerly through the middle of the channel and of Fauca's Straits to the Pacific." The channel and straits were to be free, as also the great northern branch of the Columbia River. In other words, Vancouver's Island remained to Great Britain, and the free navigation of the Columbia River was secured. We have said that the question was settled, "for that time;" because an important part of it came up again for settlement many years after. The commissioners appointed to determine that portion of the boundary which was to run southerly through the mid- dle of the channel were unable to come to any agreement on the subject, and the divergence of the claims made on one side and the other constituted a new question, which became a part of the famous Treaty of Washington in is; 1, and was finally settled by the arbitration of the em- peror of Germany. But it is much to the honor of the Peel administration that a dispute which had for years been charged with possibilities of war, and had become a stock subject of political agitation in America, should have been so far settled as to be removed forever after out of the cate- gory of disputes which suggest an appeal to arms. This was one of the last acts of Peel's government, and it was not the least of the great things he had done. We have soon to tell how it came about that it was one of his latest 206 A mSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. triumphs, and how an administration which had come into power with such splendid promise, and had accomplished so much in such various fields of legislation, was brought so suddenly to a fall. The story is one of the most remark- able and important chapters in the history of English politics and parties. During Peel's time we catch a last glimpse of the famous Arctic navigator, Sir John Franklin. He sailed on the expedition which was doomed to be his last, on May 26, 1845, with his two vessels, Erebus and Terror. Not much more is heard of him as among the living. We may say of him as Carlyle says of La Perouse, " The brave navi- gator goes and returns not; the seekers search far seas for him in vain; only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovers long in all heads and hearts." CHAPTER XIV. FREE TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. Few chapters of political history in modern times have given occasion for more controversy than that which con- tains the story of Sir Robert Peel's administration in its dealing with the corn laws. Told in the briefest form, the story is that Peel came into office in 1841 to maintain the corn laws, and that in 1846 he repealed them. The controversy as to the wisdom or unwisdom of repealing the corn laws has long since come to an end. They who were the uncompromising opponents of free trade at that time are proud to call themselves its uncompromising zealots now. Indeed, there is no more chance of a reaction against free trade in England than there is of a reaction against the rule of three. But the controversy still exists, and will probably always be in dispute, as to the conduct of Sir Robert Peel. The Melbourne ministry fell, as we have seen, in conse- quence of a direct vote of want of confidence moved by their leading opponent, and the return of a majority hostile to them at the general election that followed. The vote of want of confidence was leveled against their financial policy, especially against Lord John Russell's proposal to substitute a fixed duty of eight shillings for Peel's sliding A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 207 scale. Sir Robert Peel came into office, and he introduced a reorganized scheme of a sliding scale, reducing the duties and improving the system, but maintaining the principle. Lord John Russell proposed an amendment declaring that the House of Commons, "considering the evils which have been caused by the present corn laws and especially by the fluctuation of the graduated or sliding scale, is not prepared to adopt the measure of her majesty's government, which is founded on the same principles, and is likely to be attended by similar results." The amendment was rejected by a large majority, no less than one hundred and twenty- three. But the question between free trade and protection was even more distinctly raised. Mr. Villiers proposed another amendment declaring for the entire abolition of all duties on grain. Only ninety votes were given for the amendment, while three hundred and ninety-three were recorded against it. Sir Robert Peel's government, there- fore, came into power distinctly pledged to uphold the principle of protection for home grown grain. Four years after this Sir Robert Peel proposed the total abolition of the corn duties. For this he was denounced by some mem- bers of his party in language more fierce and unmeasured than ever since has been applied to any leading statesman. Mr. Gladstone was never assailed by the staunchest sup- porter of the Irish church in words so vituperative as those which rated Sir Robert Peel for his supposed apos- tasy. One eminent person at least made his first fame as a parliamentary orator by his denunciations of the great min- ister whom he had previously eulogized and supported. " The history of agricultural distress," it has been well observed, "is the history of agricultural abundance." This looks at first sight a paradox; but nothing can in reality be more plain and less paradoxical. " Whenever," to fol- low out the passage, " Providence, through the blessing of genial seasons, fills the nation's stores with plenteousness, then and then only has the cry of ruin to the cultivator been proclaimed as the one great evil for legislation to repress." This is indeed the very meaning of the principle of protection. When the commodity which the protected interest has to dispose of is so abundant as to be easily attained by the common body of consumers, then of course the protected interest is injured in its particular way of making money, and expects the state to do something to 208 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. secure it in the principal advantage of its monopoly. The greater quantity of grain a good harvest brings for the benefit of all the people, the less the price the corn-grower can charge for it. His interest as a monopolist is always and inevitably opposed to the interest of the community. But it is easy even now, when we have almost forgotten the days of protection, to see that the corn-grower is not likely either to recognize or to admit this conflict of inter- ests between his protection and the public welfare. Apart from the natural tendency of every man to think that that which does him good must do good to the community, there was undoubtedly something very fascinating in the theory of protection. It had a charming give and take, live and let live, air about it. " You give me a little more than the market price for my corn, and don't you see I shall be able to buy all the more of your cloth, and tea, and sugar or to pay you the higher rent for your land?" Such a compact seems reasonable and tempting. Almost up to our own time the legislation of the country was in the hands of the classes who had more to do with the growing of corn and the ownership of land than with the making of cotton and the working of machinery. The great object of legislation and of social compacts of whatever kind seemed to be to keep the rents of the landowners and prices of the farmers up to a comfortable standard. It is not particularly to the discredit of the landlords and the farmers that tbis was so. We have seen in later times how every class in succession has resisted the movement of the principle of free trade when it came to be applied to its own particular interests. The paper manufacturers liked it as little in 1800 as the landlords and farmers had done fifteen years earlier. When the cup comes to be commended to the lips of each interest in turn, we always find that it is received as a poisoned chalice, and taken with much shuddering and passionate protestation. The particular advantage possessed by vested interests in the corn laws was tbat for a long time the land- lords possessed all the legislative power and all the prestige as well. There was a certain reverence and sanctity about the ownership of land, with its hereditary descent and its patriarchal dignities, which the manufacture of paper could not pretend to claim. If it really were true that the legitimate incomes or the legitimate influence of the landlord class in England went A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 209 down in any way. because of the repeal of the corn laws, it would have to be admitted that the landlords, like the aris- tocrats before the French Revolution, had done something themselves to encourage the growth of new and disturbing ideas. Before the Revolution, free thought and the equality and brotherhood of man were beginning to be pet doctrines among the French nobles and their wives and daughters. It was the whim of the hour to talk Rousseau, and to affect indifference to rank and a general faith in a good time coming of equality and brotherhood. In some- thing of the same fashion the aristocracy of England were for some time before the repeal of the corn laws illustrating a sort of" revival of patriarchal ideas about the duties of property. The influence was stirring everywhere. Oxford was beginning to busy itself in the revival of the olden in- fluence of the church. The Young England party, as they were then called, were ardent to restore the good old days when the noble was the father of the poor and the chief of his neighborhood. All manner of pretty whimsies were caught up by this ruling idea to give them an appearance of earnest purpose. The' young landlord exhibited himself in the attitude of a protector, patron and friend to all his tenants. Doles were formally given at stated hours to all who would come for them to the castle gate. Young noble- men played cricket with the peasants on their estate, and the Saturnian age was believed by a good many persons to be returning for the express benefit of old, or rather of young, England. There was something like a party being formed in parliament for the realization of young England's idyllic purposes. It comprised among its members several more or less gifted youths of rank, who were full of enthu- siasm and poetic aspirations and nonsense; and it had the encouragement and support of one man of genius, who had no natural connection with the English aristocracy, but who was afterward destined to he the successful leader of the conservative and aristocratic party; to be its savior when it was all but down in the dust; to guide it to vic- tory, and make it once more, for the time at least, supreme in the political life of the country. This brilliant cham- pion of conservatism has often spoken of the repeal of the corn Laws as the fall of the landlord class in England. It' the landlords fell, it must be said of them, as has been fairly said of many a dynasty, that they never deserved 210 A HISTOR Y OF OUR WN TIMES. better on the whole than just at the time when the blow struck them down. The famous corn law of 1815 was a copy of the corn law of 1670. The former measure imposed a duty on the im- portation of foreign grain which amounted to prohibition. Wheat might be exported upon the payment of one shill- ing per quarter customs duty; but importation was prac- tically prohibited until the price of wheat had reached eighty shillings a quartei 4 . The corn law of 1815 was hur- ried through parliament, absolutely closing the ports against the importation of foreign grain until the price of our home-grown grain had reached the magic figure of eighty shillings a quarter. It was hurried through, despite the most earnest petitions from the commercial and manufact- uring classes. A great deal of popular disturbance attended the passing of the measure. There were riots in London, and the houses of several of the supporters of the bill were attacked. Incendiary fires blazed in many parts of the country. In the Isle of Ely there were riots which lasted for two days and two nights, and the aid of the military had to be called in to suppress them. Five persons were hanged as the result of these disturbances. One might excuse a demagogue" who compared the event to the sup- pression of some of the food riots in France just before the Revolution, of which we only read that the people — the poor, that is to say — turned out demanding bread, and the ringleaders were immediately hanged, and there was an end of the matter. After the corn law of 1815, thus ominously introduced, there were sliding scale acts, having for their business to establish a varying system of duty, so that, according as the price of home-produced wheat rose to a certain height, the duty on imported vvdieat sank in pro- portion. The principle of all these measures was the same. It was founded on the assumption that the corn grew for the benefit of the grower first of all; and that until he had been secured in a handsome profit the public at large had no right to any reduction in the cost of food. When the harvest was a good one, and the golden grain was plenty, then the soul of the grower was afraid, and he called out to parliament to protect him against the calamity of hav- ing to sell his corn any cheaper than he did in years of famine. He did not see all the time that if the prosperity of the country in general was enhanced, he too must come to benefit by it. I A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 211 Naturally, it was in places like Manchester that the fal- lacy of all this theory was first commonly perceived and ' most warmly resented. The Manchester manufacturers saw that the customers for their goods were to be found in all parts of the world; and they knew that at every turn they were hampered in their dealings with the customers by the system of protective duties. They wanted to sell their goods wherever they could find buyers, and they chafed at any barrier between them and the sale. Manchester, from the time of its first having parliamentary representation — only a few years before the foundation of the anti-corn law league — had always spoken out for free trade. The fas- cinating sophism which had such charms for other commu- ■ nities, that by paying more than was actually necessary for everything all round, Dick enriched Tom, while Tom was at the same time enriching Dick had no charms for the intelligence and the practical experience of Manchester. The close of the year 1836 was a period of stagnant trade and general depression, arising, in some parts of the conn- * try, to actual and severe suffering. Some members of par- liament and other influential men were stricken with the idea, which it does not seem to have required much strength of observation to foster, that it could not be for the advan- tage of the country in general to have the price of bread very high at a time when wages were very low and work was scarce. A movement against the corn laws began in London. An anti-corn law association on a small scale was formed. Its list of members bore the names of more than twenty members of parliament, and for a time the society had a look of vigor about it. It came to nothing, however. London has never been found an effective nur- sery of agitation. It is too large to have any central inter- est or source of action. It is too dependent socially and economically on the patronage of the higher and wealthier classes. London has never been to England what Paris has been to France. It has hardly ever made or repre- sented thoroughly the public opinion of England during any great crisis. A new center of operations soon had to be sought, and various causes combined to make Lan- cashire the proper place. In the year 1838 the town of Bolton-le-Moors, in Lancashire, was the victim of a terrible commercial crisis. Thirty out of the fifty manufacturing establishments which the town contained were closed; 212 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. nearly a fourth of all the houses of business were closed and actually deserted; and more than five thousand workmen were without homes or means of subsistence. All the in- telligence and energy of Lancashire was roused. One ob- vious guarantee against starvation was cheap bread, and cheap bread meant of course the abolition of the corn laws, for these laws were constructed on the principle that it was necessary to keep bread dear. A meeting was held in Manchester to consider measures necessary to be adopted for bringing about the complete repeal of these laws. The Manchester Chamber of Commerce adopted a petition to parliament against the corn laws. The anti-corn law agi- tation had been fairly launched. From that time it grew and grew in importance and strength. Meetings were held in various towns of England and Scotland. Associations were formed every wfi ere to co-operate with the movement which had its headquarters in Manchester. In Newall's Buildings, Market street, Manchester, the work of the league was really done for years. The leaders of the movement gave up their time day by day to its service. The league had to encounter a great deal of rather fierce opposition from the Chartists, who loudly proclaimed that the whole movement was only meant to entrap them once more into an alliance with the middle classes and the employers, as in the case of the re- form bill, in order that when they had been made the cat's- paw again they might again be thrown contemptuously aside. On the other hand, the league had from the first the cordial co-operation of Daniel O'Connell, who became one of their principal orators when they held meetings in the metropolis. They issued pamphlets by hundreds of thousands, and sent lecturers all over the country explain- ing the principles of free trade. A gigantic propaganda of free trade opinions was called into existence. Money was raised by the holding of bazaars in Manchester and in Lon- don, and by calling for subscriptions. A bazaar in Man- chester brought in ten thousand pounds; one in London raised rather more than double that sum, not including the subscriptions that were contributed. A free trade hall was built in Manchester. This building had an interesting his- tory full of good omen for the cause. The ground on which the hall was erected was the property of Mr. Cobden, and was placed by him at the disposal of the league. That A HISTOR Y OF OUR WN TIMES. 2 1 3 ground was the scene of what was known in Manchester as the Massacre of Peterloo. On August 16, 1819, a meeting of Manchester reformers was held on that spot, which was dispersed by an attack of soldiers and militia, with the loss of many lives. The memory of that clay rankled in the hearts of the Manchester Liberals for long after, and per- haps no better means could be found for purifying the ground from the stain and the shame of such bloodshed than its dedication by the modern apostle of peace and free trade as a site whereon to build a hall sacred to the pro- mulgation of his favorite doctrines. The times were peculiarly favorable to the new sort of propaganda which came into being with the anti-corn-law league. A few years before such an agitation would hardly have found the means of making its influence felt all over the country. The very reduction of the cost of postage alone must have facilitated its labors to an extent beyond calculation. The inundation of the country with pamphlets, tracts, and reports of speeches would have been scarcely pos- sible under the old system, and would in any case have swal- lowed up a far larger amount of money than even the league with its ample resources would have been able to supply. In all parts of the country railways were being opened, and these enabled the lecturers of the league to hasten from town to town and to keep the cause always alive in the popular mind. All these advantages and many others might, how- ever, have proved of little avail if the league had not from the first been in the hands of men who seemed as if they came by special appointment to do its work. Great as the work was which the league did, it will be remembered in England almost as much because of the men who won the success as on account of the success itself. The nominal leader of the free trade party in parliament was for many years Mr. Charles Villiers, a man of aristo- cratic family and surroundings, of remarkable ability, and of the steadiest fidelity to the cause he had undertaken. Nothing is a more familiar phenomenon in the history of English political agitation than the aristocrat who assumes the popular cause and cries out for the "rights" of the " unenfranchised millions." But it was something new to find a man of Mr. Vlllier's class devoting himself to a cause so entirely practical and business-like as that of the repeal of the corn laws. Mr. Yilli"rs brought forward for 214 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. several successive sessions in the House of Commons a mo- tion in favor of the total repeal of the corn laws. His elo- quence and his argumentative power served the great pur- pose of drawing the attention of the country to the whole question, and making converts to the principle he advo- cated. The House of Commons has always of late years been the best platform from which to address the country. In political agitation it has been made to prepare the way for the schemes of legislation which it has itself always begun by reprobating. But Mr. Villiers might have gone on for all his life dividing the House of Commons on the question of free trade, without getting much nearer to his object, if it were not for the manner in which the cause was taken up by the country, and more particularly by the great manufacturing towns of the north. Until the passing of Lord Grey's reform bill these towns had no representa- tion in parliament. They seemed destined after that event to make up for their long exclusion from representative influence by taking the government of the country into their own hands. Of late years they have lost some of their relative influence. They have not now all the power that for no inconsiderable time they undoubtedly possessed. The reforms they chiefly aimed at have been carried, and the spirit which in times of stress and struggle kept their populations almost of one mind has less necessity of exist- ence now. Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds are no whit less important to the life of the nation now than they were before free trade. But their supremacy does not exist now as it did then. At that time it was town against coun- try; Manchester representing the town, and the whole conservative (at one period almost the whole landowning) body representing the country. The Manchester school, as it was called, then and for long after had some teachers and leaders who were of themselves capable of making any school powerful and respected. With the Manchester school began a new kind of popular agitation. Up to that time agitation meant appeal to passion, and lived by provoking passion. Its cause might be good or bad, but the way of promoting it was the same. The Manchester school intro- duced the agitation which appealed to reason and argument only; which stirred men's hearts with figures of arithmetic rather than figures of speech, and which converted mob meetings to political economy. A HISTOR Y OF OUR WN TIMES. 2 1 5 The real leader of the movement was Mr. Richard Cob- den. Mr. Cobden was a man belonging to the yeoman class. He had received but a moderate education. His father dying while the great free trader was still young, Richard Cobden was taken in charge by an uncle, who had a wholesale warehouse in the city of London, and who gave him employment there. Cobden afterward became a partner in a Manchester printed cotton factory; and he traveled occasionally on the commercial business of this establishment. He had a great liking for travel ; but not by any means as the ordinary tourist travels; the interest of Cobden was not in scenery, or in art, or in ruins, but in men. He studied the condition of countries with a view to the manner in which it affected the men and women of the present, and through them was likely to affect the fu- ture. On everything that he saw he turned a quick and intelligent eye; and he saw for himself and thought for himself. Wherever he went he wanted to learn something. He had in abundance that peculiar faculty which some great men of widely different stamp to him and from each other have possessed; of which Goethe frankly boasted, and which Mirabeau had more largely than he was always willing to acknowledge; the faculty which exacts from every one with whom its owner comes into contact some contribution to his stock of information and to his advan- tage. Cobden could learn something from everybody. It is doubtful whether he ever came even into momentary acquaintance with anyone whom he did not compel to yield him something in the way of information. He traveled very widely for a time when traveling was more difficult work than it is at present. He made himself familiar with most of the countries of Europe, with many parts of the east, and, what was then a rarer accomplishment, with the United States and Canada. He did not make the familiar grand tour and then dismiss the places he had seen from his active memory. Pie studied them and visited many of them again to compare early with later impressions. This was in itself an education of the highest value for the career he proposed to pursue. When he was about thirty years of age he began to acquire a certain reputation as the author of pamphlets directed against some of the pel doc- trines of old-fashioned statesmanship; the balance of power in Europe; the necessity of maintaining a state church in 216 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Ireland ; the importance of allowing no European qnarrel to go on without England's intervention; and similar dogmas. Mr. Cobden's opinions then were very much as they continued to the day of his death. He seemed to have come to the maturity of his convictions all at once, and to have passed through no further change either of growth or of decay. But whatever might be said then or now of the doctrines he maintained, there could be only one opinion as to the skill and force which upheld them with pen as well as tongue. The tongue, however, was his best weapon. If oratory were a business and not an art — that is, if its test were its success rather than its form — then it might be contended reasonably enough that Mr. Cobden was one of the greatest orators England has ever known. Nothing could exceed the persuasiveness of his style. His manner was simple, sweet and earnest. It was persuasive, but it had not the sort of persuasiveness which is merely a better kind of plausibility. It persuaded by convincing. It was transparently sincere. The light of its conviction shone all through it. It aimed at the reason and the judgment of the listener, and seemed to be convincing him to his own interest against his prejudices. Cobden's style was almost exclusively conversational, but he had a clear, well-toned voice, with a quiet, unassuming power in it which enabled him to make his words heard distinctly and without effort all through the great meetings he had often to address. His speeches were full of variety. He illustrated every argument by something drawn from his personal observa- tion or from reading, and his illustrations were always striking, appropriate, and interesting. He had a large amount of bright and winning humor, and he spoke the simplest and purest English. He never used an unneces- sary sentence or failed for a single moment in making his meaning clear. Many strong opponents of Mr. Cobden's opinions confessed even during his lifetime that they some- times found with dismay their most cherished convictions crumbling away beneath his flow of easy argument. In the stormy times of national passion Mr. Cobden was less powerful. When the question was one to be settled by the rules that govern man's substantial interests, or even by the standing rules, if such an expression may be allowed, of morality, then Cobden was unequaled. So long as the controversy could be settled after this fashion — "I will A UISTOR 7 OF OUR WN TIMES. 217 show you that in such a coarse you are acting injuriously to your own interests;" or "You are doing what a fair and just man ought not to do" — so long as argument of that kind could sway the conduct of men, then there was no one who could convince as Cobden could. But when the hour and mood of passion came, and a man or a nation said, "I do not care any longer whether this is for my interest or not — I don't care whether you call it right or wrong, this way my instincts drive me, and this way I am going" — then Mr. Cobden's teaching, the very perfection as it was of common sense and fair play, was out of season. It could not answer feeling with feeling. It was not able to " overcrow," in the word of Shakespeare and Spenser, one emotion by another. The defect of Mr. Cobden's style of mind and temper is fitly illustrated in the deficiency of his method of argument. His sort of education, his modes of observation, his way of turning travel to account, all went together to make him the man he was. The apostle of common sense and fair dealing, he had no sympathy with the passions of men; he did not understand them; they passed for nothing in his calculations. His judgment of men and of nations was based far too much on his knowl- edge of his own motives and character. He knew that in any given case he could always trust himself to act the part of a just and prudent man; and he assumed that all the world could be governed by the rules of prudence and of equity. History had little interest for him, except as it testified to man's advancement and steady progress, and furnished arguments to show that men prospered by liberty, peace and just dealings with their neighbors. He cared little or nothing for mere sentiments. Even where these had their root in some human tendency that was noble in itself, he did not reverence them if they seemed to stand in the way of men's acting peacefully and prudently. He (lir at least the sons of wealthy parents. Not, many of t he dangerous revolution- ary elements were to he found among these clever, respect- able, and precocious youths. The young Ireland move- 292 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ment was as absolutely unlike the Chartist movement in England as any political agitation could be unlike another. Unreal and unlucky as the Chartist movement proved to be, its ranks were recruited by genuine passion and gen- uine misery. Before the death of O'Connell the formal secession of the Young Ireland party from the regular repealers had taken place. It arose out of an attempt of O'Connell to force upon the whole body a declaration condemning the use of physical force — of the sword, as it was grandiosely called — in any patriotic movement whatever. It was in itself a sign of O'Connell's failing powers and judgment that he expected to get a body of men about the age of Meagher to make a formal declaration against the weapon of Leonidas and Miltiades and all the other heroes dear to classically-instructed youth. Meagher declaimed against the idea in a burst of poetic rhetoric which made his followers believe that a new Grattan of bolder style was coming up to recall the manhood of Ireland that had been banished by the agitation of O'Connell and the priests. "I am not one of those tame moralists," the young orator exclaimed, " who say that liberty is not worth one drop of blood. . . . Against this miserable maxim the noblest virtue that has saved and sanctified humanity appears in judgment. From the blue waters of the Bay of Salamis; from the valley over which the sun stood still and lit the Israelite to victory; from the cathedral in which the sword of Poland has been sheathed in the shroud of Kosciusko; from the convent of St. Isidore where the fiery hand that rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of Ulster has molded into dust; from the sands of the desert where the wild genius of the Algerine so long has scared the eagle of the Pyrenees; from the ducal palace in this kingdom where the memory of the gallant and seditious Geraldine enhances more than royal favor the splendor of his race; from the solitary grave within this mute city which a dying bequest has left without an epitaph — oh! from every spot where heroism has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a voice breaks in upon the cringing crowd that cherishes this maxim, crying, 'Away with it — away with it!'" The reader will probably think that a generation of young men might have enjoyed as much as they could get A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 293 of this sparkling declamation without much harm being done thereby to the cause of order. Only a crowd of well- educated young Irishmen fresh from college, and with the teaching of their country's history which the Nation was pouring out weekly in prose and poetry, could possibly have understood all its historical allusions. No harm, indeed, would have come of this graceful and poetic move- ment were it not for events which the Young Ireland party had no share in bringing about. The continental revolutions of the year 1848 suddenly converted the movement from a literary and poetical organization into a rebellious conspiracy. The fever of that wild epoch spread itself at once over Ireland. When crowns were going down everywhere, what wonder if Hellenic Young Irelandism believed that the moment had come when the crown of the Saxon invader too was destined to fall? The French Revolution and the flight of Louis Philippe set Ireland in a rapture of hope and rebellious joy. Lamartine became the hero of the hour. A copy of his showy, superficial " Girondists" was in the hand of every true Young Irelander. Meagher was at once declared to be the Vergniaud of the Irish revolution. Smith O'Brien was called upon to become its Lafayette. A deputation" of Young Irelanders, with O'Brien and Meagher at their head, waited upon Lamartine, and were received by him with a cool good sense which made Englishmen greatly respect his judgment and prudence, but which much disconcerted the hopes of the Young Ire- landers. Many of these latter appear to have taken in their most literal sense some words of Lamartine's about the sympathy of the new French Republic with the struggles of oppressed nationalities, and to have fancied that the republic would seriously consider the propriety of going to war with England at the request of a few young men from Ireland, headed by a country gentleman and member of parliament. In the meantime a fresher and a stronger influence than that of O'Brien or Meagher bad arisen in Young Irelandism. Young Ireland itself now split into two sections: one for immediate action, the other for caution and delay. The party of action acknowledged the leadership of John Mitchel. The organ of this section was the newspaper started by Mitchel in opposition to the Nation^ which had grown too slow for him. The new 294 A HISTORY OV OUR OWN TIMES. journal was called the United Irishman, and in a short time it had completely distanced the Nation in popularity and in circulation. The deliberate policy of the United Irishman was to force the hand first of the government and then of the Irish people. Mitchel had made up his mind so to rouse the passion of the people as to compel the government to take steps for the prevention of rebellion by the arrest of some of the leaders. Then Mitchel calcu- lated upon the populace rising to defend or rescue their heroes — and then the game would be afoot; Ireland would be entered in rebellion; and the rest would be for fate to decide. This looks now a very wild and hopeless scheme. So of course it proved itself to be. But it did not appear so hopeless at the time, even to cool heads. At least it may be called the only scheme which had the slightest chance of success; we do not say of success in establishing the independence of Ireland, which Mitchel sought for, but in setting a genuine rebellion afoot. Mitchel was the one formidable man among the rebels of '48. He was the one man who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was pre- pared to run any risk to get it. He was cast in the very mold of the genuine revolutionist, and under different circumstances might have played a formidable part. He came from the northern part of the island, and was a Protestant dissenter. It is a fact worthy of note that all the really formidable rebels Ireland has produced in modern times, from Wolfe Tone to Mitchel, have been Protestants. Mitchel was a man of great literary talent ; indeed a man of something like genius. He wrote a clear, bold, incisive prose, keen in its scorn and satire, going directly to the heart of its purpose. As mere prose some of it is worth reading even to-day for its cutting force and jjitiless irony. Mitchel issued in his paper week after week a challenge to the government to prosecute him. He poured out the most fiery sedition, and used every incen- tive that words could supply to rouse a hot-headed people to arms or an impatient government to some act of severe repression. Mitchel was quite ready to make a sacrifice of himself if it were necessary. It is possible enough that he had persuaded himself into the belief that a rising in Ireland against the government might be successful. But there is good reason to think that he would have been quite A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 295 satisfied if he could have stirred up by any process a genuine and sanguinary insurrection, which would have read well in the papers and redeemed the Irish Nationalists from what he considered the disgrace of never having shown that they knew how to die for their cause. He kept on urging the people to prepare for warlike effort, and every week's United Irishman contained long descriptions 4 of how to make pikes and how to use them; how to cast * bullets, how to make the streets as dangerous for the hoofs of cavalry horses as Bruce made the field of Bannockburn. Some of the recipes, if we may call them so, were of a peculiarly ferocious kind. The use of vitriol was recom- mended among other destructive agencies. A feeling of detestation was not unnaturally aroused against Mitchel, even in the minds of many who sympathized with his gen- eral opinions; and those whom we may call the Girondists of the party somewhat shrank from him and would gladly have been rid of him. It is true that the most ferocious of these vitriolic articles were not written by him; nor did he know of the famous recommendation about the throw- ing of vitriol until it appeared in print. He was, however, justly and properly as well as technically responsible for all that appeared in a paper started with such a purpose as that of the United Irishman, and it is not even certain that he would have disapproved of the vitriol-throwing recommendation if he had known of it in time. He never disavowed it nor took any pains to show that it was not his own. The fact that he was not its author is therefore onlv mentioned here as a matter more or less interesting, and not at all as any excuse for Mitchel's general style of newspaper war-making. He was a fanatic, clever and fear- less; he would neither have asked quarter nor given it; and undoubtedly if Ireland had had many men of his ■desperate resolve she would have been plunged into a bloody, an obstinate, and a disastrous contest against the strength of the British government. In the meantime that government had to do something. The lord lieutenant could not go on forever allowing a newspaper to scream out appeals to rebellion, and to pub- lish every week minute descriptions of the easiest and quickest way of killing off English soldiers. The existing laws were not strong enough to deal with Mitchel and to suppress his paper. It would have been of little account 206 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to proceed against him under the ordinary laws which con- demned seditious speaking or writing. Prosecutions were in fact set on foot against O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel himself for ordinary offenses of that kind; but the accused men got bail and went on meantime speaking and writing as before, and when the cases came to be tried by a jury the government failed to obtain a conviction. The gov- ernment therefore brought in a bill for the better security of the crown and government, making all written incite- ment to insurrection or resistance to the law felony pun- ishable with transportation. This measure was passed rapidly through all its stages. It enabled the government to suppress newspapers like the United Irishman, and to keep in prison without bail, while awaiting trial, anyone charged with an offense under the new act. Mitchel soon gave the authorities an opportunity of testing the efficacy of the act in his person. He repeated his incitements to insurrection, was arrested and thrown into prison. The climax of the excitement in Ireland was reached when Mitchel's trial came on. There can be little doubt that he was filled with a strong hope that his followers would attempt to rescue him. He wrote from his cell that he could hear around the walls of his prison every night the tramp of hundreds of sympathizers, "felons in heart and soul." The government for their part were in full expec- tation that some sort of rising would take place. For the time, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and all the other Young Irelanders were thrown into the shade, and the eyes of the whole country were turned upon Mitchel's cell. Had there been another Mitchel out of doors, as fearless and reckless as the Mitchel in the prison, a sanguinary out- break would probably have taken place. But the leaders of the movement outside were by no means clear in their own minds as to the course they ought to pursue. Many, of them were well satisfied of the hoplessness and folly of any rebellious movement, and nearly all were quite aware that in any case the country just then was wholly unpre- pared for anything of the kind. Not a few had a shrewd suspicion that the movement never had taken any real hold on the heart of the country. Some were jealous of Mitchel's sudden popularity, and in their secret hearts were disposed to curse him for the trouble he had brought on them. But they could not attempt to give open utterance A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 297 to such a sentiment. Mitchel's boldness and resolve had placed them at a sad disadvantage. He had that superior- ity of influence over them that downright determination always gives a man over colleagues who do not quite know what they would have. One thing however they could do; and that they did. They discouraged any idea of an attempt to rescue Mitchel. His trial came on. He was found guilty. He made a short but powerful and impas- sioned speech from the dock; he was sentenced to fourteen year's transportation; he was hurried under an escort of cavalry through the streets of Dublin, put on board a ship of war, and in a few hours was on his way to Bermuda. Dublin remained perfectly quiet; the country outside hardly knew what was happening until Mitchel was well on his way, and far-seeing persons smiled to them- selves and said the danger was all over. So indeed it proved to be. The remainder of the pro- ceedings partook rather of the nature of burlesque. The Young Ireland leaders became more demonstrative than ever. The Nation newspaper now went in openly for rebellion, but rebellion at some unnamed time, and when Ireland should be ready to meet the Saxon. It seemed to lie assumed that the Saxon, with a characteristic love of fair play, would let his foes make all the preparations they pleased without any interference, and that when they announced themselves ready, then, but not until then, would he come forth to fight with them. Smith O'Brien went about the country holding reviews of the "Confeder- ates," as the Young Irelanders called themselves. The gov- ernment, however, showed a contempt for the rules of fair play, suspended the habeas corpus act in Ireland, and issued warrants for the arrest of Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and other confederate leaders. The Young Irelanders received the news of this unchivalric proceeding with an outburst of anger and surprise which was evidently gen- uine. They had clearly made up their minds that they were to go on playing at preparation for rebellion as long as they liked to keep up the game. They were completely puzzled by the new eondition of things. It was no1 very clear what Leouidas or Yerigniaud would have done under such circumstances; it was certain that if they were all arrested the country would not stir hand or foot in their behalf. Some of the principle lenders, therefore — Smith 298 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others — left Dublin and went down into the country. It is not certain even yet whether they had any clear purpose of rebellion at first. It seems probable that they thought of evading arrest for awhile, and trying meantime if the country was ready to follow them into an armed movement. They held a series of gatherings, which might be described as meetings of agitators or marshalings of rebels, according as one was pleased to interpret their purpose. But this sort of thing very soon drifted into rebellion. The principal body of the followers of Smith O'Brien came into collision with the police, at a place called Ballingarry in Tipperary. They attacked a small force of police, who took refuge in the cottage of a poor widow named Gormack. The police held the house as a besieged fort, and the rebels attacked them from the famous cabbage-garden outside. The police fired a few volleys. The rebels fired, with what wretched muskets and rifles they possessed, but without harming a single policeman. After a few of them had been killed or wounded — it never was perfectly certain that any were actually killed — the rebel army dispersed, and the rebellion Avas all over. In a few days after poor Smith O'Brien was taken cpiietly at the railway station in Thurles, Tip- perary. He was calmly buying a ticket for Limerick when he was recognized. He made no resistance whatever, and seemed to regard the whole mummery as at an end. He accepted his fate with the composure of a gentleman, and indeed in all the part which was left for him to play he bore himself with dignity. It is but justice to an unfor- tunate gentleman to say that some reports which were rather ignobly set abroad about his having showed a lack of personal courage in the Ballingarry affray were, as all will readily believe, cpiite untrue. Some of the police deposed that during the fight, if fight it could be called, poor O'Brien exposed his life with entire recklessness. One policeman said he could have shot him easily at several periods of the little drama, but he felt reluctant to be the slayer of the misguided descendant of the Irish kings. It afterward appeared also that any little chance of carrying on any manner of rebellion was put a stop to by Smith O'Brien's own resolution that his rebels must not seize the private property of anyone. He insisted that his rebellion must pay its way, and the funds were soon out. The con- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 299 federate leader awoke from a dream when he saw his fol- lowers dispersing after the first volley or two from the police. From that moment he behaved like a dignified gen- tleman, equal to the fate he had brought upon him. Meagher and two of his companions were arrested a few days after as they were wandering hopelessly and aimlessly through the mountains of Tipperary. The prisoners were brought for trial before a special commission held at Clonmel in Tipperary, in the following September. Smith O'Brien was the first put on trial, and he was found guilty. He said a few words with grave and dignified composure, simply declaring that he had endeavored to do his duty to his native country and that he was prepared to abide the consequences. He was sentenced to death after the old form in cases of high treason — to be hanged, beheaded, and quartered. Meagher was afterward found guilty. Great commiseration was felt for him. His youth and his elo- quence made all men and women pity him. His father was a wealthy man who had had a respected career in parliament; and there, had seemed at one time to be a bright and happy life before young Meagher. The short address in which Meagher vindicated his actions when called upon to show cause why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, was full of manly and pathetic eloquence. He had nothing, he said, to retract or to ask pardon for. " I am not here to crave with faltering lip the life 1 have consecrated to the independence of my country. ... I offer to my country as some proof of the sincerity with which I have thought and spoken and struggled for her, the life of a, young heart. . . . The history of Ireland explains my crime and justifies it. . . . Even here where the shadows of death surround me, and from which I see my early grave opening for me in no con- secrated soil, the hope which beckoned me forth on that perilous sea whereon I have been wrecked animates, con- soles, enraptures me. No; I do not despair of my poor old country, her peace, her liberty, her glory." Meagher was sentenced to death with the same hideous formalities as those which had been observed in the case of Smith O'Brien. No one, however, really believed for a moment that such a sentence was likely to be carried out in the reign of Queen Victoria. The sentence of death was changed into' one of transportation for life. Nor was 300 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. even this carried out. The convicts were all sent to Australia, and a few years after Meagher contrived to make his escape. He was soon followed by Mitchel. The man- ner of escape was at least of doubtful credit to the prisoners, for they were placed under parole, and a very nice question was raised as to whether they had not broken their parole by the attempt to escape. It was a nice question, which in the case of men of a delicate sense of honor ought, one Avould think, hardly to have arisen at all. The point in Mitchel's case was, that he actually went to the police court within whose jurisdiction he was, formally and pub- licly announced to the magistrate that he withdrew his parole, and invited the magistrate to arrest him then and there. But the magistrate was unprepared for his coming and was quite thrown off his guard. Mitchel was armed, and so was a friend who accompanied him, and who had planned and carried out the escape. They had horses wait- ing at the door, and when they saw that the magistrate did not know what to do, they left the court, mounted the horses, and rode away. It was contended by Mitchel and by his companion Mr. P. J. Smyth (afterward a distin- guished member of parliament), that they had fulfilled all the conditions required by the parole and had formally and honorably withdrawn it. One is only surprised how men of honor could thus puzzle and deceive themselves. The understood condition of a parole is that a man who intends to withdraw it shall place himself before his captors in ex- actly the same condition as he was when on his pledged word of honor they allowed him a comparative liberty. It is evident that a prisoner would never be allowed to go at large on parole if he were to make use of his liberty to arrange all the conditions of an escape, and when every- thing was ready, take his captors by surprise, tell them he was no longer bound by the conditions of the pledge, and that they might keep him if they could. It was long be- lieved in England that Smith O'Brien had declined to have anything to do with Mitchel's escape. But it is only just to Mitchel and his advisers to say that the wdiole plan was submitted to O'Brien, and that it had his entire approval, and it is clear that O'Brien too could not have thought there was anything dishonorable in it. Smith O'Brien himself afterward received a pardon on condition of his not returning to these islands; but this condition A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 301 was withdrawn after a time, and he came back to Ireland. He died quietly in Wales in 1864. Mitchel settled for a while in Richmond, Virginia, and became an ardent advo- cate of slavery and an impassioned champion of the Southern Rebellion. ' He returned to the North after the rebellion, and more lately came to Ireland, where, owing to some defect in the criminal law, he could not be arrested, his time of penal servitude having expired although he had not served it. He was s^ill a hero with a certain class of the people; he was put up as a candidate for an Irish county, and elected. He was not allowed to enter the House of Commons, however; the election was declared void, and a new writ was issued. He was elected again, and some turmoil was expected, when suddenly Mitchel, who had long been in sinking health, was withdrawn from the con- troversy by death. He should have died before. The later years of his life were only an anti-climax. His atti- tude in the dock in 1848 had something of dignity and heroism in it, and even the staunchest enemies of his cause admired him. He had undoubtedly great literary ability, and if he had never reappeared in politics the world would have thought that a really brilliant light had been prema- turely extinguished. Meagher served in the army of ,the Federal States when the war broke out, and showed much of the soldier's spirit and capacity. His end was prema- ture and inglorious. He fell from the deck of a steamer one night; it was dark and there was a strong current running; help came too late. A false step, a dark night, and the muddy waters of the Missouri closed the career that had opened with so much promise of brightness. Many of the conspicuous Young Irelanders rose to some distinction. Charles Gavan Duffy, the editor of the Aafioii, who was twice put on his trial after the failure of the insurrection, but whom the jury would not on either occasion convict, became a member of the House of Com- mons, and afterward emigrated to the colony of Victoria. He rose to be prime minister there, and received knight- hood from the crown and a pension from the colonial par- liament. Thomas Darev M/Gee, another prominent rebel, went to the United States, and thence to Canada, where he rose to be a minister of the crown. He was one of the most loyal supporters of the British connect ion. His untimely death by the hand of an assassin was lamented 302 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. in England as well as in the colony he had served so well. Some of the Young Irelanders remained in the United States and won repute; others returned to England, and of these not a few entered the House of Commons and were respected there, the follies of their youth quite forgotten by their colleagues, even if not disowned by themselves. A remarkable illustration of the spirit of fairness that gen- erally pervades the House of Commons is found in the fact that everyone there respected Jojin Martin, who to the day of his death avowed himself, in parliament and out of it, a consistent and unrepentant opponent of British rule in Ire- land. He was respected because of the purity of his char- acter and the transparent sincerity of his purpose. Martin had been devoted to Mitchel in his lifetime, and he died a few days after Mitchel's death. The Young Ireland movement came and vanished like a shadow. It never had any reality or substance in it. It was a literary and poetic inspiration altogether. It never took the slightest hold of the peasantry. It hardly touched any men of mature years. It was a rather pretty playing at rebellion. It was an imitation of the French Revolution as the Girondists imitated the patriots of Greece and Home. But it might, perhaps, have had a chance of doing memor- able mischief if the policy of the one only man in the business who really was in earnest and was reckless had been car- ried out. It is another illustration of the fact which O'Connell's movement had exemplified before, that in Irish politics a climax cannot be repeated or recalled. There is something fitful in all Irish agitation. The na- tional emotion can be wrought up to a certain temperature; and if at that boiling point nothing is done, the heat sud- denly goes out, and no blowing of Cyclopean bellows can rekindle it. The repeal agitation was brought up to this point when the meeting at Clontarf was convened; the dispersal of the meeting was the end of the whole agita- tion. With the Young Ireland movement the trial of Mitchel formed the climax. After that a wise legislator would have known that there was nothing more to fear. Petion, the revolutionary mayor of Paris, knew that when it rained bis partisans could do nothing. There were in 1848 observant Irishmen who knew that after the Mitchel climax had been reached the crowd would disperse, not to be collected again for that time. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN 1IMES. 303 These two agitations, the Chartist and the young Ireland, constituted what may be called our tribute to the power of the insurrectionary spirit that was abroad over Europe in 1848. In almost every other European state revolution raised its head fiercely, and fought out its claims in the very capital, under the eyes of bewildered royalty. The whole of Italy from the Alps to the Straits of Messina, and from Venice to Genoa, was thrown into convulsion; "Our Italy" once again "shone o'er with civil swords." There was insurrection in Berlin and in Vienna. The emperor had to fly from the latter city as the people fled from Rome. In Paris there came a Red Republican rising against a Republic that strove not to be red, and the rising was crushed by Cavaignac with a terrible strenuousness that made some of the streets of Paris liter- ally to run with blood. It was a grim foreshadowing of the Commune of 1871. Another remarkable foreshadow- ing of what was to come was seen' in the fact that the Prince Louis Napoleon, long an exile from France, had been allowed to return to it, and at the close of the year, in the passion for law and order at any price born of the Red Republican excesses, had been elected president of the French Republic. Hungary was in arms; Spain was in convulsion; even Switzerland was not safe. Our contribu- tion to this general commotion was to be found in the demonstration on Kennington Common and the abortive attempt at a rising near Ballingarry. There coul'd not possibly be a truer tribute to the solid strength of our sys- tem. Not for one moment was the political constitution of England seriously endangered. Not for one hour did the safety of our great communities require a eall upon the soldiers instead of upon the police. Not one charge of cavalry was needed to put down the fiercest outburst of the rebellions spirit in England, Not one single execu- tion took place. The meaning of this is clear. It is not that there were no grievances in our system calling for redress. It is not that the existing institutions did not hear heavily down on many classes. It is not that our political or social system was so conspicuously better than that of some European countries which were torn and plowed up by revolution. To imagine that we owed our freedom from revolution to our freedom from serious griev- ance would be to misread altogether the lessons offered to 304 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. our statesmen by that eventful year. We have done the work of whole generations of .reformers in the interval between this time and that. We have made peaceful reforms, political, industrial, legal, since then which, if not to be had otherwise, would have justified any appeal to revolution. There, however, we touch upon the lesson of the time. Our political and constitutional system ren- dered an appeal to force unnecessary and superfluous. No call to arms was needed to bring about any reform that the common judgment of the country might demand. Other peoples flew to arms because they were driven by despair; because there was no way in their political constitution for the influence of public opinion to make itself justly felt; because those who were in power held it by the force of bayonets and not of public agreement. The results of the year were on the whole unfavorable to popular liberty. The results of the year that followed were decidedly reac- tionary. The time had not come in 1848 or 1849 for Liberal principles to assert themselves. Their "great deed," to quote some of the words of our English poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "was too great." We in this country were saved alike from the revolution and the reaction by the universal recognition of the fact among all who gave themselves time to think, that public opinion, being the ultimate ruling power, was the only authority to which appeal was needed, and that in the end justice would be done. All but the very wildest spirits could afford to wait; and no revolutionary movement is really dangerous which is only the work of the wildest spirits. CHAPTER XIX. DON" PACIFICO. The name of Don Pacifico was as familiar to the world some quarter of a century ago as that of M. Jecker was about the time of the French invasion of Mexico. Don Pacifico became famous for a season as the man whose quarrel had nearly brought on a European war, caused a temporary disturbance of good relations between England and France, split up political parties in England in a man- ner hardly ever known before, and established the renutar A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 305 tion of Lord Palmerston as one of the greatest parliamen- tary debaters of his time. Among the memorable speeches delivered in the English House of Commons that of Lord Palmerston on the Don Pacifico debate must always take a place. It was not because the subject of the debate was a great one, or because there were any grand principles in- volved. Tbe question originally in dispute was unutter- ably trivial and paltry; there was no particular principle involved; it was altogether what is jcalled in commercial litigation a question of account; a controversy about the amount and time of payment of a doubtful claim. Nor was the speech delivered by Lord Palmerston one of the grand historical displays of oratory that even when the sound of them is lost send their echoes to " roll from soul to soul." It was not like one of Burke's great speeches, or one of Chatham's. It was not one calculated to provoke keen literary controversy, like Sheridan's celebrated "Begum speech," which all contemporaries held to be unrivaled, but which a later generation assumes to have been rather flashy rhetoric. There are no passages of splendid eloquence in Palmerston's Pacifico speech. Its great merit was its wonderful power as a contribution to parliamentary argument; as a masterly appeal to the feel- ings, the prejudices, and the passions of the House of Com- mons; as a complete parliamentary victory over a combina- tion of the most influential, eloquent, and heterogeneous opponents. Don Pacifico was a Jew, a Portuguese by extraction, but a native of Gibraltar and a British subject. His house in Athens was attacked and plundered in the open day on April 4, 1847, by an Athenian mob who were beaded, it was affirmed, by two sons of the (J reek minis- ter of war. The attack came about in this way. It had been customaryin Greek towns to celebrate Easter by burn- ing an effigy of .Judas Iseariot. In L847 the police of Alliens were ordered to prevent this performance, and the mob, disappointed of their favorite amusement, ascribed the new orders to the influence of the Jews. Don Pacifico's house happened to stand near the spot where the Judas was annually burnt,; Don Pacifico was known to be a Jew; and the anger of the mob was wreaked upon him accord- ingly. There could be no doubt that the attack was law- less, and that the Greek authorities took no trouble to pro- 306 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tect Pacifico against it. Don Pacifico made a claim against the Greek government for compensation. He estimated his losses, direct and indirect, at nearly thirty-two thou- sand pounds sterling. Another claim was made at the same time by another British subject, a man of a very different stamp from Don Pacifico. This was Mr. Finlay, the historian of Greece. Mr. Finlay had gone out to Greece in the enthsuiastic days of Byron and Cochran and Church and Hastings; and he settled in Athens when the inde- pendence of Greece had been established. Some of his land had been taken for the purpose of rounding off the new palace gardens of King Otho; and Mr. Finlay had declined to accept the terms offered by the Greek government, to which other landowners in the same position as himself had assented. Some stress was laid by Lord Palmerston's antagonists in the course of the debate on the fact that Mr. Finlay thus stood out apart from other landowners in Athens. Mr. Finlay, however, had a perfect right to stand out for any price he thought fit. He was in the same position as a Greek resident of London or Manchester whose land is taken for the purposes of a railway or other public improvement, and who declines to accept the amount of compensation tendered for it in the first instance. The peculiarity of the case was that Mr. Finlay was not left, as the supposed Greek gentleman assuredly would be, to make good his claims for himself in the courts of law. Neither Don Pacifico nor Mr. Finlay had appealed to the law courts at all. But about this time our foreign office had had several little complaints against the Greek authorities. We had taken so considerable a part in setting up Greece that our ministers not unnaturally thought Greece ought to show her gratitude by attending a little more closely to our advice. On the other hand, Lord Palmerston had made up his mind that there was constant intrigue going on against our interests among the foreign diplomatists in Athens. He was convinced that France was perpetually plotting against us there, and that Russia was watching an opportunity to supersede, once for all, our influence by completely establishing hers. Don Pacifico's sheets, counterpanes, and gold watch had the advantage of being made the subject of a trial of strength between England on the one side, and France and Russia on the other. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 307 There had been other complaints as well. Ionian sub- jects of her majesty had sent in remonstrances against law- less or high-handed proceedings; and a midshipman of her majesty's ship Fantome, landing from a boat at night on the shore of Patras, had been arrested by mistake. None of these questions would seem at first sight to wear a very grave international character. All they needed for settle- ment, it might be thought, was a little open discussion and the exercise of some good sense and moderation on both sides. It cannot be doubted that the Greek authorities were lax and careless, and that acts had been done which they could not justify. It is only fair to say that they do not appear to have tried to justify some of them; but they were of opinion that certain of the claims were absurdly exaggerated, and in this belief they proved to be well sus- tained. The Greeks were very poor, and also very dila- tory; and they gave Lord Palmerston a reasonable excuse for a little impatience. Unluckily, Lord Palmerston be- came possessed with the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly setting the Greek government on to resist our claims. For the foreign office had made the claims ours. They had lumped up the outrages on Ionian seamen, the mistaken arrest of the midshipman (who had been released with apologies the moment his nationality and position were discovered), Mr. Finlay's land, and Don Pacifico's household furniture in one claim, converted it into a national demand, and insisted that Greece must pay up within a given time or take the consequences. Greece hesitated, and accordingly the British fleet was ordered to the Pineus. It made its appearance very promptly there, and seized all the Greek vessels belonging to the govern- ment and to private merchants that were found within the waters. The Greek government appealed to France and Russia as powers joined with us in the treaty to protect the inde- pendence of Greece; France and Russia were both disposed to make bitter complaint of not having been consulted in the first instance by the British government; nor was their Iccling greatly softened by Lord Palnierston's peremptory reply that it was all a question between England and Greece, with which no other power had any business to interfere. The Russian government wrote an angry, and indeed an offensive remonstrance. The Russian foreign 308 A HI8T0R T OF OUR OWN TIMES. minister spoke of "the very painful impression produced upon the mind of the emperor by the unexpected acts of violence which the British authorities had just directed against Greece;" and asked if Great Britain, "abusing the advantages which are afforded to her by her immense mari- time superiority," intended to "disengage herself from all obligation," and to "authorize all great powers on every litting opportunity to recognize toward the weak no other rule but their own will, no other right but their own phy- sical strength." The French government, perhaps under the pressure of difficulties and uncertain affairs at home, in their unsettled state showed a better temper, and inter- vened only in the interests of peace and good understand- ing. Something like a friendly arbitration was accepted from France, and the French government sent a special representative to Athens to try to come to terms with our minister there. The difficulties appeared likely to be ad- justed. All the claims except those of Don Pacifico were matter of easy settlement, and at first the French commis- sioner seemed even willing to accept Don Pacifico's stupen- dous valuation of his household goods. But Pacifico had introduced other demands of a more shadowy character. He said that he had certain claims on the Portuguese gov- ernment, and that the papers on which these claims rested for support were destroyed in the sacking of his house, and therefore he felt entitled to ask for £26,618 as com- pensation on that account also. The French commissioner was a little staggered at this demand, and declined to accede to it without further consideration; and as our minister, Mr. Wyse, did not believe he had any authority to abate any of the now national demand, the negotiation was for the time broken off. In the meantime, however, negotiations had still been going on between the English and French governments in London, and these had resulted in a convention disposing of all the disputed claims. By the terms of this agreement a sum of eight thousand five hundred pounds was to be paid by the Greek government to be divided among the various claimants; and Greece was also to pay whatever sum might be found to be fairly due on account of Don Pacifico's Portuguese claims after these had been investigated by arbitrators. This would seem a very satisfactory and honorable arrangement. But some demon of mischief appeared to have this unlucky A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 309 affair in charge from the first. The two negotiations going on in London and Athens simultaneously got in each other's way. Instructions as to what had been agreed to in London were not forwarded to Athens quickly enough by the English government, and when the French govern- ment sent out to their commissioner the news of the con- vention he found that Mr. Wyse knew nothing about the matter, and had no authority which, as he conceived, would have warranted him in departing from the course of action he was following out. Mr. Wyse, therefore, proceeded with his measures of coercion, and at length the Greek government gave way. The convention having, however, been made in the meantime in London, there then arose a question as to whether that convention or the terms ex- torted at Athens should be the basis of arrangemeut. Over this trumpery dispute, which a few words of frank good sense and good temper on both sides would have easily settled, a new quarrel seemed at one time likely to break out between England and France. The French govern- ment actually withdrew their ambassador, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, from London ; and there was for a short time a general alarm over Europe. But the question in dispute was really too small and insignificant for any two rational governments to make it a cause of serious quarrel; and after a while our government gave way, and agreed to an arrangement which was in the main all that France desired. When, after a long lapse of time, the arbitrators came to settle the claims of Don Pacifico, it was found that he was entitled to about one thirtieth of the sum he had originally demanded. He had assessed all his claims on the same liberal and fanciful scale as that which he adopted in estimating the value of his household property. Don Pacifico, it seems, charged in his bill one hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a bedstead, thirty pounds for sheets of the bed, twenty-five pounds for two coverlets, and ten pounds for a pillow-case. Cleopatra might have been contented with bed-furniture so luxurious as Don Pacifico represented himself to have in his common use. The jewelry of his wife and daughters he estimated at two thousand pounds, lie gave no vouchers for any of these claims, saving that all his papers had been destroyed by the mob. It seemed too that he had always lived in a humble sort of way, and was never supposed by his neigh- 310 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. bors to possess such splendor of ornament and household goods. While the controversy between the English and French governments was yet unfinished, a parliamentary contro- versy between the former government and the opposition in the House of Lords was to begin. Lord Stanley pro- posed a resolution which was practically a vote of censure on the government. The resolution in fact expressed the regret of the House to find that " various claims against the Greek government, doubtful in point of justice, or ex- aggerated in amount, have been enforced by coercive meas- ures, directed against the commerce and people of Greece, and calculated to endanger the continuance of our friendly relations with foreign powers." The resolution was car- ried, after a debate of great spirit and energy, by a majority of thirty-seven. Lord Palmerston was not dismayed. A ministry is seldom greatly troubled by an adverse vote in the House of Lords. The foreign secretary, writing about the result of the division the following day, merely said : " We were beaten last night in the Lords by a larger majority than we had, up to the last moment, expected; but when we took office we knew that our opponents had a larger pack in the Lords than we had, and that whenever the two packs were to be fully dealt out, theirs would show a larger number than ours." Still it was necessary that something should be done in the Commons to counter- balance the stroke of the Lords, and accordingly Mr. Roe- buck, acting as an independent member, although on this occasion in harmony with the government, gave notice of a resolution which boldly affirmed that the principles on which the foreign policy of the government had been regulated were "such as were calculated to maintain the honor and dignity of this country; and in times of unex- ampled difficulty to preserve peace between England and the various nations of the world." On June 24, 1850, a night memorable in parliamentary annals as the opening night of the debate which established Lord Palmerston 's position as a great leader of party, Mr. Roebuck brought forward his resolution. A reader unaccustomed to parliamentary tactics may fail to observe the peculiar shrewdness of the resolution. It was framed, at least it reads as if it had been framed, to accomplish one purposs, while professing to serve another, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 31 1 It was intended, of course, as a reply to the censure of the House of Lords. It was to proclaim to the world that the representative chamber had reversed the decision of the House of Peers and acquitted the ministry. But what did Mr. Roebuck's resolution actually do? Did it affirm that the government had acted rightly with regard to Greece? The dealings with Greece were expressly cen- sured by the House of Lords; but Mr. Roebuck proposed to affirm that the general policy of the ministry deserved the approval of the House of Commons. It was well known that there were many men of Liberal opinions in the House of Commons who did not approve of the course pursued with regard to Greece, but who would yet have been very sorry to give a vote which might contribute to the overthrow of a Liberal government. The resolution was so framed as to offer to all such an oppoitunity of sup- porting the government, and yet satisfying their con- sciences. For it might be thus put to them — "you think the government were too harsh with Greece? Perhaps you are right. But this resolution does not say that they were quite free of blame in their way of dealing with Greece. It only says that their policy on the whole has been sound and successful; and of course you must admit that. They may have made a little mistake with regard to Greece; but admitting that, do you not still think that on the whole they have done very well, and much better than any Tory ministry would be likely to do? That is all that Roebuck's resolu- tion asks you to affirm and you really cannot vote against it." A large number of Liberals were no doubt influenced by this view of the situation and by the framing of the resolu- tion. But there were some who could not be led into any approval of the particular transaction which the resolution, if not intended to cover, would certainly be made to cover. There were others, too, Avho, even on the broader field opened purposely up by the resolution, honestly believed that Lord Palmerston's general policy was an incessant violation of the principle of non-intervention, and was therefore injurious to the character and the safety of the country. In a prolonged and powerful debate some of the foremost men on both sides of the house opposed and denounced the policy of the government, for which, as every one knew, Lord Palmerstou was almost exclusively responsible. "The allied troops who led the attack," says 312 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Mr. Evelyn Ashley, in his "Life of Lord Palmerston," "were English protectionists and foreign absolutists." It is strange that an able and usually fair-minded man should be led into such an absurdity. Lord Palmerston himself called it " a shot fired by a foreign conspiracy aided and abetted by a domestic intrigue." But Lord Palmerston was the minister personally assailed, and might be ex- cused, perhaps, for believing at the moment that warring monarchs were giving the fatal wound, and that the attack on him was the work of the combined treachery of Europe. An historian looking back upon the events after an interval of a quarter of a century ought to be able to take a calmer view of things. Among the "English protectionists" who took a prominent part in condemning the policy of Lord Palmerston, were Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, Sir Robert Peel, Sir William Molesworth, and Mr. Sidney Herbert. In the House of Lords, Lord Brougham, Lord Canning and Lord Aberdeen had supported the resolution of Lord Stanley. The truth is, that Lord Palmerston's proceed- ings were fairly open to difference of judgment even on the part of the most devoted Liberals and the most independ- ent thinkers. It did not need that a man should be a pro- tectionist or an absolutist to explain his entire disapproval of such a course of conduct as that which had been fol- lowed out with regard to Greece. It seems to us now, quietly looking back at the whole story, hardly possible that a man with, for example, the temperament and the general views of Mr. Gladstone could have approved of such a policy; obviously impossible that a man like Mr. Cobden could have approved of it. These men simply fol- lowed their judgment and their conscience. The principal interest of the debate now rests in the manner of Lord Palmerston's defense. The speech was indeed a masterpiece of parliamentary argument and address. It was in part a complete exposition and defense of the whole course of the foreign policy which the noble speaker had directed. But although the resolution treated only of the general policy of the government, Lord Pal- merston did not fail to make a special defense of his action toward Greece. He based his vindication of this particu- lar chapter of his policy on the ground which, of all others, gave him most advantage in addressing a parliamentary assembly. He contended that in all he had done he had A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 313 been actuated by the resolve that the poorest claimant who bore the name of an English citizen should be protected by the whole strength of England against the oppression of a foreign government. His speech was an appeal to all the elementary emotions of manhood and citizenship and good- fellowship. To vote against him seemed to be to declare that England was unable or unwilling to protect her chil- dren. A man appeared to be guilty of an unpatriotic and ignoble act who censured the minister whose only error, if error it were, was a too proud and generous resolve to make the name of England and the rights of Englishmen respected throughout the world. A good deal of ridicule had been heaped not unnaturally on Don Pacifico, his claims, his career, and his costly bed furniture. Lord Palmerston turned that very ridicule to good account for his own cause. lie repelled with a warmth of seemingly generous indignation the suggestion that because a man was lowly, pitiful, even ridiculous, even of doubtful conduct in his earlier career, therefore he was one with whom a foreign government was not bound to observe any principles of fair dealing at all. He protested against having serious things treated jocosely; as if .any man in parliament had ever treated serious things more often in a jocose spirit. lie protested against having the house kept "in a roar of laughter at the poverty of one sufferer or at the miserable habitation of another; at the nationality of one man, or the religion of another; as if because a man was poor he might be bastinadoed and tortured with impunity, as if a man who was born in Scotland might be robbed without redress, or because a man is of the Jewish persuasion he is a fair mark for any outrage." Lord Palmerston had also a great advantage given to him by the argument of some of bis opponents, that whatever the laws of a foreign coun- try, a stranger has only to abide by them, and that a gov- ernment claiming redress for any wrong done to one of its subjects is completely answered by the statement that he has suffered only as inhabitants of the country themselves have suffered. The argument against Lord Palmerston was pushed entirely too far in this instance, and it gave him one of his finest opportunities for reply. It is true as a general rule in the intercourse of nations, that a stranger who goes voluntarily into a country is expected to abide by its laws, and that his government will not protect him 314 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. from their ordinary Operation in every case where it may seem to press hardly or even unfairly against him. But in this understanding is always involved a distinct assump- tion that the laws of the state are to be such as civilization would properly recognize; supposing that the state in question professes to be a civilized state. It is also dis- tinctly assumed that the state must be able and willing to enforce its own laws where they are fairly invoked on be- half of a foreigner. If, for instance, a foreigner has a just claim against some continental government, and that government will not recognize the claim, or recognizing it will not satisfy it; and the government of the injured man intervenes and asks that his claim shall be met — it would never be accounted a sufficient answer to say that many of the inhabitants of the country had been treated just in the same way and had got no redress. If there were a law in Turkey, or any other slave-owning state, that a man who could not pay his debts was liable to have his wife and daughter sold into slavery, it is certain that no government like that of England would hear of the appli- cation of such a law to the family of a poor English trader settled in Constantinople. There is no clear rule easy to be laid down ; perhaps there can be no clear rule on the subject at all. But it is evident that the governments of all civilized countries do exercise a certain protectorate over their subjects in foreign countries, and do insist in extreme cases that the laws of the country shall not be applied or denied to them in a manner which a native resi- dent might think himself compelled to endure without protest. It is not even so in the case of manifestly harsh and barbarous laws alone, or of the denial of justice in a harsh and barbarous way. The principle prevails even in regard to laws which are in themselves unexceptionable and necessary. No government, for example, will allow one of its subjects living in a foreign country to be brought under the law for the levying of the conscrijition there and compelled to serve in the army of a foreign state. All this only shows that the opponents of Lord Palmers- ton made a mistake when they endeavored to obtain any general assent to the principle that a minister does wrong who asks for his fellow-subjects at the hands of a foreign government any better treatment than that which the gov- ernment in question administers, and without revolt, to its A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 315 own people. Lord Palmerston was not the man to lose so splendid an opportunity. He really made it appear as if the question between him and his opponents was that of the protection of Englishmen abroad; as if he were anxious to look after their lives and safety, while his opponents were urging the odious principle that when once an English- man put his foot on a foreign shore his own government renounced all intent to concern themselves with any fate that might befall him. Here was a new turn given to the debate, a new opportunity afforded to those who, while they did not approve exactly of what had been done with Greece, were nevertheless anxious to support the general principles of Lord Palmerston's foreign policy. The speech was a marvelous appeal to what are called " English interests." In a peroration of thrilling power Lord Pal- merston asked for the verdict of the house to decide " whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say l Civis Romanics sum,'' so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong." When Lord Palmerston closed his speech the overwhelm- ing plaudits of the house foretold the victory he had won. It was indeed a masterpiece of telling defense. The speech occupied some five hours in delivery. It was spoken, as Mr. Gladstone afterward said, from the dusk of one day to the dawn of the next. It was spoken without the help of a single note. Lord Palmerston always wisely thought that in order to have full command of such an audience a man should, if possible, never use notes. He was quite conscious of his own lack of the higher gifts of imagination and emotion that make the great orator; but he knew also what a splendid weapon of attack and defense was his iluency and readiness, and he was not willing to weaken the effect of its spontaneity by the interposition of a single note. All this great speech, therefore, full as it was of minute details, names, dates, figures, references of all kinds, was delivered with the same facility, the same lack of effort, the same absence of any adventitious aids to memory which charactized Palmerston's ordinary style when he answered a simple question. Nothing could be more complete than Palmerston's success. '" ( 'iris /,<>manu8 n settled the matter. Who was in the House of Commons. 316 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. so rude tliat would riot be a Roman? Who was there so lacking in patriotic spirit that would not have his country- men as good as any Roman citizen of them all? It was to little purpose that Mr. Gladstone, in a speech of singular argumentative power, pointed out that "a Roman citizen was the member of a privileged caste, of a victorious and conquering nation, of a nation that held all others bound down by the strong arm of power — which had one law for him and another for the rest of the world, which asserted in his favor principles which it denied to all others." It was in vain that Mr. Gladstone asked whether Lord Pal- merston thought that was the position which it would be- come a civilized and Christian nation like England to claim for her citizens. The glory of being a " Civis Romanus" was far too strong for any mere argument drawn from fact and common sense to combat against it. The phrase had car- ried the day. When Mr. Cockburn, in supporting Lord Palmerston's policy, quoted from classical authority to show that the Romans had always avenged any wrongs done to their citizens, and cited from one of Cicero's speeches against Verres: " Quot bella majores nostras et quanta suscepisse arbitramini, quod cives Romani injuria affecti, quod navicularii reteuti, quod mercatorcs spoliati dicereniur V the house cheered more tumultuously than ever. In vain was the calm, grave, studiously moderate remonstrance of Sir Robert Peel, who, while generously declaring that Palmerston's •speech "made us all proud of the man who delivered it," yet recorded his firm protest against the style of policy which Palmerston's eloquence had endeavored to glorify. The victory was all with Pal- merston. He had, in the words of Shakespeare's Rosalind, wrestled well and overthrown more than his enemies. After a debate of four nights, a majority of forty-six was given for the resolution. The ministry came out not only absolved but triumphant. The odd thing about the whole proceeding is that the ministers in general heartily disap- proved of the sort of policy which Palmerston put so 'ener- getically into action — at least they disapproved, if not his principles, yet certainly his way of enforcing them. Be- fore this debate came on Lord John Russell had made up his mind that it would be impossible for him to remain in office with Lord Palmerston as foreign secretary. None the less, however, did Lord John Russell defend the policy A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 317 of the foreign office in a speech which Palmerston himself described as "admirable and first-rate." The ministers felt bound to stand by the actions which they had not repudiated at the time when they were done. They could not allow Lord Palmerston to be separated from them in political responsibility when they had not separated them- selves from moral responsibility for his proceedings in time. Therefore they had to defend in parliament what they did not pretend to approve in private. The theory of a cabinet always united when attacked rendered doubtless such a course of proceeding necessary in parliamentary tactics. It would, perhaps, be hard to make it seem quite satisfac- tory to the simple and unsophisticated mind. No part of our duty calls on us to attempt such a task. It was a famous victory — we must oidy settle the question as old Caspar disposed of the doubts about the propriety of the praise given to the Duke of Marlborough and "our good Prince Eugene." "It is not telling a lie," says some one in Thackeray, "it is only voting with your party." But Thackeray had never been in the House of Commons. Of many fine speeches made during this brilliant debate we must notice one in particular. It was that of Mr. Cockburn, then member for Southampton — a speech to which allusion has already been made. Never in our time has a reputation been more suddenly, completely, and deservedly made than Mr. Cockburn won by his brilliant display of ingenious argument and stirring words. The manner of the speaker lent additional effect to his clever and captivating eloquence. He had a clear, sweet, pene- trating voice, a fluency that seemed so easy as to make lis- teners sometimes fancy that it ought to cost no effort, and a grace of gesture such as it must be owned the courts of law where he had had his training do not often teach. Mr. Cockburn defended the policy of Palmerston with an effect only inferior to that produced by Palmerston's own speech, and with a rhetorical grace and finish to which Palmerston made.no pretension. In writing to Lord Normanby about tin' debate, Lord Palmerston distributed his praise to friends and enemies with that generous impartiality which was a fine part of his character. Gladstone's attack on his policy he pronounced "a first-rate performance." Peel and Disraeli he praised likewise. Put "as to Cockburn's," he said, " I do not know that I ever in the course of my life 818 A HISTOR 7 OF OUR OWN TIMES. heard a better speech from anybody, without any excep- tion." The effect which Cockburn's speech produced on the house was well described in the house itself by one who rose chiefly for the purpose of disputing the principles it advocated. Mr. Cobden observed that when Mr. Cock- burn had concluded his speech, " one-half of the treasury benches were left empty while honorable members ran after one another, tumbling over each other in their haste to shake hands with the honorable and learned member." Mr. Cockburn's career was safe from that hour. It is needless to say that he well upheld in after years the repu- tation he won in a night. The brilliant and sudden suc- cess of the member for Southampton was but the fitting prelude to the abiding distinction won by the lord chief justice of England. One association of profound melancholy clings to that great debate. The speech delivered by Sir Eobert Peel was the last that was destined to come from his lips. The debate closed on the morning of Saturday, June 29. It was nearly four o'clock when the division was taken, and Peel left the house as the sunlight was already beginning to stream into the corridors and lobbies. He went home to rest; but his sleep could not be long. He had to attend a meeting of the royal commissioners of the great Industrial Exhibition at twelve, and the meeting was important. The site of the building had to be decided upon, and Prince Albert and the commissioners generally relied greatly on the influence of Sir Robert Peel to sustain them against the clamorous objection out of doors to the choice of a place in Hyde Park. Peel went to the meeting and undertook to assume the leading part in defending the decision of the commissioners before the House of Com- mons. He returned home for a short time after the meet- ing and then set out for a ride in the park. He called at Buckingham Palace and wrote his name in the queen's visiting book. Then as he was riding up Constitution Hill he stopped to talk to a young lady, a friend of his, who was also riding. His horse suddenly shied and flung him off; and Peel clinging to the bridle, the animal fell with its knees on his shoulders. The injuries which he received proved beyond all skill of surgery. He lingered, now conscious, now delirious with pain, for two or three days; and he died about eleven o'clock on the night of July A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 319 2. Most of the members of his family and some of his dearest old friends and companions in political arms were beside him when he died. The tears of the Duke of Wellington in one house of parliament, and the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone in the other, were expressions as fitting and adequate as might be of the universal feeling of the nation. There was no honor which parliament and the country would not willingly have paid to the memory of Peel. Lord John Russell proposed with the sanction of the crown that his remains should be buried with public honors. But Peel had distinctly declared in his will that he desired his remains to lie beside those of his father and mother in the family vault at Drayton Bassett. All that parliament and the country could do therefore was to decree a monu- ment to him in Westminster Abbey. The offer of a peer- age was made to Lady Peel, but, as might perhaps have been expected, it was declined. Lady Peel declared that her own desire was to bear no other name than that by which her husband had been known. She also explained that the express wish of her husband, recorded in his will, was that no member of his family should accept any title or other reward on account of any services Peel might have rendered to his country. No desire could have been more honorable to the statesman who had formed and ex- pressed it; none certainly more in keeping with all that was known of the severely unselfish and unostentatious character of Sir Robert Peel. Yet there were persons found to misconstrue his meaning and to discover offense to the order of aristocracy in Peel's determination. A report went about that the great statesman's objection to the acceptance of a peerage by one of his family implied a disparagement of the order of peers and was founded on feelings of contempt or hostility to the House of Lords. Mr. Goulburn, who was one of Peel's executors, easily ex- plained Peel's meaning, if indeed it needed explanation to any reasonable mind. Peel was impressed with the convic- tion that it was better for a man to be the son of his own works; and he desired that his sons, if they were to bear titles and distinctions given them by the state, should win them by their own services and worth, and not simply put them on as an inheritance from their father. As regards himself, it may well be that he thought the name under 320 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. which he had made his reputation became him better than any new title. He had not looked for reward of that kind, and might well prefer to mark the fact that he did not specially value such distinctions. Nor would it be any disparagement to the peerage — a thing which in the case of a man with Peel's opinions is utterly out of the question — to think that much of the dignity of a title depends on its long descent and its historic record, and that a fire-new, specially-invented title to a man already great is a disfig- urement, or at least a disguise, rather than an adornment. When titles were abolished during the great French Revo- lution, Mirabeau complained of being called " Citizen Riquetti," in the official reports of the assembly. "With your Riquetti," he said angrily, "you have puzzled all Europe for days." Europe knew Count Mirabeau, but was for some time bewildered by Citizen Riquetti. Sir Robert Peel may well have objected to a reversal of the process, and to the bewildering of Europe by disguising a famous citizen in a new peerage. "Peel's death," Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after, putting the remark at the close of a long letter about the recent victory of the government and the congratulations he had personally received "is a great calamity, and one that seems to have had no adequate cause. He was a very bad and awkward rider, and his horse might have been sat by any better equestrian; but he seems somehow or other to have been entangled in the bridle, and to have pulled the horse to step or kneel upon him. The injury to the shoulder was severe but curable; that which killed him was a broken rib forced with great violence inwards into the lungs." The cause of Peel's death would certainly not have been adequate, as Lord Palmerston put it, if great men needed prodigious and por- tentous events to bring about their end. But the stumble of a horse has been found enough in other instances too. Peel seemed destined for great things yet when he died. He was but in his sixty-third year; he was some years younger than Lord Palmerston, who may be said without exaggeration to have just achieved his first great success. Many circumstances were pointing to Peel as likely before long to be summoned again to the leadership in the govern- ment of the country. It is superfluous to say that his faculties as parliamentary orator or statesman were not A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 321 showing any signs of decay. An English public man is not supposed to show signs of decaying faculties at sixty- two. The shying horse and perhaps the bad ridership set- tled the question of Peel's career between them. We have already endeavored to estimate that career and to do jus- tice to Peel's great qualities. He was not a man of original genius, but he was one of the best administrators of other men's ideas that ever knew how and when to leave a party and to serve a country. He was never tried by the severe tests which tell whether a man is a statesman of the highest order. He was never tried as Cavour, for example, was tried, by conditions which placed the national exist- ence of his country in jeopardy. He had no such trials to encounter as were forced on Pitt. He was the minister of a country always peaceful, safe, and prosperous. But he was called upon at a trying moment to take a step on which assuredly much of the prosperity of the people and nearly all the hopes of his party along with his own per- sonal reputation were imperilled. He did not want courage to take the step, and he had the judgment to take it at the right time. He bore the reproaches of that which had been his party with dignity and composure. He was undoubtedly, as Lord Beaconsfield calls him, a great mem- ber of parliament; but he was surely also a great minister. Perhaps he only needed a profounder trial at the hands of fate to have earned the title of a great man. To the same year belongs the close of another remark- able career. On August 2G, 1850, Louis Philippe, lately king of the French, died at Claremont, the guest of England. Few men in history had gone through greater reverses. Son of Philippe Egalite, brought up in a sort of blending of luxury and scholastic self-denial, under the con- trasting influence of his father and of his teacher, Madame de Genlis, a woman full at least of virtuous precept and Kousseau-like profession, he showed great force of char- acter during tne revolution, lie still regarded France as his country, though she no longer gave a throne to any of his family. He had fought like a brave young soldier at Valmy and Jemappea. "JEtgalitS Mis," says Carlyle, Bpeakmg of the young man at Valmy — " Equality Junior, a light, gallant field-officer, distinguished himself by intrepidity; it is the same intrepid individual who now, as Louis Philippe, without the Equality struggles under sad 322 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. circumstances to be called king of the French for a season." It is he who, as Carlyle also describes it, saves his sister with such spirit and energy when Madame de Genlis with all her fine precepts would have left her behind to whatever danger. " Behold the young princely brother, struggling hithervvard, hastily calling; bear the princess in his arms. Hastily he has clutched the poor young lady up, in her very nightgown, nothing saved of her goods except the watch from the pillow; with brotherly despair he fiings her in, among the band-boxes, into Genlis' chaise, into Genlis' arms. . . . The brave young Egalite has a most wild morrow to look for; but now only himself to carry through it." The brave young Egalite had indeed a wild time before him. A wanderer, an exile, a fugitive, a teacher in Swiss and American schools; bearing many and various names as he turned to many callings and saw many lands, always perhaps keeping in mind that Danton had laid his great hand upon his head and declared that the boy must one day be king of France. Then in the whirligig of time the opportunity that long might have seemed impossible came round at last; and the soldier, exile, college teacher, wanderer among American-Indian tribes, resident of Philadelphia, and of Bloomingdale in the New York suburbs, is king of the French. Well had Carlyle gauged his position after some years of reign when he described him " as struggling under sad circumstances to be called king of the French for a season." He ought to have been a great man; he had had a great training. All his promise as a man faded when his seeming success began to shine. He had apparently learned nothing of ad- versity; he was able to learn nothing of prosperity and greatness. Of all men whom his time had tried he ought best to have known, one might think, the vanity of human schemes, and the futility of trying to uphold thrones on false principles. He intrigued for power as if his previous experience had taught him that power once obtained was inalienable. He seemed at one time to have no real faith in anything but chance. He made the fairest professions and did the meanest, falsest things. He talked to Queen Victoria in language that might have brought tears into a father's eyes; and he was all the time planning the detest- able juggle of the Spanish marriages. He did not even seem to retain the courage of his youth. It went appar- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 3^3 entry with whatever of true, unselfish principle he had when he was yet a young soldier of the republic. He was like our own James II., who as a youth exorted the praise of the great Turenne for his bravery, and as a king earned the scorn of the world for his pusillanimous imbecility. Some people say that there remained a gleam of perverted principle in Louis Philippe which broke out just at the close, and unluckily for him exactly at the wrong time. It is asserted that he could have put clown the movement of 1848 in the beginning with one decisive word. Certainly those who began that movement were as little prepared as he for its turning out a revolution. It is generally assumed that he halted and dallied and refused to give the word of command out of sheer weakness of mind and lack of courage. But the assumption according to some is unjust. Their theory is that Louis Philippe at that mo- ment of crisis was seized with a conscientious scruple, and believed that having been called to power by the choice of the people — called to rule not as king of France, but as king of the French ; as king, that is to say, of the French people so long as they chose to have him — he was not authorized to maintain himself on that throne by force. The feeling would have been just and right if it were cer- tain that the French people, or any majority of the French people, really wished him away and were prepared to welcome a republic. But it was hardly fair to those who set him on the throne to assume at once that he was bound to come down from it at the bidding of no matter whom, how few or how many, and without in some way trying conclusions to see if it were the voice of France that sum- moned him to descend, or only the outcry of a moment and a crowd. The scruple, if it existed, lost the throne; in which we are far from saying that France suffered any great loss. We are bound to say that M. Thiers, who ought to have known, does not seem to have believed in the operation of any scruple of the kind, and ascribes the king's fall simply to blundering and to bad advice. But it would have been curiously illustrative of the odd contra- dictions of human nature, and especially curious as illus- trating that one very odd and mixed nature, if Louis Philippe had really felt such a scruple and yielded to it. He had carried out with full deliberation, and in spite of all remonstrance, schemes which tore asunder human lives, 324 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. blighted human happiness, played at dice with the destinies of whole nations and might have involved all Europe in war, and it does not seem that he ever felt one twinge of scruple or acknowledged one pang of remorse. His policy had been unutterably mean and selfish and deceitful. His very bourgeois virtues, on which he was so much inclined to boast himself, had been a sham ; for he had carried out schemes which defied and flouted the first principles of human virtue, and made as light of the honor of women as of the integrity of man. It would humor the irony of fate if he had sacrificed his crown to a scruple which a mian of really high principle would well have felt justified in banishing from his mind. One is reminded of the daughter of Macklin, the famous actor, who having made her success on the stage by appearing constantly in pieces which com- pelled the most liberal display of form and limbs to all the house and all the town, died of a slight injury to her knee, which she allowed to grow mortal rather than permit any doctor to look at the suffering place. In Louis Philippe's case, too, the scruple would show so oddly that even the sacrifice it entailed could scarcely make us regard it with respect. He died in exile among us, the clever, unwise, grand, mean old man. There was a great deal about him which made him respected in private life, and when he had nothing to do with state intrigues and the foreign policy of courts. He was much liked in England, where for many years after his sons lived. But there were English- men who did not like him and did not readily forgive him. One of these was Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a few days after the death of Louis Philippe, expressing his sentiments thereupon with the utmost directness. "The death of Louis Philippe," he said, "delivers me from my most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him in many ways the power to injure me." Louis Philippe always detested Lord Pal- merston, and, according to Thiers, was constantly saying witty and spiteful things of the English minister, which good-natured friends as constantly brought to Palmerston's ears. When Lord Palmerston did not feel exactly as a good Christian ought to have felt, he at least never pre- tended to any such feeling. The same letter contains immediately after a reference to Sir Robert Peel. It too is A HISTORY OF OUU WN TIMES. 325 characteristic. "Though I am sorry for the death of Peel from personal regard, and because it is no doubt a great loss to the country, yet, so far as my own political position is concerned, I do not think that he was ever disposed to do me any good turn." A little while before, Prince Albert, writing to his friend Baron Stockmar, had spoken of Peel as having somewhat unduly favored Palmerston's foreign policy in the great Pacifico debate, or at least not having borne as severely as he might upon it, and for a certainly not selfish reason. "He" (Peel) "could not call the policy good, and yet he did not wish to damage the ministry, and this solely because he considered that a pro- tectionist ministry succeeding them would be dangerous to the country,- and had quite determined not to take office himself. But would the fact that his health no longer admitted of his doing so have been sufficient as time went on to make his followers and friends bear with patient resignation their own permanent exclusion from office? I doubt it." The prince might well doubt it; if Peel had lived, it is all but certain that he would have had to take office. It is curious, however, to notice how completely Prince Albert and Lord Palmerston are at odds in their way of estimating Peel's political attitude before his death. Lord Palmerston's quiet way of setting Peel down as one who would never be disposed to do him a good turn is characteristic of the manner in which the foreign secretary went in for the game of politics. Palmerston was a man of kindly instincts and genial temperament. He was much loved by his friends. His feelings were always directing him toward a certain half-indolent benevolence. But the game of politics was to him like the hunting field. One cannot stop to help a friend out of a ditch or to lament over him if he is clown and seriously injured. For the hour the only thing is to keep on one's way. In the political game Lord Palmerston was playing, enemies were only obstacles, and it would be absurd to pretend to be sorry when they were out of his path. Therefore, there is iio affectation of generous regret for Louis Philippe. Political rivals, even if private friends, are something like obstacles too. Palmerston is of opinion that Peel would never ho disposed to do him a good turn, and therefore indulges in no sentimental regret for his death. He is a loss to the country, no doubt, and personally one is sorry 326 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. for him, of course, and all that; "which done, God take King Edward to his mercy, and leave the world for me to hustle in." The world certainly was more free henceforth for Lord Palmerston's active and unresting spirit to bustle in. CHAPTER XX. THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. The autumn of 1850 and the greater part of 1851 were disturbed by an agitation which seems strangely out of keeping with our present condition of religious liberty and civilization. A struggle with the Papal court might appear to be a practical impossibility for the England of our time. The mind has to go back some centuries to put itself into what would appear the proper framework for such events. Legislation or even agitation against Papal aggression would seem about as superfluous in our modern English days as the use of any of the once-popular charms which were believed to hinder witches of their will. The story is extraordinary, and is in many ways instructive. For some time previous to 1850 there had been, as we have seen already, a certain movement among some scholarly, mystical men in England toward the Roman Church. We have already shown how this movement began, and how little could fairly be said to represent any actual impulse of reaction among the English people. But it unquestionably made a profound impression in Rome. The court of Rome then saw everything through tbe eyes of ecclesiastics; and a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic not well acquainted with the actual conditions of English life might well be excused if, when he found that two or three great Englishmen had gone over to the church, he fancied that they were but the vanguard of a vast popular or national movement. It is clear that the court of Rome was quite mistaken as to the religious condition of England. The most chimerical notions prevailed in the Vatican. To the eyes of Papal enthusiasm the whole English nation was only waiting for some word in season to return to the spiritual jurisdiction of Rome. The pope had not been fortunate in many things. He had been a fugitive from A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 32? his own city, and had been restored only by the force of French arms. He was a thoroughly good, pious and genial man, not seeing far into the various ways of human thought and national character; and to his mind there was nothing unreasonable in the idea that heaven might have made up for the domestic disasters of his reign by making him the instrument of the conversion of England. No better proof can be given of the manner in which he and his advisers misunderstood the English people than the step with which his sanguine zeal inspired him. The English people, even while they yet bowed to the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy, were always keenly jealous of any ecclesiastical attempt to control the political action or restrict the national independence of England. The his- tory of the relations between England and Kome for long generations before England had any thought of renouncing the faith of Rome might have furnished ample proof of this to anyone who gave himself the trouble to turn over a few pages of English chronicles. The pope did not read English, and his advisers did not understand England. Accordingly he took a step, with the view of encouraging and inviting England to become converted, which was calculated specially and instantly to defeat its own pur- pose. Had the great majority of the English people been really drawing toward the verge of a reaction to Rome, such an act as that done by the pope might have startled them back to their old attitude. The assumption of Papal authority over England only filled the English people with a new determination to repudiate and resist every pre- tension at spiritual authority on the part of the court of Rome. The time had so completely passed away, and the sup- posed pretensions have come to so little, that the most zealous Protestant can afford to discuss the whole question now with absolute impartiality and unruffled calmness. Everyone can clearly see now that if the pope was mistaken in the course he took, and if the nation in general was amply justified in resenting even a supposed attempt at foreign interference, the piece of legislation to which the occasion gave birth was not a masterpiece of statesman- ^ - "111 ship, nor was the manner in which it was earned through always creditable to the good sense of parliament and the public. The Papal aggression in itself was perhaps a 328 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. measure to smile at rather than to arouse great national indignation. It consisted in the issue of a papal bull, " given at St. Peter's, Rome, under the seal of the fisher-, man," and directing the establishment in England of "a hierarchy of bishops deriving their titles from their own sees, which we constitute by the present letter in the various apostolic districts." It is a curious evidence of the little knowledge of England's condition possessed by the court of Rome then, that although five-sixths at least of the Catholics in England were Irish by birth or extraction, the newly-appointed bishops were all or nearly all, English- men unconnected with Ireland. An Englishman of the present day would be probably inclined to ask, on hearing the effect of the bull, Is that all? Being told that that was all, he would probably have gone on to ask, What does it matter? Who cares whether the pope gives new titles to his English ecclesiastics or not? What Protestant is even interested in knowing whether a certain Catholic bishop living in England is called bishop of Mesopotamia, or of Lambeth? There always were Catholic bishops in England. There were Catholic arch- bishops. They were free to go and come, to preach and teach as they liked; to dress as they liked; for all that nineteen out of every twenty Englishmen cared, they might have been also free to call themselves what they liked. Any Protestant who mixed with Roman Catholics, or knew anything about their usages, knew that they were in the habit of calling their bishops "my lord," and their archbishops "your grace." He knew of course that they had not the slightest legal right to use such high-sound- ing titles, but this did not trouble him in the least. It was only a ceremonial intended for Catholics, and it did not give him either offense or concern. Why then should he be expected to disturb his mind because the pope chose to direct that the English Roman Catholics should' call a man Bishop of Liverpool or Archbishop of Westminster? The pope could not compel him to call them by any such names if he did not think fit; and unless his attention had been very earnestly drawn to the fact, he never probably would have found out that any new titles had been invented for the Catholic hierarchy in England. This was the way in which a great many Englishmen regarded the matter even then. But it must be owned A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 329 that there was something about the time and manner of the papal bull calculated to offend the susceptibility of a great and independent nation. The mere fact that a certain movement toward Rome had been painfully visible in the ranks of the English church itself was enough to make people sensitive and jealous. The plain sense of many thoroughly impartial and cool-headed Englishmen showed them that the two things were connected in the mind of the pope, and that he had issued his bull because he thought the time was actually coming when he might begin to take measures for the spiritual annexation of England. His pretensions might be of no account in themselves; but the fact that he made them in the evident belief that they were justified by realities, produced a jarring and painful effect on the mind of England. The offense lay in the pope's evident assumption that the change he was making was the natural result of an actual change in tbe national feeling of England. The anger was not against the giving of the new titles, but against the assumption of a new right to give titles representing territorial distinctions in this country. The agitation that sprang up was fiercely heated by the pastoral letter of the chief of the new hierarchy. The pope had divided England into various dioceses, which he placed under the control of an archbishop and twelve suffragans; and the new arch- bishop was Cardinal Wiseman. Under the title of Arch- bishop of Westminster and Administrator Apostolic of the Diocese of Southwark, Cardinal Wiseman was now to reside in London. Cardinal Wiseman was already well known in England, lie was of English descent on his father's side and of Irish on his mother's; he was a Spaniard by birth and a Roman by education. His family on both sides was of good position; his father came of a long line of Esses gentry. Wiseman had held the professorship of Oriental languages in the English college at Home, and afterward became rector of the college. In 1840 he was appointed by the pope one of the Vicars Apostolic in England, and held his position here as Bishop of Melipotamus in jtnrtilnis infidelium. He was well known to be a fine scholar, an accomplished linguist, and a powerful preacher and contro- versialist. But lie was believed also to be a man of great ecclesiastical ambition — ambition for his church, that is to say — of singular boldness, and of much political ability. 330 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. The pope's action was set down as in great measure the work of Wiseman. The cardinal himself was accepted in the minds of most Englishmen as a type of the regular Italian ecclesiastic — hold, clever, ambitious, and unscrupu- lous. The very fact of his English extraction only mili- tated the more against him in the public feeling. He was regarded as in some sense one who had gone over to the enemy, and who was the more to be dreaded because of the knowledge he carried with him. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in the existing mood of the English people the very title of cardinal exasperated the feeling against Wiseman. Had he come as a simple archbishop, the aggression might not have seemed so marked. The title of cardinal brought back unwelcome memories to the English public. It reminded them of a period of their history when the forces of Eome and those of the national independence were really arrayed against each other in a struggle which Englishmen might justly look on as dan- gerous. Since those times there had been no cardinal in England. Did it not look ominous that a cardinal should present himself now? The first step taken by Cardinal Wiseman did not tend to charm away this feeling. He issued a pastoral letter, addressed to England, on October 7, 1850, which was set forth as "given out of theFlaminian Gate of Eome." This description of the letter was after- ward stated to be in accordance with one of the necessary formularies of the church of Eome; but it was then assumed in England to be an expression of insolence and audacity intended to remind the English people that from out of Eome itself came the assertion of supremacy over them. This letter was to be read publicly in all the Eoman Catholic churches in London. It addressed itself directly to the English people, and it announced that " your beloved country has received a place among' the fair churches which normally constituted form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion; Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished ; and begins now anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the cen- ter of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light, and of vigor. " It must be allowed that this was rather imprudent lan- guage to address to a people peculiarly proud of being A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 331 Protestant ; a people of whom their critics say, not wholly without reason, that they are somewhat narrow and unsym- pathetic in their Protestantism; that their national ten- dency is to believe in the existence of nothing really good outside the limits of Protestantism. In England the national church is a symbol of victory over foreign enemies and domination at home. It was not likely that the English people could regard it as anything but an offense to be told that they were resuming their place as a part of an ecclesiastical system to which they, of all peoples, looked with dislike and distrust. We are not saying that the feeling with which the great bulk of the English people regarded Cardinal Wiseman's church was just or liberal. We are simply recording the unquestionable his- torical fact that such was the manner in which the English people regarded the Roman Church, in order to show how slender was the probability of their being moved to any- thing but anger by such expressions as those contained in Cardinal Wiseman's letter. But the letter had hardly reached England when the country was aroused by another letter coming from a very different quarter, and intended as a counterblast to the papal assumption of authority. This was Lord John Russell's famous Durham letter. Russell had the art of writing letters that exploded like bomb-shells in the midst of some controversy. His Edin- burgh letter had set the cabinet of Sir Robert Peel on to recognize the fact that something must be done with the free trade question; and now his Durham letter spoke the word that let loose a very torrent of English public feeling. The letter was in reply to one from the Bishop of Durham, and was dated "Downing Street, November the 4th." Lord John Russell condemned in the most unmeasured terms the assumption of the pope as "a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the queen's supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, ami with the spiritual independence of the nation as asserted even in the Roman Catholic times." Lord John Russell went on to say that his alarm was by no means equal to his indignation; that the liberty of Protestantism had been enjoyed too long in England to allow of any successful attempt to impose a, foreign yoke upon men's minds and consciences, and that the laws of the country should be 332 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. carefully examined, and the propriety of adopting some additional measures deliberately considered. But Lord John Russell went further than all this. He declared that there was a danger that alarmed him more than any aggression from a foreign sovereign, and that was "the danger within the gates from the unworthy sons of the church of England herself." Clergymen of that church, he declared, had been " leading their flocks step by step to the verge of the precipice." What, he asked, meant "the honor paid to saints, the claim of infallibility for the church, the superstitious use of the sign of the cross, the muttering of the Liturgy so as to disguise the language in which it is written, the recommendation of auricular con- fession, and the administration of penance and absolution?" The letter closed with a sentence which gave especial offense to Roman Catholics, but which Lord John Russell afterward explained, and indeed the context ought to have shown, was not meant as any attack on their religion or their ceremonial. " I have little hope that the propounders and framers of these innovations will desist from their insidious course; but I rely with confidence on the people of England; and I will not abate one jot of heart or hope so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation which looks with contempt on the mum- meries of superstition and with scorn at the laborious en- deavors which are now making to confine the intellect and enslave the soul." It is now clear from the very terms of this letter that Lord John Russell meant to apply these words to the practices within the English church which he had so strongly condemned in the earlier passages, and which alone, he said, he regarded with any serious alarm. But the Roman Catholics in general and the majority of persons of all sects accepted them as a denunciation of "popery." The Catholics looked upon them as a declara- tion of war against Catholicism ; the fanatical of the other side welcomed them as a trumpet-call to a new "Xo Popery" agitation. The very day after the letter appeared was the Guy Faux anniversary. All over the country the effigies of the pope and Cardinal Wiseman took the place of the regu- lation " Guy," and were paraded and burnt amid tumultuous demonstrations. A colossal procession of "Guys" passed A HISTORY OF OUR \VN TIMES. 333 down Fleet Street, the principal figure of which, a gigan- tic form of sixteen feet high, seated in a chariot, had to be bent down, compelled to " veil his crest," in order to pass under Temple Bar. This Titanic "Guy" was the new car- dinal in his red robes. In Exeter a yet more elaborate anti-papal demonstration was made. A procession of two hundred persons in character-dresses marched round the venerable cathedral amid the varied effulgence of colored lights. The procession represented the pope, the new car- dinal, and the Inquisition, various of the Inquisitors brandishing instruments of torture. Considerable sums of money were spent on these popular demonstrations, the only interest in which now is that they serve to illustrate the public sentiment of the hour. Mr. Disraeli good- naturedly endeavored at once to foment the prevailing heat of public temper and at the same time to direct its fervor against the ministry themselves, by declaring in a pub- lished letter that he could hardly blame the pope for sup- posing himself at liberty to divide England into bishoprics, seeing the encouragement he had got from the ministers themselves by the recognition they had offered to the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland. "The fact is," Mr. Disraeli said, " the whole question has been surrendered and decided in favor of the pope by the present govern- ment. The ministers who recognized the pseudo-Arch- bishop of Tuam as a peer and a prelate cannot object to the appointment of a pseudo-Archbishop of Westminster, even though he be a cardinal." As a matter of fact, it was not the existing government that had recognized the rank of the Irish Catholic prelates. The recognition had been formally arranged in January 1845 by a royal warrant or commission for carrying out the charitable bequests ad, which gave the Irish Catholic prelates rank immediately after the prelates of the established church of the same degree. But the letter of Mr. Disraeli, like that of Lord John Russell, served to inflame passions on both sides and to put the country in the worst possible mood for any man- ner of wholesome legislation. Never during the same generation had there been such an outburst of anger on both sides of the religious controversy. It was a curious incident in political history that Lord John Russell, who had more than any Englishman then living been identified with the principles of religious liberty, who had sat at the 334 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. feet of Fox, and had for his closest friend the Catholic poet Thomas Moore, came to be regarded by Roman Catholics as the bitterest enemy of their creed and their rights of worship, The ministry felt that something must be done. They could not face parliament without some piece of legislation to satisfy public feeling. Many even among the most zeal- ous Protestants deeply regretted that Lord John Russell had written anything on the subject. Not a few Roman Catholics of position and influence bitterly lamented the indiscretion of the papal court. The mischief, however, was now fairly afoot. The step taken by the pope had set the country aflame. Every day crowded and tumultuous meetings were held to denounce the action of the court of Rome. Before the end of the year something like seven thousand such meetings had been held throughout the kingdom. Sometimes the Roman Catholic party mustered strong at such demonstrations, and the result was rioting and disturbance. Addresses poured in upon the queen and the ministers calling for decided action against the assump- tion of papal authority. About the same time Father Gavazzi, an Italian republican who had been a priest, came to London and began a series of lectures against the papacy. He was a man of great rhetorical power, with a remarkable command of the eloquence of passion and denunciation. His lectures were at first given only in Italian, and therefore did not appeal to a popular English audience. But they were reported in the papers at much length, and they contributed not a little to swell the tide of public feeling against the pope and the court of Rome. The new lord chancellor, Lord Truro, created great applause and tumult at the lord mayor's dinner by quot- ing from Shakespeare the words, "Under my feet I'll stamp thy cardinal's hat, in spite of pope or dignitaries of church." Charles Kean, the tragedian, was interrupted by thundering peals of applause and the rising of the whole audience to their feet when, as King John, he proclaimed that "no Italian priest shall tithe or toll in our dominion." Long afterward, and when the storm seemed to have wholly died away, Cardinal Wiseman, going in a carriage through the streets of Liverpool to deliver a lecture on a purely literary subject to a general audience, was pelted with stones by a mob who remembered the papal assump- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 335 tion and the passions excited by the ecclesiastical titles act. The opening of parliament came. The ministry had to do something. No ministry that ever held power in England could have attempted to meet the House of Com- mons without some project of a measure to allay public excitement. On February 4, 1851, the queen in person opened parliament. Her speech contained some sentences which were listened to with the profoundest interest because they referred to the question which was agitating all England. "The recent assumption of certain ecclesiastical titles conferred by a foreign power has excited stong feel- ings in this country ; and large bodies of my subjects have presented addresses to me expressing attachment to the throne and praying that such assumptions should be resisted. I have assured them of my resolution to main- tain the rights of my crown and the independence of the nation against all encroachments, from whatever quarter they may proceed. I have at the same time expressed my earnest desire and firm determination, under God's bless- ing, to maintain unimpaired the religious liberty which is so justly prized by the people of this country." How little of inclination to any measures dealing unfairly with Roman ( 'at holies was in the mind of the queen herself may be seen from a letter in which, when the excitement was at its height, she had expressed her opinion to her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester. "I would never have consented to anything which breathed a spirit of intolerance. Sincerely Protestant as I always have been, and always shall be, and indignant as I am at those who call themselves Protestants while they are in fact quite the contrary, I much regret the unchristian and intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public meetings. 1 cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the Catholic religion, which is so painful and so cruel toward the many good and innocent Roman Catholics. However, we must hope and trust this excitement will soon icase, and that the wholesome effect of it upon our own church will be lasting." "The papal aggression question," Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother just before the opening of parliament "will give us some trouble, and give rise to stormy debates. Our difficulty will be to find out a measure which shall satisfy reasonable Protestants without violating those principles of 336 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we shall succeed. . . . The thing itself, in truth, is little or nothing, and does not justify the irritation. What has goaded the nation is the manner, insolent and ostentatious, in which it has been done. . . . We must bring in a measure. The country would not be satisfied without some legislative enactment. We shall make it as gentle as pos- sible. The violent party will object to it for its mildness, and will endeavor to drive us farther." A measure brought in only because something must be done to satisfy public opinion is not likely to be a very valuable piece of legislation. The ministry in this case were embarrassed by the fact that they really did not particularly waut to do anything except to satisfy public opinion for the moment and get rid of all the controversy. They were placed between two galling fires. On the one side were the extreme Pro- testants, to whom Palmerston alluded as violent, and who were eager for severe measures against the Catholics; and on the other were the Eoman Catholic supporters of the ministry, who protested against any legislation whatever on the subject. It would have been simply impossible to find any safe and satisfactory path of compromise which all could consent to walk. The ministry did the best they could to frame a measure which would seem to do some- thing and yet do little or nothing. Two or three days after the meeting of parliament Lord John Kussell intro- duced his bill to prevent the assumption by Eoman Catholics of titles taken from any territory or place within the united kingdom. The measure proposed to prohibit the use of all such titles under penalty, and to render void all acts done by or bequests made to persons under such titles. The Roman Catholic relief act imposed a penalty of one hundred pounds for every assumption of a title taken from an existing see. Lord John Russell proposed now to extend the penalty to the assumption of any title whatever from any place in the United Kingdom. The reception which was given to Lord John Russell's motion for leave to bring in this bill was not encouraging. Usually leave to bring in a bill is granted as a matter of course. Some few general observations of extemporaneous and guarded criticism are often made; but the common prac- tice is to offer no opposition. On this occasion, however, it was at once made manifest that no measure, however A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 337 "gentle," to use Lord Palmerston's word, would be allowed to pass without obstinate opposition. Mr. Roebuck described the bill as "one of the meanest, pettiest, and most futile measures that ever disgraced' even bigotry itself." Mr. Bright called it "little, paltry, and miserable — a mere sham to bolster up church ascendancy." Mr. Disraeli declared that he would not oppose the introduction of the bill ; but he spoke of it in language of as much con- tempt as Mr. Roebuck and Mr. Bright had used, calling it a mere piece of petty persecution. " Was it for this," Mr. Disraeli scornfully asked, " that the lord chancellor trampled on a cardinal's hat amid the patriotic acclamations of the metropolitan municipality?" Sir Robert Inglis, on the part of the more extreme Protestants, objected to the bill on the ground that it did not go far enough. The debate on the motion for leave to bring in the bill was renewed for night after night, and the fullest promise of an angry and prolonged resistance was given. Yet so strong was the feeling in favor of some legislation, that when the divi- sion was taken, three hundred and ninety-five votes were given for the motion, and only sixty-three against it. The opponents of the measure had on their side not only all the prominent champions of religious liberty like Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright, but also Protestant politicians of such devotion to the interests of the church as Mr. Koundell Palmer, afterward Lord Selborne, and Mr. Beresford Hope; and of course they had with them all the Irish Catholic members. Yet the motion for leave to bring in the lull was carried by this overwhelming majority. The ministers had at all events ample justification^ so far as parliamentary tactics were concerned, for the introduction of their measure. [f, however, we come to regard the ministerial proposal as a piece of practical legislation, the case to be made out for them is not strong, nor is the abortive result of their efforts at all surprising. They set out on the enterprise without any real interest in it, or any particular confidence in its success. It is probable thai Lord John Russell alone of all the ministers had any expectation of a satisfactory result to come of the piece of legislation they were attempt- ing. We have seen what Lord Palmerston thought on the whole subject. The ministers were, in fact, in the diffi- culty of all statesmen who bring in a measure, not because 338 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. they themselves are clear as to its necessity or its efficacy, but because they find that something must be done to satisfy public feeling, and they do not know of anything better to do at' the moment. The history of the ecclesias- tical titles bill was, therefore, a history of blunder, unlucky accident, and failure from the moment it was brought in until its ignominious and ridiculous repeal many years after, and when its absolute impotence had been not merely demonstrated but forgotten. The government at first, as we have seen, resolved to impose a penalty on the assumption of ecclesiastical titles by Roman Catholic prelates from places in the United Kingdom, and to make null and void all acts done or bequests made in* virtue of such titles. But they found that it would be absolutely impossible to apply such legisla- tion to Ireland. In that country a Catholic hierarchy had long been tolerated, and all the functions of a regular hier- archy had been in full and formal operation. To apply the new measure to Ireland would have been virtually to repeal the Roman Catholic relief act and restore the penal laws. On the other hand, the ministers were not willing to make one law against titles for England and another for Ireland. They were driven, therefore, to the course of withdrawing two of the stringent clauses of the bill, and leaving it little more than a mere declaration against the assumption of unlawful titles. But by doing this they furnished stronger reasons for opposition to both of the two very different parties who had hitherto denounced their way of dealing with the crisis. Those who thought the bill did not go far enough before were of course indig- nant at the proposal to shear it of whatever little force it had originally possessed. They, on the other hand, who had opposed it as a breach of the principle of religious liberty could now ridicule it with all the greater effect on the ground that it violated a principle without even the pretext of doing any practical good as a compensation. In the first instance, the ministry might plead that the crisis was exceptional; that it called for exceptional measures; that something must be done; and that they could not stand on ceremony even witli the principle of religious liberty when the interest of the state was at stake. Xow they left it in the power of their opponents to say that they were breaking a principle for the sake of introducing a nonentity. A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 339 The debates were long, fierce, and often passionate. The bill, even cut down as it was, had a vast majority on its side. But some of the most illustrious names in the House of Commons were recorded against it; by far the most eloquent voices in the house were raised to condemn it. The Irish Roman Catholic members set up a persistent opposition to it, and up to a certain period of its progress put in requisition all the forms of the house to impede it. 'J 1 Ins part of the story ought not to be passed over without mention of the fact that among other effects produced by the ecclesiastical titles bill, perhaps the most distinct was the creation of the most worthless band of agitators Avho ever pretended to speak with the voice of Ireland. These were the men who were called in the house " the pope's brass band," and who were regarded with as much dislike and distrust by all intelligent Irish Catholics and Irish Nationalists as by the most inveterate Tories. These men leaped into influence by their denunciations of the eccle- siastical titles bill. They were successful for a time in ] (aiming themselves off as patriots upon Irish constitu- encies. They thundered against the bill; they put in mo- tion every mechanism of delay and obstruction; some of them were really clever and eloquent; most of them were loud voiced; they had a grand and heaven-sent opportunity given to them, and they made use of it. They had a leader, the once famous John Sadleir. This man possessed marked ability, and was further gifted with an unscrupu- lous audacity at least equal to his ability. He went to work deliberately to create for himself a band of followers by whose help he might mount to power. He was a financial swindler as well as a political adventurer. By means of the money he had suddenly acquired and by virtue of his furious denunciations' of the anti-Catholic policy of the government, he was for a time able to work the Irish popular constituencies so as to get his own followers into the house and become for the hour a sort of little O'Con- Dell. lie had with him some two or three honest men, whom he deluded into a belief in the sincerity of himself and his gang of swindling adventurers; and it is only fair to say that by far the most eloquent man of the party appears to have been one of those on whom Sadleir was thus able to impose. Mr. Sadleir's band afterward came to sad grief. He committed suicide himself to escape the 340 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. punishment of his frauds; some of his associates fled to foreign countries and hid themselves under feigned names. James Sadleir, brother and accomplice of John, was among these, and underwent that rare mark of degradation in our days, a formal expulsion from the House of Commons. The pope's brass band and its subsequent history, culmi- nating in the suicide on Hampstead Heath, was about the only practical result of the ecclesiastical titles bill. The bill, reduced in stringency as has been described, made, however, some progress through the house. It was interrupted at one stage by events which had nothing to do with its history. The government got into trouble of another kind. At the opening of the session Mr. Disraeli introduced a motion to the effect that the agricultural dis- tress of the country called upon the government to intro- duce without delay some measures for its relief. This motion was in fact the last spasmodic cry of protection. Many influential politicians still believed that the cause of protection was not wholly lost; that a reaction was pos- sible; that the free trade doctrine would prove a failure and have to be given up; and they regarded Mr. Disraeli's as a very important motion calling for a strenuous effort in its favor. The government treated the motion as one for restored protection, and threw all their strength into the struggle against it. They won ; but only by a majority of fourteen. A few days after, Mr. Locke King, member for East Surrey, asked for leave to bring in a bill to assimilate the county franchise to that existing in boroughs. Lord John Eussell opposed the motion, and the government were defeated by one hundred votes against fifty-two. It was evident that this was only what is called a "snap" vote; that the house was taken by surprise, and that the result in no wise represented the general feeling of parlia- ment. But still it was a vexatious occurrence for the min- istry, already humiliated by the small majority they had obtained on Disraeli's motion. Their budget had already been received with very general marks of dissatisfaction. The chancellor of the exchequer only proposed a partial and qualified repeal of the window tax, an impost which was justly detested, and he continued the income tax. The budget was introduced shortly before Mr. Locke King's motion, and every day that had elapsed since its introduction only more and more developed the public dis- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 341 satisfaction with which it was regarded. Under all these circumstances Lord John Russell felt that he had no alternative but to tender his resignation to the queen. Leaving- his ecclesiastical titles bill suspended in air, he announced that he could no longer think of carrying on the government of the country. The question was, who should succeed him. The queen sent for Lord Stanley, afterward Lord Derby. Lord Stan- ley offered to do his best to form a government, but was not at all sanguine about the success of the task nor eager to undertake it. He even recommended that before he made any experiment Lord John Russell should try if he could not do something by getting some of the Peelit.es, as they were then beginning to be called — the followers of Sir Robert Peel who had held with him to the last — to join him and thus patch up the government anew. This was tried, and failed. The Peelites would have nothing to do with the ecclesiastical titles bill, and Lord John Russell would not go on without it. On the other hand, Lord Aberdeen, the chief of the Peelites in the House of Lords, would not attempt to form a ministry of his own, frankly acknowledging that in the existing temper of the country it would be impossible for any government to get on with- out legislating in some way on the papal aggression. There was nothing for it but for Lord Stanley to try. He tried without hope, and of course he was unsuccessful. The position of parties was very peculiar. It was impos- sible to form any combination which could really agree upon anything. There were three parties out of which a ministry might be formed. These were the Whigs, the Conservatives, and the Peelites. The Peelites were a very rising and promising body of men. Among them were Sir James Graham, Lord Canning, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, and some others almost equally well known. Only these three groups were fairly in the competition for office; for the idea of a ministry of Radi- cals and Manchester men was not then likely to present itself to any official mind. But how could any one put together a ministry formed from a combination of these three? The Peelites would not coalesce with the Tories because of the protection question, to which Mr. Disraeli's motion had given a new semblance of vitality, and because of Lord Stanley's own declaration that he still regarded 342 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the policy of free trade as only an experiment. The Peel- ites would not combine with the Whigs because of tbe ecclesiastical titles bill. The Conservatives would not dis- avow protective ideas; the Whigs would not give up the ecclesiastical titles bill. No statesman, therefore, could form a government without having to count on two great parties being against him on one question or the other. All manner of delays took place. The Duke of Wellington was consulted. Lord Lansdowne was consulted. The wit of man could suggest nothing satisfactory. The conditions for extracting any satisfactory solution did not exist. There was nothing better to be done than to ask the minis- ters who had resigned to resume their places and muddle on as they best could. It is not enough to say that there was nothing better to be done; there was nothing else to be done. They were at all events still administering the affairs of the country, and no one would relieve them of the task. Ipso facto they had to stay. The ministers returned to their places and resumed the ecclesiastical titles bill. It was then that they made the change in its conditions which has already been mentioned, and thus created new argument against them on both sides of the House of Commons. They struck out of the bill every word that might appear like an encroachment on the Koman Church within the sphere of its own ecclesiastical operations, and made it simply an act against the public and ostentatious assumption of illegal titles. The bill was wrangled over until the end of June, and then a large number, some seventy, of the Irish Catholic members pub- licly seceded from the discussion and announced that they would take no further part in the divisions. On this some of the strongest opponents of the papal aggression, led by Sir Frederick Thesiger, afterward Lord ■ Chelmsford, brought in a series of resolutions intended to make the bill more stringent than it had been even as originally intro- duced. The object of the resolutions was principally to give the power of prosecuting and claiming a penalty to anybody, provided he obtained the consent of the law officers of the crown, and to make penal the intoduction of bulls. The government opposed the introduction of these amendments, and were put in the awkward position of having to act as antagonists of the party in the country who represented the strongest hostility to the papal aggres- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 343 sion. Thus for the moment the author of the Durham letter was seemingly converted into a champion of the Roman Catholic side of the controversy. His champion- ship was ineffective. The Irish members took no part in the controversy, and the government were beaten by the ultra-Protestant party on every division. Lord John Rus- sell was bitterly taunted by various of his opponents, and was asked with indignation why he did not withdraw the bill when it ceased to be any longer his own scheme. He probably thought by this time that it really made very little matter what bill was passed so long as any bill was passed, and that the best thing to do was to get the con- troversy out of the way by any process. He did not there- fore withdraw the bill, although Sir Frederick Thesiger carried all his stringent clauses. When the measure came on for a third reading, Lord John Russell moved the omission of the added clauses but he was defeated by large majorities. The bill was done with so far as the House of Commons was concerned. After an eloquent and powerful protest from Mr. Gladstone against the measure, as one disparaging to the great principle of religious freedom, the bill was read a third time. It went up to the House of Lords, was passed there without alteration although not without opposition, and soon after received the royal assent. This was practically the last the world heard about it. In the Roman Church everything went on as before. The new cardinal archbishop still called himself Archbishop of Westminster; some of the Irish prelates made a point of ostentatiously using their territorial titles, in letters addressed to the ministers themselves. The bitterness of feeling which the papal aggression and the legislation against it had called up did not indeed pass away very soon. It broke out again and again, sometimes in the form of very serious riot. It turned away at many an election the eyes and minds of the constituencies from questions of pro- found and genuine public interest to dogmatic controversy and the hates of jarring sectaries. It furnished political capital for John Sadleir and his band, and kept them flourishing for awhile; and it setup in the Irish popular mind a purely imaginary figure of Lord John Russell, who became regarded as the malign enemy of the Catholic both and of all religious liberty. But save for the quarrels 344 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. aroused at the time, the act of the pope and the act of par- liament were alike dead letters. Nothing came of the papal bull. England was not restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Can- terbury and the Bishop of London retained their places and their spiritual jurisdiction as before. Cardinal Wise- man remained only a prelate of Roman Catholics. On the other hand, the ecclesiastical titles act was never put in force. Nobody troubled about it. Many years after, in 1871, it was quietly repealed. It died in such obscurity that the outer public hardly knew whether it was above ground or below. Certainly, if the whole agitation showed that England was thoroughly Protestant, it also showed that English Protestants had not much of the persecuting spirit. They had no inclination to molest their Catholic neighbors, and only asked to be let alone. The pope, they believed, had insulted them; they resented the insult; that was all. CHAPTER XXI. THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PAKK. The first of May, 1851, will always be memorable as the day on which the great exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. The year 1851, indeed, is generally associated in the memory of Englishmen with that first Great Interna- tional Exhibition. As we look back upon it pleasant recol- lections come up of the great glass palace in Hyde Park, the palace "upspringing from the verdant sod," which Thackeray described so gracefully and with so much poetic feeling. "The strange crowds of the curious of all provinces and all nations are seen again. The marvelous, and at that time wholly unprecedented, collections of the pro- ducts of all countries; the glitter of the Koh-i-Noor, the palm trees beneath the glass roof, the leaping fountains, the statuary, the ores, the ingots, the huge blocks of coal, the lacework, the loomwork, the Oriental stuffs — all these made on the mind of the ordinary inexpert a confused im- pression of lavishness and profusion and order and fantastic beauty which was then wholly novel, and could hardly be recalled except in mere memory. The novelty of the ex- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 345 periment was that which made it specially memorable. Many exhibitions of a similar kind have taken place since. Some of these far surpassed that of Hyde Park in the splendor and variety of the collections brought together. Two of them at least — those of Paris in 1867 and 1878 — were infinitely superior in the array and display of the pro- ducts, the dresses, the inhabitants of far-divided countries. But the impression which the Hyde Park Exhibition made upon the ordinary mind was like that of a boy's first visit to the play — an impression never to be equaled, no matter by what far superior charm of spectacle it may in after years again and again be followed. Golden indeed were the expectations with which hopeful people welcomed the exhibition of 1851. It was the first organized to gather all the representatives of the world's industry into one great fair; and there were those who seriously expected that men who had once been prevailed upon to meet together in friendly and peaceful rivalry would never again be persuaded to meet in rivalry of a fiercer kind. It seems extraordinary now to think that any sane person can have indulged in such expectations, or can have imagined that the tremendous forces gener- ated by the rival interests, ambitions, and passions of races could be subdued into harmonious co-operation by the good sense and good feeling born of a friendly meeting. The Hyde Park Exhibition and all the exhibitions that fol- lowed it have uot as yet made the slightest perceptible difference in the warlike tendencies of nations. The Hyde Park Exhibition was often described as the festival to open the long reign of peace. It might as a mere matter of' chronology be called without any impropriety the festi- val to celebrate the close of the short reign of peace. From that year, 1851, it maybe said fairly enough that the world lias hardly known a week of peace. The coup (Petal in France closed the year. The Crimean War began almost immediately after, and was followed by the Indian Mutiny, and that by the war between France and Australia, the long civil war in the United States, the Neapolitan enter- prises of Garibaldi, and the Mexican intervention, until we come to the war between Austria, Prussia, and Denmark; the short sharp struggle for German supremacy between Austria and Prussia, the war between France and Ger- niany, and the war between Russia and Turkey. {Such 346 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. were, in brief summary, the events that quickly followed the great inaugurating Festival of Peace in 1851. Of course those who organized the great exhibition were in no way responsible for the exalted and extravagant expec- tations which were formed as to its effects on the history of the world and the elements of human nature. But there Avas a great deal too much of the dithyrambic about the style in which many writers and speakers thought fit to describe the exhibition. With some of these all this was the result of genuine enthusiasm. In other instances the extravagance was indulged in by persons not habitually ex- travagant, but, on the contrary, very sober, methodical, and calculating, who by the very fact of their possessing eminently these qualities were led into a total misconcep- tion of the influence of such assemblages of men. These calm and wise persons assumed that because they them- selves, if shown that a certain course of conduct was for their material and moral benefit, would instantly follow it and keep to it, it must therefore follow that all peoples and states were amenable to the same excellent principle of self-discipline. War is a foolish and improvident, not to say immortal and atrocious, way of trying to adjust our disputes, they argued; let peoples far divided in geograph- ical situation be only brought together and induced to talk this over, and see how much more profitable and noble is the rivalry of peace in trade and commerce, and they will never think of the coarse and brutal arbitrament of battle any more. Not a few others, it must be owned, indulged in the high-flown glorification of the reign of peace to come because the exhibition was the special enterprise of the prince consort, and they had a natural aptitude for the production of courtly strains. But among all these classes of paean-singers it did happen that a good deal of unmerited discredit was cast upon the results of the great exhibition; for the enterprise was held responsible for illu- sions it had of itself nothing to do with creating, and dis- appointments which were no consequence of any failure on its part, Even upon trade and production it is very easy to exaggerate the beneficent influences of an international exhibition. But that such enterprises have some bene- ficial influence is beyond doubt; and that they are inter- esting, instructive, well calculated to educate and refine the minds of nations, may be admitted by the least enthu- siastic of men. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 347 The first idea- of the exhibition was conceived by Prince Albert; and it was his energy and influence which suc- ceeded in carrying the idea into practical execution. Prob- ably no influence less great than that which his station gave to the prince would have prevailed to carry to success so difficult an enterprise. There had been industrial ex- hibitions before on a small scale and of local limit ; but if the idea of an exhibition in which all the nations of the world were to compete had occurred to other minds before, as it may well have done, it was merely as a vague thought, a day-dream, without any claim to a practical realization. Prince Albert was president of the society of arts, and this position secured him a platform for the effective promulga- tion of his ideas. On June 30, 1849, he called a meeting of the society of arts at Buckingham Palace. He proposed that the society should undertake the initiative in the pro- motion of an exhibition of the works of all nations. The main idea of Prince Albert was that the exhibition should be divided into four great sections — the first to contain raw materials and produce; the second machinery for ordinary industrial and productive purposes and mechanical inventions of the more ingenious kind; the third manu- factured articles; and the fourth sculpture, models, and the illustrations of the plastic arts generally. The idea was at once taken up by the society of arts, and by their agency spread abroad. On October 17th in the same year a meeting of merchants and bankers was held in London to promote the success of the undertaking. In the first few days of 1850 a formal commission was appointed "for the promotion of the exhibition of the works of all nations, to be holden in the year 1851." Prince Albert was appointed president of the commission. The enterprise was now fairly launched. A few days after a meeting was held in the Mansion House to raise funds in aid of the exhibition, and ten thousand pounds was at once collected. This of course was but the beginning, and a guarantee fund of two hundred thousand pounds was very soon obtained. On March 21st in the same year the lord mayor of London gave a banquet at the Mansion House to the chief magis- trates of the cities, towns, and boroughs of the United Kingdom, for the purpose of inviting their co-operation in support of the undertaking. Prince Albert was present, and spoke. He had cultivated the art of speaking with 348 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. much success, and had almost entirely overcome whatever difficulty stood in his way from his foreign birth and edu- cation. He never quite lost his foreign accent. No man coming to a new country at the age of manhood as Prince Albert did ever acquired the new tongue in such a manner as to lose all trace of a foreign origin ; and to the end of his career Prince Albert spoke with an accent which, however carefully trained, still betrayed its early habitudes. But, except for this slight blemish, Prince Albert may be said to have acquired a perfect mastery of the English language; and he became a remarkably good public speaker. He had indeed nothing of the orator in his nature. It was but the extravagance of courtliness which called his polished and thoughtful speeches oratory. In the prince's nature there was neither the passion nor the poetry that are essential to genuine eloquence; nor were the occasions on which he addressed the English people likely to stimulate a man to eloquence. But his style of speaking was clear, thought- ful, stately, and sometimes even noble. It exactly suited its purpose. It was that of a man who did not set up for an orator; and who, when he spoke, wished that his ideas rather than his words should impress his hearers. It is very much to be doubted whether the English public would be quite delighted to have a prince who was also a really great orator. Genuine eloquence would probably impress a great many respectable persons as a gift not exactly suited to a prince. There is even still a certain distrust of the artistic in the English mind as of a sort of thing which is very proper in professional writers and painters and speakers, but which would hardly become persons of the highest station. Prince Albert probably spoke just as well as he could have done with successful effect upon his English audiences. At the dinner in the Mansion House he spoke with great clearness and grace of the purposes of the great exhibition. It was, he said, to "give the world a true test, a living picture, of the point of industrial development at which the whole of mankind has arrived, and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions." It must not be supposed, however, that the project of the great exhibition advanced wholly without opposition. Many persons were disposed to sneer at it; many were skeptical about its doing any good ; not a few still regarded A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 349 Prince Albert as a foreigner and a pedant, and were slow to believe that anything really practical was likely to be devel- oped under his impulse and protection. A very whimsical sort of opposition was raised in the House of Commons by a once famous eccentric, the late Colonel Sibthorp. Sib- thorp was a man who might have been drawn by Smollett. His grotesque gestures, his overboiling energy, his uncouth appearance, his huge mustache, marked him out as an ob- ject of curiosity in any crowd. He was the subject of one of the most amusing pieces of impromptu parody ever thrown off by a public speaker — that in which O'Connell travestied Dryden's famous lines about the three poets in three distant ages born, and pictured three colonels in three different counties born, winding up with, "The force of nature could no farther go ; to beard the one she shaved the other two." One of the gallant Sibthorp's especial weakness was a distrust and detestation of all for- eigners. Foreigners he lumped together as a race of beings whose chief characteristics were popery and immortality. While three-fourths of the promoters of the exhibition were dwelling with the strongest emphasis on the benefit it would bring by drawing into London the representatives of all nations, Colonel Sibthorp was denouncing this agglomeration of foreigners as the greatest curse that could fall upon England. He regarded foreigners much as Isaac of York, in "Ivanhoe," regards the Knight Templars. " When," asks Isaac in bitter remonstrance, "did Templars breathe aught but cruelty to men and dishonor to women?" Colonel Sibthorp kept asking some such ques- tion with regard to foreigners in general and their ex- pected concourse to the exhibition. In language some- what too energetic and broad for our more polite time, he warned the House of Commons and the country of the consequences to English morals which must come of the influx of a crowd of foreigners at a given season. "Take care," he exclaimed in the House of Commons, "of your wives and daughters; take care of your property and your lives!" He declared that he prayed for some tremendous hailstorm or visitation of lightning to be sent from heaven expressly for the purpose of destroying in advance the building destined for the ill-omened exhibition. When live trade had left nothing else needed to complete the ruin of the nation, the enemy of mankind, he declared, hail 350 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. inspired us with the idea of the great exhibition, so that the foreigners who had first robbed us of our trade might now be enabled to rob us of our honor. The objections raised to the exhibition were not by any means confined to Colonel Sibthorp or to his kind of argu- ment. After some consideration the royal commissioners had fixed upon Hyde Park as the best site for the great build- ing, and many energetic and some influential voices were raised in fierce outcry against what was called the profana- tion of the park. It was argued that the public use of Hyde Park would be destroyed by the exhibition ; that the park would be utterly spoiled ; that its beauty could never be restored. A petition was presented by Lord Campbell to the House of Lords against the occupation of any part of Hyde Park with the exhibition building. Lord Brougham supported the petition with his characteristic impetuosity and vehemence. He denounced the attorney-general with indignant eloquence because that official had declined to file an application to the court of chancery for an injunc- tion to stay any proceeding with the proposed building in the park. He denounced the House of Lords itself for what he considered its servile deference to royalty in the matter of the exhibition and its site. He declared that when he endeavored to raise the question there he was received in dead silence; and he asserted that an effort to bring on a discussion in the House of Commons was received with a silence equally profound and servile. Such facts, he shouted, only showed more painfully " that abso- lute prostration of the understanding which takes place even in the minds of the bravest when the word prince is mentioned in this country!" It is probably true enough that only the influence of a prince could have carried the scheme to success against the storms of opposition that began to blow at various periods and from different points. Undoubtedly a vast number, probably the great majority, of those who supported the enterprise in the beginning did so simply because it was the project of a prince. Their numbers and their money enabled it to be carried on, and secured it the test of the world's examination and approval. In that sense the very servility which accepts with delight whatever a prince proposes stood the exhibition in good stead; a courtier may plead that if English people in general had been more independent and less given to ad- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 35I miration of princes, the excellent project devised by Prince Albert would never have had a fair trial. Many times during its progress the prince himself trembled for the success of his scheme. Many a time he must have felt inclined to renounce it, or at least to regret that he had ever taken it up. Absurd as the opposition to the scheme may now seem, it is certain that a great many sensible persons thought the moment singularly inopportune for the gathering of large crowds, and were satisfied that some inconvenient, if not dangerous, public demonstration must be provoked. The smoldering embers of Chartism, they said, were every where under society's feet. The crowds of foreigners who Colonel Sibthorp so dreaded would, calmer people said, naturally include large numbers of the " Reds" of all con- tinental nations, who would be only too glad to coalesce with Chartism and discontent of all kinds, for the purpose of disturbing the peace of London. The agitation caused by the papal aggression was still in full force and aflame. By an odd coincidence the first column of the exhibition building had been set up in Hyde Park almost at the same moment with the issue of the papal bull establishing a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England. These conditions looked gloomy for the project. " The opponents of the exhibition," wrote the prince himself, "work with might and main to throw all the old women here into a panic and to drive myself crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to mur- der Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the plague is certain to ensue from the con- fluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything lias not already swept away. For all this I am "to be responsible, and against all this I have to make efficient provision." Most of the continental sovereigns looked coldly on the under- taking. The king of Prussia took such alarm at the thought of the Red Republicans whom the exhibition would draw together, that at first he positively prohibited his brother, then prince of Prussia, now German emperor, from attending the opening ceremonial; and though he afterward withdrew the prohibition he remained full of doubts and fears as to the personal safety of any royal or princely personage found in Hyde Park on the opening 352 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. day. The Duke of Cambridge, being appealed to on the subject, acknowledged himself also full of apprehensions. The objections to the site continued to grow up to a certain time. "The exhibition," Prince Albert wrote once to Baron Stockmar, his friend and adviser, " is now attacked furiously by the Times, and the House of Commons is going to drive us out of the park. There is immense ex- citement on the subject. If we are driven out of the park, the work is done for." At one time, indeed, this result seemed highly probable; but public opinion gradu- ally underwent a change, and the opposition to the site was defeated in the House of Commons by a large majority. Even, however, when the question of the site had been disposed of, there remained immense difficulties in the way. The press was not on the whole very favorable to the project; Punch, in particular, was hardly ever weary of making fun of it. Such a project, while yet only in embryo, undoubtedly furnished many points on which satire could fasten ; and nothing short of complete success could save it from falling under a mountain of ridicule. No half success would have rescued it. The ridicule was naturally provoked and aggravated to an unspeakable degree by the hyperbolical expectations and preposterous dithyrambics of some of the well-meaning but unwise and somewhat too obstreperously loyal supporters of the enter- prise. To add to all this, as the time for the opening drew near, some of the foreign diplomatists in London began to sulk at the whole project. There were small points of ob- jection made about the position and functions of foreign ambassadors at the opening ceremonial, and what the queen and prince meant for politeness was in one instance at least near being twisted into cause of offense. Up to the last moment it was not quite certain whether an absurd diplomatic quarrel might not have been part of the inaug- ural ceremonies of the opening day. The prince did not despair, however, and the project went on. There was a great deal of difficulty in selecting a plan for the building. Huge structures of brickwork, looking like enormous railway sheds, costly and hideous at once, were proposed ; it seemed almost certain that some one of them must be chosen. Happily, a sudden inspira- tion struck Mr. (afterward Sir Joseph) Paxton, who was then in charge of the Duke of Devonshire's superb grounds, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 353 at Chatsworth. Why not try glass and iron? he asked himself. Why not build a palace of glass and iron large enough to coverall the intended contents of the exhibition, and which should be at once light, beautiful, and cheap? Mr. Paxton sketched out his plan hastily, and the idea was eagerly accepted by the royal commissioners. He made many improvements afterward in his design; but the palace of glass and iron arose within the specified time on the green turf of Hyde Park. The idea so happily hit upon was serviceable in more ways than one to the success of the exhibition. It made the building itself as much an object of curiosity and wonder as the collections under its crystal roof. Of the hundreds of thousands who came to the exhibition a goodly proportion were drawn to Hyde Park rather by a wish to see Paxton's palace of glass than all the wonders of industrial and plastic art that it inclosed. Indeed, Lord Palmerston, writing to Lord Nbrmanby on the day after the opening of the exhibition, said: "The building itself is far more worth seeing than anything in it, though many of its contents are worthy of admiration." Perhaps the glass building was like the ex- hibition project itself in one respect. It did not bring about the revolution which it was confidently expected to create. Glass and iron have not surperseded brick and stone, any more than competitions of peaceful industry have banished arbitrament by war. But the building, like the exhibition itself, fulfilled admirably its more modest and immediate purpose, and was in that way a complete success. The structure of glass is indeed in every mind inseparably associated with the event and the year. The queen herself has written a very interesting account of the success of the opening day. Her description is interesting as an expression of the feelings of the writer, the sense of profound relief and rapture, as well as for tin- sake of the picture it gives of the ceremonial itself. The enthusiasm of the wife over the complete success of the project on which her husband had set his heart and staked Iiis name is simple and touching. If the importance of the undertaking and the amount of fame it was to bring to its author may seem a little over done, not many readers will complain of the womanly and wifely feeling which could not be denied such fervent expression. "The great event," wrote the queen, "has taken place — a complete 354 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and beautiful triumph — a glorious and touching sight, one which I shall ever be proud of for my beloved Albert and my country. . . . The park presented a wonderful spectacle, crowds streaming through it, carriages and troops passing, quite like the coronation day, and for me the same anxiety — no, much greater anxiety, on account of my be- loved Albert. The day was bright, and all bustle and excitement. . . . The Green Park and Hyde Park were one densely crowded mass of human beings, in the highest good humor and most enthusiastic. I never saw Hyde Park look as it did — as far as the eye could reach. A little rain fell just as we started, but before we came near the Crystal Palace the sun shone and gleamed upon the gigantic edifice, uj^on which the flags of all nations Avere floating. . . . The glimpse of the transept through the iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of people filling the galleries and seats around, with the flourish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sen- sation which I can never forget, and I felt much moved. . . The sight as we came to the middle was magical — so vast, so glorious, so touching — one felt, as so many did whom I have since spoken to, filled with devotion — more so than by any service I have ever heard. The tremendous cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains; the organ (with two hundred instruments and six hundred voices, which sounded like nothing), and my beloved husband the author of this peace festival, which united the industry of all nations of the earth — all this was moving indeed, and it was and is a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Albert ! God bless my dearest coun- try, which has shown itself so great to-day! One felt so grateful to the great God, who seemed to pervade all and to bless all." The success of the opening day was indeed undoubted. There were nearly thirty thousand people gathered together witbin the building, and nearly three-quarters of a million of persons lined the way between the exhibition and Buck- ingham Palace; and yet no accident whatever occurred, nor had the police any trouble imposed on them by the conduct of anybody in the crowd. "It was impossible," wrote Lord Palmerston, "for the invited guests of a lady's drawing-room to have conducted themselves with more per- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 355 feet propriety than did this sea of human beings." It is needless to say that there were no hostile demonstrations by Red Republicans or malignant Chartists or infuriated Irish Catholics. The one thing which especially struck foreign observers, and to which many eloquent pens and tongues bore witness, was the orderly conduct of the people. Nor did the subsequent history of the exhibition in any way belie the promise of its opening day. It con- tinued to attract delighted crowds to the last, and more than once held within its precincts at one moment nearly a hundred thousand persons, a concourse large enough to have made the population of a respectable continental capi- tal. In another way the exhibition proved even more suc- cessful than was anticipated. There had been some diffi- culty in raising money in the first instance, and it was thought something of a patriotic risk when a few spirited citizens combined to secure the accomplishment of the undertaking by means of a guarantee fund. But the guarantee fund became in the end merely one of the forms and ceremonials of the exhibition: for the undertaking not only covered its expenses, but left a huge sum of money in the hands of the royal commissioners. The exhibition was closed by Prince Albert on October 15th. That at least may be described as the closing day, for it was then that the awards of prizes were made known in presence of the prince and a large concourse of people. The exhibi- tion itself had actually been closed to the general public on the eleventh of the month. It has been imitated again and again. It was followed by an exhibition in Dublin; an exhibition of the paintings and sculptures of all nations in Manchester; three great exhibitions in Paris; the Inter- national Exhibition in Kensington in 18l!2 — the enterprise too of Prince Albert, although not destined to have his presence at its opening; an exhibition at Vienna, one in Philadelphia, and various others. Where all nations seem to have agreed to pay Prince Albert 's enterprise the com- pliment of imitation, it seems superfluous to say that it was a success. Time has so toned down our expectations in regard to these enterprises that no occasion now arises for the feeling of disappointment which was long associated in the minds of once-sanguine persons with the Crystal Palace of Hyde Park. We look on such exhibitions now as useful agencies in the work of industrial development, and 356 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. in promoting the intercourse of people, and tlms co-opera- ting with various other influences in the general business of civilization. But the impressions produced by the Hyde Park Exhibition were unique. It was the first thing of the kind; the gathering of peoples it brought together was as new, odd, and interesting as the glass building in which the industry of the world was displayed. For the first time in their lives Londoners saw the ordinary aspect of London distinctly modified and changed by the incur- sion of foreigners who came to take part in or to look at our exhibition. London seemed to be playing at holiday in a strange carnival sort of way during the time the exhi- bition was open. The Hyde Park enterprise bequeathed nothing very tangible or distinct to the world, except indeed the palace which, built out of its fabric, not its ruins, so gracefully ornaments one of the soft hills of Sydenham. But the memory of the exhibition itself is very distinct with all who saw it. None of its followers were exactly like it, or could take its place in the recollec- tion of those who were its contemporaries. In a year made memorable by many political events of the greatest importance, of disturbed and tempestuous politics abroad and at home, of the deaths of many illustrious men, and the failure of many splendid hopes, the exhibition in Hyde Park still holds its place in memory — not for what it brought or accomplished, but simply for itself, its sur- roundings, and its house of glass. CHAPTER XXII. PALMEESTON. The death of Sir Eobert Peel had left Lord Palmerston the most prominent, if not actually the most influential, among the statesmen of England. Palmerston's was a strenuous self-asserting character. He loved, whenever he had an opportunity, to make a stroke, as he frequently put it himself, "off his own bat." He had given himself up to the study of foreign affairs as no minister of his time had done. He had a peculiar capacity for understanding foreign politics and people as well as foreign languages; and he had come somewhat to pique himself upon his A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 357 knowledge. As Bacon said that he had taken all learning for his province, Palmerston seemed to have made up his mind that he had taken all European affairs for his prov- ince. His sympathies were markedly liberal. As opinions went then, they might have been considered among states- men almost revolutionary; for the conservative of our day is to the full as liberal as the average Liberal of 1848 and 1850. In all the popular movements going on throughout the continent Palmerston's sympathies were generally with the peoples and against the government; while he had, on the other hand, a very strong contempt, which he took no pains to conceal, even for the very best class of the conti- nental demagogue. It was not, however, in his sympathies that Palmerston differed from most of his colleagues. He was not more liberal even in his views of foreign affairs than Lord John Kussell; he was probably not so consis- tently and on principle a supporter of free and popular institutions. But Lord Palmerston's energetic, heedless temperament, his exuberant animal spirits, and his pro- found confidence in himself and his opinions, made him much more liberal and spontaneous in his expressions of sympathy than a man of Russell's colder nature could well have been. Palmerston seized a conclusion at once, and hardly ever departed from it. He never seemed to care who knew what he thought on any subject. He had a contempt for men of more deliberate temper, and often spoke and wrote as if he thought a man slow in forming an opinion must needs be a dull man, not to say a fool. All opinions not his own he hold in good-humored scorn. In some of his letters we find him writing of men of the most undoubted genius and wisdom, whose views have since stood all the test of time and trial, as if they were mere block- heads for whom no practical man could feel the slightest respect. It would be almost superfluous to say, in describ- ing a man of such a nature, that Lord Palmerston some- times fancied he saw great wisdom and force of character in men for whom neither then nor since did the world in general show much regard. As with a man, so with a cause. Lord Palmerston was to all appearance capricious in his sympathies. Calmer and more earnest minds were sometimes olTended at what seemed a lack of deep-seated principle in his mind and his policy, even when it hap- pened that he and they were in accord as to the course that 358 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ought to be pursued. His levity often shocked them; his blunt, brusque ways of speaking and writing sometimes gave downright offense. In his later years Lord Palmerston's manner in parlia- ment and out of it had greatly mellowed and softened and grown more genial. He retained all the good spirits and the ready, easy, marvelously telling humor: but he had grown more considerate of the feelings of opponents in debate, and he allowed his genuine kindness of heart a freer influence upon his mode of speech. He had grown to prefer on the whole his friend or even his honorable oppo- nent to his joke. They who only remember Palmerston in his very later years in the House of Commons, and who can only recall to memory that bright racy humor which never offended, will perhaps find it hard to understand how many enemies he made for himself at an earlier period by the levity and flippancy of his manner. Many grave statesmen thought that the levity and flippancy were far less dangerous even when employed in irritating his adver- saries in the House of Commons than when exercised in badgering foreign ministers and their governments and sovereigns. Lord Palmerston was unsparing in his lec- tures to foreign states. He was always admonishing them that they ought to lose no time in at once adopting the principles of government which prevailed in England. He not uncommonly put his admonitions in the tone of one who meant to say: "If you don't take my advice you will be ruined, and your ruin will serve you right for being such fools." While, therefore, he was a Conservative in home politics, and never even professed the slightest per- sonal interest in any projects of political reform in England, he got the credit all over the continent of being a suj> porter, promoter, and patron of all manner of revolutionary movements, and a disturber of the relations between sub- jects and their sovereigns. Lord Palmerston was not inconsistent in thus being a Conservative at home and something like a revolutionary abroad. He was quite satisfied with the state of things in England. He was convinced that when a people had got a well-limited suffrage and a respectable House of Com- mons elected by open vote, a House of Lords, and a consti- tutional sovereign, they had got all that in a political sense man has to hope for. He was not a far-seeing man, nor a a msTonr of our own times. 359 man who much troubled himself about what a certain class of writers and thinkers are fond of calling "problems of life." It did not occur to him to think that, as a matter of absolute necessity, the very reforms we enjoy in one day are only putting us into a mental condition to aspire after and see the occasion for further reforms as the days go on. But he clearly saw that most continental countries were governed on a system which was not only worn out and decaying, but which was the source of great practical and personal evils to their inhabitants. He desired, therefore, for every country a political system like that of Great Britain, and neither for Great Britain nor for any other country did he desire anything more. He was accordingly looked upon by continental ministers as a patron of revolu- tion, and by English Eadicals as the steady enemy of political reform. Both were right from their own point of view. The familiar saying among continental Conserva- tives was expressed in the well-known German lines, which affirm that, "If the devil had a son, he must be surely Palmerston." On the other hand, the English Radical party regarded him as the most formidable enemy they had. Mr. Cobden deliberately declared him to be the worst minister that had ever governed England. At a later period, when Lord Palmerston invited Cobden to take office under him, Cobden referred to what he had said of Palmerston, and gave this as a reason to show the impos- sibility of his serving such a chief. The good-natured statesman only smiled, and observed that another public man who had just joined his administration had often said tilings as hard of him in other days. "Yes," answered Cobden, quietly, "but I meant what I said." Palmerston, therefore, had many enemies among Euro- pean statesmen. It is now certain that the queen fre- quently winced under the expressions of ill-feeling which were brought to her ears as affecting England, and, as she supposed, herself, and which she believed to have been drawn on her by the inconsiderate and impulsive conduct of Palmerston. The prince consort, on whose advice the queen very naturally relied, was a man of singularly calm and earnest nature. He liked to form his opinions delib- erately and slowly, and disliked expressing any opinion until his mind was well made up. Lord Palmerston, when secretary for foreign affairs, was much in the habit of writ- 300 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. ing and answering despatches on the spur of the moment, and without consulting either the queen or his colleagues. Palmerston complained of the long delays which took place on several occasions when, in matters of urgent importance, he waited to submit despatches to the queen before send- ing them off. He was of opinion that during the memor- able controversy on the Spanish marriages the interests of England were once in danger of being compromised by the delay thus forced upon him. He contended too that where the general policy of a state was clearly marked out and well-known, it would have been idle to insist that a foreign secretary capable of performing the duties of his office should wait to submit for the inspection and approval of the sovereign and his colleagues every scrap of paper he wrote on before it was allowed to leave England. If such precautions were needful, Lord Palmerston contended, it could only be because the person holding office of foreign secretary was unfit for his post ; and he ought, therefore to be dismissed, and some better qualified man put in his place. Of course there is some obvious justice in this view of the case. It would perhaps have been unreason- able to expect that, at a time when the business of the for- eign office had suddenly swelled to unprecedented magni- tude, the same rules and formalities could be kept up which had suited slower and less busy days. But the complaint made by the queen was not that Palmerston failed to con- sult her on every detail and to submit every line relating to the organization of the foreign office for her approval before he sent it off. The complaint was clear, and full of matter for very grave consideration. The queen com- plained that on matters concerning the actual policy of the state, Palmerston was in the habit of acting on his own independent judgment and authority; that she found her- self more than once thus pledged to a course of policy which she had not had an opportuntiy of considering, and would not have approved if she had had such an oppor- tunity; and that she hardly ever found any question abso- lutely intact and uncompromised when it was submitted to her judgment. The complaint was justified in many cases. Lord Palmerston frequently acted in a manner which almost made it seem as if he were purposely ignoring the authority of the sovereign. In part this came from the natural impatience of a quick man confident in his own A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 361 knowledge of a subject, and chafing at any delay which he thought unnecessary and merely formal. But it is not easy to avoid a suspicion that Lord Palmerston's rapidity of action sometimes had a different explanation. Two im- pressions seem to have had a place deeply down in the mind of the foreign secretary. He appears to have felt sure that, roughly speaking, the sympathies of the English people were with the continental movements against the sovereigns, and that the sympathies of the English court were with the sovereigns against the popular movements. In the first belief he was undoubtedly right. In the second he was probably right. It is not likely that a man of Prince Albert's peculiar turn of mind could have admitted much sympathy with revolution against constituted authority of any kind. Even his Liberalism, undoubtedly a deep and genuine conviction, did not lead him to make much allowance for any disturbing impulses. His orderly intellectual nature, with little of fire or passion in it, was prone to estimate everything by the manner in which it stood the test of logical argument. He could understand arguing against a bad system better than he could under- stand taking the risk of making things worse by resisting it. Some of the published memoranda or other writings of Prince Albert are full of a curious interest as showing the way in which a calm, intellectual and earnest man could approach some of the burning questions of the day with the belief apparently that the great antagonisms of systems and of opposing national forces could be argued into moder- ation and persuaded into compromise. In Prince Albert there were two tendencies counteracting each other. His natural sympathies were manifestly with the authority of thrones. His education taught him that thrones can only exist by virtue of their occupants recognizing the fact that they do not exist of their own authority, and taking care that they do not become unsuited to the time. The influ- ence of Prince Albert would therefore be something very different from the impulses and desires of Lord Palmer- ston. It is hardly to be doubted that Palmerston some- times acted upon this conviction. He thought he under- stood better than others not only the tendencies of events in foreign politics, but also the tendencies of English pub- lic opinion with regard to them. He well knew that so long as he had public opinion with him, no influence could 362 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. long prevail against him. His knowledge of English pnl> lie opinion was something like an instinct. It could always be trusted. It had, indeed, no far reach. Lord Palmerston never could be relied upon for a judgment as to the possible changes of a generation or even a few years. But he was an almost infallible guide as to what a majority of the English people were likely to say if asked at the particular moment when any question was under dispute. Palmerston never really guided, but always followed, the English public, even in foreign affairs. He was, it seems almost needless to say, an incomparably better judge of the direction English sentiment was likely to take than the most acute foreigner put in such a place as Prince Albert's could possibly hope to be. It may be assumed, then, that some at least of Lord Palmerston's actions were dictated by the conviction that he had the general force of that sentiment to sustain him in case his mode of conducting the business of the foreign office should ever be called into account. A time came when it was called into account. The queen and the prince had long chafed under Lord Palmer- ston's cavalier way of doing business. So far back as 1849 her majesty had felt obliged to draw the attention of the foreign secretary to the fact that his office was constitu- tionally under the control of the prime minister, and that the despatches to be submitted for her approval should, therefore, pass through the hands of Lord John Russell. Lord John Russell approved of this arrangement, only sug- gesting — and the suggestion is of some moment in consid- ering the defense of his conduct afterward made by Lord Palmerston — that every facility should be given for the transaction of business by the queen's attending to the draft despatches as soon as possible after their arrival. The queen accepted the suggestion good-humoredly, only plead- ing that she should " not be pressed for an answer within a few minutes, as is done now sometimes." One can see tol- erably well what a part of the difficulty was even from these slight hints. Lord Palmerston was rapid in forming his judgments as in all his proceedings, and when once he had made up his mind was impatient of any delay which seemed to him superfluous. Prince Albert was slow, deliberate, reflective, and methodical. Lord Palmerston was always sure he was right in every judgment he formed, even if it A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 363 were adopted on the spur of the moment; Prince Albert loved reconsideration, and was open to new argument and late conviction. However, the difficulty was got over in 1849. Lord Palmerston agreed to every suggestion, and for the time all seemed likely to go smoothly. It was only for the time. The queen soon believed she had reason to com plain that the new arrangement was not carried out. Tilings were going on, she thought, in just the old way. Lord Palmerston dealt as before with foreign courts according to what seemed best to him at the moment; and his sovereign and his colleagues often only knew of some important despatch or instruction when the thing was done and could not be conveniently or becomingly undone. The prince, at her majesty's request, wrote to Lord John Eussell, complaining strongly of the conduct of Lord Palm- erston. The letter declared that Lord Palmerston had failed in his duty toward her, "and not from oversight or negligence, but upon principle, and with astonishing per- tinacity, against every effort of the queen. Besides which, Lord Palmerston does not scruple to let it appear in public as if the sovereign's negligence in attending to the jiapers sent to her caused delay and annoyance." Even before this it seems that the queen had drawn up a memorandum to lay down in clear and severe language the exact rules by Avhich the foreign secretary must be bound in his dealings with her. The memorandum was not used at that time, as it was thought that the remonstrances of the sovereign and the prime minister alike could hardly fail to have some effect on the foreign secretary. This time, however, the queen appears to have felt that she could no longer refrain; and accordingly the following important memo- randum was addressed by her majesty to the prime minis- ter. It is well worth quoting in full, partly because it be- came asubject of much interest and controversy afterward, and partly because of the tone of peculiar sternness, rare indeed from a sovereign to a minister in our times, in which its instructions are conveyed. "Osborne, August 12, 1850. "With reference to the conversation about Lord Palmer- ston which the queen had with Lord John Russell the other day, and Lord Palmerston \s disavowal that he ever intended any disrespect to her by the various neglects of 364 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. which she has had so long and so often to complain, she thinks it right, in order to prevent mistake for the future, to explain what it is she expects from the foreign secretary. "She requires: " First. That he will distinctly state what he proposes to do in a given case, in order that the queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her royal sanction. " Second. Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbitrarily altered or modified by the minis- ter; such an act she must consider as failure in sincerity toward the crown, and justly to be visited by the exercise of her constitutional right of dismissing that minister. She expects to be kept informed of what passes between him and the foreign ministers, before important decisions are taken based upon that intercourse; to receive the for- eign despatches in good time, and to have the drafts for her approval sent to her in sufficient time to make herself acquainted with their contents before they must be sent off. The queen thinks it best that Lord John Russell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston." The tone of the memorandum was severe, but there was nothing unreasonable in its stipulations. On the contrary, it simply prescribed what every one might have supposed to be the elementary conditions on which the duties of a sovereign and a foreign minister can alone be satisfactorily carried on. Custom as well as obvious convenience demanded such conditions. The Duke of Wellington declared that when he was prime minister no despatch left the foreign office without his seeing it. No sovereign, one would think, could consent to the responsibility of rule on any other terms. We have perhaps got into the habit of thinking, or at least of saying, that the sovereign of a constitutional country only rules through the ministers. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the sover- eign has no constitutional functions whatever provided by our system of government, and that the sole duty of a monarch is to make a figure in certain state pageantry. It has sometimes been said that the sovereign in a country like England is only .the signet ring of the nation. If this were true, it might be asked with unanswerable force why a veritable signet ring costing a few pounds, and never requiring to be renewed, would not serve all purposes quite A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 365 as well and save expense. But the position of the sover- eign is not one of meaningless inactivity. The sovereign has a very distinct and practical office to fulfill in a consti- tutional country. The monarch in England is the chief magistrate of the state, specially raised above party and passion and change in order to be able to look with a clearer eye to all that concerns the interests of the nation. Our constitutional system grows and develops itself year after year as our requirements and conditions change; and the position of the sovereign, like everything else, has under- gone some modification. It is settled now beyond dispute that the sovereign is not to dismiss ministers, or a minister simply from personal inclination or conviction, as until a very recent day it was the right and the habit of English monarchs to do. The sovereign now retains, in virtue of usage having almost the force of constitutional law, the ministers of whom the House of Commons approves. But the crown still has the right, in case of extreme need, of dismissing any minister who actually fails to do his duty. The sovereign is always supposed to understand the busi- ness of the state, to consider its affairs, and to offer an opinion and enforce it by argument on any question sub- mitted by the ministers. When the ministers find that they cannot allow their judgment to bend to that of the sovereign, then indeed the sovereign gives way or the min- isters resign. In all ordinary cases the sovereign gives way. But it was never intended by the English constitu- tion that the ministers and the country were not to have the benefit of the advice and the judgment of a magistrate who is purposely placed above all the excitements and temptations of party, its triumphs and its reverses, and who is assumed therefore to have no other motive than the good of the state in offering an advice. The sovereign would grossly fail in public duty, and would be practically disappointing the confidence of the nation, who consented to act simply as the puppet of the minister, and to sign mechanically and without question every document he laid on the table. In the principles which she laid down therefore, the queen was strictly right. But the memorandum was none the less a severe and a galling rebuke for the foreign secre- tary. We can imagine with what emotions Lord Palmer- ston must have received it. lie was a proud, self-contident 366 a nisTonr of o en own times. man; and it came on him just in the moment of his greatest triumph. Never before, never since, did Lord Palmerston win so signal and so splendid a victory as that which he had extorted by the sheer force of his eloquence and his genius from a reluctant House of Commons in the Don Pacifico debate. Never probably in our parliamentary history did a man of years so advanced accomplish such a feat of eloquence, argument, and persuasion as he had achieved. He stood up before the world the foremost English statesman of the day. It is easy to imagine how deeply he must have felt the rebuke conveyed in the mem- orandum of the queen. We know as a matter of fact, from what he himself afterward said, that he did feel it bitterly. But he kept down his feelings. Whether he was right or wrong in the matter of dispute, he undoubt- edly showed admirable self-control and good temper in his manner of receiving the reprimand. He wrote a friendly and good-humored letter to Lord John Eussell, saying, " I have taken a copy of this memorandum of the queen, and will not fail to attend to the directions which it contains." The letter then gave a few lines of explanation about the manner in which delays had arisen in the sending of despatches to the queen, but promising to return to the old practice, and expressing a hope that if the return required an additional clerk or two, the treasury would be liberal in allowing him that assistance. Nothing could be more easy and pleasant. It might have seemed the ease of absolute carelessness. But it was nothing of the kind. Lord Palmerston had acted deliberately and with a pur- pose. He afterward explained why he had not answered the rebuke by resigning his office. "The paper," he said, " was written in anger by a lady as well as by a sovereign, and the difference between a lady and a man could not be forgotten even in the case of the occupant of the throne." He had "no reason to suppose that this memorandum would ever be seen by or be known to anybody but the queen, John Eussell, and myself." Again, "I had lately been the object of violent political attack, and had gained a great and signal victory in the House of Commons and in public opinion; to have resigned then would have been to have given the fruits of victory to antagonists whom I had defeated, and to have abandoned my political supporters at the very moment when by their means I had triumphed." A HTSTOBY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 36? But beyond all that, Lord Palmerston said that by sud- denly resigning "I should have been bringing for decision at the bar of public opinion a personal quarrel between myself and my sovereign — a step which no subject ought to take if he can possibly avoid it; for the result of such a course must be either fatal to him or injurious to the coun- try. If he should prove to be in the wrong, he would be irretrievably condemned; if the sovereign should be proved to be in the wrong, the monarchy would suffer." It is impossible not to feel a high respect for the manner in which, having come to this determination, Lord Palm- erston at once acted upon it. As he had resolved not to resent the rebuke, he would not allow any gleam of feeliug to creep into his letter which could show that he felt any resentment. Few men could have avoided the temptation to throw into a reply on such an occasion something of the tone of the injured, the unappreciated, the martyr, the wronged one who endures much and will not complain. Lord Palmerston felt instinctively the bad taste and unwisdom of such a style of reply. He took his rebuke in the most perfect good humor. His letter must have sur- prised Lord John Russell. Macaulay observes that Warren Hastings, confident that he knew best and was acting rightly, endured the rebukes of the East India company with a patience which was sometimes mistaken for the patience of stupidity. It is not unlikely that when the prime minister received Lord Palmerston's reply he may have mistaken its patience for the patience of downright levity and indifference. Lord Palmerston went a step farther in the way of con- ciliation. He asked for an interview with Prince Albeit, and he explained to the prince, in the most emphatic and indignant terms, that the accusation against him of being purposely wanting in respect to the sovereign was abso- lutely unfounded. "Had it been deserved, he ought to be no longer tolerated in society." But he does not seem in the course of the interview to have done much more than argue the point as to the propriety and convenience of the system he had lately been adopting in the business of the foreign office. So for the hour the matter dropped. Other events interfered; there were many important questions of domes- tic policy to be attended to; and for some time Lord Palm- 368 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. erston's policy and his way of conducting the business of the foreign office did not invite any particular attention. But the old question was destined to come up again in more serious form than before. The failure of the Hungarian rebellion, through the intervention of Eussia, called up a wide and deep feeling of regret and indignation in this country. The English people had very generally sympathized with the cause of the Hungarians and rejoiced in the victories which up to a certain point the arms of the insurgents had won. When the Hungarians were put down at last, not by the strength of Austria but by the intervention of Russia, the anger of Englishmen in general found loud-spoken expression. Louis Kossuth, who had been dictator of Hungary during the greater part of the insurrection, and who represented, in the English mind at least, the cause of Hungary and her national independence, came to England. He Avas about to take up his residence, as he then intended, in the United States, and on his way thither he visited England. He had applied for permission to pass through French territory, and had been refused the favor. The refusal only gave one additional reason to the English public for welcoming him with especial cordiality. He was accord- ingly received at Southampton, in Birmingham, in Lon- don, with an enthusiasm such as no foreigner except Gari- baldi alone has ever drawn in our time from the English people. There was much in Kossuth himself as well as in his cause to attract the enthusiasm of popular assemblages. He had a strikingly handsome face and a stately presence. He was picturesque and perhaps even theatric in his dress and his bearing. He looked like a picture; all his atti- tudes and gestures seemed as if they were meant to be reproduced by a painter. He was undoubtedly one of the most eloquent men who ever addressed an English popular audience. In one of his imprisonments Kossuth had studied the English language chiefly from the pages of Shakespeare. He had mastered our tongue as few for- eigners have ever been able to do; but what he had mas- tered was not the common colloquial English of the streets and the drawing-rooms. The English he spoke was the noblest in its style from which a student could supply his eloquence: Kossuth spoke the English of Shakespeare. He could address a public meeting for an hour or more A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 369 with a fluency not inferior seemingly to that of Gladstone, with measured dignity and well-restrained force that were not unworthy of Bright; and in curiously expressive, stately, powerful, pathetic English which sounded as if it belonged to a higher time and to loftier interests than ours. Viewed as a mere performance the achievement of Kossuth was unique. It may well be imagined what the meet was on a popular audience when such eloquence was poured forth in glowing eulogy of a cause with Avhich they sympathized, and in denunciation of enemies and prin- ciples they detested. It was impossible not to be im- pressed by the force of some of the striking and dramatic passages in Kossuth's fervid, half-oriental orations. He stretched out his right hand and declared that " the time was when I held the destinies of the House of Hapsburg in the hollow of that hand !" He apostrophized those who fought and fell in the rank and file of Hungary's cham- pions as "unnamed demi-gods." He prefaced a denuncia- tion of the papal policy by an impassioned lament over the brief hopes that the pope was about to head the liberal movement in Italy, and reminded his hearers that " there was a time when the name of Pio Nono, coupled with that of Louis Kossuth, was thundered in vivas along the sunny shores of the Adriatic." Every appeal was vivid and dramatic; every allusion told. Throughout the whole there ran the thread of one distinct principle of interna- tional policy to which Kossuth endeavored to obtain the assent of the English people. This was the principle that if one state intervenes in the domestic affairs of another for the purpose of putting down revolution, it then be- comes the right, and may even he the duty, of any third state to throw in the weight of her sword against the unjustifiable intervention. As a principle this is nothing more than some of the ablest and most thoughtful English- men had advocated before and have advocated since. But in Kossuth's mind and in the understanding of those who heard him, it meant that England ought to declare war against Russia or Austria, or both ; the former for having intervened between the emperor of Austria and the Hun- garians, and the latter for having invited and profited by the intervention. The presence of Kossuth and the reception he got ex- cited a wild anger and alarm among Austrian statesmen. 370 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. The Austrian minister was all sensitiveness and remon- strance. The relations between this country and Austria seemed to become every day more and more strained. Lord Palmerston regarded the anger and the fears of Aus- tria with a contempt which he took no pains to conceal. Before the Hungarian exile had reached this country, while he was still under the protection of the sultan of Turkey, amd Austria was in wild alarm lest he should be set at liberty and should come to England, Lord Palmer- ston wrote to a British diplomatist saying, "What a child- ish, silly fear this is of Kossuth! What great harm could he do to Austria while in France or England? He would be the hero of half a dozen dinners in England at which would be made speeches not more violent than those which have been made on platforms here within the last four months, and he would soon sink into comparative obscur- ity; while, on the other hand, so long as he is a state detenu in Turkey he is a martyr and the object of never- ceasing interest." Lord Palmerston understood thoroughly the temper of his countrymen in general. The English public never had any serious notion of going to war with Austria in obedience to Kossuth's appeal. They sympa- thized generally with Kossuth's cause, or with the cause which they understood him to represent; they were taken with his picturesque appearance and his really wonderful eloquence; they wanted a new hero, and Kossuth seemed positively cut out to supply the want. The enthusiasm cooled down after awhile, as was indeed inevitable. The time was not far off when Kossuth was to make vain appeals to almost empty halls, and when the eloquence that once could cram the largest buildings with excited admirers was to call aloud to solitude. There came a time when Kos- suth lived in England forgotten and unnoticed; when his passing away from England was unobserved as his presence there had long been. There seems, one can hardly help saying, something cruel in this way of suddenly taking up the representative of some foreign cause, the spokesman of some "mission;" and then, when he has been filled with vain hopes, letting him drop down to disappointment and neglect. It was not perhaps the fault of the English people if Kossuth mistook, as many another man in like cir- cumstances has done, the meaning of English popular sympathy. The English crowds who applauded Kossuth A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 371 at first meant nothing more than general sympathy with any hero of continental revolution, and personal admira- tion for the eloquence of the man who addressed them. But Kossuth did not thus accept the homage paid to him. A'o foreigner could have understood it in his place. Lord Palmerston understood it thoroughly, and knew what it meant, and how long it would last. The time, however, had not yet come when the justice of Lord Palmerston's words wag to be established. Kos- suth was the hero of the hour, the comet of the season. The Austrian statesmen were going on as if every word spoken at a Kossuth meeting were a declaration of war against Austria. Lord Palmerston was disposed to chuckle over the anger thus displayed. " Kossuth's reception," he wrote to his brother, "must have been gall and wormwood to the Austrians and to the absolutists generally." Some of Lord Palmerston's colleagues, however, became greatly alarmed when it was reported that the foreign minister was about to receive a visit from Kossuth in person to thank him for the sympathy and protection which England had accorded to the Hungarian refugees while they were still in Turkey, and without which it is only too likely that they would have been handed over to Austria or Russia. It was thought that for the foreign secretary to receive a formal visit of thanks from Kossuth would be regarded by Austria as a recognition by England of the justice of Kossuth's cause and an expression of censure against Austria. If Kossuth were received by Lord Pal- merston, the Austrian ambassador, it was confidently reported, would leave England. Lord John Russell took alarm, and called a meeting of the cabinet to consider the momentous question. Lord Palmerston reluctantly con- sented to appease the alarms of his colleagues by promising to avoid an interview with Kossuth. It does not seem to us that there was much dignity in tlie course taken by the cabinet. Lord Palmerston actually used, and very properly used, all the influence England could command to protect the Hungarian refugees in Turkey. He had intimated very distinctly, and with the full approval of England, that he would use still stronger measures if necessary to protect at once the sultan and the refugees. It seems to us that, having done this openly, and compelled Russia and Austria to bend to his urgency, 372 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. there could be little harm in his receiving a visit from one of the men whom he had thus protected. Austria's sen- sibilities must have been of a peculiar nature indeed if they could bear Lord Palmerston's very distinct and energetic intervention between her and her intended victim, but could not bear to hear that the rescued victim had paid Lord Palmerston a formal visit of gratitude. At all events, it does not seem as if an English minister was bound to go greatly out of his way to conciliate such very eccentric and morbid sensibilities. We owe to a foreign state with which we are on friendly terms a strict and hon- orable neutrality. Our ministers are bound by courtesy, prudence, and good sense not to obtrude any expression of their opinion touching the internal dissensions of a foreign state on the representatives of that state or the public. But they are not by any means bound to treat the enemies of every foreign state as our enemies. They are not ex- pected to conciliate the friendship of Austria, for example, by declaring that any one who is disliked by the emperor of Austria shall never be admitted to speech of them. If Kossuth had come as the professed representative of an established government, and had sought an official inter- view with Lord Palmerston in that capacity, then indeed it would have been proper for the English foreign secretary to refuse to receive him. Our ministers, with perfect propriety, refused to receive Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, the emissaries of the Southern Confederation, as official representatives of any state. But it is absurd to suppose that when the civil war was over in America an English statesman in office would be bound to decline receiving a visit from Mr. Jefferson Davis. We know, in fact, that the ex-king of Naples, the ex-king of Hanover, Don Carlos, and the royal representatives of various lost causes, are constantly received by English ministers and by the queen of England, and no representatives of any of the established governments would think of offering a remonstrance. If the emperor of Austria was likely to be offended by Lord Palmerston's receiving a visit from Kossuth, the only course for an English minister, as it seems to us, was to leave him to be offended, and to recover from his anger whenever he chose to allow common sense to resume pos- session of his mind. The queen of England might as well have taken offense at the action of the American govern- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 373 ment, who actually gave, not merely private receptions, but public appointments, to Irish refugees after the out- break of 1848. Lord Palmerston, however, gave way, and did not receive the visit from Kossuth. The hoped-for result, that of sparing the sensibilities of the Austrian government was not attained. In fact, things turned out a great deal worse than they might have done if the interview between Lord Palmerston and Kossuth had been quietly allowed to come off. Meetings were held to express sympathy with Kossuth, and addresses were voted to Lord Palmerston thanking him for the influence he had exerted in prevent- ing the surrender of Kossuth to Austria. Lord Palmer- ston consented to receive these addresses from the hands of deputations at the foreign office. The deputations repre- sented certain metropolitan parishes, and were the expo- nents of markedly Radical opinions. Some of the ad- dresses contained strong language with reference to the Austrian government and the Austrian sovereign. Lord Palmerston observed in his reply that there were expres- sions contained in the addresses with which he could hardly be expected to concur; but he spoke in a manner which conveyed the idea that his sympathies generally were with the cause which the deputations had adopted. This was the speech containing a phrase which was identi- fied with Palmerston's name, and held to be specially char- acteristic of his way of speaking, and indeed of thinking, for many years after, in fact, to the close of his career. The noble lord told the deputation that the past crisis was one which required on the part of the British government much generalship and judgment; and that "a good deal of judicious bottle-holding was obliged to be brought into play." The phrase, " bottle-holding," borrowed from the prize ring, offended a good many persons who thought the past crisis far too grave, and the issues it involved too stern, to be properly described in language of such levity. But the general public were am used and delighted by the words, and the judicious bottle-holder became more of a popular favorite than ever. Some of the published reports put this a good deal more strongly than Lord Palmerston did, or at least than he intended to do; and he always insisted that he said no more to the deputations than he had often said in the House of Commons; and that he had 374 A' HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. expressly declared he could not concur in some of the ex- pressions contained in the addresses. Still, the whole pro- ceeding considerably alarmed some of Lord Palmerston's colleagues, and was regarded with distinct displeasure by the queen and Prince Albert. The queen specially re- quested that the matter should be brought before a cabinet council. Lord John Russell accordingly laid the whole question before his colleagues, and the general opinion seemed to be that Lord Palmerston had acted with want of caution. No formal resolution was adopted. It was thought that the general expression of opinion from his colleagues and the known displeasure of the queen would be enough to impress the necessity for greater prudence on the mind of the foreign secretary. Lord John Russell, in communicating with her majesty as to the proceedings of the cabinet council, expressed a hope that " it will have its effect upon Lord Palmerston, to whom Lord John Russell has written urging the necessity of a guarded conduct in the present very critical condition of Europe." This let- ter was not written when startling evidence was on its way to show that the irrepressible foreign secretary had been making a stroke off his own bat again ; and a stroke this time of capital importance in the general game of Euro- pean politics. The possible indiscretion of Lord Palmer- ston's dealings with a deputation or two from Finsbury and Islington became a matter of little interest when the country was called upon to consider the propriety of the foreign secretary's dealings with the new ruler of a new state system, with the author of the coup d'etat. The news of the coup cVctat took England by surprise. A shock went through the whole country. Never probably was public opinion more unanimous, for the hour at least, than in condemnation of the stroke of policy ventured on by Louis Naj^oleon, and the savage manner in which it was carried to success. After awhile no doubt a consider- able portion of the English public came to look more leniently on what had been done. Many soon grew accus- tomed to the story of the massacres along the boulevards of Paris and lost all sense of their horror. Some disposed of the whole affair after the satisfactory principle so com- monly adopted by English people in judging of foreign affairs, and assumed that the system introduced by Louis Napoleon was a very good sort of thing — for the French, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 375 After awhile a certain admiration, not to say adulation, of Louis Napoleon, began to be a kind of faith with many Englishmen, and the coup d'etat was condoned and even approved by them. But there can be no doubt that when the story first came to be told in England, the almost uni- versal voice of opinion condemned it as strongly as nearly all men of genuiue enlightenment and feeling condemned it then and since. The queen was particularly anxious that nothing should be said by the British ambassador to com- mit us to any approval of what had been done. On December 4th the queen wrote to Lord John Russell from Osborne, expressing her desire that Lord Normanby, our ambassador at Paris, should be instructed to remain entirely passive and say no word that might be miscon- strued into approval of the action of the prince president. The cabinet met that same day and decided that it was expedient to follow most closely her majesty's instructions. But they decided also, and very properly, that there was no reason for Lord Normanby suspending his diplomatic functions. Lord Normanby had in fact applied for instruc- tions on this point. Next day Lord Palmerston, as foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Normanby, informing him that he was to make no change in his diplomatic relations with the French government. Lord Normanby's reply to this despatch created a startling sensation. Our ambassador wrote to say that when he called on the French minister for foreign affairs to inform him that he had been in- structed by her majesty's government not to make any change in his relations with the French government, the minister, M. Turgot, told him that he had heard two (lavs before from Count Walewski, the French ambassador in London, that Lord Palmerston had expressed to him his entire approval of what Louis Napoleon had done, and his conviction that the prince president could not have acted otherwise. It would not be easy to exaggerate the sensa- tion produced among Lord Palmerston's colleagues by this astounding piece of news. The queen wrote at once to Lord John Russell, asking him if he knew anything about the approval which "the French government pretend to have received;" declaring that she could not "believe in the truth of the assertion, as such an approval given by Lord Palmerston would have been in complete contradic- tion to the line of strict neutrality and passiveness which 376 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the queen had expressed her desire to see followed with regard to the late convulsions at Paris." Lord John Rus- sell replied that he had already written to Lord Palmer- ston, "saying that he presumed there was no truth in the report." The reply of Lord Palmerston was delayed for what Lord Russell thought an unreasonable length of time at such a crisis; but when it came it left no doubt that Lord Palmerston had expressed to Count Walewski his approval of the coup d'etat. Lord Palmerston observed indeed that Walewski had probably given to M. Turgot a somewhat highly colored report of what he had said, and that the report had lost nothing in passing from M. Turgot to Lord Norman by; but the substance of the letter was a full admission that Lord Palmerston approved of what had been done, and had expressed his approval to Count Walewski. The letters of explanation which the for- eign minister wrote on the subject, whether to Lord Nor- manby or to Lord John Russell, were elaborate justifica- tions of the coup (Petal ; they were in fact exactly such arguments as a minister of Louis Napoleon might with great propriety address to a foreign court. They were full of an undisguised and characteristic contempt for any one who could think otherwise on the subject than as Lord. Palmerston thought. In replying to Lord John Russell the contempt was expressed in a quiet sneer; in the letters to Lord Normanby it was obtrusively and offensively put forward. Lord John Russell in vain endeavored to fasten Palmerston's attention on the fact that the question was not whether the action of Louis Napoleon was historically justifiable, but whether the conduct of the English foreign minister in expressing the approval of it without the knowledge and against the judgment of the queen and his colleagues was politically justifiable. Lord Palmerston simply returned to his defense of Louis Napoleon and his assertion that the prince president was only anticipating the intrigues of the Orleans family and the plans of the assembly. Lord Palmerston indeed gave a very minute account of a plot among the Orleans princes for a military rising against Louis Napoleon. No evidence of the exist- ence of any such plot has ever been discovered. Louis Napoleon never pleaded the existence of such a plot in his own justification; it is now, we believe, universally ad- mitted that Lord Palmerston was for once the victim of a. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 377 mere canard. But even if there had been an Orleanist plot, or twenty Orleanist plots, it never has been part of the duty or the policy of an English government to express approval of anything and everything that a foreign ruler may do to anticipate or put down a plot against him. The measures may be unjustifiable in their principle or in their severity; the plot may be of insignificant importance, utterly inadequate to excuse any extraordinary measures. The English government is not in ordinary cases called upon to express any opinion whatever. It had in this ease deliberately decided that all expression of opinion should be scrupulously avoided, lest by any chance the French government should be led to believe that England approved of what had been done. Lord Palmerston endeavored to draw a distinction between the expressions of a foreign secretary in conversa- tion with an ambassador and a formal declaration of opinion. But it is clear that the French ambassador did not understand Lord Palmerston to be merely indulging in the irresponsible gossip of private life, and that Lord Palmerston never said a word to impress him with the belief that their conversation had that colorless and unmeaning character. In any case it was surely a piece of singular indiscretion on the part of a foreign minister to give to the French ambassador, even in private conversa- tion, an unqualified opinion in favor of a stroke of policy of which the British government as a whole, and indeed with the one exception of Lord Palmerston, entirely dis- approved. To give such an opinion without qualification or explanation was to mislead the French ambassador in- the grossest manner and to send him away, as in fact he was sent under the impression that the conduct of his chief had the approval of the sovereign and government of England. Let it be remembered further that the foreign sec- retary who did this had been again and again rebuked for acting on his own responsibility, for saying and doing tilings which pledged, or seemed to pledge, the responsibility of the government without any authority, that a formal threat of dismissal actually hung over his head in the event of his repeating such indiscretions; and we shall be better able to form some idea of the sensation which was created in England by the revelation of Lord Palmerston's c< in- duct. Many of his colleagues had cordially sympathized 378 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. with his views on the occasion of former indiscretions; and even while admitting that he had been indiscreet, ye f acknowledged to themselves that their opinion on th broad question involved was not different from his. Bi. even these drew back from any approval of his conduct ii regard to the coup d'etat. The almost universal judgmer f was that he had gone surprisingly wrong. Not a few, fine ing it impossible to account otherwise for such a proceeding came to the conclusion that he must have been determined somehow to bring about a rupture with his colleagues of the cabinet, and had chosen this high-handed assertion of his will as the best means of flinging his defiance in their teeth. Lord John Russell made up his mind. He came to the conclusion that he could no longer go on with Lord Palm- erston as a colleague in the foreign office, and he signi- fied his decision to Lord Palmerston himself. " While I concur," thus Lord John Russell wrote, "in the foreign policy of which you have been the adviser, and much as I admire the energy and ability with which it has been car- ried into effect, I cannot but observe that misunderstand- ings perpetually renewed, violations of prudence and decorum too frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to have followed from a sound policy and able administration. I am therefore most reluctantly com- pelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct of for- eign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advan- tage to the country." Rather unfortunately, Lord John Russell endeavored to soften the blow by offering, if Lord Palmerston should be willing, to recommend him to the queen to fill the office of lord-lieutenant of Ireland. This was a proposal which we agree with Mr. Evelyn Ashley, Lord Palmerston's biographer, in regarding as almost comical in its character. Lord Palmerston's whole soul was in foreign affairs. He had never affected any particu- lar interest in Irish business. He cared little even for the home politics of England ; it was out of the question to suppose that he would consent to bury himself in the vice- regal court of Dublin and occupy his diplomatic talents in composing disputes for precedence between Protestant deans and Catholic bishops, and in doling out the due pro- portion of invitations to the Various ranks of aspiring traders and shopkeepers and their wives. Lord Palmer- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 379 ston declined the offer with open contempt, and indeed it in hardly he supposed for a moment that Lord John •ussell expected he would have seriously entertained it. he quarrel was complete; Lord Palmerston ceased for le time to be foreign secretary, and his place was taken Lord Granville. 'Seldom has a greater sensation been produced by the moval of a minister. The effect which was created all over Europe was probably just what Lord Palmerston him- self would have desired ; the belief prevailed everywhere that he had been sacrificed to the monarchical and reaction- ary influences all over the continent. The statesmen of Europe were under the impression that Lord Palmerston was put out of office as an evidence that England was about to withdraw from her former attitude of sympathy with the popular movements of the continent. Lord Pal- merston himself fell under a delusion, which seems marvel- ous in a man possessed of his clear, strong common sense. He conceived that he had been sacrificed to reactionary intrigue. He wrote to his brother to say that the real ground for his dismissal was a "weak truckling to the hos- tile intrigues of the Orleans family, Austria, Eussia, Saxony, and Bavaria, and in some degree of the present Prussian government." "All these parties," he said, "found their respective views and systems of policy thwarted by the course pursued by the British government, and they thought that if they could remove the minister they would change the policy. They had for a long time past effectually poisoned the mind of the queen and prince against me, and John Kussell giving way rather encouraged than discountenanced the desire of the queen to remove me from the foreign office." So strongly did the idea prevail that an intrigue of foreign diplomatists had overthrown Palmerston, that the Russian ambassador, Baron Brunnow, took the very ill-advised step of address- ing to Lord John Kussell a disclaimer of any participation in such a proceeding. The queen made a proper comment on the letter of Baron Brunnow by describing it as "very presuming," inasmuch as it insinuated the possibility " of changes of governments in this country taking place at the instigation of foreign ministers." Lord Palmerston was of course entirely mistaken in supposing that any for- eign interference had contributed to his removal from the 380 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. foreign office. The only wonder is how a man so exper- ienced as he could have convinced himself of such a thing; at least, it would be a wonder if one did not know that the most experienced author or artist can always persuade him- self that a disparaging critique is the result of personal and malignant hostility. But that the feeling of the queen and the prince had long been against him can hardly ad- mit of dispute. Prince Albert seems not to have taken any pains to conceal his dislike and distrust of Palmerston. Nearly two years before, when the French ambassador was recalled for a time, the prince wrote to Lord John Russell to say that both the queen and himself were exceedingly sorry to hear of the recall ; adding, " We are not surprised, however, that Lord Palmerston 's mode of doing business should not be borne by the susceptible French govern- ment with the same good humor and forbearance as by his colleagues." At the moment when Lord John Eussell resolved on getting rid of Lord Palmerston, Prince Albert wrote to him to say that " the sudden termination of your difference with Lord Palmerston has taken us much by surprise, as we were wont to see such differences terminate in his carrying his points, and leaving the defense of them to his colleagues, and the discredit to the queen." It is clear from this letter alone that the court was set against Lord Palmerston at that time. The court was sometimes right where Palmerston was wrong; but the fact that he then knew himself to be in antagonism to the court is of importance both in judging of his career and in estimating the relative strength of forces in the politics of England. Lord Palmerston then was dismissed. The meeting of parliament took place on the 3rd of February following, 1852. It would be superfluous to say that the keenest anxiety was felt to know the full reasons of the sudden dismissal. To quote the words used by Mr. Roebuck, "The most marked person in the administration, he around whom all the party battles of the administration had been fought, whose political existence had been made the political existence of the government itself, the per- son on whose being in office the government rested their existence as a government, was dismissed ; their right hand was cut off, their most powerful arm was taken away, and at the critical time when it was most needed." The House of Commons was not long left to wait for an ex- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 381 planation. Lord John Russell made a long speech, in which he went into the whole history of the differences between Lord Palmerston and his colleagues; and, what was more surprising to the house, into a history of the late foreign secretary's differences with his sovereign and the threat of dismissal which had so long been hanging over his head. The prime minister read to the house the queen's memorandum which we have already quoted. Lord John Russell's speech was a great success. Lord Palmerston 's was, even in the estimation of his closest friends, a failure. Far different, indeed, was the effect it produced from the almost magical influence of that won- derful speech on the " Don Pacifico" question, which had compelled even unconvinced opponents to genuine admira- tion. Palmerston seemed to have practically no defense. He only went over again the points put by him in the correspondence already noticed; contended that on the whole he had judged rightly of the French crisis, and that he could not help forming an opinion on it and so forth. Of the queen's memorandum he said nothing. He did not even attempt to explain how it came about that, having received so distinct and severe an injunction, he had ventured deliberately to disregard it in a matter of the greatest national importance. Some of his admirers were of opinion then and long after that the reading of the memorandum must have come on him by surprise; that Lord John Russell must have sprung a mine upon him; and that Pal- merston was taken unfairly and at a disadvantage. But it is certain that Lord John Russell gave notice to his late colleague of his intention to read the memorandum of the queen. Besides, Lord Palmerston was one of the most ready and self-possessed speakers that ever addressed the House of Commons. During the very reading of the memorandum he could have found time to arrange his ideas, and to make out some show of a case for himself. The truth, we believe, is that Lord Palmerston deliberately declined to make any reply to that part of Lord John Rus- sell's speech which disclosed the letter from the queen, lie made up his mind that a dispute between a sovereign and a subject would be unbecoming of both; and be passed over the memorandum in deliberate silence, lie doubtless felt convinced that, even though such indiscretion involved him for the moment in seeming defeat, it would in the 382 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. long run reckon to his credit and his advantage. Lord Dalling, better known as Sir Henry Bulwer, was present during the debate, and formed an opinion of Palmerston's conduct which seems in every way correct and farseeing. "I must say," Lord Dalling writes, "that I never admired him so much as at this crisis. He evidently thought he had been ill-treated ; but I never heard him make an unfair or irritable remark, nor did he seem in anywise stunned by the blow he had received, or dismayed by the isolated position in which he stood. I should say that he seemed to consider that he had a quarrel put upon him which it was his wisest course to close by receiving the fire of- his adversary and not returning it. He could not in fact have gained a victory against the premier on the ground which Lord John Russell had chosen for the combat which would not have been more permanently disadvantageous to him than a defeat. The faults of which he had been accused did not touch his own honor nor that of his country. Let them be admitted and there was an end of the matter. By and by an occasion would probably arise, in which he might choose an advantageous occasion for giving battle, and he was willing to wait calmly for that occasion." Lord Dalling judged accurately so far as his judgment went. But while we agree with him in thinking that Lord Palmerston refrained from returning his adversary's fire for the reasons Lord Dalling has given, we are strongly of opinion that other reasons too influenced Palmerston. He knew that he was not at that time much liked or trusted by the queen and Prince Albert. He was not sorry that the fact should be made known to the world. He thoroughly understood English public opinion and was not above taking advantage of its moods and its prejudices. He did not think a statesman would stand any the worse in the general estimation of the English public then because it was known that he was not admired by Prince Albert. But the almost universal opinion of the House of Com- mons and of the clubs was that Lord Palmerston's career was closed. "Palmerston is smashed!" was the common saying of the clubs. A night or two after the debate Lord Dalling met Mr. Disraeli on the staircase of the Russian Embassy, and Disraeli remarked to him that " there was a Palmerston. " Lord Palmerston evidently did not think so. The letters A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 383 he wrote to friends immediately after his fall show him as jaunty and full of confidence as ever. He was quite satis- fied with the way things had gone. He waited calmly for what he called a few days afterward, " My tit-for-tat with John Russell," which came ahout indeed sooner than even he himself could well have expected. We have not hesitated to express our opinion that throughout the whole of this particular dispute Lord Pal- merston was in the wrong. He was in the wrong in many, if not most, of the controversies which had preceded it. That is to say, he was wrong in committing England, as he so often did, to measures which had not had the approval of the sovereign or his colleagues. In the mem- orable dispute which brought matters to a crisis he seems to us to have been in the wrong not less in what he did than in his manner of doing it. Yet it ought not to have been difficult for a calm observer even at the time to see that Lord Palmerston was likely to have the best of the controversy in the end. The faults of which he was prin- cipally accused were not such as the English people would find it very hard to forgive. He was said to be too brusque and high-handed in his dealings with foreign states and ministers; but it did not seem to the English people in general as if this was an offense for which his own countrymen were bound to condemn him too severely. There was a general impression that his influence was ex- ercised on behalf of popular movements abroad; and an impression nearly as general that if he had not acted a good deal on his own impulses and of his own authority he could hardly have served any popular cause so well. The cni/p d'etat certainly was not popular in England. For a long time it was a subject of general reprehension; but even at that time men who condemned the coup d'etat were not disposed to condemn Lord Palmerston over-much because, acting as usual on a personal impulse, he had in that instance made a mistake. There was even in his error something dashing, showy and captivating to the general public. He made the influence of England felt, people said. His chief fault was that he was rather too strong for those around him. If any grave crisis came, he, it was murmured, and he alone, would be equal to the occasion and would maintain the dignity of England. Neither in war nor in statesmanship does a man suffer much 384 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. loss of popularity by occasionally disobeying orders and accomplishing daring feats. Lord Palmerston saw his way clearly at a critical period of his career. He saw that at that time there was, rightly or wrongly, a certain jealousy of the influence of Prince Albert, and he did not hesitate to take advantage of the fact. He bore his temporary dis- grace with well-justified composure. " The devil aids him surely," says Sussex, speaking to Ealeigh of Leicester in Scott's "Kenilworth," "for all that would sink another ten fathoms deep seems but to make him float the more easily." Some rival may have thought thus of Lord Palmerston. CHAPTER XXIII. BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE — DEATH OF "THE DUKE." The year 1852 was one of profound emotion, and even excitement, in England. An able writer has remarked that the history of the continent of Europe might be traced through the history of England, if all other sources of information were destroyed, by the influence which every great event in continental affairs produces on the mood and policy of England. As the astronomer infers the existence and the attributes of some star his keenest glass will not reveal by the perturbations its neighorhood causes to some body of light within its ken, so the student of English history might well discover commotion on the continent by the evidence of a corresponding movement in England. All through the year 1852 the national mind of England was disturbed. The country was stirring itself in cjuite an unusual manner. A military spirit was ex- hibiting itself everywhere, not unlike that told of in Sheakespeare's "Henry the Fourth." The England of 1852 seems to threaten that "ere this year expire we bear our civil swords and native fire as far as France. " At least the civil swords were sharpened in order that the country might be ready for a possible and even an anticipated inva- sion from France. The volunteer movement sprang into sudden existence. All over the country corps of young volunteers were being formed. An immense amount of national enthusiasm accompanied and acclaimed the forma- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 385 tion of the volunteer army, which received the sanction of the crown early in the year, and thus became a national institution. The meaning of all this movement was explained some years after by Mr. Tennyson, in a string of verses which did more honor perhaps to his patriotic feeling than to his poetic genius. The verses are absurdly unworthy of Tennyson as a poet; but they express with unmistakable clearness the popular sentiment of the hour; the condition of uncertainty, vague alarm, and very general determina- tion to be ready at all events for whatever might come. "Form, form, riflemen, form," wrote the laureate; "bet- ter a rotten borough or two than a rotten fleet and a town in flames." "True that we have a faithful ally, but only the devil knows what he means." This was the alarm and the explanation. We had a faithful ally, no doubt; but we certainly did not quite know what he meant. All the earlier part of the year had witnessed the steady prog- ress of the prince president of France to an imperial throne. The previous year had closed upon his coup d'etat. He had arrested, imprisoned, banished, or shot his principal enemies, and had demanded from the French people a presidency for ten years, a ministry responsible to the executive power — himself alone — and two political chambers to be elected by universal suffrage. Nearly five hundred prisoners, untried before any tribunal, even that of a drum-head had been shipped off to Cayenne. The streets of Paris had been soaked in blood. The president instituted a plebiscite, or vote of the whole people, of course he got all he asked for. There was no arguing witli the commander of twenty legions, and of such legions as those that had operated with terrible efficiency on the boulevards. The first day of the new year saw the reli- gious ceremony at Notre Dame to celebrate the acceptance of the ten year's presidency by Louis Napoleon. The same day a decree was published in the name of the presi- dent declaring that the French eagle should be restored to the standards of the army, as a symbol of the regenerated military genius of France. A few days after, the prince president decreed the confiscation of the property of the Orleans family and restored titles of nobility in France. The birthday of the Emperor Napoloen was declared by decree to be the only national holiday. When the two 386 A EJ8T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. legislative bodies came to be sworn in, the president made an ' announcement which certainly did not surprise many persons, but which nevertheless sent a thrill abroad over all parts of Europe. If hostile parties continued to plot against him, the president intimated, and to question the legitimacy of the power he had assumed by virtue of the national vote, then it might be necessary to demand from the people, in the name of the repose of France, " a new title which will irrevocably fix upon my head the power with which they have invested me." There could be no further doubt. The Bonapartist empire was to be restored. A new Napoleon was to come to the throne. "Only the devil knows what he means" indeed. So people were all saying throughout England in 1852. The scheme went on to its development and before the year was quite out Louis Napoleon was proclaimed emperor of the Freuch. Men had noticed as a curious, not to say ominous, coincidence that on the very day when the Duke of Wellington died the Moniteur announced that the French people were receiving the prince president every- where as the emperor-elect and as the elect of God; and another French journal published an article hinting not obscurely at the invasion and conquest of England as the first great duty of a new Napoleonic empire. The prince president indeed, in one of the provincial speeches which he delivered just before he was proclaimed emperor, had talked earnestly of peace. In his famous speech to the chamber of commerce of Bordeaux on October 9th, he denied that the restored empire would mean war. "I say," he declared, raising his voice and speaking with energy and emphasis, "the empire is peace." But the assurance did not do much to satisfy Europe. Had not the same voice, it was asked, declaimed with equal energy and earn- estness the terms of the oath to the Republican constitu- tion? Never, said a bitter enemy of the new empire, be- lieve the word of a Bonaparte, unless when he promises to kill somebody. Such was indeed the common sentiment of a large number of the English people during the event- ful year when the president became emperor and Prince Louis Napoleon was Napoleon the Third. It would have been impossible that the English people could view all this without emotion and alarm. It had been clearly seen how the prince president had carried his A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 387 point thus far. lie had appealed at every step to the memory of the Napoleonic legend. He had in every possi- ble way revived and reproduced the attributes of the reign of the great emperor. His accession to power was strictly a military and a Napoleonic triumph. In ordinary circum- stances the English people would not have troubled them- selves much about any change in the form of government of a foreign country. They might have felt a strong dis- like for the manner in which such a change had been brought about; but it would have been in nowise a matter of personal concern to them. But they could not see with indifference the rise of a new Napoleon to power on the strength of the old Napoleonic legend. The one special characteristic of the Napoleonic principle was its hostility to England. The life of the great Napoleon in its greatest days had been devoted to the one purpose of humiliating England. His plans had been foiled by England. "What- ever hands may have joined in pressing him to the ground, there could he no doubt that he owed his fall principally to England. He died a prisoner of England, and with his hatred of her embittered rather than appeased. It did not seem unreasonable to believe that the successor who had been enabled to mount the imperial throne simply because he bore the name and represented the principles of the first Napoleon would inherit the hatred to England and the designs against England. Everything else that savored of the Napoleonic era had been revived ; why should this, its principal characteristic, be allowed to lie in the tomb of the first emperor? The policy of the first Napoleon had lighted up a tire of hatred between England and Frame which at one time seemed inextinguishable. There were many who regarded that international hate as something like that of the hostile brothers in the classic story, the very flames of whose funeral piles refused to mingle in the air; or like that of the rival Scottish families whose blood, it was said, would never commingle though poured into one dish. It did not seem possible that a new Emperor Napoleon could arise without bringing a restoration of that hatred along with him. There were some personal reasons, too, for particular distrust of the upcoming emperor among the English people. Louis Napoleon had lived many years in England. He was as well-known there as any prominent member of the 388 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. English aristocracy. He went a good deal into very various society, literary, artistic, merely fashionable, purely rowdy, as well as into that political society which might have seemed natural to him. In all circles the same opinion appears to have been formed of him. From the astute Lord Palmerston to the most ignorant of the horse- jockeys and ballet-girls with whom he occasionally con- sorted, all who met him seemed to think of the prince in much the same way. It was agreed on all hands that he was a fatuous, dreamy, moony, impracticable, stupid young man. A sort of stolid amiability, not enlightened enough to keep him out of low company and questionable conduct, appeared to be his principal characteristic. He constantly talked of his expected accession somehow and some time to the throne of France, and people only smiled pityingly at him. His attempts at Strasburg and Boulogne had cov- ered him with ridicule and contempt. We cannot remem- ber one authentic account of any Englishman of mark at that time having professed to see any evidence of capacity and strength of mind in Prince Louis Napoleon. When the coup aVetat came and was successful, the amazement of the English public was unbounded. Never had any plot been more skillfully and more carefully planned; more daringly carried out. Here evidently was a master in the art of conspiracy. Here was the combina- tion of steady caution and boundless audacity. What a sub- tlety of design ; what a perfection of silent self-control ! How slowly the plan had been matured; how suddenly it was flashed upon the world and carried to success. No haste ; no delay; no scruple, no remorse, no fear! And all this was the work of the dull dawdler of English drawing- rooms, the heavy, apathetic, unmoral rather than immoral haunter of English race-courses and gambling houses! What new surprise might not be feared, what subtle and daring enterprise might not reasonably be expected from one who could thus conceal and thus reveal himself, and do both with a like success! Louis Napoleon, said a member of his family, deceived Europe twice : first when he succeeded in passing off as an idiot, and next when he succeeded in passing off as a states- man. The epigram had doubtless a great deal of truth in it. The coup d'etat was probably neither planned nor carried to success by the energy of Louis Napoleon. Cooler A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 389 and stronger heads and hands are responsible for the execu- tion at least of that enterprise. The prince, it is likely played little more than a passive part in it, and might have lost his nerve more than once but for the greater resolution of some of his associates, who were determined to crown him for their own sakes as well as for his. But at the time the world at large saw only Louis Napoleon in the whole scheme, conception, execution, and all. The idea was formed of a colossal figure of cunning and during — a Brutus, a Talleyrand, a Philip of Spain, and a Napoleon the First all in one. Those who destested him most ad- mired and feared him not the least. Who can doubt, it was asked, that he will endeavor to make himself the heir of the revengers of Napoleon? Who can believe any pledges he may give? How enter into any treaty or bond of any kind with such a man? Where is the one that can pre- tend to say he sees through him and understands his schemes? Had Louis Napoleon any intention at any time of invading England? We are inclined to believe that he never had a regular fixed plan of the kind. But we are also inclined to think that the project entered into his mind with various other ideas and plans more or less vague; and that circumstances- might have developed it into an actual scheme. Louis Napoleon was above all things a man of ideas in the inferior sense of the word ; that is to say, he was always occupying himself with vague, dreamy sugges- tions of plans that might in this, that, or the other case be advantageously pursued. He had come to power probably with the determination to keep it and make himself accept- able to France first of all. After this came doubtless the sincere desire to make France great and powerful and pros- perous. At first he had no particular notion of the way to establish himself as a popular ruler, and it is certain that he turned over all manner of plans in his mind for the pur- pose. Among these must certainly have been one for the invasion of England and the avenging of Waterloo. He let drop hints at times which showed that he was thinking of something of the kind. He talked of himself as repre- senting a defeat. He was attacked with all the bitterness of a not unnatural but very unrestrained animosity in the English press for his conduct in the coup d'etat', and no doubt he and his companions were greatly exasperated. 300 A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. The mood of a large portion of the French people was distinctly aggressive. Ashamed to some degree of much that had been done and that they had had to suffer, many Frenchmen were in that state of dissatisfaction with them- selves which makes people eager to pick a quarrel with some one else. Had Louis Napoleon been inclined, he might doubtless have easily stirred his people to the war mood; and it is not to be believed that he did not occasion- ally contemplate the expediency of doing something of the kind. Assuredly, if he had thought such an enterprise necessary to the stability of his reign, he would have risked even a war with England. But it would not have been tried except as a last resource; and the need did not arise. No one could have known better the risks of such an attempt. He knew England as his uncle never did; and if he had not his uncle's energy or military genius, he had far more knowledge of the world and of the relative resources and capabilities of nations. He would not have done anything rash without great necessity or the prospect of very certain benefit in the event of success. An invasion of England was not therefore, a likely event. Looking back composedly now on what actually did hap- pen, we may safely say that few things were less likely. But it was not by any means an impossible event. The more composedly one looks back to it noAV, the more he will be compelled to admit that it was at least on the cards. The feeling of national uneasiness and alarm was not a mere panic. There were five projects with which public opinion all over Europe specially credited Louis Napoleon when he began his imperial reign. One was a war with Russia. Another was a war with Austria. A third was a war with Prussia. A fourth was the annexation of Bel- gium. The fifth was the invasion of England. Three of these projects were carried out. The fourth we know was in contemplation. Our combination with France in the first project probably put all serious thought of the fifth out of the head of the French emperor. He got far more prestige out of an alliance with us than he could ever have got out of any quarrel with us; and he had little or no risk. We do not count for anything the repeated assurances of Louis Napoleon that he desired above all things to be on friendly terms with England. These assurances were doubtless sincere at the moment when they were made, A msTOR T OF OUR OWN TIMES. 39 1 and under the circumstances of that moment. But altered circumstances might at any time have induced an altered frame of mind. The very same assurances were made again and again to Russia, to Austria and to Prussia. The pledge that the empire was peace was addressed, like the pope's edict, urbi et orbi. Therefore we do not look upon the mood of England in 1852 as one of idle and baseless panic. The same feeling broke into life again in 1859, when the emperor of the French suddenly announced his determination to go to war with Austria. It was in this latter period indeed that the volunteer movement became a great national organization, and that the laureate did his best to rouse it into activity in the verses of hardly doubtful merit to which we have already referred. But in 1852 the beginning of an army of volunteers was made; and what is of more importance to the immediate business of our history, the government determined to bring in a bill for the reorganization of the national militia. Our militia was not in any case a body to be particularly proud of at that time. It had fallen into decay, and almost into disorganization. Nothing could have been a more proper work for any government than its restoration to efficiency and respectability. Nothing, too, could have been more timely than a measure to make it efficient in view of the altered condition of European affairs and the increased danger of disturbance at home and abroad. We had on our hands at the time, too, one of our little Avars — a Caffre war, which was protracted to a vexatious length, and which was not without serious military difficulty. It began in the December of 1850, and was not completely disposed of before the early part of 1853. We could not, therefore, afford to have our defenses in any defective con- dition, and no labor was more fairly incumbent on a gov- ernment than the task of making them adequate to their purpose. But it was an unfortunate characteristic of Lord John Russell.'s government that it attempted so much leg- islation, not because some particular scheme commended itself to the mature wisdom of the ministry, but because something had to be done in a hurry to satisfy public opinion; and the government could not think of anything better at the moment than the first scheme that came to hand. Lord John Russell accordingly introduced a militia 392 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN T1ME8. bill, which was in the highest degree inadequate and unsatis- factory. The principal peculiarity of it was that it pro- posed to substitute a local militia for the regular force that had been in existence. Lord Palmerston saw great objec- tions to this alteration and urged them with much brisk- ness and skill on the night when Lord John Russell ex- plained his measure. When Palmerston began his speech, he probably intended to be merely critical as regarded points in the measure which were susceptible of amend- ment; but as he went on he found more and more that he had the House with him. Every objection he made, every criticism he urged, almost every sentence he spoke drew down increasing cheers. Lord Palmerston saw that the house was not only thoroughly with him on this ground, but thoroughly against the government on various grounds. A few nights after he followed up his first success by pro- posing a resolution to substitute the word "regular" for the word "local" in the bill; thus, in fact, to reconstruct the bill on an .entirely different principle from that adopted by its framer. The effort was successful. The Peelites went with Palmerston ; the Protectionists followed him as well; and the result was that one hundred and thirty-six votes were given for the amendment, and only one hundred and twenty-five against it. The government were defeated by a majority of eleven. Lord John Russell instantly announced that he could no longer continue in office, as he did not possess the confidence of the country. The announcement took the house by surprise. Lord Palmerston had not himself expected any such result from his resolution. There was no reason why the government should not have amended their bill on the basis of the resolution passed by the house. The country wanted a scheme of efficient defense, and the government were only called upon to make their scheme efficient. But Lord John Russell was well aware that his administration had been losing its authority little by little. Since the time when it had returned to power, simply because no one could form a ministry any stronger than itself, it had been only a government on sufferance. Ministers who assume office in that stopgap way seldom retain it long in England. The Gladstone government illustrated this fact in 1873, when they consented to return to office because Mr. Disraeli was not then in a condition to come in, and were A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 393 dismissed by an overwhelming majority at the elections in the following spring. Lord Palmerston assigned one special reason for Lord John Russell's promptness in resigning on the change in the militia bill. The great motive for the stop was, according to Palmerston, "the fear of being defeated on the vote of censure about the Cape affairs, which was to have been moved to-day; as it is, the late government have gone out on a question which they have treated as a motion, merely asserting that they had lost the confidence of the house ; whereas, if they had gone out on a defeat upon the motion about the Cape, they would have carried with them the direct censure of the House of Commons." The letter from Lord Palmerston to his brother, from which these words are quoted, begins with a remarkable sentence: "I have had my tit-for-tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last." Palmerston did not expect any such result, he declared; but the revenge was doubtless sweet for all that. This was in February, 1852 ; and it was only in the December of the previous year that Lord Palmerston was compelled to leave the foreign office by Lord John Russell. The same influence, oddly enough, was the indirect cause of both events. Lord Palmerston lost his place because of his recognition of Louis Napoleon; Lord John Russell fell from power while endeavoring to introduce a measure sug- gested by Louis Napoleon's successful usurpation. It will be seen in a future chapter how the influence of Louis Napoleon was once again fatal to each statesman in turn. The Russell ministry had done little and initiated less. It had carried on Peel's system by throwing open the markets to foreign as well as colonial sugar, and by the repeal of the navigation laws enabled merchants to employ foreign ships and seamen in the conveyance of their goods. It had made a mild and ineffectual efl'ort at a reform bill, and had feebly favored attempts to admit Jews to parlia- ment. It sank from power with an unexpected collapse in which the nation felt small concern. Lord Palmerston did not come to power again at that moment. He might have gone in with Lord Derby if he had been so inclined. But Lord Derby, who it maybe Baid, had succeeded to that title on the death of his father in the preceding year, still talked of testing the policy of free trade at a general election, and of course Palmerston 394 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. was not disposed to have anything to do with such a propo- sition. Nor had Palmerston in any case much inclination to serve under Derby, of whose political intelligence he thought poorly, and whom he regarded principally as what he called "a flashy speaker." Lord Derby tried various combinations in vain, and at last had to experiment with a cabinet of undiluted Protectionists. He had to take office, not because he wanted it, or because any one in particular wanted him; but simply and solely because there was no one else who could undertake the task. He formed a cabinet to carry on the business of the country for the moment and until it should be convenient to have a general election, when he fondly hoped that by some inexplicable process a protectionist reaction would be brought about, and he should find himself at the head of a strong adminis- tration. The ministry which Lord Derby was able to form was not a strong one. Lord Palmerston described it as con- taining two men of mark, Derby and Disraeli, and a num- ber of ciphers. It had not, except for these two, a single man of any political ability, and had hardly one of any political experience. It had an able lawyer for lord chan- cellor, Lord St. Leonards, but he was nothing of a politi- cian. The rest of the members of the goverment were respectable country gentlemen. One of them, Mr.Herries, had been chancellor of the exchequer in a short-lived gov- ernment, that of Lord Godericb, in 1827; and he had held the office of secretary of war for a few months some time later. He was forgotten by the existing generation of politicians, and the general public only knew that he was still living when they heard of his accession to Lord Derby's govern- ment. The Earl of Malmesbury, Sir John Pakington, Mr. Walpole, Mr. Henley, and the rest, were men whose ante- cedents scarcely gave them warrant for any higher claim in public life than the position of chairman of quarter ses- sions; nor did their subsequent career in office contribute much to establish a loftier estimate of their capacity. The head of the government was remarkable for his dashing blunders as a politician, quite as much as for his dashing eloquence. His new lieutenant, Mr. Disraeli, had in for- mer days christened him very happily, "the Rupert of Debate," after that fiery and gallant prince whose blunders generally lost the battle which his headlong courage had nearly won. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 395 Concerning Mr. Disraeli himself it is not too much to say that many of his own party were rather more afraid of his genius than of the dullness of any of his colleagues. It was not a pleasant task in the best of circumstances to be at the head of a tolerated ministry in the House of Commons; a ministry which is in a minority and only holds its place because there is no one ready to relieve it of the responsibility of office. Mr. Disraeli himself, at a much later date, gave the House of Commons an amusing picture of the trials and humiliations which await the leader of such a forlorn hope. He had now to assume that posi- tion without any previous experience of office. Rarely indeed is the leadership of the House of Commons undertaken by any one who has not previously held office; and Mr. Disraeli entered upon leadership and office at the same moment for the first time. He became chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. Among the many gifts with which he was accredited by fame, not a single admirer had hitherto dreamed of including a capacity for the mastery of figures. In addition to all the ordinary difficulties of the ministry of a minority there was, in this instance, the difficulty arising from the ob- scurity and inexperience of nearly all its members. Face- tious persons dubbed the new administration the "Who? Who? Ministry." The explanation of this odd nick- name was found in a story then in circulation about the Duke of Wellington. The duke, it was said, was anxious to hear from Lord Derby at the earliest moment all about the composition of his cabinet. He was overheard asking the new prime minister in the House of Lords the names of his intended colleagues. The duke was rather deaf, and, like most deaf persons, spoke in very loud tones, and of course had to be answered in tones also rather elevated. That which was meant for a whispered conversation became audible to the whole house. As Lord Derby mentioned each name, the duke asked in wonder and eagerness, "Who? Who?" After each new name came the same inquiry. The Duke of Wellington hail clearly never heard of most of the new ministers before. The story went about; and Lord Derby's administration was familiarly known as the " Who? Who? government." Lord Derby entered office with the avowed intention of testing the protection question all over again. But he was 396 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. no sooner in office than he found that the bare suggestion had immensely increased his difficulties. The formidable organization which had worked the free trade cause so suc- cessfully seemed likely to come into political life again with all its old vigor. The free traders began to stand together again the moment Lord Derby gave his unlucky hint. Every week that passed over his head did something to show him the mistake he had made when he hampered himself with any such undertaking as the revival of the protection question. Some of his colleagues had been unhappily and blunderingly outspoken in their addresses to their constituents seeking for re-elec- tion, and had talked as if the restoration of protection itself were the grand object of Lord Derby's taking office. The new chancellor of the exchequer had been far more cau- tious. He only talked vaguely of " those remedial meas- ures which great productive interests, suffering from unequal taxation, have a right to expect from a just gov- ernment." In truth, Mr. Disraeli was well convinced at this time of the hopelessness of any agitation for the restoration of protection, and would have been only too glad of any opportunity for a complete and at the same time a safe disavowal of any sympathy with such a project. The government found their path bristling with troubles, created for them by their own mistake in giving any hint about the demand for a new trial of the free trade question. Any chance they might otherwise have had of making effective head against their very trying difficulties was com- pletely cut away from them. The free trade league was reorganized. A conference of Liberal members of the House of Commons was held at the residence of Lord John Russell in Chesham Place, at which it was resolved to extract or extort from the gov- ernment a full avowal of their policy with regard to protec- tion and free trade. The feat would have been rather difficult of accomplishment, seeing that the government had absolutely no policy to offer on the subject, and were only hoping to be able to consult the country as one might consult an oracle. The chancellor of the exchequer when he made his financial statement accepted the in- creased prosperity of the few years preceding with an unction which showed that he at least had no particular notion of attempting to reverse the policy which had so A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 39? greatly contributed to its progress. Mr. Disraeli pleased the Peelites and the Liberals much more by his statement than he pleased his chief or many of his followers. His speech indeed was very clever. A new financial scheme he could not produce, for he had not had time to make anything like a complete examination of the finances of the country; but he played very prettily and skillfully with the facts and figures, and conveyed to the listeners the idea of a man who could do wonderful things in finance if he only had a little time and were in the humor. Every one outside the limits of the extreme and unconverted protec- tionists was pleased with the success of his speech. People were glad that one who had proved himself so clever with many things should have shown himself equal to the uncongenial and unwonted task of dealing with dry facts and figures. The house felt that he was placed in a very trying position, and was well pleased to see him hold his own so successfully in it. Mr. Disraeli merely proposed in his financial statement to leave things as he found them ; to continue the income- tax for another year, as a provisional arrangement pending that complete re-examination of the financial affairs of the country to which he intimated that he found himself quite equal at the proper time. No one could suggest any better course; and the new chancellor came off on the whole with flying colors. His very difficulties had been a source of advantage to him. He was not expected to produce a financial scheme at such short notice; and if he was not equal to a financier's task, it did not so appear on this first occasion of trial. The government on the whole did not do badly during this period of their probation. They intro- duced and carried a militia bill, for which they obtained the cordial support of Lord Palmerston ; and they gave a constitution to New Zealand; and then, in the beginning of July, the parliament was prorogued and the dissolution took place. The elections were signalized by very serious riots in many parts of the country. In Ireland particu- larly party passions ran high. The landlords and the police were on one side; the priests and the popular party on the other; and in several places there was some blood- shed. It was not in Ireland, however, a question about free trade or protection. The great mass of the Irish people knew nothing about Mr. Disraeli— probably had H98 A HJBTOlir Ot? OUR OWN TIMES. never heard his name, and did not care who led the House of Commons. The question which agitated the Irish con- stituencies was that of tenant rights, in the first instance; and the time had not yet arrived when a great minister from either party was prepared to listen to their demands on this subject. There was also much bitterness of feeling remaining from the discussions on the ecclesiastical titles bill. But it may be safely said that not one of the ques- tions that stirred up public feeling in England had the slightest popular interest in Ireland, and the question which the Irish people considered essential to their very existence did not enter for one moment into the struggles that were going on all over England. The speeches of ministers in England showed the same lively diversity as before on the subject of protection. Mr. Disraeli not only threw protection overboard, but boldly declared that no one could have supposed the min- istry had the slightest intention of proposing to bring back the laws that were repealed in 1846. In fact the time, he declared, had gone by when such exploded politics could even interest the people of this country. On the other hand, several of Mr. Disraeli's colleagues evidently spoke in the fullness of their simple faith that Lord Derby was bent on setting up again the once beloved and not yet forgotten protective system. But from the time of the elections nothing more was heard about protection or about the possibility of getting a new trial for its principles. The elections did little or nothing for the government. The dreams of a strengthened party at their back were gone. They gained a little, just enough to make it unlikely that any one would move a vote of want of confidence at the very outset of their reappearance before parliament, but not nearly enough to give them a chance of carrying any measure which could really propitiate the conserva- tive party throughout the country. They were still to be the ministry of a minority; a minister on sufferance. They were a ministry on sufferance when they appealed to the country, but they were able to say then that when their cause had been heard the country would declare for them. They now came back to be a ministry on suffer- ance, who had made the appeal and had seen it rejected. It was plain to every one that their existence as a ministry was only a question of days. Speculation was already busy A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 390 as to their successors; and it was evident that a new gov- ernment could only be formed by some sort of coalition between the Whigs and the Peelites. Among the noteworthy events of the general elections was the return of Macaulay to the House of Commons. Edinburgh elected him in a manner particularly compli- mentary to him and honorable to herself. He was elected without his solicitation, without his putting himself for- ward as a candidate, without his making any profession of faith or doing any of the things that the most independent candidate was then expected to do; and in fact, in spite of his positive declaration that he would do nothing to court election. He had for some years been absent from parliament. Some difference had arisen between him and certain of his constituents on the subject of the Maynooth grant. Complaints too had been made by Edinburgh constituents of Macaulay's lack of attention to local inter- ests, and of the intellectual scorn which as they believed he exhibited in his intercourse with many of those who had supported him. The result of this was that at the general election of 1847 Macaulay was left third on the poll at Edinburgh. He felt this deeply. He might have easily found some other constituency; but his wounded pride hastened a resolution he had for some time been forming to retire to a life of private literary labor. He therefore remained out of parliament. In 1852 the movement of Edinburgh toward him was entirely spontaneous. Edin- burgh was anxious to atone for the error of which she had been guilty. Macaulay would go no farther than to say that if Edinburgh spontaneously elected him he should deem it a very high honor; and "should not feel myself justified in refusing to accept a public trust offered to me in a manner so honorable and so peculiar.'' 1 lint he would not do anything whatever to court favor. He did not want to be elected to parliament, he said; he was very happy in his retirement. Edinburgh elected him on those terms. He was not long allowed by his health to serve her; but so long as he remained in the House of Commons it was as member for Edinburgh. On September 14, 185 2, the Duke of Wellington died. His end was singularly peaceful. He fell quietly asleep about a quarter-past three in the afternoon in Walmer Castle, and he did not wake any more. He was a very old 400 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. man — in his eighty-fourth year — and his death had natur- ally been looked for as an event certain to come soon. Yet when it did come thus naturally and peacefully, it created a profound public emotion. No other man in our time ever held the position in England which the Duke of Wellington had occupied for more than a whole generation. The place he had won for himself was absolutely unique. His great deeds belonged to a past time. He was hardly anything of a statesman; he knew little and cared less about what may be called statecraft; and as an administra- tor he had made many mistakes. But the trust which the nation had in him as a counselloi was absolutely unlimited. It never entered into the mind of any one to suppose that the Duke of Wellington was actuated in any step he took, or advice he gave, by any feeling but a desire for the good of the state. His loyalty to the sovereign had something antique and touching in it. There was a blending of per- sonal affection with the devotion of a state servant which lent a certain romantic dignity to the demeanor and char- acter of one who otherwise had but little of the poetical or the sentimental in his nature. In the business of politics he had but one prevailing anxiety, and that was that the queen's government should be satisfactorily carried on. He gave up again and again his own most cherished con- victions, most ingrained prejudices, in order that he might not stand in the way of the queen's government and the proper carrying of it on. This simple fidelity, sometimes rather whimsically displayed, stood him often in stead of an exalted statesmanship, and enabled him to extricate the government and the nation from difficulites in which a political insight far more keen than his might have failed to prove a guide. It was for this true and tried, this simple and unswerv- ing devotion to the national good that the people of England admired and revered him. He had not what would be called a loveable temperament, and yet the na- tion loved him. He was cold and brusque in manner, and seemed in general to have hardly a gleam of the emotional in him. This was not because he lacked affections. On the contrary, his affections and his friendships, were warm and enduring; and even in public he had more than once given way to outbursts of emotion such as a stranger would never have expected from one of that cold and rigid A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 401 demeanor. When Sir Robert Peel died, Wellington spoke of him in the House of Lords with the tears which he did not even try to control running down his cheeks. But in his ordinary bearing there was little of the manner that makes a man a popular idol. He was not brilliant or dashing, or emotional or graceful. He was dry, cold, self-contained. Yet the people loved him and trusted in him; loved him perhaps especially because they so trusted in him. No face and figure were better known at one time to the population of London than those of the Duke of Welling- ton. Of late his form had grown stooped, and he bent over his horse as he rode in the park or down Whitehall like one who could hardly keep himself in the saddle. Yet he mounted his horse to the last, and, indeed, could keep in the saddle after he had ceased to be able to sit erect in an arm-chair. He sometimes rode in a curious little cab of his own devising; but his favorite way of going about London was on the back of his horse. He was called, par excellence, "the duke." The London workingman who looked up as he went to or from his work and caught a sight of the bowed figure on the horse, took off his hat and told some passer-by, "There goes the duke!" His victories belonged to the past. They were but traditions even to middle-aged men in "the duke's" later years. But lie was regarded still as embodiment of the national hero- ism and success; a modern St. George in a tightly-but- toned frock-coat and white trousers. Wellington belonged so much to the past at the time of bis death that it seems hardly in place here to say any- thing about his character as a soldier. But it may be remarked that his success was due in great measure to a sort of inspired common sense which rose to something like genius. He had in the highest conceivable degree the art of winning victories. In war, as in statesmanship, lie had one characteristic which is said to have been the special gift of Julius Caesar, and for the lack of which Caesar's greatest, modern rival in the art of conquest, the first Napoleon, lost all, or nearly all, that, he had won. Wellington not only understood what could be done, but also what could not be done. The wild schemes of almost universal rule which set Napoleon astray and led him to his destruction would have appealed to the strong common sense of the Duke of Wellington as impossible and absurd as they 402 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. would have looked to the lofty intelligence of Cassar. It can hardly be questioned that in original genius Napoleon far surpassed the Duke of Wellington. But Wellington always knew exactly what he could do, and Napoleon often confounded his ambitions with his capacities. Wellington provided for everything, looked after everything; never trusted to his star or to chance or to anything but care and preparation and the proper application of means to ends. Under almost any conceivable conditions, Welling- ton, pitted against Napoleon, was the man to win in the end. The very genius of Napoleon would sooner or later have left him open to the unsleeping watchfulness, the almost infallible judgment of Wellington. He was as fortunate as he was deserving. No man could have drunk more deeply of the cup of fame and fortune than Wellington ; and he was never for one moment intoxi- cated by it. After all his long wars and his splendid vic- tories he had some thirty-seven years of peace and glory to enjoy. He held the loftiest position in this country that any man not a sovereign could hold, and he ranked far higher in the estimation of his countrymen than most of their sovereigns have done. The rescued emperors and kings of Europe had showered their honors on him. His fame was as completely secured during his life- time as if death, by removing him from the possibility of making a mistake, had consecrated it. No new war under altered conditions tried the flexibility and the endurance of the military genius which had de- feated in turn all Napoleon's great marshals as a prelude to the defeat of Napoleon himself. If ever any mortal may be said to have had in life all he could have desired, Wellington was surely that man. He might have found a new con- tentment in his honors, if he really cared much about them, in the reflection than he had done nothing for himself, but all for the state. He did not love war. He had no inclina- tion whatever for it. When Lord John Eussell visited Napoleon in Elba, Napoleon asked him whether he thought the Duke of Wellington would be able to live thencefor- ward without the excitement of war. It was probably in Napoleon's mind that the English soldier would be con- stantly entangling his country in foreign complications for the sake of gratifying his love for the brave squares of war. Lord John Russell endeavored to impress upon the great A IIISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 403 fallen emperor that the Duke of Wellington would as a matter of course lapse into the place of a simple citizen, and would look with no manner of regret to the stormy days of hattle. Napoleon seems to have listened with a sort of melancholy incredulity, and only observed once or twice that "it was a splendid" game, war." To Wellington it was no splendid game, or game of any sort. It was a stern duty to be done for his sovereign and his country, and to be got through as quickly as possible. The differ- ence between the two men cannot be better illustrated. It is impossible to compare two such men. There is hardly any common basis of comparison. To say which is the greater, one must first make up his mind as to whether his standard of greatness is genius or duty. Napoleon has made a far deeper impression on history. If that be superior greatness, it would be scarcely possible for any national partiality to claim an equal place for Wellington. But Englishmen may be content with the reflection that their hero saved his country, and that Napoleon nearly ruined his. We write this without the slightest inclination to sanction what may be called the British Philistine view of the character of Napoleon. Up to a certain period of his career it seems to us deserving of almost unmingled ad- miration; just as his country, in her earlier disputes with the other European Powers, seems to have been almost entirely in the right. But his success and his glory were too strong for Napoleon. lie fell for the very want of that simple, steadfast devotion to duty which inspired Wellington always, and which made him seem dignified and great, even in statesmanship for which he was unfitted, and even when in statesmanship he Was acting in a manner that would have made another man seem ridiculous rather than respectable. Wellington more nearly resembled Wash- ington than Napoleon. He was a much greater soldier than Washington; but he was not on the whole so great a num. It is fairly to be said for Wellington that the proportions of his personal greatness seem to grow rather than to dwindle as he and his events are removed from us by time. The battle of AVaterloo does not indeed stand, as one of its historians lias described it, among the decisive battles of the world. It was fought to keep the Bonapartes off the throne of France; and in twenty-live years after 404 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. Waterloo, while the victor of Waterloo was yet living, another Bonaparte was preparing to mount that throne. It was the climax of a national policy, which, however justifiable and inevitable it may have become in the end, would hardly now be justified as to its origin by one intelligent Englishman out of twenty. The present age is not, therefore, likely to become rhapsodical over Welling- ton, as our forefathers might have been, merely because he defeated the French and crushed Napoleon. Yet it is im- possible for the coolest mind to study the career of Welling- ton without feeling a constant glow of admiration for that singular course of simple antique devotion to duty. His was truely the spirit in which a great nation must desire to be served. The nation was not ungrateful. It heaped honors on Wellington ; it would have heaped more on him if it knew how. It gave him its almost unqualified admiration. On his death it tried to give him such a public funeral as hero never had. The pageant was indeed a splendid and a gorgeous exhibition. It was not perhaps very well suited to the temperament and habits of the cold and simple hero to whose honor it was got up. Nor, perhaps, are gorgeous pageants exactly the sort of performance in which as a nation England particularly excels. But in the vast, silent, respectful crowd that thronged the London streets — a crowd such as no other city in the world could show — there was better evidence than pageantry or ceremonial could sup- ply of the esteem in which the living generation held the hero of the last. The name of Wellington had long ceased to represent any hostility of nation to nation. The crowds who filled the streets of London that day had no thought of the kind of sentiment which used to fill the breasts of their fathers when France and Napoleon were named. They honored Wellington only as one who had always served his country ; as the soldier of England and not as the invader of France, or even as the conqueror of Napo- leon. The homage to his memory was as pure of selfish passion as his own career. The new parliament was called together in November. It brought into public life in England a man who after- ward made some mark in our politics, and whose intellect and debating power seemed at one time to promise him a position inferior to that of hardly any one in the House of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 405 Commons. This was Mr. Kobert Lowe, who had returned from one of the Australian colonies to enter political life in his native country. Mr. Lowe was a scholar of a highly cultured order; and, despite some serious defects of deliv- ery, he proved to be a debater of the very highest class, especially gifted with the weapons of sarcasm, scorn, and invective. He was a Liberal in the intellectual sense; he was opposed to all restraints on education and on the prog- ress of a career; but he had a detestation for democratic doctrines which almost amounted to a mania. He despised with the whole force of a temperament very favorable to intellectual scorn alike the rural Tory and the town Radical. His opinions were generally rather negative than positive. He did not seem to have any very positive opinions of any kind where politics were con- cerned. He was governed by a detestation of abstractions and sentimentalities, and "views" of all sorts. An intellec- tual Don Juan of the political world, he believed with Moliere's hero that two and two make four, and that four and four make eight, and he was impatient of any theory which would commend itself to the mind on less rigorous evi- dence. If contempt for the intellectual weaknesses of an opposing party or doctrine could have made a great politi- cian, Mr. Lowe would have won that name. In politics however, criticism is not enough. One must be able to originate, to mold the will of others, to compromise, to lead while seeming to follow, often to follow while seeming to lead. Of gifts like these Mr. Lowe had no share. He never became more than a great parliamentary critic of the acrid and vitriolic style. Almost immediately on the assembling of the now parlia- ment, Mr. Villiers brought forward a resolution not merely pledging the House of Commons to a free trade policy, but pouring out a sort of censure on all who had hitherto failed to recognize its worth. This step was thought neces- sary, and was indeed made necessary by the errors of which Lord Derby had been guilty, and the preposterous vapor- ings of some of his less responsible followers. II' the reso- lution had been passed, the government must have resigned. They were willing enough now to agree to any resolution declaring that free trade was the established pnliey of the country; but they could not accept the tri- umpiiant eulogium which the resolution proposed to oiler 406 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to the commercial policy of the years when they were the uncompromising enemies of that very policy. They could submit to the punishment imposed on them; but they did not like this public kissing of the rod and doing penance. Lord Palmerston, who even up to that time regarded his ultimate acceptance of office under Lord Derby as a not impossible event if once the Derby party could shake them- selves quite free of protection, de'vised an amendment which afforded them the means of a more or less honorable retreat. This resolution pledged the house to the "policy of unrestricted competition firmly maintained and pru- dently extended;" but recorded no panegyric of the legis- lation of 1846, and consequent condemnation of those who opposed that legislation. The amendment was accepted by all but the small band of irreconcilable protectionists : four hundred and sixty-eight voted for it; only fifty-three against it; and the moan of Protection was made. All that long chapter of English legislation was closed. Various commercial and other "interests" did indeed afterward demur to the application of the principle of unrestricted competition to their peculiar concerns. But they did not plead for protection. They only contended that the protection they sought for was not, in fact, protection at all, but free trade under peculiar circumstances. The straightforward doctrine of protection perished of the debate of November, 1852. Still the government only existed on sufferance. Their tenure of office was somewhat rudely compared to that of a bailiff put into possession of certain premises, who is liable to be sent away at any moment when the two parties concerned in the litigation choose to come to terms. There was a general expectation that the moment Mr. Disraeli came to set out a genuine financial scheme the fate of the government would be decided." So the event proved. Mr. Disraeli made a financial statement which showed remarkable capacity for dealing with figures. It was sub- jected to a far more serious test than his first budget, for that was necessarily a mere stopgap or makeshift. This was a real budget, altering and reconstructing the financial system and the taxation of the country. The skill with which the chancellor of the exchequer explained his meas- ures and tossed his figures about convinced many even of his strongest opponents that he had the capacity to make a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 407 good budget if he only were allowed to do so by the condi- tions of his party's existence. But his cabinet had come into office under special obligations to the country party and the farmers. They could not avoid making some ex- periment in the way of special legislation forthe farmers. They had at the very least to put on an appearance of doing something for them. The chancellor of the ex- chequer might be supposed to be in the position of the soldier in Hogarth's "March to Finchley," between the rival claimants on his attention. He has promised and vowed to the one; but he knows that the slightest mark of civility he offers to her will be fiercely resented by the other. When Mr. Disraeli undertook to favor the country interest and the farmers, he must have known only too well that he was setting all the free traders and Peelites against him ; and he knew at the same time that if he neglected the country party he was cutting the ground from beneath his feet. The principle of his budget was the reduction of the malt duties and the increase of the inhabited house duty. Some manipulations of the income tax were to be introduced, chiefly with a view to lighten the impost on farmers' profits; and there was to be a modest reduction of the tea duty. The two points that stood out clear and prominent before the House of Com- mons were the reduction of the malt duty and the increase of the duty on inhabited houses. The reduction of the malt tax, as Mr. Lowe said in his pungent criticism, was the keystone of the budget. That reduction created a deficit, which the inhabited house duty had to be doubled in order to supply. The scheme was a complete failure. The farmers did not care much about the concession which had been made in their favor; those who had to pay for it in doubled taxation were bitterly indignant. Mr. Disraeli had exasperated the one claimant, and not greatly pleased the other. The government soon saw how things were likely to go. The chancellor of the exchequer began to see that he only had a desperate fight to make. The Whigs the Free-traders, the Peelites, and such independent members or unattached members as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Bernal Osborne all fell on him. it became a combat a outranee. It well suited Mr. Disraeli's peculiar temperament. During the whole of his parliamentary career lie lias never fought so well as when he has been free to indulge to the full the courage of despair. 408 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CHAPTER XXIV. MR. GLADSTONE. The debate was one of the finest of its kind ever heard in parliament during our time. The excitement on both sides was intense. The rivalry was hot and eager. Mr. Disraeli was animated by all the power of desperation, and was evidently in a mood neither to give nor to take quarter. He assailed Sir Charles Wood, the late chancellor of the exchequer, with a vehemence and even a virulence which certainly added much to the piquancy and interest of the discussion so far as listeners were concerned, but which more than once went to the very verge of the limits of par- liamentary decorum. It was in the course of this speech that Disraeli, leaning across the table and directing his words full at Sir Charles Wood, declared, " I care not to be the right honorable gentleman's critic; but if he has learned his business, he has yet to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective." The house had not heard the concluding word of Disraeli's bitter and impassioned speech, when at two o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet to answer him. Then began that long parliamentary duel which only knew a truce when at the close of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli crossed the threshold of the House of Commons for the last time, thenceforward to take his place among the peers as Lord Beaconsfield. During all the intervening four-and- twenty years these two men were rivals in power and in parliamentary debate as much as ever Pit and Fox had been. Their opposition, like that of Pitt and Fox, was one of temperament and character as well as of genius, position and political opinion. The rivalry of this first heated and eventful night was a splendid display. Those who had thought it impossible that any impression could be made upon the house after the speech of Mr. Disraeli had to acknowledge that a yet greater impression was pro- duced by the unprepared reply of Mr. Gladstone. The house divided about four o'clock in the morning, and the government were left in a minority of nineteen. Mr. Disraeli took the defeat with his characteristic composure. The morning was cold and wet. " It will be an unpleasant day for going to Osborne," he quietly remarked to a friend A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 409 as they went down Westminster Hall together and looked out into the dreary streets. That day, at Osborne, the resignation of the ministry was formally placed in the hands of the queen. In a few days after, the coalition ministry was formed. Lord Aberdeen was prime minister; Lord John Russell took the foreign office; Lord Palmerston became home sec- retary; Mr. Gladstone was chancellor of the exchequer. The public were a good deal surprised that Lord Palmer- ston had taken such a place as that of home secretary. His name had been identified with the foreign policy of England, and it was not supposed that he felt the slightest interest in the ordinary business of the home department. Palmerston himself explained in a letter to his brother that the home office was his own choice. He was not anxious to join the ministry at all; and if he had to make one, he preferred that he should hold some office in which he had personally no traditions. " I had long settled in my own mind," he said, "that I would not go back to the foreign office, and that if I ever took any office it should be the home. It does not do for a man to pass his whole life in one department, and the home office deals with the con- cerns of the country internally and brings one in contact with one's fellow-countrymen ; besides which it gives one more influence in regard to the militia and the defense of the country-" Lord Palmerston in fact announces that he has undertaken the business of the home office for the same reason as that given by Fritz, in the "Grande Duchesse," for becoming a schoolmaster. "Can you teach?" asks the Grande Duchesse. "No," is the answer, "c'esf pour apprendre'" "I go to learn." The reader may well sus- pect, however, that it was not only with a view of learning the business of the internal administration and becoming acquainted with his fellow-countrymen that Palmerston preferred the home office. He would not consent to be foreign secretary on any terms but his own, and these terms were then out of the question. The principal interest felt in the new government was not, however, centered in Lord Palmerston. The new chancellor of the exchequer was the man upon whom the eyes of curiosity and interest were chiefly turned. Mr. Gladstone was still a young man in the parliamentary sense at least. He was but forty-three. His career had been in 410 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. every way remarkable. He had entered public life at a very early age. He had been, to quote the words of Ma- caulay, a distinguished debater in the House of Commons ever since he was one-and-twenty. Criticising his book "The State in its Relations with the Church," which was published in 1838, Macaulay speaks of Gladstone as "a young man of unblemished character and of distinguished parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader whose experience is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor." Tbe time was not so far away when the stern and unbend- ing Tories would regard Gladstone as the greatest hope of their most bitter enemies. Lord Macaulay goes on to over- whelm the views expressed by Mr. Gladstone as to the rela- tions between state and church, with a weight of argument and gorgeousness of illustration that now seem to have been hardly called for. One of the doctrines of the young statesman which Macaulay confutes with especial warmth, is the principle which, as he states it, "would give the Irish a Protestant church whether they like it or not." The author of the book which contained this doctrine was the author of the disestablishment of the state church in Ireland. Mr. Gladstone was by birth a Lancashire man. It is not unworthy of notice that Lancashire gave to the parlia- ments of recent times their three greatest orators: Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and the late Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone was born in Liverpool, and was the son of Sir John Gladstone, a Scotchman, who founded a great house in the seaport of the Mersey. He entered parliament when very young as a protege of the Newcastle family, and he soon faithfully attached himself to Sir Robert Peel. His knowledge of finance, his thorough appreciation of the various needs of a nation's commerce and business, his middle-class origin, all brought him into natural affinity with his great leader. He became a free trader with Peel. He was not in the House of Commons, oddly enough, during the session when the free trade battle was fought and won. It has already been explained in this history that as he had changed his opinions with his leader he felt a reluctance to ask the support of the Newcastle family for the borough which by virtue of their influence A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 411 he had previously represented. But except for that short interval his whole career may be pronounced one long par- liamentary success. He was from the very first recognized as a brilliant debater, and as one who promised to be an orator; but it was not until after the death of Sir Robert Peel that he proved himself the master of parliamentary eloquence we all now know him to be. It was he who pro- nounced what may be called the funeral oration upon Peel in the House of Commons; but the speech, although undoubtedly inspired by the truest and the deepest feelings does not seem by any means equal to some of his more recent efforts. There is an appearance of elaboration about it which goes far to mar its effect.' Perhaps the first really great speech made by Gladstone was the reply to Disraeli on the memorable December morning which we have just described. That speech put him in the very foremost rank of English orators. Then perhaps he first showed to the full the one great quality in which as a par- liamentary orator he has never had a rival in our time; the readiness which seems to require no preparation, but can marshal all its arguments as if by instinct at a given moment, and the fluency which can pour out the most eloquent language as freely as though it were but the breath of the nostrils. When, shortly after the formation of the coalition ministry, Mr. Gladstone delivered his first budget, it was regarded as a positive curiosity of financial exposition. It was a performance that belonged to the department of the fine arts. The speech occupied several hours, and assuredly no listener wished it the shorter by a single sentence. Pitt, we read, had the same art of mak- ing a budget speech a fascinating discourse; but in our time no minister has bad this gift except Mr. Gladstone. Each time that he essayed the same task subsequently he accomplished just the same success. Mr. Gladstone's first oratorical qualification was bis exquisite voice. Such a voice would make commonplace seem interesting and lend something of fascination to dullness itself. It was singu- larly pure, clear, resonant, and sweet. The orator never seemed to use the slightest effort or strain in filling any hall and reaching the ear of the farthest among the audience. It was not a loud voice or of great volume; but strong, vibrating and silvery. The words were always aided by energetic action and by the deep gleaming eyes of 412 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the orator. Somebody once said that Gladstone was the only man in the house who could talk in italics. The say- ing was odd, but was nevertheless appropriate and expres- sive. Gladstone could by the slightest modulation of his voice give all the emphasis of italics, of small print, or large print, or any other effect he might desire, to his spoken words. It is not to be denied that his wonderful gift of words sometimes led him astray. It was often such a fluency as that of a torrent on which the orator was carried away. Gladstone had to pay for his fluency by being too fluent. He could seldom resist the temptation to shower too many words on his subject and his hearers. Sometimes he involved his sentence in parenthesis within parenthesis until the ordinary listener began to think ex- trication an impossibility; but the orator never failed to unravel all the entanglements and to bring the passage out to a clear and legitimate conclusion. There was never any halt or incoherency, nor did the joints of the sentence fail to fit together in the right way. Harley once described a famous speech as "a circumgyration of incoherent words." This- description certainly could not be applied even to Mr. Gladstone's most involved passages; but if some of those were described as a circumgyration of coherent words, the phrase might be considered germane to the matter. His style was commonly too redundant. It seemed as if it belonged to a certain school of exuberant Italian rhetoric. Yet it was hardly to be called florid. Gladstone indulged in few flowers of rhetoric, and his great gift was not imag- ination. His fault was simply the habitual use of too many words. This defect was indeed a characteristic of the Peelite school of eloquence. Mr. Gladstone retained some of the defects of the school in which he had been trained, even after he had come to surpass its greatest master. Often, however, this superb, exuberant rush of words added indescribable strength to the eloquence of the speaker. In passages of indignant remonstrance or denun- ciation, when word followed word, and stroke came down upon stroke, with a wealth of resource that seemed inex- haustible, the very fluency and variety of the speaker over- whelmed his audience. Interruption only gave him a new stimulus, and appeared to supply him with fresh resources of argument and illustration. His retorts leaped to his lips. His eye caught sometimes even the mere gesture A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 413 that indicated dissent or question; and perhaps some unlucky opponent who was only thinking of what might be said in opposition to the great orator found himself suddenly dragged into the conflict and overwhelmed with a torrent of remonstrance, argument, and scornful words. Glad- stone had not much humor of the playful kind, but he had a certain force of sarcastic and scornful rhetoric. He was always terribly in earnest. Whether the subject were great or small, he threw his whole soul into it. Once, in addres- sing a schoolboy gathering, he told his young listeners that if a boy ran he ought always to run as fast as he could; if he jumped, he ought always to jump as far as he could. He illustrated his maxim in his own career. He had no idea apparently of running or jumping in such measure as happened to please the fancy of the moment. He always exercised his splendid powers to the uttermost strain. A distinguished critic once pronounced Mr. Gladstone to be the greatest parliamentary orator of our time, on the ground that he had made by far the greatest number of fine speeches, while admitting that two or three speeches had been made by other men of the day which might rank higher than any of his. This is, however, a principle of criticism which posterity never sanctions. The greatest speech, the greatest poem, give the author the highest place, though the effort were but single. Shakespeare would rank beyond Massinger just as he does now had he written only "The Tempest." We cannot say how many novels, each as good as "Gil Bias," would make Le Sage the equal of Cervantes. On this point fame is inexorable. We are not, therefore, inclined to call Mr. Gladstone the greatest English orator of our time when we remember some of the finest speeches of Mr. Bright; but did we regard parliamentary speaking as a mere instrument of parliamentary business and debate, then unquestionably Mr. Gladstone is not only the greatest, but by far the greatest English orator of our time; for lie had a richer combination of gifts than any other man we can remem- ber, and he could use them oftenest with effect. He was like a racer which cannot indeed always go faster than every rival, but can win more races in the year than any other horse. Mr. Gladstone could get up at any moment, and no matter how many times a night, in the House of Commons, and be argumentative or indignant, pour out a 414 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. stream of impassioned eloquence or a shower of figures just as the exigency of the debate and the moment required. He was not, of course, always equal ; but he was always eloquent and effective. He seemed as if he could not be anything but eloquent. Perhaps, judged in this way, he never had an equal in the English parliament. Neither Pitt nor Fox ever made so many speeches combining so many great qualities. Chatham was a great actor rather than a great orator. Burke was the greatest political essayist who ever addressed the House of Commons. Canning did not often rise above the level of burnished rhetorical commonplace. Macaulay, who during his time drew the most crowded houses of any speaker, not even excepting Peel, was not an orator in the true sense. Prob- ably no one, past or present, had in combination so many gifts of voice, manner, fluency and argument, style, reason and passion, as Mr. Gladstone. The House of Commons was his ground. There he was himself; there he was always seen to the best advantage. As a rule, he was not so successful on the platform. His turn of mind did not fit him well for the work of address- ing great public meetings. He loved to look too carefully at every side of a question, and did not always go so quickly to the heart of it as would suit great popular audi- ences. The principal defect of his mind was probably a lack of simplicity, a tendency to over-refining and super- subtle argument. Not perhaps unnaturally, however, when he did, during some of the later passages of his career, lay himself out for the work of addressing popular audiences, he threw away all discrimination, and gave loose to the full force with which, under the excitement of great pressure, he was wont to rush at a principle. There seemed a certain lack of balance in his mind ; a want of the exact poise of all his faculties. Either he must refine too much or he did not refine at all. Thus he became accused, and with some reason, of over-refining and all but quibbling in some of his parliamentary arguments; of looking at all sides of a question so carefully that it was too long in doubt whether he was ever going to form any opinion of his own; and he was sometimes accused with equal justice of pleading one side of a political cause before great meet- ing of his countrymen with all the passionate blindness of a partisan. The accusations might seem self-contradic- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 415 tory, if we did not remember that they will apply, and with great force and justice to Burke. Burke cut blocks with a razor, and went on refining to an impatient House of Com- mons, only eager for its dinner; and the same Burke threw himself into antagonism to the French Revolution as if he were the Avildest of partisans; as if the question had but one side, and only fools or villains could possibly say it had any other. Mr. Gladstone grew slowly into Liberal convictions. At the time when he joined the coalition ministry he was still regarded as one who had scarcely left the camp of Tory- ism, and who had only joined that ministry because it was a coalition. Years after he was applied to by the late Lord Derby to join a ministry formed by him; and it was not supposed that there was anything unreasonable in the prop- osition. The first impulse toward Liberal principles was given to his mind probably by bis change with his leader from protection to free trade. When a man like Gladstone saw that his traditional principles and those of his party had broken down in any one direction, it was but natural that he should begin to question their endurance in other directions. The whole fabric of belief was built up together. Gladstone's was a mind of that order that sees a principle in everything, and must, to adopt the phrase of a great preacher, make the plowing as much a part of religious duty as the praying. The interests of religion seemed to him bound up with the creed of Conservatism; the principles of protection must probably at one time have seemed a part of the whole creed of which one article was as sacred as another. His intellect and his principles, however, found themselves compelled to follow the guid- ance of his leader in the matter of free trade; and when inquiry thus began it was not very likely soon to stop. He must have seen how much the working of such a principle as that of protection became a class interest in England, and how impossible it would have been for it to continue long in existence under an extended and a popular suffrage. In other countries the fallacy of protection did not show itself so glaringly in the eves of the poorer classes, for in other countries it was not the staple food of the population that became the principle object of a protective duty. But in England the bread on which the pooresl had to live was made to pay a tax for the benefit of landlords and farmers, 416 A HISTOR T OF OUR WN TIMES. As long as one believed this to be a necessary condition of a great unquestionable creed, it was easy for a young states- man to reconcile himself to it. It might bear cruelly on individuals, or even multitudes; but so would the law of gravitation, as Mill has remarked, bear harshly on the best of men when it dashed him down from a height and broke his bones. It would be idle to question the existence of the law on that account; or to disbelieve the whole teaching of the physical science which explains its move- ments. But when Mr. Gladstone came to be convinced that tbere was no such law as the protection principle at all; that it was a mere sham; that to believe in it was to be guilty of an economic heresy — then it was impossible for him not to begin questioning the genuineness of the whole system of political thought of which it formed but a part. Perhaps, too, he was impelled toward Liberal prin- ciples at home by seeing what the effects of opposite doc- trines had been abroad.. He rendered memorable service to the Liberal cause of Europe by his eloquent protest against the brutal treatment of Baron Poerio and other Liberals of Naples who were imprisoned by the Neapolitan king — a protest which Garibaldi declared to have sounded the first trumpet-call of Italian liberty. In rendering service to Liberalism and to Europe he rendered service also to his own intelligence. He helped to set free his own spirit as well as the Neapolitan people. We find him, as his career goes on, dropping the traditions of his youth, always rising higher in Liberalism, and not going back. One of the foremost of his compeers, and his only actual rival in popu- lar eloquence, eulogized him as always struggling toward the light. The common taunts addressed to public men who have changed their opinions were hardly ever applied to him. Even his enemies felt that the one idea always inspired him — a conscientious anxiety to do the right thing. None accused him of being one of the politicians who mistake, as Victor Hugo says, a weathercock for a flag. With many qualities which seemed hardly suited to a practical politician; with a sensitive and eager temper, like that of Canning, and a turn for theological argument that as a rule Englishmen do not love in a statesman; with an impetuosity that often carried him far astray, and a defi- ciency of those genial social qualities that go so far to make a public success in England, Mr. Gladstone maintained A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 41? through the whole of his career a reputation against which there was hardly a serious cavil. The worst thing that was said of him was that he was too impulsive, and that his intelligence was too restless. He was an essayist, a critic, a Homeric scholar; a dilettante in art, music, and old china; he was a theological controversialist; he was a politi- cal ecouomist, a financier, a practical administrator whose gift of mastering details has hardly ever been equaled; he was a statesman and an orator. No man could attempt so many things and not occasionally make himself the sub- ject of a sneer. The intense gravity and earnestness of Gladstone's mind always, however, saved him from the special penalty of such versatility; no satirist described him as not one, but all mankind's epitome. As yet, however, he is only the young statesman who was the other day the hope of the more solemn and solid Con- servatives, and in whom they have not even yet entirely ceased to put some faith. The coalition ministry was so formed that it was not supposed a man necessarily nailed his colors to any mast when he joined it. More than one of Gladstone's earliest friends and political associates had a part in it. The ministry might undoubtedly be called an administration of all the talents. Except the late Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, it included almost every man of real ability who belonged to either of the two great parties of the state. The Manchester school had, of course, no place there; but they were not likely just yet to be recognized as constituting one of the elements out of which even a coali- tion ministry might be composed. CHAPTER XXV. THE EASTERN QUESTION. For forty years England had been at peace. There had indeed been little wars here and there with some of her Asiatic, and African neighbors; and once or twice, as in the instance of the quarrel between Turkey and Egypt, she had been menaced for a moment with a dispute of a more formidable kind and nearer home. But the trouble had passed away, and from Waterloo downward England had known no real war. The new generation were grow- 418 A BI8T0R Y OF OUR OWX TIMES. ing up in a kind of happy belief that wars were things of the past for us; out of fashion ; belonging to a ruder and less rational society, like the wearing of armor and the carrying of weapons in the civil streets. It is not surpris- ing if it seemed possible to many that the England of the future might regard the instruments and the ways of war with the same curious wonder as that which Virgil assumes would one day fill the minds of the rustic laborers whose plows turned up on some field of ancient battle the rusted swords and battered helmets of forgotten war- riors. During all the convulsions of the continent, England had remained undisturbed. When bloody revolutions were storming through other capitals, London was smiling over the dispersion of the Chartists by a few special constables. When the armies of Austria, of Russia, of France, of Sar- dinia were scattered over vast and various continental bat- tle-grounds, our troops were passing in peaceful pageantry of review before the well-pleased eyes of their sovereign i»» some stately royal park. A new school as well as a new generation had sprung up. This school, full of faith but full of practical shrewd logic as well, was teaching with great eloquence and effect that the practice of settling inter- national controversy by the sword was costly, barbarous, and blundering as well as wicked. The practice of the duel in England had utterly gone out. BJiitle was forever out of fashion as a means of settling private controversy in England. Why then should it be unreasonable to believe that the like practice among nations might soon become equally obsolete? Such certainly was the faith of a great many intelligent persons at the time when the coalition ministry was formed. The majority tacitly acquiesced in the belief without thinking much about it. They had never in their time seen England engaged in European war; and it was natural to assume that what they had never seen they were never likely to see. Any one who retraces attentively the history of English public opinion at that time will easily find evi- dence enough of a commonly accepted understanding that England had done with great wars. Even then perhaps a shrewd observer might have been inclined to conjecture that by the very force of reaction a change would soon set in. Man, said Lord Palmerston, is by nature a fighting and quarreling animal. This was one of those smart saucy A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 419 generalizations characteristic of its author, and which used to provoke many graver and more philosophic persons; hut which nevertheless often got the heart of a question in a rough and ready sort of way. In the season of which we are now speaking, it was not, however, the common belief that man was by nature a fighting and a quarreling animal — at least in England. Bad government, the arbitrary power of an aristocracy, the necessity of finding occupation for a standing army, the ambitions of princes, the misguid- ing lessons of romance and poetry; these and other influ- ences had converted man into an instrument of war. Leave him to his own impulses, his own nature, his own idea of self-interest, and the better teachings of wiser guides, and he is sure to remain in the paths of peace. Such was the common belief of the year or two after the great exhibition — the belief fervently preached by a few and accepted without contradiction by the majority, as most common beliefs are — the belief floating in the air of the time, and becoming part of the atmosphere in which the generation was brought up. Suddenly all this happy quiet faith was disturbed, and the long peace, which the hero of Tennyson's " Maud" says he thought no peace, was over and done. The hero of "Maud" had, it will be observed, the advantage of explaining his convictions after the war had broken out. The name was indeed legion of those who, under the same conditions, discovered like him that they had never relished the long long peace, or be- lieved in it much as a peace at all. The eastern question it was that disturbed the dream of peace. The use of such phrases as "theeastern question," borrowed chiefly from the political vocabulary of France, is not in general to he commended; hut we can in this instance find no more ready and convenient way of expres- sing clearly and precisely t he meaning of the crisis which had risen in Europe. It was strictly the eastern "ques- tion" — the question of what to do with the east of Europe. It was certain that things could not remain as they then were, and nothing else was certain. The Ottoman power had heen settled during many centuries in the south-east of Europe, [t had come in there as a conqueror, and had remained there only as a conqueror occupies the ground his tents are covering. The Turk had many of the strong qualities and even the virtues of a great warlike conqueror; 420 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. but he had no capacity or care for the arts of peace. He never thought of assimilating himself to those whom he had conquered, or them to him. He disdained to learn anything from them ; he did not care whether or no they learned anything from him. It has been well remarked, that of all the races who conquered Greeks, the Turks alone learned nothing from their gifted captives. Captive Greece conquered all the world except the Turks. They defied her. She could not* teach them letters or arts, com- merce or science. The Turks were not, as a rule, oppres- sive to the races that lived under them. They were not habitual persecutors of the faiths they deemed heretical. In this respect they often contrasted favorably with states that ought to have been able to show them a better exam- ple. In truth, the Turk for the most part was disposed to look with disdainful composure on what he considered the religious follies of the heretical races who did not believe in the prophet. They were objects of his scornful pity rather than of his anger. Every now and then, indeed, some sudden fierce outburst of fanatical cruelty toward some of the subject sects horrified Europe, and reminded her that the conqueror who had settled himself down in her south-eastern corner was still a barbarian who had no right or place in civilized life. But as a rule the Turk did not care enough about the races he ruled over to feel the impulses of the perverted fanaticism which would strive to scourge men into the faith itself believes needful to salvation. At one time there can be little doubt that all the powers of civilized Europe would gladly have seen the Turk driven out of our continent. But the Turk was powerful for a long series of generations, and it seemed for awhile rather a question whether he would not send the Europeans out of their own grounds. He was for centuries the great terror, the nightmare of western Europe. When he began to decay, and when his aggressive strength was prac- tically all gone, it might have been thought that the west- ern powers would then have managed somehow to get rid of him. But in the meantime the condition of Europe had greatly changed. No one not actually subject to the Turk was afraid of him any more; and other 'states had arisen strong for aggression. The uncertainties of these states as to the intentions of their neighbors and each A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 421 other proved a better bulwark for the Turks than any war- like strength of their own could any longer have furnished. The growth of the great Russian empire was of itself enough to change the whole conditions of the problem. Nothing in our times has been more remarkable than the sudden growth of Russia. The rise of the United States is not so wonderful; for the men who made the United States were civilized men; men of our own race who might be expected to make a way for themselves anywhere, and who were, moreover, put by destiny in possession of a vast and splendid continent having all variety of climate and a limitless productiveness; and where they had no neighbors or rivals to molest them. But Russia was peopled by a race who even down to our own times remain in many respects little better than semi-barbarous; and she had enemies and obstacles on all sides. A few genera- tions ago Russia was literally an inland state. She was shut up in the heart of eastern Europe as if in a prison. The genius, the craft and the audacity of Peter the Great first broke the narrow bounds set to the Russia of his day and extended her frontier to the sea. He was followed after a reign or two by a woman of genius, daring, unscrupulousness, and profligacy equal to his own; the greatest woman probably who ever sat on a throne, Eliza- beth of England not even excepted. Catherine the Second so ably followed the example of Peter the Great, that she extended the Russian frontier in directions which he had not had opportunity to stretch to. By the time her reign was done Russia was one of the great powers of Europe, entitled to enter into negotiations on a footing of equality with the proudest states of the continent. Unlike Turkey, Russia had always shown a yearning after the latest devel- opment of science and of civilization. There was some- thing even of affectation, provoking the smiles of an older and more ingrained culture, in the efforts persistently made by Russia to put on the garments of western civiliza- tion. Catherine the Great, in especial, had set the example in this way. She invited Diderot to her court. She adorned her cabinet with a bust of Charles James Fox. While some of the personal habits of herself and of those who surrounded her at court would have seemed too rude and coarse for Esquimaux, and while she was putting down free opinion at home with a severity worthy only of some it-) A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. mediaeval Asiatic potentate, she was always talking as though she were a disciple of Rousseau's ideas and a pupil of Chesterfield's manners. This may have seemed ridicu- lous enough sometimes; and even in Our own days the con- trast between the professions and the practices of Russia is a familiar subject of satire. But in nations at least the homage which imitation pays often wins for half -conscious hypocrisy as much success as earnest and sincere endeavor. A nation that tries to appear more civilized than it really is ends very often by becoming more civilized than its neigh- bors ever thought it likely to be. The wars against Napoleon brought Russia into close alliance with England, Austria, Prussia, and other Euro- pean states of old and advanced civilization. Russia was, during one part of that great struggle, the leading spirit of the alliance against Napoleon. Her soldiers were seen in Italy and in France, as well as in the east of Europe. The semi-savage state became in the eyes of Europe a power charged along with others with the protection of the conservative interests of the continent. She was recog- nized as a valuable friend and a most formidable enemy. Gradually it became evident that she could be aggressive as well as conservative. In the war between Austria and Hungary, Russia intervened and conquered Austria's rebel- lious Hungarians for her. Russia had already earned the hatred of European Liberals by her share in the partition of Poland and her manner of dealing with the Poles. After awhile it grew to be a fixed conviction in the minds of the Liberalism of western Europe that Russia was the greatest obstacle then existing in civilization to the spread of popu- lar ideas. The Turk was comparatively harmless in that sense. He was well content now, so much had his ancient ambition shrunk and his ancient war spirit gone out, if his strong and restless neighbors would only let him alone. But he was brought at more than one point into especial collision with Russia. Many of the provinces he ruled over in European Turkey were of Sclavonian race and of the religion of the Greek Church. They were thus affined by a double tie to the Russian people, and therefore the man- ner in which Turkey dealt with those provinces was a con- stant source of dispute between Russia and her. . The Rus- sians are a profoundly religious people. No matter what one may think of their form of faith, no matter how lie t .1 HISTORY OE OUR OWN TIMES. 423 may sometimes observe that religious profession contrasts with the daily habits of life, yet he cannot but see that the Russian character is steeped in religious faith or fanaticism. To the Russian fanatic there was something intolerable in the thought of a Sclave population, professing the religion of the orthodox Church, being persecuted by the Turks. No Russian ruler could hope to be popular who ventured to show a disregard for the national sentiment on this sub- ject. The Christian populations of Turkey were to the Russian sovereigns what the Germans of Schleswig-Holstein w T ere to the great German princes of later years, an indirect charge to which they could not, if they would, profess any indifference. A German prince, in order to be popu- lar, had to proclaim himself enthusiastic about the cause of Schleswig-Holstein; a Russian emperor could not be loved if he did not declare his undying resolve to be the protector of the Christian populations of Turkey. Much of this was probably sincere and single-minded on the part of the Russian people and most of the Russian politicians. But the other states of Europe began to suspect that min- gled up with benign ideas of protecting the Christian populations of Turkey might be a desire to extend the frontier of Russia to the southward in a new direction. Europe had seen by what craft and what audacious enter- prises Russia had managed to extend her empire to the sea in other quarters; it began to be commonly believed that her next object of ambition would be the possession of Constantinople and the Bosphorus. It was reported that a will of Peter the Great had left it as an injunction to his successors to turn all the efforts of their policy toward that object. The particular document which was believed to be a will of Peter the Great enjoined on all succeeding Russian sovereigns never to relax in the extension of their territory northward on the Baltic and southward on the Black Sea shores, and to encroach as far as possible in the direction of Constantinople and the Indies. "To work out this, raise wars continually — at one time against Turkey, at another against Persia; make dockyards on the Black Sea; by degrees make yourselves masters of that sea as well as of the Baltic; hasten the decay of Persia, and penetrate to the Persian Gulf; establish, if possible, the ancient commerce of the east vid Syria, and push on to the Indies, which are the entrepot of the world. Once t 424 A ULSTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. there you need not fear the gold of England." We now know that the alleged will was not genuine; but there could be little doubt that the policy of Peter and of his great follower Catherine would have been in thorough harmony with such a project. It therefore seemed to be the natural business of other European powers to see that the defects of the Ottoman government, such as they were, should not be made an excuse for helping Eussia to secure the objects of her special ambition. One great power, above all the rest, had an interest in watching over every movement that threatened in any way to interfere with the highway to India; still more with her peaceful and secure possession of India herself. That power, of course, was England. England, Russia, and Turkey were alike in one respect; they were all Asiatic as well as European powers. But Turkey could never come into any manner of collision with the interests of England in the east. The days of Turkey's interfering with any great state were long over. Neither Russia nor England nor any other power in Europe or Asia feared her any more. On the contrary, there seemed something like a natural antagonism between England and Russia in the East. The Russians were ex- tending their frontier toward that of our Indian empire. They were showing in that quarter the same mixture of craft and audacity which had stood them in good stead in various parts of Europe. Our officers and diplomatic emissaries reported that they were continually confronted by the evidences of Russian intrigue in Central Asia. We have already seen how much influence the real or sup- posed intrigues of Russia had in directing our policy in Afghanistan. Doubtless there was some exaggeration and some panic in all the tales that were told of Russian intrigue. Sometimes the alarm spread by these tales con- jured up a kind of Russian hobgoblin, bewildering the minds of public servants and making even statesmen occasionally seem like affrighted children. The question that at present concerns us is not whether all the apprehensions of danger from Russia were just and reasonable, but whether as a matter of fact they did exist. They certainly counted for a great deal in determining the attitude of the English people toward both Turkey and Russia. It was in great measure out of these alarms that there grew up among certain statesmen and classes in this country the convic- t A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 425 tion that the maintenance of the integrity of the Turkish empire was part of the national duty of England. It is not too much, therefore, to say that the states of Europe generally desired the maintenance of the Ottoman empire simply because it was believed that while Turkey held her place she was a barrier against vague dangers which it was not worth while encountering as long as they could possibly be averted. Sharply defined, the condition of things was this; Russia, by reason of her sympathy of religion or race with Turkey's Christian populations, was brought into chronic antagonism with Turkey; England, by reason of her Asiatic possessions, was kept in just the same state of antagonism to Russia. The position of England was trying and difficult. She felt herself com : pelled by the seeming necessity of her national interests to maintain the existence of a power which on its own merits stood condemned, and for which, as a power, no English statesman ever cared to say a word. The position of Russia had more plausibility about it. It sounded better when described in an official document or a popular appeal. Russia was the religious state which had made it her mis- sion and her duty to protect the suffering Christians of Turkey. England, let her state her case no matter how carefully or frankly, could only affirm that her motive in opposing Russia was the protection of her own interests. One inconvenient result of this condition of things was that, here among English people, there was always a wide difference of opinion as to the national policy with regard to Russia and Turkey. Many public men of great ability ami influence were of opinion that England had no right to uphold the Ottoman power because of any fancied dan- ger that might come to us from its fall. It was the simple duty of England, they insisted, to be just and fear not. In private life, they contended, we should all abhor a man who assisted a ruffian to live in a house which he had only got into as a burglar, merely because there was a chance that the dispossession of the ruffian might enable his patron's rival in business to become the owner of the premises. The duty, they insisted, of a conscientious man is clear. He must not patronize a ruffian, whatever comes. Let what will happen, that lie must not do. So it was, according to their argument, with national policy. We are not concerned in discussing this question just now; we 426 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. are merely acknowledging a fact which came to be of material consequence when the crisis arose that threw England into sudden antagonism with Eussia. That crisis came about during the later years of the reign of the Emperor Nicholas. He saw its opening, but not the close of even its first volume. Nicholas was a man of remarkable character. He had many of the ways of an Asiatic despot. He had a strong ambition, a lierce and fitful temper, a daring but sometimes, too, a vacillating will. He had many magnanimous and noble qualities, and moods of sweetness and gentleness. He reminded people some- times of an Alexander the Great; sometimes of the "Arabian Nights" version of Haroun-al-Raschid. Acer- tain excitability ran through the temperament of all his house, which, in some of its members, broke into actual madness and in others prevailed no farther than to lead to wild outbreaks of temper such as those that often con- vulsed the frame and distorted the character of a Charles the Bold or a Coeur de Lion. We cannot date the ways and characters of Nicholas' family from the years of Peter the Great. We must, for tolerably obvious reasons, be content to deduce their orign from the reign of Catherine II. The extraordinary and almost unparalleled conditions of the early married life of that much-injured, much- injuring woman, would easily account for any aberrations of intellect and will among her immediate descendants. Her son was a madman ; there Avas madness or something very like it among the brothers of the Emperor Nicholas. The emperor at one time was very popular in England. He had visited the queen, and he had impressed every one by his noble presence, his lofty stature, his singular personal beauty, his blended dignity and familiarity of manner. He talked as if he had no higher ambition than to be in friendly alliance with England. When he wished to con- vey his impression of the highest degree of personal loyalty and honor, he always spoke of the word of an English gen- tleman. There can, indeed, be little doubt that the em- peror was sincerely anxious to keep on terms of cordial friendship with England; and, what is more, had no idea until the very last that the way he was walking was one which England could not consent to tread. His brother and predecessor had been in close alliance with England ; his own ideal hero was the Duke of Wellington; he had A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 427 made up his mind that when the division of the spoils of Turkey came about, England and he could best consult for their own interests and the peace of the world by mak- ing the appropriation a matter of joint arrangement. We do not often in history find a great despot explain- ing in advance and in frank words a general policy like that which the Emperor Nicholas cherished with regard to Turkey. We are usually left to infer his schemes from his acts. Not uncommonly we have to set his acts and the fair inferences from them against his own positive and repeated assurances. But in the case of the Emperor Nicholas we are left in no such doubt. He told England exactly what he proposed to do. He told the story twice over; more than that, he consigned it to writing for our clearer under- standing. When he visited England in 1844, for the second time, Nicholas had several conversations with the Duke of Wellington ;md with Lord Aberdeen, then foreign secretary, about Turkey and her prospects, and what would be likely to happen in the event of her dissolution, which he believed to be imminent. When he returned to Russia he had a memorandum drawn up by Count Nesselrode, his chancellor, embodying the views which, according to Nicholas' impressions, were entertained alike by him and by the British statesmen with whom he had been convers- ing. Mr. Kinglake says that he sent this document to England with the view of covering his retreat, having met with no encouragement from the English statesmen. Our idea of the matter is different. It may be taken for granted that the English statesmen did not give Nicholas any encouragement or at least that they did not intend to do so; but it seems clear to us that lie believed they had done so. The memorandum drawn up by Count Nessel- rode is much more like a formal reminder or record of a general and oral engagement than a withdrawal from a pro- posal which was evidently not likely to he accepted. The memorandum set forth that Russia and England were alike penetrated by the conviction that it was for their common interest that the Ottoman empire should maintain itself in its existing independence and extent of territory, and that they had an equal interest in averting all the dangers that might place its safety in jeopardy. With this object, the memorandum declared, the essential point was to Buffer the Porte to live in repose without needlessly dis- 428 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. turbing it by diplomatic bickering. Turkey, however, had a habit of constantly breaking her engagements; and the memorandum insisted strongly that while she kept up this practice it was impossible for her integrity to be secure; and this practice of hers was indulged in because she be- lieved she might do so with impunity, reckoning on the mutual jealousies of the cabinets, and thinking that if she failed in her engagements toward one of them, the rest would espouse her cause. " As soon as the Porte shall per- ceive that it is not supported by the other cabinets, it will give way, and the differences which have arisen will be arranged in a conciliatory manner, without any conflict resulting from them." The memorandum spoke of the imperative necessity of Turkey being led to treat her Chris- tian subjects with toleration and mildness. On such con- ditions it was laid down that England and Eussia must alike desire her preservation; but the document proceeded to say that, nevertheless, these states could not conceal from themselves the fact that the Ottoman empire con- tained within itself many elements of dissolution, and that unforeseen events might at any time hasten its fall. " In the uncertainty which hovers over the future a single fundamental idea seems to admit of a really practical appli- cation ; that is, that the danger which may result from a catastrophe in Turkey will be much diminished if in the event of its occurring Russia and England have come to an understanding as to the course to be taken by them in common. That understanding will be the more beneficial inasmuch as it will have the full assent of Austria, between whom and Russia there already exists an entire accord." This document was sent to London and kept in the archives of the foreign office. It was only produced and made public when, at a much later day, the Russian press began to insist that the English government had always been in posssesion of the views of Russia in regard to Turkey. It seems to us evident that the emperor of Russia really believed that his views were shared by English statesmen. The mere fact that his memorandum was received and retained in the English foreign office might well of itself tend to make Nicholas assume that its prin- ciples were recognized by the English government as the basis of a common action, or at least a common understand- ing, between England and Russia. Nothing is more easy A HISTORY Of OUR OWN TIMES. 429 than to allow a fanatic or a man of one idea to suppose that those to whom he explains his views are convinced by him and in agreement with him. It is only necessary to listen and say nothing. Therefore, it is to be regretted that the English statesmen should have listened to Nicholas with- out saying something very distinct to show that they were not admitting or accepting any combination of purpose; or that they should have received his memorandum with- out some distinct disclaimer of their being in any way bound by its terms. Some of the statements in the mem- orandum were at the least sufficiently remarkable to have called for comment of some kind from the English states- men who received it. For example, the emperor of Russia professed to have in his hands not alone the policy of Russia, but that of Austria as well. He spoke for Austria, and he stated that he understood himself to be speaking for England too. Accordingly, England, Austria, and Russia were, in his understanding, entering into a secret conspiracy among themselves for the disposal of the terri- tory of a friendly power in the event of that power getting into difficulties. This might surely be thought by the English statesmen to bear an ominous and painful resem- blance to the kind of pourparlers that were going on between Russia, Prussia, and Austria before the partition of Poland, and might well have seemed to call for a strong and unmistakable repudiation on the part of England. We could scarcely have been too emphatic or too precise in conveying to the emperor of Russia our determination to have nothing to do with any such conspiracy. Time went on, and the emperor thought he saw an occa- sion for still more clearly explaining his plans and for reviving the supposed understanding with England. Lord Aberdeen came into office as prime minister of this coun- try; Lord Aberdeen who was foreign secretary when Nicholas was in England in 1S44. On January 9, 1853, before the re-elections which were consequent upon the new ministerial appointments had vet taken place, the em- peror met our minister, Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, at a party given by the Archduchess Helen, at her palace in St. Petersburg, and lie drew him aside and began to talk with him in the most outspoken manner about the future of Turkey and the arrangements it might be necessary for England and Russia to make regarding it. The conversa- 43o a nisronr op our own times. tion was renewed again and again afterward. Few conver- sations have had greater fame than these. One phrase which the emperor employed has passed into the familiar political language of the world. As long as there is memory of an Ottoman empire in Europe, so long the Turkey of the days before the Crimean War will be called " the sick man." "We have on our hands," said the emperor, "a sick man — a very sick man ; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us before the necessary arrangements have been made." The conversa- tions all tended toward the one purpose. The emperor urged that England and Kussia ought to make arrange- ments beforehand as to the inheritance of the Ottoman in Europe — before what he regarded as the approaching and inevitable day when the sick man must come to die. The emperor explained that he did not contemplate nor would he allow a permanent occupation of Constantinople by .Kussia; or, on the other hand, would he consent to see that city held by England or Erance or any other great power. He would not listen to any plans for the recon- struction of Greece in the form of a Byzantine empire, nor would he allow Turkey to be split up into little republics — aslyums, as he said, for the Kossuths and Mazzinis of Europe. It was not made very clear what the emperor wished to have done with Constantinople, if it was not to be Russian, nor Turkish, nor English, nor French, nor Greek, nor yet a little republic; but it was evident, at all events, that Nicholas had made up his mind as to what it was not to be. He thought that Servia and Bulgaria might become independent states; that is to say, inde- pendent states, such as he considered the Danubian prin- cipalities then to be, "under my protection." If the reor- ganization of south-eastern Europe made it seem neces- sary to England that she should take possession of Egypt, the emperor said he should offer no objection. He said the same thing of Candia; if England desired to have that island, he saw no objection. He did not ask for any for- mal treaty, he said; indeed, such arrangements as that are not generally consigned to formal treaties; he only wished for such an understanding as might be come to among gentlemen, and he was satisfied that if he had ten minutes' conversation with Lord Aberdeen the thing could be easily settled. If only England and Russia could A ffiSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 431 arrive at an understanding on the subject, he declared that it was a matter of indifference to him what other powers might think or say. He spoke of the several millions of Christians in Turkey whose right she was called- upon to watch over, and he remarked — the remark is of significance — that the right of watching over them was secured to him by treaty. The emperor was evidently under the impression that the interests of England and of Russia were united in this proposed transaction. He had no idea of anything but the most perfect frankness so 'far as we were concerned. It clearly had not occurred to him to suspect that there could be anything dishonorable, anything England might recoil from, in the suggestion that the two powers ought to enter into a plot to divide the sick man's goods between them while the breath was yet in the sick man's body. It did not even occur to him that there could be anything dis- honorable in entering into such a compact without the knowledge of any other of the great European powers. The emperor desired to act like a man of honor; but the idea of western honor was as yet new to Russia, and it had not quite got possession of the mind of Nicholas. He was like the savage who is ambitious of learning the ways of civilization, and who may be counted on to do whatever he knows to be in accordance with these ways, but who is constantly liable to make a mistake simply from not know- ing how to apply them in each new emergency. The very consequences which came from Nicholas' confidential com- munications with our minister would of themselves testify to his sincerity, and in a certain sense to his simplicity. But the English government never after the disclosures of Sir Hamilton Seymour put any faith in Nicholas. They regarded him as nothing better than a plotter. They did not probably even make allowance enough for the degree of religious or superstitious fervor which accompanied and qualified all his ambition and his craft. Human nature is so oddly blent that we ought not to be surprised if we find a very high degree of fanatical and sincere fervor in com- pany with a crafty selfishness. The English government and most of the English people ever after looked on Nich- olas as a determined plotter and plunderer who was not to be made an associate in any engagement. On the other hand, Nicholas was as much disappointed as an honest 432 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. highwayman of the days of Captain Macheatli might have been who, on making a handsome offer of a share in a new enterprise to a trusted and familiar "pal," finds that the latter is taken with a fit of virtuous indignation and is hurrying off to Bow street to tell the whole story. The English minister and the English government could only answer the emperor's overtures by saying that they did not think it quite usual to enter into arrangements for the spoilation of a friendly power, and that England had no desire to succeed to any of the possessions of Turkey. The emperor doubtless did not believe these assurances. He probably felt convinced that England had some game of her own in hand into which she did not find it conven- ient to admit him on terms of partnership. He must have felt bitterly annoyed at the thought that he had-committed himself so far for nothing. The communications were of course understood to be strictly confidential; and Nicholas had no fear that they would be given to the public at that time. They were in fact not made publicly known for more than a year after. But Nicholas had the dissatisfac- tion of knowing that her majesty's ministers were now in possession of his designs. He had the additional discom- fort of believing that while he had shown his hand to them, they had contrived to keep whatever designs of their own they were preparing a complete secret from him. One unfortunate admission, the significance of which will be seen hereafter, was made on the part of the English government during the correspondence caused by the con- versation between the emperor and Sir Hamilton Seymour. It was Lord John Eussell who, inadvertently, no doubt, made this admission. In his letter to Sir Hamilton Sey- mour on February 9, 1853, he wound up with the words, " The more the Turkish government adopts the rules of impartial law and equal administration, the less will the emperor of Russia find it necessary to apply that excep- tional protection which his imperial majesty has found so burdensome and inconvenient, though no doubt prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty." These conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour formed but an episode in the history of the events that were then going on. It was an episode of great importance, even to the immediate progress of the events, and it had much to do with the turn they took toward war; but there were A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 433 great forces moving toward antagonism in the south-east of Europe that must in any case have come into collision. Russia, with her ambitions, her tendency to enlarge her frontier on all sides, and her natural sympathies of race and religion with the Christian and Sclave populations under Turkish rule, must before long have come into active hostility with the Porte. Even at the present some- what critical time we are not under any necessity to per- suade ourselves that Eussia was actuated in the move- ments she made by merely selfish ambition, and nothing else; that all the wrong was on her side of the quarrel, and all the right upon ours. It may be conceded without any abrogation of patriotic English sentiment, that, in standing up for the populations so closely affined to her in race and religion, Russia was acting very much as England would have acted under similar circumstances. If we can imagine a number of English and Christian populations under the sway of some Asiatic despot on the frontiers of our Indian empire, we shall admit that it is likely the sen- timents of all Englishmen in India would be extremely sen- sitive on their behalf, and that it would not be difficult to get us to believe that we were called upon to interfere for their protection. Certainly, anyone who should try to persuade us that, after all, these Englishmen were nearly as well off under the Asiatic and despotic rule as many other people, or as they deserved to be, would not have much chance of a patient hearing from us. The Russian emperor fell back a little after the failure of his efforts with Sir [Iain il ton Seymour, and for awhile seemed to agree with the English government as to the necessity of aot embarrassing Turkey by pressing too severely upon her. He was oo doubt seriously disappointed when he found that England would not go with him; and his calculations were put out by the discovery. He there- fore saw himself compelled to act with a certain modera- tion while feeling his way to some other mode of attack. But the natural forces which were in operation did not depend on the will of any empire or government for their tendency. Nicholas would have had to move in any case. There is really no such thing in modern politics as a gen- uine autocrat. Nicholas of Russia could oo more afford to overlook the evidences of popular and national feeling among his people than an English sovereign could. He 434 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. was a despot by virtue of the national will which he em- bodied. The national will was in decided antagonism to the tendencies of the Ottoman power in Europe; and after- ward to the policy which the English government felt themselves compelled to adopt for the support of that power against the schemes of the emperor of Russia. There had long been going on a dispute about the holy places in Palestine. The claims of the Greek Church and those of the Latin Church were in antagonism there. The emperor of Eussia was the protector of the Greek Church ; the kings of France had long had the Latin Church under their protection. France had never taken our views as to the necessity of maintaining the Ottoman power in Europe. On the contrary, as we have seen, the policy of England and that of France were so decidedly opposed at the time when France favored the independence of Egypt, and England would not hear of it, that the two countries very nearly came to war. Nor did France really feel any very profound sympathy with the pretensions which the Latin monks were constantly making in regard to the holy places. There was unquestionably downright religious fanaticism on the part of Russia to back up the demands of the Greek Church ; but we can hardly believe that opinion in France or in the cabiuets of French ministers really concerned itself much about the Latin monks except in so far as political purposes might be subserved by paying some atten- tion to them. But it happened somewhat unfortunately that the French government began to be unusually active in pushing the Latin claims just then. The whole dispute on which the fortunes of Europe seemed for awhile to depend was of a strangely mediaeval character. The holy places to which the Latins raised a claim were the great church in Bethlehem; the sanctuary of the nativity, with the right to place a new star there (that which formerly ornamented it having been lost); the -tomb of the Virgin; the stone of anointing; the seven arches of the Virgin in the church of the holy sepulchre. In the reign of that remarakbly pious, truthful, and virtuous monarch, Francis the First of France, a treaty was made with the sultan by which France was acknowledged the protector of the holy places in Palestine, and of the monks of the Latin Church who took 071 themselves the care of the saored monuments and memorials. But the Greek Church after- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 435 ■ward obtained firmans from the sultan; each sultan gave away privileges very much as it pleased him, and without taking much thought of the manner in which his firman might affect the treaties of his predecessors; and the Greeks claimed on the strength of these concessions that they had as good a right as the Latins to take care of the holy places. Disputes were always arising, and of course these were aggravated by the fact that France was supposed to be con- cerned in the protection of one set of disputants-and Russia in that of another. The French and the Russian govern- ments did, in point of fact, interfere from time to time for the purpose of making good their claims. The claims at length came to be identified with the states which respec- tively protected them. An advantage of the smallest kind gained by the Latins was viewed as an insult to Russia; a concession to the Greeks was a snub to France. The subject of controversy seemed trivial and odd in itself. But it had even in itself a profounder significance than many a question of diplomatic etiquette which has led great states to the verge of war, or into war itself. Mr. Kinglake, whose brilliant history of the invasion of the Crimea is too often disfigured by passages of solemn and pompous monotony, has superfluously devoted several elo- quent pages to prove that the sacredness of association attaching to some particular spot has its roots in the very soil of human nature. The custody of the holy places was in this instance a symbol of a religious inheritance to the monastic disputants, and of political power to the diplomatists. It was France which first stirred the controversy in the time just before the Crimean War. The fact is beyond dis- pute. Lord John Russell had hardly come into office when he had to observe in writing to Lord Cowley, our ambassador in Paris, that "her majesty's government can- not avoid perceiving that the ambassador of France at Constantinople was the first to disturb the status quo in which the matter rested." " Not," Lord John Russell went on to say, "that the disputes of the Latin and Greek Churches were not very active, but without some political action on the part of France those quarrels would never have troubled the relations of friendly powers." Lord John Russell also complained that the French ambassador was the first to speak of having recourse to force and to 436 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. threaten the intervention of a French fleet. "I regret to say," the despatch continued, "that this evil example has been partly followed by Eussia." The French govern- ment were indeed unusually active at that time. The French ambassador, M. de Lavalette, is said to have threat- ened that a French fleet should appear off Jaffa, and even hinted at a French occupation of Jerusalem, "when," as he significantly put it, "we should have all the sanctuaries." One French army occupying Eome and another occupying Jerusalem would have left the world in no doubt as to the supremacy of France. The cause of all this energy is not far to seek. The prince president had only just succeeded in procuring himself to be installed as emperor; and he was very anxious to distract the attention of Frenchmen from domestic politics to some showy and startling policy abroad. He was in quest of a policy of adventure. This controversy between the church of the east and the church of the west tempted him into activity, as one that seemed likely enough to give him an opportunity of displaying the power of France and of the new system without any very great danger or responsibility. Technically, therefore, we are entitled to lay the blame of disturbing the peace of Europe in the first instance on the emperor of the French. But while we must condemn the restless and self-interested spirit which thus set itself to stir up disturbance, we can- not help seeing that the quarrel must have come at some time, even if the plebiscite had never been invited and a new emperor had never been placed upon the throne of France. The emperor of Kussia had made up his mind that the time had come to divide the property of the sick man, and he was not likely to remain long without an opportunity of quarreling with any one who stood at the side of the sick man's bed, and seemed to constitute him- self a protector of the sick man's interests. The key of the whole controversy out of which the east- ern war arose, and out of which indeed all subsequent complications in the east came as well, was said to be found in a clause of the treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji. During the negotiations for peace that took place in Vienna while the Crimean War was yet going on, the assembled plenipo- tentiaries declared that the whole dispute was owing to a misinterpretation of a clause in this unfortunate treaty. In a time much nearer to our own, the discussion on the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 437 same clause in the same treaty was renewed with all the old earnestness; and with the same difference of interpre- tation. It may not perhaps give an initiated reader any very exalted opinion of the utility and beauty of diplomatic arrangements to hear that disputes covering more than a century of time, and causing at least two great wars, arose out of the impossibilty of reconciling two different interpretations of the meaning of two or three lines of a treaty. The American civil war was said with much jus- tice to have been fought to obtain a definition of the limits of the rights of the separate states as laid down in the con- stitution; the Crimean War was apparently fought to ob- tain a satisfactory and final definition of the. seventh clause of the Treaty of Kainardji; and it did not fulfill its purpose. The historic value therefore of this seventh clause may in one sense be considered greater than that of the famous disputed words which provoked the censure of the Jansenists and the immortal letters of Pascal. The treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji was made in 1774, between the Ottoman porte and Catherine II. of Kussia. On sea and land the arms of the great empress had been victorious. Turkey was beaten to her knees. She had to give up Azof and Taganrog to Russia, and to declare the Crimea independent of the Ottoman empire; an event which it is almost needless to say was followed not many years after by the Russians taking the Crimea for them- selves and making it a province of Catherine's empire. The Treaty of Kainardji, as it is usually called, was that which made the arrangements for peace. When it exacted from Turkey such heavy penalties in the shape of cession of territory, it was hardly supposed that one seemingly insig- nificant clause was destined to threaten the very existence of the Turkish empire. The treaty bore date July 10, 1774; and it was made, so to speak, in the tent of the vic- tor. The seventh clause declared that the sublime porte promised "to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches; and also to allow the minister of the imperial court of Russia to make on all occasions representations as well in favor of the new church in Constantinople, of which mention will be made in the fourteenth article, as in favor of those who officiate therein, promising to take such representations into due consideration as bemg made by a confidential functionary of a neighboring and sincerely 438 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. friendly power." Not much possibility of misunderstand- ing about these words, one might feel inclined to say. We turn then to the fourteenth article alluded to, in order to discover if in its wording lies the perplexity of meaning which led to such momentous and calamitous results. We find that by this article it is simply permitted to the court of Russia to build a public church of the Greek rite in the Galata quarter of Constantinople, in addition to the chapel built in the house of the minister; and it is declared that the new church "shall be always under the protection of the ministers of the (Russian) empire, and shield from all obstruction and all damage." Here, then, we seem to have two clauses of the simplest meaning and by no means of first-class importance. The latter clause allows Russia to build a new church in Constantinople; the former allows the Russian minister to make representations to the porte on behalf of the church and of those who officiate in it. What difference of opinion, it may be asked, could possibly arise? The difference was this; Russia claimed a right of protectorate over all the Christians of the Greek Church in Turkey as the consequence of the seventh clause of the treaty. She insisted that when Turkey gave her a right to interfere on behalf of the worshipers in one par- ticular church, the same right extended so far as to cover all the worshipers of the same denomination in every part of the Ottoman dominions. The great object of Russia throughout all the negotiations that preceded the Crimean War was to obtain from the porte an admis- sion of the existence of such a protectorate. Such an acknowledgment would, in fact, have made the emperor of Russia the patron and all but the ruler of by far the larger proportion of the populations of European Turkey. The sultan would no longer have been master in his own dominions. The Greek Christians would naturally have regarded the Russian emperor's right of intervention on their behalf as constituting a protectorate far more power- ful than the nominal rule of the sultan. They would have known that the ultimate decision of any dispute in which they were concerned rested with the emperor, and not with the sultan; and they would soon have come to look upon the emperor, and not the sultan, as their actual sovereign. Now it does not seem likely on the face of things that any ruler of a state would have consented to hand over to a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 439 more powerful foreign monarch such a right over the great majority of his subjects. Still, if Turkey, driven to her last defenses, had no alternative but to make such a con- cession, the emperor of Russia could not be blamed for insisting that it should be carried out. The terms of the article in the treaty itself certainly do not seem to admit of such a construction. But for the views always advocated by Mr. Gladstone, we should say it was self-evident that the article never had any such meaning. We cannot, however, dismiss the argument of such a man as Mr. Glad- stone as if it were unworthy of consideration, or say that an interpretation is obviously erroneous which he has delib- erately and often declared to be accurate. We may as well mention here at once that Mr. Gladstone rests his argument on the first line of the famous article. The promise of the sultan, he contends, to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches is an engagement distinct in itself, and disconnected from the engagement that follows in the same clause, and which refers to the new building and its ministrants. The sultan engages to protect the Christian churches; and with whom does he enter into this engagement ? With the sovereign of Russia. Why does he make this engagement? Because he has been de- feated by Russia and compelled to accept terms of peace; ami one of the conditions on which he is admitted to peace is his making this engagement. How does he make the engagement? By an article in a treaty agreed to between him and the sovereign of Russia. But if a state enters into treaty engagement with another that it will do a cer- tain thing, it is clear that the other state must have a Bpecial right of remonstrance and of representation if the tiling be not done. Therefore Mr. Gladstone argues that as tin 1 sultan math' a special treaty with Russia to protect the Christians, he gave in the very nature of things a special right to Russia to complain if the protection was not given. We are far from denying that there is force in the argument; and it is at all events worthy of being recorded for its mere historical importance. But Mr. Gladstone's was certainly not the European interpretation of the clause; nor does it seem to us the interpretation that history will accept. Lord John Russell, as we have seen, made a somewhat unlucky admission that the claims of Russia to a protectorate were "prescribed by duty and 440 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. sanctioned by treaty." Bnt this admission seems rather to have been the result of inadvertence or heedlessness than of any deliberate intention to recognize the particular claim involved. The admission was afterward made the occasion of many a severe attack upon Lord John Eussell by Mr. Disraeli and other leading members of the opposition. Assuredly Lord John Eussell's admission, if it is reaily to be regarded as such, was not endorsed by the English gov- ernment. "Whenever we find Eussia putting the claim into plain words, we find England, through her ministers, refusing to give it their acknowledgment. During the discussions before the Crimean War, Lord Clarendon, our foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Stratford de Eedcliffe a letter embodying the views of the English government on the claim. No sovereign, Lord Clarendon says, having a due regard for his own dignity and independence, could admit proposals which conferred upon a foreign and more powerful sovereign a right of protection over his own sub- jects. "If such a concession were made, the result," as Lord Clarendon pointed out, "would be that fourteen mil- lions of Greeks would henceforward regard the emperor as their supreme protector, and their allegiance to the sultan would be little more than nominal, while his own inde- pendence would dwindle into vassalage." Diplomacy, therefore, was powerless to do good during all the pro- tracted negotiations that set in, for the plain reason that the only object of the emperor of Eussia in entering upon negotiation at all was one which the other European powers regarded as absolutely inadmissable. The dispute about the holy places was easily settled. The porte cared very little about the matter, and was willing enough to come to any fair terms by which the whole controversy could be got rid of. But the demands of Eussia went on just as before. Prince Mentschikoff, a man of the Potemkin school," fierce, rough, and unable or unwilling to control his temper, was sent with demands to Constantinople; and his very manner of making the demands seemed as if it were taken up for the purpose of ensuring their rejection. If the envoy fairly represented the sovereign, the demands must have been so conveyed with the deliberate intention of immediately and irresis- tibly driving the Turks to reject every proposition coming from such a negotiator. Mentschikoff brought his pro- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 441 posals with him cut and dry in the form of a convention which he called upon Turkey to accept without more ado. In other words, he put a pistol at Turkey's head and told her to sign at once or else he would pull the trigger. Turkey refused, and Prince Mentschikoff withdrew in real or affected rage, and presently the Emperor Nicholas sent two divisions of his army across the Pruth to take posses- sion of the Danubian principalities. Diplomacy, however, did not give in even then. The emperor announced that he had occupied the principalities not as an act of war, but with the view of obtaining material guarantees for the concession of the demands which Turkey had already declared that she would not concede. The English government advised the porte not to treat the occupation as an act of war, although •fully admitting that it was strictly a casus belli, and that Tur- key would have been amply justified in meeting it by an armed resistance if it were prudent for her to do so. It would of course have been treated as war by any strong power. We might well have retorted upon Russia the harsh but not wholly unjustifiable language she had em- ployed toward us when we seized possession of material guar- antees from the Greek government in the harbor of Piraeus. In our act, however, there was less of that which consti- tutes war than in the arbitrary conduct of Russia. Greece did not declare that our demands were such as she could not admit in principle. She did admit most of them in principle but was only, as it seemed to our government, or at least to Lord Palmerston, trying to evade an actual settlement. There was nothing to go to war about; and our seizure of the ships, objectionable as it was, might be described as only a way of getting hold of a material guar- antee for the discharge of a debt which was not in principle disputed. But in the dispute between Russia and Turkey the claim was rejected altogether; it was declared intoler- able; its principle was absolutely repudiated, and any overt act on the part of Russia must therefore have had for its object to compel Turkey to submit to a demand which she would yield to force alone. This is of course in the very spirit of war; and if Turkey had been a stronger power, she would never have dreamed of meeting it in any other way than by an armed resistance. She was, however, strongly advised by England and other powers to adopt a 442 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. moderate course; and, in fact, throughout the whole of the negotiations she showed a remarkable self-control and a dignified courtesy which must sometimes have been very vexiug to her opponent. Diplomacy went to work again, and a Vienna note was concocted which Russia at once offered to accept. The four great powers who were carry- ing on the business of mediatiou were at first quite charmed with the note, with the readiness of Russia to accept it, and with themselves; and but for the interposition of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe it seems highly probable that it would have been agreed to by all the parties concerned. Lord Stratford, however, saw plainly that the note was a virtual concession to Russia of all that she specially desired to have, and all that Europe was unwilling to concede to her. • The great object of Russia was to obtain an acknowl- edgment, however vague or covert, of her protectorate over the Christians of the Greek Church in the sultan's domin- ions ; and the Vienna note was so constructed as to affirm much rather than to deny the claim which Russia had so long been setting up. Assuredly such a note could at some future time have been brought out in triumph by Russia as an overwhelming evidence of the European recognition of such a protectorate. Let us make this a little more plain. Suppose the ques- tion at issue were as to the payment of a tribute claimed by one prince from another. The one had been always insisting that the other was his vassal, bound to pay him tribute; the other always repudiated the claim in princi- ple. This was the subject of dispute. After awhile the question is left to arbitration, and the arbitrators, without actually declaring in so many words that the claim to the tribute is established, yet go so far as to direct the payment of a certain sum of money, and do not introduce a single word to show that in their opinion the original claim was unjust in principle. Would not the claimant of the tribute be fully entitled in after years, if any new doubt of his claim were raised, to appeal to this arbitration as con- firming it? Would he not be entitled to say, "The dis- pute was about my right to tribute. Here is a document awarding to me the payment of a certain sum, and not con- taining a word to show that the arbitrators disputed the principle of my claim. Is it possible to construe that other- wise than as a recognition of my claim?" We certainly A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 443 cannot think it would have been otherwise regarded by any impartial mind. The very readiness with which Kussia consented to accept the Vienna note ought to have taught its framers that Kussia found all her account in its vague and ambiguous language. The prince consort said it was a trap laid by Russia through Austria; and it seems hardly possible to regard it now in any other light. The Turkish government, therefore, acting under the advice of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our ambassador to Constantinople, who had returned to his post after a long absence, declined to accept the Vienna note unless with considerable modifications. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe showed great acuteness and force of character throughout all these negotiations. A reader of Mr. Kinglake's his- tory is sometimes apt to become nauseated by the absurd pompousness with which the historian overlays his descrip- tions of "the great Eltchi," as he is pleased to call him, and is inclined to wish that the great Eltchi could have imparted some of his own sober gravity and severe sim- plicity of style to his adulator. Mr. Kinglake writes of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe as if he were describing the all- compelling movements of some divinity or providence. A devoted imperial historian would have made himself ridi- culous by writing of the great Napoleon at the height of his power in language of such inflated mysticism as this educated Englishman has allowed himself to employ when describing the manner in which our ambassador to Con- stantinople did his duty during the days before the Crimean War. But the extraordinary errors of taste and good sense into which Mr. Kinglake occasionally descends can- not prevent us from doing justice to the keen judgment and the inflexible will which Lord Stratford displayed dur- ing this critical time. He saw the fatal defect of the note, which, prepared in Paris, had been brought to its sup- posed perfection at Vienna, and bad there received the adhesion of the English government along with that of the governments of the other great powers engaged in the con- ference. A hint from Lord Stratford made the ministers of the porte consider it was suspicious scrutiny, and they too saw its weakness and its conscious or unconscious treachery. They declared that unless certain modifications were introduced they would not accept the note. The reader will at first think perhaps that some of these modi- 444 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. fications were mere splittings of hairs and diplomatic, worse even than lawyer-like quibbles. But in truth the altera- tions demanded were of the greatest importance for Tur- key. The porte had to think not for the immediate pur- pose of the note, but of the objects it might be made to serve afterward. It contained, for instance, words which de- clared that the government of his majesty the sultan would remain " faithful to the letter and the spirit of the stipula- tions of the treaties of Kainardji and of Adrianople, rela- tive to the protection of the Christian religion." These words, in a note drawn up for the purpose of satisfying the emperor of Russia, could not but be understood as recogniz- ing the interpretation of the treaty of Kainardji on which Eussia has always insisted. The porte therefore proposed to strike out these words and substitute the following: "To the stipulations of the treaty of Kainardji, confirmed by that of Adrianople, relative to the protection by the sublime porte of the Christian religion." By these words the Turkish ministers quietly affirm that the only protec- torate exercised over the Christians of Turkey is that of the sultan of Turkey himself. The difference is simply that between a claim conceded and a claim repudiated. The Russian government refused to accept the modifications; and in arguing against them, the Russian minister, Count Nesselrode, made it clear to the English government that Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was right when he held the note to be full of weakness and of error. For the Russian minister argued against the modifications on the very ground that they denied to the claims of Russia just that satisfaction that the statesmanship and the public opinion of Europe had always agreed to refuse. The prince con- sort's expression was appropriate ; the western powers had nearly been caught in a trap. From that time all hopes of peace were over. There were, to be sure, other negotiations still. A ghastly sem- blance of faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement was kept up for awhile on both sides. Little plans of ad- justment were tinkered up and tried, and fell to pieces the moment they were tried. It is not necessary for us to describe them. Not many persons put any faith or even professed any interest in them. They were conducted amid the most energetic preparations for war on both sides. Our troops were moving toward Malta; the streets of Lon- A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 445 don, of Liverpool, of Southampton, and other towns, were ringing with the cheers of enthusiastic crowds gathered to- gether to watch the marching of troops destined for the east. Turkey had actually declared war against Russia. People now were anxious rather to see how the war would open between Russia and the allies than when it would open ; the time when could evidently only be a question of a few days; the way how was a matter of more peculiar interest. We had known so little of war for nearly forty years, that added to all the other emotions which the coming of battle must bring was the mere feeling of curi- osity as to the sensation produced by a state of war. It was an abstraction to the living generation — a thing to read of and discuss and make poetry and romance out of; but they could not yet realize what itself was like. CHAPTER XXVI. WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? Meanwhile where was Lord Palmerston? He of all men, one would think, must have been pleased with the turn things were taking. He had had from the beginning little faith in any issue of the negotiations but war. Prob- ably he did not really wish for any other result. We are well inclined to agree with Mr. Kinglake that of all the members of the cabinet he alone clearly saw his way and was satisfied with the prospect. But according to the sup- posed nature of his office he had now nothing to do with the war or with foreign afi'airs except as every member of the cabinet shares the responsibilities of the whole body. He had apparently about as much to do with the war as the postmaster-general, or the chancellor for the duchy of Lancaster, might have. He had accepted the office of home secretary; he had declared that he did not choose to be foreign secretary any more. He affirmed that he wanted to learn something about home afi'airs, and to get to understand his countrymen, and so forth. He was really very busy all this time in his new duties. Lord Palm- erston wns a remarkably efficient and successful home sec- retary. His unceasing activity loved to show itself in what- ever department he might be called upon to occupy. He 446 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. brought to the somewhat prosaic duties of his new office, not only all the virile energy, but also all the enterprise which he had formerly shown in managing revolutions and dictating to foreign courts. The ticket-of-leave system dates from the time of his administration. Our transpor- tation system had broken down, for, in fact, the colonies would stand it no longer, and it fell to Lord Palmerston to find something to put in its place; and the plan of grant- ing tickets-of-leave to convicts who had shown that they were capable of regeneration was the outcome of the neces- sity and of his administration. The measures to abate the smoke nuisance, by compelling factories under penal- ties to consume their own smoke, is also an offspring of Palmerston's activity in the home office. The factory acts were extended by him. He went energetically to work in the shutting up of graveyards in the metropolis; and in a letter to his brother he declared that he should like to "put down beershops, and let shopkeepers sell beer like oil, and vinegar, and treacle, to be carried home and drunk with wives and children." This little project is worthy of notice because it illus- trates more fairly perhaps than some far greater plan might do at once the strength and the weakness of Palm- erston's intelligence. He could not see why everything should not be done in a plain straightforward way, and why the arrangements that were good for the sale of one thing might not be good also for the sale of another. He did not stop to inquire whether, as a matter of fact, beer is a commodity at all like oil, and vinegar, and treacle; whether the same consequences follow the drinking of beer and the consumption of treacle. His critics said that he was apt to manage his foreign affairs on the same rough- and-ready principle. If a system suited England, why should it not suit all other places as well? If treacle may be sold safely without any manner of authoritive regula- tion, why not beer? The answer to the latter question is plain— because treacle is not beer. So, people said, with Palmerston's constitutional projects for every place. Why should not that which suits England suit also Spain? Be- cause, to begin with, a good many people urged, Spain is not England. There was one department of his duties in which Palm- erston was acquiring a new and somewhat odd reputation, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 447 This was in his way of answering deputations and letters. "The mere routine business of the home office," Palmer- ston writes to his brother, "as far as that consists in daily correspondence, is far lighter than that of the foreign office. But during a session of parliament the whole time of the secretary of state, up to the time when he must go to the House of Commons, is taken up by deputations of all kinds, and interviews with members of parliament, militia colonels, etc." Lord Palmerston was always civil and cor- dial; he was full of a peculiar kind of fresh common sense, and always ready to apply it to any subject whatever. He could at any time say some racy thing which set the public wondering and laughing. He gave something like a shock to the Presbytery of Edinburgh when they wrote to him through the moderator to ask whether a national fast ought not to be appointed in consequence of the appearance of cholera. Lord Palmerston ' gravely admonished the Presbytery that the Maker of the universe had appointed certain laws of nature for the planet on which we live, and that the weal or woe of mankind depends on the ob- servance of those laws — one of them connecting health " with the absence of those noxious exhalations which pro- ceed from overcrowded human beings, or from decompos- ing substances whether animal or vegetable." He therefore recommended that the purification of towns and cities should be more strenuously carried on, and remarked that the causes and sources of contagion, if allowed to remain, "will infallibly breed pestilence and be fruitful in death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a united but inactive nation." When Lord Stanley of Alderly applied to Lord Palmerston for a special permission for a deceased dignitary of a church to be buried under the roof of the sacred building, the home secretary declined to accede to the request in a letter that might have come from, or might have delighted, Sydney Smith. " What special con- nection is there between church dignities and the privilege of being decomposed under the feet of survivors? Do you seriously mean to imply that a soul is more likely to go to heaven because the body which it inhabited lies decompos- ing under the pavement of a church instead of being placed in a churchyard?. . . England is, I believe, the only country in which in these days people accumulate putrefy- ing dead bodies amid the dwellings of the living; and as 448 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to burying bodies under thronged churches, you might as well put them under libraries, drawing-rooms, and dining-rooms." Lord Palmerston did not see what a very large field of religious and philosophical controversy he opened up by some of his arguments, both as to the fasting and as to the burial in churchyards. He only saw, for the moment, what appeared to him the healthy, common-sense aspect of the position he had taken up, and did not think or care about what other positions he might be surrendering by the very act. He had not a poetic or philosophic mind. In clearing his intelligence from all that he would have called prejudice or superstition, he had cleared out also much of the deeper sympathetic faculty which enables one man to understand the feelings and get at the springs of conduct in the breasts of other men. No one can doubt that his jaunty way of treating grave and disputed subjects of- fended many pure and simple minds. Yet it was a mistake to suppose that mere levity dictated his way of dealing with the prejudices of others. He had often given the question his deepest attention, and had come to a conclusion with as much thought as his temperament would have allowed to any subject. The difference between him and graver men was that when he had come to a conclusion seriously, he loved to express his views humorously. He resembled in this respect some of the greatest and the most earnest men of his time. Count Cavour delighted in jocose and hu- morous answers; so did President Lincoln; so atone period of his public career did Prince Bismarck. But there can be no doubt that Palmerston often made enemies by his seeming levity when another man could easily have made friends by saying just the same thing in grave words. The majority of the House of Commons liked him because he amused them and made them laugh ; and they thought no more of the matter. But the war is now fairly launched; and Palmerston is to all appearance what would be vulgarly called "out of the swim." Every eye was turned to him. He was like Pitt standing up on one of the back benches to support the administration of Addington. For years he had been identified with the foreign office, and with that sort of for- eign policy which would seem best suited to the atmos- phere of war; and now war is on foot, and Palmerston is A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 449 iu the home office pleasantly " chaffing" militia colonels and making sensitive theologians angry by the flippancy of his replies. Perhaps there was something flattering to Palm- erston's feeling of self-love in the curious wonder with which people turned their eyes upon him during all that interval. Every one seemed to ask how the country was to get on without him or to manage its foreign affairs, and when he would be good enough to come down from his quiet seat in the home office and assume what seemed his natural duties. A famous tenor singer of our day once had some quarrel with his manager. The singer withdrew from the company; some one else had to be put in his place. On the first night when the new man made his appearance before the public, the great singer was seen in a box calmly watching the performance like any other of the audience. The new man turned out a failure. The eyes of the house began to fix themslves upon the one who could sing, but who was sitting as unconcernedly in his box as if he never meant to sing any more. The audience at first was incredulous. It was in a great provincial city where the singer had always been a prime favorite. They could not believe that they were in good faith to be ex- pected to put up with bad singing while he was there. At last their patience gave way. They insisted on the one singer leaving his place on the stage, and the other coming down from his box and his easy attitude of unconcern, and resuming what they regarded as his proper part. They would have their way; they carried their point; and the man who could sing was compelled at last to return to the scene of his old triumphs and sing for them again. The attitude of Lord Palmerston and the manner in which the public eyes were turned upon him during the early days of the war could hardly be illustrated more effectively than by this story. As yet the only wonder was why he did not take somehow the directorship of affairs; the time was to come when the general voice would insist upon his doing so. One day a startling report ran through all circles. It was given out that Palmerston had actually resigned. So far was he from any intention of taking on himself the direction of affairs — even of war or of foreign affairs — that he appeared to have gone out of the ministry altogether. The report was confirmed; Palmerston actually had re- 450 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. signed. It was at once asserted that his resignation was caused by difference of opinion between him and his col- leagues on the eastern policy of the government. But, on the other hand, it was as stoutly affirmed that the differ- ence of opinion had only to do with the new reform bill which Lord John Bussed was preparing to introduce. Now it is certain that Lord Palmerston did differ in opinion with Lord John Bussed on the subject of his reform bill. It is certain that this was the avowed cause, and the only avowed cause of Palmerston's resignation. But it is equally certain that the real cause of the resignation was the con- viction in Palmerston's mind that his colleagues were not up to the demands of the crisis in regard to the eastern war. Lord Palmerston's letters to his brother on the sub- ject are amusing. They resemble some of the epistles which used to pass between suspected lovers in old days, and in which the words were so arranged that the sentences conveyed an obvious meaning good enough for the eye of jealous authority, but had a very different tale to tell to the one being for whom the truth was intended.- Lord Palmerston gives his brother a long and circumstantial account of the differences about the reform bill, and about the impossibility of a home secretary either supporting by speech a bill he did not like or sitting silent during the whole discussion on it in the House of Commons. He shows that he could not possibly do otherwise under such trying circumstances than resign. The whole letter, until we come to the very last paragraph, is about the reform bill and nothing else. One might suppose that nothing else whatever was entering into the writer's thoughts. But at the end Palmerston just remembers to add that the Times was telling "an untruth" when it said there had been no difference in the cabinet about eastern affairs; for in fact there had been some little lack of agreement on the subject, but it would have looked rather silly, Palmerston thinks, if he were to have gone out of office merely because he could not have his own way about Turkish affairs. Exactly; and in a few days after Palmerston was induced to withdraw his resignation and to remain in the govern- ment; and then he wrote to his brother again explaining how and all about it. He explains that several members of the cabinet told him they considered the details of the reform bill quite open to discussion and so forth. " Their A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 45I earnest representations, and the knowledge that the cabinet had on Thursday taken a decision on Turkish affairs in entire accordance with opinions which I had long unsuc- cessfully pressed upon them, decided me to withdraw my resignation, which I did yesterday." "Of course," Lord Palmerston quietly adds, "what I say to you about the cabinet decision on Turkish affairs is entirely for yourself and not to be mentioned to anybody. But it is very im- portant, and will give the allied squadrons the command of the Black Sea." All this was very prudent, of course, and very prettily arranged. But we doubt whether a single man in England who cared anything about the whole ques- tion was imposed upon for one moment. Nobody believed that at such a time. Lord Palmerston would have gone out of office because he did not quite like the details of a reform bill, or that the cabinet would have obstinately clung to such a scheme just then in spite of his opposi- tion. Indeed the first impression of every one was that Palmerston had gone out only in order to come back again much stronger than before; that he resigned when he could not have his way in eastern affairs, and that he would resume office empowered to have his way in every- thing. The explanations about the reform bill found as im- patient listeners among the public at large as the desperate attempts of the young heroine in " She Stoops to Conquer " to satisfy honest Tony Lumpkin with her hasty and ill- concocted devices about Shagbag and Green and the rest of them, whose story she pretends to read for him from the. letter which is not intended to reach the suspicious ears of his mother. When Lord Palmerston resumed his place in the ministry, the public at large felt certain that the war spiril was now at last to have its way, and that the dallv- ings of the peace-lovers were over. Nor was England long left to guess at the reason why Lord Palmerston had so suddenly resigned his orlice and so suddenly returned to it. A great disaster had fallen upon Turkey. Her fleet had beeu destroyed by the Prus- sians at Sinope, in the Black Sea. Sinope is, or was, a considerable seaport town and naval station belonging to Turkey, and standing on a rocky promontory on the southern shore of the Black Sea. <)u November 30, is,".:;, the Turkish squadron was lying there at anchor. The squadron consisted of seven frigates, ;i sloop, and a steamer, 452 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. It had no ship of the line. The Russian fleet, consist- ing of six ships of the line and some steamers, had been cruising about the Black Sea for several days previously, issuing from Sebastopol, and making an occasional swoop now and then as if to bear down upon the Turkish squad- ron. The Turkish commander was quite aware of the danger, and pressed for reinforcements; but nothing was done, either by the Turkish government or by the ambas- sadors of the allies at Constantinople. On November 30, however, the Sebastopol fleet did actually bear down upon the Turkish vessels lying at Sinope. The Turks, seeing that an attack was coming at last, not only accepted, but even anticipated it; for they were the first to fire. The fight was hopeless for them. Tbey fought with all the desperate energy of fearless and unconquerable men; unconquerable, at least, in the sense that they would not yield. But the odds were too much against them to give them any chance. Either they would not haul down their flag, which is very likely; or if they did strike their colors, the Russian admiral did not see the signal. The fight went on until the whole Turkish squadron, save for the steamer, was destroyed. It was asserted on official author- ity that more than four thousand Turks were killed ; that the survivors hardly numbered four hundred; and that of these every man was wounded. Siuope itself was much shattered and battered by the Russian fleet. The affair was at once the destruction of the Turkish ships and an attack upon Turkish territory. This was "the massacre of Sinope." When the news came to England there arose one cry of grief and anger and shame. It was regarded as a deliberate act of treach- ery, consummated amid conditions of the most hideous barbarity. A clamor arose against the emperor of Russia as if he were a monster outside the pale of civilized law, like some of the furious and treacherous despots of medi- aeval Asiatic history. Mr. Kinglake has shown — and indeed the sequence of events must in time have shown every one — that there was no foundation for these accusa- tions. The attack was not treacherous, but openly made; not sudden, but clearly announced by previous acts, and long expected, as we have seen, by the Turkish commander himself; and it was not in breach even of the courtesies of war. Russia and Turkey were not only formally but A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 453 actually at war. The Turks were the first to begin the actual military operations. More than five weeks before the affair at Smope they had opened the business by firing from a fortress on a Russian flotilla. A few days after this act they crossed the Danube at Widdin and occupied Kalafat; and for several days they had fought under Omar Pasha with brilliant success against the Russians at Otenitza. All England had been enthusiastic about the bravery which the Turks had shown at Otenitza and the success which had attended their first encounter with the enemy. It was hardly to be expected that the emperor of Russia would only fight when he was at a disadvan- tage and refrain from attack where his power was over- whelming. Still there was an impression among English and French statesmen that while negotiations for peace were actually going on between the western powers and Russia, and while the fleets of England and France were remaining peacefully at anchor in the Bosphorus, whither they had been summoned by this time, the Russian em- peror would abstain from complicating matters by making use of his Sebastopol fleet. Nothing could have been more unwise than to act upon an impression of this kind as if it were a regular agreement. But the English public did not understand at that moment the actual condition of things, and may well have supposed that if our govern- ment seemed secure and content, there must have been some definite arrangement to create so happy a condition of mind. It may look strange to readers now, surveying this chapter of past history with cool, unimpassioned mind, that anybody could have believed in the existence of any arrangement by virtue of which Turkey could be at war with Russia and not at war with her at the same time; which would have allowed Turkey to strike her enemy when and how she pleased, and would have restricted the enemy to such time, place, and method of retort as might suit the convenience of the neutral powers. But at the time, when the true state of affairs was little known in England, the account of the "massacre of Sinope" was received as if it had been the talc of some unparalleled act of treachery and savagery ; and the eagerness of the coun- try for war against Russia became inflamed to actual passion. It was at that moment that Palmerston resigned his 454 ^ til STOUT OF OUR OWN TIMES. office. The cabinet were still not prepared to go as far as he would have gone. They had believed that the Sebas- topol fleet would do nothing as long as the western powers kept talking about peace; they now believed perhaps that the emperor of Eussia would say he was very sorry for what had been done and promise not to do so any more. Lord Palmerston, supported by the urgent pressure of the em- peror of the French, succeeded, however, in at last over- coming their determination. It was agreed that some deci- sive announcement should be made to the emperor of Russia on the part of England and France; and Lord Palm- erston resumed his place, master of the situation. This was the decision of which he had spoken in his letter to his brother; the decision which he said he had long unsuc- cessfully pressed upon his colleagues, and which would give the allied squadrons the command of the Black Sea. It was, in fact, an intimation to Eussia that France and England were resolved to prevent any repetition of the Sinope affair ; that their squadrons would enter the Black Sea with orders to request, and if necessary to constrain, every Russian ship met in the Euxine to return to Sebas- topol ; and to repel by force any act of aggression afterward attempted against the Ottoman territory or flag. This was not, it should be observed, simply an intimation to the emperor of Eussia that the great powers would impose and enforce the neutrality of the Black Sea. It was an announcement that if the flag of Eussia dared to show itself on that sea, which washed Eussia's southern shores, the war-ships of two far foreign states, taking possession of those waters, would pull it down, or compel those who bore it to fly ignominiously into port. This was, in fact, war. Of course Lord Palmerston knew this. Because it meant war he accepted it and returned to his place, well pleased with the way m which things were going. From his point of view he was perfectly right. He had been consistent all through. He believed from the first that the pretensions of Eusisa would have to be put down by force of arms, and could not be put down in any other way; he believed that the danger to England from the aggrandisement of Eussia was a capital danger calling for any extent of national sacrifice to avert it. He believed that a war with Eussia was inevitable, and he preferred A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 455 taking it sooner to taking it later. He believed that an alliance with the emperor of the French was desirable, and a war with Russia would be the best means of making this effective. Lord Palmerston, therefore, was deter- mined not to remain in the cabinet unless some strenuous measures were taken, and now, as on a memorable former occasion, he understood better than any one else the pre- vailing temper of the English people'. When the resolution of the western cabinets was com- municated to the emperor of Russia he withdrew his repre- sentatives from London and Paris. On February 21, 1845, the diplomatic relations between Russia and the two allied powers were brought to a stop. Six weeks before this the English and French fleets had entered the Black Sea. The interval was filled up with renewed efforts to bring about a peaceful arrangement, which were conducted with as much gravity as if any one believed in the possibility of their success. The emperor of the French, who always loved letter-writing, and delighted in what Cobden once happily called the "monumental style," wrote to the Rus- sian emperor appealing to him, professedly in the interests of peace, to allow an armistice to be signed, to let the belligerent forces on both sides retire from the places to which motives of war had led them, and then to negotiate a convention with the sultan which might be submitted to a conference of the four powers. If Russia would not do this, then Louis Napoleon, undertaking to speak in the name of the queen of Great Britain as well as of himself, intimated that France and England would be compelled to leave to the chances of war what might now be decided by reason and justice. The Emperor Nicholas replied that ho "had claimed nothing hut what was confirmed by treaties; that his conditions were perfectly woll known; he was still willing to treat on those conditions; but if Russia were driven to arms, then he quietly observed that he had no doubt she could hold her own as well in 1854 as she had done in 1812. That year, 1812, it is hardly necessary to say, was the year of the burning of Moscow and the disas- trous retreat of the French. We can easily understand what-faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement the Russian emperor must have had when he made the allu- sion and the French emperor must have had when it met his eye. Of course if Louis Napoleon had had the faintest 456 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. belief in any good result to come of his letter he would never have closed it with the threat which provoked the Russian sovereign into his insufferable rejoinder. The correspondence might remind one of that which is said to have passed between two Irish chieftains. " Pay me my tribute," wrote the one, " or else !" " I owe you no tribute," replied the other, " and if . . . " England's ultimatum, to Russia was despatched on Feb- ruary 27, 1854. It was conveyed in a letter from Lord Clarendon to Count Nesselrode. It declared that the British government had exhausted all the efforts of nego- tiation, and was compelled to announce that "if Russia should decline to restrict within purely diplomatic limits the discussion in which she has for some time past been engaged with the sublime porte, and does not, by return of the messenger who is the bearer of my present letter, announce her intention of causing the- Russian troops under Prince Gortschakoff to commence their march with a view to recross the Pruth, so that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia shall be completely evacuated on April 30 next, the British government must consider the refusal for the silence of the cabinet of St. Petersburg as equivalent to a declaration of war and will take its meas- ures accordingly." It is not perhaps very profitable work for the historian to criticise the mere terms of a document announcing a course of action which long before its issue had become inevitable. But it is worth while remarking perhaps that it would have been better and more dignified to confine the letter to the simple demand for the evacua- tion of the Danubian provinces. To ask Russia to promise that her controversy with the porte should be thencefor- ward restricted within purely diplomatic limits was to" make a demand with which no great power would, or indeed could, undertake to comply. A member of the peace society itself might well hesitate to give a promise that a dispute in which he was engaged should be forever confined within purely diplomatic limits. In any case it was certain that Russia would not now make any conces- sions tending toward peace. The messenger who was the bearer of the letter was ordered not to wait more than six days for an answer. On the fifth day the messenger was informed by word of mouth from. Count Nesselrode that the emperor did not think it becoming in him to give any A HI8T0 UT OF OUR WN TIMES. 45 1 reply to the letter. The die was cast. Rather, truly, the fact was recorded that the die had been cast. A few days after a crowd assembled in front of the royal exchange to watch the performance of a ceremonial that had been little known to the living generation. The sergeant-at- arms, accompanied by some of the officials of the city, read from the steps of the royal exchange her majesty's declaration of Avar against Russia. The causes of the declaration of war were set forth in an official statement published in the London Gazette. This document is an interesting and a valuable state paper. It recites with clearness and deliberation the successive steps by which the allied powers had been led to the necessity of an armed intervention in the controversy between Turkey and Russia. It described, in the first place, the complaint of the emperor of Russia against the sultan with reference to the claims of the Greek and Latin Churches, and the arrangement promoted satisfactorily by her majesty's ambassador at Constantinople for rendering justice to the claim, " an arrangement to which no exception was taken by the Russian government." Then came the sudden unmasking of the other and quite different claims of Prince Mentschikoff, " the nature of which in the first instance he endeavored, as far as possible, to conceal from her majesty's ambassador." These claims, "thus studiously concealed," affected not merely, or at all, the privileges of the Greek Church at Jerusalem, "but the position of many millions of Turkish subjects in their relations to their sov- ereign the sultan." The declaration recalled the various attempts that were made by the queen's government in conjunction with the governments of France, Austria, and Prussia, to meet any just demands of the Russian em- peror without alfccting the dignity and independence of the sultan; and showed that if the object of Russia had been solely to secure their proper privileges and immu- nities for the Christian populations of (lie Ottoman empire, the offers that were made could not have failed to meet that object. Her majesty's government, therefore, held it as manifest that what Russia was really seeking was not the happiness of the Christian communities of Turkey, but the right to interfere in the ordinary relations between Turkish subjects and their sovereign. The sultan refused to consent to this, and declared war in self-defense. Yet 458 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the government of her majesty did not renounce all hope of restoring peace between the contending parties until, advice and remonstrance proving wholly in vain, and Rus- sia continuing to extend her military preparations, her majesty felt called upon, " by regard for an ally, the integ- rity and independence of whose empire have been recog- nized as essential to the peace of Europe; by the sympa- thies of her people with right against wrong; by a desire to avert from her dominions most injurious consequences, and to save Europe from the preponderance of a power which has violated the faith of treaties and defies the opinion of the civilized world, to take up arms in con- junction with the emperor of the French for the defense of the sultan." Some passages of this declaration have invited criticism from English historians. It opens, for example, with a statement of the fact that the efforts for an arrangement were made by her majesty in conjunction with France, Austria and Prussia. It speaks of this concert of the four powers clown almost to the very close; and then it sud- denly breaks off and announces, that, in consequence of all that has happened, her majesty has felt compelled to take up arms "in conjunction with the emperor of the French." What strange diplomatic mismanagement, it was asked, has led to this singular non sequitur? Why, after having carried on the negotiations through all their various stages with three other great powers, all of them supposed to be equally interested in a settlement of the question, is England at the last moment compelled to take up arms with only one of those powers as an ally? The principle reason for the separation of the two west- ern powers of Europe from the other great states was found in the condition of Prussia. Prussia was then greatly under the influence of the Russian court. The Prussian sovereign was related to the emperor of Russia; and his kingdom was almost overshadowed by Russian influence. Prussia had come to occupy a lower position in Europe than she had ever before held during her existence as a kingdom. It seemed almost marvelous how by any process the country of the Great Frederick could have sunk to such a condition of insignificance. She had been com- pelled to stoop to Austria after the events of 1848. The King of Prussia, tampering wHh the offers of the strong A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 459 national party who desired to make him emperor of Ger- many, now moving forward and now drawing back, "let- ting I dare not wait upon I would," was suddenly pulled up by Austria. The famous arrangement, called after- ward "the humiliation of Olmlitz," and so completely revenged at Sadowa, compelled him to drop all his triflings with nationalism and repudiate his former instigators. The king of Prussia was a highly-cultured, amiable, literary man. He loved letters and art in a sort of dilettante way; he had good impulses and a weak nature; he was a dreamer; a sort of philosopher manque. He was unable to make up his mind to any momentous decision until the time for ren- dering it effective had gone by. A man naturally truthful he was often led by very weakness into acts that seemed irreconcilable with his previous promises and engagements. He could say witty and sarcastic things, and when political affairs went wrong with him, he could console himself with one or two sharp sayings only heard by those imme- diately around him; and then the world might go its way for him. He was, like Rob Roy, "ower good for banning and ower bad for blessing." Like our own Charles II., he never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one. He ought to have been an aesthetic essayist, or a lecturer on art and moral philosophy to young ladies; and an unkind destiny had made him the king of a state specially embar- rassed in a most troublous time. 80 unkindly was popu- lar rumor as well as fate to him, that he got the credit in foreign countries of being a stupid sensualist, when he was really a man of respectable habits ami refined nature; and in England at least the nickname "" King Clicquot" was long the brand by which the popular and most mistaken impression of his character was signified. The king of Prussia was the elder brother of the present German emperor. Had the latter been then on the throne he would probably have taken some timely and energetic decision with regard to the national duty of Prussia during the impending crisis. Right or wrong, he would doubtless have contrived to see his way ami make up his mind at an early stage of the European movement. It is by no means to be assumed thai he would have taken the course mosl satisfactory to England and France; hut it is likely that his action mighl have prevented the war, either by render- ing the allied powers far too strong to be resisted by Russia, 460 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. or by adding to Eussia an influence which would have ren- dered the game of war too formidable to suit the calcula- tions of the emperor of the French. The actual king of Prussia, however, went so far with the allies as to lead them for awhile to believe that he was going all the way; but at the last moment he broke off, declared that the interests of Prussia did not require or allow him to engage in a war, and left Prance and England to walk their own road. Austria could not venture upon such a war without the co-operation of Prussia; and indeed the course which the campaign took seemed likely to give both Austria and Prussia a good excuse for assuming that their interests were not closely engaged in the struggle. Austria would most certainly have gone to war if the emperor of Russia had kept up the occupation of the Danubian principalities and for that purpose her territorial situation made her irresist- ible. But when the seat of war was transferred to the Black Sea, and when after awhile the czar withdrew his troops from the principalities and Austria occupied them by virtue of a convention with the sultan, her direct interest in the struggle was reduced almost to nothing. Austria and Prussia were in fact solicited by both sides of the dispute, and at one time it was even thought possible that Prussia might give her aid to Russia. This, how- ever, she refrained from doing; Austria and Prussia made an arrangement between themselves for mutual defense in case the progress of the war should directly imperil the interests of either; and England and France undertook in alliance the task of chastising the presumption and restraining the ambitious designs of Russia. Sir. King- lake finds much fault with the policy of the English gov- ernment, on which he lays all the blame of the severance of interests between the two western states and the other two great powers. But we confess that we do not see how any course within the reach of England could have secured just then the thorough alliance of Prussia; and without such an alliance it would have been vain to expect that Austria would throw herself unreservedly into the policy of the western powers. It must be remembered that the controversy between Russia and the west really involved several distinct questions, in some of which Prussia, had absolutely no direct interest and Austria very little. Let us set out some of these questions separately. There was A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4fil the Russian occupation of the principalities. In this Aus- tria frankly acknowledged her capital interest. Its direct bearing was on her more than any other power. It con- cerned Prussia as it did England and France, inasmuch as it was an evidence of an aggressive purpose which might very seriously threaten the general stability of the institu- tions of Europe; but Prussia had no closer interest in it. Austria was the state most affected by it, and Austria was the state which could with most effect operate against it, and was always willing and resolute if needs were to do so. Then there was the question of Russia's claim to exercise a protectorate over the Christian populations of Turkey. This concerned England and France in one sense as part of the general pretensions of Russia, and concerned each of them separately in another sense. To France it told of a rivalry with the right she claimed to look after the interests of the Latin Church; to England it spoke of a purpose to obtain a hold over populations nominally subject to the sultan which might in time make Russia virtual master of the approaches to our eastern possessions. Austria too had a direct interest in repelling these pretensions of Russia, for some of the populations they referred to were on her very frontier. But Prussia can hardly be said to have had any direct national interest in that question at all. Then there came, distinct from all these, the question of the straits of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. This question of the straits, which had so much to do with the whole European aspect of the war, is not to be understood except by those who bear the conformation of the map of Europe constantly in their minds. The only outlet of Russia on the southern side is the Black Sea. The Black Sea is, save for one little outlet at its south- western extremity, a huge land-locked lake. That little outlet is the narrow channel called the Bosphorus. Russia and Turkey between them surround the whole of the Black Sea with their territory. Russia has the north and some of the eastern shore; Turkey has all the southern, the Asia Minor shore, and nearly all the western shore. Close the straits of the Bosphorus and Russia would be literally locked into the Black Sea. The Bosphorus is a narrow channel, as has been said; it is some seventeen miles in length, and in some places it is hardly more than half a mile in breadth. But it is very deep all through, so that 462 A HISTORY OF Otfll OWN TIMES, ships of war can float close up to its very shores on either side. This channel in its course passes between the city of Constantinople and its Asiatic suburb of Scutari. The Bosphorus then opens into the little Sea of Marmora; and out of the Sea of Marmora the way westward is through the channel of the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles form the only passage into the Archipelago, and thence into the Mediterranean. The channel of the Dardanelles is, like the Bosphorus, very narrow and very deep, but it pursues its course for some forty miles. Any one who holds a map in his hand will see at once how Turkey and Russia alike are affected by the existence of the straits on either extrem- ity of the Sea of Marmora. Close up these straits against vessels of war, and the capital of the sultan is absolutely unassailable from the sea. Close them, on the other hand, and the Russian fleet in the Black Sea is absolutely cut off from the Mediterranean and the western world. But then it has to be remembered that the same act of closing would secure the Russian ports and shores on the Black Sea from the approach of any of the great navies of the west. The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus being alike such narrow channels, and being edged, alike by Turkish territory, were not regarded as high seas. The sultans always claimed the right to exclude foreign ships of war from both the straits. The treaty of 1841 secured this right to Turkey by the agreement of the five great powers of Europe. The treaty acknowledged that the porte had the right to shut the straits against the armed navies of any foreign power; and the sultan, for his part, engaged not to allow any such navy to enter either of the straits in time of peace. The closing of the straits had been the subject of a perfect suc- cession of treaties. The treaty of 1809 between Great Britain and Turkey confirmed by engagement "the ancient rule of the Ottoman empire" forbidding vessels of war at all times to enter the "Canal of Constantinople." The treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi between Russia and Turkey, aris- ing out of Russia's co-operation with the porte to put down the rebellious movement of Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian vassal of the latter, contained a secret clause binding the porte to close " the Dardanelles" against all war vessels whatever, thus shutting Russia's enemies out of the Black Sea, but leaving Russia free to pass the Bosphorus, so far at least, as that treaty engagement was concerned. A H18T0RY OP OUR OWN TIMES. 463 Later, when the great powers of Europe combined to put down the attempts of Egypt, the treaty of July 13, 1841, made in London, engaged that in time of peace no foreign ships of war should be admitted into the straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. This treaty was but a renewal of a convention made the year before, while France was still sulking away from the European concert and did nothing more than record her return to it. As matters stood then, the sultan was not only permitted but was bound to close the straits in times of peace, and no navy might enter them without his consent even in times of war. But in times of war he might of course give the permission and invite the presence and co-operation of the armed vessels of a foreign power in the Sea of Mar- mora. By this treaty the Black Sea fleet of Kussia became literally a Black Sea fleet, and could no more reach the Mediterranean and western Europe than a boat on the Lake of Lucerne could do. Naturally Russia chafed at this; but at the same time she was not willing to see the re- striction withdrawn in favor of an arrangement that would leave the straits, and consequently the Black Sea, open to the navies of France and England. Her supremacy in eastern Europe would count for little, her power of coer- cing Turkey would be sadly diminished, if the war-flag of England, for example, were to float side by side with her own in front of Constantinople or in the Euxine. There- fore it was natural that the ambition of Russia should tend toward the ultimate possession of Constantinople and the straits for herself; but as this was an ambition the fufill- ment of which seemed far off and beset with vast dangers, her object, meanwhile, was to gain as much influence and ascendency as possible over the Ottoman government; to make it practically the vassal of Russia, and in any case to prevent any other great power from obtaining the influence and ascendency which she coveted for herself. Now the tendency of this ambition and of all the intermediate claims and disputes with regard to the opening or closing of the straits was of importance to Europe generally as a part of Russian aggrandizement; but of the great powers they concerned England most; France as a Mediterranean and a naval power; Austria only in a third and remoter degree; and Prussia at the time of King Frederick Wil- liam least of all. It is not surprising therefore that the 464 A BISTORT OF OUR WN TIMES. two western powers were not able to carry their accord with Prussia to the extent of an alliance in war against Kussia; and it was hardly possible then for Austria to go on if Prussia insisted on drawing back. Thus it came that at a certain point of the negotiations Prussia fell off absolutely or nearly so; Austria undertook but a conditional co-opera- tion, of which, as it happened, the conditions did not arise; and the queen of England announced that she had taken up arms against Russia "in conjunction with the emperor of the French." To the great majority of the English people this war was popular. It was popular, partly because of the natural and inevitable reaction against the doctrines of peace and mere trading prosperity which had been preached some- what too pertinaciously for some time before. But it was popular too because of its novelty. It was like a return to the youth of the world when England found herself once more preparing for the field. It was like the pouring of new blood into old veins. The public had grown impa- tient of the common saying of foreign capitals that England had joined the peace society and would never be seen in battle any more. Mr. Kinglake is right when he says that the doctrines of the peace society had never taken any hold of the higher classes in this country at all. They had never, we may venture to add, taken any real hold of the humbler classes ; of the working men, for example. The well-educated thoughtful middle-class, who knew how much of worldly happiness depends on a regular income, moderate taxation, and a comfortable home, supplied most of the advocates of "peace," as it was scornfully said, "at any price." Let us say, in justice to a very noble and very futile doctrine, that there were no persons in England who advocated peace "at any price," in the ignominious sense which hostile critics pressed upon the words. There was a small, a serious and a very respectable body of persons who, out of the purest motives of conscience, held that all war was criminal and offensive to the Deity. They were for peace at any price, exactly as they were for truth at any price, or conscience at any price. They were opposed to war as they were to falsehood or to impiety. It seemed as natural to them that a man should die unresisting rather than resist and kill, as it does to most persons who profess any sentiment of religion, or even of honor, that a man A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4Q$ should die rather than abjure the faith he believed in, or tell a lie. It is assumed as a matter of course that any Englishman worthy of the name would have died by any torture tyranny could put on him rather than perform the old ceremony of trampling on the crucifix which certain heathen states were said to have sometimes insisted on as the price of a captive's freedom. To the believers in the peace doctrine the act of war was a trampling on the crucifix, which brought with it evil consequences unspeak- ably worse than the mere performance of a profane cere- monial. To declare that they would rather suffer any earthly penalty of defeat or national servitude than take part in a war was only consistent with the great creed of their lives. It ought not to have been held as any reproach to them. Even those who, like this writer, have no personal sympathy with such a belief, and who hold that a war in a just cause is an honor to a nation, may still recognize the purity and nobleness of the principle which inspired the votaries of peace and do honor to it. Hut these men were in any case not many at the time when the Crimean War broke out. They had very little influ- ence on the course of the national policy. They were assailed with a flippant and a somewhat ignoble ridicule. The worst reproach that could be given to men like Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright was to accuse them of being mem- bers of the peace society. It does not appear that either man was a member of the actual organization. Mr. Bright's religious creed made him necessarily a votary of peace; Mr. Cobden had attended meetings called with the futile pur- pose of establishing peace among nations by the operation of good feeling ami of common sense. But for a consider- able time the temper of the English people was such as to render any talk about peace not only unprofitable, but perilous to the very cause of peace itself. Some of the lead- ing members of the peace society did actually get up a deputation to the emperor Nicholas to appeal to his better feelings; and of course they were charmed by the manners of the emperor, who made it bis business to be in a very gracious humor, and spoke them fair, and introduced them in the most unceremonious way to bis wife. Such a visit counted for nothing in Russia, and at home it only tended to make people angry and impatient, and to put the cause. of peace in greater jeopardy than ever. Viewed as a prac- 466 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. tical influence the peace doctrine was completely broken down, as a general resolution against the making of money might have done during the time of the mania for specula- tion in railway shares. But it did not merely break down of itself. It carried some great influences down with it for the time — influences that were not a part of itself. The eloquence that had coerced the intellect and reasoning power of Peel into a complete surrender to the doctrines of free trade, the eloquence that had aroused the popula- tions of all the cities of England and had conquered the House of Commons, was destined now to call aloud to soli- tude. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright addressed their constit- uents and their countrymen in vain. The fact that they were believed to be opposed on principle to all wars put them out of court in public estimation, as Mr. Kinglake justly observes, when they went about to argue against this particular war. In the cabinet itself there were men who disliked the idea of a war quite as much as they did. Lord Aberdeen detested war, and thought it so absurd a way of settling national disputes, that almost until the first cannon-shot had been fired he could not bring himself to believe in the possibility of the intelligent English people being drawn into it. Mr. Gladstone had a conscientious and a sensitive objection to war in general as a brutal and an unchristian occupation, although his feelings would not have carried him so far away as to prevent his recognition of the fact that war might often be a just, a necessary and a glorious under- taking on the part of a civilized nation. The difficulties of the hour were considerably enhanced by the differences of opinion that prevailed in the cabinet. There were other differences there as well as those that belonged to the mere abstract question of the glory or the guilt of war. It soon became clear that two parties of the cabinet looked on the war and its objects with different eyes and interests. Lord Palmerston wanted simply to put down Bussia and uphold Turkey. Others were especially concerned for the Christian populations of Tur- key and their better government. Lord Palmerston not merely thought that the interests of England called for some check to the aggressiveness of Bussia; he liked the Turk for himself; he had faith in the future of Turkey; he went so far even as to proclaim his belief in ( the endur- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 467 ance of her military power. Give Turkey single-handed a fair chance, he argued, and she would beat Russia. He did not believe either in the disaffection of the Christian populations or in the stories of their oppression. He regarded all these stories as part of the plans and inven- tions of Russia. He had no half-beliefs in the matter at all. The Christian populations and their grievances he regarded, in plain language, as mere humbugs; he looked upon the Turk as a very fine fellow whom all chivalric minds ought to respect. He believed all that was said upon the one side, and nothing upon the other; he had made up his mind to this long ago, and no arguments or facts could now shake his convictions. A belief of this kind may have been very unphilosophic. It was undoubt- edly in many respects the birth of mere prejudice inde- pendent of fact or reasoning. But the temper born of such a belief is exactly that which should have the mak- ing of a war entrusted to it. Lord Palmerston saw his way straight before him. The brave Turk had to be supported; the wicked Russian had to be put down. On one side there were Lord Aberdeen, who did not believe any one seriously meant to be to barbarous as to go to war, and Mr. ( i ladstone, who shrank from war in general and was not yet quite certain whether England had any right to undertake tliis war; the two being furthermore concerned far more for the welfare of Turkey's Christian subjects than for the stability of Turkey or the humiliation of Russia. On the other side was Lord Palmerston, gay, resolute, clear as to his own purpose, convinced to the heart's core of every- thing which just then it was for the advantage of his cause to believe. It was impossible to doubt on which side were to be found the materials for the successful con- duct of the enterprise which was now so popular with the country. The most conscientious men might differ about the prudence or the moral propriety of the war; but to those who once accepted its necessity and wished our side to win, there could be no possible doubt, even for mem- bers of the peace society, as to the importance of having Lord Palmerston either at the head of affairs or in charge of the war itself. The moment the war actually broke out, it became evident to everyone that Palnierston's in- terval of comparative inaction and obscurity was well nigh over. 468 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CHAPTEE XXVII. THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. England then and France entered the war as allies. Lord Kaglan, formerly Lord Fitzeroy Somerset, an old pupil of the Great Duke in the Peninsular War, and who had lost his right arm serving under Wellington at Water- loo, was appointed to command the English forces. Mar- shal St. Arnaud, a bold, brilliant soldier of fortune, was entrusted by the emperor of the French with the leader- ship of the soldiers of France. The allied forces went out to the east and assembled at Varna, on the Black Sea shore, from which they were to make their descent on the Crimea. The war, meantime, had gone badly for the em- peror of Russia in his attempt to crush the Turks. The Turks had found in Omar Pasha a commander of remark- able ability and energy; and they had in one or two instances received the unexpected aid and counsel of clever and successful Englishmen. A singularly brilliant episode in the opening part of the war was the defense of the earthworks of Silistria, on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube, by a body of Turkish troops under the directions of three young Englishmen, Captain Butler, of the Ceylon Rifles, Lieut. Nasmyth, of the East India Company's ser- vice, and Lieut. J. A. Ballard, of the Bombay Engineers. These young soldiers had voluntarily undertaken the danger and responsibility of the defense. Butler was killed, but the Russians were completely foiled and had to raise the siege. At Giurgevo and other places the Rus- sians were likewise repulsed ; and the invasion of the Dan- ubian provinces was already, to all intents, a failure. Mr. Kinglake and other writers have argued that but for the ambition of the emperor of the French and the excited temper of. the English people the war might well have ended then and there. The emperor of Russia had found, it is contended, that he could not maintain an inva- sion of European Turkey; his fleet was confined to its ports in the Black Sea, and there was nothing for him but to make peace. But we confess we do not see with what propriety or wisdom the allies, having entered on the en- terprise at all, could have abandoned it at such a moment and allowed the czar to escape thus merely scorched. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 469 However brilliant and gratifying the successes obtained against the Russians, they were but a series of what might be called outpost actions. They could not be supposed to have tested the resources of Russia or weakened her strength. They had humbled and vexed her just enough to make her doubly resentful and no more. It seems im- possible to suppose that such trivial disasters could have affected in the slightest degree the historic march of Rus- sian ambition, supposing such a movement to exist. If we allow the purpose with which England entered the war to be just and reasonable, then we think the instinct of the English people was sound and true which would have refused to allow Russia to get off with one or two trifling checks, and to nurse her wrath and keep her vengeance waiting for a better chance some other time. The allies went on. They sailed from Varna for the Crimea nearly three months after the raising of the siege of Silistria. There is much discussion as to the original author of the project for the invasion of the Crimea. The emperor Napoleon has had it ascribed to him ; so has Lord Palm- erston; so has the Duke of Newcastle; so, according to Mr. Kinglake, has the Times newspaper. It does not much concern us to know in whom the idea originated, but it is of some importance to know that it was essentially a civilian's and not a soldier's idea. It took possession almost simultaneously, so far as we can observe, of the minds of several statesmen, and it had a sudden fascination for the public. The Emperor Nicholas had raised and sheltered his Black Sea fleet at Sebastopol. That fleet had sallied forth from Sebastopol to commit what was called the massacre of Sinope. Sebastopol was the great arsenal of Russia. It was the point from which Turkey was threatened; from which, it was universally believed, the embodied ambition of Russia was one day to make its most formidable effort of aggression. Within the fence of its vast sea-forts the fleet of the Black Sea lay screened. From the moment when Hie vessels of England and France entered the Euxine, the Russian fleet had withdrawn be- hind the curtain of these defenses, and was seen upon the open waves no more. If, therefore, Sebastopol could be taken or destroyed, it would seem as if the whole material fabric, put together at such cost and labor, for the execu- 470 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tion of the schemes of Russia would be shattered at a blow. There seemed a dramatic justice in the idea. It could not fail to commend itself to the popular mind. Mr. Kinglake has given the world an amusing picture of the manner in which the despatch of the Duke of New- castle, ordering the invasion of the Crimea — for it really amounted to an order — was read to his colleagues in the cabinet. It was a despatch of the utmost importance, for the terms in which it pressed the project on Lord Raglan really rendered it almost impossible for the commander-in- chief to use his own discretion. It ought to have been considered sentence by sentence, word by word. It was read, Mr. Kinglake affirms, to a number of cabinet ministers most of whom had fallen fast asleep. The day was warm, he says ; the despatch was long ; the reading was somewhat monotonous. Most of those who tried to listen found the soporific influence irresistible. As Sam Weller would have said, poppies were nothing to it. The statesmen fell asleep; and there was no alteration made in the despatch. All this is very amusing; and it is, we believe, true enough that at the particular meeting to which Mr. Kinglake refers there was a good deal of nodding of sleepy heads and closing of tired eyelids. But it is not fair to say that these slumbers had anything to do with the subsequent events of the war. The reading of the despatch Was purely a piece of formality; for the project it was to recommend had been discussed very fully before, and the minds of most members of the cabinet were finally made up. The 28th of June, 1854, was the day of the slumbering cabinet. But Lord Palmerston had during the whole of the previous fortnight at least been urging on the cabinet, and on indi- vidual members of it separately, the Duke of Newcastle in especial, the project of an invasion of the Crimea and an attempt on Sebastopol. With all the energyandstrenuous- ness of his nature he had been urging this, by arguments in the cabinet, by written memoranda for the consideration of each member of the cabinet separately, and by long earnest letters addressed to particular members of the cabi- net. Many of these documents, of the existence of which Mr. Kinsdake was doubtless not aware when he set down his vivacious and satirical account of the sleeping cabinet, have since been published. The plan had also been greatly favored and much urged by the emperor of the French be- A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 471 fore the day of the sleep of the statesmen; indeed, as has been said already, he receives from many persons the credit of having originated it. The plan therefore, good or bad, was thoroughly known to the cabinet, and had been argued for and against over and over again before the Duke of Newcastle read aloud to drowsy ears the despatch recom- mending it to the commander-in-chief of the British forces in the field. The perusal of the despatch was a mere form. It would indeed have been better if the most wearied states- man had contrived to pay full attention to it, but the want of such respect in no wise affected the policy of the coun- try. It is a pity to have to spoil so amusing a story as Mr. Kinglake's; but the commonplace truth has to be told that the invasion of the Crimea was not due to the crotchet of one minister aud the drowsiness of all the rest. The invasion of the Crimea, however, was not a soldier's project. It was not welcomed by the English or the French commander. It was undertaken by Lord Raglan out of deference to the recommendations of the government; and by Marshal St. Arnaud out of deference to the emperor of the French and because Lord Raglan too did not see his way to decline the responsibility of it. The allied forces were therefore conveyed to the south-western shore of the Crimea, and effected a landing in Kalamita Bay, a short, distance north of the point at which the river Alma runs into the sea. Sebastopol itself lies about thirty miles to the south; and then more southward still, divided by the bulk of a jutting promontory from Sebastopol, is the har- bor of Balaklava. The disembarkation began on the morning of September 14, 1854. It was completed on the fifth day; and there were then some 27,000 English, 30,000 French, and 7,000 Turks, landed on the shores of Catherine -the Croat's Crimea. The landing was effected without any opposition from the Russians. On September lOth the allies marched out of their encampments and moved southward in the direction of Sebastopol. They had a skirmish or two with a reconnoitering force of Russian cavalry and Cossacks; but they had no business of genuine war until they reached the nearer bank of the Alma. The Russians in great strength had taken up a splendid position on the heights that fringed the other side of the river. The allied forces reached the Alma about noon on September 20th. They found that they had to cross the 472 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. river in the face of the Russian batteries armed with heavy guns on the highest point of the hills or bluffs, of scattered artillery, and of dense masses of infantry which covered the hills. The Russians were under the command, of Prince Mentschikoff . It is certain that Prince Mentschikoff believed his position unassailable, and was convinced that his enemies were delivered into his hands when he saw the allies approach and attempt to effect the crossing of the river. He had allowed them, of deliberate purpose, to approach thus far. He might have attacked them on their landing, or on their two days' march toward the river. But he did not choose to do anything of the kind. He had carefully sought out a strong and what he considered an impregnable position. He had found it, as he be- lieved, on the south bank of the Alma; and there he was simply biding his time. His idea was that he could hold his ground for some days against the allies with ease; that he would keep them there, play with them, until the great reinforcements he was expecting could come to him ; and then he would suddenly take the offensive and crush the enemy. He proposed to make of the Alma and its banks the grave of the invaders. But with characteristic arro- gance and lack of care he had neglected some of the very precautions which were essentially necessary to secure any position, however strong. He had not taken the pains to make himself certain that every easy access to his position was closed against the attack of the enemy. The attack was made with desperate courage on the part of the allies, but without any great skill of leadership or tenacity of dis- cipline. It was rather a pell-mell sort of fight, in which the headlong courage and the indomitable obstinacy of the English and French troops carried all before them at last. A study of the battle is of little profit to the ordinary reader. It was an heroic scramble. There was little coherence of action between the allied forces. But there was happily an almost total absence of generalship on the part of the Russians. The soldiers of the czar fought stoutly and stubbornly as they have always done; but they could not stand up against the blended vehemence and obstinacy of the English and French. The river was crossed, the oppo- site heights were mounted, Prince Mentschikoff's great redoubt was carried, the Russians were driven from the field, the allies occupied their ground ; the victory was to A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 473 the western powers. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that the victory was to the English; owing to whatever cause, the French did not take that share in the heat of the battle which their strength and their military genius might have led men to expect. St. Arnaud, their com- mander-in-chief, was in wretched health, on the point of death, in fact; he was in no condition to guide the battle; a brilliant enterprise of General Bosquet was ill-supported and had nearly proved a failure; and Prince Napoleon's division got hopelessly jammed up and confused. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that in the confusion and scram- ble of the whole affair we were more lucky than the French. If a number of men are rushing headlong and in the dark toward some distant point, one may run against an unthought-of obstacle and fall down and so lose his chance, while his comrade happens to meet with no such stumbling- block and goes right on. Perhaps this illustration may not unfairly distribute the parts taken in the battle. It would be superfluous to say that the French fought splendidly where they had any real chance of fighting. But the luck of the day was not with them. On all sides the battle was fought without generalship. On all sides the bravery of the officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were the luckiest. They saw the heights; they saw the enemy there; they made for him; they got at him ; they would not go back ; and so he had to give way. That was the history of the day. The big scramble was all over in a few hours. The first field was fought, and we had won. The Russians ought to have been pursued. They them- selves fully expected a pursuit. They retreated in some- thing like utter confusion, eager to put the Katcha river, which runs south of the Alma and with a somewhat simi- lar course, between them and the imaginary pursuers. Had they been followed to the Katcha they might have been all made prisoners or destroyed. But there was no pur- suit. Lord Raglan was eager to follow up the victory; but the French had as yet hardly any cavalry, and Mar- shal St. Arnaud would not agree to any further enterprise that day. Lord Raglan believed that he ought not to per- sist; and nothing was done. The Russians were unable at first to believe in their good fortune. It seemed to them for a long time impossible that any commanders in the 474 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. world could have failed, under conditions so tempting, to follow a flying and disordered enemy. Except for the bravery of those who fought, the battle was not much to boast of. The allies together considerably outnumbered the Russians, although, from the causes we have mentioned, the Englishmen were left throughout the greater part of the day to encounter an enemy numerically superior, posted on difficult and commanding heights. But it was the first great battle which for nearly forty years our soldiers had fought with .a civilized enemy. The military authorities and the country were well dis- posed to make the most of it. At this distance of time it is almost touching to read some of the heroic contempo- raneous descriptions of the great scramble of the Alma. It might almost seem as if, in the imaginings of the enthu- siastic historians, Englishmen had never mounted heights and defeated superior numbers before. The sublime triumphs against every adverse condition which had been won by the genius of a Marlborough or a Wellington could not have been celebrated in language of more exalted dithyrambic pomp. The gallant medley on the banks of the Alma and the fruitless interval of inaction that fol- lowed it were told of as if men were speaking of some battle of the gods. Very soon, however, a different note came to be sounded. The campaign had been opened under conditions differing from those of most campaigns that went before it. Science had added many new discoveries to the art of war. Liter- ature had added one remarkable contribution of her own to the conditions amid which campaigns were to be carried on. She had added the "special correspondent." The old-fashioned historiographer of wars traveled to please sovereigns and minister to the self-conceit of conquerors'. The modern special correspondent had a very different pur- pose. He watched the movements of armies and criticized the policy of generals in the interest of some journal, which for its part was concerned only for the information of the public. No favor that courts or monarchs could bestow was worthy a moment's consideration in the mind even of the most selfish proprietor of a newspaper when compared with the reward which the public could give to him and to his paper for quick accurate news and trust- worthy comment. The business of the special correspon- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 475 dent has grown so much since the Crimean War that we are now inclined to look back upon the war correspondents of those days almost as men then did upon the old- fashioned historiographer. The war correspondent now scrawls his despatches as he sits in his saddle under the fire of the enemy ; he scrawls them with a pencil, noting and describing each incident of the fight, so far as he can see it, as coolly as if he were describing a review of volunteers in Hyde Park ; and he contrives to send off his narrative by telegraph before the victor in the fight has begun to pursue, or has settled down to hold the ground he won; and the war correspondent's story is expected to be as brilliant and picturesque in style as it ought to be exact and faithful in its statements. In the days of the Crimea things had not advanced quite so far as that; the war was well on before the submarine telegraph between Varna and the Crimea allowed of daily reports; but the feats of the war correspondent then filled men's minds with wonder. When the expedition was leaving England it was accom- panied by a special correspondent from each of the great daily papers of London. The Times sent out a representa- tive whose name almost immediately became celebrated — Mr. William Howard Eussell, the j^reux chevalier of war cor- respondents in_ that day as Mr. Archibald Forbes of the Daily News is in this. Mr. Eussell rendered some service to the English army and to his country, however, which no brilliancy of literary style would alone have enabled him to do. It was to his great credit as a man of judgment and observation that, being a civilian who had never before seen one puff of war-smoke, he was able to distinguish between the confusion inseparable from all actual levying of war and the confusion that comes of distinctly bad ad- ministration. To the unaccustomed eye of an ordinary civilian the whole progress of a campaign, the development of a battle, the arrangements of the commissariat, appear, at any moment of actual pressure, to be nothing but a mass of confusion. He is accustomed in civil life to find everything in its proper place, and every emergency well provided for. When he is suddenly plunged into the midst of a campaign he is apt to think that everything must be going wrong; or else he assumes contentedly that the whole is in the hands of persons who knew better than he, and that it would be absurd on his part to attempt to 476 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. criticise the arrangements of the men whose business it is to understand them. Mr. Russell soon saw that there was confusion; and he had the soundness of judgment to know that the confusion was that of a breaking-down system. Therefore, while the fervor of delight in the courage and success of our army was still fresh in the minds of the pub- lic at home, while every music-hall was ringing with the cheap rewards of valor in the shape of popular glorifications of our commanders and our soldiers, the readers of the Times began to learn that things were faring badly indeed with the conquering army of the Alma. The ranks were thinned by the ravages of cholera. The men were pursued by cholera to the very battle-field, Lord Raglan himself said. No system can charm away all the effects of climate; but it appeared only too soon that the arrangements made to encounter the indirect and inevitable dangers of a cam- paign were miserably inefficient. The hospitals were in a wretchedly disorganized condition. Stores of medicines and strengthening food were decaying in places where no one wanted them or could well get at them, while men were dying in hundreds among our tents in the Crimea for lack of them. The system of clothing, of transport, of feeding, of nursing — everything had broken down. Am])le provisions had been got together and paid for; and when they came to be needed no one knew where to get at them. The special correspondent of the Times and other corre- spondents continued to din these things into the ears of the public at home. Exultation began to give way to a feel- ing of dismay. The patriotic anger against the Russians was changed for a mood of deep indignation against our own authorities and our own war administration. It soon became apparent to every one that the whole campaign had been planned on the assumption that it was to be like the career of the hero whom Byron laments, "brief, brave, and glorious." Our military authorities here at home — we do not speak of the commanders in the field — had made up their minds that Sebastopol was to fall like another Jericho at the sound of the war-trumpets' blast. Our commanders in the field were, on the contrary, rather disposed to overrate than to underrate the strength of the Russians. It was, therefore, somewhat like the con- dition of things described in Macaulay's ballad: those be- hind cried forward, those in front called back. It is very A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 477 likely that if a sudden dash had been made at Sebastopol by land and sea, it might have been taken almost at the very opening of the war. But the delay gave the Eussians full warning; and they did not neglect it. On the third day after the battle of the Alma the Russians sank seven vessels of their Black Sea fleet at the entrance of the har- bor of Sebastopol. This was done full in the sight of the allied fleets, who, at first, misunderstanding the move- ments going on among the enemy, thought the Russian squadron were about to come out from their shelter and try conclusions with the western ships. But the real pur- pose of the Russians became soon apparent. Under the eyes of the allies the seven vessels slowly settled down and sank in the water until at last only the tops of their masts were to be seen ; and the entrance of the harbor was barred as by sunken rocks against any approach of an enemy's ship. There was an end to every dream of a sudden cap- ture of Sebastopol. The allied armies moved again from their positions on the Alma; but they did not direct their march to the north side of Sebastopol. They made for Balaklava, which lies south of the city, on the other side of a promontory, and which has a port that might enable them to secure a constant means of communication between the armies and the fleets. To reach Balaklava the allied forces had to undertake a long and fatiguing flank march, passing Sebas- topol on their right. They accomplished the march in safety and occupied the heights above Balaklava, while the fleets appeared at the same time in the harbor. Sebastopol was but a few miles off, and preparations were .at once made for an attack on it by land and sea. On October 17th the attack began. It was practically a failure. Nothing better indeed could well have been expected. The fleet could not get near enough to the sea-forts of Sebastopol to make their broadsides of any real effect, be- muse of the shallow water and the sunken ships; and al- though the attack from the land was vigorous and was fiercely kept up, yet it could not carry its object. It be- came clear that Sebastopol was not to be taken by any coup de main; and the allies had not men enough to invest it. They were, therefore, to some extent themselves in the condition of a besieged force, for the Russians had a large army outside Sebastopol ready to make every sacrifice for 478 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the purpose of preventing the English and French from getting even a chance of undisturbed operations against it. The Russians attacked the allies fiercely on October 25th, in the hope of obtaining possession of Balaklava. The attempt was bold and brilliant; but it was splendidly repulsed. Never did a day of battle do more credit to English courage, or less perhaps to English generalship. The cavalry particularly distinguished themselves. It was in great measure on our side a cavalry action. It will be memorable in all English history as the battle in which occurred the famous charge of the light brigade. Owing to some fatal misconception of the meaning of an order from the commander-in-chief, the light brigade, six-hun- dred and seven men in all, charged what has been rightly described as "the Russian army in position." The brigade was composed of 118 men of the 4th light Dragoons; 104 of the 8th Hussars; 110 of the 11th Hussars; 130 of the 13th Light Dragoons; and 145 of the 17th Lancers. Of the 607 men 198 came back. Long, painful, and hopeless were the disputes about this fatal order. The controversy can never be wholly settled. The officer who bore the order was one of the first who fell in the outset. All Europe, all the world, rang with wonder and admiration of the futile and splendid charge. The poet laureate sang of it in spirited verses. Perhaps its best epitaph was con- tained in the celebrated comment ascribed to the French General Bosquet, and which has since become proverbial, and been quoted until men are well nigh tired of it — "It was magnificent, but it was not war." Next day the enemy made another vigorous attack, on a much larger scale, moving out of Sebastopol itself, and were again repulsed. The allies were able to prevent the troops who made the sortie from co-operating with the Russian army outside who had attacked at Balaklava. The latter were endeavoring to entrench themselves at the little village of Inkerman, lying on the north of Sebas- topol; but the stout resistance they met with from the allies frustrated their plans. On November 5th the Rus- sians made another grand attack on the allies, chiefly on the British, but were once more splendidly repulsed. The plateau of Inkerman was the principal scene of the strug- gle. It was occupied by the guards and a few British regi- ments, on whom fell, until General Bosquet with his French A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 479 was able to come to their assistance, the task of resisting a Russian army. This was the severest and the fiercest engage- ment of the campaign. The loss to the English was 2,612, of whom 145 were officers. The French lost about, 1,700. The Russians were believed to have lost 12,000 men; but at no time could any clear account be obtained of the Rus- sian losses. It was believed that they brought a force of 50,000 men to the attack. Inkerman was described at the time as the soldier's battle. Strategy, it was said every- where, there was none. The attack was made under cover of a dark and drizzling mist. The battle was fought for awhile almost absolutely in the dark. There was hardly any attempt to direct the allies by any principles of scientific warfare. The soldiers fought stubbornly a series of hand-to-hand fights, and we are entitled to say that the better men won in the end. We fully admit that it was a soldier's battle. All the comment we have to make upon the epithet is, that we do not exactly know which of the engagements fought in the Crimea was anything but a soldier's battle. Of course with the soldiers we take the officers. A battle in the Crimea with which generalship had anything particular to do has certainly not come under the notice of this writer. Mr. Kinglake tells that at Alma, Marshal St. Arnaud, the French commander-in-chief, addressing General Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, said — " With such men as you, I have no orders to give; I have but to point to the enemy." This seems to have been the general principle on which the commanders conducted tho campaign. There were the enemy's forces — let the men go at them any way they could. Nor, under the circum- stances, could anything much better have been done. When orders were given it appeared more than once as if things would have gone better without them. The soldier won his battle always. No general could prevent him from doing that. Meanwhile what were people saying in England? They were indignantly declaring that the whole campaign was a muddle. It was evident now that Sebastopol was not going to fall at once; it was evident too that the prepara- tions had been made on the assumption that it musl tall at once. To make disappointment more hitter at home, the public had been deceived for a \\'\\ days by a false re- port of the taking of Sebastopol; and the disappointment 480 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. naturally increased the impatience and dissatisfaction of Englishmen. The fleet that had been sent out to the Baltic came back without having accomplished anything in particular; and although there really was nothing in particular that it could have accomplished under the circum- stances, yet many people were as angry as if it had culpa- bly allowed the enemy to escape it on the open seas. The sailing of the Baltic fleet had indeed been preceded by cere- monials especially calculated to make any enterprise ridicu- lous which failed to achieve some startling success. It was put under the command of Sir Charles Napier, a brave old salt of the fast-fading school of Smollett's Commodore Trunnion — rough, dashing, bull-headed, likely enough to succeed where sheer force and courage could win victories, but wanting in all the intellectual qualities of a comman- der, and endowed with a violent tongue and an almost unmatched indiscretion. Sir Charles Napier was a mem- ber of a family famed for its warriors; but he had not any- thing like the capacity of his cousin the other Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, or the intellect of Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War. He had won some signal and surprising successes in the Portu- guese civil Avar and in Syria; all under conditions wholly different and with an enemy wholly different from those he would have to encounter in the Baltic. But the voice of admiring friends was tumultuously raised to predict splen- did things for him before his fleet had left its port, and he himself quite forgot, in his rough self-confidence, the difference between boasting when one is taking off his armour and boasting when one is only putting it on. His friends entertained him at a farewell dinner at the reform club. Lord Palmerston was present and Sir James Graham, the first lord of the admiralty, and a great deal of exuberant nonsense was talked. Lord Palmerston, carried away by his natural bonhomie and his high animal spirits, showered the most extravagant praises upon the gallant ad- miral intermixed with jokes which set the company laugh- ing consumedly, but which read by the outer public next day seemed unbecoming preludes to an expedition that was to be part of a great war and of terrible national sac- rifices. The one only thing that could have excused the whole performance would have been some overwhelming success on the part of him who was its hero. But it is A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. not probable that a Dundonald, or even a Nelsor have done much iu the Baltic just then; and Napit* .. not a Dundonald or a Nelson. The Baltic fleet came home safely after awhile, its commander having brought with him nothing but a grievance which lasted him all the remainder of his life. The public were amazed, scornful, wrathful ; they began to think that they were destined to see nothing but failure as the fruit of the campaign. In truth, they were extravagantly impatient. Perhaps they were not to be blamed. Their leaders, who ought to have known better, had been filling them with the idea that they had nothing to do but to sweep the enemy from sea and land. The temper of a people thus stimulated and thus disap- pointed is almost always indiscriminating and unreasonable in its censure. The first idea is to find a victim. The vic- tim on whom the anger of a large portion of the public turned in this instance was the prince consort. The most absurd ideas, the most cruel and baseless calumnies, were in circulation about him. He was accused of having out of some inscrutable motive made use of all his secret influ- ence to prevent the success of the campaign. He was charged with being in a conspiracy with Prussia, with Russia, with no one knew exactly whom, to weaken the strength of England and secure a trimuph for her enemies. Stories were actually told at one time of his having been arrested for high tresaon. He had in one of his speeches about this time said that constitutional government was under a heavy trial, and could oidy pass triumphantly through it if the country would grant its confidence to her majesty's government. In this observation, as the whole context of the speech showed, the prince was only explain- ing that the queen's government were placed at a disadvan- tage, in the carrying on of a war, as compared with a gov- ernment like that of the emperor of the French, Avho could act of his own arbitrary will, without check, delay, or control on the part of any parliamentary body. But the speech was iustantly fastened on as illustrating the prince's settled and unconquerable dislike of all constitu- tional and popular principles of government. Those who opposed the prince had not indeed been waiting for his speech at the Trinity House dinner to denounce and con- demn him j but the sentence in that speech to which refer- 482 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ence has been made opened upon him a new torrent of hostile criticism. The charges which sprang of this heated and unjust temper on the part of the public did not indeed long prevail against the prince consort. When once the subject came to be taken up in parliament it was shown almost in a moment that there was not the slightest ground or excuse for any of the absurd surmises and ciuel suspi- cions which had been creating so much agitation. The agi- tation collapsed in a moment. But while it lasted it was both vehement and intense, and gave much pain to the prince, and far more pain still to the queen his wife. We have seen more lately and on a larger scale something like the phenomenon of that time. During the war between France and Germany the people of Paris went nearly wild with the idea that they had been betrayed, and were clamorous for victims to punish anywhere or any- how. To many calm Englishmen this seemed monstrously unreasonable and unworthy; and the French people received from English writers many grave rebukes and wise exhortations. But the temper of the English public at one pe- riod of the Crimean War was becoming very like that which set Paris wild during the disastrous struggle with Germany. The passions of peoples are, it is to be feared, very much alike in their impulses and even in their manifestations; and if England during the Crimean War never came to the wild condition into which Paris fell during the later strug- gle it is perhaps rather because, on the whole, things went well with England, than in consequence of any very great superiority of Englishmen in judgment and self-restraint over the excitable people of France. Certainly, those who remember what we may call the dark days of the Crimean campaign, when disappointment following on extravagant confidence had incited popular passion to call for some victim, will find themselves slow to set a limit to the lengths that passion might have reached if the Russians had actually been successful even in one or two battles. The winter was gloomy at home as well as abroad. The news constantly arriving from the Crimea told only of devastation caused by foes far more formidable than the Russians — sickness, bad weather, bad management. The Black Sea was swept and scourged by terrible storms. The destruction of transport-ships laden with winter stores for our men was of incalculable injury to the army. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 483 Clothing, blanketing, provisions, hospital necessaries of all kinds, were destroyed in vast quantities. The loss of life among the crews of the vessels was immense. A storm was nearly as disastrous in this way as a battle. On shore the sufferings of the army were unspeakable. The tents were torn from their pegs and blown away. The officers and men were exposed to the bitter cold and the fierce stormy blasts. Our soldiers had for the most part little experience or even idea of such cold as they had to encoun- ter this gloomy winter. The intensity of the cold was so great that no one might dare to touch any metal substance in the open air with his bare hand under penalty of leaving the skin behind him. The hospitals for the sick and wounded at Scutari were in a wretchedly disorganized con- dition. They were for the most part in an absolutely chaotic condition as regards arrangement and supply. In some instances medical stores were left to decay at Varna or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay, which were needed for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers were able and zealous men ; the stores were provided and paid for so far as our govern- ment was concerned; but the stores were not brought to the medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve for the want of the com- monest appliances of the hospital. The most extraordi- nary instances of blunder and confusion were constantly coming to light. Great consignments of boots arrived and were found to be all for the left foot. Mules for the con- veyances of stores were contracted for and delivered, but delivered so that they came into the hands of the Russians mid not of us. Shameful frauds were perpetrated in the instance of some of the contracts for preserved meat. " One man's preserved meat," exclaimed Punch with bitter humor, "is another man's poison." .The evils of the hos- pital disorganization were happily made a means of bring- ing about a new system of attending to the sick and wounded in war which lias already created something like a revolution in the manner of treating the victims of battle. .Mr. Sidney Herbert, horrified at the way in which things were managed in Scutari and the Crimea, applied to a distinguished woman who had long taken ;) deep inter- est in hospital reform to superintend personally the nursing 484 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of the soldiers. Miss Florence Nightingale was the daugh- ter of a wealthy English country gentleman. She had chosen not to pass her life in fashionable or aesthetic inac- tivity, and had from a very early period turned her atten- tion to sanitary questions. She had studied nursing as a science and a system ; had made herself acquainted with the working of various continental institutions; and about the time when the war broke out she was actually engaged in reorganizing the Sick Governess' Institution in Harley street, London. To her Mr. Sidney Herbert turned. He offered her, if she would accept the task he proposed, plenary authority over all the nurses, and unlimited power of drawing on the government for whatever she might think necessary to the success of her undertaking. Miss Nightingale accepted the task, and went out to Scutari accompanied by some women of rank like her own and a trained staff of nurses. They speedily reduced chaos into order; and from the time of their landing in Scutari there was at least one department of the business of war which was never again a subject of complaint. The spirit of the chivalric days had been restored under better auspices for its abiding influence. Ladies of rank once more devoted themselves to the service of the wounded ; and the end was come of the Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Prig type of nurse. Sidney Herbert, in his letter to Miss Nightingale, had said that her example, if she accepted the task he proposed, would "multiply the good to all time." These words proved to have no exaggeration in them. We have never seen a war since in which women of education and of genuine devotion have not given them- selves up to the task of caring for the wounded. The Geneva Convention and the bearing of the Red Cross are among the results of Florence Nightingale's work in the Crimea. But the siege of Sebastopol was meanwhile dragging heavily along; and sometimes it was not quite certain which ought to be called the besieged — the Russians in the city or the allies encamped in sight of it. During some months the allied armies did little or nothing. The commissariat system and the land transport system had broken down. The armies were miserably weakened by sickness. Cholera was ever and anon raging anew among our men. Horses and mules were dying of cold and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 485 starvation. The roads were only deep irregular ruts filled with mud; the camp was a marsh; the tents stood often in pools of water; the men had sometimes no beds but straw dripping with wet; and hardly any bed coverings. Our unfortunate Turkish allies were in a far more wretched plight than even we ourselves. The authorities who ought to have looked after them were impervious to the criticisms of special correspondents and unassailable by parliamentary votes of censure. A condemnation of the latter kind was hanging over our government. Lord John Russell became impressed with the conviction that the Duke of Newcastle was not strong enough for the post of war minister, and he wrote to Lord Aberdeen urging that the war department should be given to Lord Palmer- ston. Lord Aberdeen replied that although another per- son might have a better choice when the appointments were made in the first instance, yet, in the absence of any proved defect or alleged incapacity, there was no sufficient ground for making a kind of speculative change. Parliament was called together before Christmas; and after the Christmas recess Mr. Roebuck gave notice that he would move for a select committee to inquire into the condition of the army before Sebastopol and into the conduct of those depart- ments whose duty it had been to minister to the wants of the army. Lord John Russell did not believe for him- self that the motion could be conscientiously resisted; but as it necessarily involved a censure upon some of his colleagues, he did not think he ought to remain longer in the ministry, and he therefore resigned his office. The sudden resignation of the leader of the House of Commons was a death-blow to any plans of resistance by which the government might otherwise have thought of encounter- ing Mr. Roebuck's motion. Lord Palmerston, although Lord John Russell's course was a marked tribute to his own capacity, had remonstrated warmly with Russell by letter as to his determination to resign. " You will have the appearance," he said, "of having remained in office aiding in carrying on a system of which you disapprove until driven out by Roebuck's announced notice, and the government will have the appearance of self-condemnation by flying from a discussion which they dare not face; while as regards the country the action of the executive will be paralyzed for a time in a critical moment of a great war. 486 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. with an impending negotiation, and we shall exhibit to the world a melancholy spectacle of disorganization among our political men at home similar to that which has pre- vailed among onr military men abroad." The remonstrance, however, came too late, even if it could have had any effect at any time. Mr. Roebuck's motion came on, and was resisted with vigor by Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone. Lord Palmerston insisted that the responsibility ought to fall not on the Duke of Newcastle, but on the whole cabi- net; and with a generosity which his keenest opponents might have admitted to be characteristic of him, he accepted the task of defending an administration whose chief blame was in the eyes of most persons that they had. not given the control of the war into his hands. Mr. Gladstone declared that the inquiry sought for by the reso- lution could lead to nothing but " confusion and disturb- ance, increased disasters, shame at home and weakness abroad; it would convey no consolation to those whom you seek to aid, but it would, carry malignant joy to the hearts of the enemies of England." The House of Com- mons was not to be moved by any such argument or appeal. The one pervading idea was that England had been endangered and shamed by the breakdown of her army organization. When the division took place three hundred and five members voted for Mr. Roebuck's mo- tion and only one hundred and forty-eight against. The majority against ministers were therefore one hundred and fifty-seven. Every one knows what a scene usually takes place when a ministry is defeated in the House of Com- mons. Cheering again and again renewed, counter-cheers of defiance, wild exultation, vehement indignation, a whole whirlpool of various emotions seething in that little hall in St. Stephen's. But this time there was no such outburst. The house could hardly realize the fact that the ministry of all the talents had been thus completely and ignominiously defeated. A dead silence followed the announcement of the numbers. Then there was a half- breathless murmur of amazement and incredulity. The speaker repeated the numbers, and doubt was over. It was still uncertain how the house would express its feel- ings. Suddenly some one laughed. The sound gave a direction and a relief to perplexed, pent-up emotion. Shouts of laughter followed. Not merely the pledged a maroRY op oub own TiMEa. 487 opponents of the government laughed. Many of those who had voted with ministers found themselves laughing too. It seemed so absurd, so incongruous, this way of dispos- ing of the great coalition government. Many must have thought of the night of fierce debate, little more than two years before, when Mr. Disraeli, then on the verge of his fall from power and realizing fully the strength of the combination against him, consoled his party and himself for the imminent fatality awaiting them by the defiant words, "I know that I have to face a coalition; the com- bination may be successful. A combination has before this been successful; but coalitions, though they may be successful, have always found that their triumphs have been brief. This I know, that England does not love coalitions." Only two years had passed and the great coal- itions had fallen, overwhelmed with reproach and popular indignation, and amid sudden shouts of laughter. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. On February 15, 1855, Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother : " A month ago if any man had asked me to say what was one of the most improbable events, I should have said my being prime minister. Aberdeen was there, I >erby was the head of one great party, John Russell of the other; and yet in about ten days' time they all gave way like straws before the wind; and so here am I, writ- ing to you from Downing street as first lord of the treasury." No doubt Lord Palmerston was sincere in the expression of surprise which we have quoted; but there were not many other men in the country who felt in the least as- tonished at the turn of events by which lie had become prime minister. Indeed it had long become apparent to almost every one that his assuming that place was only a question of time. The country was in thai mood that it would absolutely have somebody at the head of affairs who knew his own mind and saw his way clearly before him. When the coalition ministry broke down. Lord Derby was invited by the queen to form a government, lie tried 488 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and failed. He did all in his power to accomplish the task with which the queen had entrusted him. He invited Lord Palmerston to join him, and it was intimated that if Palmerston consented Mr. Disraeli would waive all claim to the leadership of the House of Commons, in order that Palmerston should have that place. Lord Derby also offered, through Lord Palmerston, places in his adminis- tration to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney Herbert. Palm- erston did not see his way to join a Derby administration and without him Lord Derby could not go on. The queen then sent for Lord John Eussell; but Kussell's late and precipitate retreat from his office had discredited him with most of his former colleagues; and he found that he could not get a government together. Lord Palmerston was then, to use his own phrase, V inevitable. There was not much change in the personnel of the ministry. Lord Aberdeen was gone, and Lord Palmerston took his place ; and Lord Panmure, who had formerly as Fox Maule admin- istered the affairs of the army, succeeded the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Panmure, however, combined in his own person the functions, up to that time absurdly separated, of secretary-at-war and secretary-for-war. The secretary-at- war under the old system was not one of the principal sec- retaries of state. He was merely the officer by whom the regular communications was kept up between the war office and the ministry, and has been described as the civil officer of the army. The secretary-for-war was commonly entrusted with the colonial department as well. The two war offices were now made into one. It was hoped that by this change great benefit would come to our whole army system. Lord Palmerston acted energetically too in send- ing out a sanitary commission to the Crimea, and a com- mission to superintend the commissariat, a department that, almost more than any other, had broken down. Nothing could be more strenuous than the terms in which Lord Palmerston recommended the sanitary commission to Lord Raglan. He requested that Lord Raglan would give the commissioners every assistance in his power. " They will, of course, be opposed and thwarted by the medical officers, by the men who have charge of the port arrange- ments, and by those who have the cleaning of the camp. Their mission will be ridiculed, and their recommenda- tions and directions set aside, unless enforced by the per- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 489 emptory exercise of your authority. But that- authority I must request you to exert iu the most peremptory manner for the immediate and exact carrying into execution what- ever changes of arrangement they may recommend; for these are matters on which depend the health and lives of many hundreds of men, I may indeed say of thouands." Lord Palmerston was strongly pressed by some of the more strenuous reformers of the house. Mr. Layard, who had acquired some celebrity before in a very different field, as a discoverer, that is to say, in the ruins of Ninevah and Babylon, was energetic and incessant in his attacks on the administration of the war, and was not disposed even now to give the new government a moment's rest. Mr. Layard was a man of a certain rough ability, immense self-suffi- ciency and indomitable egotism. He was not in any sense an eloquent speaker; he was singularly wanting in all the graces of style and manner. But he was fluent, he was vociferous, he never seemed to have a moment's doubt on any conceivable question, he never admitted that there could by any possibility be two sides to any matter of dis- cussion. He did really know a great deal about the east at a time when the habit of traveling in the east was com- paratively rare. He stamped down all doubt or difference of view with the overbearing dogmatism of Sir Walter Scott's " Touchwood," or of the proverbial man who has been there and ought to know ; and he was in many respects admirably fitted to be the spokesman of all those, and they were not a few, who saw that things had been going wrong without exactly seeing why, and were eager that some- thing should be done, although they did not clearly know what. Lord Palmerston strove to induce the house not to press for the appointment of the committee recommended in Mr. Roebuck's motion. The government, he said, would make the needful inquiries themselves. He re- minded the house of Richard II. 's offer to lead the men of the fallen Tyler's insurrection himself; and in the same spirit he offered on the part of the government to take the lead in every necessary investigation. Mr. Roebuck, how- ever, would not give way, and Lord Palmerston yielded to a demand which had undoubtedly the support of a vast force of public opinion. The constant argument of Mr. Layard had some sense in it; the government now in office was very much like the government in which the house 490 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. had declared so lately that it had no confidence. It could hardly, therefore, be expected that the house should accept its existence as guarantee enough that everything should be done which its predecessor had failed to do. Lord Palmerston gave way, but his unavoidable concession brought on a new ministerial crisis. Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Sidney Herbert declined to hold office any longer. They had opposed the motion for an inquiry most gravely and strenuously, and they would not lend any countenance to it by remaining in office. Sir Charles Wood succeeded Sir James Graham as first lord of the admiralty ; Lord John Eussell took the place of secre- tary for the colonies, vacated by Sidney Herbert; and Sir George Cornwall Lewis followed Mr. Gladstone as chan- cellor of the exchequer. Meanwhile new negotiations for peace, set afoot under the influence of Austria, had been begun at Vienna, and Lord John Russell had been sent there to represent the interests of England. The conference opened at Vienna under circumstances that might have seemed especially favorable to peace. We had got a new ally, a state not indeed commanding any great military strength, but full of energy and ambition, and representing more than any other perhaps the tendencies of liberalism and the opera- tion of the comparatively new principle of the rights of nationalities. This was the little kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was then under the control of one of the master-spirits of modern politics; a man who belonged to the class of the Richelieus and the Orange Williams, the illustrious Count Cavour. Sardinia, it may be frankly said, did not come into the alliance because of any particu- lar sympathies that she had with one side or the other of the quarrel between Russia and the western powers. She went into the war in order that she might have a locus standi in the councils of Europe from which to set forth her grievances against Austria. In the marvelous history of the uprise of the kingdom of Italy there is a good deal over which, to use the words of Carlyle, moralities not a few must shriek aloud. It would not be easy to defend on high moral principles the policy which struck into a war without any particular care for either side of the contro- versy, but only to serve an ulterior and personal, that is to say, national purjiose. But regarding the policy merely A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 49I by the' light of its results, it must be owned that it was singularly successful and entirely justified the expectations of Cavour. The Crimean War laid the foundations of the kingdom of Italy. That was one fact calculated to inspire hopes of a peace. The greater the number and strength of the allies, the greater obviously the pressure upon Eussia and the prob- ability of her listening to reason. But there was another event of a very different nature, the effect of which seemed at first likely to be all in favor of peace. This was the death of the man whom the united public opinion of Europe regarded as the author of the war. On March 2, 1855, the Emperor Nicholas of Russia died of pulmonary apop- lexy, after an attack of influenza. In other clays it would have been said he had died of a broken heart. Perhaps the description would have been more strictly true than the terms of the medical report. It was doubtless the effect of utter disappointment, of the wreck and ruin of hopes to which a life's ambition had been directed" and a life's energy dedicated, which left that frame of adamant open to the sudden dart of sickness. One of the most remarkable illustrations of an artist's genius devoted to a political subject was the cartoon which appeared in Punch, and which was called " General Fevrier turned Traitor." The emperor Nicholas had boasted that Russia had two generals on whom she could always rely — General Janvier and G-en'eral Fevrier; and now the English artist repre- sented General February, a skeleton in Russian uniform, turning traitor and laving his bony ice-cold hand on the heart of the sovereign and betraying him to the tomb. But, indeed, it was not General February alone who doomed Nicholas to death. The czar died of broken hopes; of the recklessness that conies from defeat and despair. He took no precautions against cold and exposure; he treated with a magnanimous disdain the remonstrances of his physi- cians and his friends. As of Max Piccolomini in Schiller's noble play, so of him: men whispered that he wished to die. The Alma was to him what Austerlizt was to Pitt. From the moment when the news of that defeat was announced to him he no longer seemed to have hope of the campaign. He took the story of the defeat very much as Lord North took the surrender of Cornwallis — as if a bullet had struck him. Thenceforth he was like one 492 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. whom the old Scotch phrase would describe as fey; one who moved, spoke and lived under the shadow of coming death, until the death came. The news of the sudden death of the emperor created a profound sensation in England. Mr. Bright, at Man- chester, shortly after rebuked what he considered an ignoble levity in the manner of commenting on the event among some of the English journals; but it is right to say that on the whole nothing could have been more decorous and dignified than the manner in which the English public generally received the news that the country's great enemy was no more. At first there was, as we have said, a com- mon impression that Nicholas' son and successor, Alex- ander II., would be more anxious to make peace than his father had been. But this hope was soon gone. The new czar could not venture to show himself to his people in a less patriotic light than his predecessor. The pros- pects of the allies were at the time remarkably gloomy. There must have seemed to the new Eussian emperor con- siderable ground for the hope that disease, and cold, and bad management would do more harm to the army of England at least than any Eussian general could do. The conference at Vienna proved a failure, and even in some respects a fiasco. Lord John Eussell, sent to Vienna as our representative, was instructed that the object he must hold in view was the admission of Turkey into the great family of European states. For this end there were four principal points to be considered: the condition of the Danubian principalities, the free navigation of the Danube, the limitation of Eussian supremacy in the Black Sea, and the independence of the porte. It was on the attempt to limit Eussian supremacy in the Black Sea that the negotiations became a failure. Eussia would not consent to any pro- posal which could really have the desired effect. She would agree to no arrangement between Turkey and her- self, but this was exactly what the western powers were determined not to allow. She declined to have the strength of her navy restricted; and proposed as a counter-resolu- tion that the straits should be opened to the .war flags of all nations, so that if Eussia were strong as a naval power in the Black Sea, other powers might be just as strong if they thought fit. Lord Palmerston, in a letter to Lord John Eussell, drily characterized this position, involving A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 493 as it would the maintenance by England and France of permanent fleets in the Black Sea to counter-balance the fleet of Russia, as a " mauvaise plaisanterie." Lord Palm- erston indeed believed no more in the sincerity of Aus- tria throughout all these transactions than he did in that of Russia. The conference proved a total failure, and in its failure it involved a good deal of the reputation of Lord John Russell. Like the French representative, M. Drouyn de Lhuys, Lord John Russell had been taken by the pro- posals of Austria and had supported them in the first instance; but when the government at home would not have them he was still induced to remain a member of the cabinet and even to condemn in the House of Commons the recommendations he had supported at Vienna. He was charged by Mr. Disraeli with having encouraged the Rus- sian pretensions by declaring at a critical point of the negotiations that he was disposed to favor whatever arrangement would best preserve the honor of Russia. "What has the representative of England," Mr. Disraeli indignantly asked, " to do with the honor of Russia?" Lord John had indeed a fair reply. He could say with justice and good sense that no settlement was likely to be lasting which simply forced conditions upon a great power like Russia without taking any account of what is considered among nations to be her honor. But he was not able to give any satisfactory explanation of his having approved the conditions in Vienna which he afterward condemned in Westminster. He explained in parliament that he did in the first instance regard the Austrian propositions as containing the possible basis of a satisfactory and lasting peace; but that as the government would not hear of them he had rejected them against his own judgment; and that he had afterward been converted to the opinion of his col- leagues and believed them inadmissible in principle. This was a sort of explanation more likely to alarm than to reassure the public. What manner of danger, it was asked on all sides, may we not be placed in when our representa- tives do not know their own minds as to proper terms of peace; when they have no opinion of their own upon the subject, but are loud in approval of certain conditions one day which they are equally loud in condemning the aexl '! There was a general impression throughout England that some of our statesmen in office had never been Bincerely in. 494 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. favor of the war from the first ; that even still they were cold, doubtful, and half-hearted about it, and that the honor of the country was not safe in such hands. The popular instinct, whether it was right as to facts or not, was perfectly sound as to inferences. We may honor, in many instances, we must honor, the conscientious scruples of a public man who distrusts the objects and has no faith in the results of some war in which his people are engaged. But such a man has no business in the government which has the conduct of the war. The men who are to carry on a war must have no doubt of its rightfulness of pur- pose, and must not be eager to conclude it on any terms. In the very interests of peace itself they must be resolute to carry on the war until it has reached the end they sought for. Lord John Russell's remaining in office after these dis- closures was practically impossible. Sir E. B. Lytton gave notice of a direct vote of censure on " the minister charged with the negotiations at Vienna." But Russell anticipated the certain effect of a vote in the House of Commons by resigning his office. This step at least extricated his col- leagues from any share in the censure, although the recriminations that passed on the occasion in parliament were many and bitter. The vote and censure was how- ever withdrawn. Sir William Molesworth, one of the most distinguished of the school who were since called Philoso- phical Radicals, succeeded him as colonial secretary, and the ministry carried one or two triumphant votes against Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Roebuck, and other opponents, or at least unfriendly critics. Meanwhile the emperor of the French and his wife had paid a visit to London and had been received with considerable enthusiasm. The queen seems to have been very favorably impressed by the emperor. She sincerely admired him, and believed in his desire to maintain peace as far as possible, and to do his best for the promotion of liberal principles and sound economic doctrines throughout Europe. The beauty and grace of the empress likewise greatly won over Queen Victoria. The prince consort seems to have been less impressed. _ He was indeed a believer in the sincerity and good disposition of the emperor but he found him strangely ignorant on some subjects, even the modern political history of England and France. During the visit of the royal family of England A MI8T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 495 to Prance, and now while the emperor and empress were in London, the same impression appears to have been left on the mind of the prince consort. He also seems to have noticed a certain barrack-room flavor about the emperor's entourage which was not agreeable to his own ideas of dignity and refinement. The prince consort appears to have judged the emperor almost exactly as we know now that Prince Bismarck did then, and as impartial opinion has judged him everywhere in Europe since that time. The operations in the Crimea were renewed with some vigor. The English army lost much by the death of its brave and manly commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan. He was succeeded by General Simpson, who had recently been sent out to the Crimea as chief of the staff, and whose administration during the short time that he held the command was at least well qualified to keep Lord Eaglan's memory green and to prevent the regret for his death from losing any of its keenness. The French army had lost its first commander long before — the versatile, reckless, bril- liant soldier of fortune, St. Arnaud, whose broken health had from the opening of the campaign prevented him from displaying any of the qualities which his earlier career gave men reason to look for under his command. After St. Arnaud's death the command was transferred for awhile to General Canrobert, who, finding himself hardly equal to the task, resigned it in favor of General Pelissier. The Sardinian contingent had arrived and had given admirable proof of its courage and discipline. On August 10, 1855, the Russians, under General Liprandi, made a desperate effort to raise the siege of Sebastopol by an attack on the allied forces. The attack was skillfully planned during the night, and was made in great strength. The French divisions had to bear the principal weight of the attack} but the Sardinian contingent also had a prominent place in the resistance, and bore themselves with splendid brav- ery and success. The attempt of the Russians was com- pletely foiled; and all northern Italy was thrown into wild delight by the news that the flag of Piedmont had been carried to victory over the troops of one great European power, and side by side with those of two others. The unanimous voice of the country now approved and acclaimed the policy of Oavour, which had been sanctioned only by a very narrow majority, had been denounced from 496 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. all sides as reckless and senseless, and had been carried out in the face of the most tremendous difficulties. It was the first great illustration of Cavour's habitual policy of blended audacity and cool far-seeing judgment. It is a curious fact that the suggestion to send Sardinian troops to the Crimea did not originate in Cavour's own busy brain. The first thought of it came up in the mind of a woman, Cavour's niece. The great statesman was struck with the idea from the moment when she suggested it. He thought over it deeply, resolved to adopt it, and car- ried it to triumphant success. The repulse of the Tchernaya was a heavy, indeed a fatal stroke for the Eussians. The siege had been progressing for sometime with considerable activity. The French had drawn their lines nearer and nearer to the besieged city. The Eussians, however, had also been throwing up fresh works, which brought them nearer to the lines of the allies, and sometimes made the latter seem as if they were the besieged rather than the besiegers. The Malakoff tower and the Mamelon battery in front of it became the scenes and the objects of constant struggle. The Eussians made desperate night-sorties again and again, and were always repulsed. On June 7th the English assaulted the quarries in front of the Eedan, and the French attacked the Mamelon. The attack on both sides was successful ; but it was followed on the 18th of the same month by a desperate and wholly unsuccessful attack on the Eedan and Malakoff batteries. There was some misapprehension on the side of the French commander, which led to a lack of precision and unity in the carrying out of the enterprise, and it became, therefore, a failure on the part of both the allies. A pompous and exulting address was issued by Prince Gortschakoff, in which he informed the Eussian army that the enemy had been beaten, driven back with enormous loss; and announced that the hour was approach- ing " when the pride of the enemy will be lowered, their armies swept from our soil like chaff blown away by the wind." On September 5th the allies made an attack almost si- multaneously upon the Malakoff and the Eedan. It was agreed that as soon as the French had got possession of the Malakoff the English should attack the Eedan, the hoist- ing of the French flag on the former fort to be the signal A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 497 for our men to move. The French were brilliantly suc- cessful in their part of the attack, and in a quarter of an hour from the beginning of the attempt the flag of the empire was floating on the parapets. The English then at once advanced upon the Redan ; but it was a very different task from that which the French had had to undertake. The French were near the Malakoff; the English were very far away from the Redan. The distance our sol- diers had to traverse left them almost helplessly exposed to the Russian fire. They stormed the parapets of the Redan despite all the difficulties of their attack; but they were not able to hold the place. The attacking party were far too small in numbers; reinforcements did not come in time; the English held their own for an hour against odds that might have seemed overwhelming; but it was simply impossible for them to establish themselves in the Redan, and the remnant of them that could withdraw had to retreat to the trenches. It was. only the old story of the war. Superb courage and skill of officers and men ; out- rageously bad generalship. The attack might have been renewed that day, but the English commander-in-chief, General Simpson, declared with naivete that the trenches were too crowded for him to do anything. Thus the attack failed because there were too few men, and could not be renewed because there were too many. The cautious commander resolved to make another attempt the next morning. But before the morrow came there was nothing to attack. The Russians withdrew during the night from the south side of Sevastopol. A bridge of boats had been constructed across the hay to connect the north and the south sides of the city, and across this bridge Prince (iortschakoff quietly withdrew his troops. The bombard- ment kept up by the allies had been so terrible and so close for several days, and their long-range guns were so entirely superior to anything possessed by or indeed known to the Russians, that the defenses of the south side were irrepa- rably destroyed. The Russian general felt that it would be impossible for him to hold the city much longer, and that to remain there was only useless waste of life. But, as he said in his own despatch, "it is not Sebastopol which we have left to them, but the burning ruins of the town, which we ourselves set lire to, having maintained the honor of the defense in such a manner that our great grandchil- 498 A HTSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. dren may recall with pride the remembrance of it and send it on to all posterity." It was some time before the allies could venture to enter the abandoned city. The arsenals and power-magazines were exploding, the flames were bursting out of every public building and every private house. The Russians had made of Sebastopol another Moscow. With the close of that long siege, which had lasted nearly a year, the war may be said to have ended. The brilliant episode of Kars, its splendid defense and its final surren- der, was brought to its conclusion, indeed, after the fall of Sebastopol; but, although it naturally attracted peculiar attention in this country, it could have no effect on the actual fortunes of such a war. Kars was defended by Colonel Fenwick Williams, an English officer, who had been sent all too late, to reorganize the Turkish forces in Armenia after they had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Russians. Never probably had a man a more difficult task than that which fell to the lot of Williams. He had to contend against official stupidity, corruption, delay; he could get nothing clone without having first to remove whole mountains of obstruction, and to quicken into life and movement an apathy which seemed like that of a paralyzed system. He concentrated his efforts at last upon the defense of Kars, and he held the place against overwhelming Russian forces, and against an enemy far more appalling, starvation itself. With his little garri- son he repelled a tremendous attack of the Russian army under General Mouravieff, in a battle that lasted nearly seven hours, and as the result of which the Russians left on the field more than five thousand dead. He had to surrender at last to famine; but the very articles of sur- render to which the conqueror consented became the trophy of Williams and his men. The garrison were allowed to leave the place with all the honors of war; and, "as a testi- mony to the valorous resistance made by the garrison of Kars, the officers of all ranks are to keep their swords." Williams and his English companions, Colonel Lake, Major Teesdale, Major Thompson, and Dr. Sandwith, had done as much for the honor of their country at the close of the war as Butler and Nasmyth and Ballard had done at its opening. The curtain of that great drama rose and fell upon a splendid scene of English heroism. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 499 The war was virtually over. Austria had been exerting herself throughout its progress in the interests of peace, and after the fall of Sebastopol she made a new effort with greater success. Two of the belligerents were indeed now anxious to be out of the struggle almost on any terms. These were France and Russia. The new emperor of Russia was not a man personally inclined for war; nor had he his father's overbearing and indomitable temper. He could not but see that his father had greatly overrated the military strength and resources of his country. He had accepted the war only as a heritage of necessary evil, with little hope of any good to come of it to Russia; and he welcomed any chance of ending it on fair terms. France, or at least her emperor, was all but determined to get back again into peace. If England had held out, it is highly probable that she would have had to do so alone. For this indeed Lord Palmerston was fully prepared as a last resource, sooner than submit to terms which he considered unsatisfactory. He said so and he meant it. " I can fancy," Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord Clarendon in his bright good-humored way, "how I should be hooted in the House of Commons if I were to get up and say that we had agreed to an imperfect and unsatisfactory arrangement. . . . I had better beforehand take the Chiltern Hun- dreds." Lord Palmerston, however, had no occasion to take the Chiltern Hundreds; the Congress of Paris opened on February 20, 1856, and on March 30th the treaty of peace was signed by the plenipotentiaries of the great powers. Prussia had been admitted to the congress, which therefore represented England, France, Austria, Prussia, Turkey and Sardinia. The treaty began by declaring that Kara was to be restored to the Sultan, and that Sebastopol and all other places taken by the allies were to be given back to Russia. The sublime porte was admitted to participate in all the advantages of the public law and system of Europe. The other powers engaged to respect the independence and ter- ritorial integrity of Turkey. They guaranteed in common the strict observance of that engagement, and announced that they would in consequence consider any act tending to a violation of it as a question of general interest. The sultan issued a firman for ameliorating the condition of his Christian subjects, and communicated to the other powers 500 a history of our own times. the purposes of the firman "emanating spontaneously from his sovereign will." No right of interference, it was distinctly specified, was given to the other powers by this concession on the sultan's part. The article of the treaty which referred to the Black Sea is of especial importance. "The Black Sea is neutralized; its waters and its ports, thrown open to the mercantile marine of every nation, are formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the flag of war either of the powers possessing its coast or of any other power, with the exceptions mentioned in articles fourteen and nineteen." The exceptions only reserved the right of each of the powers to have the same number of small armed vessels in the Black Sea to act as a sort of maritime police and to protect the coasts. The sultan and the em- peror engaged to establish and maintain no military or maritime arsenals in that sea. The navigation of the Danube was thrown open. In exchange for the towns restored to him, and in order more fully to secure the navi- gation of the Danube, the emperor consented to a certain ratification of his frontier in Bessarabia, the territory ceded by Russia to be annexed to Moldavia under the suzerainty of the porte. Moldavia and Wallachia, continu- ing under the suzerainty of the sultan, were to enjoy all the privileges and immunities they already possessed under the guarantee of the contracting powers, but with no sepa- rate right of intervention in their affairs. The existing position of Servia was assured. A convention respecting the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus was made by all the powers. By this convention the sultan maintained the ancient rule prohibiting ships of war of foreign powers from entering the straits so long as the porte is at peace. Dur- ing time of peace the sultan engaged to admit no foreign ships of war into the Bosphorus or the Dardanelles. The sultan reserved to himself the right as in former times of delivering firmans of passage for light vessels under the flag of war employed in the service of foreign powers — that is to say, of their diplomatic missions. A separate convention as to the Black Sea between Russia and Turkey agreed that the contracting parties should have in that sea six light steam vessels of not more than eight hundred tons, and four steam or sailing vessels of not more than two hundred tons each. Thus the controversies about the Christian provinces, A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 501 the straits, and the Black Sea were believed to be settled. The great central business of the congress, however, was to assure the independence and the territorial integrity of Turkey, now admitted to a place in the family of European states. As it did not seem clear to those most particularly concerned in bringing about this result that the arrange- ments adopted in full congress had been sufficient to guar- antee Turkey from the enemy they most feared, there was a tripartite treaty afterward agreed to between England, France, and Austria. This document bears date in Paris, April 15, 1856; by it the contracting parties guaranteed jointly and severally the independence and integrity of the Ottoman empire, and declared that any infraction of the general treaty of March 30th would be considered by them as casus belli. It is probable that not one of the three contracting parties was quite sincere in the making of this treaty. It appears to have been done, at the instigation of Austria, much less for the sake of Turkey than in order that she might have some understanding of a special kind with some of the great powers, and thus avoid the sem- blance of isolation which she now especially dreaded, hav- ing Russia to fear on the one side, and seeing Italy already raising its head on the other. England did not particu- larly care about the tripartite treaty, which was pressed upon her, and which she accepted trusting that she might never have to act upon it; and France accepted it without any liking for it, probably without the least intention of ever acting on it. The congress was also the means^of bringing about a treaty between England and France and Sweden. By this engagement Sweden undertook not to cede to Russia any part of her present territories or any rights of fishery; and the two other powers agreed to maintain Sweden by force against aggression. The congress of Paris was remarkable too for the fact that the plenipotentiaries before separating came to an agreement on the subject of the right of search and the rules generally of maritime war. They agreed to the four following declarations. " First: privateering is and remains abolished. Second; the neutral flag covers enemies' goods, with the exception of contraband of war. Third: neutral goods with the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture under an enemy's flag. Fourth: block- 502 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ades in order to be binding must be effective; that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy's coast." At the opening of the war Great Britain had already virtually given up the claims she once made against neutrals, and which were indeed untenable in the face of modern civilization. She gladly agreed therefore to ratify so far as her declaration went the doc- trines which would abolish forever the principle upon which those and kindred claims once rested. It was agreed, however, that the rules adopted at the congress of Paris should only be binding on those states that had acceded or should accede to them. The government of the United States had previously invited the great European powers by a circular to assent to the broad doctrine that free ships make free goods. At the instance of England it was answered that the adoption of that doctrine must be conditional on America's renouncing the right of privateer- ing. To this the United States raised some difficulty, and the declarations of the congress were therefore made with- out America's assenting to them. With many other questions too the congress of Paris occupied itself. At the instigation of Count Cavour the condition of Italy was brought under its notice; and there can be no doubt that out of the congress and the part that Sardinia assumed as representative of Italian nationality came the great succession of events which ended in the establishment of a king of Italy in the palace of the Quirinal. The adjustment of the condition of the Danubian princi- palities too engaged much attention and discussion and a highly ingenious arrangement was devised for the purpose of keeping those provinces from actual union, so that they might be coherent enough to act as a rampart against Russia, without being so coherent as to cause Austria any alarm for her own somewhat disjointed, not to say dis- tracted, political system. All these artificial and complex arrangements presently fell to pieces, and the principalities became in course of no very long time an independent state under a hereditary prince. But for the hour' it was hoped that the independence of Turkey and the restriction of Russia, the security of the Christian provinces, the neu- trality of the Black Sea, and the closing of the straits against war vessels, had been brought by the war. England lost some twenty-four thousand men in the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 503 Avar; of whom hardly a sixth fell in battle or died of wounds. Cholera and other diseases gave grim account of the rest. Forty-one millions of money were added by the campaign to the national debt. Not much, it will be seen, was there in the way of mere military glory to show for the cost. Our fleets had hardly any chance of mak- ing their power felt. The ships of the allies took Bomar- sund in the Baltic, and Kinburn in the Black Sea, and bombarded several places; but the war was not one that gave a chance to a Nelson, even if a Nelson had been at hand. Among the accidental and unpleasant consequences of the campaign it is worth mentioning the quarrel in which England became involved with the United States because of our foreign enlistment act. At the close of December, 1854, parliament hurriedly passed an act authorizing the formation of a foreign legion for service in the war, and some Swiss and Germans were recruited who never proved of the slightest service. Prussia and America both complained that the zeal of our recruiting functionaries outran the limits of discretion and of law. One of our consuls was actually put on trial at Cologne; and America made a serious complaint of the enlistment of her citizens. England apologized; but the United States were out of temper and insisted on sending our minister, Mr. Crampton, away from Washington, and some little time passed before the friendly relations of the two states were completely restored. So the Crimean War ended. It was one of the unlucky accidents of the hour that the curtain fell in the Crimea upon what may be considered a check to the arms of England. There were not a few in this country who would gladly have seen the peace negotiations fail, in order that England might thereby have an opportunity of reasserting her military supremacy in the eyes of Europe. Never during the campaign, nor for a long time before it, had England been in so excellent a condition for war, as she was when the warlike operations suddenly came to an end. The campaign had, indeed, only been a training time for us after the unnerving relaxation of a long peace. We had Learned some severe lessons from it; and not unnaturally there were impatient spirits who chafed at the idea of England's having no opportunity of putting these lessons to account. It was hut a mere chance that prevented us 504 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. from accomplishing the capture of the Eedan, despite the very serious disadvantages with which we were hampered in our enterprise as compared with our allies and their simultaneous operation. With just a little better general- ship the Redan would have been taken ; as it was, even with the generalship that we had the next attempt would not have been likely to fail. But the Russians abandoned Sebastopol, and our principal ally was even more anxious for peace than the enemy; and we had no choice but to accept the situation. The war had never been popular in France. It had never had even that amount of popularity which the French people accorded to their emperor's later enterprise, the campaign against Austria. Louis Napoleon had had all he wanted. He had been received into the society of European sovereigns, and he had made what the French public were taught to consider a brilliant cam- paign. It is surprising to any one who looks calmly back now on the history of the Crimean War to find what an extravagant amount of credit the French army obtained by its share in the operations. Even in this country it was at the time an almost universal opinion that the French succeeded in everything they tried; that their system was perfect; that their tactics were beyond improvement; that they were a contrast to us in every respect. Much of this absurd delusion was no doubt the result of a condition of things among us which no reasonable Englishman would exchange for all the imaginary triumphs that a court his- toriographer ever celebrated. It was due to the fact that our system was open to the criticism of every pen that chose to assail it. Not a spot in our military organization escaped detection and exposure. Every detail was keenly criticised ; every weakness was laid open to public observa- tion. We invited all the world to see where we were fail- ing and what were the causes of our failure. Our journals did the work for the military system of England that Mat- thew Arnold says Goethe did for the political and social systems of Europe — stuck its finger upon the weak places, "and said thou ailest here and here." While the official and officious journals of the French empire were sounding pagans to the honor of the emperor and his successes, to his generals, his officers, his commissariat, his transport service, his soldiers, his camp, pioneers, and all our lead- ing papers of all shades of politics were only occupied in A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 505 pointing out defects, and blaming those who did not instantly remedy them. Unpatriotic conduct, it may be said. Ay, truly, if the conduct of the doctor be unfriendly when he tells that we have the symptoms of failing health, and warns us to take some measures for rest and renovation. ►Some of the criticisms of the English press were undoubt- edly inaccurate and rash. But their general effect was bracing, healthful, successful. Their immediate result was that which has already been indicated, to leave the English army at the close of the campaign far better able to under- take prolonged and serious operations of war than it had been at any time during the campaign's continuance. For the effect of the French system on the French army we should have to come down a little later in history and study the workings of imperialism as they displayed them- selves in the confidence, the surprises, and the collapse of 18T0. fStill there was a feeling of disappointment in this coun- try at the close of the war. This was partly due to dissat- isfaction with the manner in which we had carried on the campaign, and partly to distrust of its political results. Our soldiers had done splendidly; but our generals and our system had done poorly indeed. Only one first-class repu- tation of a military order had come out of the war, and that was by the common consent of the world awarded to a Eussian — to General Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol. No new name was made on our side or on that of the French; and some promising or traditional reputations were shattered. The political results of the Avar were to many minds equally unsatisfying. We had gone into the enterprise for two things — to restrain the aggressive and aggrandizing spirit of Russia, and to secure the integrity and independence of Turkey as a power capable of uphold- ing herself with credit among the states of Europe. Events which happened more than twenty years later will have to be studied before any one can form a satisfac- tory opinion as to the degree of success which at- tended each of these objects. For the present, it is enough to say that there was not among thoughtful minds at the time a very strong conviction of success either way. Lord Aberdeen had been modest in his estimate of what the war would do. lie had never had any heart in it, and he was not disposed to exaggerate its beneficent possibilities, lie, 506 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. estimated that it might perhaps secure peace in the east of Europe for some twenty-five years. His modest expec- tation was prophetic. Indeed, it a little overshot the mark. Twenty-two years after the close of the Crimean campaign Russia and Turkey were at war again. CHAPTER XXIX. THE LITERATURE OF THE REIGN — FIRST SURVEY. The close of the Crimean War is a great landmark in the reign of Queen Victoria. This, therefore, is a conven- ient opportunity to cast a glance back upon the literary achievements of a period so markedly divided in political interest from any that went before it. The reign of Queen Victoria is the first in which the constitutional and parlia- mentary system of government came fairly and completely into recognition. It is also the reign which had the good fortune to witness the great modern development in all that relates to practical invention, and more especially in the application of science to the work of making communi- cation rapid between men. On land and ocean, in air and under the sea, the history of rapid travel and rapid interchange of message coincides with that of the present reign. Such a reign ought to have a distinctive literature. So, in truth, it has. Of course it is somewhat bold to predict long and distinct renown for contemporaries or contemporary schools. But it may perhaps be assumed, without any due amount of speculative ven- turesomeness, that the age of Queen Victoria will stand out in history as the period of a litera- ture as distinct from others as the age of Elizabeth or Anne; although not perhaps equal in greatness to the latter and far indeed below the former. . At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign a great race of literary men had come to a close. It is curious to note how sharply and completely the literature of Victoria separates itself from that of the era whose heroes were Scott, Byron, and Words- worth. Before Queen Victoria came to the throne, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats were dead. Wordsworth lived, indeed, for many years after; so did Southey and Moore; and Savage Landor died much later still. But A HISTORY OF OtfR WN TIMES. 50? Wordsworth, Sou they, Moore, aucl Landor had completed their literary work before Victoria came to the throne. Not one of them added a cubit or an inch to his intellectual stature from that time; some of them even did work which distinctly proved that their day was done. A new and fresh breath was soon after breathed into literature. Nothing, perhaps, is more remarkable about the better literature of the age of Queen Victoria than its complete severance from the leadership of that which had gone be- fore it, and its evidence of a fresh and genuine inspiration. It is a somewhat curious fact, too, very convenient for the purposes of this history, that the literature of Queen Vic- toria's time thus far divides itself clearly enough into two parts. The poets, novelists, and historians who were mak- ing their fame with the beginning of the reign had done all their best work and made their mark before these later years, and were followed by a new and different school, drawing inspiration from wholly different sources, and challenging comparison as antagonists rather than disciples. We speak now only of literature. In science the most remarkable developments were reserved for the later years of the reign. AVe use the words "remarkable develop- ments" in the historical rather than in the scientific sense. It would be hardly possible to overrate the benefits con- ferred upon science and the world by some of the scientific men who made the best part of their fame iu the earlier years of the reign. Some great names at once start to the memory. We think of. Brewster, the experimental philosopher, who combined in so extraordinary a degree the strictest severity of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy and imagination which lent pictur- esqueness to all his illustrations and invested his later writ- ings especially with an indefinable charm. We think of Michael Faraday, the chemist and electrician, who knew so well how to reconcile the boldest researches into the heights and depths of science with the sincerest spirit of faith and devotion; the memory of whose delightful im- provisations on the science he loved to expound must remain forever with all who had the privilege of hearing the unrivaled lecturer deliver his annual discourses at the Royal Institution. It is not likely that the name of Sir John Herschel, a gifted member of a gifted family, would be forgotten by any one taking even the hastiest glance at 508 A HISTORY OF OVR OWN TIMES. the science of our time — a family of whom it may truly be said, in slight alteration of Wordsworth's praise of Milton, that their souls were with the stars, and dwelt apart. Richard Owen's is, in another field of knowledge, a great renown. Owen had been called the Cuvier of England, and the Newton of natural history, and there cannot be any doubt that his researches and discoveries as an anato- mist and palaeontologist have marked a distinct era in the development of the study to which he devoted himself. Hugh Miller, the author of " The Old Eed Sandstone" and "The Testimony of the Bocks," the devotee and unfortunately the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought a fresh and brilliant literary ability, almost as untutored and spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman Robert Burns, to bear on the exposition of the studies to which he literally sacrificed his life. If, therefore, we say that the later period of Queen Victoria's reign is more remark- able in science than the former, it is not because we would assert that the men of this later day contributed in richer measure to the development of human knowledge, and especially of practical science, than those of the earlier time. But it was in the later period that the scientific controversies sprang up and the school arose which will be, in the his- torian's sense, most closely associated with the epoch. The value of the labors of men like Owen and Faraday and Brewster is often to be appreciated thoroughly by scientific students alone. What they have done is to be recorded in the history of science rather than in the general and popu- lar history of a day. But the school of scientific thought which Darwin founded and in which Huxley and Tyndall taught is the subject of a controversy which may be set down as memorable in the history of the world. All science and all common life accepted with gratitude and without contest the contributions made to our knowledge by Faraday and Brewster; but the theories of Darwin divided the scientific world, the religious world, and indeed all society, into two hostile camps, and so became an event in history which the historian can no more pass over than in telling of the growth of the United States he could omit any mention of the great civil war. Even in dealing with the growth of science it is on the story of battles that the attention of the outer world must to the end of time be turned with the keenest interest. This is, one might A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 509 almost think, a scientific law in itself, with which it would be waste of time to quarrel. The earlier part of the reign was richer in literary genius than the later has thus far been. Of course the dividing line which we draw is loosely drawn, and may sometimes appear to be capricious. Some of those who won their tame in the earlier part continued active workers, in cer- tain instances steadily adding to their celebrity, through the succeeding years. The figure of Thomas Carlyle is familiar still to all who live in the neighborhood of Chelsea. It was late in the reign of Victoria that Stuart Mill came out for the first time on a public platform in London, after a life divided between official work and the most various reading and study ; a life divided too between the seclusion of Blackheath and the more poetic seclusion of Avignon, among the nightingales whose song was afterward so sweet to his dying ears. He came, strange and shy, into a world which knew him only in his books, and to which the gentle and grave demeanor of the shrinking and worn recluse seemed out of keeping with the fearless brain and heart which his career as a thinker proved him to "have. The reign had run for forty years when Harriet Martineau was taken from that beautiful and romantic home in the bosom of the lake country to which her celebrity had drawn so many famous visitors for so long a time. The renown of Dickens began with the reign, and his death was sadly premature when he died in his quaint and charming home at Gad's Hill, in the country of Falstaff and Prince Hal, some thirty-three years after. Mrs. Browning passed away very prematurely; but it might well be contended that the fame, or at least the popularity, of Robert Browning be- longs to this later part of the reign even though his greatest work belongs to the earlier. The author of the most brilliant and vivid book of travel known in our modern English, "Eothen," made a sudden renown in the earlier part of the reign, and achieved a new and a different sort of repute as the historian of the Crimean War during the later part. Still, if we take the close of the Crimean War as an event dividing the reign thus far into two parts, we shall find that there does seem a tolerably clear division between the literature of the two periods. We have therefore put in this first part of our history the men and women who had distinctly made their mark in these former years, and 510 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. who would have "been famous if from that time out they had done nothing more. It is with this division borne in mind that we describe the reign as more remarkable in the literature of the earlier and in the science of these later years. It is not rash to say that, although poets, historians and novelists of celebrity came afterward and may come yet, the literature of our time gave its measure, as the French phrase is, in that earlier period. Alike in its earlier passages and in its later the reign i? rich in historical labors. The names of Grote, Macaulay and Carlyle occur at once to the mind when we survey the former period. Mr. Grote's history of Greece is indeed a monumental piece of work. It has all that patience and exhaustive care which principally mark the German his- torians, and it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally in the representatives of what Carlyle has called the Dryasdust school. Grote threw himself completely into the life and politics of Athens. It was said of him with some truth that he entered so thoroughly into all the political life of Greece as to become now and then the partisan of this or that public man. His own practical acquaintance with politics was undoubtedly of great service to him. We have all grown somewhat tired of hearing the words of Gibbon quoted in which he tells us that "the discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the cap- tain of the Hampshire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian 'of the Eoman Em- pire." Assuredly the practical knowledge of politics which Grote acquired during the nine or ten years of his parlia- mentary career was of much service to the historian of Greece. It has been said indeed of him that he never could quite keep from regarding the struggle of parties in Athens as exactly illustrating the principles disputed between the Liberals and the Tories in England. It does not seem to us, however, that his political career affected his historical studies in any way, but by throwing greater vitality and nervousness into his descriptions of Athenian controversies. The difference between a man who has mingled anywhere in the active life of politics and one who only knows that life from books and the talk of others, is specially likely to show itself in such a study as Grote's history. His political training enabled Grote to see in the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 511 statesmen and soldiers of the Greek peoples men and not trees walking. It taught him how to make the dry bones live. Mr. Grote began life as what would have been called in later years a philosophical Radical. He was a close friend of Stuart Mill, although he did not always agree with Mill in his opinions. During his parliamentary career he devoted himself for the most part to the advo- cacy of the system of vote by ballot. He brought forward a motion on the subject every session as. Mr. Charles Villiers did at one time for the repeal of the corn laws. He only gave up the House of Commons in order that he might be free to complete his great history. He did not retain all his radical opinions to the end of his life so thor- oughly as Mill did, but owned with a certain regret that in many ways his views had undergone modification, and that he grew less and less ardent for political change; less hopeful, we may suppose, of the amount of good to be done for human happiness and virtue by the spread and move- ment of what are now called advanced opinions. It must be owned that it takes a very vigorous and elastic mind to enable a man to resist the growth of that natural and physical tendency toward conservatism or reaction which comes with advancing years. It is as well for society on the whole that this should be so, and that the elders as a rule should form themselves into a guard to challenge very pertinaciously all the eager claims and demands for change made by hopeful and restless youth. No one would more readily have admitted the advantage that may come from this common law of life than Grote's friend, Mill;* although Mill remained to the close of his career as full of hope in the movement of liberal opinions as he had been in his boyhood, still, to quote from some noble words of Schiller, "reverencing as a man the dreams of his youth." In his later years Grote withdrew from all con- nection with active political controversy, and was indeed curiously ignorant of the very bearings of some of the greatest questions around the settlement of which the passions and interests of another hemisphere were brought into fierce and vast dispute. We have already had occasion more than once to speak of Macaulay, the great parliamentary debater and states- man. It is the less necessary to say much of him as an his- torian;' for Macaulay will be remembered rather as a man 512 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. who could do many tilings brilliantly than as the author of a history. Yet Macaulay's "History of England," whatever its defects, is surely entitled to rank as a great work. We do not know whether grave scholars will regard it as to the honor of the book or the reverse, that it was by far the most popular historical essay ever produced by an Englishman. The successive volumes of Macaulay's "History of England, " were run after as the Waverley Novels might have been at the zenith of their author's fame. Living England talked for the time of nothing but Macaulay's "England." Certainly history had never be- fore in our country been treated in a style so well calcu- lated to render it at once popular, fascinating, and fashion- able. Every chapter glittered with vivid and highly-colored description. On almost every page was found some sen- tence of glowing eloquence or gleaming antithesis, which at once lent itself to citation and repetition. Not one word of it could have failed to convey its meaning. The whole stood out in an atmosphere clear, bright, and incap- able of misty illusion as that of a Swiss lake in summer. No shade or faint haze of a doubt appeared anywhere. The admirer of Macaulay had all the comfort in his studies that a votary of the Roman Catholic Church may have. He had an infallible guide. He had no need to vex himself with doubt, speculation, or even conjecture. This absolute certainty about everything was, beyond question, one great source of Macaulay's popularity. That resolute conviction which readers of a more intellectual class are especially inclined to distrust has the same charm for the ordinary reader that it has for children, who never care to- hear any story if they suppose the narrator does not know all about it in such a way as to render question or contradic- tion impossible. But although this was one of the causes of Macaulay's popularity, it was not the most substantial cause. The brilliancy of his style, the variety and aptness of his illustrations, and the animated manner in which he contrived to set his ideas of men, places, and events before the reader — these were among the sources of success to which his admirers must look with the greatest satisfac- tion. It is of late somewhat the fashion to disparage Macaulay. He was a popular idol so long that, in the nat- ural course of things, it has come to him to have his title to worship, or even to faith, very generally questioned. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 513 To be unreasonably admired by one generation is to incur the eertaiuty of being unreasonably disparaged by the next. The tendency of late is to assume that because Macaulay was brilliant he must necessarily be superficial. But Macaulay was not superficial. He was dogmatic; he was full of prejudice; he was in all respects a better advocate than judge; he was wanting in the calm impartial balanc- ing faculty which an historian of the highest class ought to have; but he was not superficial. No man could make out a better and a stronger case for any side of a contro- versy which he was led to espouse. He was not good at drawing or explaining complex characters. He loved indeed to picture contradictory and paradoxical characters. Nothing delighted him more than to throw off an animated description of some great person, who having been shown in the first instance to possess one set of qualities in ex- treme prominence, was then shown to have a set of exactly antagonistic qualities in quite equal prominence. This was not describing a complex character. It was merely embodying a paradox. It was to "solder close," as Timon of Athens says, "impossibilities and make them kiss." There was something too much of trick about this, although it was often done with so much power as to be- wilder the better judgment of the calmest reader. But where Macaulay happened to be right in his view of a man or an event, he made his convictions clear with an impres- siveness and a brilliancy such as no modern writer has sur- passed. The world owes him something for having pro- tested, by precept and example, against the absurd notion that the "dignity of history" required of historians to be grave, pompous, and dull. lie was not a Gibbon, but he wrote with all Gibbon's delight in the picturesqueness of a subject, and Gibbon's resolve to fascinate as well as to instruct his readers. Macaulay's history tries too much to be an historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated in Macaulay's sparkling pages. But it is some- thing to know that their splendid qualities are far more conspicuous still than their defects. Perhaps very recent readers of history too may feel disposed to be grateful to Macaulay for having written without any profound philoso- phical theory to expound. He told history like a story. He warmed up as he went along, and grew enamored, as 514 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. a romancist does, of this character and angry with that other. No doubt he frequently thus did harm to the trust- worthiness of his narrative where it had to deal with dis- puted questions, although he probably enhanced the charms of his animated style. But he did not set out with a mission to expound some theory as to a race or a ten- dency, and therefore jdedged beforehand to bend all facts of the physical, the political, and the moral world to the duty of bearing witness for him and proclaiming the truth of his message to mankind. Macaulay was not exactly what the Germans would call a many-sided man. He never was anything but the one Macaulay in all he did or attempted. But he did a great many things well. Nothing that he ever attempted was done badly. He was as successful in the composition of a pretty valentine for a little girl as he was in his history, his essays, his "Lays of Ancient Borne," and his parlia- mentary speeches. In everything he attempted he went very near to that success which true genius achieves. In everything he just fell short of that achievement. But he so nearly attained it that the reader who takes up one of Macaulay's books or speeches for the first time is almost sure to believe, under the influence of the instant impres- sion, that the genuine inspiration is there. Macaulay is understood to have for a long time thought of writing a romance. If he had done so, we may feel sure that many intelligent readers would have believed on the first perusal of it that it was almost on a level with Scott, and only as the first impression gradually faded, and they came to read it over again, have found out that Macaulay was not a Scott in fiction any more than he was a Burke in eloquence or a Gibbon in history. Ht filled for a long time a larger space in the public mind than any other literary man in England, and his style greatly affected literary men. But his influence did not pierce deeply down into public feel- ing and thought as that of one or two other men of the same period undoubtedly did, and does still. He did not impress the very soul of English feeling as Mr. Carlyle, for example, has done. No influence suffused the age from first to last more strongly .than that of Thomas Carlyle. England's very way of thinking was at one time profoundly affected by Carlyle. He introduced the English people to the great A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 515 German authors, very much as Leasing had introduced the Germans to Shakespeare and the old English ballads. Carlyle wrote in a style which was so little like that ordi- narily accepted as English, that the best thing to be said for it was that it was not exactly German. At one time it appeared to be so completely molded on that of Jean Paul Richter, that not a few persous doubted whether the new comer really had any ideas of his own. But Carlyle soon proved that he could think for himself; and he very often proved it by thinking wrong. There was in him a strong, deep vein of the poetic. Long after he had evidently settled down to be a writer of prose and nothing else, it still seemed to many that his true sphere was poetry. The grim seriousness which he had taken from his Scottish birth and belongings was made hardly less grim by the irony which continually gleamed or scowled through it. Truth and force were the deitiesof Carlyle's especial wor- ship. " The eternal verities" sat on the top of his Olympus. To act out the truth in life and make others act it out would require some force more strong, ubiquitous, and penetrating than we can well obtain from the slow deliber- ations of an ordinary parliament, with its debates and divisions and everlasting formulas. Therefore, to enforce his eternal verities, Carlyle always preached up and yearned for the strong man, the poem in action, whom the world in our day had not found, and perhaps could not appre- ciate. If this man were found it would be his duty and his privilege to drill us all as in some vast camp, and com- pel us to do the right thing to his dictation. It cannot be doubted that this preaching of the divine right of force had a serious and sometimes a very detrimental effect upon the public opinion of England. It degenerated often into affectation, alike with the teacher and the disciples. But the -influence of Carlyle in preaching earnestness and truth, in art and letters and everything else, had a healthy and very remarkable effect entirely outside the regions of the moralist, who in this country at least has always taught the same lesson. It is not probable that individual men were made much more truthful in England by Carlyle's glorification of the eternal verities than they would have Been without it. But his influence on letters and art was peculiar, and was not evanescent. Carlyle is distinctly the founder of a school of history and a school of art. In 516 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the meanwhile we may regard him simply as a great author, and treat his books as literary studies and not as gospels. Thus regarded, we shall find that he writes in a style which every sober critic would feel bound to con- demn, but which, nevertheless, the soberest critic is forced continually, despite of himself and his rules, to admire. For, out of the strange jargon which he seems to have deliberately adopted, Carlyle has undoubtedly constructed a wonderfully expressive medium in which to speak his words of remonstrance and admonition. It is a mannerism, but a mannerism into which a great deal of the individuality of the man seems to have entered. It is not wholly affecta- tion or superficiality. Carlyle's own soul seems to speak out in it more freely and strenuously than it would in the ordinary English of society and literature. No tongue, says Eichter, is eloquent save in its own language; and this strange language which he has made for himself does really appear to be the native tongue of Carlyle's powerful and melancholy eloquence. Carlyle is endowed with a marvelous power of depicting stormy scenes and rugged, daring natures. At times strange, wild, piercing notes of the pathetic are heard through his strenuous and fierce bursts of eloquence like the wail of a clarion thrilling between the blasts of a storm. His history of the French Eevolution is history read by lightning. Of this re- markable book John Stuart Mill supplied the principal material; for Mill at one time thought of writing a his- tory of the revolution himself, but giving uj) the idea, placed the materials he had collected at the service of Car- lyle. Carlyle used the materials in his own way. He is indebted to no one for his method of making up his his- tory. With all its defects, the book is one of the very fin- est our age has produced. Its characters stand out like portraits by Eembrandt. Its crowds live and move. The picture of Mirabeau is worthy of the hand of the great German poet who gave us Wallenstein. But Carlyle's style has introduced into this country a thoroughly false method of writing history. It is a method which has little regard for the "dry light" which Bacon approved. It works under the varying glare of colored lights. Its purpose is to express scorn of one set of ideas and men, and admiration of another. Given the man we admire, then all his doings and ways must be admirable; and the his- A HISTORY OFOUROWN TIMES. 51? torian proceeds to work this principle out. Carlyle's Mira- beau is as truly a creature of romance, as the Monte Cristo of Dumas. This way of going to work became even more apparent, as the mannerisms became more incessant, in Carlyle's later writings — in the "Frederick the Great," for example. The reader dares not trust such history. It is of little value as an instructor in the lessons of the times and events it deals with. It only tells us what Carlyle thought of the times and the events, and the men who were the chief actors in them. Nor does Carlyle bequeath many new ideas to the world which he stirred by his stormy eloquence. That falsehood cannot prevail over truth in the end, nor simulacra do the work of realities, is not, after all, a lesson which earth can be said to have waited for up to the nineteenth century and the coming of Carlyle; and yet it would be hard to point to any other philosophical outcome of Mr. Carlyle's teaching. His value is in his eloquence, his power, his passion, and pathos; his stirring and lifelike pictures of human charac- ter, whether faithful to the historical originals or not; and the vein of poetry which runs through all his best writ- ings, and sometimes makes even the least sympathetic reader believe that he has to do with a genuine poet. In strongest contrast to the influence of Carlyle may be set the influence of Mill. Except where the professed teachers of religious creeds are concerned, there can be found no other man in the reign of Victoria who had any- thing like the influence over English thought that Mill and Carlyle possessed. Mill was a devoted believer in the possibilities of human nature and of liberty. If Rousseau was the apostle of affliction, Mill was surely the apostle of freedom. He believed that human society might be brought to something not far removed from perfection by the influence of education and of freedom acting on the best impulses and disciplining the emotions of men and women. Mill was a strange blending of political econo- mist and sentimentalist. It was not altogether in humor- ous exaggeration that somebody said he was Adam Smith and Petrarch in one. The curious seclusion in which he was brought up by his father, the wonderful discipline of study to which in his very infancy he was subjected, would have made something strange and striking out of a com- monplace nature; and Mill was in any case a man of genius. 518 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. There was an antique simplicity and purity about his life which removed him altogether from the ways of ordinary society. But the defect of his teaching as an ethical guide was that he made too little allowance for the influence of ordinary society. He always seemed to act on the prin- ciple that with true education and noble example the most commonplace men could be persuaded to act like heroes, and to act like heroes always. The great service which he rendered to the world in his political economy and his sys- tem of logic is of course independent of his controverted theories and teachings. These works would, if they were all he had written, place him in the very front rank of English thinkers and instructors. But these only repre- sent half of his influence on the public opinion of his time. His faith in the principle of human liberty led him to originate the movement for what is called the emancipation of women. Opinions will doubtless long differ as to the advantages of the movement, but there can be no possible difference of judgment as to the power and fascination of Mill's advocacy and the influence he exercised. He did not succeed in his admirable essay " On Liberty" in estab- lishing the rule or principle by which men may decide between the right of free expression of opinion and the right of authority to ordain silence. Probably no precise boundary line can ever be drawn; and in this, as in so much else, lawmakers and peoples must be content with a compromise. But Mill's is at least a noble plea for the fullest possible liberty of utterance; and he has probably carried the argument as far as it ever can be carried. There never was a more lucid and candid reasoner. The most difficult and abstruse questions became clear by the light of his luminous exposition. Something too of human interest and sympathy became infused into the most seem- ingly arid discussions of political economy by the virtue of his emotional and half poetic nature. It was well said of him that he reconciled political economy with human feeling. His style was clear as light. Mill, said one of his critics, lives in light. Sometimes his language rose to a noble and dignified eloquence; here and there are passages of a grave, keen irony. Into the questions of religious belief which arise in connection with his works it is no part of our business to enter; but it may be remarked that his latest writings seem to show that his views were under- a bistort of our own times. 519 going much modification in his closing years. His oppo- nents would have allowed as readily as his supporters that no man could have been more sincerely inspired with a desire to arrive at the truth; and that none could be more resolute to follow the course which his conscience told him to be right. He carried this resolute principle into his warmest controversies, and it was often remarked that he usually began by stating the case of the adversary better than the adversary could have done it for himself. Apply- ing to his own character the same truthful method of inquiry which he applied to others, Mill has given a very accurate description of one at least of the qualities by which he was able to accomplish so much. He tells us in his autobiography that he had from an early period con- sidered that the most useful part he could take in the domain of thought was that of an interpreter of original thinkers and mediator between them and the public. " I had always a humble opinion of my own pow r ers as an original thinker, except in abstract science (logic, meta- physics, and the theoretic principles of political economy and politics), but thought myself much superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from everybody; as I found hardly any one who made such a point of examining what was said in defense of all opinions, however new or however old, in the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a substratum of truth underneath them, and that in any case the discovery of what it was that made them plausible would be a benefit to truth." This was not assuredly Mill's greatest merit, but it was perhaps his most peculiar quality. He was an original thinker, despite his own sincere disclaimer; but ho founded no now system. \\c could be trusted to exam- ine and expound any system with the most perfect fairness and candor; and, even where it was least in harmony with his own ideas, to do the fullest justice to every one of its claims. Harriet Martineau's career as a woman of letters and a teacher began indeed before the reign of Queen Victoria, but it was carried on almost without interruption during nearly forty years of the reign. She was a political econo- mist, novelist, historian, biographer, and journalist; and in no path (lid she fail to make her mark. Few women could have turned to the occupations of a political writer 520 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. under greater physical disadvantages; and no man in this line of life, however well furnished by nature with physical and intellectual qualifications for success, could have done better work. She wrote some exquisite little stories, and one or two novels of more ambitious character. It is praise enough to give them when we say that, although fiction certainly was not work for which she was most especially qualified, yet what she did seems to be destined to live and hold a place in our literature. She was, so far as we know, the only English woman who ever achieved distinct and great success as a writer of leading articles for a daily news- paper. Her strong prejudices and dislikes prevent her from being always regarded as a trustworthy historian. Her " His- tory of the Thirty Years' Peace" — for it may be regarded as wholly hers, although Charles Knight began it — is a work full of vigorous thought and clear description, with here and there passages of genuine eloquence. But it is marred in its effect as a trustworthy narrative by the manner in which the authoress yields here and there to inveterate and wholesale dislikes; and sometimes, though not so often or so markedly, to an over-wrought hero-worship. Miss Martineau had to a great extent an essentially mascu- line mind. She was often reproached with being unfemi- nine; and assuredly she would have been surprised to hear that there was anything womanish in her way of criticising public events and men. Yet in reading her " History" one is sometimes amused to find that that partisanship which is commonly set down as a specially feminine quality affects her estimate of a statesman. Hers is not by any means the Carlylean way of starting with a theory and finding all virtue and glory in the man who seems to embody it, and all baseness and stupidity in his opponents. But when she takes a dislike to a particular individual, she seems to assume that where he was wrong he must have been wrong of set malign purpose, and that where he chanced to be in the right it was in mistake, and in despite of his own greater inclination to be in the wrong. It is fortunate that these dislikes are not many, and also that they soon show themselves, and therefore cease to be seri- ously misleading. In all other respects the book well deserves careful study. The life of the woman is a study still more deeply interesting. Others of her sex there were of greater genius, even in her own time; but no English- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 521 woman ever followed with such perseverance and success a career of literary and political labor. " The blue-peter has long been flying at my foremast, and, now that I am in my ninety-second year, I must soon expect the signal for sailing." In this quaint and cheery way Mary Somerville, many years after the period at which we have now arrived in this work, described her condition and her quiet waiting for death. No one surely could have better earned the right to die by the labors of a long life devoted to the education and the improvement of her kind. Mary Somerville has probably no rival among women as a scientific scholar. Her summary of Laplace's "Mecanique Celeste," her treatise on the " Connection of the Physical Sciences," and her "Physical Geography," would suffice to place any student, man or woman, in the foremost rank of scientific expounders. The " Physical Geography" is the only one of Mrs. Somerville's remark- able works which was published in the reign of Queen Vic- toria; but the publication of the other two preceded the opening of the reign by so short a time, and her career and her fame so entirely belong to the Victorian period, that, even if the " Physical Geography" had never been pub- lished, she must be included in this history. "I was intensely ambitious," Mrs. Somerville says of herself in her earlier days, "to excel in something; for I felt in my own breast that women were capable of hiking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my early days, which was very low." It is not exaggeration to say that Mrs. Somerville distinctly raised the world's estimate of woman's capacity for tlie severest and the loftiest scientific pursuits. She possessed the most extraordinary power of concentration, amounting to an entire absorption in the subject which she happened to be studying, to the exclu- sion of all disturbing sights and sounds. She had in a supreme degree that which Oarlyle calls the first quality of genius, an immense capacity for taking trouble. She had also, happily for herself, an immnese capacity for finding enjoyment in almost everything; in new places, people, and thoughts; in the old familial' scenes and friends and associations. Hers was a noble, calm, fully-rounded life. She worked as steadfastly and as eagerly in her scientific studies as Harriet Martineau did with her economics and her politics: but she had a more cheery, less sensitive, less 522 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. eager and impatient nature than Harriet Martineau. She was able to pursue her most intricate calculations after she had passed her nineteenth year; and one of her chief regrets in dying was that she should not " live to see the distance of the earth from the sun determined by the transit of Venus, and the source of the most renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will immortalize the name of Dr. Livingstone." The paths of the two poets who first sprang into fame in the present reign are strangely remote from each other. Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning are as unlike in style and choice of subject, and indeed in the whole spirit of their poetry, as Wordsworth and Byron. Mr. Tennyson deals with incident and picturesque form, and graceful legend, and with so much of doubt and thought and yearn- ing melancholy as would belong to a refined and cultured intellect under no greater stress or strain than the ordinary chances of life among educated Englishmen might be ex- pected to impose. He has revived with great success the old Arthurian legends, and made them a part of the living literature of England. But the knights and ladies whom he paints are refined, graceful, noble, without roughness, without wild or at all events complex and distracting pas- sions. It may perhaps be said that Tennyson has taken for his province all the beauty, all the nobleness, all the feel- ing that lie near to or on the surface of life and of nature. His object might seem to be that which Lessing declared the true object of all art, "to delight;" but it is to delight in a somewhat narrower sense than was the meaning of Lessing. Beauty, melancholy, and repose are the elements of Tenny- son's poetry. There is no storm, no conflict, no complica- tion. Mr. Browning, on the other hand, delights in per- plexed problems of character and life: in studying the effects of strange contrasting forces of passion coming into play under peculiar and distracting conditions. All that lies beneath the surface; all that is out of the common track of emotion ; all that is possible, that is poetically conceivable, but that the outer air and the daily walks of life never see, this is what specially attracts Mr. Browning. In Tennyson a knight of King Arthur's mythical court has the emotions of a polished English gentleman of our day, and nothing more. Mr. Browning would prefer, in treating of a polished Englishman of our day, to exhibit A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 523 him under some conditions which should draw out in him all the strange elementary passions and complications of emotion that lie far down in deeps below the surface of the best-ordered civilization. The tendency of the one poet is naturally to fall now and then into the sweetly insipid ; of the other to wander away into the tangled regions of the grotesque. It is perhaps only natural that under such con- ditions the one poet should be profoundly concerned for beauty of form, and the latter almost absolutely indifferent to it. No poet has more finished beauty of style and ex- quisite charm of melody than Tennyson. None certainly can be more often wanting in grace of form and delight of soft sound than Mr. Browning. There are many passages and even many poems of Browning which show that the poet could be melodious if he would; but he seems sometimes as if he took a positive delight in perplex- ing the reader's ear with harsh untuneful sounds. Mr. Browning commonly allows the study of the purely psychological to absorb too much of his moods and of his genius. It has a fascination for him which he is seemingly unable to resist. He makes of his poems too often mere searchings into strange deeps of human character and hu- man error. He seldom abandons himself altogether to the inspiration of the poet; he hardly ever deserves the defini- tion of the minstrel given in Goethe's ballad who " sings but as the song-bird sings." Moreover, Mr. Browning has an almost morbid taste for the grotesque; he is not unfrequently a sort of poetic Callot. It has to be added that Mr. Browning is seldom easy to understand, and that there are times when he is only to be understood at the expense of as much thought and study as one might give to a controverted passage in an ancient author. This is a defect of art, and a very serious defect. The more de- voted of Mr. Browning's admirers will tell us no doubt that the poet is not bound to supply us with brains as well as poetry, and that if we cannot understand what he says it is the fault simply of our stupidity. Mat an ordi- nary man who finds that he can understand Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden and Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, with- out any trouble, may surely be excused if he does not set down his difficulty about some of Browning's poems wholly to theaccounl of his own dullness. It may well be doubted whether there is any idea so subtle that, if the poet can 524 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. actually realize it in his own mind clearly for himself, the English language will not be found capable of expressing it with sufficient clearness. The language has been made to do this for the most refined reasonings of philosophical schools, for transcendentalists and utilitarians, for psychol- ogists and metaphysicians. No intelligent person feels any difficulty in understanding what' Mill or Herbert Spencer or Huxley means; and it can hardly be said that the ideas Mr. Browning desires to convey to his readers are more difficult of exposition than some of those which the authors we name have contrived to set out with a white light of clearness all round them. The plain truth is that Mr. Browning is a great poet in spite of some of the worst defects that ever stood between a poet and popularity. He is a great poet by virtue of his commanding genius, his fearless imagination, his penetrating pathos. He strikes an iron harpstring. In certain of his moods his poetry is like that of the terrible lyre in the weird old Scottish ballad, the lyre that was made of the murdered maiden's breast-bone, and which told its fearful story in tones " that would melt a heart of stone." In strength and depth of passion and pathos, in wild humor, in emotion of every kind, Mr. Browning is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The poet laureate is the completer man. Mr. Tennyson is beyond doubt the most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria's time. No one else has the same combination of melody, beauty of description, culture and intellectual power. He has sweetness and strength in exquisite com- bination. If a just balance of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then undoubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest English poet of our time. The reader's estimate of Browning and Tennyson will probably be decided by his predilection for the higher effort or for the more perfect art. Browning's is surely the higher aim in poetic art; but of the art which he essays Tenny- son is by far the completer master. Tennyson has undoubt- edly thrown away much of his sweetness and his exquisite grace of form on mere triflings and pretty conceits ; and perhaps as a retribution those poems of his which are most familiar in the popular mouth are just those which least do justice to his genuine strength and intellect. The cheap sentiment of "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," the yet cheaper pathos of "The May Queen," are in the minds of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 525 thousands the choicest representation of the genius of the poet who wrote " In Memoriam" and the " Morte d' Arthur." Mr. Browning, on the other hand, has chosen to court the approval of his time on terms of such disadvantage as an orator might who insisted in addressing an assemblage in some tongue which they but imperfectly understood. It is the fault of Mr. Browning himself if he has for his only audience and admirers men and women of culture, and misses altogether that broad public audience to which most poets have chosen to siug, and which all true poets, one would think, must desire to reach with their song. It is, on the other hand, assuredly Mr. Tennyson's fault if he has by his too frequent condescension to the drawing-room, and even the young ladies' school, made men and women of culture forget for a moment his best things, and credit him with no higher gift than that of singing "virginibus puerisque." One quality ought to be mentioned as com- mon to these two poets who have so little else in common. They are both absolutely faithful to nature and truth in their pictures of the earth and its scenes and seasons. Almost all the great poets of the past age, even including Wordsworth himself, were now and then content to gener- alize nature; to take some things for granted; to use their memory or the eyes of others, rather than their own eyes, when they had to describe changes on leaf, or sky, or water. It is the characteristic of Tennyson and Brown- ing that they deal with nature in a spirit of the most faith- ful loyalty. Not the branch of a tree, nor the cry of a bird, nor the shifting colors on sea or sky, will be found described on their pages otherwise than as the eye sees for itself at the season of which the poet tells. In reading Tennyson's description of woodland and forest scenes one might almost fancy that he can catch the exact peculiarities of sound in the rustling and moaning of each separate tree. In some of Mr. Browning's pictures of Italian scenery every detail is so perfect that many a one journey- ing along an Italian road and watching the little mouse- colored cattle as they drink at the stream may For the mo- ment almost feel uncertain whether he is looking on a page of living reality or recalling to memory a page from the author of "The King and the Book." The poets seem to have returned to the fresh simplicity of a far distant age of poetry, when a man described exactly what he saw, and 52f> A HISTORY OP OtfR OWN TIMES. was put to describing it because he saw it. In most of the intermediate times a poet describes because some other poet has described before, and has said that in nature there are such and such beautiful things which every true poet must see, and is bound to acknowledge accordingly in his verse. These two are the greatest of our poets in the earlier part of the reign ; indeed in the reign early or late so far. But there are other poets also of whom we must take account. Mrs. Browning has often been described as the greatest poetess of whom we know anything since Sappho. This description, however, seems to carry with it a much higher degree of praise than it really bears. It has to be remembered that there is no great poetess of whom we know anything from the time of Sappho to that of Mrs. Browning. In England we have hardly had any woman but Mrs. Browning alone who really deserves to rank with poets. She takes a place altogether different from that of any Mrs. Hemans or such singer of sweet, mild, and inno- cent note. Mrs. Browning would rank highly among poets without any allowance being claimed for her sex. But estimated in this way, which assuredly she would have chosen for herself, she can hardly be admitted to stand with the foremost even of our modern day. She is one of the most sympathetic of poets. She speaks to the hearts of numbers of readers who think Tennyson all too sweet, smooth, and trivial, and Robert Browning harsh and rugged. She speaks especially to the emotional in woman. In all moods when men or women are distracted by the bewildering conditions of life, when they feel themselves alternately dazzled by its possibilities and baffled by its limitations, the poems of Elizabeth Browning ought to find sympathetic ears. But the poems are not the highest which merely appeal to our own moods and echo our own plaints ; and there was not much of creative genius in Mrs. Browning. Her poems are often but a prolonged sob; a burst of almost hysterical remonstrance or entreaty. It must be owned, however, that the egotism of emotion has seldom found such exquisite form of outpouring as in her so-called "Sonnets from the Portuguese;" and that what the phraseology of a school would call the emotion of "altruism" has rarely been given- forth in tones of such piercing pathos as in "The Cry of the Children." Mr. Matthew Arnold's reputation was made before this A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 52? earlier period had closed. He is a maker of such exquisite and thoughtful verse that it' is hard sometimes to question his title to be considered a genuine poet. On the other hand, it is likely that the very grace and culture and thoughtfulness of his style inspire in many the first doubt of his claim to the name of poet. Where the art is evident and elaborate, we are all too apt to assume that it is all art and not genius. Mr. Arnold is a sort of miniature Goethe; we do not know that his most ardent admirers could de- mand a higher praise for him, while it is probable that the description will suggest exactly the intellectual peculiari- ties which lead so many to deny him a place with the really inspired singers of his clay. Of the three men whom we have named we should be inclined to say that Mr. Arnold made the very most of his powers, and Mr. Browning the very least. Mr. Arnold is a critic as well as a poet; there are many who relish him more in the critic than in the poet. In literary criticism his judgment is refined, and his aims are always high if his range be not very wide; in politics and theology he is somewhat apt to be at once fas- tidious and fantastic. The "Song of the Shirt" would give Thomas Hood a technical right, if he had none other, to be classed as a poet of the reign of Queen Victoria. The " Song of the Shirt" was published in Punch when the reign was well on; and after it, appeared "The Bridge of Sighs"; and no two of Hood's poems have done more to make him famous. He was a genuine though not a great poet, in whom humor was most properly to be defined as Thackeray has defined it — the blending of love and wit. The "Song of the Shirt" and the " Bridge of Sighs" made themselves a kind of monumental place in English sympathies. The " Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" was written several years be- fore. It alone would have made for its author a reputa- tion. The ballad of "Fair Inez" is almost perfect in its way. The name of Sir Henry Taylor must be included with the poets of this reign, although lushest Avork was done before the reign began. In his work, clear strong intelligence prevails more than the emotional and the sensuous. He makes himself a poet by virtue of intellect and artistic judgment; for there really do seem some examples of a poet being made and not born. We can hardly bring Procter among the Victorian poets. Macaulay's 528 A BISTORT OF OTTR OWN TIMES. ringing verses are rather the splendid and successful tour a deforce of a clever man than the genuine lyrics of a poet. Arthur Clough was a man of rare promise, whose lamp was extinguished all too soon. Philip James Bailey startled the world by his " Festus" and for a time made people believe that a great new poet was coming; but the impression did not last, and Bailey proved to be little more than the comet of a season. A spasmodic school which sprang up after the success of "Festus," and which was led by a brilliant young Scotchman, Alexander Smith, passed away in a spasm as it came, and is now almost forgotten. "Orion," an epic poem by Richard H. Home, made a very distinct mark upon the time. Home proved himself to be a sort of Landor manque — or perhaps a connecting link between the style of Landor and that of Browning. The earlier part of the reign was rich in singers; but the names and careers of most of them would serve rather to show that the poetic spirit was abroad, and that it sought ex- pression in all manner of forms, than that there were many poets to dispute the place with Tennyson and Browning. It is not necessary here to record a list of mere names. The air was filled with the voices of minor singers. It was pleasant to listen to their piping, and the general effect may well be commended ; but it is not necessary that the names of all the performers in an orchestra should be recorded for the supposed gratification of a posterity which assuredly would never stop to read the list. Thirty-six years have passed away since Mr. Ruskin leaped into the literary arena, with a spring as bold and start- ling as that of Kean on the Kemble-haunted stage. The little volume, so modest in its appearance and self-sufficient in its tone, which the author defiantly flung down like a gauge of battle before the world, was entitled, " Modern Painters; their superiority in the art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters; by a Graduate of Oxford." It was a challenge to established beliefs and prejudices; and the challenge was delivered in the tone of one who felt confident that he could make good his words against any and all opponents. If there was one thing that more than another seemed to have been fixed and rooted in the English mind, it was that Claude and one or two others of the old masters possessed the secret of landscape paint- ing. When, therefore, a bold young dogmatist involved A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 529 in one common denunciation "Claude, Gasper, Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, Paul Potter, Canaletto, and the various Van-somethings and Koek somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libeled the sea," it was no wonder that affronted authority raised its indig- nant voice and thundered at him. Affronted authority, however, gained little by its thunder. The young Oxford graduate possessed, along with genius and profound con- viction, an imperturbable and magnificent self-conceit against which the surges of angry criticism dashed them- selves in vain. Mr. Ruskin sprang into literary life simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner. But as he went on with his task he found, or at least he convinced himself, that the vindication of the great landscape painter was essentially a vindication of all true art. Still further proceeding with his self-imposed task, he persuaded him- self that the cause of true art was indentical with the cause of truth, and that truth, from Ruskin's point of view, enclosed in the same rules and principles all the morals, all the science, industry, and daily business of life. Therefore, from an art-critic he became a moralist, a political economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher — anything, everything that human intelligence can impel a man to be. All that he has written since his first appeal to the public has been inspired by this conviction : that, an appreciation of the truth in art reveals to him who has it the truth in everything. This belief has been the source of Mr. Ruskin's greatest successes and of his most complete and ludicrous failures. It has made him the ad- miration of the world one week and the object of its placid pity or broad laughter the next. A being who could be Joan of Arc to-day and Voltaire's Pucelle to-morrow would hardly exhibit a stronger psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr. Ruskin sometimes illustrates. But in order to do him justice, and not to regard him as a mere erratic utterer of eloquent contradictions, poured out on the impulse of cadi moment's new freak of fancy, we must always bear in mind the fundamental faith of the man. Extravagant as this or that doctrine may be, outrageous as to-day's contradiction of yesterday's assertion may sound, yet the whole career is consistent with its essential prin- ciples and beliefs, h may be fairly questioned whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities but his eloquence and 530 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. his true, honest love of nature. As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and greedy, and preach to it of nature's immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, Kuskin has and had a position of genuine dignity. This ought to be enough for the work and for the praise of any man. But the restlessness of Raskin's temperament, combined with the extraordinary self-suffi- ciency which contributed so much to his success where he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor, and enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. Seldom has a man contradicted himself so often, so recklessly, and so com- placently as Mr. Kuskin. It is venturesome to call him a great critic even in art, for he seldom expresses any opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He is a great writer as Rousseau was— fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out of the fullness of the present mood, and heed- less how far the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yesterday. But as Rousseau was always faithful to his idea of truth, so Ruskin is always faithful to nature. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten, this will remain to his praise. No man since Wordsworth's brightest days did half so much to teach his countrymen, and those who speak his language, how to appreciate and honor that silent nature "which never did betray the heart that loved her." In fiction as well as in poetry there are two great names to be compared or contrasted when we turn to the litera- ture of the earlier part of the reign. In the very year of Queen Victoria's accession appeared the " Pickwick Papers," the work of the author who the year before had published the "Sketches by Boz." The public soon recog- nized the fact that a new and wonderfully original force had come into literature. The success of Charles Dickens is absolutely unequaled in the history of English fiction. At the season of his highest popularity Sir Walter Scott was not so popular an author. But that happened to Dickens which did not happen to Scott. When Dickens was at his zenith, and when it might have been thought that any manner of rivalry with him was impossible, a literary man, who was no longer young, who had been working with but moderate success for many years in light A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 531 literature, suddenly took to writing novels, and almost in a moment stepped up to a level with the author of " Pick- wick." During the remainder of their careers the two men stood as nearly as possible on the same level. Dickens always remained by far the more popular of the two; but, on the other hand, it may be safely said that the opinion of the literary world in general was inclined to favor Thackeray. From the time of the publication of "Vanity Fair" the two were always put side by side for compar- ison or contrast. They have been sometimes likened to Fielding and Smollett, but no comparison could be more misleading or less happy. Smollett stands on a level dis- tinctly and considerably below that of Fielding; but Dickens cannot be said to stand thus beneath Thackeray. If the comparison were to hold at all, Thackeray must be compared to Fielding, for Fielding is not in the least like Dickens; but then it must be allowed that Smollett wants many of the higher qualities of the author of " David Cop- perfield." It is natural that men should compare Dickens and Thackeray; but the two will be found to be curiously unlike when once a certain superficial resemblance ceases to impress the mind. Their ways of treating a subject were not only dissimilar, but were absolutely in contrast. They started, to begiu with, under the influence of a totally different philosophy of life, if that is to be called a pbilosophy which was probably only the result of peculiarity of temperament in each case. Dickens set out on the liter- ary theory that in life everything is better than it looks; Thackeray with the impression that it is worse. In the one case there was somewhat too much of a mechanical interpretation of everything for the best in the best pos- sible world; in the other the savor of cynicism was at times a little annoying. As each writer went on, the pecu- liarity became more and more of a mannerism. lint the writings of Dickens were far more deeply influenced by his peculiarities of feeling or philosophy than those of Thack- eray. A large share of the admiration which is popularly given to Dickens is undoubtedly a tribute to what people consider his cheerful view of life. In that too he is especially English. In this country the artistic theory of France and other continental nations, borrowed from the aesthetic principles of Greece, which accords the palm to the artistic treatment rather than to the subject, or the 532 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. purpose or the way of looking at things, lias found hardly any broad and general acceptation. The popularity of Dickens was therefore in great measure due to the fact that he set forth life in cheerful lights and colors. He had of course gifts of far higher artistic value; he could describe anything that he saw with a fidelity which Balzac could not have surpassed; and like Balzac he had a way of inspiring inanimate objects with a mystery and motive of their own which gave them often a weird and fascinating individuality. But it must be owned that if Dickens' peculiar "philosophy" were effaced from his works the fame of the author would remain a very different thing from what it is at the present moment. On the other hand, it would be possible to cut out of Thackeray all his little cynical, melancholy sentences and reduce his novels to bare descriptions of life and character, without affecting in any sensible degree his influence on the reader or his position in literature. Thackeray had a marvelously keen appreciation of human motive and character within certain limits. If Dickens could draw an old quaint house or an odd family interior as faithfully and yet as picturesquely as Balzac, so on the other hand not Balzac himself could analyze and illustrate the weaknesses and foibles of certain types of character with greater subtlety of judgment and force of exposition than Thackeray. Dickens had little or no knowledge of human character, and evidently cared very little about the study. His stories are fairy tales made credible by the masterly realism with which he described all the surroundings and accessories, the costumes and the ways of his men and women. While we are read- ing of a man whose odd peculiarities strike us with a sense of reality as if we had observed them for ourselves many a time, while we see him surrounded by streets and houses which seem to us rather more real and a hundred times more interesting than those through which we pass every day, we are not likely to observe very quickly or to take much heed of the fact when we do observe it, that the man acts on various important occasions of his life as only people in fairy stories ever do act. Thackeray, on the other hand, cared little for descriptions of externals. He left his readers to construct for themselves the greater part of the surroundings of his personages from his descrip- tion of the characters of the personages themselves. He A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 533 made us acquainted with the man or woman in his chapters as if we had known him or her all our life; and knowing Pendennis or Becky Sharp, we had no difficulty in con- structing the surroundings of either for ourselves. Thus it will be seen that these two eminent authors had not only different ideas about life, but absolutely contrasting principles of art. One worked from the externals inward ; the other realized the unseen, and left the externals to grow of themselves. Three great peculiarities, however, they shared. Each lived and wrote of and for London. Dickens created for art the London of the middle and poorer classes; Thackeray did the same for the London of the upper class and for those who strive to imitate their ways. Neither ever even attempted to describe a man kept constantly above and beyond the atmosphere of mere egotism by some sustaining greatness or even intensity of purpose. In Dickens as in Thackeray, the emotions described are those of conventional life merely. This is not to be said in disparagement of either artist. It is rather a tribute to an artist's knowledge of his own capa- city and sphere of work that he only attempts to draw what he thoroughly understands, lint it is proper to remark of Dickens and of Thackeray, as of Balzac, that the life they described was, after all, but the life of a coterie or a quar- ter, and that there existed side by side with their field of work a whole world of emotion, aspiration, struggle, de- feat and triumph, of which their brightest pages do not give a single suggestion. This is the more curious to observe because of the third peculiarity which Dickens and Thack- eray had in common — a love for the purely ideal and romantic in fiction. There are many critics who hold that Dickens in "Barnaby Rudge"and the "Tale of Two Cities," Thackeray in "Esmond," exhibited powers which vindi- cated for their possessors a very rare infusion of that higher poetic spirit which might have made of both some- thing greater than the painters of the manners of a day and a class. But to paint the manners of a day and a class as Dickens and Thackeray have done is to deserve fame and the gratitude of posterity. The age of Victoria may claim in this respect an equality at least with that of the reign which produced Fielding and Smollett; for if there arc some 1 who would demand for Fielding a higher place on the whole than can be given either to Dickens or to Thackeray, 534 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. there are not many, on the other hand, who would not say that either Dickens or Thackeray is distinctly superior to Smollett. The age must claim a high place in art which could in one department alone produce two such compet- itors. Their effect upon their time was something mar- velous. People talked Dickens or thought Thackeray. Passion, it will be seen, counted for little in the works of Dickens and Thackeray. Dickens, indeed, could draw a conventionally or dramatically wicked man with much power and impressiveness; and Thackeray could suggest certain forms of vice with wonderful delicacy and yet vivid- ness. But the passions which are common to all human natures in their elementary moods made but little play in the novels of either writer. Both were in this respect, for all their originality and genius in other ways, highly and even exclusively conventional. There was apparently a sort of understanding in the mind of each — indeed Thack- eray has admitted as much in his preface to " Pendennis" — that men and women were not to be drawn as men and women are known to be, but with certain reserves to suit conventional etiquette. It is somewhat curious that the one only novel-writer who during the period we are now considering came into any real rivalry with them was one who depended on passion altogether for her material and her success. The novels of a young woman, Charlotte Bronte, compelled all English society into a recognition, not alone of their own sterling power and genius, but also of the fact that profound and passionate emotion was still the stuff out of which great fiction could be constructed. "Exultations, agonies, and love, and man's unconquer- able mind" were taken by Charlotte Bronte as the matter out of which her art was to produce its triumphs. The novels which made her fame, "Jane Eyre," and " Villette," are positively aflame with passion and pain. They have little variety. They make hardly any pretense to accurate drawing of ordinary men and women in ordinary life, or, at ail events, under ordinary conditions. The authoress had little of the gift of the mere story-teller; and her own peculiar powers were exerted sometimes with indifferent success. The familiar on whom she depended for her inspiration would not always come at call. She had little genuine relish for beauty except the beauty of a weird melancholy and of decay. But when she A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 535 touched the chord of elementary human emotion with her best skill, then it was impossible for her audience not to feel that they were under the spell of a power rare indeed in our well-ordered days. The abso- lute sincerity of the author's expression of feeling lent it great part of its strength and charm. Nothing was ever said by her because it seemed to society the right sort of thing to say. She told a friend that she felt sure " Jane Eyre" would have an effect on readers in general because it had so great an effect on herself. It would be possible to argue that the great strength of the books lay in their sin- cerity alone; that Charlotte Bronte was not so much a woman of extraordinary genius as a woman who looked her own feelings fairly in the face and painted them as she saw them. But the capacity to do this would surely be some- thing which we could not better describe than by the word genius. Charlotte Bronte was far from being an artist of fulfilled power. She is rather to be regarded as one who gave evidence of extraordinary gifts which might with time and care, and under happier artistic auspices, have been turned to such account as would have made for her a fame with the very chiefs of her tribe. She died at an age hardly more mature than that at which Thackeray won his first distinct literary success; much earlier than the age at which some of our greatest novelists brought forth their first completed novels. But she left a very deep im- pression on her time, and the time that has come and is coming after her. No other hand in the age of Queen Victoria has dealt with human emotion so powerfully and so truthfully. Hers are not cheerful novels. A cold, gray, mournful atmosphere hangs over them. One might imagine that the shadow of an early death is forecast on them. They love to linger among the glooms of nature, to haunt her darkling wintry twilights, to study her stormy sunsets, to link man's destiny and his hopes, fears, and passions somehow with the glare and gloom of storm and darkness, and to read the symbols of his fate as the fore-doomed and passion-wasted Antony did in the cloud-masses that are "black vesper's pageants." The supernatural had a con- stant vague charm for Charlotte Bronte as the painful had. Man was to her a being torn between passionate love and the more ignoble impulses and ambitions and common day occupations of life. Woman was a being of equal 536 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. passion, still more sternly and cruelly doomed to repression and renunciation. It was a strange fact that in the midst of the splendid material successes and the quietly trium- phant intellectual progress of this most prosperous and well-ordered age, when even in its poetry and its romance passion was systematically toned down and put in thrall to good taste and propriety, this young writer should have suddenly come out with her books all thrilling with emo- tion, and all protesting in the strongest practical manner against the theory that the loves and hates of men and women had been tamed by the process of civilization. Perhaps the very novelty of the apparition was in great measure a part of its success. Charlotte Bronte did not, indeed, influence the general public, or even the literary public, to anything like the same extent that Thackeray and Dickens did. She appeared and passed away almost in a moment. As Miss Martineau said of her, she stole like a shadow into literature and then became a shadow again. But she struck very deeply into the heart of the time. If her writings were only, as has been said of them, a cry of pain, yet they were such a cry as once heard lingers and echoes in the mind forever after. Godwin declared that he would write in " Caleb Williams" a book which would leave no man who read it the same that he was before. Something not unlike this might be said of "Jane Eyre." No one who read it was exactly the same that he had been before he opened its weird and wonderful pages. The novels of Mrs. Gaskell must not be without record. "Ruth", and "Cranford," and "Wives and Daughters" — this last left unfinished, its authoress called away by death — are pictures of quiet English life, with its homely joys and sorrows, which linger long in the mind, and have a peculiar place in our literature. No man could well have made more of his gifts than Lord Lytton. Before the coming up of Dickens and Thackeray he stood above all living English novelists. Perhaps this is rather to the reproach of the English fiction of the clay than to the renown of Lord Lytton. But even after Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte and later and not less powerful and original. writers had appeared in the same field, he still held a place of great mark in literature. That he was not a man of genius is, perhaps, conclusively proved by the fact that he was able A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 537 so readily to change his style to suit the tastes of each day. He began by writing of fops and roues of a time now almost forgotten; then he made heroes of highwaymen and murderers; afterward he tried the philosophic and mildly didactic style; then he turned to mysticism and spiritualism; later still he wrote of the French second empire. What- ever he tried to do he did well. Besides his novels he wrote plays and poems; and his plays are among the very few modern productions which manage to keep the stage. He played, too, and with much success, at being a states- man and an orator. Not Demosthenes himself had such difficulties of articulation to contend against in the beginning, and Demosthenes conquered his diffi- culties, while some of those in the way of Lord Lytton proved unconquerable; yet Lord Lytton did somehow contrive to become a great speaker, and to seem occasionally like a great orator in the House of Com- mons. He was at the very least a superb phrase-maker; and he could turn to account every scrap of knowledge in literature, art, or science which he happened to possess. His success in the House of Commons was exactly like his success in romance and the drama. He threw himself into competition with men of far higher original gifts, and he made so good a show of contesting with them that in the minds of many the victory was not clearly with his antago- nists. There was always, for example, a considerable class, even among educated persons, who maintained that Lytton was in his way quite the peer of Thackeray and Dickens. His plays, or some of them, obtained a popularity only second to those of .Shakespeare; and although nobody cared to read them, yet people were always found to go and look at them. When Lytton went into the House of Commons for the second time he found audiences which were occa- sionally tempted to regard him as the rival of Gladstone and Bright. Not a few persons saw in all this only a sort of superb charlatanerie ; and indeed it is certain that no man ever made and kept a genuine success in so many different fields as those in which Lord Lytton tried and seemed to succeed. But he had splendid qualities; he had every- thing short of genius. He had indomitable patience, in- exhaustible power of self-culture, and a capacity for assimi- lating the floating ideas of the hour which supplied the place of originality. He borrowed from the poet the 538 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. knack of poetical expression, and from the dramatist the trick of construction ; from the Byronic time its professed scorn for the false gods of the world ; and from the more modern period of popular science and sham mysticism its extremes of materialism and magic; and of these and various other borrowings he made up an article which no one else could have constructed out of the same materials. He was not a great author; but he was a great literary man. Mr. Disraeli's novels belong in some measure to the school of "Pelham" and "Godolphin." But it should be said that Mr. Disraeli's "Vivian Grey" was published be- fore " Pelham" made its appearance. In all that belongs to political life Mr. Disraeli's novels are far superior to those of Lord Lytton. We have nothing in our literature to compare with some of the best of Mr. Disraeli's novels for light political satire and for easy, accurate characteriza- tion of political cliques and personages. But all else in Disraeli's novels is sham. The sentiment, the poetry, the philosophy — all these are sham. They have not half the appearance of reality about them that Lytton has con- trived to give to his efforts of the same kind. In one at least of Disraeli's latest novels the political sketches and satirizing became sham also. "Alton Locke" was published nearly thirty years ago. Then Charles Kingsley became to most boys in Great Britain who read books at all a sort of living embodiment of chivalry, liberty, and a revolt against the established order of class-oppression in so many spheres of our society. For a long time he continued to be the chosen hero of young men with the youthful spirit of revolt in them, with dreams of republics and ideas about the equality of man. Later on he commanded other admiration for other quali- ties — for the championship of slave systems, of oppression, and the iron reign of mere force. But though Charles Kingsley always held a high place somewhere in popular estimation, he is not to be rated very highly as an author. He described glowing scenery admirably, and he rang the changes vigorously on his two or three ideas — the muscular Englishman, the glory of the Elizabethan discoveries, and so on. He was a scholar, and he wrote verses which some- times one is on the point of mistaking for poetry, so much of the poet's feeling have they in them. He did a great many things very cleverly. Perhaps if he had done less lie, A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 539 might have done better. Human capacity is limited. It is not given to mortal to be a great preacher, a great phi- losopher, a great scholar, a great poet, a great historian, a great novelist, and an indefatigable country parson. Charles Kingsley never seems to have made up his mind for which of these callings to go in especially, and being, with all his versatility, not at all many-sided, but strictly one-sided and almost one-idea'd, the result was, that while touching success at many points he absolutely mastered it at none. Since his novel "Westward Ho," he never added anything substantial to his reputation. All this acknowledged, however, it must still be owned that, failing in this, that, and the other attempt, and never achieving any real and enduring success, Charles Kingsley was an influence and a man of mark in the Victorian age. Perhaps a word ought to be said of the rattling romances of Irish electioneering, love-making, and fighting which set people reading " Charles O'Malley" and "Jack Hinton," even when " Pickwick" was still a novelty. Charles Lever had wonderful animal spirits and a broad bright humor. He was quite genuine in his way. He afterward changed his style completely, and with much success; and will be found in the later part of the period holding just the same relative place as in the earlier, just behind the foremost men, but in a manner so different that he might be a new writer who had never read a line of the roystering adven- tures of Light Dragoons which were popular when Charles Lever first gave them to the world. There was nothing great about Lever, but the literature of the Victorian period would not be quite all that we know it without him. There were many other popular novelists during the period we have passed over, some in their day more popular than either Thackeray or Charlotte Bronte. Many of us can remember without being too much ashamed of the fact that there were early days when Mr. James and his cavaliers and his chivalric adventures gave nearly as much delight as Walter Scott could have given to the youth of a preceding generation. But Walter Scott is with us still, young and old, and poor James is gone. His once famous solitary horseman has ridden away into actual solitude, and the shades of night have gathered over his heroic form. The founding of Punch drew together a host of clever young writers, some of whom made a really deep mark on 540 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the literature of their time, arid the combined influence of whom in this artistic and literary undertaking was on the whole decidedly healthy. Thackeray was by far the greatest of the regular contributors to Punch in its earlier days. But " The Song of the Shirt" appeared in its pages, and some of the brightest of Douglas Jerrold's writings made their appearance there. Punch was a thoroughly English production. It had little or nothing in common with the comic periodicals of Paris. It ignored absolutely and of set purpose the whole class of subjects which make up three-fourths of the stock in trade of a French satirist. The escapades of husbands and the infidelities of wives form the theme of by far the greater number of the humor- ous sketches with pen or pencil in Parisian comicalities. Punch kept altogether aloof from such unsavory subjects. It had an advantage, of course, which was habitually denied to the French papers — it had unlimited freedom of political satire and caricature. Politics and the more trivial troubles and trials of social life gave subjects to Punch. The inequalities of class and the struggles of ambitious and' vain persons to get into circles higher than their own, or at least to imitate their manners — these supplied for Punch the place of the class of topics on which French papers relied when they had to deal with the domestic life of the nation. Punch started by being somewhat fiercely Radi- cal, but gradually toned away into a sort of intelligent and respectable Conservatism. Its artistic sketches were from first to last admirable. Some men of true genius wrought for it with the pencil as others did with the pen. Doyle, Leech, and Tenniel were men of whom any school of art might well be proud. A remarkable sobriety of style was apparent in all their humors. Of later years caricature has had absolutely no place in the illustrations to Punch. The satire is quiet, delicate, and no doubt superficial. It is a satire of manners, dress, and social ways altogether. There is justice in the criticism that, of late more especi- ally, the pages of Punch give no idea whatever of the emo- tions of the English people. There is no suggestion of grievance, of bitterness, of passion or pain. It is all made up of the pleasures and annoyances of the kind of life which is enclosed in a garden party. But it must be said that Punch has thus always succeeded in maintaining a good, open, convenient neutral ground, where young men and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 541 maidens, girls and boys, elderly politicians and staid matrons, law trade, science, all sects and creeds, may safely and pleasantly mingle. It is not so, to be sure, tbat great satire is wrought. A Swift or Juvenal is not thus to be brought out. But a votary of the present would have his answer simple and conclusive: we live in the age of Punch ; we do not live in the age of Juvenal or Swift. CHAPTER XXX. THE LORCHA ARROW. After the supposed settlement of the eastern question at the congress of Paris, a sort of languor seems to have come over parliament and the public mind in England. Lord John Russell endeavored unsuccessfully to have some- thing done which should establish in England a genuine system of national education. He proposed a series of reso- lutions, one of which laid down the principle that after a certain appointed time, when any school district should have been declared to be deficient in adequate means for the education of the poor, the quarter session of the peace for the county, city, or borough should have power to im- pose a school rate. This was a step in the direction of com- pulsory education. It anticipated the principle on which the first genuine measure for national instruction was founded many years after. It was of course rejected by the House of Commons when Lord John Russell proposed it. Public opinion, both in and out of parliament, was not nearly ripe for such a principle then. All such proposals were quietly disposed of with the observation that that sort of thing might do very well for Prussians, but would never suit Englishmen. That was a time when a Prussian was regarded in England as a dull, beer-bemused, servile creature, good for nothing better. than to grovel before his half-inebriated monarchs, and to get the stick from his in- capable military officers. The man who suggested then that perhaps some day the Prussians might show that they knew how to right would have been sot down as on a par intellectually with the narrow-minded grumbler who did not believe in the profound sagacity of the emperor of the French. For a country of practical men England is ruled 542 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to a marvelous extent by phrases, and the term " un-En- glish" was destined for a considerable time to come to set- tle all attempts at the introduction of any system of national education which even touched on the compulsory principle. One of the regular attempts to admit the Jews to parliament was made and succeeded in the House of Commons, to fail, as usual, in the House of Lords. The House of Lords itself was thrown into great perturbation for a time by the proposal of the government to confer a peerage for life on one of the judges, Sir James Parke. Lord Lyndhurst strongly opposed the proposal, on the ground that it was the beginning of an attempt to introduce a system of life peerages, which would destroy the ancient and hereditary character of the House of Lords, allow of its being at any time broken up and remodeled according to the discretion of the minister in power, and reduce it in fact to the level of a continental life senate. Many mem- bers of the House of Commons were likewise afraid of the innovation; it seemed to foreshadow the possible revival of an ancient principle of crown nomination which might be applied to the representatives as well as to the hereditary chamber, seeing that at one time English sovereigns did undoubtedly assume the right of nominating members of the House of Commons. The government, who had really no reactionary or revolutionary designs in their mind, set- tled the matter for the time by creating Sir James Parke Baron Wensleydale in the usual way, and the object they had in view was quietly accomplished many years later, when the appellate jurisdiction of the Lords was remodeled. Sir George Lewis was chancellor of the exchequer. He was as yet not credited with anything like the jjolitical ability which he afterward proved that he possessed. It was the fasbion to regard him as a mere bookman, who had drifted somehow into parliament, and who, in the temporary absence of available talent, had been thrust into the office lately held by Mr. Gladstone. The contrast indeed between the style of his speaking and that of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli was enough to dishearten any political assembly. Mr. Gladstone had brought to his budget speeches and eloquence that brightened the driest details and made the wilderness of figures to blossom like the rose. Mr. Disraeli was able to make a financial state- ment burst into a bouquet of fireworks. Sir George Lewis A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 543 began by being nearly inaudible, and continued to the last to be oppressed by the most ineffective and unattractive manner and delivery. But it began to be gradually found out that the monotonous, halting, feeble manner covered a very remarkable power of expression; that the speaker had great resources of argument, humor, and illustration ; that every sentence contained some fresh idea or some happy expression. It was not very long before an experienced observer in parliament declared that Sir George Lewis delivered the best speeches with the worst manner known to the existing House of Commons. After awhile a reac- tion set in, and the capacity of Lewis ran the risk of being overrated quite as much as it had been undervalued before. In him, men said, was seen the coining prime minister of England. Time, as it will be seen afterward, did not allow Sir George Lewis any chance of making good this prediction. He was undoubtedly a man of rare ability and refined intellect; an example very uncommon in England of the thinker, the scholar, and the statesman in one. His speeches were an intellectual treat to all with whom matter counted for more than manner. One who had watched parliamentary life from without and within for many years said he had never had his deliberate opinion changed by a speech in the House of Commons but twice, and each time it was an argument from Sir George Lewis that accomplished the conversion. For the present, however, Sir George Lewis was regarded only as the sort of statesman whom it was fitting to have in office just then; the statesman of an interval in whom no one was expected to take any particular interest. The attention of the public was a good deal distracted from political affairs by the simultaneous outbreak of new forms of crime and fraud. The trial of Palmer in the Hugely poi- soning case, the trial of Dove in the Leeds poisoning case, these and similar events set the popular mind into wild alarm as to the prevalence of strychnine poisoning every- where. The failure and frauds of the Royal British Bank, the frauds of Robsonand Redpath, gave for the time a sort of idea that the financial principles of the country were crumblingto pieces. The culmination of the extraordinary career of John Sadleir was fresh in public memory. This man, it will be recollected, was the organizer and guiding spirit of the Irish brigade, the gang of adventurers whom 544 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. we have already described as trading on the genuine griev- ances of their country to get power and money for them- selves. John Sadleir overdid the thing. He embezzled, swindled, forged, and finally escaped justice by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. So fraudf ul had his life been that many persons persisted in believing that his supposed suicide was but another fraud. He had got possession — such was the theory — of a dead body which bore some resemblance to his own form and features; he had palmed this off as his own corpse done to death by poison ; and had himself contrived to escape with a large portion of his ill- gotten money. This extraordinary parody and perversion of the plot of Jean Paul Richter's story of " Siebenkas" really found many faithful believers. It is worth mention- ing, not as a theory credible in itself, but as an evidence of the belief that had got abroad as to the character and the stratagems of Sadleir. The brother of Sadleir was ex- pelled from the House of Commons; one of his accom- plices, who had obtained a government appointment and had embezzled money, contrived to make his escape to the United States; and the Irish brigade was broken up. It is only just to say that the best representatives of the Irish Catholics and the Irish national party, in and out of par- liament, had never from the first believed in Sadleir and his band, and had made persistent efforts to expose them. About this same time Mr. Cyrus W. Field, an energetic American merchant, came over to this country to explain to its leading merchants and scientific men a plan he had for constructing an electric telegraph line under the At- lantic. Mr. Field had had this idea strongly in his mind for some years, and he made a strenuous effort to impress the English public with a conviction of its practicability. He was received by the merchants of Liverpool on Novem- ber 12, 1856, in their exchange rooms, and he made a long statement explaining his views, which were listened to with polite curiosity. Mr. Field had, however, a much better reception on the whole than M. de Lesseps, who came to England a few months later to explain his project for constructing a ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez. The proposal was received with coldness, and more than coldness, by engineers, capitalists, and politicians. Engi- neers showed that the canal could not be made, or at least maintained when made; capitalists proved that it never A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 545 could pay; and politicians were ready to make it plain that such a canal, if made, would be a standing menace to English interests. Lord Palmerston, a few day after frankly ad- mitted that the English government were opposed to the project, because it would tend to the more easy separation of Egypt from Turkey, and set afloat speculations as to a ready access to India. M. de Lesseps himself has given an amusing account of the manner in which Lord Palmerston denounced the scheme in an interview with the projector. Luckily, neither Mr. Field nor M. de Lesseps was a person to be lightly discouraged. Great projectors are usually as full of their own ideas as great poets. M. de Lesseps had in the end perhaps more reason to be alarmed at England's sudden appreciation of his scheme than he had in the first instance to complain of the cold disapprobation with which her government encountered it. The political world seemed to have made up its mind for a season of quiet. Suddenly that happened which always does happen in such a condition of things — a storm broke out. To those who remember the events at that time, three words will explain the nature of the disturb- ance. " The lorcha Arrow" will bring back the recollec- tion of one of the most curious political convulsions known in this country during our generation. For years after the actual events connected with the lorcha Arrow, the very name of that ominous vessel used to send a shudder through the House of Commons. The word suggested first an impas- sioned controversy which had left a painful impression on the condition of political parties, and next an effort of futile persistency to open the whole controversy over again, and force it upon the notice of legislators who wished for nothing better than to be allowed to forget it. In the speech from the throne at the opening of parlia- ment, on February 3, 1857, the following passage occurred: "Her majesty commands us to inform you that acts of violence, insults to the British flag, and the infraction of treaty rights, committed by the local Chinese authorities at Canton, and a pertinacious refusal of redress, have rendered it necessary for her majesty's officers in China to have recourse to measures of force to obtain satisfaction." The acts of violence, the insults to the British flag, and the infraction of treaty rights alleged to have been com- mitted by the Chinese authorities at Canton had for their 546 A llISTOnr OF OUR OWN TIMES. single victim the lorcha Arrow. The lorcha Arrow was a small boat built on the European model. The word " lorcha" is taken from the Portuguese settlement at Macao at the mouth of the Canton river. It often occurs in treaties with the Chinese authorities. "Every British schooner, cutter, lorcha, etc.," are words that we constantly find in these documents. On October 8, 1856, a party of Chinese in charge of an officer boarded a boat, called the Arrow, in the Canton river. They took off twelve men on a charge of piracy, leaving two men in charge of the lorcha. The Arrow was declared by its owners to be a British vessel. Our consul at Canton, Mr. Parkes, demanded from Yeh, the Chinese government of Canton, the return of the men, basing his demand upon the ninth article of the supplemental treaty of 1843, entered into subsequently to the treaty of 1842. We need not go deeper into the terms of this treaty than to say that there could be no doubt that it did not give the Chinese authorities any right to seize Chinese offenders or supposed offenders on board an English vessel. It merely gave them a right to require the surrender of the offenders at the hands of the English. The Chinese governor, Yeh, contended, however, that the lorcha was not an English but a Chinese vessel — a Chinese pirate, venturing occasionally for her own purposes to fly the flag of England, which she had no right whatever to hoist. Under the treaties with China, British vessels were to be subject to consular authority only. The treaty pro- vided amply for the registration of vessels entitled to Brit- ish protection, for the regular renewal of the registration, and for the conditions under which the registration was to be granted or renewed. The Arrow had somehow obtained a British registration, but it had expired about ten days before the occurrence in the Canton river, and even the British authorities who had been persuaded to grant the registration were not certain whether, with the knowledge they subsequently obtained, it could legally be renewed. We believe it may be plainly stated at once, as a matter of fact, that the Arrow was not an English vessel, but only a Chinese vessel which had obtained by false pretenses the temporary possession of a British flag. Mr. Consul Parkes, however, was fussy, and he demanded the instant restora- tion of the captured men, and he sent off to our plenipo- tentiary at Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, for authority and assistance in the business. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 54-} Sir John Bowring was a man of considerable ability. At one time he seemed to be a candidate for something like fame. He was the political pupil and the literary executor of Jeremy Bentham, and for some years was editor of the Westminster Review. He had a very large and varied, although not profound or scholarly knowledge of European and Asiatic languages (there was not much scientific study of languages in his early days), he had traveled a great deal, and had sat in parliament for some years. He under- stood political economy, and had a good knowledge of trade and commerce ; and in those days a literary man who knew anything about trade and commerce was thought a person of almost miraculous versatility. Bowring had many friends and admirers, and he set up early for a sort of great man. He was full of self-conceit, and without any very clear idea of political principles on the large scale. Nothing in all his previous habits of life, nothing in the association and friendships by which he had long been surrounded, nothing in his studies or his writings warranted any one in expecting that when placed in a responsible position in China at a moment of great crisis he would have taken on him to act the part which aroused such a controversy. It would seem as if his eager self-conceit would not allow him to resist the temptation to display himself on the field of political action as a great English plenipotentiary, a master-spirit of the order of Clive or Warren Hastings, bid- ding England to be of good cheer, and compelling inferior races to grovel in the dust before her. Bowring knew China as well as it was then likely that an Englishman could know the "huge mummy empire by the hands of custom wrapped in swathing hands." lie had been consul for some years at Canton, and he had held the post of chief superintendent of trade there. He sent to the Chinese authorities and demanded the surrender of all the men taken from the Arrow. Not merely did he demand the surrender of the men, hut lie insisted that an apology should be offered for their arrest, and a formal pledge given by the Chinese authorities that no such act should ever be committed again. If this were not done within forty-eight hours, naval operations we re to be begun against the Chinese. This sort of demand was less like that of a dignified English official, conscious of the justice of his cause and the strength of his country, than like the 548 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. demeanor of Ancient Pistol formulating his terms to the fallen Frenchman on the battle-field; " I'll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him — discuss the same in French unto him." Sir John Bowring called out to the Chinese governor Yeh, that he would fer him, and firk him, and ferret him, and bade the same be discussed in Chinese unto him. Yeh sent back all the men, saying in effect that he did so to avoid the ferring, and firking, and ferreting, and he even undertook to promise that for the future great care should be taken that no British ship should be visited improperly by Chinese officers. But he could not offer an apology for the particular case of the Arrow, for he still maintained, as was indeed the fact, that the Arrow was a Chinese vessel, and that the English had nothing to do with her. In truth, Sir John Bowring had himself written to Consul Parkes to say that the Arrow had no right to hoist the English flag, as her license, however obtained, had expired; but he got over this difficulty by remarking that after all the Chinese did not know that fact, and that they were therefore responsible. Accordingly, Sir John Bowring carried out his threat and immediately made war on China. He did something worse than making war in the ordinary way; he had Canton bombarded by the fleet which Admiral Sir Michael Seymour commanded. From October 23rd to November 13th naval and military operations were kept up continuously. A large number of forts and junks were taken and destroyed. The suburbs of Canton were battered down in 'order that the ships might have a clearer range to fire upon the city. Shot and shell were poured in upon Canton. Sir John Bowring thought the time apjjropriate for reviving certain alleged treaty rights for the admission of representatives of British authority into Canton. Dur- ing the parliamentary debates that followed, Sir John Bowring was accused by Lord Derby and Mr. Cobden of having a sort of monomania about getting into Canton. Curiously enough, in his autobiographical fragments Sir John Bowring tells us when he was a little boy he dreamed that he was sent by the king of England as ambassador to China. In his later days he appears to have been some- what childishly anxious to realize this dream of his infancy. He showed all a child's persistent strength of will and weakness of reason in enforcing his demand, and he appears, at one period of the controversy, to have A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 549 thought that it had no other end than his solemn entry into Canton. Meanwhile Commissioner Yeh retaliated by foolishly offering a reward for the head of every English- man. Throughout the whole business Sir John Bowring contrived to keep himself almost invariably in the wrong, and even where his claim happened to be in itself good he managed to assert it in a manner at once untimely, impru- dent, and indecent. This news from China created a considerable sensation in England, although not many public men had any idea of the manner in which it was destined to affect the House of Commons. On February 24, 1857, Lord Derby brought forward in the House of Lords a motion, comprehensively condemning the whole of the proceedings of the British authorities in China. The debate would have been mem- orable if only for the powerful speech in which the vener- able Lord Lyndhurst supported the motion, and exposed the utter illegality of the course pursued by Sir John Bow- ring. Lord Lyndhurst declared that the proceedings of the British authorities could not be justified upon any principle, either of law or of reason; that the Arrow was simply a Chinese vessel, built in China, and owned and manned by Chinamen; and he laid it down as a "principle which no one will successfully contest," that you may give "any rights and privileges to a foreigner or a foreign vessel as against yourself, but you cannot grant to any such foreigner a single right or privilege as against a foreign state." In other words, if the British authorities chose to give a British license to a Chinese pirate boat which would secure her some immunity against British law, that would be altogether an affair for themselves and their government; but they could not pretend by any British register or other document to give a Chinese boat in Chinese waters a right of exemption from the laws of China. Perhaps the whole question never could have arisen if it were not for the fact on which Lord Lyndhurst commented, that "when we are talking of treaty transactions with eastern nations, we have a kind of loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to them." The question as to the right conferred by the license, such as it was, to hoist the British flag, could not have been disposed of more effectually than it was by the Chinese governor Yeh himself, in a single sen- tence. "A lorcha," as Yeh put it, "owned by a Chinese, 550 A HISTORY OF OTfR OWN TiMtiS. purchased a British flag; did that make her a British vessel?" The lord chancellor was actually driven to answer Lord Lyndhurst by contending that, no matter whether the lorcha was legally or illegally flying the British flag, it was not for the Chinese to assume that she was flying it illegally, and that they had no right to board the vessel on the assumption that she was not what she pretended to be. To show the value of that argument, it is only neces- sary to say that if such were the recognized principle, every pirate in the Canton river would have nothing further to do than to hoist any old scrap of British bunting and sail on, defiant, under the very eyes of the Chinese authorities. The governor of Canton would be compelled to make a formal complaint to Sir John Bowring, and trust mean- while that a spirit of fair play would induce the pirates to wait for a formal investigation by the British authorities. Otherwise neither Chinese nor British could take any steps to capture the offenders. The House of Lords rejected the motion of Lord Derby by a majority of one hundred and forty-six to one hundred and ten. On February 2Gth, Mr. Cobden brought forward a motion in the House of Commons, declaring that " the papers which have been laid upon the table fail to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measures resorted to at Canton in the late affair of the Arrow," and demanding "that a select committee be appointed to inquire into the state of our commercial relations with China." This must have been a peculiarly painful task for Mr. Cobden. He was an old friend of Sir John Bowring, with whom he had always supposed himself to have many or most opinions in common. But he followed his convictions as to public duty in despite of personal friendship. It is a curious evi- dence of the manner in which the moral principles become distorted in a political contest, that during the subsequent elections it was actually made a matter of reproach to Mr. Cobden that while acknowledging his old friendship for Sir John Bowring he was nevertheless found ready to move a vote of censure on his public conduct. The debate was remarkable more for the singular political combination which it developed as it went on than even for its varied ability and eloquence. Men spoke and voted on the same side who had probably never been brought into such com- panionship before and never were afterward. Mr. Cobden. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 55I found himself supported by Mr. Gladstone aud Mr. Disraeli, by Mr. Eoebuck and Sir E. B. Lytton, by Lord John Rus- sell and Mr. Whiteside, by Lord Eobert Cecil, afterward the Marquis of Salisbury, Sir Frederick Thesiger, Mr. Roundel! Palmer, afterward Lord Selborne, Mr. Sydney Herbert, and Mr. Milner Gibson. The discussion lasted four nights, and it was only as it went on that men's eyes began to open to its political importance. Mr.Cobden had probably never dreamed of the amount or the nature of the support his motion was destined to receive. The govern- ment and the opposition alike held meetings out of doors to agree upon a general line of action in the debate and to pre- pare for the result. Lord Palmerston was convinced that he would come all right in the end, but he felt that he had made himself obnoxious to the advanced Liberals by his indifference, or rather hostility, to every project of reform, and he persuaded himself that the opportunity would be eagerly caught at by them to make a combination with the Tories against him. In all this he was deceiving himself as he had done more than once before. There is not the slightest reason to believe that anything but a growing con- viction of the insufficiency of the defense set up for the proceedings in Canton influenced the great majority of those who spoke and voted for Mr. Cobden's motion. The truth is, that there has seldom been so flagrant and so in- excusable an example of high-handed lawlessness in the dealings of a strong with a weak nation. When the debate first began it is quite possible that many public men still believed some explanation or defense was coming forward which would enable them to do what the House of Com- mons is always unwilling not to do — to sustain the action of an English official in a foreign country. As the discus- sion went on it became more and more evident that there was no such defense or explanation. Men found their con- sciences coerced into a condemnation of Sir John BoWring's conduct. It was almost ludicrous when the miserable quibbling and evasions of the British officials came to be const Tasted with the cruelly clear arguments of the Chinese. The reading of these latter documents came like a practical enforcement of Mr. Cobden's description of the Chinese empire as a state "which had its system of logic before the time of the Aristotle, and its code of morals be- fore that of Socrates." The vote of censure was carried 552 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. by two hundred and sixty-three votes against two hundred and forty seven — a majority of sixteen. Mr. Disraeli, in the course of a clever and defiant speech made toward the close of the long debate, had challenged Lord Palmerston to take the opinion of the country on the policy of the government. "I should like," he exclaimed, " to see the programme of the proud leaders of the Liberal party — no reform, new taxes, Canton blazing, Pekin invaded." Lord Palmerston's answer was virtually that of Brutus: "Why, I will see thee at Philippi then." He announced two or three days after that the government had resolved on a dissolution and an appeal to the country. Lord Palmerston knew his Pappenheimers. He under- stood his countrymen. He knew that a popular minister makes himself more popular by appealing to the country on the ground that he has been condemned by the House of Commons for upholding the honor of England and coerc- ing some foreign power somewhere. His address to the electors of Tiverton differed curiously in its plan of appeal from that of Lord John Russell to the electors of the city, or that of Mr. Disraeli to those of Buckinghamshire. Lord John Russell coolly and wisely argued out the con- troversy between him and Lord Palmerston, and gave very satisfactory reasons to prove that there was no sufficient justification for the bombardment of Canton. Mr. Disraeli described Lord Palmerston as the Tory chief of a Radical cabinet, and declared that, " with no domestic policy, he is obliged to divert the attention of the people from the con- sideration of their own affairs to the distractions of foreign politics." "His external system is turbulent and aggres- sive, that his rule at home may be tranquil and unassailed. In later days a charge not altogether unlike that was made against an English prime minister who was not Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston understood the temper of the country too well to trouble himself about arguments of any kind. He came to the point at once. In his ad- dress to the electors of Tiverton he declared that " an inso- lent barbarian, wielding authority at Canton, violated the British flag, broke the engagements of treaties, offered rewards for the heads of British subjects in that part of China, and planned their destruction by murder, assassina- tion, and poison." That of course was all-sufficient. The "insolent barbarian" was in itself almost enough. Gov- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 553 ernor Yeh certainly was not a barbarian. His argument on the subject of international law obtained the endorse- ment of Lord Lyndhurst. His way of arguing the political and commercial case compelled the admiration of Lord Derby. His letters form a curious contrast to the docu- ments contributed to the controversy by the representatives of British authority in China. However, he became for electioneering purposes an insolent barbarian; and the story of a Chinese baker who was said to have tried to poison Sir John Bowring became transfigured into an attempt at the wholesale poisoning of Englishmen in China by the express orders of the Chinese governor. Lord Palmerston further intimated that he and his government had been censured by a combination of factious persons who, if they got into power and were prepared to be con- sistent, must apologize to the Chinese government and offer compensation to the Chinese commissioner. "Will the British nation," he asked, "give their support to men who have thus endeavored to make the humiliation and the degradation of their country the stepping stone to power?" No, to be sure; the British nation would do nothing of the kind. Lord Derby, Lord Lyndhurst, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, Mr. Disraeli, Sir E. B. Lytton, Lord Grey, Lord Robert Cecil — these were the craven Englishmen, devoid of all patriotic or manly feeling, who were trying to make the humiliation and degradation of their country a stepping-stone to power. They were likewise the friends and allies of the insolent barbarian. There were no music halls of the modern type in those days. Had there been such, the denunciations of the insolent barbarian, and of his still baser British friends, would no doubt have been shouted forth, night after night in the metropolis, to the accompaniment of rattling glasses and clattering pint-pots. Even without the alliance of the music halls, however, Lord Palmerston swept the field of his enemies. His victory was complete. The defeat of the men of peace in especial was what Mr. Ruskin once called not a fall, but a catas- trophe. Cobden, Bright, Milner Gibson, W. J. Fox, Layard, and many other leading opponents of the Chinese policy was left without seats. There was something pecu- liarly painful in the circumstances of Mr. Bright's defeat at Manchester. Mr. Bright was suffering from severe illness. In the opinion of his many friends his health was 554 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TTMES. thoroughly broken. He had worked in public life with the generous disregard of his physical resources; and he was compelled to leave the country and seek rest first in Italy and afterward in Algeria. It was not a time when even political enmity could with a good grace have ventured to visit on him the supposed offenses of his party. But the " insolent barbarian" phrase overthrew him too. He sent home from Florence a farewell address to the electors of Manchester, which was full of quiet dignity. " I have esteemed it a high honor," thus ran one passage of the address, "to be one of your representatives, and have given more of mental and physical labor to your service than is just to myself. I feel it scarcely less an honor to suffer in the cause of peace, and on behalf of what I believe to be the true interests of my country, though I could have wished that the blow had come from other hands, at a time when I could have met face to face those who dealt it. " Not long after, Mr. Cobden, one of the least sentimental and the most unaffected of men, speaking in the Man- chester Free Trade hall of the circumstances of Mr. Bright's rejection from Manchester, and the leave-taking address which so many regarded as the last public word of a great career, found himself unable to go on with that part of his speech. An emotion more honorable to the speaker and his subject than the most elaborate triumph of elo- quence checked the flow of the orator's words, and for the moment made him inarticulate. Lord Palmerston came back to power with renewed and redoubled strength. The little war with Persia, which will be mentioned afterward, came to an end in time to give him another claim as a conqueror on the sympathies of the constituencies. His appointments of bishops had given great satisfaction to the evangelical party, and he had become for the time quite a sort of church hero, much to the amusement of Lord Derby, who made great sport of "Palmerston, the true Protestant;" "Palmerston, the only Christian prime minister." In the royal speech at the opening of parliament it was announced that the differences between this country and China still remained unadjusted and that therefore " Her majesty had sent to China a pleni- potentiary fully entrusted to deal with all matters of differ- ence; and that plenipotentiary will be supported by an adequate naval and military force in the event of such A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 555 assistance becoming necessary." It would be almost super- fluous to say that the assistance of the naval and military force thus suggested was found to be necessary. The government, however, had more serious business with which to occupy themselves before they were at liberty to turn to the easy work of coercing the Chinese. The new parliament was engaged for some time in pass- ing the act for the establishment of a court of divorce — that is to say, abolishing the ancient jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts respecting divorce, and setting up a regular court of law, the divorce and matrimonial-causes court, to deal with questions between husband and wife. The passing of the divorce act was strongly contested in both houses of parliament, and indeed was secured at last only by Lord Palmerston's intimating very significantly that he would keep the houses sitting until the measure had been disposed of. Mr. Gladstone, in particular, offered to the bill a most strenuous opposition. He condemned it on strictly conscientious grounds. Yet it has to be said, even as a question of conscience, that there was divorce in England before the passing of the act, the only difference being that the act made divorce somewhat cheap and rather easy. Before it was the luxury of the rich; the act brought it within the reach of almost the poorest of her majesty's subjects. We confess that we do not see how any great moral or religious principle is violated in the one case any more than in the other. The question at issue was, not whether divorce should be allowed by the law, but only whether it should be high-priced or compara- tively inexpensive. It is certainly a public advantage, as it seems to us, that the change in the law has put an end to the debates that used to take place in both houses of parliament. When any importanl bill of divorce was under discussion, the members crowded the bouse, the case was discussed in all its details as any. clause in a bill is now debated; long speeches were made by those who thought the divorce ought to be granted and those who thought the contrary; and the time of parliament was occupied in the edifying discussion as to whether some unhappy woman's shame was or was not clearly established. In one famous case, where a distinguished peer, orator, and statesman sought a. divorce from his wife, every point of the evidence was debated in parliament for night after 556 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. night. Members spoke in the debate who had known nothing of the case until the bill came before them. One member, perhaps, was taken with a vague sympathy with the wife; he set about to show that the evidence against her proved nothing. Another sympathized with husbands in general, and made it his business to emphasize every point that told of guilt in the woman. More than one earnest speaker during those debates expressed an ardent hope that the time might come when parliament should be relieved from the duty of undertaking such unsuitable and scandalous investigations. It must be owned that public decency suffers less by the regulated action of the divorce court than it did under this preposterous and abominable system. We cannot help adding too that the divorce act, judging by the public use made of it, cer- tainly must be held to have justified itself in a merely practical sense. It seems to have been thoroughly appre- ciated by a grateful public. It was not easy after awhile to get judicial power enough to keep the supply of divorces up to the ever-increasing demand. Lord Palmerston, then, appears to be furnished with an entirely new lease of power. The little Persian "War has been brought to a close; the country is not disposed to listen to any complaint as to the manner in which it was undertaken. The settlement of the dispute with China promised to be an easy piece of business. The peace party were everywhere overthrown. No one could well have anticipated that within less than a year from the general election a motion made in the House of Commons by one whom it unseated was to compel the government of Lord Palmerston suddenly to resign office. CHAPTER XXXI. TRANSPORTATION. The year 1857 would have been memorable, if for no other reason, because it saw the abolition of the system of transportation. Transportation as a means of getting rid of part of our criminal population dates from the time of Charles II., when the judges gave power for the removal of offenders to the North American colonies. The fiction A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 557 of the years coming immediately after took account of this innovation, and one of the most celebrated, if not exactly one of the finest, of Defoe's novels deals with the history of a convict thus sent out to Virginia. Afterward the revolt of the American colonies and other cases made it necessary to send convicts farther away from civilization. The punishment of transportation was first regularly intro- duced into our criminal law in 1717 by an act of parliament. In 1787 a cargo of criminals was shipped out to Botany Bay, on the eastern shore of New South Wales, and near Sydney, the present thriving capital of the colony. After- ward the convicts were also sent to Van Diemen's Land or Tasmania; and to Norfolk Island, a lonely island in the Pacific, some eight hundred miles from New South Wales shore. Norfolk Island became the penal settlement, for the convicted among convicts; that is to say, criminals who, after transportation to New South Wales, committed new crimes there, might be sent by the colonial authorities for sterner punishment to Norfolk Island. Nothing can seem on the face of it a more satisfactory way of disposing of criminals than the system of transpor- tation. In the first place, it got rid of them, so far as the people at home were concerned ; and for a long time that was about all that the people at home cared. "Those who had committed crimes not bad enough to be disposed of by the simple and efficient operation of "the gallows were got rid of in a manner almost as prompt and effective by the plan of sending them out in shiploads to America or to Aus- tralia. It looked, too, as if the system ought to be satis- factory in every way and to everybody. The convicts were provided with a new career, a new country, and a chance of reformation. They were usually after awhile released from actual durance in the penal settlement, and allowed conditionally to find employment, and to make themselves, if they could, good citizens" Their labor, it was thought, would be of great service to the colonists. The act of 1717 recited that u in many of his majesty's colonies and plantations in America there was a great want of servants who, by their labor and industry, might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation." At that time statesmen only thought of the utility of the colonies to this nation'. Philanthropy might therefore for awhile beguile itself with 558 a niBTonr op otrn own times, the belief that the transportation system was a benefit to the transported as well as to those among whom they were sent. But the colonists very soon began to complain. The convicts who had spent their period of probation in hulks or prisons generally left those homes of horror with natures so brutalized as to make their intrusion into any community of decent persons an insufferable nuisance. Pent up in penal settlements by themselves, the convicts turned into demons; drafted into an inhabited colony, they were too numerous to be wholly absorbed by the popula- tion, and they carried their contagion along with them. New South Wales began to protest against their presence. Lord John Russell, when secretary for the colonies in 1840, ordered that no more of the criminal refuse should be carted out to that region. Then Tasmania had them all to herself for awhile. Lord Stanley, when he came to be at the head of the colonial office, made an order that the free settlers of Tasmania were not to obtain convict labor at any lower rates than the ordinary market price; and Tasmania had only put up with the presence of the con- victs at all for the sake of getting their labor cheap. Tas- mania, therefore, began to protest against being made the refuse ground for our scoundrelism. Mr. Gladstone, while colonial secretary, suspended the whole system for awhile, but it was renewed soon after. Sir George Grey endeav- ored to make the Cape of Good Hope a receptacle for a number of picked convicts; but in 1849 the inhabitants of Cape Colony absolutely refused to allow a shipload of criminals to be discharged upon their shores, and. it was manifestly impossible to compel them to receive such dis- agreeable guests. By this time public opinion in England was ready to sympathize to the full with any colony which stood out against the degrading system. For a long time there had been growing up a conviction that the transpor- tation system carried intolerable evils with it. Romilly and Bentham had condemned it long before. In 1837 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider and report on the system. The committee in- cluded Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, Charles Buller, Sir W. Molesworth, and Lord Howick, afterward Earl Grey. The evidence they collected settled the question in the minds of all thinking men. The Rev. Walter Clay, son of the famous prison chaplain, Rev. John Clay, says A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 559 in his memoirs of his father, that probably no volume was ever published in England of which the contents were so loathsome as those of the appendix to the committee's report. There is not much exaggeration in this. The reader must be left to imagine for himself some of the hor- rors which would be disclosed by a minute account of what happened in a penal den like Norfolk Island, where a number of utterly brutalized men were left to herd together without anything like beneficent control, without homes, and without the society of women. In Norfolk Island the convicts worked in chains. They were roused at daylight in the morning and turned out to labor in their irons, and huddled back in their dens at night. In some rare cases convicts were sent directly from England to Norfolk Island ; but as a rule the island was kept as a place of punishment for criminals who, already convicted in the mother country, were found guilty of new crimes during their residence in New South Wales. The condition of things in New South Wales was such as civilization has not often seen. In Sydney especially it was extraordinary. When the convicts were sent out to the colony they received each in turn, after a certain period of penal probation, a conditional freedom; in other words, a ticket-of-leave. They were allowed to work for the colo- nists, and to support themselves. Any one who wanted laborers or artisans or servants could apply to the authori- ties and have convicts assigned to him for the purpose. Female convicts as well as male were thus employed. There was, therefore, a large number of convicts, men and women, moving about freely in the active life of Sydney, doing business, working in trades, performing domestic service; to all appearance occupying the place that artisans and laborers and servants occupy among ourselves. But there was a profound difference. The convict laborers and servants were in reality little better than slaves. They were assigned to masters and mistresses, and they had to work. Stern laws were enacted, and were no doubt required, to keep those terrible subordinates in order. The lash was employed to discipline the men; the women were prac- tically unmanageable. The magistrates had the power, on the complaint of any master or mistress, to order a man to be flogged with as many as fifty lashes. Some of the pun- ishment lists remind a reader of the days of slavery in the 560 A mSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. United States. On every page we come on entries of the flogging of men for disobeying the orders of a master or mis- tress ; for threatening a fellow-servant, for refusing to rub down the horses or clean the carriage, or some such breach of discipline. A master who was also a magistrate, was not allowed to adjudicate in his own case; but practically it would seem that masters and mistresses could have their convict servants flogged whenever they thought fit. At that time a great many of the native population, "the blacks" as they were called, used to stream into the town of Sydney, as the Indians now come into Salt Lake City or some other western town of America. In some of the outlying houses they would lounge into the kitchens as beggars used to do in Ireland in old days, looking out for any scraps that might be given to them. It was a common sight then to see half a dozen of the native women, abso- lutely naked, hanging round the doors of houses where they expected anything. Between the native women and the convicts at large an almost indiscriminate intercourse set in. The " black" men would bring their wives into the town and offer them for a drop of rum or a morsel of tobacco. In this extraordinary society there were these three strands of humanity curiously intertwined. There was the civilized Englishman with his money, his culture, his domestic habits; there was the outcast of English civili- zation, the jail-bird fresh from the prison and the hulks; and there was the aboriginal naked savage. In the draw- ing-room sat the wife and daughters of the magistrate; in the stable was the convict, whose crimes had perhaps been successive burglaries crowned with attempted murder; in the kitchen were women servants taken from, the convict depot and known to be prostitutes; and hanging round the door were the savages, men and women. All the evi- dence seems to agree that with hardly any exceptions the women convicts were literally prostitutes. There were some exceptions, which it is well to notice. Witnesses who were questioned on the subject gave it as the result of their experience, that women convicted of any offense what- ever in this country and sent out to New South Wales invariably took to profligacy, unless they were Irishwomen. That is to say, it did not follow that an Irish convict woman must necessarily be a profligate woman ; it did follow as a matter of fact in the case of other women. Some of the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 561 convicts married women of bad character and lived on their immoral earnings, and made no secret of the fact. Many of these husbands boasted that they made their wives keep them in what they considered luxuries by the wages of their sin. Tea and sugar were great luxuries to them at that time, and it was a common saying among men of this class that their wives must take care to have the tea and sugar bag filled every day. The convicts soon inoculated the natives with the vilest vices and the foulest diseases of civilization. Many an English lady found that her women servants went off in the night somewhere and came back in the morning, and they knew perfectly well that the women had been off on some wild freak of profligacy ; but it was of no use to complain. In the midst of all this it would appear that a few of the convicts did behave well ; that they kept to work with iron industry, and rose in the world, and were respected. In some cases the wives of convicts went out to New South Wales and started farms or shops, and had their husbands assigned to them as ser- vants, and got on tolerably well. But in general the con- victs led a life of utter profligacy, and they corrupted all that came within their reach. One convict said to a judge: "Let a man be what he will, when he comes out here he is soon as bad as the rest; a man's heart is taken from him, and there is given to him the heart of a beast." Perpetual profligacy, incessant flogging — this was the combination of the convict's life. Many of the convicts liked the life on the whole, and wrote to friends at home urging them to commit some offense, get transported, and come out to New South Wales. An idle ruffian had often a fine time of it there. This of course does not apply to Norfolk Island. No wretch could he so degraded or so unhappy anywhere else as to find relief in that hideous lair of suffer- ing and abomination. Such was the condition of things described to the com- mittee of the House of Commons in ls:>7. It is right and even necessary to say that we have passed over almost without allusion some of the most hideous of the revela- tions. We have kept ourselves to abominations which at all 'events hear to he spoken of. From the publication of the evidence taken before the committee any one might have seen that the transportation system was doomed. It was clear that if any colony made up its mind to declare 562 A HT8T0RT OF OUR- OWN TIMES. that it would not endure the thing any longer, no English minister could venture to say that he would force it on the colonists. The doomed and odious system, however, con- tinued for a long time to be put in operation as far as pos- sible. It was most tempting both as to theory and as to practice. It was an excellent thing for the people at home to get rid of so much of their ruffianism ; and it was easy to persuade ourselves that the system gave the con- victs a chance of reform, and ought to be acceptable to the colonists. The colonists, however, made up their minds at least in most places, and would not have any more of our convicts. Only in Western Australia were the people willing to receive them on any conditions, and Western Australia had but scanty natural resources and could in any case harbor very few of our outcasts. The discovery of gold in Aus- tralia settled the question of those colonies being troubled any more with our transportation system ; for the greatest enthusiast for transportation would hardly propose to send out gangs of criminals to a region glowing with the temptations of gold. There were some thoughts of estab- lishing a convict settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria on the north side of the great Australian Island. Some such scheme was talked of at various inter- vals. It always, however, broke down on a little examina- tion. One difficulty alone was enough to dispose of it effectually. It was impossible, after the revelations of the committee of the House of Commons, to have a convict settlement of men alone; and if it was proposed to found a colony, where were the women to come from ? Were respect- able English and Irish girls to be enticed to goout and become the wives of convicts? What statesman would make such a proposal? The wildest projects were suggested. Let the con- victs marry the savage women, one ingenious person sug- gested. Unfortunately in the places thought most suita- ble for a settlement there happened to be no savage women. Let the convict men be married to convict women, said another philosopher. But even if any colonial minister could have been found hardy enough to approach parlia- ment with a scheme for the foundation of a colony on the basis of common crime, it bad to be said that there were not nearly enough of convict women to supply brides for even a tolerable proportion of the convict men. Another A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 563 suggestion it is only necessary to mention for the purpose of showing to what lengths the votaries of an idea will go in their effort to make it fit in with the actual conditions of things. There were persons who thought it would not be a bad plan to get rid of two nuisances at once, our con- victs and a portion of what is euphuistically termed our "social evil," by founding a penal settlement on some lonely shore, and sending out cargoes of the abandoned women of our large towns to be the wives of the present and the mothers of the future colonists. When it came to proposi- tions of this kind it was clear that there was an end to any serious discussion as to the possibility of founding a con- vict settlement. As late as 185G committees of both houses of parliament declared themselves greatly in favor of the transportation system — that is, of some transportation sys- tem, of an ideal transportation system; but also recorded their conviction that it would be impossible to carry on the known system any longer. The question then arose what was England to do with the criminals whom up to that time she had been able to shovel out of her way. All the receptacles were closed but Western Australia, and that counted for almost nothing. Some prisoners were then, and since, sent out for a part of their term to Gibraltar and Bermuda; but they were always brought back to this country to be discharged, so that they may be considered as forming a part of the ordi- nary class of criminals kept in detention here. The trans- portation system was found to carry evils in its train which did not directly belong to its own organization. It had been for a long time the practice of England and Scotland to send out to a colony only those who were transported for ten years and upward, and to retain those condemned for shorter periods in the hulks and other convict prisons. In these hideous hulks the convicts were huddled together very much as in Norfolk Island, with scarcely any superin- tendence or discipline, and the result was that they became what were called with hardly any exaggeration "floating hells." It was quite clear that the whole system of our dealings with our convicts must be revised and reorganized. In 1853 the government took a step which has been well described as an avowal that we must take the complete charge of our criminal upon ourselves. A bill was brought in by the ministry to substitute penal servitude for trans- 564 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. o portation, unless in cases where the sentence was for four- teen years and upward. The bill reduced the scale of punishment ; that is to say, made a shorter period of penal servitude supply the place of a longer term of transporta- tion. Lord Palmerston was home secretary at this time. It was during that curious episode in his career described in a former volume when he adopted, if such an expression may be used, the business of home secretary in order, as he put it, to learn how to deal with the concerns of the coun- try internally, and to be brought in contact with his fellow countrymen. He threw all his characteristic energy into the work of carrying through the measure for the estab- lishment of a new system of secondary punishments. It was during the passing of the bill through the House of Lords that Lord Grey suggested the introduction of a modi- fication of the ticket-of-leave system which was in practice in the colonies. The principle of the ticket-of-leave was that the convict should not be kept in custody during the whole period of his sentence, but that he should be allowed to pass through a period of conditional liberty before he obtained his full and unrestricted freedom. Lord Grey also urged that the sentences to penal servitude should correspond in length with sentences for transportation. The government would not accept this latter suggestion, but they adopted the principle of the ticket-of-leave. The bill was introduced into the House of Lords by Lord Cran worth, the lord chancellor. When it came down to the House of Commons there was some objection made to the ticket-of-leave clauses, but the government carried them through. The effect of the measure Was to substi- tute penal servitude for transportation, in all cases except those where the sentence of transportation was for fourteen years and upward. Now. there can be no doubt that the principle of the ticket-of-leave is excellent. But it proved on its first trial in this country the most utter delusion. It got no fair chance at all. It was understood by the whole English public that the object of the ticket-of-leave was to enable the authorities to give a conditional discharge from custody to a man who had in some way proved his fitness for such a relaxation of punishment, and that the eyes of the police would be on him even during the period of his conditional release. This was in fact the construc- tion put on the act in Ireland, where accordingly the ticket- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 565 of -leave system was worked with the most complete success. Under the management of Sir Walter Crof ton, chairman of the board of prison directors, the principle was applied exactly as any one might have supposed it would be applied everywhere, and as indeed the very conditions endorsed on the ticket-of -leave distinctly suggested. The convicts in Ireland were kept away from the general community in a little penal settlement near Dublin; they were put at first to hard, monotonous, and weary labor; they were then en- couraged to believe that with energy and good conduct they could gradually obtain relaxation of punishment, and even some small rewards; they were subjected to a process of really reforming discipline; they got their conditional freedom as soon as they had satisfactorily proved that they deserved and were fit for it; but even then they had to report themselves periodically to the police, and they knew that if they were seen to be relapsing into old habits and old companionships they were certain to be sent back to the penal settlement to begin the hard work over again. The result was substantial and lasting reform. It was easy for the men who were let out conditionally to obtain employment. A man who had Sir Walter Crof ton's ticket-of-leave was known by that very fact to have given earnest of good purpose and steady character. The system in Ireland was therefore all that its authors could have wished it to be. But for some inscrutable reason the act was interpreted in this country as simply giving every con- vict a right, after a certain period of detention, to claim a ticket-of-leave provided he had not grossly violated any of the regulations of the prison, or misconducted himself in some outrageous manner. In' 1856 Sir George Grev, the home secretary, told the House of Commons that there never was a more fallacious idea than the supposition that a ticket-of-leave was a certificate of good character, and that a man only obtained such a ticket if he could prove that he had reformed. A ticket-of-leave, he went on to explain, was indeed withheld in the case of very bad e<»n- duct; but in any ordinary case the convicts, "unless they have transgressed the prison rules, and acted in such a man- ner as to incur an unfavorable report from the prison authorities, are, after a stated period of imprisonment, entitled as a matter of course to a ticket-of-leave. It would be superfluous to examine the working of such 566 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. a system as that which Sir George Grey described. A number of scoundrels whom the judges had sentenced to be kept in durance for so many years were without any conceivable reason turned loose upon society long before the expiration of their sentence. They were in England literally turned loose upon society, for it was held by the authorities here that it might possibly interfere with the chance of a jail-bird's getting employment, if he were seen to be watched by the police. The police therefore were considerately ordered to refrain from looking after them. "I knew you once," says the hero of a poem by Mr. Browning, "but in paradise, should we meet, I will pass nor turn my face." The police were ordered to act thus discreetly if they saw Bill Sykes asking for employment in some wealthy and quiet household. They certainly knew him once, but now they were to pass nor turn their face. Nothing, surely, that we know of the internal arrangement of Timbuctoo, to adopt the words of Sydney Smith, warrants us in supposing that such a system would have been endured there for a year. Fifty per cent, of the , ruffians released on ticket-of-leave were afterward brought up for new crimes, and convicted over again. Of those who although not actually convicted were believed to have relapsed into their old habits, from sixty to seventy per cent, relapsed within the first year of their liberation. Baron Bramwell stated from the bench that he had had instances of criminals coming before him who had three sentences overlapping each other. The convict was set free on ticket-of-leave, convicted of some new crime, and re-committed to prison; released again on ticket-of-leave, and convicted once again, before the period of his original sentence had expired. An alarm sprang up in England; and like all alarms it was supported both by exaggeration and misconception. The system pursued with the con- victs was bad enough ; but the popular impression ascribed to the ticket-of-leave men every crime committed by any one who had been previously convicted and imprisoned. A man who had worked out the whole of his sentence, and who therefore had to be discharged, committed some crime immediately after. Excited public opinion described it as a crime committed by a ticket-of leave man. Two committees sat, as has already been said, in 1856. The result of the public alarm and the parliamentary recon- A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 567 sideration of the whole subject, was the bill brought in by Sir George Grey in 185?'. This measure extended the provisions of the act of 1853 by substituting in all cases a sentence of penal servitude for one of transportation. It extended the limits of the penal servitude sentences by making them correspond with the terms of transportation to which men had previously been sentenced. It gave power also to pass sentences of penal servitude for shorter periods than was allowed by former legislation, allowing penal servitude for as short a period as three years. It attached to all sentences of penal servitude the liability to be removed from this country to places beyond seas fitted for their reception; and it restricted the range of the remission of sentences. The act, it will be seen, abolished the old-fashioned transportation system altogether, but it left the power to the authorities to have penal servitude carried out in any of the colonies where it might be thought expedient. The government had still some idea of utiliz- ing western Australia for some of our offenders. But nothing came of this plan, or of the clause in the new act which was passed to favor it; and as a matter of fact trans- portation was abolished. How the amended legislation worked in other respects we shall have an opportunity of examining hereafter. Transportation was not the only familiar institution which came to an end in this year. The Gretna Green marriages became illegal in 1857, their doom having been fixed for that time by an act passed in the previous session. Thenceforward such marriages were unlawful, unless one of the parties had lived at least twenty-one days previously in Scotland. The hurried (light to the border, the pnst- chaise and the panting steeds, the excited lovers, the pur- suing father, passed away into tradition. Lydia Languish had to reconcile herself to the license and the blessing, and even the_ writers of fiction might have given up without a sigh an incident which had grown wearisome in romance long before it ceased to be interesting in reality. 568 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CHAPTER XXXII. THE SEPOY. On the 23rd of June, 1857, the hundredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey was celebrated in London. One object of the celebration was to obtain the means of raising a monument to Clive in his native county. At such a meeting it was but natural that a good deal should be said about the existing condition of India, and the prospects of that great empire which the genius and the daring of Clive had gone so far to secure for the English crown. It does not appear, however, as if any alarm was expressed with regard to the state of things in Bengal, or as if any of the noblemen and gentlemen present believed that at that very moment India was passing through a crisis more serious than Clive himself had had to encounter. Indeed, a month or so before a Bombay journal had congratulated itself on the fact that India was quiet "throughout." Yet at the hour when the Plassey celebration was going on the great Indian mutiny was already six weeks old, had already assumed full and distinctive proportions, was already known in India to be a convulsion destined to shake to its foundations the whole fabric of British rule in Hindostan. A few evenings after the celebration there was some cursory and casual discussion in parliament about the doubtful news that had begun to arrive from India; but as yet no Englishman at home took serious thought of the matter. The news came at last with a rush. Never in our time, never probably at any time, came such news upon England as the first full story of the out- break in India. It came with terrible, not unnatural, exaggeration. England was horror-stricken by the stories of wholesale massacres of English women and children; of the most abominable tortures, the most degrading outrages inflicted upon English matrons and maidens. The news- papers ran over with the most horrifying and the most cir- cumstantial accounts of how English ladies of the highest refinement were dragged naked through the streets of Delhi, and were paraded in their nakedness before the eyes of the aged king of Delhi, in order that his hatred might be feasted with the sight of the shame and agony of the captives. Descriptions were given, to which it is unneces- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 569 sary to make any special allusions now, of the vile mutila- tions and tortures inflicted on Englishwomen to glut the vengeance of the tyrant. The pen of another Procopius could alone have done full justice to the narratives which were poured in day after day upon the shuddering ears of Englishmen, until all thought even of the safety of the In- dian empire was swallowed up in a wild longing for revenge on the whole seed, breed, and race of the mutinous people who had tortured and outraged our countrywomen. It was not till the danger was all over, and British arms had reconquered Northern India, that England learned the truth with regard to these alleged outrages and tortures. Let us dispose of this most painful part of the terrible story at the very beginning, and once for all. During the In- dian mutiny the blood of innocent women and children was cruelly and lavishly spilled ; on one memorable occasion with a bloodthirstiness that might have belonged to the most savage times of mediaeval warfare. But there were no outrages, in the common acceptation, upon women. No Englishwomen were stripped or dishonored or purposely mutilated. As to this fact all historians of the mutiny are agreed. But if the first stories of the outbreak that reached England dealt in exaggerations of this kind, they do not seem to have exaggerated, they do not seem to have adequately appreciated, the nature of the crisis with which England was suddenly called upon to deal. The fact was, that throughout the greater part of the north and north-west of the great Indian peninsula there was a rebellion of the native races against English power. It was not alone the Sepoys who rose in revolt. It was not by any means a merely military mutiny. It was a com- bination, whether the growth of deliberate design and long preparation, or the sudden birth of chance and unex- pected opportunity — a combination of military grievance, national hatred and religious fanaticism, against the English occupiers of India. The native princes and the native soldiers were in it. The Mohammedan and the Hindoo forgot their own religious antipathies to join against the Christian. Hatred and panic were the stimulants of that great rebellious movement. The quarrel about the greased cartridges was but the chance spark flung in among all the combustible material. If that spark had not lighted 570 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. it, some other would have done the work. In fact, there are thoughtful and well-informed historians who believe that the incident of the greased cartridges was a fortunate one for our people ; that coming as it did it precipitated unexpectedly a great convulsion which, occurring later, and as the result of more gradual operations, might have been far more dangerous to the perpetuity of our rule. Let us first see what were the actual facts of the out- break. When the improved (Enfield) rifle was introduced into the Indian army, the idea got abroad that the cart- ridges were made up in paper greased with a mixture of cow's fat and hog's lard. It appears that the paper was actually greased, but not with any such material as that which religious alarm suggested to the native troops. Now a mixture of cow's fat and hog's lard would have been, above all other things, unsuitable' for use in cartridges to be tributed among our Sepoys; for the Hindoo regards the cow with religious veneration, and the Mohammedan looks upon the hog with utter loathing. In the mind of the former something sacred to him was profaned; in that of the latter something unclean and abominable was forced upon his daily use. It was in 1856 that the new rifles were sent out from England, and the murmur against their use began at once. Various efforts were made to allay the panic among the native troops. The use of the cartridges complained of was discontinued by orders issued in January, 1857. The governor-general sent out a proclamation in the following May, assuring the army of Bengal that the tales told to them of offense to their religion or injury to their caste being meditated by the government of India, were all malicious inventions and falsehoods. Still the idea was strong among the troops that some design against their religion was meditated. A mutinous spirit began to spread itself abroad. In March some of the native regiments had to be disbanded. In April some executions of Sepoys took place for gross and open mutiny. In the same month several of the Bengal native cavalry in Meerut refused to use the cartridges served out to them, although they had been authoritatively assured that the paper in which the cartridges were wrapped had never been touched by any offensive material. On May 9th these men were sent to the jail. They had been tried by court-martial, and were sentenced, eighty of them, to imprisonment and hard labor A B1ST0R T OP OUR OWN TIMES. 5 ? 1 for ten years, the remaining five to a similar punishment for six years. They had chains put on them in the pres- ence of their comrades, who no doubt regarded them as martyrs to their religious faith, and they were thus pub- licly marched off to the common jail. The guard placed over the jail actually consisted of Sepoys. The following day, Sunday, May 10th, was memorable. The native troops in Meerut broke into open mutiny. The swmnia dies, the ineluctabile tempus had come. They fired upon their officers, killed a colonel and others, broke into the jail, released their comrades, and massacred several of the European inhabitants. The European troops rallied and drove them from their cantonments or bar- racks. Then came the momentous event, the turning point of the mutiny; the act that marked out its character, and made it what it afterward became. Meerut is an im- portant military station between the Ganges and the Jumna, thirty-eight miles north-east from Delhi. In the vast palace of Delhi, almost a city in itself, a reeking Alsatia of lawless and privileged vice and crime, lived the aged king of Delhi, as he was called ; the disestablished, but not wholy disendowed sovereign, the descendant of the great Timour, the last representative of the Grand Mogul. The mutineers fled along the road to Delhi; and some evil fate directed that they were not to be pursued or stopped on their way. Unchecked, unpursued, they burst into Delhi, and swarmed into the precincts of the palace of the king. They claimed his protection; they insisted upon his accepting their cause and themselves. They proclaimed him emperor of India, and planted the standard of rebellion against English rule on the battlements of his palace. They hud found m one moment a leader, a flag, and a cause, and the mutiny was transfigured into a revolutionary war. The Sepoy troops, in the city and the cantonments on the Delhi ridge, two miles off, and overlooking the city, at once began to cast in their lot with the mutineers. The poor old puppet whom they set up as their emperor was some eighty years of age; a feeble creature, believed to have a mild taste for poetry and weak debauchery. He had long been merely a pensioner of the East India Com- pany. During the early intrigues and struggles between the English and Erench in India the company had taken the sovereigns of Delhi under their protection, nominally 572 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. • to save them from the aggressiveness of the rival power; and, as might be expected, the Delhi monarchs soon be- came mere pensionaries of the British authorities. It had even been determined that after the old king's death a dif- ferent arrangement should be made ; that the title of king would not be allowed any longer, and that the privileges of the palace, the occupants of which were thus far allowed to be a law to themselves should be restricted or abolished. A British commissioner directed affairs in the city, and British troops were quartered on the Delhi ridge outside. Still the king was living, and was called a king. He was the representative of the great dynasty whose name and effigies had been borne by all the coin of India until within some twenty years before. He stood for legitimacy and divine right; and he supplied all the various factions and sects of which the mutiny was composed, or to be com- posed, with a visible and an acceptable head. If the muti- neers flying from Meernt had been promptly pursued and dispersed, or captured, before they reached Delhi, the tale we have to tell might have been much shorter and very different. But when they reached, unchecked, the Jumna glittering in the morning light, when they swarmed across the bridge of boats that spanned it, and when at length they clamored under the windows of the palace that they had come to restore the rule of the Delhi dynasty, they had all unconsciously seized one of the great critical mo- ments of history, and converted a military mutiny into a national and religious war. This is the manner in which the Indian Bebellion began and assumed its distinct character. But this dry state- ment of facts would go a very short way toward explaining how the mutiny of a few regiments came to assume the aspect of a rebellion. Mutinies were not novelties in India. There had been some very serious outbreaks before the time of the greased cartridges. The European officers of the company had themselves mutinied in Bengal nearly a century before; and that time the Sepoys stood firm by the company whose salt they had eaten. There was a more general and serious mutiny at Vellore, near Madras, in 1806; and the sons of the famous Tippoo Sahib took part with it, and endeavored to make it the means of regaining the forfeited power of their house. It had to be dealt with as if it were a war, and Vellore had to be A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 573 recaptured. In 1849 a Bengal regiment seized a fortress near Lahore. Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, once protested that thirty regiments of the Bengal army were ripe for revolt. Napier, however seems to have thought only of military mutiny, and not of religious and political rebellion. At Meerut itself, the very cradle of the outbreak, a pamphlet was published in 1851 by Colonel Hodgson, to argue that the admission of the priestly cast too freely into the Bengal army would be the means of foment- ing sedition among the native troops. But there was a combination of circumstances at work to bring about such a revolt as Napier never dreamed of; a revolt as different from the outbreak he contemplated as the French Kevolu- tion differed from the mutiny of the Nore. These causes affected variously but at once the army, the princes, and the populations of India. "The causes and motives for sedition," says Bacon — and the words have been cited with much appropriateness and effect by Sir J. W. Kaye in his " History of the Sepoy War" — "are innovations in religion, taxes, alteration of laws and customs, breaking of privileges, general oppres- sion, advancement of unworthy persons, strangers, deaths, disbanded soldiers, factions grown desperate, and whatso- ever in offending people joineth and knitteth them in a common cause." Not all these various impulses to rebel- lion were stirring perhaps in India, but assuredly many, possibly the majority, of them were at work. As is usual in such cases too, it happened that many changes made, nay, many privileges disinterestedly conferred by the ruling power in India for the benefit and pleasure of the native levies, turned into other causes and stimulants of sedition and rebellion. Let us speak first of the army. The Bengal army was very different in its constitution and conditions from that of Bombay or Madras, the other great divisions of Indian government at that time. In the Ben- gal army, the Hindoo Sepoys were far more numerous than the Mohammedans, and were chiefly Brahmins of high caste; while in .Madras and Bombay the army was made up, as the Bengal regiments are now, of men of all sects and races without discrimination. Until the very year be- fore the mutiny the Bengal soldier was only enlisted for service in India, and was exempted from any liability to be sent across the seas; across the black water which the Sepoy 574 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. dreaded and hated to have to cross. No such exemption was allowed to the soldiers of Bombay or Madras; and in July, 1856, an order was issued by the military authorities to the effect that future enlistments in Bengal should be for service any where without limitation. Thus the Bengal Sepoy had not only been put in the position of a privileged and pampered favorite, but he had been subjected to the indignity and disappointment of seeing his privileges taken away from him. He was indeed an excellent soldier, and was naturally made a favorite by many of his com- manders. But he was very proud, and was rigidly tena-' cious of what he considered his rights. He lived apart with his numerous and almost limitless family, represent- ing all grades of relationship; he cooked his food apart and ate it apart ; he acknowledged one set of governing prin- ciples while he was on parade, and had a totally different code of customs and laws and morals to regulate his private life. The tie of blood relationship was very strong with the Sepoy. The elder Sepoy always took good care to keep his regiment well supplied with recruits from among his own family. As the Highland sergeant in the British army endeavors to have as many as possible of his kith and clan in the regiment with himself; as the Irishman in the New York police force is anxious to get as many of his friends and fellow countrymen as may be into the same ranks, so the Sepoy did his best to surround himself with men of his blood and of his ways. There was therefore the spirit of a clan and of a sect pervading the Sepoy regiments; a strong current flowing beneath the stream of superficial military discipline and esprit de corps. The Sepoy had many privileges denied to his fellow-religionists who were not in the military ranks. Let it be added that he was very often deeply in debt; that his pay was frequently mortgaged to usurers hung on him as the - crimps do upon a sailor in one of our seaport towns ; and that therefore he had something of Catiline's reason for desiring a gen- eral upset and clearing off of old responsibilities. But we must above all other things take into account, when considering the position of the Hindoo Sepoy, the influence of the tremendous institution of caste. An Englishman or European of any country will have to call his imaginative faculties somewhat vigorously to his aid in order to get even an idea of the power of this monstrous. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 575 superstition. The man who by the merest accident, by the slightest contact with anything that defiled, had lost caste, was excommunicated from among the living, and was held to be forevermore accused of God. His dearest friend, his nearest relation, shrank back from him in alarm and abhorrence. When Helen Macgregor, in Scott's romance, would express her sense of the degradation that had been put upon her, she declares that her mother's bones would shrink away from her in the grave, if her corpse were to be laid beside them. The Sepoy fully be- lieved that his mother's bones ought to shrink away from contact with the polluted body of the son who had lost caste Now, it had become from various causes a strong sus- picion in the mind of the Sepoy that there was a deliberate purpose in the minds of the English rulers of the country to defile the Hindoos, and to bring them all to the dead level of one caste or no caste. The suspicion in part arose out of the fact that this institution of caste, penetrating as it did so subtly and so universally into the business of life, could not but come into frequent collision with any system of European military and civil discipline, however carefully and considerately managed. No doubt there was in many instances a lack of consideration shown for the Hindoo's peculiar and very preplexing tenets. The Englishman is not usually a very imaginative personage; nor is he rich in those sympathetic instincts which might enable a ruler to enter into and make allowance for the influence of sentiments and usages widely different from his own. To many a man fresh from the ways of England, the Hindoo doctrines and practices appeared so ineffably absurd that he could not believe any human beings were serious in their devotion to them, and he took no pains to conceal his opinion as to the absurdity of the creed, and the hypocrisy of those who professed it. Some of the elder officers and civilians were imbued very strongly with a conviction that the work of open, and what we may call aggressive, proselytism, was part of the duty of a Chris- tian; and in the best faith and with the purest intentions they thus strengthened the growing suspicion that the mind of the authorities was set on the defilement of the Hindoos. Nor was it, among the Hindoos alone that the alarm began to be spread abroad. It was the conviction of the Mohammedans that their faith and their rites were to, 576 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. be tampered with as well. It was whispered among them everywhere that the peculiar baptismal custom of the Mohammedans was to be suppressed by law, and that the Mohammedan women were to be compelled to go unveiled in public. The slightest alterations in any system gave fresh confirmation to the suspicions that were afloat among the Hindoos and Mussulmans. When a change was made in the arrangements of the prisons, and the native prisoners were no longer allowed to cook for themselves, a murmur went abroad that this was the first overt act in the con- spiracy to destroy the caste, and with it the bodies and souls of the Hindoos. Another change must be noticed too. At one time it was intended that the native troops should be commanded for the most part by native officers. The men would, therefore, have had something like sufficient security that their religious scruples were regarded and respected. But by degrees the clever, pushing, and cap- able Briton began to monopolize the officers' posts every- where. The natives were shouldered out of the high posi- tions, until at length it became practically an army of native rank and file commanded by Englishmen. If we remember that a Hindoo sergeant of lower caste would, when off parade, often abase himself with his forehead in the dust before a Sepoy private who belonged to the Brahmin order, we shall have some idea of the perpetual collision between military discipline and religious principle which affected the Hindoo members of an army almost exclu- sively commanded by Europeans and Christians. There was, however, yet another influence, and one of tremendous importance in determining the set of that otherwise vague current of feeling which threatened to dis- turb the tranquil permanence of English rule in India. We have spoken of the army and of its religious scruples ; we must now speak of the territorial and political influences which affected the princes and the populations of India. There had been just before the outbreak of the mutiny a wholesale removal of the landmarks, a striking application of a bold and thorough policy of annexation; a gigantic system of reorganization applied to the territorial arrange- ments of the north and north-west of the great Indian peninsula. A master-spirit had been at work at the recon- struction of India; and if you cannot make revolutions with rosewater, neither can you make them without reaction, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 577 Lord Dalhousie had not long left India on the appoint- ment of Lord Canning to the governor-generalship when the mutiny broke out. Lord Dalhousie was a man of com- manding energy, of indomitable courage, with the intellect of a ruler of men, and the spirit of a conqueror. The statesmen of India perforin their parts upon a vast stage, and yet they are to the world in general somewhat like the actors in a provincial theatre. They do not get the fame of their work and their merits. Men have arisen in India whose deeds, if done in Europe, would have ranked them at least with the Richelieus and Bismarcks of history, if not actually with the Caesars and Charlemagnes; and who are ytt condemned to what may almost be called a merely local renown ; a record on the roll of great officials. Lord Dalhousie was undoubtedly a great man. He had had some parliamentary experience in England and in both houses; and he had been vice-president and subsequently president of the board of trade under Sir Robert Peel. He had taken great interest in the framing of regulations for the railway legislation of the mania season of 1844 and 1845. Toward the close of 1847 Lord Hardinge was recalled from India, and Lord Dalhousie was sent out in his place. Never was there in any country an administration of more successful activity than that of Lord Dalhousie. He introduced cheap postage into India; he made railways; he set up lines of electric telegraph. Within fifteen months, according to one of his biographers, the telegraph was in operation from Calcutta to Agra, thence to Attock on the Indus, and again from Agra to Bombay and Madras. He devoted much of his attention to irrigation, to the making of great roads, to the work of the Ganges Canal. He was the founder of a comprehensive system of native educa- tion; especially female education, a matter so difficult and delicate in a country like India. He put down infanticide and the odious and extraordinary Thug system, and he car- ried out with vigor Lord William Bentwick's act for the suppression of the Suttee or burning of widows on the funeral pile of their husbands. These are only some of the evidences of his unresting, all-conquering energy. They are but illustrative; they are far indeed from being exhaustive even as a catalogue. But Lord Dalhousie was not wholly engaged in such works as these. Indeed, his noble and glorious triumphs over material, intellectual, and 5?8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. moral obstacles run some risk of being forgotten or over- looked by the casual reader of history in the storm of that fierce controversy which his other enterprises called forth. During his few years of office he annexed the Punjaub, he incorporated part of the Burmese territory in our dominions ; he annexed Nagpore, Sattara, Jhansi, Berar, and Oudh. We are not called upon here to consider in detail the circumstances of each of these annexations, or to ask the reader to pass judgment on the motives and the policy of Lord Dalhousie. It is fair to say that he was not by any means the mere imperial proconsul he is often represented to be, thirsty with the ardor of a Roman conqueror to en- large the territory of his own state at any risk or any sacrifice of principle. There was reason enough to make out a plausible case for even the most questionable of his annexations ; and in one or two instances he seems only to have resolved on annexation reluctantly and because things had come to that pass that he saw no other safe alternative left to him. But his own general policy is properly expressed in his own words; "We are lords- paramount of India, and our policy is to acquire as direct a dominion over the territories in possession of the native princes as we already hold over the other half of India." Such a principle as this could only con- duct in the vast majority of cases to a course of direct- annexation, let the ruler begin by disavowing it as he will. In the Punjaub the annexation was provoked in the beginning, as so many such retributions have been in India, by the murder of some of our officers, sanctioned, if not actually ordered, by a native prince. Lord Dalhousie marched a force into the Punjaub. This land, " the land of the five waters," lies at the gateway of Hindostan and was peopled by Mussulmans, Hindoos, and Sikhs, the latter a new sect of reformed Hindoos. We found arrayed against us not only the Sikhs, but our old enemies the Afghans. Lord Gough was in command of our forces. He fought rashly and disastrously the famous battle of Chillian wallah. The plain truth may as well be spoken out without periphrasis; he was defeated. But before the outcry raised in India and in England over this calamity had begun to subside he had wholly recovered our position and prestige by the complete clef eat which he inflicted upon the enemy at Goojrat. Never was a victory more com- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 579 plete in itself or more promptly and effectively followed up. The Sikhs were crushed; the Afghans were driven in wild rout back across their savage passes; and Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub. He presented as one token of his conquest the famous diamond, the Koh-i-Noor surrendered in evidence of submission by the Maharajah of Lohore, to the crown of England. Lord Dalhousie annexed Oudh on the ground that the East India Company had bound themselves to defend the sovereigns of Oudh against foreign and domestic enemies on condition that the state should be governed in such a manner as to render the lives and property of its popula- tion safe; and that while the company performed their part of the contract, the king of Ouhd so governed his dominions as to make his rule a curse to his own people and to all neighboring territories. Other excuses or justi- fications there were of course in the case of each other annexation; and we shall yet hear some more of what came of the annexation of Sattara and Jhansi. If, however, each of these acts of policy were not only justifiable but actually inevitable, none the less must a succession of such acts produce a profound emotion among the races in whose midst they were accomplished. Lord Dalhousie wanted one quality of a truly great man : he lacked imagi- nation. He had not that dramatic instinct, that fine sym- pathetic insight, by which a statesman is enabled to under- stand the feelings of races and men differing wholly in edu- cation, habits, and principles from himself. He appeared to be under the impression that when once a ruler had established among whatever foreign people a system of government or of society better than that which he found existing there, he might count on obtaining their instant appreciation of his work and their gratefulness for it. The sovereign of Oudh was undoubtedly a very had ruler. His governing system, if it ought to he dignified by such a name, was a combination of anarchy and robbery. The chiefs of Oudh were reivers and bandits; the king was the head reiver and bandit. Hut human nature, even in the west, is not so constituted as to render a population always and at once grateful to any powerful stranger who uproots their old and bad systems and imposes a better on them by force of arms. "A tyrant, but our masters then were .-till at least our countrymen," is the faithful expression of a 580 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. sentiment which had embarrassed energetic reformers be- fore the days of Lord Dalhousie. The populations of India became stricken with alarm as they saw their native princes thus successively dethroned. The subversion of thrones, the annexation of states, seemed to them naturally enough to form part of that vast scheme for rooting out all the religions and systems of India, concerning which so many vague forebodings had darkly warned the land. Many of our Sepoys came from Oudh and other annexed territories; and little reason as they might have had for any personal attachments to the subverted dynasties, they left yet that national resentment which any manner of for- eign intervention is almost certain to provoke. There were peculiar reasons, too, why, if religious and political distrust did prevail, the moment of Lord Canning's accession to the supreme authority in India should see inviting and favorable for schemes of sedition. The Afghan war had told the Sepoy that British troops are not absolutely invincible in battle. The impression produced almost everywhere in India by the Crimean War was a conviction that the strength of England was on the wane. The stories of our disasters in the Crimea had gone abroad, adorned with immense exaggerations, among all the native populations of Hindostan. Any successes that the Kus- sians had had during the war were in Asia, and these naturally impressed the Asiatic mind more than the vic- tories of France and England which were won farther off. Intelligent and quick-witted Mohammedans and Hindoos talked with Englishmen, English officers in India, and heard from them the accounts of the manner in which our system had broken down in the Crimea, of the blunders of our government, and the shortcomings of our leaders. They entirely misinterpreted the significance of the stories that were so freely told. The Englishmen who spoke of our failures talked of them as the provoking and inexcus- able blunders of departments and individuals; the Asiatics who greedily listened were convinced that they heard the acknowledgment of the national collapse. The English- men were so confident in the the strength and resources of their country that it did not even occur to them to think that anybody on earth could have a doubt on the subject. It was as if a millionaire were to complain to some one in a foreign country that the neglect and blunder A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 581 of a servant had sent his remittances to some wrong place, and left him for the moment without money enough to pay his hotel bill, and the listener were to accept this as a genuine announcement of approaching bankruptcy. The Sepoy saw that the English force in Northern India was very small ; and he really believed that it was small because England had no more men to send there. He was as ignorant as a child about everything which he had not seen with his own eyes; and he knew absolutely nothing about the strength, the population, and the resources of England. In his mind Russia was the great rising and conquering country; England was sinking into decay; her star waning before the strong glare of the portentous northern light. Other impulses, too, there were to make sedition believe that its opportunity had come. Lord Canning hardly assumed office as governor-general of India when the dis- pute occurred between the British and Chinese authorities at Canton, and a war was imminent between England and China. Troops were sent shortly after from England to China; and although none were taken from India, yet it was well known among the native populations that England had an Asiatic war on her hands. Almost at the same moment war was declared against Persia by proclama- tion of the governor-general at Calcutta, in consequence of the shah having marched an army into Herat and besieged it, in violation of a treaty with Great Britain made in 1853. A body of troops was sent from Bombay to the Persian Gulf, and shortly after General On tram left Bombay with additional troops, as commander-in-chief of the field force in Persia. Therefore, in the opening days of 1857, it was known among the native populations of India that the East India company was at war with Persia, and that England had on her hands a quarrel with China. At this time the number of native soldiers in the employment of England throughout Northern India was about one hundred and twenty thousand, while the European soldiers numbered only some twenty-two thous- and. The native army of the three presidencies taken together was nearly three hundred thousand, while the Europeans were but forty-three thousand, of whom some five thousand had just been told off for duty in Persia. It must be owned that, given the existence of a seditious spirit, it would have been hardly possible for it to find con- 582 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ditions more seemingly favorable and tempting. To many a temper of sullen discontent the appointed and fateful hour must have seemed to be at hand. There can be no doubt that a conspiracy for the subver- sion of the English government in India was afoot during the early days of 1857, and possibly for long before. The story of the mysterious chupatties is well known. The chupatties are small cakes of unleavened bread, "bannocks of salt and dough," they have been termed; and they were found to be distributed with amazing rapidity and preci- sion of system at one time throughout the native villages of the north and north-west. A native messenger brought two of these mysterious cakes to the watchman or head- man of the village, and bade him to have others prepared like them and to pass them on to another place. The token has been well described as the fiery cross of India, although it would not appear that its significance was as direct and precise as that of the famous Highland war- signal. It is curious how varying and unsatisfactory is the evidence about the meaning of these chupatties. According to the positive declaration of some witnesses, the sending of such a token had never been a custom, either Mohammedan or Hindoo, in India. Some witnesses believed that the chupatties were regarded as spells to avert some impending calamity. Others said the native population looked on them as having been sent round by the government itself as a sign that in future all would be compelled to eat the same food as the Christians ate. Others, again, said the intention was to make this known, but to make it known on the part of the seditious, in order that the people might be prepared to resist the plans of the English. But there could be no doubt that the chupatties conveyed a warning to all who received them that something was about to happen, and bade them to be prepared for whatever might befall. One fact alone con- clusively proves that the signal given had a special refer- ence to impending events connected with British rule in India. In no instance were they distributed among the populations of still-existing native states. They were only sent among the villagers over which English rule extended. To the quick, suspicious mind of the Asiatic a breath of warning may be as powerful as the crash of an alarm-bell or the sound of a trumpet. It may be, as some authorities A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 583 would have us to believe, that the panic about the greased cartridges discoucerted, instead of bringing to a climax, the projects of sedition. CHAPTER XXXIII. THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF PLASSEY. The news of the outbreak at Meerut and the proclama- tion in Delhi broke upon Calcutta with the shock of a thunderclap. Yet it was not wholly a shock of surprise. For some time there had been vague anticipations of some impending danger. There was alarm in the air. There had long been a prophecy known to India that the hun- dredth anniversary of the battle of Plassey would see the end of English rule in Hindostan; and now the hundredth anniversary was near. There is a fine passage in Sir Henry Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde," in which Van Ryke says to the hero of the drama — " If you mark, my Lord, Mostly a rumor of such things precedes The certain tidings;" and Philip musingly answers — " It is strange — yet true That doubtful knowledge travels with a speed Miraculous, which certain cannot match. I know not why, when this or that has chanced, The smoke outruns the flash; but so it is." The smoke had apparently outrun the flash in many parts of India during this eventful season. Calcutta heard the news of what had happened with wild alarm and horror, bnt hardly with much surprise. For one or two days Calcutta was a prey to mere panic. The alarm was greatly increased by the fact that the dethroned king of Oudh was established near to the city. At Garden Reach, a few miles down the Hooghly, the dispossessed king was living. There he lived for many years after, with his host of dependants and hangers-on around him. A picturesque writer lately described the "grotesque structures" in which the old man, with his mania for building, "quarters not only his people but his 584 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. menagerie." "Tower after tower rises high above the lower buildings, on the top of each of which, comfortably quartered in a spacious den, abides a huge Bengal tiger, whose stripes glisten in the sun, in the sight of the passer- by on the river. He owns vast flocks of trained pigeons, which fly or alight at the word of command — wild but not unmusical shouts — of coolies stationed on the housetops, who appear to direct their motions by the waving of long bamboos. The inhabitants of Calcutta, when the news of the mutiny came, were convinced that the king of Oudh harbored close to their city companions more dangerous than pigeons, or even Bengal tigers. They were sure that the place was the headquarters of rebellion, and were ex- pecting the moment when, from the residence at Garden Keach, an organized army of murderers was to be sent forth to capture and destroy the ill-fated city, and to make its streets run with the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Lord Canning took the prudent course of having the king, with his prime minister, removed to the governor-general's own residence within the precincts of Fort William. There is no recklessness, no cruelty, like the cruelty and the recklessness of panic. Perhaps there is hardly any panic so demoralizing in its effects as that which seizes the unwarlike members of a ruling race set down in the midst of overwhelming numbers of the subject populations, at a moment when the cry goes abroad that the subjected are rising in rebellion. Fortunately, there was at the head of affairs in India a man with a cool head, a quiet, firm will and a courage that never faltered. If ever the crisis found the man, Lord Canning was the man called for by that crisis in India. He had all the divining genius of the true statesman; the man who can rise to the height of some unexpected and new emergency; and he had the cool courage of a practiced conqueror. The greatest trial to which a ruler can be subjected is to be called upon at a moment's notice to deal with events and conditions for which there is no precedent. The second-class statesman, the official statesman, if we may use such an expression, collapses under such a trial. The man of genius finds it his opportunity, and makes his own of it. Lord Canning thus found his opportunity in the Indian mutiny. Among all the distracting counsels and wild stories poured in upon him from every side, he kept his mind clear. He never A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 585 gave way either to anger or to alarm. If he ever showed a little impatience, it was only where panic would too openly have proclaimed itself by counsels of wholesale cruelty. He could not perhaps always conceal from frightened people the fact that he rather despised their terrors. Throughout the whole of that excited period there were few names, even among the chiefs of rebellion, on which fiercer denunciation was showered by Englishmen than the name of Lord Canning. Because he would not listen to the bloodthirsty clamors of mere frenzy, he was nicknamed "Clemency Canning," as if clemency were an attribute of which a man ought to be ashamed. Indeed for some time people wrote and spoke, not merely in India but in England, as if clemency were a thing to be reprobated, like treason or crime. Every allowance must be made for the unparalleled excitement of such a time, and in especial for the manner in which the elementary passions of manhood were inflamed by the stories, happily not true, of the whole- sale dishonor and barbarous mutilation of women. But when the fullest allowance has been made for all this, it must be said by any one looking back on that painful time that some of the public instructors of England betrayed a fury and ferocity which no conditions can excuse on the part of civilized and Christian men who have time to reflect before they write or speak. The advices which some English journals showered upon the government, the army, and all concerned in repressing the mutiny might more fittingly have come from some of the heroes of the "Spanish Eury." Nay, the Spanish Fury itself was, in express words, held up to the English army as an example for them to imitate. An English paper, of high and well-earned authority, distinctly declared that such mercy as Alva showed the Netherlands was the mercy that English soldiers must show to the rebellious regions of India. There was for awhile but little talk of repression. Every one in England well knew that the rebellion would be repressed. It has to be remembered, to the credit of England's national courage and resolve, that not at the worst moment of the crisis did it seem to have occurred to any Englishman that there was the slightest possibility of the rebellion being allowed to succeed. It is painful to have to remember that the talk was not of repression but of revenge. Public speakers and writers were shrieking 586 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. out for the vengeance which must be inflicted on India when the rebellion had been put down. For awhile it seemed a question of patriotism which would propose the most savage and sanguinary measures of revenge. We shall see farther on that one distinguished English officer was clamorous to have powers given to him to impale, to burn alive, and to flay mutineers who had taken part in the murder of Englishwomen. Mr. Disraeli, to do him jus- tice, raised his voice in remonstrance against the wild pas- sions of the hour, even when these passions were strongest and most general. He declared that if such a temper were encouraged we ought to take down from our altars the images of Christ and raise the statue of Moloch there; and he protested against making Nana Sahib, of whom we shall hear more, the model for the conduct of a British officer. Mr. Disraeli did, indeed, at a later period show an inclination to back out of this courageous and honorable expression of opinion; but it stands at all events to the credit of his first impulse that he could venture, at such a time, to talk of morality, mercy, and Christianity. If people were so carried away in England, where the danger was far remote, we can easily imagine what were the fears and passions roused in India, where the terror was or might be at the door of every one. Lord Canning was gravely embarrassed by the wild urgencies and counsels of distracted Englishmen, who were furious with him because he even thought of distinguishing friend from foe where native races were concerned. He bore himself with perfect calmness; listened to everything that any one had to say, where time gave him any chance of doing so, read as far as possible all the myriad communications poured in upon him, regarded no- suggestion as unworthy of consid- eration, but made his own resolves and his own judgment the final arbiter. He was greatly assisted and encouraged in his counsels by his brave and noble wife, who proved herself in every way worthy to be the helpmate of such a man at such a crisis. He did not for a moment under- estimate the danger; but neither did he exaggerate its im- portance. He never allowed it to master him. He looked upon it with the quiet resolute eye of one who is deter- mined to be the conqueror in the struggle. Lord Canning saw that the one important thing was to strike at Delhi which had proclaimed itself the head- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 587 quarters of the rebellion. He knew that English troops were on their way to China for the purpose of wreaking the wrongs of English subjects there, and he took on his own responsibility the bold step of intercepting them and calling them to the work of helping to put down the mutiny in India. The dispute with China he thought could well afford to wait, but with the mutiny it must be now or never. India could not wait for reinforcements brought all the way from England. In Scott's " Betrothed " the soldier of the knight who owns the frontier castle en- courages him, when the Welsh are about to attack, by the assurance that the forces of the constable of Chester will soon come to his aid, and with these reinforcements they will send the Welsh dragon-flag flying from the field. The knight sadly answers that it must fly from the field be- fore the reinforcements arrive, "or it will flyover all our dead bodies." Thus felt Lord Canning when he thought of the strong arms that England could send to his assist- ance. He knew well enough, as well as the wildest alarmist could know, that the rebel flag must be forced to fly from some field before that help came, or it would fly over the dead bodies of those who then represented English authority in India. He had, therefore, no hesitation in appealing to Lord Elgin, the envoy in charge of the Chi- nese expedition, to stop the troops that were on their way to China, and lend them to the service of India at such a need. Lord Elgin had the courage and the wisdom to assent to the appeal at once. Fortune, too, was favorable to Canning in more ways than one. The Persian war was of short duration. Sir James Outran) was soon victorious, and the Persians sued for a peace. The treaty of peace was signed at Paris in March 1857, and was arranged so quickly that Outram inflicted a crushing defeat on the Persians after the treaty was signed, but before the news of its signature had time to reach the seat of war. Outram, therefore, and his gallant companions, Colonel Jacob and Colonel llavelock, were able to lend their invalu- able services to the governor-general of India. Most im- portant for Lord Canning's purposes was the manner in which the affairs of the runjaub were managed at this crisis. The Punjaub was under the administration of one of the ablest public servants [ndia has ever had — Sir John, afterward Lord Lawrence. John Lawrence had 588 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. from his youth been in the civil service of the East India Company and when Lord Dalhousie annexed the Punjaub, he made Lawrence and his soldier-brother — the gallant Sir Henry Lawrence — two out of a board of three for the ad- ministration of the affairs of the newly-acquired province. Afterward Sir John Lawrence was named the chief com- missioner of the Punjaub, and by the promptitude and energy of himself and his subordinates the province was completely saved for English rule at the outbreak of the mutiny. Fortunately, the electric telegraph extended from Calcutta to Lahore, the chief city of the Punjaub. On May 11th the news of the outbreak at Meerut was brought to the authorities at Lahore. As it happened, Sir John Lawrence was then away at Eawul Pinclee, in the Upper Punjaub; but Mr. Kobert Montgomery, the judicial commissioner at Lahore, was invested with plenary power, and he showed that he could use it to advantage. Meean Meer is a large military cantonment five or six miles from Lahore, and there were then some four thousand native troops there, with only about thirteen hundred Europeans of the queen's and the company's service. There was no time to be lost. If the spirit of mutiny were to spread, the condition of things in the Punjaub would be desperate; but what did the condition of things in the Punjaub involve? The possible loss of a province? Some- thing far greater than that. It meant the possibility of a momentary collapse of all British authority in India. For if any one will take the trouble to cast a glance at a map of India, he will see that the Punjaub is so placed as to become a basis of operations for the precise military move- ments which every experienced eye then saw to be neces- sary for the saving of our Indian empire. The candle would have been burning at both ends, so far as regards the north-west provinces, if the Punjaub had gone with Delhi and Lucknow. While the Punjaub held firm, it was like a barrier raised at one side of the rebellious move- ment, not merely preventing it from going any farther in that direction, but keeping it pent up until the moment came when the blow from the other direction could fall upon it. The first thing to be done to strike effectually at the rebellion was to make an attack on Delhi ; and the possession of the Punjaub was of inestimable advantage to the authorities for that purpose. It will be seen, then, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 589 that the moment was critical for those to whose hands the ad- ministration of the great new province had heen entrusted. There was no actual reason to assume that the Sepoys in Meean Meer intended to join the rebellion. There would be a certain danger of converting them into rebels if any- rash movement were to be made for the purpose of guard- ing against treachery on their part. Either way was a serious responsibility, a momentous risk. The authorities soon made up their minds. Any risk would be better than that of leaving it in the power of the native troops to join the rebellion. A ball and supper were to be given at Lahore that night. To avoid creating any alarm it was arranged that the entertainments should take place. Dur- ing the dancing and the feasting Mr. Montgomery held a council of the leading officials of Lahore, civil and mili- tary, and it was resolved at once to disarm the native troops. A parade was ordered for daybreak at Meean Meer; and on the parade-ground an order was given for a military movement which brought the heads of four col- umns of the native troops in front of twelve guns charged with grape, the artillerymen with their port-fires lighted, and the soldiers of one of the queen's regiments standing behind with loaded muskets. A command was given to the Sepoys to pile arms. They had immediate death be- fore them if they disobeyed. They stood literally at the cannon's mouth. They piled their arms, which were borne away at once in carts by European soldiers, and all chances of a rebellious movement were over in that prov- ince, and the Punjaub was saved. Something of the same kind was done at Mooltan, in the Lower Punjaub, later on; and the province, thus assured to English civil and mili- tary authority, became a basis for some of the most important operations by which the mutiny was crushed, and the sceptre of India restored to the queen. Within little more than a fortnight from the occupation of Delhi by the rebels, the British forces under General Anson, the commander-in-chief, were advancing on that city. The commander did not live to conduct any of the operations. He died of cholera almost at the beginning of the march. lie had lived long enough to come in for much sharp censure. The temper of the time both in England and in India expected men to work by witchcraft rather than wit, and Anson was furiously denounced by 590 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. some of the principal English journals because he did not recapture Delhi without having even to march an army to the neighborhood of the city. He was described as "a holiday soldier who had never seen service either in peace or in war. " His appointment was denounced as a " shame- less job," and a tribute altogether to "the claims of family and personal acquaintance." We cannot venture now to o^iticise the mode of General Anson's appointment; and ne had not time to show whether he was any better than a holiday soldier. But it would appear that Lord Canning had no poor opinion of his capacity, and was particularly impressed by his coolness and command of temper. He died, however, at the very outset of his march; and we only refer now to the severe attacks which were made upon him to illustrate the temper of the nation, and the manner in which it delighted to hear itself addressed. We are always rebuking other nations for their impatience and fretfulness under difficulties. It is a lesson of no slight importance for us to be reminded that when the hour of strain and pressure comes we are found to be in most ways very like our neighbors. The siege of Delhi proved long and difficult. Another general died, another had to give up his command, before the city was recaptured. It was justly considered by Lord Canning and by all the authorities as of the utmost impor- tance that Delhi should be taken before the arrival of great reinforcements from home. Meanwhile, the rebel- lion was breaking out at new points almost everywhere in these northern and north-western regions. On May 30th the mutiny declared itself at Lucknow. Sir Henry Law- rence was governor of Oudh. He endeavored to drive the rebels from the place, but the numbers of the mutineers were overwhelming. He had under his command, too, a force partly made up of native troops, and some of these deserted him in the battle. He had to retreat and to fortify the Residency at Lucknow, and remove all the Europeans, men, women, and children thither, and patiently stand a siege. Lawrence himself had not long to endure the siege. On July 2nd he had been up with the dawn, and after a great amount of work he lay on a sofa; not, as it has been well said, to rest, but to transact busi- ness in a recumbent position. His nephew and another officer were with him. Suddenly a great crash was A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES.- 591 heard, and the room was filled with smoke and dust. One of his companions was flung to the ground. A shell had burst. When there was silence the officer who had been flung down called out, "Sir Henry, are you hurt?" At first there was no answer. Then a weak voice was heard to reply in just the words that Browning has put into the mouth of the gallant French lad similarly questioned by the great Napoleon. "I am killed," was the answer that came faintly but firmly from Sir Henry Lawrence's lips. The shell had wounded him in the thigh so fearfully as to leave surgery no chance of doing anything for his relief. On the morning of July 4th he died calmly and in perfect submission to the will of Providence. He had made all possible arrangements for his successor and for the work to be done. He desired that on his tomb should be engraven merely the words " Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty." The epitaph was a simple, truthful summing up of a simple, truthful career. The man, however, was greater than the career. Lawrence had not opportunity to show in actual result the greatness of spirit that was in him. The immense influence he exercised over all who came within his reach bears testimony to his strength and nobleness of character better than any of the mere successes which his biographer can record. He was full of sympathy. His soul was alive to the noblest and purest aspirations. " It is the due admixture of romance and reality," he was himself accustomed to say, "that best carries a man through life." No professional teacher or philosopher ever spoke a truer sentence. As one of his many admirers says of him — "what he said and wrote, he did, or rather he was." Let the bitterest enemy of England write the history of her rule in India, and set down against her every wrong that was done in her name, from those which Brooke denounced to those which the Madras com- mission exposed; he will have to say that men, many men, like Henry Lawrence, lived and died devoted to the cause of that rule, and the world will take account of the admission. END OF FIRST VOLUME. A History of our Own Times. CHAPTER XXXIV. CAWNPORE. During the later clays of Sir Henry Lawrence's life it had another trouble added to it by the appeals which were made to him from Cawnpore for a help which he could not give. The story of Cawnpore is by far the most profound and tragic in its interest of all the chapters that make up the history of the Indian mutiny. The city of Cawnpore stands in the Doab, a peninsula between the Ganges and the Jumna, and is built on the south bank of the Ganges, there nearly a quarter of a mile broad in the dry season, and more than a mile across when swelled by the rains. By a treaty made in 1775 the East India Company en- gaged to maintain a force in Cawnpore for the defense of Oudh, and the revenues of an extensive district of country were appropriated to the maintenance of the troops quar- tered there. In 1801, for some of the various reasons impelling similar transactions in India, Lord Wellesley "closed the mortgage," as Mr. Trevelyan puts it in his in- teresting and really valuable little book, "Cawnpore," and the territory lapsed into the possession of the company. From that time it took rank as one of our first-class mili- tary stations. When Oudh was annexed to our dominions there was an additional reason for maintaining a strong military force at Cawnpore. The city commanded the bridge over which passed the high road to Lucknow, the capital of our new province. The distance from Cawnpore to Lueknow is about fifty miles as the bird flies. At the time when the mutiny broke out in Mcerut there were some three thousand native soldiers in Cawnpore, consisting of two regiments of infantry, one of cavalry, and a company of artillerymen. There were about three 2 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. hundred officers and soldiers of English birth. The European or Eurasian population, including women and children, numbered about one thousand. These consisted of the officials, the railway people, some merchants and shopkeepers and their families. The native town had about sixty thousand inhabitants. The garrison was under the command of Sir Hugh Wheeler, among the oldest of an old school of Bengal officers. Sir Hugh Wheeler was some seventy-five years of age at the time when the events occurred which we have now to describe. The revolt was looked for at Cawnpore from the moment when the news came of the rising at Meerut; and it was not long expected before it came. Sir Hugh Wheeler applied to Sir Henry Lawrence for help; Lawrence of course could not spare a man. Then Sir Hugh Wheeler remembered that he had a neighbor whom he believed to be friendly, despite of very recent warnings from Sir Henry Lawrence and others to the contrary. He called this neighbor to his assistance, and his invitation was promptly answered. The Nana Sahib came with two guns and some three hundred men to lend a helping hand to the English commander. The Nana Sahib resided at Bithoor, a small town twelve miles up the river from Cawnpore. He represented a grievance. Bajee Rao, Peishwa of Poonah, was the last prince of one of the great Mahratta dynasties. The East India company believed him guilty of treachery against them, of bad government of his dominions, and so forth ; and they found a reason for dethroning him. He was assigned, however, a residence in Bithoor and a large pen- sion. He had no children, and he adopted as his heir Seereek Dhoondoo Punth, the man who will be known to all time by the infamous name of Nana Sahib. It seems almost superfluous to say, that according to Hindoo belief it is needful for a man's eternal welfare that he leave a son behind him to perform duly his funeral rites; and that the adoption of a son is recognized as in every sense con- ferring on the adopted all the rights that a child of the blood could have. Bajee died in 1851, and Nana Sahib claimed to succeed to all his possessions. Lord Dalhousie had shown in many instances a strangely unwise disregard of the principle of adoption. The claim of the Nana to the pension was disallowed. Nana Sahib sent a confidential A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 3 agent to London to push his claim there. This man was a clever and handsome young Mohammedan who had at one time been a servant in an Anglo-Indian family, and had picked up a knowledge of French and English. His name was Azimoolah Khan. This emissary visited London in 1854, and became a lion of the fashionable season. As llajji Baba, the barber's son, in the once popular story, was taken for a prince in London and treated accordingly, so the promoted footman, Azimoolah Khan, was welcomed as a man of princely rank in our AVest End society. He did not succeed in winning over the government to take any notice of the claims of his master, but being very hand- some and of sleek and alluring manners, he became a favor- ite in the drawing-rooms of the metropolis, and was under the impression that an unlimited number of Englishwomen of rank were dying with love for him. On his way home he visited Constantinople and the Crimea. It was then a dark hour for the fortunes of England in the Crimea, and Azimoolah Khan swallowed with glad and greedy ear all the alarmist rumors that were afloat in Stamboul about the decay of England's strength and the impending domination of Kussian power over Europe and Asia. In tbe Crimea itself Azimoolah had some opportunity of seeing how the campaign was going, and it is not surprising that with his prepossessions and his hopes, he interpreted everything he saw as a threatened disaster for the arms of England. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times, made the acquaintance of Azimoolah Khan in Constantinople and afterward met him in the Crimea, and has borne testimony to the fact, that along with the young Mohammedan's boasts of his conquests of Englishwomen were mingled a good many grave and sinister predictions as to the prospects of England's empire. The western visit of this man was not an event without important consequences. He doubtless reported to his master that the strength of England was on the wane; and while stimulating his hatred and revenge, stimulated also his confidence in the chances of an effort to gratify both. Azimoolah Khan did after- ward, as it will be seen, make some grim ami genuine havoc among English ladies. The most bloodthirsty massacre of the whole mutiny is witli good reason ascribed to his insti- gation. With Azimoolah Khan's mission and its results ended the hopes of Nana Sahib for the success of his 4 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. claims, and began, we may presume, his resolve to be revenged. Nana Sahib, although his claim on the English govern- ment was not allowed, was still rich. He had the large private property of the man who had adopted him, and he had the residence at Bithoor. He kept up a sort of princely state. He never visited Cawnpore; the reason being it is believed, that he would not have been received there with princely honors. But he was especially lavish of his attentions to English visitors, and his invitations went far and wide among the military and civil servants of the crown and the company. He cultivated the society of English men and women ; he showered his civilities upon them. He did not speak or even understand English, but he took a great interest in English history, customs, and literature. He was luxurious in the most thoroughly oriental fashion; and oriental luxury implies a great deal more than any experience of western luxury would sug- gest. At the time with which we are now dealing he was only about thirty-six years of age, but he was prematurely heavy and fat, and seemed to be as incapable of active ex- ertion as of unkindly feeling. There can be little doubt that all this time he was a dissembler of more than com- moii eastern dissimulation. It appears almost certain that while he was lavishing his courtesies and kindnesses upon Englishmen without discrimination, his heart was burn- ing with a hatred to the whole British race. A sense of his wrongs had eaten him up. It is a painful thing to say, but it is necessary to the truth of this history, that his wrongs were genuine. He had been treated with injustice. According to all the recognized usages of his race and his religion, he had a claim indefeasible in justice to the suc- cession which had been unfairly and unwisely denied to him. It was to Nana Sahib, then, that poor old Sir Hugh Wheeler in the hour of his distress applied for assistance. Most gladly, we can well believe, did the Nana come. He established himself in Cawnpore with his guns and his soldiers. Sir Hugh Wheeler had taken refuge, when the mutiny broke out, in an old military hospital with mud walls, scarcely four feet high, hastily thrown up around it, and a few guns of various calibre placed in position on the so-called entrenchments. Everything seemed to have A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 5 neen against our people in this hour of terror. Sir Hugh Wheeler might have chosen a far better refuge in the magazine, in a different quarter of Cawnpore; but it appeared destined that the mutineers should have this chance, too, as they had every other. The English com- mander selected his place in the worst position, and hardly capable of defense. Within his almost shadowy and cer- tainly crumbling entrenchments were gathered about a thousand persons, of whom four hundred and sixty-live were men of every age and profession. The married women and grown daughters were about two hundred and eighty; the children about the same number. Of the men there were probably four hundred Avho could fight. It can never be made quite clear whether Nana Sahib had in the beginning any idea of affecting to help the Englishmen. If any object of his could have been served by his assuming such a part for any given length of time, or until any particular moment arrived, he assuredly would not have been wanting in patient dissimulation. But almost as soon as his presence became known in Cawnpore he was surrounded by the mutineers, who insisted that he must make common cause with them and become one of their leaders. He put himself at their disposal. At first their idea was that he should lead them on to Delhi, the recognized center of the revolt. But he was urged by some of his advisers, and especially by Azimoolah Khan, not to allow all his personal pretensions to be lost in the cause of Delhi, and his individual influence to be absorbed into the court of the Grand Mogul. He was advised to make himself a great mau in the first instance by conquer- ing the country all round Cawnpore; and overcome by these persuasions and by the promptings of personal am- bition, he prevailed upon the mutineers not to leave the city until they had first "scoured these English thence." The Nana therefore became the recognized chief of the Cawnpore movement. Let us do justice, even to Nana Sahib. It will be hard to say a word for him after this. Let us now observe that he gave notice to Sir Hugh Wheeler that if the entrenchments were not surrendered they would be instantly attacked. They were attacked. A general assault was made upon the miserable mud walls on June 12th, but the resistance was heroic and the assault tailed. It was after that assault that the garrison succeeded in send- 6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ing a message to Sir Henry Lawrence, at Lucknow, craving for the aid which it was absolutely impossible for him to give. From that time the fire of the mutineer army on the English entrenchments never ceased. Cawnpore was alive with all the ruffianism of the region. It became an Alsatia for the scoundrels and jail-birds of the country round, and of the province of Oudh. All these scoundrels took their turn at the pleasant and comparatively safe amusement of keeping up the fire on the English people behind the mud walls. Whenever a regular attack was made the assailants invariably came to grief. The little garrison, thinning in numbers every day and almost every hour, held out with splendid obstinacy, and always sent those who assailed it scampering back — except of course for such assailants as perforce kept their ground by the persuasion of the English bullets. The little population of women and children behind the entrenchments had no roof to shelter them from the fierce Indian sun. They cowered under the scanty shadow of the little walls often at the imminent peril of the unceasing Sepoy bullets. The only water for their drinking was to be had from a single well, at which the guns of the assailants were unceasingly leveled. To go to the well and draw water became the task of self-sacrificing heroes, who might with better chances of safety have led a forlorn hope. The water which the fainting women and children drank might have seemed to be reddened by blood ; for only at the price of blood was it ever obtained. It may seem a trivial detail, but it will count for much in a history of the suffering of delicately-nurtured Englishwomen, that from the begin- ning of the siege of the Cawnpore entrenchments to its tragic end, there was not, as Mr. Trevelyan puts it, "one spoil ge- ful of water" to be had for the purposes of personal cleanli- ness. The inmates of that ghastly garrison were dying like flies. One does not know which to call the greater; the suffering of the women or the bravery of the men. The Nana was joined by a large body of the Oudh sol- diers, believed to be among the best fighting men that India could produce. These made a grand assault on the entrenchments, and these, too, were driven back by the indomitable garrison, who were hourly diminishing in num- bers, in food, in ammunition, in everything but courage A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 7 and determination to fight. The repulse of the Oudh men made a deep impression on the mutineers. A convic- tion began to spread abroad that it was of no use attempt- ing to conquer these terrible British sahibs; that as long as one of them was alive he would be as formidable as a wild beast in his lair. The Sepoys became unwilling to come too near to the low crumbling walls of the entrenchment. Those walls might have been leaped over as easily as that of Komulus; but of what avail to know that, when from be- hind them always came the fatal fire of the Englishmen? It was no longer easy to get the mutineers to attempt any- thing like an assault. They argued that when the Oudh men could do nothing it was hardly of any use for others to try. The English themselves began to show a perplex- ing kind of aggressive enterprise, and took to making little sallies, in small numbers indeed, but with astonishing effect, on any bodies of Sepoys who happened to be any- where near. Utterly, overwhelmingly, preposterously out- numbered as the Englishmen were, there were moments when it began to seem almost possible that they might actually keep back their assailants until some English army could come to their assistance and take a terriWe venge- ance upon Oawnpore. Meanwhile the influence of the Nana began sensibly to wane. They who accept the responsibility of undertakings like his soon come to know that they hold their place only on condition of immediate success. Only great organizations, with roots of system firmly fixed, can afford to wait and to look over disappoint- ment. Nana Sahib began to find that he could not take by assault those wretched entrenchments; and he could not wait to starve the garrison out. He therefore resolved to treat with the English. The terms, it is believed, were arranged by the advice and assistance of Tantia Topee, his lieutenant, and Azimoolah Khan, the favorite of English drawing-rooms. An offer was sent to the entrenchments, the terms of which are worthy of notice. "All those," it said, "who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and who are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad." The terms had to hi' accepted. There was nothing else to be done. The English people were promised, during the course of the negotiations, sufficient supplies of food and boats to carry them to Allahabad, which was n<>w once 8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. more in the possession of England. The relief was unspeakable for the survivors of that weary defense. The women, the children, the wounded, the sick, the dying, welcomed any terms of release. Not the faintest suspicion crossed any mind of the treachery that was awaiting them. How, indeed, could there be any such suspicion? Not for years and years had even oriental warfare given example of such practice as that which Nana Sahib and the grace- ful and civilized Azimoolah Khan had now in preparation. The time for the evacuation of the garrison came. The boats were in readiness on the Ganges. The long procession of men, women, and children passed slowly down ; very slowly in some instances, because of the num- ber of sick and wounded by which its progress was encum- bered. Some of the chief among the Nana's counsellors took their stand in a little temple on the margin of the river, to superintend the embarkation and the work that was to follow it. Nana Sahib himself was not there. It is understood that he purposely kept away; he preferred to hear of the deed when it was done. His faithful lieu- tenant, Tantia Topee, had given orders, it seems, that when a trumpet sounded, some work, for which he had arranged should begin. The wounded and the women were got into the boats in the first instance. The officers and men were scrambling in afterward. Suddenly the blast of a trumpet was heard. The boats were of the kind common on the rivers of India, covered with roofs of straw, and looking, as some accounts describe them, not unlike floating haystacks. The moment the bugle sounded, the straw of the boat-roofs blazed up, and the native rowers began to make precipitately for the shore. They had set fire to the thatch, and were now escaping from the flames they had purposely lighted up. At the same moment there came from both shores of the river thick showers of grapeshot and musketry. The banks of the Ganges seemed in an instant alive with shot, a very rain of bullets poured in upon the devoted inmates of the boats. To add to the horrors of the moment if, indeed, it needed any addition, nearly all the boats stuck fast in mud- banks, and the occupants became fixed targets for the fire of their enemies. Only three of the boats floated. Two of these drifted to the Oudh shore, and those on board them were killed at once. The third floated farther along A 1I1ST0R 7 OF OUR OWN TIMES. 9 with the stream, reserved for further adventures and hor- rors. The firing ceased when Tantia Topee and his con- federates thought that enough had been done; and the women and children who were still alive were brought ashore and carried in forlorn procession back again through the town where .they had suffered so much, and which they had hoped that they were leaving forever. They were about one hundred and twenty-five in number, women and children. Some of them were wounded. There were a few well-disposed natives who saw them and were sorry for them; who had perhaps served them, and experienced their kindness in other days, and who now had some grate- ful memory of it, which they dared not express by any open prof ession of sympathy. Certain of these afterward described the English ladies as they saw them pass. They were bedraggled and disheveled, these poor Englishwomen ; their clothes were in tatters; some of them were wounded, and the blood was trickling from their feet and legs. They were carried to a place called the Savada House, a large building, once a charitable institution bearing the name of Salvador, which had been softened into Savada by Asiatic pronunciation. On board the one boat which had floated with the stream were more than a hundred persons. The boat was attacked by a constant fire from both banks as it drifted along. At length a party of some twelve men, or thereabouts, landed with the bold object of attacking their assailants and driv- ing them back. -In their absence the boat was captured by some of the rebel gangs, and the women and the wounded were brought hack to Cawnpore. Some sixty men, twenty-live women, and four children, were thus recaptured. The men were immediately shot. It may be said at once, that of the gallant little party who went ashore to attack the enemy, hand to hand, four finally escaped, after adventures so perilous and so extraordinary that a professional story-teller would hardly venture to make them part of a fictitious narrative. The Nana had now a considerable number of English- women in his hands. They were removed, after awhile, from their first prison-house to a small building north of the canal, and between the native city and the (ianges. Here they were cooped up in the closest manner, except when some of them were taken out in the evening and set 10 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. to the work of grinding corn for the use of their captors. Cholera and dysentery set in among these unhappy sufferers, and some eighteen women and seven children died. Let it be said for the credit of womanhood, that the royal widows, the relicts of the Nana's father by adop- tion, made many efforts to protect the • captive English- women, and even declared that they would throw them- selves and their children from the palace windows if any harm were done to the prisoners. We have only to repeat here, that as a matter of fact no indignities other than that of the compulsory corn-grinding, were put upon the English ladies. They were doomed, one and all, to suffer death, but they were not, as at one time was believed in England, made to long for death as an escape from shame. Meanwhile the prospects of the Nana and his rebellion were growing darker and darker. He must have begun to know by this time that he had no chance of establishing himself as a ruler anywhere in India. The English had not been swept out of the country with a rush. The first flood of the mutiny had broken on their defenses, and already the tide was falling. The Nana well knew it never would rise again to the same height in his day. The English were coming on. Neill had recaptured Allahabad, and cleared the country all round it of any traces of rebellion. Havelock was now moving forward from Alla- habad toward Cawnpore, with six cannon and about a thousand English soldiers. Very small in point of num- bers was that force when compared with that which Nana Sahib could even still rally round him; but no one in India now knew better than Nana Sahib what extraordinary odds the English could afford to give with the certainty of win- ning. Havelock's march was a series of victories, although he was often in such difficulties that the slightest display of real generalship or even soldiership on the part of his opponents might have stopped his advance. He had one encounter with the lieutenant of the Nana, who had under his command nearly four thousand men and twelve guns, and Havelock won a complete victory in about ten minutes. He defeated in the same off-hand way various other chiefs of the mutiny. He was almost at the gates of Cawnpore. Then it appears to have occurred to the Nana, or to have been suggested to him that it would be inconvenient to have his English captives recaptured by the enemy, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 11 their countrymen. It may be that in the utter failure of all his plans and hopes he was anxious to secure some satis- faction, to satiate his hatred in some way. It was intimated to the prisoners that they were to die. Among them were three or four men. These were called out and shot. Then some Sepoys were sent to the house where the women still were, and ordered to fire volleys through the windows. This they did, but apparently without doing much harm. Some persons are of opinion, from such evidence as can be got, that the men purposely fired high above the level of the floor, to avoid killing any of the women and children. In the evening five men — two Hindoo peasants, two Mohammedan butchers, and one Mohammedan wearing the red uniform of the Nana's body-guard — were sent up to the house, and entered it. Incessant shrieks were heard to come from that fearful house. The Mohammedan soldier came out to the door holding in his hand a sword-hilt from which the blade had been broken off, and he exchanged this now useless instru- ment for a weapon in proper condition. Not once but twice this performance took place. Evidently the task imposed on these men was hard work for the sword-blades. After awhile the five men came out of the now quiet house and locked the doors behind them. During that time they had killed nearly all the English women and children. They had slaughtered them like beasts in the shambles. In the morning it appeared indeed that the work, however zealously undertaker^, had not been quite thorough. The strongest arms and sharpest sabers some- times fail to accomplish a long piece of work to perfect satisfaction. In the morning it would seem that some of the women, and certainly some of the children, were still alive; that is to say, were not dead. For the five men came then with several attendants to clear out the house of the captives. Their task was to tumble all the bodies into a dry well beyond some trees that grew near. A Large crowd of idlers assembled to watch this operation. Then it was seen by some of the spectators that certain of the women and children were not yet quite dead. Of the chil- dren some were alive, and even tried to get away. But the same well awaited them all. Some witnesses were of opinion that theNana's officials took the trouble to kill the still living before they tossed them down into the well; 12 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. others do not think they stopped for any such work of humanity, but flung them down just as they came to hand, the quick and the dead together. At all events, they were all deposited in the well. Any of the bodies that had clothes worth taking, were carefully stripped before being consigned to this open grave. When Cawnpore was after- ward taken by the English, those who had to look down into that well saw a sight the like of which no man in modern days had ever seen elsewhere. No attempt shall be made to describe it here. When the house of the massacre itself was entered, its floors and its walls told with terrible plainness of the scene they had witnessed. The plaster of the walls was scored and seamed with sword- slashes low down and in the corners, as if the poor women had crouched down in their mortal fright with some wild hope of escaping the blows. The floor was strewn with scraps of dresses, women's faded ragged finery, frilling, underclothing, broken combs, shoes, and tresses of hair. There were some small and neatly severed curls of hair too, which had fallen on the ground, but evidently had never been cut off by the rude weapon of a professional butcher. These doubtless were keepsakes that had been treasured to the last, parted with only when life and all were going. There was no inscription whatever on the walls when the house was first entered. Afterward a story was told of words found written there by some Englishwomen telling of hideous wrong done to them, and becpieathing to their countrymen the task of revenge. This story created a terrible sensation in England, as was but natural, and aroused a furious thirst for vengeance. It was not true. Some such inscription did appear on the walls afterward, but it is painful to have to say that it was a vulgar, and what would have been called in later times a " sensational" forgery. Our countrywomen died without leaving behind them any record of a desire on their part for vengeance. We may be sure they had other thoughts and other hopes as they died. One or two scraps of paper were found which recorded deaths and such-like interruptions of the monotony of imprisonment; but nothing more. The well of horrors has been filled up, and a memorial chapel sur- rounded by a garden built upon the spot. It was right to banish all trace of that hideous crime, and to replace the house and the well, as Mr. Trevelyan says, by " a fair gar- den and a graceful shrine." A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 13 Something, however, has still to be told of the Nana and his fortunes. He made one last stand against the victorious English in front of Cawnpore, and was completely defeated. He galloped into the city on a bleeding and exhausted horse; he fled thence to Bithoor, his residence. He had just time left, it is said, to order the murder of a separate captive, a woman who had previously been overlooked or purposely left behind. Then he took flight in the direc- tion of the Nepaulese marches; and he soon disappears from history. Nothing of his fate was ever known. Many years afterward England and India were treated to a momentary sensation by a story of the capture of Nana Sahib. But the man who was arrested proved to be an entirely different person; and indeed from the moment of his arrest few believed him to be the long-lost murderer of the English women. In days more superstitious than our own, popular faith would have found an easy explanation of the mystery which surrounded the close of Nana Sahib's career. He had done, it would have been said, the work of a fiend ; and he had disappeared as a fiend would do when his task was accomplished. CHAPTER XXXV. BECONQUEST. The capture of Delhi was effected on September 20th. The siege had been long and difficult; and for some time it did not seem to the general in command, Archdale Wil- son, that the small force he had could with any hope of success attempt to carry the city by assault. Colonel Baird Smith, who was chief of the engineer department, urged the attempt strongly on him; and at length it was made, and made with success, though not without many moments when failure seemed inevitable. Brigadier-genera] -Nichol- son led the storming columns, and paid for his bravery and success the price of a gallant life. He was shot through the body, and died three days after the English standard had been planted on the rout of the palace of the moguls. Nicholson was one of the lira vest and most capable officers whom the war produced. It is worthy of record as an evidence of the temper aroused t>\ be done, at a time of excitement when everybody thought be was bound to suggest something. It would have required a minister less fond of popularity than Lord Palmerston to resisl such an outcry, or pretend that be did not hear it. In this, as in so many other cases. Lord Palmerston only seemed to lead public opinion, while he was really following it. One other remark it is also fair to make. We have had no indications, as yet, of any likelihood that the adminis- 34 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tration of India is to become a thing to be scrambled for by second and third-class parliamentary politicians. The ad- ministration of India means, of course, the viceroyalty. Now there have been since Lord Canning, five viceroys, and of these three at least were not parliamentary politi- cians at all. Sir John Lawrence never was in parliament until he was raised to the peerage, after his return home from India. Lord Elgin may be fairly described as never having been in parliament, unless in the technical sense which makes every man on whom a peer's title is conferred a parliamentary personage; and the same holds true of Lord Lytton, who had no more to do with parliament than was involved in the fact of his having succeeded to his father's title. Lord Mayo and Lord Northbrook, to whom perhaps an invidious critic might apply the term second or third-class parliamentary politicians, on the ground that neither had obtained very high parliamentary distinction, proved nevertheless very capable, and indeed excellent administrators of Indian affairs, and fully justified the choice of the ministers who appointed them. Indeed, the truth is that the change made in the mode of governing India by the act which we have just been describing, was more of name than of reality. India was ruled by a governor-gen- eral and a board before ; it has been, ruled by a governor- general, called a viceroy, and a board since. The idea which Mr. Mill had evidently formed in his mind, of a restless and fussy parliament forever interfering in the affairs of India, proved to have been a false impression altogether. Parliament soon ceased to take the slightest interest, collectively, in the affairs of India. Once more it came to be observed that an Indian budget, or other question connected with the government of our great em- pire in the east, could thin the house as in the days before the mutiny. Again, as before, some few men profoundly in earnest took care and thought on the subject of India, and were condemned to pour out the results of their study and experience to a listening under-secretary and a chill array of green leather benches. At intervals, when some picpiant question arose, of little importance save to the court official or the partisan, like the project for conferring an imperial crown, brand-new and showy as a stage diadem on the wearer of the great historic emblem of English mon- archy, then, indeed, public opinion condescended to think A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 35 about India, and there were keen parliamentary debates and much excitement in fashionable circles. Sometimes, when there was talk of Russian ambition seeking, some- how, a pathway into India, a sort of public spirit was aroused, not, perhaps, wholly unlike the manly emotion of Squire Sullen, in the "Beaux Stratagem," when he dis- covers that a foreigner is paying court to the woman he has so long neglected. But as a rule the English parliament has wholly falsified Mr. Mill's prediction, and has not intruded itself in any way upon the political administra- tion of India. CHAPTER XXXVII. THE ORSINI BOMBS EXPLODE IN PARIS AND LONDON. The last chapter has told us that Lord Palmerston in- troduced a measure to transfer to the crown the govern- ment of India, but that unexpected events in the mean- while compelled him to resign office, and called Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli to power. These events had nothing to do directly with the general policy of Lord Palmerston or Lord Derby. At midday of January 14, 1858, no one could have had the slightest foreboding of anything about to happen which could affect the place of Lord Palmerston in English politics. He seemed to be as popular and as strong as a minister well could be. There had been a winter session called together on December 3rd, to pass a bill of indemnity for the government, who had suspended the bank charter act during the terrible money-panic of the autumn, and the failures of banks and commercial firms. The bank was authorized, by the suspension of the charter act, to extend its circulation two millions beyond the limit of that act. The effect of this step in restoring confidence was so great that the bank had only to put in circulation some £900,000 beyond the limit of 1844, and even that sum was replaced, and a certain reserve estab- lished by the close of the year. Most people thought the government had met the difficulty promptly and well, and were ready to offer their congratulations. Parliament ad- journed at Christmas, and was to meet early in February. The Princess Victoria, eldest daughter of the queen, was. 36 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMfiS. to be married to the Prince Frederick William, eldest son of the then Prince of Prussia, late German emperor, and it was to be Lord Palmerston's pleasant task, when parlia- ment resumed in February, to move a vote of congratula- tion to her majesty on her child's marriage. Meantime, however, on the evening of January 14th, Felice Orsini, an Italian exile, made his memorable attempt to assassinate the emperor of the French. Orsini lost himself, and he drew the English government down at the same time. Felice Orsini was well known in England. After his romantic escape from a prison at Mantua, he came to this country and delivered lectures in several towns. He described the incidents of his escape and denounced Aus- trian rule in Italy, and was made a lion of in many places. He was a handsome soldierly-looking man, with intensely dark eyes and dark beard, in appearance almost the model Italian conspirator of romance. He was not an orator, but he was able to tell his story clearly and well. One great object which he had in view was to endeavor to rouse up the English people to some policy of intervention on behalf of Italy against Austria. It is almost impossible for a man like Orsini to take the proper measure of the enthusiasm with which he is likely to be received in England. He goes to several public meetings; he is welcomed by immense crowds; he is cheered to the echo; and he gets to be under the impression that the whole country is on his side and ready to do anything he asks for. He does not understand that the crowds go for the most part out of curiosity; that they represent no policy or action what- ever, and that they will have forgotten all about him by the day after to-morrow. Of those who went to hear Orsini, and who applauded him so liberally, not one in ten probably had any distinct idea as to who he was or what cause he represented. He was an Italian exile who had escaped from tyranny of some sort somewhere, and he was a good-looking man; and that was enough for many or most of his audiences. But Orsini was thoroughly deceived. He convinced himself that he was forming public opinion in England; that. he was inspiring the people, that the people would inspire the government, and that the result would be an armed intervention on behalf of Lombardy and Venetia. At a meeting which he held in Liverpool a merchant of that town, who sympathized cordially with A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 3? Orsini's cause, had the good sense to get up and tell Orsini that he was cruelly deceiving himself if he fancied that England either would or could take any step to intervene on behalf of the Italian province then held by Austria. Orsini at first thought little of this warning. After awhile, however, he found out that the advice was sound and just. He saw that England would do nothing. He might have seen that even the English Liberals, with the exception of a very few enthusiasts, were entirely against his projects. They were in fact just as much opposed to the principle of intervention in the affairs of other states as the Conservatives. But Orsini set himself to devise ex- planations for what was simply the prudent and just deter- mination of all the statesmen and leading politicians of the country. He found the explanation in the subtle influ- ence of the emperor of the French. It happened that during Orsini's residence in this country the emperor and empress of the French came on a visit to the queen at Osborne; and Orsini saw in this a conclusive confirmation of his suspicions. Disappointed, despairing, and wild with anger against Louis Napoleon, he appears then to have allowed the idea to get possession of him that the removal of the emperor of the French from the scene was an in- dispensable preliminary to any policy having for its object the emancipation of Italy from Austrian rule. He brooded on this idea until it became a project and a passion. It transformed a soldier and a patriot into an assassin. On January 14th, Orsini and his fellow-conspirators made their attempt in the Rue Lepelletier in Paris. As the em- peror and empress of the French were driving up to the door of the opera-house in that street, Orsini and his com- panions flung at and into the carriage three shells or bombs shaped like a pear, and filled with detonating powder. The shells exploded, and killed and wounded many persons. 80 minute were the fragments into which the bombs burst that five hundred and sixteen wounds, great and little were inflicted by the explosion. This attempt at assassina- tion was unfavorably distinguished from most other attempts by the fact that it took no account of the number of innocent lives which it imperilled. The murderers of William the Silent, of Henry IV., of Abraham Lincoln, could at least say that they only struck at the objects of their hate. In Orsini's case t he emperor's wife, the em- 38 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. peror's attendants and servants, the harmless and uncon- cerned spectators in the crowd, who had no share in Aus- trian misgovernment, were all exposed to the danger of death or of horrible mutilation. Ten persons were killed; one hundred and fifty-six were wounded. For any pur- pose it aimed at the project was an utter failure. It only injured those who had nothing to do with Orsini's cause, or the condition of the Italian populations. We may as well dispose at once also of a theory which was for a time upheld by some who would not indeed justify or excuse Orsini's' attempt, but who were inclined to believe that it was not made wholly in vain. Orsini failed, it was said; but nevertheless the emperor of the French did soon after take up the cause of Italy; and he did so because he was afraid of the still living confederates of the Lombard Scaevola, and wished to purchase safety for himself by con- ciliating them. Even the prince consort wrote to a friend on April 11, 1858, about Louis Napoleon; "I fear he is at this moment meditating some Italian development, which is to serve as a lightning conductor, for ever since Orsini's letter he has been all for Italian independence." Histori- cal revelations made at a later period show that this is altogether a mistake. We now know that at the time of the congress of Paris Count Cavour had virtually arranged with the emperor the plans of policy which were afterward carried out, and that even before that time Cavour was satisfied in his own mind as to the ultimate certainty of Louis Napoleon's co-ojieration. Those who are glad to see Italy a nation may be glad, too, to know that Orsini's bombs had nothing to do with her success. Orsini was arrested. Curiously enough his arrest was made more easy by the fact that he himself received a wound from one of the fragments of shell, and he was tracked by his own bloodmarks. Great as his crime was he compelled a certain admiration from all men by the man- ner in which he bore his fate. He avowed his guilt, and made a strenuous effort to clear of all complicity in it a man who was accused of being one of the conspirators. He wrote from his prison to the emperor, beseeching him to throw his influence into the national cause of Italy. He made no appeal on his own behalf. The emperor, it is believed, was well inclined to spare his life; but the com- prehensive heinousuess of the crime which took in so many A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 39 utterly blameless persons, rendered it almost impossible to allow the leading conspirator to escape. As it was, how- ever, the French government certainly showed no unrea- sonable severity. Four persons were put on trial as partici- pators in the attempt, three of them having actually thrown the bombs. Only two, however, were executed, Orsini and Pierri ; the other two were sentenced to penal servitude for life. This, on the whole, was merciful deal- ing. Three Fenians, it must be remembered, were exe- cuted in Manchester for an attempt to rescue some prisoners, in which one police officer was killed by one shot. Orsini's project was a good deal more criminal, most sane persons will admit, than a mere attempt to rescue a prisoner; and it was the cause not of one but of many deaths. Orsini died like a soldier, without bravado and without the slightest outward show of fear. As he and his companion Pierri were mounting the scaffold, he was heard to encourage the latter in a quiet tone. Pierri con- tinued to show signs of agitation, and then Orsini was heard to say in a voice of gentle remonstrance, " Try to be calm, my friend; try to be calm." France was not very calm under the circumstances. An outburst of anger followed the attempt in the Rue Lepelletier; but the anger was not so much against Orsini as against England. One of the persons charged along with Orsini, although he was not tried in Paris, for he could not be found there, was a Frenchman, Simon Ber- nard, who had long been living in London. It was certain that many of the arrangements for the plot were made in London. The bombs were manufactured in Birmingham, and were ordered for Orsini by an Englishman. It was known that Orsini had many friends and admirers in this country. The imperialists in France at once assumed that England was a country where assassination of foreign sov- ereigns was encouraged by the population, and not discour- aged by the laws. The French minister for foreign affairs, Count Walewski, wrote a despatch, in which he asked whether England considered that hospitality was due to assassins. "Ought English legislation," he asked, "to contribute to favor their designs and their attempts, and oan it continue to shelter persons who by their flagrant acts put themselves outside the pale of common rights, and under the ban of humanity?" The Due de Persigny, then 40 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ambassador of France in England, made a very foolish and unfortunate reply to a deputation from the corporation of London, in which he took on himself to point out that if the law of England was strong enough to put down con- spiracies for assassination it ought to be put in mo'tion, and if it were not, it ought to be made stronger. Persigny did not indeed put this forward as his own contribution of ad- vice to England. H^ gave it as an expression of the public feeling of France, and as an explanation of the anger which was aflame in that country. "France," he said, "does not understand and cannot understand this state of things; and in that lies the danger, for she may mistake the true sentiments of her ally and may cease to believe in England's sincerity." Talk of that kind would have been excusable and natural on the part of an imperialist orator in the Corps Legislatif in Paris; but it was silly and impertinent when it came from a professional diplomatist. That flavor of the canteen and the barrack-room, which the prince consort detected and disliked in the emperor's associates, was very perceptible in Persigny's harangue. The barrack- room and the canteen, however, had much more to say in the matter. Addresses of congratulation were poured in upon the emperor from the French army, and many of them were full of insulting allusions to England as the sheltering-ground of assassination. One regiment declared that it longed to demand an account from " the land of impurity which contains the haunts of the monsters who are sheltered by its laws." This regiment begged of the emperor to give them the order, " and we will pursue them even to their stronghold." In another address, it was urged that " the infamous haunt (repaire infdme) in which machinations so infernal are planned" — London, that is — "should be destroyed forever." Some of these addresses were inserted in the Moniteur, tben the official organ of the French government. It was afterward explained that the official sanction thus apparently given to the rhodo- montades of the French colonels was a mere piece of inad- vertence. There were so many addresses sent in, it was said, that some of them escaped examination. Count Waleswki expressed the regret of the emperor that language and sentiments so utterly unlike his own should have found their way into publicity. It is certain that Louis Napo- leon would never have deliberately sanctioned the obstrep- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TlMKS. 41 erous buffoonery of such sentences as we have referred to; but anyhow the addresses were published, were read in England, and aroused in this country an amount of popu- lar resentment not unlikely to explode in utterances as vehement and thoughtless as those of the angry French colonels themselves. Let us do justice to the French colonels. Their language was ludicrous; nothing but the grossness of its absurdity saved it from being intolerably offensive. But the feeling which dictated it was not unnatural. Foreign countries always find it hard to understand the principles of liberty which are established in England. They assume that if a state allows certain things to be done it must be because the state wishes to see them done. If men are allowed to plot against foreign sovereigns in England it can only be, they argue, because the English government likes to have plots carried on against foreign sovereigns. It would be impos- sible to deny that people in this country are singularly thoughtless in their encouragement of any manner of for- eign revolution. Even where there are restrictive laws public opinion will hardly sanction their being carried out. London is and long has been the head-quarters of revolutionary plot. No one knew that better than Louis Napoleon himself. No one had made more unscrupulous use of a domicil in London to carry out political and revo- lutionary projects. Associations have been formed in Lon- don to supply men and money to Don Carlos, to Queen Isabella, to the Polish revolutionists, to Hungary, to Gari- baldi, to the Southern Confederation, to the Circassians, to anybody and everybody who could say that he represented a defeat, or a victory, or a national cause, or anything. In 1800, Lord John Russell admitted in the House of Com- mons that it would be impossible to put into execution our laws against foreign enlistment, because every political party and almost every man was concerned in breaking them at one time or another. He referred to the fact that some forty years before the cause of Greece against Turkey had been taken, up openly in London by public men of the highest mark, and that money, arms, and men were got together for Greece without the slightest pretense at concealment. While he was speaking a Legion was being formed in one place to light for Victor Emmanuel against the pope; in another place to fight for the pope against 42 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Victor Emmanuel. Every refugee was virtually free to make Loudon a basis of operations against the government which had caused his exile. There were, it is right to say, men who construed the conditions upon which they were sheltered in England with a conscientious severity. They held that they were protected by this country on the implied understanding that they took no part in any proceedings that might tend to embarrass her in her deal- ings with foreign states. They argued that the obligation on them, whether declared or not, was exactly the same as that which rests on one who asks and obtains the hospi- tality and shelter of a private house: the obligation not to involve his host in quarrels with his neighbors. M. Louis Blanc, for example, who lived some twenty years in England, declined on principle to take part in secret political movements of any kind during all the time. But the great majority of the exiles of all countries were inces- santly engaged in political plots and conspiracies; and undoubtedly some of these were nothing more or less than conspiracies to assassinate. Many of the leading exiles were intimately associated with prominent and distin- guished Englishmen; and these same exiles were naturally associated to some extent with many of their own country- men of a lower and less scrupulous class. It had therefore happened more than once before this time, and it happened more than once afterward, that when a plot at assassina- tion was discovered the plotters were found to have been on more or less intimate terms with some leading exiles in London, who themselves were well acquainted with eminent Englishmen. Men with a taste for assassination are to be found among the camp-followers of every political army. To assume that because the leaders of the party may have been now and then associated with them, they must there- fore be acquainted with, and ought to be held responsible for all their plots, is not less absurd than it would be to assume that an officer in a campaign must have been in the secret when some reprobate of his regiment was about to plunder a house. But the French colonels saw that the assassin this time was not a nameless scoundrel, but a man of birth and distinction like Felice Orsini, who had been received and welcomed everywhere in England. It is not very surprising if they assumed that his projects had the approval and favor of English public opinion. The A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 43 French government indeed ought to have known better. But the French government lost for the moment its sense and self-control. A semi-official pamphlet, published in Paris and entitled "the Emperor Napoleon the Third and England," actually went the ridiculous length of describ- ing an obscure debating club in a Fleet Street public-house where a few dozen honest fellows smoked their pipes of a night and talked hazy politics, as a formidable political institution where regicide was nightly preached to fanatical desperadoes. Thus we had the public excited on both sides. The feeling of anger on this side was intensified by the convic- tion that France was insulting us because she thought England was crippled by her troubles in India, and had no power to resent an insult. It was while men here were smarting under this sense of wrong that Lord Palmerston introduced his famous measure for the suppression and punishment of conspiracies to murder. The bill was -introduced in consequence of the despatch of Count Walewski. In that despatch it was suggested to the English government that they ought to do something to strengthen their law. "Full of confidence," Count Walewski said, "in the exalted reason of the English cabinet, we abstain from all indication as regards the measures which it may be suitable to take. We rely on them for a careful appreciation of the decision which they shall judge most proper, and we congratulate ourselves in the firm persuasion that we shall not have appealed in vain to their conscience and their loyalty." The words were very civil. They were words as sweet as those of which Cassius says, that "they rob the Hybla bees and leave them honeyless." Nor was the request they contained in itself unreasonable. Long afterward this country had to acknowledge in reply to the demand of the United States, that a nation cannot get rid of her responsibility to a for- eign people by pleading that her municipal legislation does not provide for this or that emergency. If somebody domiciled among us shoots his arrow over the house and hurts our foreign brother, it is not enough for us to say, when complaint is made that we have no law to prevent people from shooting arrows out of our premises. The natural rejoiner is, "Then you had better make such a law j you are not to injure us and get off by saying your U A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. laws allow us to be injured." But the conditions under which the request was made by France had put England in the worse possible mood for acceding to it. We have all heard of the story of General Jackson, who was on one occasion very near refusing in wrath a reasonable and courteous request of the French government, because his secretary, in translating the letter for Jackson, who did not know French, began with the words "the French government demands." Jackson vehemently declared that if the French government dared to demand anything of the United States they should not have it. It was only when it had been made quite clear to him that the French word demander did not by any means correspond with the English word "demand," that the angry soldier consented even to listen to the representation of France. The English public mind was now somewhat in Jackson's mood. It was under the impression that France was mak- ing a demand, and was not in the temper to grant it. Ominous questions were put to the government in both houses of parliament. In the House of Commons Mr. Roebuck asked whether any communications had passed between the governments of England and France with respect to the alien act or any portion of our criminal code. Lord Palmerston answered by mentioning Count Walewski's despatch, which he said should be laid before the house. He added a few words about the addresses of the French regiments, and pleaded that allowance should be made for the irritation caused by the attempt on the life of the emperor. He was asked a significant question — had the government sent any answer to Count Walewski's despatch? No, was the reply; her majetsy's government had not answered it; not yet. Two or three days after Lord Palmerston moved for leave to bring in the conspiracy-to-murder bill. The chief object of the measure was to make conspiracy to murder a felony instead of a mere misdemeanor, as it had been in England, and to render it liable to penal servitude for any period varying from five years to a whole life. Lord Palmerston made a feeble and formal attempt to prove that his bill was introduced simply as a measure of needed reform in our criminal legislation, and without special reference to anything that had happened in France. The law against conspiracy to murder was very light in England, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 45 he showed, and was very severe in Ireland. It was now proposed to make the law the same in both countries — that was all. Of course no one was deceived by this explana- tion. The bill itself was as much of a sham as the explana- tion. Such a measure would not have been of any account whatever as regarded the offenses against which it was particularly directed. As Lord John Russell said, in the debate, it would argue great ignorance of human nature to imagine that a fanatic of the Orsini class, or any of those whom such a man could fascinate by his influence, would be deterred by the mere possibility of a sentence of penal servitude. Lord Palmerston, we may be sure, did not put the slightest faith in the efficacy of the piece of legislation he had undertaken to recommend to parliament. It was just as in the case of the ecclesiastical titles bill. He was compelled to believe that the government would have to do something; and he came after awhile, to the conclusion that the most harmless measure would be the best. He had had an idea of asking parliament to empower the sec- retary of state to send out of the country foreigners whom the government believed to be engaged in plotting against the life of a foreign sovereign; the government being under obligation to explain the grounds for their belief and their action to a secret committee of parliament, or to a com- mittee composed of the three chiefs of the law courts. Such a measure as this would probably have proved effec- tive; but it would have been impossible to induce the House of Commons to pass such a bill, or to entrust such power to any government. Indeed, if it were not certain that Palmerston did entertain such a project, the language he used in his speech when introducing the conspiracy bill might lead one to believe that nothing could have been further from his thoughts. He disclaimed any intention to propose a measure which should give power to a govern- ment to remove aliens on mere suspicion. He "was sure it was needless for him to say he had no such intention." He had, however, such an intention at one time. His biographer, Mr. Evelyn Ashley, is clear on that point, and there cannot be better authority. It must have been only for a moment that Palmerston even thought of making a proposal of the kind to an English parliament. He bad not been long enough in the home office, it would seem, to understand thoroughly the temper of his countrymen. 46 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Indeed, in this instance he made a mistake every way. When he assented to the introduction of the ecclesiastical titles bill he was right in thinking that English public opinion wisbed to have something done; but in this case the inclination of public opinion was the other way; it wished to have nothing done — at least, just at that mo- ment. Mr. Kinglake moved an amendment, formally ex- pressing the sympathy of the house with the French people, on account of the attempt made against the em- peror, but declaring it inexpedient to legislate, in compli- ance with the demand made in Count Walewski's despatch of January 20th, " until further information is before it of the communications of the two governments subsequent to the date of that despatch." A discussion took place, in which Mr. Eoebuck pointed out, very properly, that in any new measure of legislation it was not punishment of crime accomplished that was required, but discovery of crime meditated ; and he also showed, with much effect, that in some cases, when the English government had actually warned the government of France that some plot was afoot, and that the plotters had left for Paris, the Paris police were unable to find them out, or to benefit in any way by the action of the English authorities. Mr. Disraeli voted for the bringing in of the bill, and made a cautious speech, in which he showed himself in favor of some sort of legislation, but did not commit himself to approval of that particular measure. This prudence proved con- venient afterward, when the crisis of the debate showed that it would be well for him to throw himself into the ranks of the opponents of the measure. The bill was read a first time. Two hundred and ninety -nine votes were for it; only ninety-nine against. But before it came on for a second reading public opinion was beginning to declare ominously against it. The fact that the govern- ment had not answered the despatch of Count Walewski told heavily against them. It was afterward explained that Lord Cowley had .been instructed to answer it ver- bally, and that Lord Palmerston thought this course the more prudent, and the more likely to avoid an increase of irritation between the two countries. But public opinion in England was not now to be propitiated by counsels of moderation. The idea had gone abroad that Lord Palmer- ston was truckling to the emperor of the French, and that A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 47 the very right of asylum which England had so long afforded to the exiles of all nations, was to be sacrificed at the bidding of one who had been glad to avail himself of it in his hour of need. This idea received support from the arrest of Dr. Simon Bernard, a French refugee, who was immediately put on trial as an accomplice in Orsini's plot. Bernard was a na- tive of the South of France, a surgeon by profession, and had lived a long time in England. He must have been, in outward aspect at least, the very type of a French Red Republican conspirator, to judge by the description given of him in the papers of the day. He is described as thin and worn, "with dark restless eyes, sallow complexion, a thick mustache, and a profusion of long black hair combed backward and reaching nearly to his shoulders, and expos- ing a broad but low and receding forehead." The arrest of Bernard may have been a very proper thing, but it came in with most untimely effect upon the government. It was understood to have been made by virtue of information sent over from Paris, and no one could have failed to observe that the loosest accusations of that kind were always coming from the French capital. Many persons were influenced in their belief of Bernard's innocence by the fact, which does assuredly count for something, that Orsini himself had almost with his dying breath declared that Bernard knew nothing of the intended assassination. Not a few made up their minds that he was innocent because the French gov- ernment accused him of guilt; and still more declared that innocent or guilty he ought not to be arrested by English authorities at the bidding of a French emperor. At the same time the Cantillon story was revived; the story of the legacy left by the First Napoleon to the man who attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington, and it was insisted that the legacy had been paid to Oantillion by the authority of Napoleon III. The debate was over and the conspiracy bill disposed of before the Bernard trial came to an end; but we may anticipate by a few days, and finish the Bernard story. Bernard was tried at the central criminal court under existing law; lie was defended by Mr. Edwin James, a well-known criminal lawyer, and lie was acquitted. The trial was a practical evidence of the inutility of such special legislation as that which Lord Palnierston attempted to 48 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. introduce. A new law of conspiracy could not have fur- nished any new evidence against Bernard or persuaded a jury to convict him on such evidence as there was. In the prevailing temper of the public the evidence should have been very clear indeed to induce an ordinary English jury to convict a man like Bernard, and the evidence of his knowledge of an intended assassination was anything but clear. Mr. Edwin James improved the hour. He made the trial an occasion for a speech denunciatory of tyrants generally, and he appealed in impassioned language to the British jury to answer the French tyrant by their verdict; which they did accordingly. Mr. James became a sort of popular hero for the time in consequence of his oration. He had rhetorical talent enough to make him a sort of Old Bailey Erskine, a Buzfurz Berryer. He set up for a liberal politician and tribune of the people, and was enabled after a while to transfer his eloquence to the House of Commons. He vapored about as a friend of Italy and Garibaldi and oppressed nationalities generally for a year or two after; got into money and other difficulties, and had to extinguish his political career suddenly and ignominiously. He was indeed heard of after. He went to America, and he came back again. But we need not speak of him any more. In the midst of the commotion caused by Bernard's arrest, and by the offer of £200 reward for the detection of an Englishman named Allsopp, also charged with com- plicity in the plot, Mr. Milner Gibson quietly gave notice of an amendment to the second reading of the conspiracy bill. The amendment proposed to declare that while the house heard with regret the allegation that the recent crime had been devised in England, and was always ready to assist in remedying any proved defects in the criminal law, "yet it cannot but regret that her majesty's govern- ment, previously to inviting the house to amend the law of conspiracy by the second reading of this bill at the present time, have not felt it to be their duty to make some reply to the important despatch received from the French gov- ernment, dated Paris, January 20, 1858, and which has been laid before parliament." It might have been seen at once that this was a more serious business for the govern- ment than Mr. Kinglake's amendment. In forecasting the result of a motion in the House of Commons much depends on the person who brings it forward. Has he a party A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 49 behind him? If so, then the tiling is important. If not, let his ability be what it will, his motion is looked on as a mere expression of personal opinion, interesting, perhaps, but without political consequence. Mr. Kinglake was emphatically a man without a party behind him ; Mr. Gib- son was emphatically a man of party and of practical politics. Mr. Kinglake was a brilliant literary man who had proved little better than a failure in the House; Mr. Gibson was a successful member of parliament and nothing else. No one could have supposed that Mr. Gibson was likely to get up a discussion for the mere sake of expressing his own opinion or making a display. He was one of those who had been turned out of parliament when Palm- erston made his triumphant appeal to the country on the China question. He was one of those whom Punch made fun of by a • new adaptation of the old " il n^y a pas de quoi" story; one of those who could not sit because they had no seats. Now he had just been returned to parlia- ment by another constituency; and he was not likely to be the mouthpiece of a merely formal challenge to the policy of the government. When the debate on the second read- ing came on it began soon to be seen that the condition of things was grave for Lord Palmerston. Every hour and every speech made it more ominous. Mr. Gladstone spoke eloquently against the government. Mr. Disraeli suddenly discovered that he was bound to vote against the second reading, although he had voted for the first. The govern- ment, he argued, had not yet answered the despatch as they might have done in the interval, and as they had not vindicated the honor of England, the House of Commons could not entrust them with the measure they demanded. Lord Palmerston saw that, in homely phrase, the game was up. He was greatly annoyed ; he lost his temper, and did not even try to conceal the fact that he had lost it. He attacked Mr. Milner Gibson fiercely; declared that "he appears for the first time in my memory as the cham- pion of the dignity and honor of the country." He wan- dered off into an attack on the whole peace party, or Manchester school, and told some story about one of their newspapers which laid it down as a doctrine, that it would not matter if a foreign enemy conquered and occupied England so long as they were allowed to work their mills. All this was in curiously bad taste. For a genial and kindly 50 A HISTORY OF OUtt OWN TIMES. as well as a graceful man, it was singular how completely Lord Palmerston always lost liis good manners when he lost his temper. Under the influence of sudden anger, luckily a rare influence with him, he could be actually vulgar. He was merely vulgar, for example, when on one occasion, wishing to throw ridicule on the pacific principles of Mr. Bright, he alluded to him in the House of Commons as " the honorable and reverend gentleman." Lord Palmer- ston, in his reply to Mr. Milner Gibson, showed a positive spitefulness of tone and temper very unusual in him and especially unbecoming in a losing man. A statesman may rise as he will, but he should fall with dignity. When the division was taken it appeared that there were two hun- dred and fifteen votes for the second reading and two hun- dred and thirty-four against it. The government, there- fore, were left in a minority of nineteen; one hundred and forty-six Conservatives were in the majority and eighty- four Liberals. Besides these there were such of the Peelite party as Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cardwell, and Mr. Sidney Herbert. Lord Palmerston at once made up his mind to resign. His resignation was accepted. Not quite a year had passed since the general elections sent Lord Palmerston into power triumphant over the routed Liberals and the prostrate Manchester school. The leaders of the Manchester party were actually driven from their seats. There was not a Cobden or a Bright to face the conqueror in parliament. Not quite a year, and now, on the motion of one of the lieutenants of that same party returned to their position again, Lord Palmerston is ejected from office. Palmerston once talked of having his " tit-for-tat with John Russell." The peace party now had their tit-for-tat with him. "Cassio hath beaten thee, and thou by that small hurt has cashiered Cassio." Lord Palmerston had the satisfaction before he left office of being able to announce the capture of Canton. The operations against China had been virtually suspended, it will be remembered, when the Indian mutiny broke out. To adopt the happy illustration of a clever writer, England had dealt with China for the time as a backwoodsman sometimes does with a tree in the American forests — "girdled" it with the ax, so as to mark it for felling at a more convenient opportunity. She had now got the co-operation of France. Prance had a complaint of long A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 51 standing against China on account of the murder of some missionaries, for which redress had been asked in vain. The emperor of the French was very glad to have an oppor- tunity of joining his arms with those of England in any foreign enterprise. It advertised the empire cheaply; it showed to Frenchmen how active the emperor was, and how closely he had at heart the honor and the interests of France. An expedition to China in association with England could not be much of a risk, and would look well in the newspapers; whereas if England were to be allowed to go alone she would seem to be making too much of a position for herself in the east. There was, there- fore, an allied attack made upon Canton, and of course the city was easily captured. Commissioner Yeh himself was taken prisoner, not until he had been sought for and hunted out in most ignominious fashion.- He was found at last hidden away in some obscure part of a house. He was known by his enormous fatness. One of our officers caught hold of him; Yeh tried still to get away. A British seaman seized Yeh by his pigtail, twisted the tail several times round his hand, and the unfortunate Chinese dig- nitary was thus a helpless and ludicrous prisoner. He was not hurt in any serious way; but otherwise he was treated with about as much consideration as schoolboys show toward a captured cat. The whole story of his cap- ture may be read in the journals of the day, in some of which it is treated as though it were an exploit worthy of heroes, and as if a Chinese with a pigtail were obviously a person on whom any of the courtesies of war would be thrown away. When it was convenient to let loose Yeh's pigtail, he was put on board an English man-of-war, and afterward sent to Calcutta, where he died early in the fol- lowing year. Unless report greatly belied him he had been exceptionally cruel, even for a Chinese official. It was said that he had ordered the beheading of about one hundred thousand rebels. There may he exaggeration in this number, but, as Voltaire says in another case, even if we reduce the total to half, "cela serait encore admirable." The English and French Envoys, Lord Elgin and Baron Gros, succeeded in making a treaty with China. By the conditions of the treaty, Kngland and France were to have ministers at the Chinese court, on certain special occasions at least, and china was to he represented in London and 52 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Paris; there was to be toleration of Christianity in China, and a certain freedom of access to Chinese rivers for English and French mercantile vessels, and to the interior of China for English and French subjects. China was to pay the expenses of the war. It was further agreed that the term "barbarian" was no longer to be applied to Europeans in China. There was great congratulation in England over this treaty, and the prospect it afforded of a lasting peace with China. The peace thus procured lasted in fact exactly a year. Lord Palmerston then was out of office. Having nothing in particular to do, he presently went over to Compiegne on a visit to the emperor of the French. For the second time his friendship for Louis Napoleon had cost him his place. CHAPTER XXXVIII. "ON the true faith of a christian." When Mr. Disraeli became once more leader of the House of Commons, he must have felt that he had almost as difficult a path to tread as that of him described in "Henry the Fourth," who has to "o'er walk a current roaring loud on the unsteadfast footing of a spear." The ministry of Lord Derby, whereof Mr. Disraeli was undoub- tedly the sense-carrier, was not supported by a parliamentary majority nor could it pretend to great intellectual and ad- ministrate ability. It had in its ranks two or three men of something like statesman capacity, and a number of respectable persons possessing abilities about equal to those of any intelligent business man or county magistrate. Mr. Disraeli of course became chancellor of the exchequer. Lord Stanley undertook the colonies; Mr. Walpole made a painstaking and conscientious home secretary, as long as he continued to hold the office. Lord Malmesbury muddled on with foreign affairs somehow; Lord Ellenborough's brilliant eccentric light preplexed for a brief space the Indian department. General Peel was secretary for war, and Mr. Henley president of the board of trade. Lord Naas, afterward Lord Mayo, became chief secretary for Ireland, and was then supposed to be nothing more than A BISTORT Off OtTR OWN TIMES. 53 a kindly, sweet-tempered man, of whom his most admiring friends would never have ventured to foreshadow such a destiny as that he should succeed to the place of a Canning and an Elgin, and govern the new India to which so many anxious eves were turned. Sir John Pakington was made first lord of the admiralty, because a place of some kind had to be found for him, and he was as likely to do well at the head of the navy as anywhere else. A ridiculous story, probably altogether untrue, used to be told of President Lincoln in some of the difficult days of the American civil war. He wanted a commander-in-chief, and he hap- pened to be in conversation with a friend on the subject of the war. Suddenly addressing the friend, he asked him if he had ever commanded an army. "No, Mr. President," was the reply. " Do you think you could command an army?" "I presume so, Mr. President; I know nothing to the contrary-" He was appointed commander-in-chief at once. One might without great stretch of imagination conceive of a conversation of the same kind taking place between Sir John Pakington and Lord Derby. Sir John Pakington had no reason to know that he might not prove equal to the administration of the navy, and he became first lord of the admiralty accordingly. No conservative government could be supposed to get on without Lord John Manners, and luckily there was the department of public works for him. Lord Stanley was regarded as a statesman of great and peculiar promise. The party to which he belonged were inclined to make him an object of especial pride because he seemed to have in a very remarkable degree the very qualities which most of their leading members were gener- ally accused of wanting. The epithet which Mr. Mill at a later period applied to the Tories, that of the stupid party, was the expression of a feeling very common in the political world, and under which many of the Conserva- tives themselves winced. The more intelligent a Conserva- tive was the more was he inclined to chafe at the ignorance and dullness of many of the party. It was therefore with particular satisfaction that intelligent Tories saw among themselves a young statesman, who appeared to have all those qualities of intellect, and those educational endow- ments which the bulk of the party did not possess, and what was worse did not even miss. Lord Stanley had a 54 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. calm, meditative intellect. He studied politics as one may study a science. He understood political economy, that new-fangled science which had so hewildered his party, and of which the Peelites and the Manchester men made so much account. He had traveled much; not merely making the old-fashioned grand tour, which most of the Tory country gentlemen had themselves made, but visiting the United States and Canada and the Indies, East and West. He was understood to know all about geography and cotton and sugar; and he had come up into politics in a happy age when the question of free trade was understood to be settled. The Tories were proud of him, as a demo- cratic mob is proud of an aristocratic leader, or as a working- men's convention is proud of the co-operation of some dis- tinguished scholar. Lord Stanley was strangely unlike his father in intellect and temperament. The one man was indeed almost the very opposite of the other. Lord Derby was all instinct and passion; Lord Stanley was all method and calculation. Lord Derby amused himself in the intervals of political work by translating classic epics and odes; Lord Stanley beguiled an interval of leisure by the reading of Blue-books. Lord Derby's eloquence when at its worst became fiery nonsense; Lord Stanley's sank occa- sionally to be nothing better than platitude. The extreme of the one was rhapsody, and of the other commonplace. Lord Derby was too hot and impulsive to be always a sound statesman ; Lord Stanley was too coldly methodical to be the statesman of a crisis. Both men were in a certain sense superficial and deceptive. Lord Derby's eloquence had no great depth in it; and Lord Stanley's wisdom often proved somewhat thin. The career of Lord Stanley did not afterward bear out the expectations that were originally formed of him. He proved to be methodical, sensible, conscientious, slow. He belonged, perhaps, to that class of men about whom Goethe said, that if they could only once commit some extravagance we should have greater hopes of their future wisdom. He did not commit any extrava- gance; he remained careful, prudent, and slow. But at the time when he accepted the Indian secretaryship it was still hoped that he would, to use a homely expression, warm to his work, and on both sides of the political contest people looked to him as a new and a great figure in Con- servative politics. He was not an orator; he had nothing A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 55 whatever of the orator in language or in temperament. His manner was ineffective; his delivery was decidedly bad. But his words carried weight with them, and even his commonplaces were received by some of his party as the utterances of an oracle. There were men among the Con- servatives of the back benches who secretly hoped that in this wise young man was the upcoming statesman who was to deliver the party from the thraldom of eccentric genius, and of an eloquence which, however brilliantly it fought their battles, seemed to them hardly a respectable sort of gift to be employed in the service of gentlemanlike Tory principles. Lord Stanley had been in office before. During his father's first administration he had acted as under secre- tary for foreign affairs. On the death of Sir William Molesworth, Lord Palmerston had offered the colonial secretaryship to Lord Stanley; but the latter, although his Toryism was of the most moderate and liberal kind, did not see his way to take a seat in a Liberal administration. His appearance therefore as a cabinet minister in the gov- ernment formed by his father was an event looked to with great interest all over the country. The Liberals were not without a hope that he might some day find himself driven by his conscientiousness and his clear unprejudiced intelli- gence into the ranks of avowed Liberalism. It was con- fidently predicted of him in a Liberal review two or three years after this time, that he would one day be found a prominent member of a liberal cabinet under the premier- ship of Mr. Gladstone. For the present, however, he is still the rising light — a somewhat cold and colorless light indeed — of Conservatism. Arrayed against the Conservatives was a party disjointed indeed for the present, but capable at any moment, if they could only agree", of easily overturning the government of Lord Derby. The superiority of the opposition in debating power was simply overwhelming. In the House of Com- mons Mr. Disraeli was the only first-class debater, with the exception, perhaps, of the new solicitor-general, Sir Hugh Cairns; and Sir Hugh Cairns, being new to office, was not expected as yet to carry very heavy metal in great debate. The best of their colleagues could only be called a respect- able second elass. Against them were Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, Sir James Graham, 56 a Misronr of our own times. Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright, every one of whom was a first-class debater; some of them great parliamentary orators; some too, with the influence that comes from the fact of their having led ministries and con- ducted wars. In no political assembly in the world does experience of office and authority tell for more than in the House of Commons. To have held office confers a certain dignity even on mediocrity. The man who has held office, and who sits on the front bench opposite the ministry, has a sort of prescriptive right to be heard whenever he stands up to address the house, in preference to the most rising and brilliant talker who has never yet been a member of an administration. Mr. Disraeli had opposed to him not merely the eloquence of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, but the authority of Lord John Kussell and Lord Palmerston. It required much dexterity to make a decent show of carry- ing on a government under such conditions. Mr. Disraeli well knew that his party held office only on sufferance from their opponents. If they attempted nothing, they were certain to be censured for inactivity ; if they attempted any- thing, there was the chance of their exposing themselves to the combined attack of all the factions of the Liberal party. Luckily for them it was not easy to bring about such a combination just yet; but whenever it came, there was foreshown the end of the ministry. Lord Derby's government quietly dropped the unlucky conspiracy bill. England and France were alike glad to be out of the difficulty. There was a short interchange of correspondence in which the French government explained that they really had meant nothing in particular, and it was then announced to both houses of parliament that the misunderstanding was at an end, and that friendship had set in again. We have seen already how the India bill was carried. Lord Derby's tenure of office was made remark- able by the success of one measure which must have given much personal satisfaction to Mr. Disraeli. The son of a Jewish father, the descendant of an ancient Jewish race, himself received as a child into the Jewish community, Mr. Disraeli had since his earliest years of intelligence been a Christian. "I am, as I have ever been," he said himself when giving evidence once in a court of law, "a Christian." But he had never renounced his sympathies with the race to which he belonged, and the faith in which his fathers A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 5? worshiped. He had always stood up for the Jews. He had glorified the genius and the influence of the Jews in many pages of romantic, high-flown, and sometimes very turgid eloquence. He had in some of his novels seemingly set ahout to persuade his readers that all of good and great the modern world had seen was due to the unceasing intellectual activity of the Jew. He had vindicated with as sweeping a liberality the virtues of the Jewish race. In one really fine and striking sentence he declares that " a Jew is never seen upon the scaffold unless it be at an auto-da-fS." "Forty years ago," he says in his "Lord George Bentinck," — " not a longer period than the children of Israel were wandering in the desert — the two most dis- honored races in Europe were the Attic and the Hebrew, and they were the two races that had done most for man- kind." Mr. Disraeli had the good fortune to see the civil eman- cipation of the Jews accomplished during the time of his leadership of the House of Commons. It was a coincidence merely. He had always assisted the movement toward that end; unlike some other men who carried on their faces the evidences of their Hebrew extraction, and who yet made themselves conspicuous for their opposition to it. But the success did not come from any inspiration of his; and most of his colleagues in power resisted it as long as they could. His former chief, Lord George Bentinck, it will be remembered, had resigned his leadership of the party in the House of Commons, because of the complaints made when he spoke and voted for the removal of Jewish disabilities. It was in July, 1858, that the long political and sectarian struggle came to an end. Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, who has but lately died was allowed to take his seat in the House of Commons on the 26th of that month as one of the representatives of the city of London, and the controversy about, .Jewish disabilities was over at last. It is not uninteresting, before we trace the history of this struggle to its close, to observe how com- pletely the conditions under which it was once carried on had changed in recent years. Of late the opposition to the claims of the dews came almost exclusively from the Tories, and especially from the Tories in the House of Lords, from the high churchmen and from the bishops. A century before that time the bishops were for the most 58 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. part very willing that justice should be done to the Jews; and statesmen and professional politicians, looking at the question perhaps rather from the view of obvious necessity and expediency, were well-inclined to favor the claim made for rather than by their Jewish fellow-subjects. But at that time the popular voice cried out furiously against the Jews. The old traditions of calumny and hatred still had full influence, and the English people, as a whole, were determined that they would not admit the Jews to the rights of citizenship. They would borrow from them, buy from them, accept any manner of service from them, but they would not allow of their being represented in parliament. As time went on all this feeling changed. The public in general became, either absolutely indifferent to the question of Jewish citizenship or decidedly in favor of it. No statesman had the slightest excuse for profess- ing to believe that an outcry would be raised by the people if he attempted to procure the representation of Jews by Jews in parliament. We have seen how by steps the Jews made their way into municipal office and into the magis- tracy. At the same time persistent efforts were being made to obtain for them the right to be elected to the House of Commons. On April 5, 1830, Mr. Eobert Grant, then a colleague of one of the Gurney family in the repre- sentation of Norwich, moved for leave to bring in a bill to repeal the civil disabilities affecting British-born subjects professing the Jewish religion. The claim which Mr. Grant made for the Jews was simply that they should be allowed to enjoy all those rights which we may call fundamental to the condition of the British subject, without having to profess the religion of the state. At that time the Jews were unable to take the oath of allegiance, passed in Elizabeth's reign, although it had nothing in its substance or language opposed to their claims, inasmuch as it was sworn on the Evangelists. Nor could they take the oath of adjuration, intended to guard against the return of the Stuarts, because that oath contained the words "on the true faith of a Chris- tian." Before the repeal of the test and corporations act in 1828, the sacrament had to be taken as a condition of holding any corporate office, and had to be taken before admission. In the case of offices held under the crown it might be taken after admission. Jews, however, did ob- tain admission to corporate offices, not expressly as Jews, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 59 but as all Dissenters obtained it; that is to say by breaking the law, and having an annual indemnity bill passed to relieve them from the penal consequences. The test and corporations act put an end to this anomaly as regarded the Dissenters, but it unconsciously imposed a new disa- bility on the Jew. The new declaration, substituted for the old oath, contained the words "on the true faith of a Christian." "The operation of the law was fatal," says Sir Erskine May, "to nearly all the rights of a citizen. A -lew could not hold any office, civil, military, or corporate. I [e could not follow the profession of the law as barrister or attorney, or attorney's clerk ; he could not be a school- master or an usher at a school. He could not sit as a mem- ber of either house of parliament, nor even exercise the electoral franchise, if called upon to take the elector's oath." Thus, although no special act was passed for the exclusion of the Jew from the rights of citizenship, he was effectually shut up in a sort of political and social Ghetto. The debate on Mr. Grant's motion was made memorable by the fact that Macaulay delivered then his maiden speech. He rose at the same time with Sir James Mack- intosh, and according to the graceful usage of the House of Commons, the new member was called on to speak. We need not go over the arguments used in the debate. Pub- lic opinion has settled the question so long and so com- pletely that they have little interest for a time like ours. One curious argument is, however, worth a passing notice. One speaker, Sir John Wrottesley, declared that when it was notorious that seats were to be had in that house to any extent for money, he could not consent to allow any one to become a member who was not also a Christian. Bribery and corruption were so general and so bad that they could not with safety to the state be left to be the privilege of any hut Christians. "If I be drunk," says Master Slender, "I'll he drunk with those that have the fear of God and not with drunken knaves." The pro- posal for the admission of Jews to parliament was sup- ported by Lord John Russell, O'Connell, Brougham and Mackintosh, its first reading — for it was opposed even on the first reading — was carried by a majority of eighteen; Inn on the motion for the second reading the bill was thrown out by a majority of sixty-three, the votes for it being 60 A I1ISTORF OF OUR OWN TIMES. one hundred and sixty-five and those against it two hun- dred and twenty-eight. In 1883 Mr. Grant introduced his bill again, and this time was fortunate enough to pass it through the Commons. The Lords rejected it by a ma- jority of fifty. The following year told a similar story. The Commons accepted ; the Lords rejected. Meantime the Jews were being gradually relieved from other restrictions. A clause in Lord Denman's act for amending the laws of evidence allowed all persons to be sworn in courts of law in form which they held most binding on their conscience. Lord Lyndhurst succeeded in passing a bill for the admis- sion of Jews to corporate offices. Jews had, as we have already seen, been admitted to the shrievalty and the mag- istracy in the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1848 the struggle for their admission to parliament was renewed, but the Lords still held out and would not pass a bill. Meanwhile influential Jews began to offer them- selves as candidates for seats in parliament. Mr. Salomons contested Shoreham and Maidestone successively and unsuccessfully. In 1847 Baron Lionel Eothschild was elected one of the members for the city of London. He resigned his seat when the House of Lords threw out the Jews bill, and stood again and was again elected. It was not, however, until 1850 that the struggle was actually transferred to the floor of the House of Commons. In that year Baron Eothschild presented himself at the table of the house as O'Connell had done, and offered to take the oaths in order that he might be admitted to take his seat. For four sessions he had sat as a stranger in the house of which he had been duly elected a member by the votes of one of the most important English constituencies. Now he came boldly up to the table and demanded to be sworn. He was sworn on the Old Testament. He took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy; but when the oath of abjura- tion came he omitted from it the words "on the true faith of a Christian." He was directed to withdraw, and it was decided that he could neither sit nor vote unless he would consent to take the oath of abjuration in the fashion pre- scribed by the law. In other words, he could only sit in the House of Commons on condition of his perjuring him- self. Had he sworn "on the true faith of a Christian," the House of Commons, well knowing that he had sworn to a falsehood, would have admitted him as one of its members. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 61 Baron Rothschild quietly fell back to his old position. He sat in one of the seats under the gallery, a place to which strangers are admitted, but where also members occasionally sit. He did not contest the matter any further. Mr. David Salomons was inclined for a rougher and a bolder course. He was elected for Greenwich in 1851, and he presented himself as Baron Rothschild had done. The same thing followed; he refused to say the words, "on the true faith of a Christian," and he was directed to withdraw. He did withdraw. He sat below the bar. A few evenings after a question was put to the government by a member friendly to the admission of Jews, Sir Benjamin Hall, afterward Lord Llanover: "If Mr. Salomons should take his seat, would the government sue him for the penalties provided by the act of parliament in order that the question of right might be tried by a court of law?" Lord John Russell replied on the part of the government that they did not intend to take any pro- ceedings; in fact, implied that they considered it no affair of theirs. Then Sir Benjamin Hall announced that Mr. Salomons felt he had no alternative but to take his seat and let the question of right be tested in that way. Forth- with, to the amazement and horror of steady old constitu- tional members, Mr. Salomons, who had been sitting below the bar, calmly got up, walked into the sacred precincts of the house, and took his seat among the members. A tumultuous scene followed. Half the house shouted indig- nantly to Mr. Salomons to "withdraw, withdraw," the other half called out encouragingly tohim.tokeephis place. The perplexity was indescribable. What is to be done with a quiet and respectable gentleman who insists that he is a member of parliament, comes and takes his seat in the house, and will not withdraw? To be sure if he were an absolute intruder he could be easily removed by the ser- geant-at-arms and his assistants. But in such a case, unless indeed the intruder were a lunatic, he would hardly think of keeping his place when he had been bidden by authority to take himself off. Mr. Salomons, however, had undoubtedly been elected member for Greenwich by a considerable majority. His constituents believed him to be their lawful representative, and in fact had obtained from him a promise that if elected he would actually take his seat. Even then, perhaps, something might have been G2 A HISTORY OF Otfti OWN T1MF8. done if the house in general had been opposed to the claim of Mr. Salomons and of Greenwich. When Lord Cochrane escaped from prison and presented himself in the house from which he had been expelled, he, too, was ordered to withdraw. He, too, refused to do so. The speaker directed that he should be removed by force. Cochrane had a giant's strength, and on this occasion he used it like a giant. He struggled hard against the efforts of many officials to remove him, and some of the woodwork of the benches was actually torn from its place before the gal- lant seaman could be got out of the house. But in the case of Lord Cochrane the general feeling of the house was with the authorities and against the expelled member, who, however, happened to be in the right while the house was in the 'wrong. The case of Mr. Salomons was very different. Many members were of opinion, and eminent lawyers were among them, that in the strictest and most technical view of the law, he was entitled to take his seat. Many more were convinced that the principle which ex- cluded him was stupid and barbarous, and that the course he was at present taking was necessary for the purpose of obtaining its immediate repeal. Therefore any idea of expelling Mr. Salomons was out of the question. The only thing that could be done was to set to work and debate the matter. Lord John Kussell moved a resolution to the effect that Mr. Salomons be ordered to withdraw. Lord John Kussell, it need hardly be said, was entirely in favor of the admission of Jews, but thought Mr. Salomon's course irregular. Mr. Bernal Osborne moved an amendment declaring Mr. Salomons entitled to take his seat. A series of irregular discussions, varied and enlivened by motions for adjournment, took place; and Mr. Salomons not only voted in some of the divisions, but actually made a speech. He spoke calmly and well, and was listened to with great attention. He ex- plained that in the course he had taken he was acting in no spirit of contumacy or presumption, and with no dis- regard for the dignity of the house, but that he had been lawfully elected, and that he felt bound to take his seat for the purpose of asserting his own rights and those of his constituents. He intimated also that be would withdraw if just sufficient force were used to make him feel that he was acting under coercion. The motion that he be ordered A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 63 to withdraw was carried. The speaker requested Mr. Salomons to withdraw. Mr. Salomons held his place. The speaker directed the sergeant-at-arms to remove Mr. Salo- mons. The Sergeant-at-arms approached Mr. Salomons and touched him on the shoulder, and Mr. Salomons then quietly withdrew. The farce was over. It was evident to every one that Mr. Salomons had virtually gained his ob- ject, and that something must soon be done to get the House of Commons and the country out of the difficulty. It is curious that even in ordering him to withdraw, the speaker called Mr. Salomons "the honorable member." Mr. Salomons did well to press his rights in that prac- tical way upon the notice of the house. It is one of the blots upon our parliamentary system that a great question, like that of the removal of Jewish disabilities, is seldom settled upon its merits. Parliament rarely bends to the mere claims of reason and justice. Some pressure has almost always to be put on it to induce it to see the right. Its tendency is always to act exactly as Mr. Salomons himself formally did in this case; to yield only when sufficient pressure has been put on it to signify coercion. Catholic emancipation was carried by such a pressure. The promo- ters of the Sunday trading bill yield to a riot in Hyde Park. A Tory government turn reformers in obedience to a crowd who pull down the railing of the same enclosure. A chan- cellor of the exchequer modifies his budget in deference to a demonstration of match-selling boys and girls. In all these instances it was right to make the concession; but the concession was not made because it was right. The Irish home rulers, or some of them at least, are convinced that they will carry home rule in the end by the mere force of a pressure brought to bear on parliament; and their ex- pectation is justified by all previous experience. They have been told often enough that they must not expect to carry it by argument. If parliamentary institutions do really oome to be discredited in this country, as many people love to predict, one especial reason will be this very ex- perience on the part of the public, that parliament has invariably conceded to pressure the reforms which it per- sistently denied to justice. A reform is first refused with- out reason, to lie at last conceded without grace. Mr. Salomons acted wisely therefore for the cause he had at heart when he thrust himself upon the House of Com- 64 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. mons. The course taken by Baron Rothschild was more dignified no doubt; but it did not make much impression. The victory seems to us to have been practically won when Mr. Salomons sat down after having addressed the House of Commons from his place among the members. But it was not technically won just then, nor for some time after. Two actions were brought against Mr. Salomons, not by the government, to recover penalties for his having unlaw- fully taken his seat. One of the actions was withdrawn, the object of both alike being to get a settlement of the legal question, for which one trial would be as good as twenty. The action came on for trial in the court of ex- chequer on December 9, 1851, before Mr. Baron Martin and a special jury. Baron Martin suggested that, as the question at issue was one of great importance, a special case should be prepared for the decision of the full court. This was done, and the case came before the court in January, 1852. The issue really narrowed itself to this: were the words " on the true faith of a Christian" merely a form of affirmation, or were they purposely inserted in order to obtain a profession of Christian faith? Did not the fram- ers of the measure merely put in such words as at the moment seemed to them most proper to secure a true declaration from the majority of those to be sworn, and with the understanding that in exceptional cases other forms of asseveration might be employed as more suited to other forms of faith? Or were the words put in for the express purpose of making it certain that none but Chris- tians should take the oath? We know as a matter of fact that the words were not put in with any such intention. No one was thinking about the Jews when the asseveration was thus constructed. Still the court of exchequer decided by three voices to one that the words must be held in law to constitute a specially Christian oath, which could be taken by no one but a Christian, and without taking which no one could be a member of parliament ; of that parlia- ment which had had Bolingbroke for a leader, and Gibbon for a distinguished member. The legal question then being settled, there were renewed efforts made to get rid of the disabilities by an act of par- liament. The House of Commons continued to pass bills to enable Jews to sit in parliament, and the House of Lords continued to throw them out. Lord John Russell, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 65 who had taken charge of the measure, introduced his bill early in 1858. The bill was somewhat peculiar in its con- struction. On a former occasion the House of Lords found another excuse for not passing a measure for the same purpose, in the fact that it mixed up a modification of the oath of supremacy with the question of the relief of the Jews. In the present measure the two questions were kept separate. The bill proposed to reconstruct the oath altogether. Some obsolete words about the pretender and the Stuart family were to be taken out. The assevera- tions relating to succession, supremacy, and allegiance were to be condensed into one oath, to which were added the words "on the true faith of a Christian." Thus far the measure merely reconstructed the form of oath so as to bring it into accord with the existing condition of things. But then there came a separate clause in the bill, providing that where the oath had to be administered to a Jew the words "on the true faith of a Christian" might be left out. This was a very sensible and simple way of settling the matter. It provided a rational form of oath for all sects alike; it got rid of obsolete anomalies, and it likewise re- lieved the Jews from the injustice which had been uninten- tionally imposed on them. Unfortunately the Very con- venience of the form in which the bill was drawn only put, as it will be seen, a new facility into the hands of the anti- reformers in the House of Lords for again endeavoring to get rid of it. Lord John Russell had no difficulty with the House of Commons. He had brought up his bill in good time, in order that it might reach the House of Lords as quickly as possible; and it passed a second reading in the Commons without anydebate. When it came up to the House of Lords, the majority simply struck out the par- ticular clause relating to the -lews. This made the bill of no account whatever for the purpose it specially had in view. The Commons, on the motion of Lord John Russell, refused to assenl to the alteration made by the Lords, and appointed a committee to draw up a statement of their reasons for refusing to agree to if. On the motion of Mr. Duncombe, it was actually agreed that Baron Rothschild should be a member of the committee, although a legal decision had declared himnot to be a member of the house. During the debate to which all this led, Lord Lucan made. a suggestion of compromise in the House of Lords which 66 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. proved successful. He recommended the insertion of a clause in the bill allowing either house to modify the form of oath according to its pleasure. Lord John Russell ob- jected to this way of dealing with a great question, but did not feel warranted in refusing the proposed compromise. A bill was drawn up with the clause suggested, and it was rattled, if we may use such an expression, through both houses. It passed with the oaths bill, which the Lords had mutilated, and which now stood as an independent measure. A Jew, therefore, might be a member of the House of Com- mons, if it chose to receive him, and might be shut out of the House of Lords if that house did not think fit to let him in. More than that, the House of Commons might change its mind at any moment, and by modifying the form of oath shut out the Jews again; or shut out any new Jewish candidates. Of course such a condition of things as that could not endure. An act passed not long after which consolidated the acts referring to oaths of allegiance, abjuration, and supremacy, and enabled Jews on all occa- sions whatever to omit the words " on the true faith of a Christian." Thus the Jew was at last placed in a position of political equality with his Christian fellow-subjects, and an anomaly and a scandal was removed from our legis- lation. About the same time as that which saw Baron Roths- child admitted to take his seat in the House of Commons, the absurd property qualification for members of parliament was abolished. This ridiculous system originally professed to secure that no man should be a member of the House of Commons who did not own a certain amount of landed property. The idea of defining a man's fitness to sit in parliament according to his possession of landed property, was in itself preposterous; but such as the law was it was evaded every day. It had not the slightest real force. Fictitious conveyances were issued as a matter of course. Any one who desired a seat in parliament could easily find some friend or patron who would convey to him by formal deed the fictitous ownership of landed property enough to satisfy the requirements of the law. This was done usually with as little pretense at concealment as the borrowing of an umbrella. It was perfectly well known to everybody that a great many members of the House of Commons did not possess, and did not even pretend to possess, a single A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 07 acre of land their own property. What made the thing more absurd was that men who were rich enough to spend thousands of pounds in contesting boroughs and counties, had often to go through this form of having a fictitious conveyance made to them, because they did not happen to have invested any part of their wealth in land. Great city magnates, known for their wealth, and known in many cases for their high personal honor as well, had to submit to this foolish ceremonial. The property qualification was a device of the reign of Anne. The evasions of it became so many and so notorious that in George II. 's time an act was passed making it necessary for every member to take an oath that he possessed the requisite amount of property. In the present reign a ' declaration was substituted for the oath, and it was provided that if a man had not landed property, it would be enough for him to prove that he had funded property to the same amount — £600 a year for counties and £300 for boroughs. The manufacture of fictitious qualifications went on as fast as ever. There were many men in good position, earning large incomes by a profession or otherwise, who yet had not realized money enough to put them in possession of a property of £000 or £300 a year — it might take £10,000 to secure an income of £300 a year; £20,000 to secure £000 a year. Scores of mem- bers of parliament were well known not to have any such means. To make the anomaly more absurd, it should be noted that there was no property qualification in Scotland, and the Scotch members were then, as now, remarkable for their respectability and intelligence. Members for the univer- sities, too, were elected without a property qualification. Mr. Locke King stated in the House of Commons that after every general election there were from fifty to sixty cases in which it was found that persons had declared themselves to be possessed of the requisite qualification who were notoriously not in possession of it. Many men, too, it was well known, were purposely qualified by wealthy patrons, in order that they might sit in parliament as mere nominees and political servants. As usual with parliament, this anomaly was allowed to go on until a sudden scandal made its abolition necessary. One luckless person, who probably had no position and few friends, Avas actually prosecuted for having made a false declaration as to his property qualification. He had been 68 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. a little more indiscreet, or a little more open in his perform- ance, than other people, and he was pounced upon by old "father antic," the law. This practically settled the matter. Every one knew that many other members of parliament deserved in point of fact just as well as he the three months' imprisonment to which he was sentenced. Mr. Locke King introduced a bill to abolish the property qualification hitherto required from the representatives of English and Irish constituencies, and it became law in a few days. CHAPTER XXXIX. THE IONIAN" ISLANDS. When Lord Ellenborough abruptly resigned the place of president of the board of control he was succeeded by Lord Stanley, who, as we have seen already, became secre- tary of state for India, under the new system of government. Lord Stanley had been secretary for the colonies, and in this office he was succeeded by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. For some time previously Sir Edward Lytton had been taking so marked a place in parliamentary life as to make it evident that when his party came into power he was sure to have a chance of distinguishing himself in office. Bulwer's political career had up to this time been little better than a failure. He started in public life as a Radical and a friend of O'Connell; he was indeed the means of introducing Mr. Disraeli to the leader of the Irish party. lie began his parliamentary career before the reform bill. He was elected for St. Ives in f 831 . After the passing of the bill, he represented Lincoln for several years. At the general election of 1841 he lost his seat, and it was not until July, 1852, that he was again returned to parliament. This time he came in as member for the county of Herts. In the interval many things had happened — to quote the expression of Mr. Disraeli in 1874. Lytton had succeeded to wealth and to landed estates, and he had almost altogether changed his political opinions. From a poetic Radical he had become a poetic Conservative. In the "Par- liamentary Companion" for the year 1855 we find him thus quaintly described — by his own hand it may be assumed: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 09 "Concurs in the general policy of Lord Derby; would readjust the income-tax, and mitigate the duties on malt, tea, and soap; some years ago advocated the ballot, but see- ing its utter inefficiency in France and America can no longer support that theory; will support education on a religious basis, and vote for a repeal of the Maynooth Grant." It will perhaps be assumed from this confession of faith, that Lytton had not very clear views of any kind as to practical politics. It probably seemed a graceful and poetic thing, redolent of youth and Ernest Maltravers, to stand forth as an impassioned Radical in early years; and it was quite in keeping with the progress of Ernest Maltravers to tone down into a thoughtful Conservative, opposing the Maynooth Grant and mitigating the duty on malt and soap, as one advanced in years, wealth, and gravity. At all events, it was certain that whatever Lytton attempted he would in the end carry to some considerable success. His first years in the House of Commons had come to nothing. When he lost his seat most people fancied that he had accepted defeat, and had turned his back on par- liamentary life forever. But Lytton possessed a mar- velously strong will, and had a faith in himself which almost amounted to genius. When he wrote a play which proved a distinct failure, some of the leading critics assured him that he had no dramatic turn at all. He believed on the contrary that he had; and he determined to write another play which should be of all things dramatic, and which should hold the stage. He went to work and pro- duced the "Lady of Lyons;" a play filled with turgid pas- sages and preposterous situations, but which has neverthe- less in so conspicuous a degree the dramatic or theatric qualities that it has always held the stage, and has never been wholly extinguished by any change of fashion or of fancy. In much the same way Sir Edward Lytton seems to have made up his mind that he would compel the world to confess him capable of playing the part of a politician. We have in a former chapter of this work alluded to the physical difficulties which stood in the way of his success as a parliamentary speaker, and in spite of which he accom- plished his success. lie was ileal', and his articulation was so defective that those who heard him speak in public for the first time often found themselves unable to understand him. Such difficulties would assuredly have scared any 70 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. ordinary man out of the parliamentary arena forever. But Lytton seems to have determined that he would make a figure in parliament. He set himself to public speaking as coolly as if he were a man like Gladstone or Bright, whom nature had marked out for such a competition by her phy- sical gifts. He became a decided, and even in a certain sense a great success. He could not strike into a debate actually going on; his defect of hearing shut him off from such a performance; and no man who is not a debater will ever hold a really high position in the House of Commons. But he could review a previous night's arguments in a speech abounding in splendid phrases and brilliant illustra- tions. He could pass for an orator. He actually did pass for an orator. Mr. Disraeli seems to have admired his speaking with a genuine and certainly a disinterested ad- miration ; for he described it as though it were exactly the kind of eloquence in which he would gladly have himself excelled if he could. In fact, Lytton reached the same relative level in parliamentary debate that he had reached in fiction and the drama. He contrived to appear as if he ought to rank among the best of the craftsmen. Sir Edward Lytton, as secretary for the colonies, seemed resolved to prove by active and original work that be could be a practical colonial statesman as well as a novelist, a playwright, and a parliamentary orator. He founded the colony of British Columbia, which at first was to comprise all such territories within the queen's dominions "as are bounded to the south by the frontier of the United States of America, to the east by the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, to the north by Simpson's River and the Finlay branch of the Peace River, to the west by the Pacific Ocean." It was originally intended that the colony should not include Vancouver's Island, but her majesty was allowed, on receiving an address from the two houses of the legislature of Vancouver's Island, to annex that island to British Columbia. Vancouver's Island was in fact incor- porated with British Columbia in 1866, and British Col- umbia was united with the Dominion of Canada in 1871. Something, however, more strictly akin to Sir Edward Lytton 's personal tastes was found in the mission to which he invited Mr. Gladstone. There bad long been dissatisfac- tion and even disturbance in the Ionian Islands. These seven islands were constituted a sort of republic or com- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 71 monwealth by the treaty of Vienna. But they were con- signed to the protectorate of Great Britain, which had the right of maintaining garrisons in them. Great Britain used to appoint a lord high commissioner, who was gener- ally a military man, and whose office combined the duties of commander-in-chief with those of civil governor. The little republic had a senate of six members and a legislative assembly of forty members. It seems almost a waste of words to say that the islanders were not content with British government. For good or ill, the Hellenes where- ever they are found, are sure to be filled with an impas- sioned longing for Hellenic independence. The people of the Ionian Islands were eager to be allowed to enter into one system with the kingdom of Greece. It was idle to try to amuse them by telling them they constituted an inde- pendent republic, and were actually governing themselves. A duller people than the Greeks of the islands could not be deluded into the idea that they were a self-governing people, while they saw themselves presided over by an English lord high commissioner who was also the commander in-chief of a goodly British army garrisoned in their midst. They saw that the lord high commissioner had a way of dismissing the republican parliament whenever he and they could not get on together. They knew that if they ven- tured to resist his orders, English soldiers would make short work of their effort at self-assertion. They might, therefore, well be excused if they failed to see much of the independent republic in such a system. It is certain that they got a great deal of material benefit from the presence of the energetic road-making British power. But they wanted to be above all things Greek. Their national prin- ciples and aspirations, their personal vanities, their truly Greek restlessness and craving for novelty, all combined to make them impatient of that foreign protectorate which was really foreign government. The popular constitution which had been given to the Septinsular Republic some ten years before Sir E. B. Lytton's time had enabled Hellenic ' agitation to make its voice and its claims more effectual. In England, after the usual fashion, a great many shallow politicians were raising an outcry against the popular con- stitution, as if it were the cause of all the confusion. Because it enabled discontent to make its voice heard they condemned it as the cause of the discontent. They would 72 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. have been for silencing the alarm-bell immediately, and then telling themselves that all was safe. As was but natural, local politicians rose to popularity in the islands in proportion as they were loud in their denunciation of foreign rule, and in their demands for union with the king- dom of Greece. Anybody might surely have foretold all this years before. It might have been taken for granted that so long as any sort of independent Greek kingdom held its head above the waters the Greek populations every- where would sympathize with its efforts, and long to join their destiny with it. Many English public men, however, were merely angry with these pestilential Greeks who did not know what was good for them. A great English journal complained, with a simple egotism that was posi- tively touching, that in spite of all argument the national assembly, the municipalities, and the press of the Ionian Islands had now concentrated their pretensions on the pro- ject of a union with the kingdom of Greece. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had not been long enough in office to have become soaked in the ideas of routine. He did not regard the unanimous opinions of the insular legislature, munici- palities, and press as evidence merely of the unutterable stupidity or the incurable ingratitude and wickedness of the Ionian populations. He thought the causes of the complaints and the dissatisfaction were well worth looking into, and he resolved on sending a statesman of distinc- tion out to the islands to make the inquiry. Mr. Gladstone had been for some years out of office. He had been acting as an independent supporter of Lord Palmerston's govern- ment. It occurred to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton that Mr. Gladstone was the man best fitted to conduct the inquiry. He was well known to be a sympathizer with the struggles and the hopes of the Greeks generally; and it seemed to the new colonial secretary that the mere fact of such a man having been appointed would make it clear to the islanders that the inquiry was about to be con- ducted in no hostile spirit. He offered therefore to Mr. Gladstone the office of lord high commissioner extraordi- nary to the Ionian Islands, and Mr. Gladstone accepted the offer and its duties. The appointment created much sur- prise, some auger, and a good deal of ridicule here at home. There seemed to certain minds to be something novel, startling, and positively unseemly in such a proceed- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 73 ing. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had alluded iu his despatch to Mr. Gladstone's Homeric scholarship, and this was, in the opinion of some politicians, an outrage upon all the principles and proprieties of routine. This, it was muttered, is what comes of literary men in office. A writer of novels is leader of the House of Commons, and he has another writer of novels at his side as colonial sec- retary, and between them they can think of nothing better than to send a man out to the Ionian Islands to listen to the trash of Greek demagogues, merely because he happens to be fond of reading Homer. Mr. Gladstone went out to the Ionian Islands, and arrived in Corfu in the November of 1858. He called together the senate, and endeavored to satisfy them as to the real nature of his mission. He explained that he had not come there to discuss the propriety of maintaining the English protectorate, but only to inquire into the manner in which the just claims of the Ionian Islands might be secured by means of that protectorate. Mr. Gladstone's visit, however, was not a successful enterprise for those who desired that the protectorate should be perpetual, and that the Ionians should be brought to accept it as inevi- table. The population of the islands persisted in regard- ing him, not as the commissioner of a Conservative English government, but as "Gladstone the Philhellene." He was received wherever he went with the honors due to a liber- ator. His path everywhere was made to seem like a triumphal progress. In vain he repeated his assurances that he came to reconcile the islands to the protectorate, and not to deliver them from it. The popular instinct insisted on regarding him as at least the precursor of their union to the kingdom of Greece. The national assembly passed a formal resolution declaring for union with Greece. All that Mr. Gladstone's persuasions could do was to induce them to appoint a committee, and draw up a memorial to be presented in proper form to the protecting powers. By this time the news of Mr. Gladstone's recep- tion in the islands, and in Athens, to which also lie paid a visit, had reached England, and the most extravagant ex- aggerations were put into circulation. Mr. Gladstone was attacked in an absurd manner. He was accused not merely of having encouraged the pretensions of the Ionian Islanders, but even talked of as if he, and he alone, had 74 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. been their inspiration. One might have imagined that there was something portentous and even unnatural in a population of Hellenic race feeling anxious to be united with a Greek kingdom instead of being ruled by a British protectorate imposed by the arbitrary decree of a congress of foreign powers. National complacency could hardly push sensible men to greater foolishness than it did when it set half England wondering and raging over the imperti- nence of a Greek population who perferred union with a Greek kindgom to dependence upon an English protector- ate. English writers and speakers went on habitually as if the conduct of the islanders were on a par with that of some graceless daughter who forsakes her father's house for the companionship of strangers, or of some still more guilty wife who deserts her loving husband to associate herself with some strolling musician. There can be no doubt that in every material sense the people of the islands were much better governed under England's pro- tectorate than they could be for generations, probably for centuries to come, under any Greek administration. They had admirable means of communication by land and sea, splendid harbors, regular lines of steamers, excellent roads everywhere, while the people of the kingdom of Greece were hardly better off for all these advantages under Otho than they might have been under Codrus. M. Edmond About declared that the inhabitants of the Ionian Islands were richer, happier, and a hundred times better governed than the subjects of King Otho. M. About detested Greece and all about it; but his testimony thus far is that of the most enthusiastic Philhellene. Indeed it seems a waste of words to say, that where Englishmen ruled they would take care to have good roads and efficient lines of steamers. But M. About was mistaken in assuming that the popula- tions of the islands were happier under British rule than they would have been under that of a Greek kingdom. Such a remark only showed a want of the dramatic sym- pathy which understands the feelings of others, aud which we especially look for in a writer of any sort of fiction. M. About would not have been so successful a romancist if he had always acted on the assumption that people are made happy by the material conditions which, in the opinion of other people, ought to confer happiness. He would not, we may presume, admit that the people of A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 75 Aisace and Lorraine are happier under the Germans than they were under the French, even though it were to be proved beyond dispute that the Germans made better roads and managed more satisfactorily the lines of railways. The populations of the islands persevered in the belief that they understood better what made them happy than M. About could do. The visit of Mr. Gladstone, whatever purpose it may have been intended to fulfill, "had the effect of making them agitate more strenuously than ever for annexation to the kingdom of Greece. Their wish, however, was not to be granted yet. A new lord high commissioner was sent out after Mr. Gladstone's return, doubtless with instructions to satisfy what was supposed to be public opinion at home by a little additional stringency in maintaining the connexion between Great Britain and the protected populations. Still, however, the idea held ground that sooner or later Great Britain would give up the charge of the islands. A few years after an oppor- tunity occurred for making the cession. The Greeks got rid quietly of their heavy German King Otho, and on the advice chiefly of England they elected as sovereign a brother of the Princess of Wales. The Greeks themselves were not very eager for any other experiment in the matter of royalty. They seemed as if they thought they had had enough of it. But the great powers, and more especially England, pressed upon them that they could never be really respectable if they went without a king; and they submitted to the dictates of conventionality. They first asked for Prince Alfred of England, now Duke of Edin- burgh; but the arrangements of European diplomacy did not allow of a prince of any of the great reigning houses being set over Greece. In any case, nothing can be less likely than that an English prince would have accepted such a responsibility. The French government made some significant remark, to the effect that if it were possible for any of the great powers to allow one of their princes to accept the Greek crown, France had a prince disengaged, who she thought might have at least as good a claim as another. This was understood to be Prince Napoleon, son of Jerome, king of Westphalia, a prince of whom a good deal was heard after, as a good deal bad been heard before, in the politics of Enrope. The suggestion then about the prince of the house of Denmark was made either by or to % A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the Greeks, and it was accepted. The second son of the king of Denmark was made king of Greece; and Lord John Russell, on behalf of the English government, then handed over to the kingdom of Greece the islands of which Great Britain had had so long to bear the unwilling charge, and the retention of which, according to some uneasy politi- cians, was absolutely necessary alike to the national safety and the imperial glory of England. This is anticipating by a few years the movement of time; but the effects of Mr. Gladstone's visit so distinctly foreshadowed the inevitable result that it is not worth while dividing into two parts this little chapter of our history. Mr. Gladstone's visit, the mistaken interpretation put upon it by the islanders, and the reception which chiefly on account of that mis- take he had among them, must have made it clear to every intelligent person in England that this country could not long continue to force her protectorate upon a reluctant population over whom it could not even claim the right of conquest. It ought to have been plain to all the world that England could not long consent, with any regard for her own professions and principles, to play the part of Europe's jailer or man in possession. The cession of the Ionian Islands marked, however, the farthest point of progress attained for many years in that liberal principle of foreign policy which recognizes fairness and justice as motives of action more imperative than national vanity, or the imperial pride of extended possession. England had to suffer for some time under the influence of a reaction which the cession of the islands, all just and prudent though it was, unquestionably helped to bring about. CHAPTER XL. THE TORY DIOGENES ROLLING HIS TUB. There was once, we read, a mighty preparation for war going on in Athens. Everybody was busy in arrange- ment of some kind to meet the needs of coming battle. Diogenes had nothing in particular to do, but was unwilling to appear absolutely idle when all else were so busy. He set to work, therefore, with immense clatter and energy to roll his tub up and down the streets of Athens. The A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 77 Conservative government, seeing Europe all in disturbance and having nothing very particular to do, began to roll a tub of their own, and to show a preternatural and wholly unnecessary activity in doing so. The year 1859 was one of storm and stress on the European continent. The war-drum throbbed through the whole of it. The year began with the memorable declaration of the emperor of the French to the Austrian ambassador at the Tuileries that the relations between the two empires were not such as he could desire. This he said, according to the description given of the event in a despatch from Lord Cowley, "with some severity of tone." In truth, Count Cavour had had his way. He had pre- vailed upon Louis Napoleon, and the result was a deter- mination to expel the Austrians from Italy. It seems clear enough that the emperor, after awhile, grew anxiously inclined to draw back from the position in which he had placed himself. Great pressure was brought to bear upon him by the English government, and by other governments as well, to induce him to refrain from disturbing the peace of Europe. He was probably quite sincere in the assur- ances he repeatedly gave that he was doing his best to pre- vent a rupture with Austria; and he would possibly have given much to avoid the quarrel. The turn of his mind was such that he scarcely ever formed any resolution or entered into any agreement, but the moment the step was taken he began to see reasons for wishing that he had fol- lowed a different course. In this instance it is evident that he started at the sound himself had nnule. It was not, however, any longer in his power to guide events. He was in the hands of a stronger will and a more daring spirit than his own. In the career of Count Cavour our times have seen perhaps the most remarkable illustration of that great Italian statesmanship which has always appeared at intervals in the history of Europe. There may be very different opinions about the political morality of Cavour. Rather, indeed, may it be said that his strongest admirer is forced to invent a morality of his own, in order to justify all the political actions of a man who knew no fear, hesitation, or scruple. Cavour had the head of a Machiavelli, the daring of a Ceesar Borgia, the political craft and audacity of a Richelieu. He was undoubtedly a patriot and a lover of his country; but he was willing to 78 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. serve his country by means from which the conscience of modern Europe, even as it shows itself in the business of statesmanship, is forced to shrink back. If ends were to justify means, then the history of united Italy may be the justification of the life of Cavour; but until ends are held to justify means one can only say that he did marvelous things; that he broke up and reconstructed political sys- tems; that he made a nation; that he realized the dreams of Dante, and some of the schemes of Alexander VI.; and that he accomplished all this for the most part at the cost of other people and not of Italians. Louis Napoleon was simply a weapon in the hands of such a man. Cavour knew precisely what he wanted, and was prepared to go all lengths and to run all risks to have it. When once the French emperor had entered into a compact with him there was no escape from it. Cavour did not look like an Italian; at least a typical Italian. He looked more like an Englishman. He reminded Englishmen oddly of Dickens' Pickwick, with his large forehead, his general look of moony good-nature, and his spectacles. That commonplace homely exterior concealed unsurpassed force of character, subtlety of. schem- ing, and power of will. Cavour was determined that France should fight Austria. If Louis Napoleon had shown any decided inclination to draw back, Cavour would have flung Piedmont single-handed into the fight, and defied France, after what had passed, to leave her to her fate. Louis Napoleon dared not leave Piedmont to her fate. He had gone too far with Cavour for that. The war between France and Austria broke out. It was over, one might say, in a moment. Austria had no generals; the French army rushed to success; and then Louis Napoleon stopped short as suddenly as he had begun. He had pro- claimed that he went to war to set Italy free from the Alps to the sea; but he made peace on the basis of the liberation of Lombardy from Austrian rule, and he left Venetia for another day and for other arms. He drew back before the very serious danger that threatened on the part of the German states, who showed ominous indica- tions of a resolve to make the cause of Austria their own if France went too far. He held his hand from Venetia because of Prussia; seven years later Prussia herself gave Venetia to Italy, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 79 The English government had made futile attempts to prevent the outbreak of war. Lord Malmesbury had elaborated quires of heavy commonplace in the vain hope that the great conflicting forces then let loose could be brought back into quietude by the gentle charm of plenteous platitude. Meanwhile, the Conservative govern 1 ment could not exactly live on the mere reputation of hav- ing given good advice abroad to which no one would listen. They had to do something more at home. They began to roll a tub. While Europe was aflame with war-passion and panic, the Conservatives determined to try their hand at a reform bill. Mr. Disraeli, as leader of the House of Commons, knew that a reform bill was one of the certain- ties of the future. It suited him well enough to praise the perfection of existing institutions in his parliamentary and platform speeches; but no one knew better than he that the reform bill of 1832 had left some blanks that must be, one day or another, filled up by some government. Lord John Russell had made an attempt more than once and failed. He had tried a reform bill in 1852, and lost his chance because of the defeat of the ministry on the militia bill; he had tried another experiment in 1854, but the country was too eager about war with Russia to care for domestic reform, and Lord John Russell had to abandon the attempt, not without an emotion which he could not succeed in concealing. Mr. Disraeli knew well enough that whenever Lord John Russell happened to be in power again he would return to his first love in politics, a reform bill. He knew also that a refusal to have anything to do with reform would always expose the Tories in office to a coalition of all the Liberal factions against them. At present he could not pretend to think that his party was strong. The Conservatives were in office, but they were not in power. At any moment, if the Liberals chose, a motion calling for reform, or censuring the government be- cause they were doing nothing for reform, might be brought forward in the House of Commons and carried in the teeth of the Tory party. Mr. Disraeli had to chose between two dangers. He might risk all by refusing reform; he might risk all by attempting reform, lie thought on the whole the wiser course would be to endeavor to take possession of the reform question for himself and his party. The reappearance of Mr. Bright in politics stimulated no. 80 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. doubt this resolve on the part of the Conservative leader. We speak only of the one leader; for it is not likely that the prime minister, Lord Derby, took any active interest in the matter. Lord Derby had outlived political ambition, or he had had perhaps all the political success he cared for. There was not much to tempt him into a new reform cam- paign. Times had changed since his fiery energy went so far to stimulate the Whigs of that day into enthusiasm for the bill of Lord Grey. Lord Derby had had nearly all in life that such a man could desire. He had station of the highest; he had wealth and influence; he had fame as a great parliamentary debater. Now that Brougham had ceased to take any leading part in debate, he had no rival in the House of Lords. He had an easy, bouyant tempera- ment; he was, as we have said already, something of a scholar, and he loved the society of his Homer and his Horace, while he could enjoy out-door amusements as well as any Squire Western or Sir Hildebrand Osbaldistone of them all. He was a sincere man without any pretense; and, if he did not himself care about reform, he was not likely to put on any appearance of enthusiasm about it. Nor did be set much store on continuing in office. He would be the same Lord Derby out of office as in. It is probable, therefore, that he would have allowed reform to go its way for him and never troubled; and if loss of office came of his indifference, he would have gone out of office with unabated cheerfulness. But this way of looking at things was by no means suitable to his energetic and ambi- tious lieutenant. Mr. Disraeli had not nearly attained the height of his ambition, nor had he by any means exhausted his political energies. Mr. Disraeli, therefore, was not a man to view with any satisfaction the consequences likely to come to the Conservative party from an open refusal to take up the cause of reform. He had always, too, meas- ured fairly and accurately the popular influence and the parliamentary strength of Mr. Bright. It is clear that, at a time when most of the Conservatives, and not a few of the Whigs, regarded Mr. Bright as only an eloquent and respectable demagogue, Mr. Disraeli had made up his mind that the Manchester orator was a man of genius and foresight, who must be taken account of as a genuine political power. Mr. Bright now returned to public life. He had for a long time been withdrawn by ill-health from A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 81 all share in political agitation, or politics of any kind. At one time it was indeed fully believed that the House of Commons had seen the last of him. To many his return to parliament and the platform seemed almost like a resur- rection. Almost immediately on his returning to public life he flung himself into a new agitation for reform. He addressed great meetings in the north of England and in Scotland, and he was induced to draw up a reform bill of his own. His scheme was talked of at that time by some of his opponents as though it were a project of which Jack Cade might have approved. It was practically a proposal to establish a franchise precisely like that which we have now, ballot and all, only that it threw the expenses of the returning officer on the county or borough rate, and it introduced a somewhat large measure of redistribution of seats. The opponents of reform were heard everywhere assuring themselves and their friends that the country in general cared nothing about reform. Mr. Bright himself was accredited with having said that his own effort to arouse a reforming spirit even in the North was like flogging a dead horse. But Mr. Disraeli was far too shrewd to be satisfied with such consolations as his followers would thus have administered. He knew well enough that the upper and middle classes cared very little about a new reform bill. They had had all the reform they wanted in L832. But so long as the bill of 1832 remained unsupple- mented, it was evident that any political party could appeal to the support of the working-classes throughout the coun- try in favor of any movement which promised to accom- plish that object. In short, Mr. Disraeli knew that reform had to come some time, and he was resolved to make his own game if he could. This time, however, he was not successful. The diffi- culties in his way were too great. It would have been im- possible for him to introduce such a reform bill as Mr. Bright would be likely to accept. I lis own party would not endure such a proposition. He could only go so far as to bring in some bill which might possibly seem to reformers to be doing something for reform, and at the same time might be commended to Conservatives on the ground that it really did nothing for it. Mr. Disraeli's reform bill was a curiosity. It offered a variety of little innovations which nobody wanted or could have cared 82 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. about, and it left out of sight altogether the one reform which alone gave an excuse for any legislation. We have explained more than once that Lord Grey's reform bill admitted the middle-class to legislation but left the work- ing-class out. What was now wanted was a measure to let the working-class in. Nobody seriously pretended that any other object than this was sought by those who called out for reform. Yet Mr. Disraeli's scheme made no more account of the working-class as a whole than if they already possessed the vote every man of them. It proposed to give a vote in boroughs to persons who had property to the amount of £10 a year in the funds, bank stock or East India stock ; to persons who had £60 in a savings bank ; to persons receiving pensions in the naval, military, or civil service, amounting to £20 a year; to professional men, to graduates of universities, ministers of religion, and certain schoolmasters; in fact, to a great number of persons who either already had the franchise or could have it if they had any interest that way. The only proposition in the bill not absolutely farcial and absurd was that which would have equalized the franchise in counties and in boroughs, making £10 the limit in each alike. The English work- ing-classes cried out for the franchise, and Mr. Disraeli proposed to answer the cry by giving the vote to graduates of universities, medical practitioners, and schoolmasters. Yet we may judge of the difficulties Mr. Disraeli had to deal with by the reception which even this poor little meas- ure met with from some of his own colleagues. Mr. Wal- pole and Mr. Henley resigned office rather than have any- thing to do with it. Mr. Henley was a specimen of the class who might have been described as a fine old English gentlemen. He was shrewd, blunt, honest, and narrow; given to broad jokes and to arguments flavored with a sort of humor which reminded not very faintly of the drollery of Fielding's time. Mr. Walpole was a man of gentle bear- ing, not by any means a robust politician, nor liberally endowed with intellect or eloquence, but pure-minded and upright enough to satisfy the most exacting. Mr. Walpole wrote to Lord Derby a letter which had a certain simple dignity and pathos in it, to explain the reason for his resig- nation. He frankly said that the measure which the cabi- net were prepared to recommend was one which they should all of them have stoutly opposed if either Lord A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 83 Palmerston or Lord John Russell had ventured to bring it forward. This seemed to Mr. Walpole reason enough for his declining to have anything to do with it. It did not appear to him honorable to support a measure because it had been taken up by one's own party, which the party would assuredly have denounced and opposed to the utter- most if it had been brought forward by the other side. Mr. Walpole's colleagues no doubt respected his scruples, but some probably regarded them with good-natured, contempt. Such a man, it was clear, was not destined to make much of a way in politics. Public opinion admired Mr. Walpole and applauded his decision. Public opinion would have pronounced even more strongly in his favor had it known that at the time of his making this decision and withdraw- ing from a high official position Mr. Walpole was in cir- cumstances which made the possession of a salary of the utmost importance to him. Had he .even swallowed bis scruples and held on a little longer, he would have become entitled to a pension. He did not appear to have hesitated a moment. He was a high-minded gentleman; he could very well bear to.be poor; he could not bear to surrender his self-respect. This resignation, however, so honorable to Mr. Walpole and to Mr. Henley, will serve to show how great were the difficulties which then stood in Mr. Disraeli's way. Prob- ably Mr. Disraeli's own feelings were in favor of a liberally extended suffrage. It is not a very rash assumption to conjecture that be looked with contempt on the kind of reasoning which fancied that the safety of a state depends upon the narrowness of its franchise. Put his bill bore the character of a measure brought in with the object of trying to reconcile irreconcilable claims and principles. To be the author of something which should give the government the credit with their opponents of being reformers at heart, and with their friends of being non- reformers at heart, was apparently theobjeel of Mr. Disraeli. The attempt was a complete failure. It was vain to preach up the beauty of "lateral extension" of the franchise as opposed to extension downward. The country saw through the whole imposture at a glance. One of Mr. Disraeli's defects as a- statesman has always been that he is apt to he just a, little too clever for the business he has in band. This ingenious reform bill was a little too clever. 84 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. More matter and less art would have served its turn. It was found out in a moment. Some one described its enfranchising clauses as "fancy franchises;" Mr. Bright introduced the phrase to the House of Commons, and the clauses never recovered the epithet. The savings bank clause provoked immense ridicule. Suppose, it was asked, a man draws out a few pounds to get married, or to save his aged parent from starvation, or to help a friend out of difficulties, is it fair that he should be immediately dis- franchised as a penalty for being loving and kindly? One does not want to make the electoral franchise a sort of Monthyon prize for the most meritorious of any class; but still is it reasonable that a man who is to have a vote as long as he hoards his little sum of money is to forfeit the vote the moment he does a kind or even a prudent thing? Even as a matter of mere prudence, it was very sensibly argued, is it not better that a man should do something else with his money than invest it in a savings bank which is, after all, only a safer version of the traditional old stocking? It would be useless to go into any of the dis- cussions which took place on this extraordinary bill. It can hardly be said to have been considered seriously. It had to be got rid of somehow, and therefore Lord John Russell moved an amendment, declaring that no readjust- ment of the franchise would satisfy the House of Commons or the country which did not provide for a greater exten- sion of the suffrage in cities and boroughs than was con- templated in the government measure. Perhaps the most remarkable speech made during the debate was that of Mr. Gladstone, who, accepting neither the bill nor the resolution, occupied himself chiefly with an appeal to par- liament and public opinion on behalf of small boroughs. The argument was ingenious. It pointed to the number of eminent men who had been enabled to begin public life very early by means of a nomination for some pocket- borough, or who, having quarreled with the constituents of a city or county, might for awhile have been exiled from parliament if some pocket-borough, or rather pocket- borough's master, had not admitted them by that little postern-gate. The argument, however, went no further than to show that in a civilized country every anomaly, how- ever absurd, may be turned to some good account. If, instead of creating: small pocket-bor<.!.>d.s the Eggjiah A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 85 constitutional system had conferred on a few great peers the privilege of nominating members of parliament directly by their own authority, this arrangement would undoubt- edly work well in some cases. Beyond all question some of these privileged peers would send into parliament deserv- ing men who otherwise might be temporarily excluded from it. The same thing would sometimes happen no doubt, if they made over the nomination to their wives or their wives' waiting-women. But the system of pocket- boroughs, taken as a whole, was stuffed with injustice and corruption. It worked direct evil in twenty cases for every one case in which it brought about indirect good. The purchase of seats in the parliament of Paris undoubt- edly did good in some cases. Some of the men for whom seats were bought proved themselves useful and impartial members of that curious tribunal. Lord John Russell's resolution was carried by a majority of three hundred and thirty against two hundred and ninety-one, or a majority of thirty-nine. The government dissolved parliament, and appealed to the country. The elections did not excite very much public interest. They took place during the most critical moments of the war between France and Austria. While such news was arriv- ing as that of the defeat of Magenta, the defeat of Solferino, the entrance of the emperor of the French and the king of Sardinia into Milan, it was not likely that domestic news of a purely parliamentary interest could occupy all the attention of Englishmen. It was not merely a great foreign war that the people of these islands looked on with such absorbing interest. It was what seemed to be the birth of a new era for Europe. There were some who felt inclined to echo the celebrated saying of Pitt after Austerlitz, and declare that we might as well roll up the map of Europe. In the victories of the French many saw the first indications of the manifest destiny of the heir of Waterloo, the man who represented a defeat. To many the strength of the Austrian military system had seemed the great bulwark of Conservatism in Europe; and now that was gone, shriveled like a straw in fire, shattered like a potsherd. Surprise, bewilderment, rather than partisan passion of any kind, predominated over England. Jn such a condition of things the general election passed over hardly noticed. AVhen it was over, it was found that the 86 A tilSTORY OF 6TJR OWN TIMfiS. conservatives had gained indeed, but had not gained nearly enough to enable them to hold office, unless by the tolera- tion of their rivals. The rivals soon made up their minds that they had tolerated them long enough. A meeting of the Liberal party was held at Willis' Rooms, once the scene of Almack's famous assemblies. There the chiefs of the Liberal party met to adjust their several disputes, and to arrange on some plan of united action. Lord Palmerston represented one section of the party, Lord John Russell another. Mr. Sidney Herbert spoke for the Peelites. Not a few persons were surprised to find Mr. Bright among the speakers. It was well known that he liked Lord Palmerston little; that it could hardly be said he liked the Tories any less. But Mr. Bright was for a reform bill, from whomsoever it should come; and he thought, perhaps, that the Liberal chiefs had learned a lesson. The party contrived to agree upon a principle of action, and a compact was entered into, the effect of which was soon made clear at the meeting of the new parliament. A vote of want of confidence was at once moved by the Marquis of Hartington, eldest son of the Duke of Devon- shire, and even then marked out by common report as a future leader of the Liberal party. Lord Hartington had sat but a short time in the House of Commons, and had thus far given no indications of any eloquence, or even of any taste for politics. Nothing could more effectively illus- trate one of the peculiarities of the English political sys- tem than the choice of the Marquis of Hartington as the figurehead of this important movement against the Tory government. Lord Hartington did not then, nor for many years afterward, show any greater capacity for politics than is shown by an ordinary county member. He seemed rather below than above the average of the House of Com- mons. As leader subsequently of the Liberal party in that house, he can hardly be said to have shown as yet any higher qualities than a strong good sense and a manly firm- ness of purpose, combined with such skill in debate as con- stant practice under the most favorable circumstances must give to any man not absolutely devoid of all capacity for self-improvement. But even of the moderate abilities which Lord Hartington proved that he possessed in the Conservative parliament of 1874, he had given no indication in 1859. He was put up to move the vote of want of A msTORT OF OUR W2? TIMES. 8? confidence as the heir of the great Whig house of Devonshire ; his appearance in the debate would have carried just as much significance with it if he had simply moved his resolution without an accompanying word. The debate that followed was long and bitter. It was enlivened by more than even the usual amount of personalities. Mr. Disraeli and Sir James Graham had a sharp passage of arms, in the course of which Sir James Graham used an expression that has been often quoted since. He described Mr. Disraeli as "the Eed Indian of debate," who "by the use of the tomahawk had cut his way to power, and by recurrence to the scalp- ing system hopes to prevent the loss of it." The scalping- system however, did not succeed this time. The division, when it came on after three nights of discussion showed a majority of thirteen in favor of Lord Hartington's motion. The result surprised no one. Everybody knew that the moment the various sections of the Liberal party contrived a combination the fate of the ministry was sealed. Willis' rooms had anticipated the decision of St. Stephen's. Rather, perhaps, might it be said that St. Stephen's had only recorded the decision of Willis' rooms. The queen invited Lord Granville to form a ministry. Lord Granville was still a young man to be prime minister, considering how much the habits of parliamentary life had changed since the days of Pitt. He was not much over forty years of age. He had filled many ministerial offices, however, and had experience of parliament which may be said to have begun with his majority. After some nine years spent in the House of Commons, the death of his father called him, in 1840, to the House of Lords. He made no assumption of commanding abilities, nor had he any pretense to the higher class of eloquence or statesmanship. Hut he was a thorough man of the world and of parliament; he understood English ways of feeling and of acting; he was a clever debater, and bad the genial art — very useful and very rare in English public life — of keeping even antagonists in good humor. Probably a better man could not have been found to suit all parties as prime minister of England, in times when there was no particular stress or strain to try the energies and the patience of the country. Still there was some surprise felt that the queen should have passed over two men of years and of fame like Lord Ralmerston and Lord John Russell, and have invited a 88 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. much younger man at such a moment to undertake for the first time to form a ministry. An explanation was soon given on the part of the queen, or at least with her con- sent. The queen had naturally thought, in the first instance, of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell; but she found it "a very invidious and unwelcome task" to make a choice between " two statesmen so full of years and honors, and possessing so just a claim on her consideration." Her majesty, therefore, thought a compromise might be best got at between the more Conservative section of the Liberal party, which Lord Palmerston appeared to repre- sent, and the more popular section led by Lord John Rus- sell, if both could be united under the guidance of Lord Granville, the acknowledged leader of the Liberal party in the House of Lords. The attempt was not successful. Lord John Russell declined to serve under Lord Granville, but declared himself perfectly willing to serve under Lord Palmerston. This declaration at once put an end to Lord Granville's chances and to the whole difficulty which had been anticipated. There had been a coldness for some time between Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. The two men were undoubtedly rivals; at least all the world persisted in regarding them in such a light. It was not thought possible that Lord John Russell would submit to take office under Lord Palmerston. On this occasion, however, as upon others, Lord John Russell showed a spirit of self-abnegation for which the public in general did not give him credit. The difficulty was settled to the satisfaction of every one, Lord Granville included. Lord Granville was not in the slightest degree impatient to be- come prime minister, and indeed probably felt relieved from a very unwelcome responsibility when he was allowed to accept office under the premiership of Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston was now prime minister for life. Until his death he held the office with the full approval of Con- servatives as well as Liberals; nay, indeed, with much warmer approbation from the majority of the Conserva- tives than from many of the Liberals. Palmerston formed a strong ministry. Mr. Gladstone was chancellor of the exchequer; Lord John Russell had the office of foreign secretary; Sir G. C. Lewis was home sec- retary; Mr. Sidney Herbert minister for war. The Duke of Newcastle took charge of the colonies, Mr. Cardwell A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 89 accepted the Irish secretaryship, and Sir Charles Wood was secretary for India. Lord Palmerston endeavored to propitiate the Manchester Liberals by offering a seat in the government to Mr. Cobden and to Mr. Milner Gibson. Mr. Cobden was at the time on his way home from the United States. In his absence he had been elected member for Rochdale; and in his absence, too, the office of presi- dent of the board of trade in the new ministry had been put at his disposal. His friends eagerly awaited his return, and, when the steamer bringing him home was near Liver- pool a number of them went out to meet him before his landing. They boarded the steamer, and astonished him with the news that the Tories were out, that the Liberals were in, that he was member for Rochdale, and that Lord Palmerston had offered him a place in the new ministry. Cobden took the news which related to himself with his usual quiet modesty. He declined to say anything about the offer he had received from Lord Palmerston until he should have the opportunity of giving his answer directly to Lord Palmerston himself. This, of course, was only a necessary courtesy, and most of Cobden's friends were of opinion that he ought to accept Lord Palmerston's offer. Cobden explained afterward that the office put at his dis- posal was exactly that which would have best suited him, and in which he thought that he could do some good. He also declared frankly that the salary attached to the office would be a consideration of much importance to him. Mr. Cobden's friends were well* aware that he had invested the greater part of his property in American railways, which just then were not very profitable investments, although in the long run they justified his confidence in their success. At the moment he was a poor man. Yet he did not in his own mind hesitate a moment about Lord Palmerston's offer. He disapproved of Palmerston's foreign policy, of his military expenditure, and his love of interfering in the disputes of the continent; and he felt that he could not conscientiously accept office under such a leader. He refused the offer decisively, and the chief promoter of the repeal of the corn laws never held any place in an English admin- istration. Cobden, however, aihised his friend, Mr. Mil- ner Gibson, to avail himself of Lord Palmerston's offer, and Mr. Gibson acted on the advice. The opinions of Mr. pobden and Mr. Gibson weye the same on most subjects, "90 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. but Mr. Gibson had never stood out before the country in so conspicuous a position as an opponent of Lord Palm- erston. Perhaps Cobden's advice was given in the spirit of Dr. Parr, who encouraged a modest friend to adopt the ordinary pronunciation of the Egyptian city's name. "Dr. Bentley and, I sir, must call it Alexandria ; but I think you may call it Alexandria." Mr. Cobden felt really grateful to Lord Palmerston for his offer, and for his manner of making it. " I had no per- sonal feeling whatever," he said to his constituents at Rochdale, " in the course I took with regard to Lord Palm- erston's offer. If I had had any feeling of personal hos- tility, which I never had toward him, for he is of that happy nature which cannot create a personal enemy, his kind and manly offer would have instantly disarmed me." Lord Palmerston had not made any tender of office to Mr. Bright; and he wrote to Mr. Bright frankly explaining his reasons. Mr. Bright had been speaking out too strongly during his recent reform campaign to make his presence in the cabinet acceptable to some of the Whig magnates for whom seats had to be found. It is curious to notice now the conviction, which at that time seemed to be universal, that Mr. Cobden was a much more moderate reformer than Mr. Bright. The impression was altogether wrong. There was in Mr.Bright's nature a certain element of Conservatism which showed itself clearly enough the moment the particular reforms which he thought necessary were carried ; Mr. Cobden would have gone on advancing in the direction of reform as long as he lived. It was Mr. Cobden's conciliatory manner, and an easy, genuine bon- homie, worthy of Palmerston himself, that made the differ- ence between' the two men in popular estimation. Not much difference, to be sure, was ever to be noticed between them in public affairs. Only once had they voted in oppo- site lobbies of the House of Commons, and that was, if we are not mistaken, on the Maynooth grant; and Mr. Bright afterward adopted the views of Mr. Cobden. But where there was any difference, even of speculative opinion, Mr. Cobden went further than Mr. Bright along the path of Radicalism. Mr. Cobden's sweet temper and good-humored disposition made it hard for him to express strong opinions in tones of anger. It is doubtful whether a man of his temperament ever could be a really great orator. Indig- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 91 nation is even more effective as an element in the making of great speeches than in the making of small verses. The closing days of the year were made memorable by the death of Macaulay. He had been raised to the peerage, and had had some hopes of being able to take occasional part in the stately debates of the House of Lords. But his health almost suddenly broke down, and his voice was never heard in the upper chamber.' He died prematurely, having only entered on his sixtieth year. We have already studied the literary character of this most successful liter- ary man. Macaulay had had, as he often said himself, a singularly happy life, although it was not without its severe losses and its griefs. His career was one of uninter- rupted success. His books brought" him fame, influence, social position, and wealth, all at once. He never made a failure. The world only applauded one book more than the other, the second speech more than the first. Macaulay the essayist, Macaulay the historian, Macaulay the ballad- writer, Macaulay the parliamentary orator, Macaulay the brilliant, inexhaustible talker — he was alike, it might ap- pear, supreme in everything he chose to do or to attempt. After his death there came a natural reaction; and the re- action, as is always the case, was inclined to go too far. People began to find out that Macaulay had done too many things; that he did not do anything as it might have been done; that he was too brilliant; that he was only brilliant; that he was not really brilliant at all, but only superficial and showy. The disparagement was more unjust by far than even the extravagant estimate. Macaulay was not the paragon, the ninth wonder of the world, for which people once set him down; but he was undoubtedly a great liter- ary man. He was also a man of singularly noble character. He was, in a- literary sense, egotistic; that it to say, lie thought and talked and wrote a great deal about his works and himself; but he was one of t lie most unselfish men that ever lived. He appeal's to have enjoyed advancement, suc- cess, fame, and money only because these enabled him to give pleasure and support to the members of his family. He was attached to his family, especially to his .sisters, with the tenderest affection. His real nature seems only to have thoroughly shone out when in their society. There he was loving, sportive even to joyous frolicsomeness; a glad schoolboy almost to the very end. He was remark- 92 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. ably generous and charitable, even to strangers; his hand was almost always open ; but he gave so unostentatiously that it was not until after his death half his kindly deeds became known. He had a spirit which was absolutely above any of the corrupting temptations of money and rank. He was very poor at one time; and during his poverty he was beginning to make his reputation in the House of Commons. It is often said that a poor man feels nowhere so much out of place, nowhere so much at a disadvantage, nowhere so much humiliated, as in the House of Commons. Macaulay felt nothing of the kind. He bore himself as easily and steadfastly as though he had been the eldest son of a proud and wealthy family. It did not seem to have occurred to him when he was poor that money was lacking to the dignity of his intellect and his manhood; or when he was rich that money added to it. Certain defects of temper and manner, rather than of character, he had which caused men often to misunderstand him, and sometimes to dislike him. He was apt to be overbearing in tone, and to show himself a little too confident of his splendid gifts and acquirements: his marvelous memory, his varied reading, his overwhelming power of argument. He trampled on men's prejudices too heedlessly, was inclined to treat igno- rance as if it were a crime, and to make dullness feel that it had cause to be ashamed of itself. Such defects as these are hardly worth mentioning, and would not be mentioned here, but that they serve to explain some of the misconcep- tions which were formed of Macaulay by many during his lifetime, and some of the antagonisms which he uncon- sciously created. Absolutely without literary affectation, undepressed by early poverty, unspoiled by later and almost unequal ed success, he was an independent, quiet, self-relying man who, in all his noon of fame, found most happiness in the companionship and the sympathy of those he loved; and who, from first to last, was loved most ten- derly by those who knew him best. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in the first week of the new year, and there truly took his place among his peers. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 93 CHAPTER XLI. THE FRENCH TREATY AND THE PAPER DUTIES. Lord Palmerston's ministry came into power in troublous times. All over the world there seemed to be an upheaving of old systems. Since 1848 there had not been such a period of political and social commotion. A new war had broken out in China. The peace of Villafranca had only patched up the Italian system. Every one saw that there was much convulsion to come yet before Italy was likely to settle down into order. From across the Atlantic came the first murmurings of civil war. John Brown had made his famous raid into Harper's Ferry, a town on the borders of Virginia and Maryland, for the pur- pose of helping slaves to escape, and he was captured, tried for the attempt, and executed. He met his death with the composure of an antique hero. Victor Hugo declared in one of his most impassioned sentences, that the gibbet of John Brown was the Calvary of the anti-slavery move- ment; and assuredly the execution of the brave old man was the death sentence of slavery. Abraham Lincoln had just been adopted by the National Republican Convention at Chicago as candidate for the presidency, and even here in England people were beginning to understand what that meant. At home there were distractions of other kinds. Some of the greatest strikes ever known in England had just broken out; and a political panic was further per- plexed by the quarrels of class with class. A profound distrust of Louis Napoleon prevailed almost everywhere. The fact that he had been recently our ally did not do much to diminish this distrust. On the contrary, it helped in a certain sense to increase it. Against what state, it was asked, did he enter into alliance with us? Against Russia. To defend Turkey? Not at all; Louis Napoleon always acknowledged that he despised the Turks and felt sure nothing could ever be made of them. It was to have his revenge for Moscow and the Beresina, people said, that he struck at Russia; and he made us his mere tools in the enterprise. Now he turns upon Austria, to make her atone for other wrongs done against the ambition of the Bona- partes; and he has conquered. Austria, believed by all men to have the greatest military organization in Europe, 94 A H18T0BY OF till OWN TIMES. lies crushed at his feet. What next? Prussia perhaps — or England? The official classes in this country had from the first been in sympathy with Austria,and would, if they could, have had England take up her quarrel. The Tories were Austrian for the most part. Not much of the feeling for Italy which was afterward so enthusiastic and effusive had yet sprung up in England among the Liberals and the bulk of the population. People did not admit that it was an affair of Italy at all; they saw in it rather an evidence of the ambition of Piedmont. When, soon after the close of the short war, it became known that Sardinia was to pay for the alliance of France by the surrender of Nice and Savoy, the indignation in this country became irrepressible. The whole thing seemed a base transaction. The house of Savoy, said an indignant orator in parliament, had sprung from the womb of those mountains; its connection with them should be as eternal as the endurance of the moun- tains themselves. Men saw in the conduct of Louis Napo- leon only an evidence of the most ignoble rapacity. It is of no use, they said, talking of alliances and cordial under- standings with such a man. There is in him no faith and no scruple. Gras milii. To-morrow he will try to hum- ble and to punish England as he has already humbled and punished Austria; his alliance with us will prove to be of as much account as did his alliance with Sardinia. He did not scruple to wring territory from the confederate whose devoted friend and patron he professed to be ; what should we have to expect, we against whom he cherishes up a national and a family hatred, if by any chance he should be enabled to strike us a sudden blow? The feeling therefore in England was almost entirely one of revived dread and distrust of Louis Napoleon. There was a good deal to be said for his bargain about Savoy and Nice by those who were anxious to defend it. But, taken as a whole, it was a singularly unfortunate transaction. It turned back the attention of conquerors to that old- fashioned plan of partition which sanguine people were beginning to hope was gone out of European politics, like the sacking of towns and the holding of princes to ransom. It is likely that Louis Napoleon thought of this himself somewhat bitterly later on in his career, when the Germans adopted his own principle, although, as they themselves pleaded, with somewhat better excuse; for they only ex- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. % torted territory from an enemy; lie extorted it from a friend. There could be no pretense that it was other than an act of extortion. Even the Piedmontese statesmen who conducted the transaction — Cavour cleverly dodged out of it himself — did not venture to profess that they were doing it willingly. It had to be done. Perhaps it had to be done by Louis Napoleon as well as by Victor Emmanuel. Cavour had compelled the emperor of the French to make a stand for Italy; but the emperor could hardly face his own people without telling them that France was to have something for her money and her blood. Wars for an idea generally end like this. On the whole, however, let it be owned that the Italians had made a good bargain. Savoy and Nice were provinces of which the Italian nationality was very doubtful; of which the Italian sentiment was perhaps more doubtful still. Louis Napoleon had the worst of the bargain in that as in most other transactions wherein he thought he was doing a clever thing. He went very near estranging altogether the friendly feeling of the English people from him and from France. The invasion panic sprang up again here in a moment. The volunteer forces began to increase in numbers and in ardor. Plans of coast fortification and of national defenses generally were thrust upon parliament from various quarters. A feverish anxiety about the security of the island took possession of many minds that were usually tranquil and shrewd enough. It really seemed as if the country was looking out for what Mr. Disraeli called, a short time afterward, when he was not in office and was therefore not responsible to public clamor for the defense of our coasts, "a midnight foray from our imperial ally." The venerable Lord Lyndhurst took on himself in especial the task of rousing the nation. With a vigor of manner and a literary freshness of style well worthy of his earlier and best years, he devoted him- self to the work of inflaming the public spirit of England against Louis Napoleon; a graceful and acrid lawyer Demosthenes denouncing a Philip of the Opera-Gomique. "If I am asked," said Lyndhurst, "whether I cannot place reliance upon the Emperor Napoleon, 1 reply with confi- dence that I cannot, because he is in a situation in which he cannot place reliance upon himself." "If the calamity should come," he asked, "if the conflagration should lake place, what words can describe the extent of the calamity, 9G A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. or what imagination can paint the overwhelming ruin that would fall upon us?" The most harmless and even reason- able actions on the part of France were made a ground of suspicion and alarm by some agitated critics. A great London newspaper saw strong reason for uneasiness in the fact that " at this moment the French government is pushing with extraordinary zeal the suspicious project of the impracticable Suez Canal." We have already remarked upon the fact that up to this time there was no evidence in the public opinion of England of any sympathy with Italian independence such as became the fashion a year later. At least if there was any such sympathy here and there, it did not to any perceptible degree modify the distrust which was felt toward the Emp- eror Napoleon. Mrs. Barrett-Browning's passionate praises of the emperor and lamentations for the failure of " his great deed," were regarded as the harmless and gushing senti- mentalisms of a poet and a woman — indeed, a poet with many people seems a sort of woman. The king of Sardinia, Victor Emanuel, had visited England not long before, and had been received with public addresses and other such demonstrations of admiration here and there; but even his concrete presence had not succeeded in making impression enough to secure him the general sympathy of the English public. Some association in Edinburgh had had the sin- gular bad taste to send him an address of welcome in which they congratulated him on his opposition to the holy see, as if he were another Achilli or Gavazzi come over to denounce the pope. The king's reply was measured out with a crushing calmness and dignity. It coldly reminded his Edinburgh admirers of the fact, which we may pre- sume they had forgotten, that he was descended from a long line of Catholic princes, and was the sovereign of subjects almost entirely Catholic, and that he could not therefore accept with satisfaction "words of reprobation injurious to the head of the church to which he belonged." We only recall to memory this unpleasant little incident for the purpose of pointing a moral which it might of itself suggest. It is much to be feared that the popular enthusiasm for the unity and independence of Italy which afterward flamed out in England was only enthusiasm against the pope. Something no doubt was due to the brilliancy of Garibaldi's exploits in 18G0 : and to the. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Qf romantic halo which at that time and for long after sur- rounded Garibaldi himself; but no Englishman who thinks coolly over the subject will venture to deny that nine out of every ten enthusiasts for Italian liberty at that time were in favor of Italy because Italy was supposed to be in spiritual rebellion against the pope. The ministry attempted great things. They undertook a complete remodeling of the customs system, a repeal of the paper duties, and a reform bill. The news that a com- mercial treaty with France was in preparation broke on the world somewhat abruptly in the- early days of 1800. The arrangement was made in a manner to set old formal- ism everywhere shaking its solemn head and holding up its alarmed hands. The French treaty was made without any direct assistance from professional diplomacy. It was made indeed, in despite of professional diplomacy. It was the result of private conversations and an informal agree- ment between the emperor of the French and Mr. Cobden. The first idea of such an arrangement came, we believe, from Mr. Bright; but it was Mr. Cobden who undertook to see the Emperor Napoleon and exchange ideas with him on the subject. The emperor of the French, to do him justice, was entirely above the conventional formalities of imperial dignity. He sometimes ran the risk of seeming undignified in the eyes of the vulgar by the disregard of all formality with which he was willing to allow himself to be approached. Although Mr. Cobden had never held official position of any kind in England, the emperor recived him very cordially and entered readily into his ideas on the subject of a treaty between England and France which should remove many of the prohibitions and restric- tions then interfering with a liberal interchange of tin; productions of the two nations. Napoleon the Third was a freetrader or something nearly approaching to it. His cousin, Prince Napoleon, was still more advanced and more decided in his views of political economy. The emperor was, moreover, n good deal under the influence of Michael Chevalier, the distinguished French publicist and econo- mist, who from having been a member of the socialistic sect of the famous Pere Enfantin, had come to be a practical politician and an economist of a very high order. Mr. Cobden had the assistance of all the influence Mr. Glad- stone could bring to bear, It is not likely that Lord Palm- 98 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. erston cared much about the French treaty project, but at least he did not oppose it. Mr. Cobden was under the im- pression, and probably not without reason, that the officials of the English embassy in Paris were rather inclined to thwart, than to assist his efforts. But if such a feeling pre- vailed, it was perhaps less a dislike of the proposed arrange- ment between England and France than an objection to the informal and irregular way of bringing it about. Diplo- macy has always been mechanical and conventional in its working, and the English diplomatic service has even among diplomatic services been conspicuous for its wor- ship of routine. There were many difficulties in the way on both sides. The French people were for the most part opposed to the principles of free trade. The French manufacturing bodies were almost all against it. Some of the most influential poli- ticians of the country were uncompromising opponents of free trade. M. Thiers, for example, was an almost impas- sioned protectionist. It may be admitted at once that if the emperor of the French had had to submit the provisions of his treaty to the vote of an independent legislative assembly, he could not have secured its adoption. He had in fact to enter into the engagement by virtue of his im- perial will and power. On the other hand, a strong objec- tion was felt in this country just then to any friendly negotiation or arrangement whatever with the emperor. His schemes in Savoy and Nice had created so much dis- like and distrust of him, that many people felt as if war between the two states were more likely to come than any sincere and friendly understanding on any subject. As soon as it became known that the treaty was in course of negotiation a storm of indignation broke out in this coun- try. Most of the newspapers denounced the treaty as a mean arrangement with a man whose policy was only per- fidious, and whose vows were as little to be trusted as dicers' oaths. Not only the Conservative party condemned and denounced the proposed agreement, but a large pro- portion of the Liberals were bitter against it. Some critics declared that Mr. Cobden had been simply taken in ; that the French emperor had "bubbled" him. Others accused Mr. Cobden of having entered into a conspiracy with the em- peror to enable Louis Napoleon to " jockey his own subjects" — such was the phrase adopted by one influential member A H1ST0R Y OF OUR OWN TIMES. 99 of parliament, the late Mr. Horsman, then a speaker with a certain gift of rattling metallic declamation. Others again declared that the compromise effected by the treaty was in itself a breach of the principle of free trade. It was observ- able that this argument usually came from lately converted or still unconverted protectionists; just as the argument founded on the arbitrariness of the imperial action was most strenuously enforced by those who at home were least inclined to encourage the principle of government by the people. Thus Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, and even Mr. Gladstone found themselves in the odd position of having to repel the charge of renouncing free trade, and rejecting the principles of representative government. It is hardly necessary to defend the course taken by Mr. Cobden in accepting a compromise where he could not possibly obtain an absolutely free interchange of commodities. The most devoted champion of the freedom of religious worship is not to be blamed if he enters into an agreement with some foreign government to obtain for its nonconforming sub- jects a qualified degree of religious liberty. An opponent of capital punishment would not be held to have surren- dered his principle because he endeavored to reduce the number of capital sentences where he saw no hope of the immediate abolition of the death penalty. Nor do we see that there was anything inconsistent in Mr. Cobden's enter- ing into an agreement with the emperor of the French, even though that agreement was to be carried out in France by an arbitrary exertion of imperial will, such as would have been intolerable and impossible in England. To lay down a principle of this kind would be only to say that no statesman shall conclude an arrangement of any sort with the rulers of a state not so liberal as his own in its system of government. Of course no one ever tbinks of arguing for such a principle in the regular diplomatic negotiations between states. Those who found fault with Mr. Cobden because be was willing to assent to an arrangement which the Emperor Napoleon imposed upon his subjects must have known that our official statesmen were every day entering into engagements with one or the other European sovereign which were to be carried out by that sovereign on the same arbitrary principle. There was in fact no soundness or sincerity in such objections to Mr. Cobden's work. Some men opposed it because they were protec- 100 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tionists, pure and simple; some opposed it because they detested the Emperor Napoleon. The ground of objection with not a few was their dislike of Mr. Cobden and the Manchester school. The hostility of some came from their repugnance to seeing anything done out of the regular and conventional way. All these objections coalesced against the treaty and the chancellor of the exchequer's budget; but the eloquence of Mr. Gladstone and the strength of the government prevailed against them all. The effect of the treaty, so far as France was concerned, was an engagement virtually to remove all prohibitory duties on all the staples of British manufacture, and to re- duce the duties on English coal and coke, bar and pig iron, tools, machinery, yarns, flax, and hemp. England, for her part, proposed to sweep away all duties on manu- factured goods, and to reduce greatly the duties on foreign wines. In one sense, of course, England gave more than she got, but that one sense is only the protectionist's sense — more properly nonsense. England could not, with any due regard for the real meaning of words, be said to have given up anything when she enabled her people to buy light and excellent French wines at a cheap price. She could not be said to have sacrificed anything when she secured for her consumers the opportunity of buying French manu- factured articles at a natural price. The whole principle of free trade stamps as ridiculous the theory that because our neighbor foolishly cuts himself off from the easy purchase of the articles we have to sell, it is our business to cut ourselves off from the easy purchase of the articles he has to sell and we wish to buy. We gave France much more reduction of duty than we got; but the reduction was in every instance a direct benefit to our consumers. The introduction of light wines, for example, made, after awhile, a very remarkable, and on the whole a very bene- ficial, change in the habits of our people. The heavier and more fiery drinks became almost disused by large classes of the population. The light wines of Bordeaux began to be familiar in almost every table; the portentous brandied ports, which carried gout in their very breath, were gradu- ally banished. Some of the debates, however, on this par- ticular part of the budget recalled to memory the days of Colonel Sibthorp and his dread of the importation of for- eign ways among our countrymen. Many prophetic voices A IITSTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 101 declared in the House of Commons that with the greater use of French wines would come the rapid adoption of what were called French morals; that the maids and ma- trons of England would be led by the treaty to the drink- ing of claret, and from the drinking of claret to the ways of the French novelist's odious heroine, Madame Bovary. Appalling pictures were drawn of the orgies to go on in the shops of confectioners and pastrycooks who had a license to sell the light wines. The virtue of English- women, it was insisted, would never be able to stand this new and terrible mechanism of destruction. She who was far above the temptations of the public-house would be drawn easily into the more genteel allurements of the wine- selling confectioner's shop ; and in every such shop would be the depraved conventional foreigner, the wretch with a mustache and without morals, lying in wait to accomplish at last his long-boasted conquests of the blonde misses of England. One impasssioned speaker, glowing into a genuine prophetic fury as he spoke, warned his hearers of the near approach of a time when a man suddenly entering one of the accursed confectioners' shops in quest of the missing female members of his family, would find his wife lying drunk in one room and his daughter disgraced in another. In spite of all this, however, Mr. Gladstone succeeded in carrying this part of his budget. He carried, too, as far as the House of Commons was concerned, his important measure for the abolition of the duty on paper. The duty on paper was the last remnant of an ancient system of finance which pressed severely on journalism. The stamp duty was originally imposed with the object of checking the growth of seditious newspapers. It was reduced, increased, reduced again, and increased again, until in the early part of the century it stood at fourpence on each copy of a newspaper issued. In 1836 it was brought down to the penny, represented by the red stamp on every paper, which most of us can still remember. There was besides this a considerable duty — sixpence, or some such sum — on every advertisement in a newspaper. Finally, there Mas the heavy duty on the paper material itself. A journal, therefore, could not come into existence until if had made provision for all these factitious and unnecessary expenses. The consequence was that a newspaper was a costly thing. 102 -4 HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Its possession was the luxury of the rich ; those who could afford less had to be content with an occasional read of a paper. It was common for a number of persons to club together and take in a paper, which they read by turns, the general understanding being that he whose turn came last remained in possession of the journal. It was consid- ered the fair compensation for his late reception of the news that he should come into the full proprietorship of the precious newspaper. The price of a daily paper then was uniformly sixpence; and no sixpenny paper contained anything like the news, or went to a tenth of the daily ex- pense, which is supplied in the one case and undertaken in the other by the penny papers of our day. Gradually the burdens on journalism and on the reading public were reduced. The advertisement duty was abolished ; in 1855 the stamp duty was abolished ; that is to say, the stamp was either removed altogether or was allowed to stand as" postage. On the strength of this reform many new and cheap journals were started. Two of them in London, the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Star, acquired influ- ence and reputation. But the effect of the duty on the paper material still told heavily against cheap journalism. It became painfully evident that a newspaper could not be sold profitably for a penny while that duty remained, and therefore a powerful agitation was set on foot for its removal. The agitation was carried on, not on behalf of the interests of newspaper sacculation, but on behalf of the reading public and of the education of the people. It is not necessary now to enter ujion any argument to show that the publication of such a paper as the Daily News or the Daily Telegraph must be a matter of immense impor- tance in popular education. But at that time there were still men who argued that newspaper literature could only be kept up to a proper level of instruction and decorum by being made factitiously costly. It was the creed of many that cheap newspapers meant the establishment of a daily propaganda of socialism, communism, red republicanism, blasphemy, bad spelling, and general immorality. Mr. Gladstone undertook the congenial task of abolish- ing the duty on paper. He was met with strong opposition from both. sides of the house. The paper manufacturers made it at once a question of protection to their own trade. They dreaded the competition of all manner of adventurous A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 103 rivals under a free system. Many of the paper manufac- turers had been stanch free traders when it was a case of free trade to be applied «to the manufactures of other people; but they cried out against having the ingredients of the unwelcome chalice commended to their own lips. Vested interests in the newspaper business itself also opposed Mr. Gladstone. The high-priced and well-estab- lished journals did not by any means relish the idea of cheap and unfettered competition. They therefore preached without reserve the doctrine that in journalism cheap meant nasty, and that the only way to keep the English press pure and wholesome was to continue the monopoly to their own publications. The House of Commons is a good deal governed, directly and indirectly, by "interests." It is influenced by them directly, as when the railway interest the mining interest, the brewing interest, or the landed interest, boldly stands up, through its acknowledged repre- sentatives in parliament, to fight for its own hand. It is also much influenced indirectly. Every powerful interest in the house can contrive to enlist the sympathies and get the support of men who have no direct concern one way or another in some proposed measure, who know nothing about it, and do not want to be troubled with any knowl- edge, and who are, therefore, easily led to see that the side on which some of their friends are arrayed must be the right side. There was a good deal of rallying up of such men to sustain the cause of the paper-making and journal- selling monopoly. The result was that although Mr. Glad- stone carried his resolutions for the abolition of the ex- cise on paper, he only carried them by dwindling majorities. The second reading was carried by a majority of fifty-three; the third by a majority of only nine. The effect of this was to encourage some members of the House of Lords to attempt the task of getting rid of Mr. Gladstone's proposed reform altogether. An amendment to reject the resolu- tions repealing the tax was proposed by Lord Monteagle, and received the support of Lord Derby and of Lord Lyndhurst. Lord Lyndhurst was then just entering on his eighty- ninth year. His growing infirmities made it necessary that a temporary railing should be constructed in front of his seat in order that he might lean on it and be supported. But although his physical strength thus needed support 104 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. his speech gave no evidence of failing intellect. Even his voice could hardly be said to have lost any of its clear, light, musical strength. He entered into a long and a very telling argument to show that although the peers had abandoned their claim to alter a money bill, they had still a right to refuse their assent to a repeal of taxation, and that in this particular instance they were justified in doing so. There was not much perhaps in this latter part of the argument. Lord Lyndhurst fell back on some of his familiar alarms about the condition of Europe and the possible schemes of Louis Napoleon, and out of these he ex- tracted reasons for contending that we ought to maintain unimpaired the revenue of the country, to be ready to meet emergencies, and encounter unexpected liabilities. In an ordinary time not much attention would be paid to criti- cism of this kind. It would be regarded as the duty of the finance minister, the government, and the House of Com- mons to see that the wants of the coming year were properly provided for in taxation; and when the govern- ment and the House of Commons had once decided that a certain amount was sufficient, the House of Lords would hardly think that on it lay any responsibility for a formal revision of the ministerial scheme. Some peer would in all probability make some such observations as those of Lord Lyndhurst; but they would be accepted as mere pass- ing criticisms of the ministerial scheme, and it would not occur to any one to think of taking a division on the sug- gested amendment. In this instance the House of Lords was undoubtedly influenced by a dislike for the proposed measure of reduction, for the manner in which it had been introduced, for its ministerial author, or at least for his general policy, and for some of the measures by which it had been accompanied. It is not unlikely, for example, that Lord Lyndhurst himself felt something like resent- ment for the policy which answered all his eloquent warn- ings about the schemes of the Emperor Napoleon, by pro- ducing a treaty of commerce with the supposed invader of England. The repeal of the paper duty was known also to have the warm advocacy of Mr. Bright; and it was ad- vocated by the Morning Star, a journal greatly influenced by Mr. Bright's opinions, and in which popular rumor said, very untruly, that Mr. Bright was a writer of fre- quent leading articles. Thus the repeal of the paper duty A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 105 got to seem in the eyes of many peers a proposal connected somehow with the spread of democracy, the support of the Manchester school, and the designs of Napoleon III. The question which the House of Lords had to face was somewhat serious. The Commons had repealed a tax; was it constitutionally in the power of the House of Lords to reimpose it? Was not this, it was asked, simply to assert for the House of Lords a taxing power equal to that of the Com- mons? Was it not to reduce to nothing the principle that taxation and representation go together? Suppose, instead of re-enacting the paper duty, the House of Lords had thought fit to introduce into the new budget a new and different tax, what Avas there to hinder them, on their own principle, from doing so? On the other hand, those who took Lord Lyndhurst's view of the question insisted that when the budget scheme was laid before them for their approval, the House of Lords had as good a right constitutionally to reject as to accept any part of it, and that to strike out a clause in a budget was quite a different thing from taking the initiative in the imposition of taxa- tion. It was contended that the House of Lords had not only a constitutional right to act as they were invited to do in the case of the paper duty, but that as a matter of fact they had often done so, and that the country had never challenged their authority. The Conservative party in the J louse of Lords can always carry any division, and in this instance it was well known that they could marshal a strong majority against Mr. Gladstone's proposed remission of taxation. But it was commonly expected that they would on this occasion, as they had done on many others, abstain from using their overpowering numerical strength; that prudent counsels would prevail in the end, and that the amendment would not be pressed to a division. The hope, however, was deceived. The House of Lords was in an unusually aggressive mood. The majority were resolved to show that they could do something. Mr. Disraeli in one of his novels had irreverently said of the Lords, that when the peers accomplish a division they cackle as if they had laid an egg. On this occasion they were determined to have a division. The majority against the government was overwhelming. For the second reading of the paper duty bill, ninety peers voted and there were fourteen proxies; in all one hundred and four. For Lord Mont- 106 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. eagle's amendment there were one hundred and sixty-one votes of peers actually present and thirty-two proxies, or one hundred and ninety-three in all. The majority against the government was therefore eighty-nine; and the repeal of the excise duty on paper was done with for that session. The peers went home cackling; not a few of them, how- ever, a little in doubt as to the wisdom of the course they had pursued, a little afraid to think on what they had done. The House of Lords had not taken any very active step in politics for some time, and many of them were uncertain as to the manner in which the country would regard their unwonted exertion of authority. The country took it rather coolly on the whole. Lord Palmerston promptly came forward and moved in the House of Commons for a committee to ascertain and report on the practice of each house with regard to the several descriptions of bills imposing or repealing taxes. By thus interposing at once he hoped to take the wind out of the sails of a popular agitation which he disliked and would gladly have avoided. The committee took two months to consider their report. They found, by a majority of four- teen, a series of resolutions to the effect that the privilege of the House of Commons did not extend so far as to make it actually unconstitutional for the lords to reject a bill for the repeal of a tax. Mr. Walpole was the chairman of the committee, and he drew up the report, which cited a con- siderable number of precedents in support of the view adopted by the majority. Mr. Bright, who was a member of the committee, did not assent to this principle. He prepared a draft report of his own in which he contended for the very reasonable view, that if the Lords might prolong or reimpose a tax by refusing their assent to its repeal when that repeal had been voted by the House of Commons, the House of Commons could not have absolute control over the taxation of the country. It seems clear that, what- ever may have been the technical right of the Lords, or however precedent may have occasionally appeared to justify the course which they took, Mr. Bright was warranted in asserting that the constitution never gave the House of Lords any power of reimposing a tax which the Commons had repealed. The truth is, that if the majority of the House of Commons in favor of the repeal of the paper duties had been anything considerable, the House of Lords would A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 107 never have ventured to interfere. There was an impression among many peers that the remission was uot much liked even by the majority of those who voted for it. " Glad- stone has 'done it all," was the common saying; and it was insisted that Gladstone had done it only to satisfy Mr. Bright and the Manchester Radicals. Not a few of the peers felt convinced that the majority of the House of Commons would secretly bless them for their intervention. Lord Palmerston followed up the report of the committee by proposing a series of resolutions which he probably con- sidered equal to the occasion. The object of the resolu- tions was to reaffirm the position and the claims of the House of Commons in regard to questions of taxation. That at least was the ostensible object; the real object was to do something which should leave a way of retreat open to the Lords in another session, and at the same time make those who clamored against their intervention believe that the ministry were not indifferent to the rights of the rep- resentative chamber. The first resolution affirmed that " the right of granting aids and supplies to the crown is in' the Commons alone, as an essential part of their constitution; and the limitation of all such grants as to the matter, man- ner, measure and time, is only in them." The second reso- lution declared that although the Lords had rejected bills relating to taxation by negativing the whole, yet the exercise of such a power had not been frequent, and was justly regarded by the House of Commons with peculiar jealousy as affecting the right of the Commons to grant the sup- plies. The third resolution merely laid it down that "to guard for the future against an undue exercise of that power by the Lords, and to secure to the Commons their rightful control over taxation and supply," the house reaffirmed its right to impose and remit taxes, and to frame bill of supply. Such resolutions were not likely to satisfy the more impa- tient among the Liberals. An appeal was made to the people generally to thunder a national protest against the House of Lords. But the country did not, it must be owned, respond very tumultuously to the invitation. Great public meetings were held in London and the large towns of the north, and much anger was expressed at the conduct of the Lords. The Morning Shir newspaper led the agitation. It had recourse to the ingenious device of 108 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. announcing every day in large letters and in a conspic- uous part of its columns that the House of Lords had that day imposed so many thousand pounds of taxation on the English people, contrary to the fundamental principles of the constitution. It divided the whole amount of the reimposed duty hy the number of days in the year, and thus arrived at the exact sum which it declared to have been each day unconstitutionally imposed on the country. This device was copied by the promoters of public meet- ings, and M. Taine, the French author, then in this coun- try, was amused to see placards borne about in the streets with this portentous announcement. Mr. Bright threw his eloquence and his influence into the agitation, and Mr. Gladstone expressed himself strongly in favor of its object. Yet the country did not become greatly excited over the controversy. It did not even enter warmly into the question as to the necessity of abolishing the House of Lords. One indignant writer insisted that if the Lords did not give way the English people would turn them out of Westminster Palace and strew the Thames with the wrecks of their painted chamber. Language such as this sounded oddly out of tune with the temper of the time. The general conviction of the country was undoubtedly that the Lords were in the wrong; that whatever their technical right, if they had any, they had made a mistake, and that it would certainly be necessary to check them if they attempted to repeat it. But the feeling also was that there was not the slightest chance of such a mistake being repeated. The mere fact that so much stir had been made about it was enough to secure the country against any chance of its passing into a precedent. In truth, the country could not be induced to feel any fear of persist- ent unconstitutional action on the part of the House of Lords. That house is known by every one to hold most of its technical rights on condition of its rarely exercising them. When once its action in any particular case has been seriously called in question, it may be taken for granted that that action will not be repeated. Its principal func- tion in the state now is to interpose at some moment of emergency and give the House of Commons time to think over some action which seems inconsiderate. This is a very important and may be a very useful office. At first sight it may appear a little paradoxical to compare the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 109 functions of the English House of Lords in any way with those of the chief magistrate of the United States; and yet the delaying power which the president possesses is al- most exactly the same as that which our usages, even more than our constitution, have put at the discretion of the House of Lords. The president can veto a bill in the first instance. But the legislature can afterward, if they will, pass the measure in spite of him by a certain majority. Practically this means that the president can say to the legislature, " I think this measure has not been very care- fully considered ; I send it back, and invite you to think the matter over again. If when you have done so, you still desire to pass the measure, I can make no further objec- tion." This is all that the House of Lords can now do, and only in exceptional cases will the peers venture to do so much. Most people knew in 1800 that the interposi- tion of the House of Lords only meant the delay of a ses- sion; and knew too that the controversy which had been raised upon the subject, such as it was, would be quite enough to keep the peers from carrying the thing too far. A course of action which Mr. Gladstone denounced as a "gigantic innovation," which Lord Palmerston could not approve, which the Liberal party generally condemned, and which the House of Commons made the occasion of a significantly warning resolution, was not in the least likely to be converted by repetition into an established principle and precedent. This was the reason why the country took the whole matter with comparative indifference. It was not in the least influenced by the servile arguments which many Conservatives and a few feeble Liberals em- ployed to make out a constitutional case for the House of Lords. One orator, Mr. Horsman, carried his objection fco democracy so far as to undertake ;m elaborate argument to prove that the House of Lords had a taxing power co- ordinate with that of the House of Commons. It maybe imagined to what a depth party feeling had brought some men down when it is stated that their nonsense was applauded by the Conservatives in the House of Com- mons. Luckily for the privilege of the House of Lords no serious attention was paid to Mr. Hoi-smaiTs argument. If that indiscreet champion of the authority of the Lords could have made out his ease, it' lie could have shown that the peers really had a taxing power co-ordinate with that 110 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of the Commons, there would have been nothing for it hut to make new arrangements and withdraw from the heredi- tary assembly so inappropriate a privilege. For it may be surely taken for granted that the people of this country would never endure the idea of being taxed by a legislative body over whose members they had no manner of control. The whole controversy has little political importance now. Perhaps it is most interesting for the evidence it gave that Mr. Gladstone was every day drifting more and more away from the opinions, not merely of his old Con- servative associates, but even of his later Whig colleagues. The position which he took up in this dispute was entirely different from that of Lord Palmerston. He condemned without reserve or mitigation the conduct of the Lords and he condemned it on the very grounds which made his words most welcome to the Radicals. He did not indeed give his support to the course of extreme self-assertion which some Radical members recommended to the House of Commons; but he made it clear that he only disclaimed such measures because he felt convinced the House of Lords would soon come to its senses again, and would refrain from similar acts of unconstitutional interference in the future. The first decided adhesion of Mr. Glad- stone to the doctrines of the more advanced Liberals is generally regarded as having taken place at a somewhat later period, and in relation to a different question. It would seem, however, that the first decisive intimation of the course Mr. Gladstone was thenceforward to tread was his declaration that the constitutional privileges of the representative assembly would not be safe in the hands of the Conservative opposition. Mr. Gladstone was dis- tinctly regarded during that debate as the advocate of a policy far more energetic than any professed by Lord Palm- erston. The promoters of the meetings which had been held to protest against the interference of the Lords found full warrant for the course they had taken in Mr. Glad- stone's stern protest against the "gigantic innovation." Lord Palmerston, on the other hand, certainly suffered some damage in the eyes of the extreme Liberals. It be- came more clear than ever to them that he had no sym- pathy with any Radical movement here at home, however he might sympathize with every Radical movement on the Continent. Still Lord Palmerston's resolutions contained in A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Ill them quite enough to prove to the Lords that they had gone a little too far, and that they must not attempt any- thing of the kind again. A story used to be told of Lord Palmerston at that time which would not have been out of character if it had been true. Some one, it was said, pressed him to say what he intended to do about the Lords and the reimposition of the paper duties. "I mean to tell them," was the alleged reply of Lord Palmerston, "that it was a very good joke for once, but they must not give it to us again." This was really the effect of Palmerston's resolutions. All very well for once; but don't try it again. The Lords took the hint. They did not try it again. Even in that year, 18(50, Mr. Gladstone was able to carry his resolution for removing, in accordance with the provisions of the French treaty, so much of the cus- toms duty on imported paper as exceeded the excise duty on paper made here at home. Meanwhile the government had sustained a severe hu- miliation in another way. They had had to abandon their reform bill. The bill was a moderate and simple scheme of reform. It proposed to lower the county franchise to £10, and that of the boroughs to £6; and to make a consid- erable redistribution of seats. Twenty-five boroughs return- ing two members each were to return but one for the future, and the representation of several large counties and divisions of counties was to be strengthened ; Kensington and Chel- sea were to form a borough with two members; Birken- head, Staleybridge, and Burnley were to have one member each; Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham were each to have; an additional member; the University of London was to have a member. It was also proposed that where there were three members to a constituency the third should represent the minority, an end to be accom- plished by the simple process of allowing each elector to vote for only two of the three. The bill was brought in on March Lst. The second reading was moved on March lttth. Mr. Disraeli condemned the measure then, although he did not propose to otter any opposition to it at that stage. He made a long and labored speech, in which he talked of the bill as a " measure of a mediaeval character, without the inspiration of the feudal system or the genius of the middle ages." No one knew exactly what this meant; but it was loudly applauded by Mr. Disraeli's fol- 112 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. lowers, and was thought rather fine by some of those who sat on the ministerial side. Mr. Disraeli also condemned it for being too homogeneous in its character; by which he was understood to mean that he considered there was too great a monotony or uniformity in the suffrage it pro- posed to introduce. Long nights of debate more or less languid followed. Mr. Disraeli, with his usual sagacity, was merely waiting to see how things would go before he committed himself or his party to any decided opposition. He began very soon to see that there was no occasion for him to take any great trouble in the matter. He and his friends had little more to do than to look on and smile complacently while the chances of the bill were being hopelessly undermined by some of the followers of the government. The milder Whigs hated the scheme rather more than the Tories did. It was Lord John Russell's scheme. Bussed was faithful to the cause of reform, and he was backed up by the support of Cobden, Bright, and the Manchester and Radical party in general. But the bill found little favor in the cabinet itself. It was accepted principally as a means of soothing the Radicals and appeas- ing Lord John Russell. Lord Palmerston was well known to be personally indifferent to its fate. There was good reason to believe that, if left to himself, he would never have introduced such a measure, or any measure having the same object. Lord Palmerston was not so foreseeing as Mr. Disraeli. The leader of the opposition knew well enough even then that a reform bill of some kind would have to be brought in before long. There is not the least reason to suppose that he ever for a moment fell into Lord Palmerston's mistake, and fancied that the opinions of the clubs, of the respectable Whigs, and of the metropolitan shopkeepers, represented the opinions of the English people. Mr. Disraeli probably foresaw even then that it might be convenient to his own party one day to seek for the credit of carrying a Radical reform bill. He therefore took care not to express any disapproval of the principles of reform in the debates that took place on the second read- ing of Lord John Russell's bill. His manner was that of one who looks on scornfully at a bungling attempt to do some piece of work which he could do much better if he had a chance of making the attempt. " Call that a reform bill!" he seemed to say, "that piece of homogeneousness A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 113 and medievalism, which has neither the genius of feudal- ism nor the spirit of the middle ages! Only give me a chance some day of trying my hand again, and then you shall see the genius of the middle ages, and the later ages, and feudalism, and all the rest of it, combined to perfection." Meanwhile the hill was drifting and flounderiug on to destruction. If Lord Palmerston had spoken one deter- mined word in its favor, it could have been easily carried. The Conservatives would not have taken on themselves the responsibility of a prolonged resistance. Those of the Lib- erals who secretly detested the measure would not have had the courage to stand up against Lord Palmerston. Their real objection to the proposed reform was that it would put them to the trouble of a new election, and that they did not like the extreme Eadicals and the Manchester school. But they would have swallowed their objections if they had supposed that Lord Palmerston was determined to pass the bill. Very soon they came to understand, or at least to believe, that Lord Palmerston would be rather pleased than otherwise to see the measure brought into contempt. Lord Palmerston took practically no part in the debates. He did actually make a speech at a late period; but as Mr. Disraeli said with admirable effect, it was a speech not so much "in support of as about, the reform bill." Sir George Lewis argued for the bill so coldly and sadly that Sir E. B. Lytton brought down the laughter and cheers of both sides of the houses when he described Lewis as having "come to bury Cesar, not to praise him." The measure was already doomed; it was virtually dead and buried. Notice was given of amend- ment after amendment chiefly or altogether by professing Liberals. The practice of obstructing the progress of the bill by incessant speech-making was introduced and math' to work with ominous effect. Some of the more boisterous of the Tories began to treat the whole thing as a good piece of fun. Once an attempt was made to get the house counted out during the progress of the debate. It would be a capital means of reducing the whole discussion to an absurdity, some members thought, if the house could actually he counted on during a debate on the reform bill. A bill to remold the whole political constitution of the country — and the House of Commons not caring enough about the subject to contribute forty listeners, or even 114 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. forty patient watchers, within the precincts of Westmin- ster Palace ! When the attempt to count did not succeed in the ordinary way, it occurred to the genius of some of the Conservatives that the object might be accomplished by a little gentle and not unacceptable violence. A num- ber of stout squires therefore got round the door in the lobby, and endeavored by sheer physical obstruction to pre- vent zealous members from re-entering the house. It will be easily understood what the temper of the majority was when horse-play of this kind could even be attempted. At length it was evident that the bill could not pass; that the talk which was in preparation must smother it. The moment the bill got into committee there would be amend- ments on every line of it, and every member could speak as often as he pleased. The session was passing; the finan- cial measures could not be postponed or put aside; the opponents of the reform bill, open and secret, had the gov- ernment at their mercy. On Monday, June 11th, Lord John Russell announced that the government had made up their minds to withdraw the bill. There was no alternative. Lord Palmerston had rendered to the bill ex- actly that sort of service which Kemble rendered to the play of " Vortigern and Rowena." Kemble laid a peculiar emphasis on the words, " And when this solemn mockery is o'er," and glanced at the pit in such a manner as to ex- press only too clearly the contempt he had for the part which he was coerced to play; and the pit turned the piece into ridicule and would have no more of it. If Kemble had approved of the play, they might have put up with it for his sake; but when he gave them leave, they simply made sport of it. Lord Palmerston conveyed to his pit his private idea on the subject of the reform bill which he had officially to recommend; and the pit took the hint, and there was an end of the bill. Lord Palmerston became more unpopular than ever with the advanced Liberals. He had yielded so far to public alarm as to propose a vote of two millions, the first instal- ment of a sum of nine millions, to be laid out in fortifying our coast against the emperor of the French. He was accused of gross inconsistency. The statesman who went out of his way to give premature recognition to Louis Napoleon after the coup d'etat; the statesman of the con- spiracy bill was now clamoring for the means to resist a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 115 treacherous invasion from his favorite ally. Yet Lord Palmerston was not inconsistent. He had now brought himself seriously to believe that Louis Napoleon meditated evil to England; and with Palmerston, right or wrong, England was the one supreme consideration. To us he seems to have been wrong when he patronized Louis Napo- leon, and wrong when he wasted money in measures of superfluous protection against Louis Napoleon ; but we do not think the latter Palmerston was inconsistent with the former. Thenceforward it was understood that Lord Palmerston would have no more of reform. This was accepted as a political condition by most of Lord Palmerston's colleagues. Even Lord John Russell accepted the condition and bowed to his leader's determination, as George HP's ministers came to bend to his scruples with regard to Catholic eman- cipation. There was to be no reform bill while Lord Palm- erston lived. CHAPTER XLII. TROUBLES IN THE EAST. The queen's speech at the opening of parliament on January 24, 1800, mentioned, among other things, the renewal of disturbances in China. The English and French plenipotentiaries, it stated, had proceeded to the mouth of the Peiho river in order to repair to Pekin and exchange in that city the ratifications of the treaty of Tien-tsin. They found their further progress opposed, and a conflict took place between the Chinese forts at the mouth of the river and the naval force by which the pleni-' potentiaries were escorted. The allied forces were com- pelled to retire; and the royal speech mentioned that an expedition had been despatched to obtain redress. The treaty of Tien-tsin was that which, as was told in a former chapter, had been arranged by Lord Elgin and Baron Grros. The treaty contained a clause providing for the exchange of the ratifications at Pekin within a year from the date of the signature, which took place in June, 1858. Lord Elgin returned to England, ana his brother, Mr. Frederick Bruce, was appointed in March, 1850, envoy HO A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to China. Mr. Bruce was directed to proceed by way of the Peiho to Tien-tsin and thence to Pekin to exchange the ratifications of the treaty. In the instructions furnished to him, Lord Malmesbury, who was then foreign secretary, earnestly pressed upon the envoy the necessity of insisting on having the ratifications exchanged at Pekin. Lord Malmesbury pointed out that the Chinese authorities, having the strongest objection to the presence of an envoy in Pekin, would probably try to interpose all manner of delays and difficulties; and impressed upon Mr. Bruce that he was not to be put off from going to the capital. Mr. Bruce was distinctly directed to go to the mouth of the Peiho with "a sufficient naval force" and was told that unless some " unforeseen circumstances" should interpose to make other arrangement necessary, it would be desirable that he should go to Tien-tsin in a British man-of-war. Instruc- tions were sent out from England at the same time to Ad- miral Hope, the naval commander-in-chief in China, to provide a sufficient force to accompany Mr. Bruce to the mouth of the Peiho. The Peiho river flows from the highlands on the west into the Gulf of Pecheli, at the north-east corner of the Chinese dominions. The capital of the empire is about one hundred miles inland from the mouth of the Peiho. It does not stand on that river, which flows past it at some distance westward, but it is connected with the river by means of a canal. The town of Tien-tsin stands on the Peiho near its junction with one of the many rivers that flow into it, and about forty miles from the mouth. The entrance to the Peiho was defended by the Taku forts. On June 20, 1859, Mr. Bruce and the French envoy reached the mouth of the Peiho with Admiral Hope's fleet, some nineteen vessels in all, to escort them. Admiral Hope had sent a message two or three days before to Taku to announce that the English and French envoys were coming, and his boat had found the forts defended and the river staked by an armed crowd, who stated that they were militiamen, and said that they had no instructions as regarded the pas- sage of the envoys, but offered to send any message to Tien-tsin and bring back any answer which the authorities there might think fit to send. Admiral Hope again sent to them, and requested them to remove the obstructions in A HISTOR T OF Ull WN TIMES. 11? the river and clear a passage for the envoys. They do not appear to have actually refused the request, but they said that they had sent a messenger to Tien-tsin to announce the approach of the fleet. When, however, the envoys reached the mouth of the river they found the defenses further increased. Some negotiations and inter-communi- cations took place, and a Chinese official from Tien-tsin came to Mr. Bruce and endeavored to obtain some delay or compromise. Mr. Bruce became convinced that the condition of things predicted by Lord Malmesbury was coming about, and that the Chinese authorities were only trying to defeat his purpose. He also imagined, or discovered, that there was a want of proper respect for an English envoy shown in the terms of the letter and the rank of the official by whom it was conveyed. After a consultation with the French envoy, Mr. Bruce called on Admiral Hope to clear a passage for the vessels. On June 25th the ad- miral brought his gunboats close to the barrier and began to attempt their removal. The forts opened fire. The Chinese artillerymen showed unexpected skill and precision. Four of the gunboats were almost immediately disabled. All the attacking vessels got aground. Admiral Hope attempted to storm the forts. The attempt was a complete failure. About one thousand Englishmen and one hundred French went into action, of whom nearly four hundred and fifty were killed or wounded. Admiral Hope himself was wounded; so was the commander of the French vessel which had contributed a contingent to the storming party. An American naval captain rendered great service to the English and French in their distress. With "magnanimous indiscretion" he disregarded the strict principles of inter- national law; declared that "blood was thicker than water," and that he could not look on and see English- men destroyed by Chinese without trying to lend them a helping hand. The attempt to force a passage of the river was given up, and the mission to Pekin was over for the present. It will be easily imagined that the news created a deep sensation in England. It soon became known that although the Chinese government did Dot exactly accept the respon- sibility of what had occurred on the Peiho, yet they bluntly and rudely refused to make any apology for the attack on our ships or to punish the officials who Had ordered it. People 118 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. in general made up their minds at once that the matter could not be allowed to rest there and that the mission to Pekin must be enforced. At the same time a strong feel- ing prevailed that the envoy, Mr. Bruce, had been impru- dent and precipitate in his conduct. Lord Elgin had himself stated that we could have no right to navigate the Peiho until after the ratification of the treaty; and, however dis- courteous or even double-dealing the conduct of the Chinese authorities might have been, it was surely a ques- tionable policy to insist on forcing our way to the capital by one particular route to which for any reason they ob- jected. For this, however, it seems more just to blame Lord Malmesbury than Mr. Bruce. Lord Malmesbury had of course no idea of what was likely to happen; but his instructions to the English envoy read as if they were pre- pared with a view to that very contingency. Mr. Bruce might well have thought that they left him no alternative but to force his way. Before the whole question came to be discussed in parliament the Conservatives had gone out and the Liberals had come in. Lord Palmerston's govern- ment were only responsible in a technical sort of way for what had happened; and to do them justice they only defended the proceeding in a very cold and perfunctory manner. But they could hardly condemn their prede- cessors, whose action they had to continue and whose responsibilities they had to assume, and there did not seem much use in attacking the conduct of men who were out of office and were no longer amenable to parliamentary censure. On the other hand, it seems only fair to say that the outcry raised in England about the treacherous con- duct of the Chinese at the mouth of the Peiho was unfounded and even absurd. The Chinese government showed itself as usual crafty, double-dealing, and childishly arrogant for awhile; but the Chinese at the Peiho cannot be accused of perfidy. They had mounted the forts and barri- caded the river openly and even ostentatiously. The English admiral knew for days and days that the forts were armed and that the passage of the river was ob- structed. A man who when he sees you approaching his hall door closes and bars it against you, and holds a rifle pointed at your head while he parleys with you from an upper window, may be a very inhospitable and discour- teous person j but if when you attempt to dash in his door A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES, 119 lie fires at you with his rifle, you can hardly call him treacherous, or say that you had uo expectation of what was going to happen. Some of the English officers who were actually engaged in the attempt of Admiral Hope frankly repudiated the idea of any treachery on the part of the Chinese, or any surprise on their own side. They knew perfectly well, they said, that the forts were about to resist the attempt to force a way for the envoys up the river. The English and French governments determined that the men who had made the treaty of Tien-tsin — Lord Elgin and Baron Gros — should he sent back to insist on its reinforcement. Sir Hope Grant was appointed to the mili- tary command of our land forces, and General Cousin de Montauban, afterward Count Palikao, commanded the sol- diers of France. We need not here enter into the military history of the expedition. The English and French made short work of the Chinese resistance. The Chinese, to do them justice fought very bravely, as indeed they seem to have done on all occasions when war was forced on them, but of course they had no chance whatever against such forces as those commanded by the English and French generals. The allies captured the Taku forts, occupied Tien-tsin, and marched on Pekin. The Chinese government endeavored to negotiate for peace, and to interpose any manner of delay, diplomatic or otherwise, between the allies and their progress to the capital. Lord Elgin consented at last to enter into negotiations at Tungchow, a walled town ten or twelve miles nearer than Pekin. The Chinese commis- sioners were to meet the European plenipotentiaries at Tungchow. Lord Elgin's secretaries, Mr. Parkes and Mr. Loch, accompanied by some English officers, by Mr. Bowlby, the correspondent of the Times, and by some members of the stall' of Baron G-ros, went to Tungchow to make the necessary arrangements for an interview between the envoys and the Chinese commissioners. On their way back they had to pass through the lines of a large Chinese force, which had occupied the ground marked out by the commissioners themselves for the use of the European allies. Some quarrel took place between a French com- missariat officer and some Tartar soldiers, and a sort of general engagement was brought on. Mr. Parkes and Mr. Loch, and several of their companions, French and English, were seized and dragged off to various prisons, despite the. 1 20 A HISTO R Y OF OUR WN TIMES. fact that they bore a flag of truce and were known to have come for the purpose of arranging a conference requested by the Chinese themselves with a view to peace. Twenty- six British subjects and twelve subjects of France were thus carried off. Mr. Parkes and Mr. Loch were after- ward released, after having been treated with much cruelty and indignity. Of the twenty-six British subjects thus seized, thirteen died of the horrible ill-treatment they received. The thirteen who were released all bore more or less evidence physically of the usage which had been inflicted on them. Lord Elgin refused to negotiate until the prisoners had been returned, and the allied armies were actually at one of the great gates of Pekin and had their guns in position to blow the gate in, when the Chinese acceded to their terms. The gate was surrendered, the allies entered the city, and the English and French flags were hoisted side by side on the walls of Pekin. It was only after entering the city that Lord Elgin learned of the murder of the captives. He then determined to inflict an exemplary and a signal punishment on the Chinese authorities. The Chinese summer palace, a building, or rather a park and collection of buildings of immense ex- tent, had been plundered somewhat efficiently by the French on their march to Pekin. The French commander- in-chief had become possessed of a magnificent diamond necklace, which, according to popular rumor, was after- ward an adornment of the festivities of the imperial Tuileries. Lord Elgin now determined that the palace should be burnt down as a means of impressing the mind of the Chinese authorities generally with some sense of the danger of treachery and foul play. " What remains of the palace," such was Lord Elgin's stern notification, "which appears to be the place at which several of the British cap- tives were subjected to the grossest indignities, will be immediately leveled to the ground; this condition requires no assent on the part of his highness" (Prince Kung, the Chinese emperor's brother and plenipotentiary), "because it will be at once carried into effect by the commander-in- chief." Two days were occupied in the destruction of the palace. It covered an area of many miles. The palace of Adrian, at Tivoli, might have been hidden in one of its courts. Gardens, temples, small lodges and pagodas, groves, grottos, lakes, bridges, terraces, artificial hills. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 121 diversified the vast space. All the artistic treasures, all the curiosities, archaeological and other, that Chinese wealth and Chinese taste, such as it was, could bring together, had been accumulated in this magnificent pleas- aunce. The surrounding scenery was beautiful. The high mountains of Tartary ramparted one side of the enclosure. "It certainly was," says a spectator, "one of the most curious, and also one of the most beautiful scenes I had ever beheld." The buildings were set on fire; the whole place was given over to destruction. A monument was raised with an inscription in Chinese, setting forth that such was the reward of perfidy and cruelty. Very different opinions were held in England as to the destruction of the imperial palace. To many it seemed an act of unintelligible and unpardonable vandalism. Assur- edly the responsibility which Lord Elgin assumed was great. It was all the greater because the French plenipo- tentiary refused to share it. This was not, however, be- cause the French 'envoy thought it an act of mere vandal- ism. The French, who had remorselessly looted the palace, who had made it a wreck before Lord Elgin converted its site into a desert, could hardly have offered any becoming protest in the interests of art and of conciliation. The French plenipotentiary Avas merely of opinion that the destruction of the palace might interfere with the negotia- tions for peace which he was naturally anxious to bring to a conclusion. Lord Elgin assumed a heavy responsi- bility another way, inasmuch as he did not consider the capture of the Englishmen to have been a deliberate act of treachery on the part of the Chinese authorities. "On the whole," he wrote, " I come to the conclusion that in the proceedings of the Chinese plenipotentiaries and com- mander-in-chief in this instance there was that mixture of stupidity, want of straightforwardness, suspicion, and bluster which characterizes so generally the conduct of affairs in this country; but I cannot believe that after the experience which Sang-kol-in-sin" (tin 1 Chinese general-in- chief) "had already bad of our superiority in the field, either he or his civil colleagues could have intended to bring on a conflict in which, as the event has proved, he was sure to he worsted." Still, Lord Elgin held that for the ill-treatment and murder of men who ought never to have been touched with unfriendly hand, the Chinese 122 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. authorities must be held responsible; and that even war itself must become ten times more horrible if it were not one of its essential conditions that the messengers engaged in the preliminaries of peace are to be held sacred from harm. In this Lord Elgin was undoubtedly right. The only question was as to his justification in adopting what seemed to be so illogical and barbarous a mode of taking venge- ance. Would any breach of faith committed by the grand duke of Tuscany, when there was such a prince, have jus- tified a foreign conqueror in destroying the Pitti Palace? Would any act of treachery committed by a Spanish sover- eign justify the destruction of the Alhambra? To such demands Lord Elgin would have answered that he had no other way of recording in memorable characters his con- demnation of the cruelty perpetrated by the Chinese. He explained, that if he did not demand the surrender of the actual perpetrators, it was because he knew full well that no difficulty would have been made about giving him a seeming satisfaction. The Chinese government would have handed over to him as many victims as he chose to ask for, or would have executed as many as he thought fit to sug- gest. They would have selected for vicarious punishment, in all probability, a crowd of mean and unfortunate wretches who had no more to do with the murders than Lord Elgin had himself, who perhaps had never heard that such murders were done, and who would possibly even go to their death without the slightest notion of the reason why they were chosen out for such a doom. That was the chief reason which determined Lord Elgin. We confess it seems to us to have some strength in it. Most of our ac- tions in the war were unjustifiable; this was the one for which, perhaps, the best case could be made out by a moralist. It is somewhat singular that so many persons should have been roused to indignation by the destruction of a building who took with perfect composure the unjust invasion of a country. The allied powers now of course had it all in their own way. A convention was made by which China agreed that the representatives of England and France should reside either permanently or occasionally in Pekin according as the English and French governments might decide, and that the port of Tientsin should be open to trade and to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 123 the residence of foreign subjects. China had to pay a war indemnity and a large sum of money as compensation to the families of the murdered prisoners and to those who had suffered injuries, and to make an apology for the attack by the garrison of the Taku forts. Thus England established her right to have an envoy in Pekin, whether the Chinese liked it or not. The practical result was not very great. Perhaps the most important gain to Europie was the knowledge that Pekin was not by any means so large a city as we had all imagined it to be. British geographies had time out of mind taught British children that Pekin was the largest city in the world. Now we learned that it was not nearly so large as several other cities, and that it was, on the whole, rather a crumbling and tumble-down sort of place. There is some comfort in knowing that so much blood was not spilled wholly in vain. The same year saw also the troubles in the mountain terraces of the Lebanon, which likewise led to the com- bined intervention of England and France. The disturb- ances arose out of the rivalries and quarrels between two sects, the Maronites and those whom Mr. Browning's poem describes as " the Druse nation, warders on the mount of the world's secret since the birth of time." In the month of May a Maronite monk was found murdered, and sus- picion fell upon the Druses. Some Druses were killed apparently in retaliation. Then there were some killings on each side. On May 28th a general attack was made by the Druses on the Maronite villages in the neighborhood of Beyront, and some of them wvw burned down. A large town under Mount Hermon was attacked by the Druses. The Turkish commander ordered the Maronites to lay down their arms and promised that lie would protect them. They did give up their arms and the Turkish officer had the weapons removed. Then he seems to have abandoned the Maronites to their enemies. The Druses, animated by such a spirit as might have belonged to their worshiped chief and saint, Hakem, poured into the place and mas- sacred them all. The Turkish soldiers did not make any attempt to protect them, hut even, it was stated, in some cases helped the Druses in their work of butchery. In July the fanatical spirit spread to Damascus. A mob of Turk- ish fanatics made a general attack upon the Christian quarter and burned the greater part of it down. The con- 124 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. sulates of France, Russia, Austria, Holland, Belgium, and Greece were destroyed. Nearly two thousand Chris- tians were massacred in that one day's work. Many of the respectable Mussulman inhabitants of Damascus were most generous and brave in their attempts to save and shelter the unfortunate Christians; but the Turkish gover- nor of Damascus, although he had a strong military force at his disposal, made no serious effort to interfere with the work of massacre; and, as might be expected, his supine- ness was construed by the mob as an official approval of their doings, and they murdered with all the more vigor and zest. The famous Algerian chief, Abd-el-Kader, was then living in Damascus, and he exerted himself nobly in the defense and protection of the Christians. France had treated him when fallen and a prisoner with some- thing like generosity, and he well repaid in this season of horror to the Christians in Damascus any debt that he may have owed to a Christian people. The news of the massacres in the Lebanon naturally created a profound sensation in England. The cause of the disturbance was not very clearly understood in the first instance, and it was generally assumed that it was a mere quarrel of religion between Christians and Moham- medans. The Maronites being Christians, "a sect of Syrian Christians, united to Rome, although preserving their own primitive discipline," the Druses were assumed to be Mussulmans. Mr. Urquhart gave an amusing, and not altogether exaggerated, description of the manner in which English public opinion is made up on eastern questions. Conversing, be says, with a Druse of the Lebanon long before this particular outbreak, he observed to the Druse, " You get up one morning and cut each other's throats; then people at Beyrout or elsewhere sit down and write letters. One says the Maronites are a very virtuous and oppressed people of Christians; another says they are served right, for they are only Roman Catholics. One says the Druses have done it all; they are savages; another, the Turks have done it all; they are ferocious, perfidious, and fanatic. Then the j)eople in London begin to write who dwell in rooms on the housetop." This, it is to be understood, is Mr. Urquhart's playful way of describing the authors of newspaper articles, who, in accordance with a tradition still prevailing when he was young, he assumes to be the occupants of garrets. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 125 "They say these people are very ill off; we must protect tliem; or we must punish them ; or we must convert them. Then they all cry out, 'We must put down the Turkish government.' After this has been written and paid for, it is printed; and after it is printed it is sold. Then all the nation buys it, and after it has bought it reads it while it is eating its breakfast. Then each man goes out and meets his friends and talks it. This is the way the people of England occupy themselves about their affairs; and they call it by a name which being translated means universal guess. They smile then at each other, and say, 'We are great men; we know all that is doing in the world, we govern the world; like unto us were none since Noah came out of the ark. ' " Mr. Urquhart was a very clever, self-opinionated, and often curiously wrong-headed man. He had seen much of the east and had a knowledge of eastern ways and eastern history which few English- men could equal. But he was under the absolute dominion of a mania with regard to Russia which distorted all his faculties. Men who found that he could entertain as articles of faith some theories about English diplomacy and English statesmen which seemed almost too wild for the ordinary occupant of a madhouse, might well begin to doubt whether all his knowledge of the east must necessarily help him to any better conclusions about Asia than he had formed about the political men and affairs of his own country. In the passage which has been quoted he did, however, give a very fair exposition of the confusion of idea that prevailed in England about the disturbances in Syria. He was also able to make it quite clear that, what- ever the Druses were, they were not Mussulmans. The nooks of the mountain, a well-informed writer says, "are not more sequestered from the dwellings of man than the faith of the Druses is segregated from that of Christian or Moslem." Mr. Urquhart ascribed the cause of the quarrels to the intervention of the European powers in 1840," and of course to the secret influence of Russia working through that intervention. It is probable that the intervention did help, in one sense, to lead to the dissensions. The great powers started in L840 and in 1X41 ;i variety of theories about the better government of the Lebanon, <>ne of which was that it should have two governors, a Druse and a, Maronite. This was found impracticable, owing to the 126 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. fact that in many parts of the Lebanon the two sects were living in inextricable companionship. The bare idea, how- ever, was probably effectual in starting a new sort of rivalry. The porte did finally grant a certain amount of administra- tive autonomy to the Lebanon, and, having granted this under pressure, it is not unlikely that they were anxious to reduce it to as little of practical value as possible. Prob- ably the porte was unwilling to make use of any antipathy existing between Druses 'and Maronites. The porte was also under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the Maronites were planning an attack upon the Druses with the object of shaking off the Turkish yoke. It may be that Constantinojne was anxious to anticipate- matters and to call in the fanaticism of the Druses to rid them of the Maronites. Certainly the manner in which the Turkish officials at first seemed to connive at the massacres might have justified any such suspicion in the mind of Europe. England and France took strong and decisive steps. They resolved upon instant intervention to restore tran- quillity in the Lebanon. A convention was drawn up, to which all the great powers of Europe agreed, and which Turkey had to accept. By the convention England and France were entrusted with the duty of restoring order. France undertook to supply the troops required in the first instance; further requirements were to be met as the intervening powers might think fit. The intervening powers pledged themselves reciprocally not to seek for any territorial advantage or exclusive influence. England sent out Lord Dufferin to act as her commissioner; and Lord Dufferin accomplished his task with as much spirit as judgment. The Turkish government, to do it justice, had at last shown great energy in punishing the authors and the abettors of the massacres. The sultan sent out Fuad Pasha, his minister for foreign affairs, to the Lebanon ; and Fuad Pasha showed no mercy to the promoters of the disturbances, or even to the highly-placed official abettors of them. The governor of Damascus and the commander of the Turkish troops suffered death for their part in the transactions, and about sixty persons were pub- licly executed in the city, of whom the greater number belonged to the Turkish police force. Lord Dufferin described what he actually saw in such a manner as to prove that even alarmed rumor had hardly exaggerated the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 12? horrors of the time. Lord Dufferin tells that he came to Deir-el-Kamer a few clays after the massacre. "Almost every house was burned, aud the street crowded with dead bodies, some of them stripped and mutilated in every pos- sible way. My road led through some of the streets; my horse could not even pass, for the bodies were literally piled up. Most of those I examined had many wounds,and in each case the right hand was either entirely or nearly cut off; the poor wretch, in default of weapons, having instinc- tively raised his arm to parry the blow aimed at him. I saw little children of not more than four years old stretched on the ground, and old men with gray beards." The intervention was successful in restoring order and in providing for the permanent peace of Syria. It had one great recommendation; it was thorough. It was in that respect a model intervention. To intervene in the affairs of any foreign state is a task of great responsibility. The cases are few indeed in which it can be justified or even excused. But it has long been to all seeming a prin- ciple of European statesmanship that Turkey is a country in the government of which it is necessary for other powers to intervene from time to time. The whole of the policy of what is called the eastern question is based on the assumption that Turkey is to be upheld by external influ- ence, and that being thus virtually protected she is liable also to be relinked and kept in order. Now there may be some doubt as to the propriety of intervening at all in the affairs of Turkey, but there can be no doubt that when intervention does take place it should be prompt and it should be thorough. The independence of Turkey is at an end when a conference of foreign ministers sits round a table to direct what she is to do; it is then merely a ques- tion of convenience and expediency as to the extent to which intervention shall go. Nothing can be more illogical and more pernicious in its way than to say, "We will intervene just far enough to take away from the Turkish government its domestic supremacy and its responsibility; but, out of consideratiou for its feelings, or its convenience we will not- intervene far enough to make it certain that what we think necessary shall lie promptly and efficiently done." In the case of the Syrian disturbances the inter- vention was conducted ona practical principle. The great powers, acting on the assumption, which alone could justify 128 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. their interference, that Turkey was not in a condition to restore order herself, proceeded to do this for her in the most energetic and complete manner. The consent of Turkey was not considered necessary. The sultan was distinctly informed that the interference would take place whether he approved of it or not. When the intervention had succeeded in thoroughly restoring order, the repre- sentatives of the great powers assembled in Constantinople unanimously agreed that a Christian governor of the Lebanon should be appointed in subordination to the sul- tan, and the sultan had, of course, no choice but to agree to this proposition. The French troops evacuated Syria in June, 1861, and thereby much relieved the minds of many Englishmen, who had long forgotten all about the domestic affairs of the Lebanon in their alarm lest the French imperial troops, having once set foot in Syria, should not easily be induced to quit the country again. This was not merely a popular and ignorant alarm. On June 26, 1861, Lord Palmerston wrote to the British am- bassador at Constantinople, Sir Henry Bulwer, "I am heartily glad we have got the French out of Syria, and a hard job it was to do so. The arrangement made for the future government of the Lebanon will, I dare say, work sufficiently well to prevent the French from having any pretext for returning thither." In the same letter Lord Palmerston makes a characteristic allusion to the death of the sultan of Turkey, which had taken place the very day before; " Abd-ul-Medjid was a good-hearted and weak- headed man, who was running two horses to the goal of perdition — his own life and that of his empire. Luckily for the empire, his own life won the race." Then Palmer- ston adds, " If the accounts we have heard of the new sul- tan are true, we may hope that he will restore Turkey to her proper position among the powers of Europe. " A day or two after, Lord Wodehouse, on the part of the govern- ment, expressed to the House of Lords a confident hope that a new era was about to dawn upon Turkey. Another new era! It would hardly be fitting to close the history of this stormy year without giving a few lines to record the peaceful end of a life which had through all its earlier parts been one of "sturt and strife." Quietly in his Kensington home passed away, in the late autumn of this year, Thomas A II18T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 129 Cochrane — the gallant Dundonald, the hero of the Basque Roads, the volunteer who lent his genius and his courage to the cause of Brazil, of Chili, and of Greece; a sort of Peterborough of the waves, a "Swiss of heaven." Lord Dundonald had been the victim of cruel, although not surely intentional, injustice. He was accused, as every one knows, of having had a share in the famous stock- jobbing frauds of 1814; he was tried, found guilty, sen- tenced to fine and imprisonment; expelled from the House of Commons, dismissed from the service which he had helped to make yet more illustrious than he found it; and deprived of all his public honors. He lived to see his innocence believed in as well by his enemies as by his friends. William IV. reinstated him in his naval rank, and Queen Victoria had the congenial task of completing the restoration of his well-won honors. It was not, how- ever, until many years after his death that the country fully acquitted itself of the mere money debt which it owed to Lord Dundonald and his family. Cochrane was a Radical in politics, and for some years sat as a colleague of Sir Francis Burdett in the representation of Westminster. He carried on in the House of Commons many a bitter argument with Mr. John Wilson Croker, when the latter was secretary to the admiralty. It cannot be doubted that Cochrane's political views and his strenuous way of assert- ing them made him many enemies, and that some men were glad of the opportunity for revenge which was given by the accusation got up against him. His was an impa- tient spirit, little suited for the discipline of parliamentary life. His tongue was often bitter, and he was too apt to assume that a political opponent must be a person unwor- thy of respect. Even in his own service he was impatient of rebuke. To those under his command he was always genial and brotherly; but t<> those above him he was some- times wanting in that patient submission which is an essen- tial quality of those who would learn how to command wit li most success. Cochrane's true place was on his quar- ter-deck; his opportunity came in the extreme moment of danger. Then his spirit asserted itself. His gift was that which wrenches success out of the very jaws of failure; he saw his way most clearly when most others began to despair. During part of his later life he had been occupy- ing himself with some inventions of his own — some sub- 130 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. marine methods for blowing up ships, some engines which were, by their terrible clestructiveness, to abridge the struggles and agonies of war. At the time of the Crimean War he offered to the government to destroy Sebastopol in a few hours by some of his plans. The proposal was examined by a committee and was not accepted. It was his death, on October 30, 1860, which recalled to the mind of the living generation the hero whose exploits had divided the admiration of their fathers with those of Nelson, of Collingwood, and of Sidney Smith. A new style of naval warfare has come up since those days, and perhaps Cochrane may be regarded as the last of the old sea-kings. CHAPTER XLIII. THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA. Civil war broke out in the United States. The long threatened had come to pass. Abraham. Lincoln's election as president, brought about by the party divisions of the southerners among themselves, seemed to the south the beginning of a new order of things, in which they and their theories of government would no longer predominate. They felt that the peculiar institution on which they be- lieved their prosperity and their pride to depend was threat- ened with extinction, and they preferred secession to such a result. In truth, tbe two sets of institutions were in- compatible. A system founded on slavery could not be worked much longer in combination with the political and social institutions of the northern states. The struggle was one for life or death between slavery and the principles of modern society. When things had come to this pass it is hardly worth stopping to consider what particular event it was which brought about the actual collision. If the election of Mr. Lincoln had not supplied the occasion, something else would have furnished it. Those who are acquainted with the history of tbe great emancipation struggle in America know very well that if the south had not seceded from the Union some of the northern states would sooner or later have done so. Every day in the northern states saw an increase in the number of those who would rather have seceded than give further couute- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 131 nance to the system of slavery. It was a peculiarity of that system that it could not stand still; it could not rest con- tent with tolerance and permission to hold what it already possessed. It must have new ground, new fields to occupy. It must get more or die. Most of the abolitionists would rather themselves secede than yield any more to slavery. We are chiefly concerned in this history with the Ameri- can civil war in so far as it affected England. It becomes part of our history, by virtue of the Alabama question and the Treaty of Washington. It is important to intro- duce a short narrative of the events which led to the long dispute between England and the United States, a dispute which brought us more than once to the very edge of war, and which was only settled by the almost unparalleled con- cession of the Washington treaty. The southern states, led by South Carolina, seceded. Their delegates assembled at Montgomery, in Alabama, on February 4, 18G1, to agree upon a constitution. A southern confederation was formed, with* Mr. Jefferson Davis as its president. Mr. Davis announced the determination of the south to main- tain its independence by the final arbitrament of the sword, "if passion or lust of dominion should cloud the judgment or influence the ambition of the north." This announce- ment was made on February 18, 1861, and on March 4th following, the new president of the United States entered formally into office. Mr. Lincoln announced that he had no intention to interfere with the institution of slavery in any state where it existed; that the law gave him no power to do so, even if he had the inclination; but that, on the other hand, no state could, upon its own mere motion, law- fully get out of the union; that acts of violence against, the authority of the United States must be regarded as insur- rectionary or revolutionary. There was still an impression in this country, and to some extent in America, that an invitation was thus held out by Mr. Lincoln to the southern states to enter into peaceful negotiations, with a view to a dissolution of partnership. But if there was any such intention in the mind of Mr. Lincoln, or any possibility of carrying it into effect, all such contingencies were put out of the question by the impetuous action of South Carolina. This state had been the first to secede, and it was the first to commit an act of war. The traveler in South Carolina, as he stands on one of the quays of Charleston and looks 132 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. toward the Atlantic, sees the sky line across the harbor broken by a heavy-looking, solid, square fort, which soon became famous in the war. This was Fort Sumter, a place built on an artificial island, with walls some^ sixty feet high and eight to twelve feet thick. It was in the occupation of the Federal government, as of course were the defenses of all the harbors of the Union. It is,_ per- haps, not necessary to say that while each state made inde- pendently its local laws, the Federal government and con- gress had the charge of all business of national interest; customs duties, treaties, the army and navy, and the coast defenses. The Federal government had therefore a gar- rison in Fort Sumter, and when there seemed a possibility of civil war, they were anxious to reinforce it. A vessel which they sent for the purpose was fired at, from a great island in the harbor, by the excited secessionists of South Carolina and on April 12th the Confederates who had erected batteries on the mainland for the purpose, began to bom- bard the fort. The little garrison had no means of resist- ance, and after a harmless bombardment of two days it sur- rendered, and Fort Sumter was in the hands of the secessionists of South Carolina. The effect of this piece of news on the mind of the north has been well and tersely described by a writer of the time. It was as if while two persons were still engaged in a peaceful discussion as to some claim of right, one suddenly brought the debate to a close by giving the other a box on the ear. There was an end to all negotiation; thenceforward only strokes could arbitrate. Four days after, President Lincoln called for seventy- five thousand men to volunteer in' re-establishing the Federal authority over the rebel states. President Davis immediately announced his intention to issue letters of marque. President Lincoln declared the southern ports under blockade. On May 8th Lord John Eussell announced in the House of Commons, that after consulting the law officers of the crown the government were of opinion that the southern Confederacy must be recognized as a belliger- ent power. On May 13th the neutrality proclamation was issued by the government, warning all subjects of her majesty- from enlisting on land or sea, in the service of Federals or Confederates, supplying munitions of war, equipping vessels for privateering purposes, engaging in A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 133 transport service, or doing any other act calculated to afford assistance to either belligerent. This was, in fact, the recognition of the southern Confederacy as a belligerent power; and this was the first act on the part of England which gave offense in the north. It was regarded there as an act of unseemly and even indecent haste, as evidence of an overstrained anxiety to assist and encourage the southern rebels. This interpretation was, to some extent, borne out by the fact that the English government did not wait for the daily-expected arrival of Mr. Adams, the new American minister, to hear what he might have to say be- fore resolving on issuing the proclamation. Yet it is cer- tain that the proclamation was made with no unfriendly motive. It was made at the instance of some of the most faithful friends the northern cause had on this side of the Atlantic, conspicuous among whom in recommending it was Mr. W. E. Foster. If such a proclamation had not been issued, the English government could not have under- taken to recognize the blockade of the southern ports. If there was no belhtm going on, the commerce of the world could not be expected to recognize President Lincoln's blockade of Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans. International law on the subject is quite clear. A state cannot blockade its own ports. It can only blockade the ports of an enemy. It can, indeed, order a closure of its own ports. But a closure of the ports would not have been so effective for the purposes of the Federal government as a blockade. It would have been a matter of municipal law only. An offender against the ordinance of closure could be only dealt with lawfully in American waters; an offender against the decree of blockade could be pursued into the open sea. In any case, Mr. Lincoln's government chose the blockade. They had previously announced that the crews of Confederate privateers would} be treated as pirates, but their proclamation of the blockade compelled them to recede from that declaration. It was, indeed, a threat that modern humanity and the public feeling of the whole northern states would never have allowed them to carry out, and which Mr. Lincoln himself, whose temper always Leaned to mercy, would never have thought of putting into ell'eet. The proclamation of a blockade com- pelled the Federal government totreal privateers as belliger- ents. It could not but compel foreign states to admit the belligerent rights of the southern Confederation. 134 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. In England the friends of the north, or some of them at least, were anxious that the recognition should take place as quickly as possible, in order that effect should be given to the president's proclamation. The English gov- ernment had trouble enough afterward to resist the impor- tunity of those at home and abroad who thought they ought to break the blockade in the interests of European trade. They could have no excuse for recognizing it if they did not also recognize that there was a war going on wh ich warranted it. Therefore, whether the recognition of the southern Confederates as belligerents was wise or unwise, timely or premature, it was not done in any spirit of unfriendliness to the north, or at the spiriting of any southern partisans. It was done at the urgency of friends of the north, and in what was believed to be the interest of President Lincoln's government. It seems to us that in any case the recognition was fully justified. The proclamation began by setting forth that "hostilities had unhappily begun between the government of the United States and certain states styling themselves the Confederate States of America." Before its issue Fort Sumter had been taken, Mr. Seward, the new Federal secretary of state, had announced, in a despatch, that the insurgents had "instituted revolution with open, flagrant, deadly war;" and that the United States had " accepted this civil war as an inevitable necessity." Many days before the proclama- tion was issued the New York chamber of commerce had stated that secession had culminated in war, and the judges of the higher courts had decided that a state of war existed. Under such circumstances it seems hardly possible to con- tend that England was bound by any principle of law, international or other, to withhold her recognition. With the proclamation of neutrality on the part of her majesty's government began, curiously enough, the long diplomatic controversy which was carried on between this country and the United States. The correspondence spreads over years. It is maintained principally by Earl Eusseil, Mr. Adams, American minister in Londou, and Mr. Seward, American secretary of state. The diplomatic cor- respondence is conducted, as might be expected, with unvarying courtesy, and with at least the outward expres- sion of good temper; but it deepens sometimes in tone and earnestness, so that any reader can see that it is reaching a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 135 tension not likely to be long kept up. More than once it becomes evident that the states thus represented are on the verge of a serious quarrel. The impression on the part of the United States evidently is, all throughout, that England is the concealed and bitter enemy of the Union, and is seizing every possible opportunity to do it harm. The first cause of dispute is the recognition of belligerent rights. Then there comes the seizure of the Confederate envoys in the Trent, which England could not permit, and which apparently the public of the United States could not for- give her for not being able to permit and thus putting them in the wrong. Ear more serious as a cause of quarrel was the career of the Alabama and her kindred vessels. The Mexican expedition was a grievance to the north, connected as it was with the supposed inclination of the English gov- ernment to follow the promptings of the French emjieror and concede to the southern Confederates their actual recognition ;is an independent state. It is necessary to endeavor to follow the course of public opinion in England and ascertain, if possible, the meaning of its various changes. Let it be firmly stated at the out- set, as a matter of justice, that it was not any feeling of sympathy with slavery which influenced so many English- men in their support of the south. No real evidence exists of any change in public opinion of that kind. It is true that sometimes a heated champion of the south did, when driven to bay for argument, contend that after all, perhaps slavery was not quite so bad a thing as people fancied. The Times did once venture to suggest that the Scriptures contained no express interdiction of slavery; but no great stress even there was laid upon such an argument; and it might be doubted whether the opinion of any rational man on the slavery question was changed in this country by symp- athy with the south. On thecontrary, strange as it may seem at first, the dislike of many Knglishnien to the slave system converted them first into opponents of the north and next into partisans of the south. An impression got abroad that the northern statesmen were not sincere in their reprobation of slavery, and that they only used the argu- ments and the feeling against it as a means of endeavoring to crush the south. Many Englishmen could not under- stand — some of them perhaps would not understand — that a northern statesman might very well object to breaking 136 A HISTORY OF OVR OWN TIMES. up the union in order to put clown slavery, and might yet, when an enemy endeavored to destroy the union, make up his mind, with perfect consistency; that the time had come to get rid of the slave system once for all. The statesmen of the north were not to he classed as Abolition- ists. Not many men in office, or likely just then to be in office, were professed opponents of slavery. Most of them regarded it as a very objectionable institution which the southern states had unfortunately inherited, which no one would think of introducing then if it had not been introduced before, but which nevertheless it was not worth risking a national convulsion for the sake of trying to root out at once. They would have been willing to trust to time and education, and all the civilizing processes, for the gradual extinction of the system. Many of them had even known so many good and kindly southern slave- owners, that they could not feel a common hatred for all the upholders of the unfortunate institution. Men like Mr. Lincoln himself would have gladly kept to the Union, even though, for the present and for some time to come, union meant the toleration of slavery in the south. Two extreme parties there were who would not compromise; the planter faction of the south and the Abolitionists of New England. The planters were not content that their institution should be tolerated; they would have it ex- tended and made supreme. The Abolitionists took their stand on principle; slavery was to them simply a crime, and they would have nothing to do with the accursed thing. When at last the inevitable collision came, there was nothing inconsistent or unreasonable in the position of the northern statesman who said, " I am opposed to all sudden changes in our constitution; I would not have broken up the Union on the question of southern slavery; but now that the southerners themselves have chosen to secede and to begin a civil war, I say the time has come to get done with this long-standing cause of quarrel, and to decree once for all the extinction of the slave system." That came, in fact, as the war went on, to be the posi- tion of Mr. Lincoln and of many other northern statesmen. It was the position which practical statesmen would have been likely to take, and might have been expected to take. Yet it seemed to many Englishmen to argue mere hypocrisy that a man should be intolerant of slavery when it led to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 13? secession and civil war, if he had been willing to put up with it for the sake of peace. Again, Englishmen insisted that the northern statesmen were not going into the war with an unmixed motive ; as if any state ever yet went to war with one single and undiluted purpose. A good deal was heard about the manner in which the colored race were excluded from society in New York and the northern states generally. The exclusiveness was assuredly narrow- minded and bad enough; but it is one thing to say a colored man shall not sit next us in a theatre or a church, that he shall not go to school with one's son or marry one's daughter, and it is quite another thing to say that we have a right to scourge the colored man to death, to buy his son for a slave, and sell his daughter at the auction-block. A citizen of one of the Canadian provinces might strongly ob- ject to the society of the red Indian in any form, and yet might be willing to arm against a system which would reduce the red Indian to a condition of slavery. Not a few Englishmen condemned, boldly and out of hand, the whole principle of coercion in political affairs. They declared that the north had no right to put down seces- sion; that the south had a right to secede. Yet the same men had upheld the heaven-appointed right of England to put down the rebellion in India, and would have drenched, if need be, Ireland in blood rather than allow her to with- draw from a partnership into which, after all, unlike the southern states, she had never voluntarily entered. At first, however, the feeling of Englishmen was almost unanimously in favor of the north. It was thought that the southern states would be allowed quietly to secede, and most Englishmen did not take a great interest in the mat- ter, or, when they did, were inclined to regard the south- erners as a turbulent and troublesome set, who had better be permitted to go off with their peculiar institution and keep it all to themselves. When, however, it became apparent that the secession must lead to war, then many of the same Englishmen began to put the blame on the north for making the question any cause of disturbance to the world. There was a kind of impatient feeling as if we and the world in general had no right to be troubled with these American quarrels, as if it was unfair to us that our cotton trade should he interrupted and we ourselves put to inconvenience for a dispute about secession. There clearly 138 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. would have been no war and no disturbance if only the north had agreed to let the south go, and therefore the people on this side of the Atlantic set themselves to find good cause for blaming the statesmen who did not give in to anything rather than disturb the world with their ob- stinacy and their Union. Out of this condition of feeling came the resolve to find the north in the wrong; and out of that resolve came with many the discovery that the north- ern statesmen were all hypocrites. Suddenly, as if to de- cide wavering minds, an event was reported which made hosts of admirers for the south in England. The battle of Bull Run took place on July 21, 1861, and the raw levies of the north were defeated, thrown into confusion, and in some instances driven into ignominous flight. This was not very surprising. The southern men were infinitely better fitted for the beginning of a war than the men of the north. The southerners had always a taste for soldiering, and had kept up their state militia systems with an energy and exactness which the business men of the north had neither the time nor the inclination to imitate. The southern militia systems were splendid training schools for arms, and became the nucleus each of an excellent army when at last the war broke out. The northern govern- ment had yielded to a popular cry, and made a premature movement on Eichmond, in Virginia, now the southern capital. It was not very surprising, therefore, that the south should have won the first battle. It was not very surprising either if some of the hastily-raised northern regiments of volunteers should have proved wretched soldiers and should have yielded to the sudden influence of panic. But when the news reached England, it was re- ceived by vast numbers with exultation, and with derision at the expense of the " Yankees." It had been well settled that the Yankees were hypocrites and low fellows before; but now it came out that they were mere runaways and cowards. The English people, for a brave nation, are sur- prisingly given to accusing their neighbors of cowardice. They have a perfect mania for discovering cowardice all over the world. Napoleon was a coward to a past genera- tion; the French were for a long time cowards; the Italians were cowards; at the time of the Schleswig-Hol- stein war the Germans were cowards; the Russians still are cowards. In 1861 the Yankees were the typical cowards of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 139 the earth. A very flame of enthusiasm leaped up for the brave south, which, though so small in numbers, had con- trived with such spirit and ease to defeat the Yankees. Something of chivalry there was, no doubt, in the wish that the weaker side should win; but that chivalry was strongly dashed with the conviction that after all the south had the better fighters and was sure to succeed in the end; that the American Union was in some mysterious way a sort of danger to England, and that the sooner it was broken up the better. Mr. Cobden afterward accused the English government of having dealt with the United States as if they were dealing with Brazil or some such weak and help- less state. It is important for the fair understanding and appreciation of the events that followed, to remember that there was, among all the advocates of the south in Eng- land, a very general conviction that the north was sure to be defeated and broken up, and was therefore in no sense a formidable power. It is well also to bear in mind that there were only two European states which entertained this feeling and allowed it to be everywhere understood. The southern scheme found support only in England and in France. In all other European countries the sympathy of people and government alike went with the north. In most places the sympathy arose from a detestation of slavery. In Russia, or at least with the Russian govern- ment, it arose from a dislike of rebellion. But the effect was the same : that assurances of friendship came from all civilized countries to the northern states except England and France alone. One of the latest instructions given by Cavour on his deathbed in this year was that an assurance should be sent to the Federal government that Italy could give its sympathies to no movement which tended to the perpetuation of slavery. The pope, Pius IX, and Cardi- nal Antonelli repeatedly expressed their hopes for the suc- cess of the northern cause. On the other hand, the em- peror of the French fully believed that the southern cause was sure to triumph and that the Union would be broken up; he was even very willing to hasten what he as- sumed to be the unavoidable end. He was anxious that England should join with him in some measures to facili- tate the success of the south by recognizing the government of the southern Confederation. He got up the Mexican intervention, of which we shall have occasion presently to 140 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. speak, and which assuredly he would never have attempted if he had not been persuaded that the Union was on the eve of disruption. He was not without warning. Many eminent Frenchmen, well acquainted with America, urged on him the necessity of caution. His cousin, Prince Na- poleon, went over to America, and surveyed the condition of affairs from both points of view, talked with the leaders on both sides, visited both camps and came back impressed with the conviction that the southern movement for inde- pendence would be a failure. The Emperor Napoleon, however, held to his own views and his own schemes. He had afterward reason to curse the day when he reckoned on the break-up of the. Union and persuaded himself that there was no occasion to take account of the northern strength. Yet in France the French people in general were on the side of the north. Only the emperor and his government were on that of the south. In England, on the other hand, the vast majority of what are called the in- fluential classes came to be heart and soul with the south. The government was certainly not so, but it can hardly be doubted that the government allowed itself sometimes to be overdone by the clamor of a West End majority, and gave the north only too much reason to suspect that its defeats were welcome to those in authority in England. Lord Palmerston made some jesting allusion in a public speech to the "unfortunate rapid movements" of the northern soldiers at Bull Bun; and the jibe was bitterly resented by many Americans. At first the northern states counted with absolute confi- dence upon the sympathy of England. The one reproach Englishmen had always been casting in their face was that they did not take any steps to put down slavery. Not long before this time Lord Brougham, at a meeting of a statisti- cal congress in London, where the American minister hap- pened to be present, delivered a sort of lecture at him on the natural equality of the black with the white. All England had just been in a state of wild excitement about the case of the fugitive slave, Anderson. An escaped slave, who had taken refuge in Canada, was demanded back by the United States government — at that time, be it remem- bered, still a southern government — because in trying to escape he had killed one of those who strove to stay his flight and capture him. The idea seemed monstrous to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 141 Englishmen, that any British or colonial court of law should give back as a criminal a man who had only done that which English law would warrant him in doing — resisted, even to slaying, an attempt to make him a slave. The fugitive was not given up to the United States. The colonial courts discharged him from custody on the ground of some informality in the warrant of detention and he came to England. But the court of queen's bench here had already issued a writ of habeas corpus to bring him before it, on the ground that his detention in Toronto, even while waiting the decision of the colonial court, was illegal ; and if it had not so happened that he was released from custody before the writ could interfere, some very impor- tant and difficult questions in international law might have had to be decided. In this country public opinion was warmly in favor of the release of Anderson, and would have gone any length to save him from being surrendered to his captors. Public opinion was expressing itself soundly and justly. It would have amounted to a recogni- tion of slavery if an English court had consented, on any ground, to hand over as a criminal a man who merely resisted an attempt to drag him back into servitude. 'IMi is was just before the accession of Mr. Lincoln to office. It was the common expectation of the northern states that England would welcome the new state of things, under which the demand for the return of a fugitive slave was never likely to insult them. The English government had had for years and years incessant difficulties with the gov- ernment of the United States while the latter was in the hands of the south. Colored subjects of the queen had been seized in Charleston and carried oil' into slavery, and it was not possible to get any redress. For years we had been listening to complaints from our governments about the arrogance and insolence of the American statesmen in office, who were all more or less under the control of the south. It is easy to understand, therefore, how Mr. Lin- coln and his friends counted on the sympathy of the English government and the English people, and how surprised they were when they found English statesmen, journalists, preachers, and English society generally, deriding their misfortunes and apparently wishing for the success of their foes. The surprise changed into a feeling of bitter disappointment, and that gave place to an angrj temper, 143 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. which exaggerated every symptom of ill will, distorted every fact, and saw wrong even where there only existed an honest purpose to do right. It was while this temper was beginning to light up on both sides of the Atlantic that the unfortunate affair of the Trent occurred. The Confederate government had resolved to send envoys to Europe to arrange, if possible, for the recognition of the southern states. Mr. W. L. Yancey, an extreme advocate of the doctrine of state sover- eignty had already been in Europe with this purpose; and now Mr. Davis was anxious to have a regular envoy in London and another in Paris. Mr. Slidell, a prominent southern lawyer and politician, was to represent the south at the court of the Emperor Napoleon, provided he could obtain recognition there; and Mr. James Murray Mason, the author of the fugitive slave law, was to be despatched with a similar mission to the court of Queen Victoria. The two southern envoys escaped together from Charles- ton, one dark and wet October night, in a small steamer, and got to Havana. There they took passage for Southamp- ton in the English mail steamer Trent. The United States sloop of war, San Jacinto, happened to be returning from the African coast about the same time. Her commander, Captain Wilkes, was a somewhat hot-tempered and indis- creet officer. He was cruising about in quest of the, Con- federate privateer Sumter, and while at Havana he learned that the Confederate agents, with their secretaries, were on their way to Europe. He determined to intercept them. Two hundred and fifty miles from Havana he awaited them in the Bahama Channel. The Trent approached ; he summoned her to heave to, and his summons being disre- garded, fired a shot across her hows. An armed party was then sent on board, and the Confederate envoys were seized with their secretaries, and carried as prisoners on board the San Jacinto, despite the protest of the captain of the English steamer and from under the protection of the English flag. The prisoners were first carried to New York, and then confined in one of the forts in Boston harbor. Now, there cannot be the slightest doubt of the illegality of this proceeding on the part of Captain Wilkes. It was not long, to be sure, since England had claimed and exer- cised a supposed right of the same kind. But such a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 143 claim had been given up, and could not, in 1861, have been maintained by any civilized state. It was a claim which the United States government had especially exerted themselves to abolish. This was the view taken at once by President Lincoln, whose plain good sense served him in better stead than their special studies had served some pro- fessors of international law. We have it on the excellent authority of Dr. Draper, in his "History of the American Civil War," that Mr. Lincoln at once declared that the act of Captain Wilkes could not be sustained. He said, " This is the very thing the British captains used to do. They claimed the right of searching American ships and carry- ing men out of them. That was the cause of the war of 1812. Now, we cannot abandon our own principles. We shall have to give these men up and apologize for what we have done." This was, in fact, the course that the Ameri- can government had to take. Mr. Seward wrote a long letter in answer to Lord Russell's demand for the surrender of the prisoners, in which lie endeavored to make out that Captain Wilkes had acted in accordance with English precedents, but stated that he had not had any authority from the American government to take such a course, and that the government did not consider him to have acted in accordance with the law of nations. "It will be seen," Mr. Seward went on to say, " that this govern- ment cannot deny the justice of the claim presented to us, in this respect, upon its merits. We are asked to do to the British nation what we have always insisted all nations ought to do unto us." He announced therefore, that the four prisoners would be "cheerfully liberated." On January 1, L862, the Confederate envoys were given upon the demand of the British government, and sailed for Europe. The question, then, it might be thought, was satisfac- torily settled. Unfortunately, however, a great deal of harm had been done in the meantime. Popular clamor in the United States had entirely approved of the action of Captain Wilkes. A mass meeting held in Tammany Hall or the Cooper Institute of New York, or even in the less vehement Faneuil Hall of Boston, is not exactly an assem- bly qualified to give an authoritative decision on questions of international law. The secretary of the navy, however, who ought to have known better hut did not, had com- mended the action of the captain of the San Jacinto. A 144 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. vote of thanks had been passed to Captain Wilkes in the House of Eepresentatives, Washington, " for his arrest of the traitors Slidell and Mason." Under these circum- stances, it is not surprising if people on this side of the ocean should have fancied that the United States were eager to sustain a great act of wrong done against us and against international law. But, on the other hand, the arrest was so absolutely without justification that the English government might well have known President Lincoln's cabinet could not sustain it. The governments of all the great European states promptly interposed their good advice, pointing out to Mr. Lincoln the impossibility of maintaining Captain Wilkes' act. The foreign envoys in Washington, and the Orleans princes, then in that city, had given the same good advice. Lord Palmerston's govern- ment acted, however, as if an instant appeal to arms must be necessary. Lord Eussell sent out to Washington a per- emptory demand for the liberation of the envoys and an apology, and insisted on an answer within seven days. Troops were at once ordered out to Canada, and a proc- lamation was issued forbidding the export of arms and munitions of war. All this was done, although on the very day that Lord Russell was despatching his peremptory letter to Washington, Mr. Seward was writing to London to assure her majesty's government that the arrest had been made without any authority from the United States government, and that the president and his advisers were then considering the proper course to take. The fact that Mr. Seward's letter had been received was, for some reason or other not made publicly known in England at the time, and the English people were left to believe that the action of Captain Wilkes either was the action of the American government or had that government's approval. Public feeling therefore raged and raved a good deal on both sides. American statesmen believed that the English government was making a wanton and offensive display of a force which they had good reason to know would never be needed. The English public was left under the impression that the American statesmen were only yielding to the display of force. The release of the prisoners did not seem to our people to come with a good grace. It did not seem to the American people to have been asked or accepted with a good grace. Mr. Seward might as well, perhaps, when he had A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 145 made up bis mind to restore the prisoners, have spared himself the trouble of what the Scotch would call a long "haver," to show that if he acted as England had done he should not have given them up at all. But Mr. Seward always was a terribly eloquent despatch writer, and he could not, we may suppose, persuade himself to forego the opportunity of issuing a dissertation. On the other hand, Lord Palmerston's demeanor and language were what he would probably himself have called, in homely language, " bumptious" if some one else had been in question. Lord Palmerston could not deny himself the pleasure of a burst of cheap popularity, and of seeming to flourish the flag of England in the face of presumptuous foes. The episode was singularly unfortunate in its effect upon the temper of the majority in England and America. Erom that mo- ment there was a formidable party in England who detested the north, and a formidable party in the north who detested England. CHAPTER XLIV. THE CRUISE OF THE ALABAMA. The cause of peace between nations lost a good friend at the close of 1861. The prince consort died. It is be- lieved that the latest advice he gave on public affairs had reference to the dispute between England and the United States about the seizure of the Confederate envoys, and that the advice recommended calmness and forbearance on the part of the English government. It is not to be sup- posed, of course, that the prince consort even thought of suggesting that the English government should acquiesce in what had been done, or allow the wrong to remain unredressed. He knew, as every reasonable man might have known, that the error of the American sailor was unjustifi- able, and would have to be atoned for; but he probably assumed that for that very reason the atonement might be awaited without excitement, and believed that it would neither be politic nor generous to make a show of compel- ling by force what must needs he conceded to justice. The death of the prince. consort, lamentable in every way, was especially to be deplored at a time when influential coun- 146 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. sels tending toward forbearance and peace were much needed in England. But it may be said, with literal truth, that when the news of the prince's death was made known, its possible effect on the public affairs of England was for- gotten or unthought of in the regret for the personal loss. Outside the precincts of Windsor Castle itself the event was wholly unxepected. Perhaps even within the precincts of the castle there was little expectation up to the last that such a calamity was so near. The public had only learned a few days before that the prince was unwell. On Decem- ber 8th the Court Circular mentioned that he was confined to his room by a feverish cold. Then it was announced that he was "suffering from fever, unattended by unfav- orable symptoms, but likely, from its symptoms, to con- tinue for some time." This latter announcement appeared in the form of a bulletin on Wednesday, December 11th. About the midnight of Saturday, the 14th, there was some sensation and surprise created throughout London by the tolling of the great bell of St. Paul's. Not many people even suspected the import of the unusual sound. It signified the death of the prince consort. He died at ten minutes before eleven that Saturday night, in the presence of the queen, the Prince of Wales, and the Princesses Alice and Helena. The fever had become fierce and wasting on Friday, and from that time it was only a descent to death. Congestion of the lungs set in, the consequence of exhaustion; the prince fell into utter weakness, and died conscious but without pain. He knew the queen to the last. His latest look was turned to her. The prince con- sort was little more than forty-two years of age when he died. He had always seemed to be in good, although not perhaps robust health; and he had led a singularly tem- perate life. No one in the kingdom seemed less likely to be prematurely cut off; and his death came on the whole country with the shock of an utter surjorise. The regret was universal ; and the deepest regret was for the wife he had loved so dearly, and whom he was condemned so soon to leave behind. Every testimony has spoken to the singularly tender and sweet affection of the loving home the queen and prince had made for themselves. A domes- tic happiness rare even among the obscurest was given to them. It is one of the necessities of royal position that marriage should be seldom the union of hearts. The A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. U? choice is limited by considerations which do not affect people in private life. The convenience of states has to be taken into account; the possible likitigs and dislikings of peoples whom, perhaps the bride and bridegroom had never seen and are never destined to see. A marriage among princes is, in nine cases out of ten, a marriage of convenience only. Seldom indeed is it made, as that of the queen was, wholly out of love. Seldom is it even in love-matches when the instincts of love are not deceived and the affection grows stronger with the days. Every one knew that this had been the strange good fortune of the queen of England. There was something poetic, romantic in the sympathy with which so many faithful and loving hearts turned to her in her hour of unspeakable distress. We have already endeavored to do justice to the charac- ter of the prince consort; to show what was his intellec- tual constitution, what were its strong points, and what its weaknesses and limitations. It is not necessary to go over that task again. It will be enough to say that the country which had not understood him at first was beginning more and more to recognize his genuine worth. Even those who are still far from believing that his influence in , politics always worked with good result, are ready to admit that his influence, socially and morally, was that which must always come from the example of a pure and noble lii'e. Of him it might fairly have been said in the classic words that from his mouth "nihil unquam insolens neque gloriosum exiit." Perhaps, as we have been considering the influence of the prince consort on the councils of England during the earlier parts of the American civil war, it will be appropriate to quote some sentences in which the eminent American his- torian already mentioned, Dr. Draper, speaks of him. "One illustrious man there was in England," Dr. Draper says, "who saw that the great interests of the future would he better subserved by a sincere friendship with America. than by the transitory alliances of Europe. He recognized the bonds of race. His prudent counsels strengthened the determination of the sovereign that the Trent controversy should have an honorable and peaceful solution. Had the desires of these, the most exalted personages of the realm, been more completely fulfilled, the administration of Lord 1'almerston would not have cast a disastrous shadow on U8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the future of the Anglo-Saxon race." Dr. Draper may be thought unjust to Lord Palmerston; he certainly is only just to the prince consort. After the dispute about the Trent, the feeling between England and the United States became one of distrust, and almost of hostility. We cannot help thinking that the manner in which our government managed the dis- pute, the superfluous display of force, like a pistol thrust at the head of a disputant whom mere argument is already bringing to reason, had a great deal to do with the growth of this bitter feeling. The controversy about the Trent was hardly over when Lord Russell and Mr. Adams were engaged in the more prolonged and far more serious controversy about the Confederate privateers. The adventures of the Confederate cruisers began with the escape of a small schooner, the Savannah, from Char- leston, in June, 1861. It scoured the seas for awhile as a privateer, and did some damage to the shipping of the northern states. The Sumter had a more memorable career. She was under the command of Captain Semmes, who afterward became famous and during her time she did some little damage. The Nashville and Petrel were also well known for awhile. These were, however, but small vessels, and each had only a short run of it. The first pri- vateer which became really formidable to the shipping of the north was a vessel called in her earlier history the Oreto, but afterward better known as the Florida. Within three months she had captured fifteen vessels. Thirteen of these she burned, and the other two were converted into cruisers by the Confederate government. The Florida was built in Birkenhead, nominally for the use of the Italian government. She got out of the Mersey without deten- tion or difficulty, although the American minister had warned our government of her real purpose. From that time Great Britain became what an American writer calls without any exaggeration " the naval base of the Confed- eracy." As fast as shipbuilders could work, they were pre- paring in British shipping yards a privateer navy for the Confederate government. Mr. Gladstone said in a speech which was the subject of much comment, that - Jefferson Davis had made a navy. The statement was at all events not literally correct. The English shipbuilders made the navy. Mr. Davis only ordered it and paid for it. Only A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 149 seven Confederate privateers were really formidable to the United States, and of these five were built in British dock- yards. We are not including in the list any of the actual war-vessels, the rams and ironclads, that British energy was preparing for the Confederate government. We are now speaking merely of the privateers. Of these privateers the most famous by far was the Alabama. It was the fortune of this vessel to be the occasion of the establishment of a new rule in the law of nations. It had nearly been her fortune to bring England and the United States into war. The Alabama was built expressly for the Confederate service in one of the dock- yards of the Mersey. She was built by the house of Laird, a firm of the greatest reputation in the shipbuilding trade, and whose former head was the representative of Birken- head in the House of Commons. While in process of con- struction she was called the " two hundred and ninety;" and it was not until she had put to sea and hoisted the Confederate flag, and Captain Semmes, formerly comman- der of the Sumter, had appeared on her deck in full Con- federate uniform that she took the name of the Alabama. During her career the Alabama captured nearly seventy northern vessels. Her plan was always the same. She hoisted the British flag, and thus decoyed her intended victim within her reach ; then she displayed the Confeder- ate colors and captured her prize. Unless when there was some particular motive for making use of the captured ves- sels, they were burned. Sometimes the blazing wreck be- came the means of decoying a new victim. Some Ameri- can captain saw far off* in the night the flames of a burning vessel reddening the sea. He steered to her aid; and when he came near enough, the Alabama, which was yet in the same waters and had watched his coming, fired her shot across his bows, hung out her flag, and made him her prisoner. One American captain bitterly complained that the fire, which seen across the waves at any other time be- came a summons to every seaman to hasten to the rescue, must thenceforward he a signal to him to hold his course and keep away from the blazing ship. The Alabama and her captain were of course much glorified in this country. Cap- tain Semmes was eulogized as if his exploits had been those of another Cochrane or Kanaris. But the Alabama did not do much fighting; she preyed on merchant vessels. 150 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. that could not fight. She attacked where instant surren- der must be the reply to her summons. Only twice, so far as we know, did she engage in a fight. The first time was with the Hatteras, a small blockading ship, whose broad- side was so unequal to that of the Alabama that she was sunk in a quarter of an hour. The second time was with the United States ship of war Kearsarge, whose size and armaments were about equal to her own. The fight took place off the French shore, near Cherborg, and the career of the Alabama was finished in an hour. The Confeder- ate rover was utterly shattered and went down. Captain Semmes was saved by an English steam yacht, and brought to England to be made a hero for awhile, and then for- gotten. The cruise of the Alabama had lasted nearly two years. During this time she had contrived to drive Ameri- can commerce from the seas. Her later cruising days were unprofitable; for American owners found it necessary to keep their vessels in port. All this, however, it will be said, was but the fortune of war. America had not abolished privateering; and if the northern states suffered from so clever and daring a pri- vateer as Captain Semmes, it was of little use their com- plaining of it. If they could not catch and capture the Alabama, that was their misfortune or their fault What the United States government did complain of was some- thing very different. They complained that the Alabama was practically an English vessel. She was built by English builders in an English dockyard; she was manned for the most part by an English crew ; her guns were English ; her gunners were English ; many of the latter belonged to the royal naval reserve, and were actually receiving pay from the English government; she sailed under the Eng- lish flag, was welcomed in English harbors, and never was in, or even saw, a Confederate port. As Mr. Forster put it very clearly and tersely, she was built by British ship- builders and manned by a British crew ; she drew prizes to destruction under a British flag, and was paid for by money borrowed from British capitalists. Mr. Adams called the attention of the government in good time to the fact that the Alabama was in course of construction in the dockyard of Messrs. Laird, and that she was intended for the Confederate government. Lord Russell asked for proofs. Mr. Adams forwarded what he A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 151 considered proof enough to make out a case for the deten- tion of the vessel pending further inquiry. The opinion of an eminent English lawyer, now Sir Robert Collier, was also sent to Lord Russell by Mr. Adams. This opinion declared that the vessel ought to be detained by the collector of customs at Liverpool; and added that it appeared diffi- cult to make out a stronger case of infringement of the for- eign enlistment act, "which if not enforced on this occas- ion, is little better than a dead letter." The English government still asked for proofs. It did not seem to have occurred to our authorities that if they set a little inquiry on foot themselves they might be able to conduct it much more efficiently than a stranger like Mr. Adams could do. What Mr. Adams asked for was inquiry with a view to detention. He did not ask for the infringement of any domestic law of England; he only asked for such steps to be taken as would allow the law of England to be put in force. The argument of the correspondence on our side seemed to be that a stranger had no right to the protection of our laws until he could make out a case which would amount to the legal conviction of those against whom he asked to be protected. We cannot better summarize the correspondence than by saying it was as if Mr. Adams had forwarded affidavits alleging that there was a conspiracy to murder him, had named the persons against whom he made the charge, and asked for inquiry and protection from the government; and the government had answered that until he could make out a case for the actual conviction of the accused, it was no part of the business of our police to interfere. Let us dispose of one simple question of fact. There never was the slightest doubt on the mind of anyone about the business for which the vessel in the Birkenhead dock- yard was destined. There was no attempt at concealment in the matter. Newspaper paragraphs described the gradual construction of the Confederate cruiser, as if it were a British vessel of war that Messrs. Laird had in hand. There never was any question about her destination. Openly and in the face of day she was built by the Laird firm for the Confederate service. The Lairds built her as they would have built any vessel for any one who ordered it and could pay for it. We see no particular reason for blaming them. They certainly made no mystery of the 152 A HI8T0RT OF OUR OWN TIMES. matter then or after. Whatever technical difficulties might have intervened, it is clear that no real doubt on the mind of the government had anything to do with the delays that took place. At last, Lord Russell asked for the opinion of the queen's advocate. Time was pressing; the cruiser was nearly ready for sea. Everything seemed to be against us. The queen's advocate happened to be sick at the moment, and there was another delay. At last he gave his opinion that the vessel ought to be detained. The opinion came just too late. The Alabama had got to sea; her cruise of nearly two years began. She went upon her destroying course with the cheers of English sympathizers and the rapturous tirades of the English newspapers glorifying her. Every misfortune that befell an American merchantman was received in this country with a roar of delight. When Mr. Bright brought on the question in the House of Com- mons, Mr. Laird declared that he would rather be known as the builder of a dozen Alabamas than be a man who, like Mr. Bright, had set class against class, and the majority of the house applauded him to the echo. Lord Palmerston peremptorily declared that in this country we were not in the habit of altering our laws to please a foreign state; a declaration which came with becoming effect from the author of the abortive conspiracy bill, got up to projntiate the emperor of the French. The building of vessels for the Confederates began to go on with more boldness than ever. Two iron rams of the most formidable kind were built and about to be launched in 1863 for the purpose of forcibly opening the southern ports and destroying the bockading vessels. Mr. Adams kept urging on Lord Russell, and for a long time in vain, that something must be done to stop their departure. Lord Russell at first thought the British government could not interfere in any way. Mr. Adams pressed and protested, and at length was informed that the matter was "now under the serious consideration of her majesty's govern- ment." At last, on September 5th, Mr. Adams wrote to tell Lord Russell that one of the ironclad vessels was on the point of departure from this kingdom on its hostile errand against the United States; and added; "it would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war." On September 8th Mr. Adams received the fol- lowing: "Lord Russell presents his compliments to Mr, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 153 Adams, and has the honor to inform him that instructions have been issued Avhich will prevent the departure of the two ironclad vessels from Liverpool." Throughout the whole of the correspondence Lord Eussell took up one position. He insisted that the government could only act upon the domestic laws of England and were not bound to make any alteration in these laws to please a foreign state. Nothing can be more self-evident than the fact that the government cannot infringe the laws of the country. During this controversy the law courts decided sometimes, in the case of the Alexandra, for ex- ample, that there was not evidence enough to justify the seizure or the stoppage of a vessel. But it has to be remembered, that in regard to the Alabama, what Mr. Adams asked was not the breaking of English law, but the holding, as it were, of the vessel to bail until the law could be ascertained. There is, however, a much wider question than this, in his views with regard to Avhich Lord Russell seems to have been entirely wrong. The laws of a country are made, first of all, to suit its own people. The people have a right to keep their laws unchanged as long as they please. They are not bound to alter them to suit the pleasure or the convenience of any other nation. All that is clear. But it is equally clear, on the other hand, that they cannot get out of their responsibility to another state by merely saying, " We have such and such laws, and we do not choose to alter them." If the laws permit harm to be done to a foreign state, the people maintaining the laws must either make compensa- tion to the foreign state or they must meet her in war. It is absurd to suppose that our neighbors are to submit to injury on our part merely because our laws do not give us the means of preventing the injury. Mr. Adams put it in the fairest manner to Lord Russell. "This is Avar." In other words, the Americas government might have said : " You can allow this sort of thing to go on if you like; but we must point out to you that it is simply Avar, and nothing else. You are making Avar or allowing Avar to be made on us; you cannot shelter yourselves under an imag- inary neutrality. If you choose to keep your laws ns they are, very good; but you must take the consequences." The extraordinary mistake which Lord Palmerston and Lord Eussell made Avas the assumption that the existence 154 A IIISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of certain domestic regulations of ours could be a sufficient answer to claims made upon us by our neighbors. Suppose we had no foreign enlistment act? Suppose the Con- federates were allowed openly to raise armies and equip navies in England, and to fly their flag here and go forth to make war on the United States with the permission of our government? Would it be enough to say to the United States, " We are very sorry indeed ; we do not like to see people making war on you from our territory; but, unluckily, we have no law to prevent it; and you must, therefore, only put up with it?" The dullest English sympathizer with the cause of the South- ern Confederation would not be taken in by a plea like this, or expect the United States to admit it. Yet the case set up by Lord Palmerston and Lord Eussell was .really not different in kind. It merely pleaded that although our ports were made the basis, and indeed the only basis, of naval operations against the United States, we could not help it; our laws were not so framed as to give our neigh- bors any protection. The obvious retort on America's side was, "Then we must protect ourselves; we cannot admit that the condition of your municipal laws entitles you to become with impunity a nuisance and a pest to your neighbors." The position which Lord Palmerston and Lord Eussell took up was wisely and properly abandoned by Lord Stan- ley, now Lord Derby, when the Conservatives came into office. It was then frankly admitted that every state is responsible for the manner in which the working of its municipal laws may effect the interests of its neighbors. We need not, however, anticipate just now a controversy and a settlement yet to come. Lord Eussell, it may be remarked, was mistaken in another part of his case. He was able to show that in some way or other the authorities of the United States had failed to prevent the enlistment of British subjects in this country for the armies of the Union. But his mistake was in supposing that this was a practical answer to the complaints made by Mr. Adams. There is some difference between a small grievance and a very great grievance. The grievance to us in the secret enlistment of a few British subjects for the northern ser- vice was not very serious. The authorities of the United States acknowledged that it was improper, and promised to A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 155 use all diligence to put a stop to it; and of course, if they had failed to do so, it would be entirely for England to consider what steps she ought to take to obtain a redress of any wrong done to her. But in a practical controversy there Avas no comparison between the grievances. It is not a reasonable reply to a neighbor who complains that our fierce dog has broken into his house and bitten his chil- dren, if we say that his cat has stolen into our kitchen and eaten our cream. It is strange, too, to observe that Lord Russell and the chief baron and other authorities con- stantly dwell on the fact that a neutral may sell arms to either belligerent, and ask triumphantly if arms, why not an armed vessel? If shot and shell, why not a cruiser or a ram? There is, at all events, one plain reason which would be enough even if there were none other. It is not possible to prove that the shot and shell have done any damage; it is possible to prove that the cruiser has. We cannot follow the rifle or the bullet to its destination; w T e can follow the Alabama. It would be idle to try to prove that a certain lot of gunpowder was discharged against a northern regiment; but it is easy to prove that the Ala- bama burned American vessels and confiscated American eargoes. The bitterness of the feeling in America was not mitigated, nor the sense of English unfairness made less keen, by the production during the controversy of a despatch sent from England to Washington at the opening of the Crimean war, in which the English government expressed a confident hope that the authorities of the United States would give orders that no privateer under Russian colors should be equipped or victualled or admitted with its prizes into any of the ports of the United States. The controversy was carried on for some years. It be- came mixed up with disputes about Confederate raids from Canada into the states, and later on about Fenian raids from the states into Canada, and questions of fishery right and various other matters of discussion; but the principle subject of dispute, the only one of real gravity, was that which concerned the cruise of the Alabama. Lord Rus- sell at length declined peremptorily to admit that the English government were in any way responsible for what had been done by the Confederate cruisers, or that England was called on to alter her domestic law to please her neigh- bors. Mr. Adams therefore dropped the matter for the 156 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. time, intimating however that it was only put aside for the time. The- United States government had their hands full just then; and in any case could afford to wait. The question would keep. The British government were glad to be relieved from the discussion and from the necessity of arguing the various points Avith Mr. Adams, and were under the pleasing impression that they had heard the last of it. Surveying the diplomatic controversy at this distance of time, one cannot but think that Mr. Adams comes best out of it. No minister representing the interests of his state in a foreign capital could have had a more trying position to sustain and a more difficult part to play. Mr. Adams knew that the tone of the society in which he had to move was hostile to his government and to his cause. It was difficult for him to remain always patient and yet to show that the American government could not be ex- pected to endure everything. It was not easy to retain always the calm courtesy which his place demanded, and which was, indeed, an inheritance in his family of stately public men. He was embarrassed sometimes by the officious efforts, the volunteer intervention of some of his own countrymen, who, knowing nothing of English politi- cal life and English social ways, fancied they were making a favorable impression on public opinion here by the tactics of a fall campaign at home. Moreover, it is plain that for a long time Mr. Adams was in much doubt as to the capa- city of the military leaders of the north ; and he well knew that nothing but military success could rescue the Union from the diplomatic conspiracies which were going on in Europe for the promotion of the southern cause. Mr. Adams appears to have borne himself all through with judgment, temper, and dignity. Lord Russell does not show to so much advantage. He is sometimes petulant; he is too often inclined to answer Mr. Adams' grave and mo- mentous remonstrances with retorts founded on allegations against the north Avhich, even if w ell-founded, were of slight comparative importance. When Mr. Adams com- plains that the Alabama is sweeping American commerce from the seas, Lord Russell too often replies with some complaint about the enlistment of British subjects for the service of the Union; as if the Confederates making war on the United States from English ports with English A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 157 ships and crews were no graver matter of complaint than the story true or false, of some American agent having enlisted Tim Doolan and .Sandy Macsnlsh to fight for the north. Mr. Seward does not come out of the correspond- ence well. There is a curious evasiveness in his frecpient floods of eloquence which contrasts unpleasantly with Mr. Adams' straightforward and manly style. Mr. Seward writes as if he were under the impression that he could palaver Mr. Adams and Lord Russell and the British pub- lic into not believing the evidence of their senses. At the gloomiest hour of the fortunes of the north, Mr. Adams faces the facts, and, confident of the ultimate future, makes no pretense at ignoring the seriousness of the pres- ent danger. Mr. Seward seems to think that public atten- tion can be cheated away from a recognition of realities by a display of inappropriate rhetorical fireworks. At a mo- ment when the prospect of the north seemed especially gloomy, and when it was apparent to every human creature that its military affairs had long been in hopelessly bad hands, Mr. Seward writes to inform Mr. Adams that " Our assault upon Richmond is for the moment suspended," and is good enough to add that "no great and striking movements or achievements are occurring, and the govern- ment is rather preparing its energies for renewed operations than continuing to surprise the world by new and brilliant victories.." The northern commanders had, indeed, for some time been surprising the world, but not at all by brilliant victories; and the suggestion that the northern government might go on winning perpetual victories if they only wished it, but that they preferred for the present not to dazzle the world too much with their success, must have fallen rather chillingly on Mr. Adams' ear. Mr. Adams knew only too well that the north must win vic- tories soon, or they might find themselves confronted with a European confederation against them. The Emperor Napoleon was working hard to get England to join with him in recognizing the south. Mr. Roebuck had atone time a motion in the House of Commons calling on the English government to make up their minds to the recog- nition; and Mr. Adams had explained again and again that such a step would mean war with the northern states. Mr. Adams was satisfied that the fate of Mr. Roebuck's motion would depend on the military events of a few days. 158 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. He was right. The motion was never pressed to a division ; for during its progress there came at one moment the news that General Grant had taken Vicksburg on the Mississipjn, and that General Meade had defeated General Lee at Get- tysburg and put an end to all thought of a southern in- vasion. This news was at first received with resolute incredulity in London by the advocates and partisans of the south. In some of the clubs there was positive indig- nation that such things should even be reported. The outburst of wrath was natural. That was the turning- point of the war, although not many saw it even then. The south never had a chance after that hour. There was no more said in this country about the recognition of the southern confederation, and the emperor of the French was thenceforward free to follow out his plans as far as he could and alone. The Emperor Napoleon, however, was for the present confident enough. He was under the impression that he had heard the last of the protests against his Mexican ex- pedition. This expedition was in the beginning a joint undertaking of England, France, and Spain. Its pro- fessed object as set forth in a convention signed in London on October 31, 1861, was "to demand from the Mexican authorities more efficacious protection for the persons and properties of their (the allied sovereigns,) subjects, as well as a fulfillment of the obligations contracted toward their majesties by the republic of Mexico." Mexico had been for a long time in a very disorganized state. The consti- tutional government of Benito Juarez had come into power, but the reactionary party were still struggling to regain the upper hand, and a sort of guerrilla warfare was actually going on. The government of Juarez, whatever its defects, gave promise of being stronger and better than that of its predecessors. It was, however, burthenecl with responsi- bility for the debts incurred and the crimes committed by its predecessors; and it entered into an agreement with several foreign states, England among the rest, to make over a certain proportioned of the customs revenues to meet the claims of foreign creditors. This arrangement was not kept, and timely satisfaction was not given for wrongs committed against foreign subjects — wrongs for the most part, if not altogether, done by the government which Juarez had expelled from power, but for which of course A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 159 he, as the suceessor to [tower, was properly responsihle. Lord Russell, who had acted with great forbearance toward Mexico up to this time, now agreed to co-operate with France and Spain in exacting reparation from Juarez. But he defined clearly the extent to which the intervention of England would go. England would join in an expedi- tion for the purpose, if necessary, of seizing on Mexican custom houses, and thus making good the foreign claims. But she would not go a step farther. She would have nothing to do with upsetting the government of Mexico, or imposing any European system on the Mexican people. Accordingly the second article of the convention pledged the contracting parties not to seek for themselves any ac- quisition of territory or any special advantage, and not to exercise in the internal affairs of Mexico any influence of a nature to prejudice the right of the Mexican nation to choose and to constitute freely the form of government. The emperor of the French, however, had already made up his mind that he would establish a sort of feudatory monarchy in Mexico. He had long had various schemes and ambitions floating in his mind concerning those parts of America on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico which were once the possessions of France. In his dreamy fantastic way, he had visions of restoring French influence and authority somewhere along the shores of the gulf; and the outbreak of the southern rebellion appeared to give him just the opportunity that he desired. At the time when the convention was signed the affairs of the Federal states seemed all but hopeless, and for a long time after they ga^e no gleam of hope for the restoration of the Union. Louis Napoleon was convinced then, and for long after, that the southern states would succeed in establishing their independ- ence. He seems to have been of Mr. Roebuck's way of thinking, that "the only fear we ought to have is lest the independence of the south should l>e established without us." He was glad therefore of the chance afforded him by the Mexican convention, and at the very time when he signed the convention with the pledge contained in its second article, he had already been making arrangements to found a monarchy in Mexico. If he could have ven- tured to set up a monarchy with a French prince at its head, he would probably have done so; hut this would have been too bold a venture. He, therefore, persuaded the lUO A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Archduke Maximilian, brother of the emperor of Austria, to accept the crown of the monarchy he proposed to set up in Mexico. The archduke was a man of pure and noble character, but evidently wanting in strength of mind, and he agreed after some hesitation to accept the offer. Meanwhile the joint expedition sailed. We sent only a liue-of -battle ship, two frigates and 700 marines. France sent in the first instance about 2,500 men, whom he largely reinforced immediately after. Spain had about 0,000 men, under the command of the late Marshal Prim. The allies soon began to find that their purposes were in- compatible. There was much suspicion about the designs of France, although the French statesmen were every day repudiating in stronger and stronger terms the intentions imputed to them, and which soon proved to be the resolute purposes of the emperor of the French. Some of the claims set up by France disgusted the other allies. The Jecker claims were for a long time after as familiar a subject of ridicule as our own Pacific claims had been. The Swiss house of Jecker & Company had lent the former government of Mexico 1750,000, and got bonds from that government, which was on its very last legs, for fifteen millions of dollars. The government was immediately afterward upset, and Juarez came into power. M. Jecker modestly put in his claim for fifteen millions of dollars. Juarez refused to comply with the demand. He offered to pay the $750,000 lent and five per cent, interest, but de- clined to pay exactly twenty times the amount of the sum advanced. M. Jecker had by this time become somehow a subject of France, and the French government took up his claim. It was clear that the emperor of the French had resolved that there should be war. At last the designs of the French government became evident to the English and Spanish plenipotentiaries, and England and Spain with- drew from the convention. England certainly ought never to have entered into it. But as she had been drawn in, the best thing then was for her to get out of it as decently and as quickly as she could. Nothing in the enterprise became her like to the leaving of it. The emperor of the French "walked his own wild road whither that led him." He overran a certain portion of Mexico with his troops. He captured Puebla after a long and desperate .resistance; he occupied the capital, and he A HI8T0R T OF UR WN TIMES. 1 6 1 set tip the Mexican empire with Maximilian as emperor. French troops remained to protect the _ne\v empire. Against all this the United States government protested from time to time. They disclaimed any intention to pre- vent the Mexican people from establishing an empire if they thought fit; but they pointed out that grave incon- veniences must arise if a foreign power like France per- sisted in occupying with her troops any part of the Ameri- can continent. The Monroe doctrine, which by the way was the invention of George Canning and not of President Monroe, does not forbid the establishing of a monarchy on the American continent, but only the intervention of a European power to set up such a system, or any system opposed to liberty there. However, the Emperor Napo- leon cared nothing just then about the Monroe doctrine, complacently satisfied that the United States were going to pieces, and that the Southern Confederacy would be his friend and ally. He received the protests of the American government with unveiled indifference. At last the tida in American affairs turned. The Confederacy crumbled away — Richmond was taken; Lee surrendered ; Jefferson Davis was a prisoner. Then the United States returned to the Mexican question, and the American gov- ernment informed Louis Napoleon that it would be incon- venient, gravely inconvenient, if he were not to withdraw his soldiers from Mexico. A significant movement of American troops, under a renowned general, then flushed with success, was made in the direction of the Mexican frontier. There was nothing for Louis Napoleon but to withdraw. Up to the last he had been rocked in the vainest hopes. Long after the end had become patent to every other eye, he assured an English member of parlia- ment that he looked upon the Mexican empire as the greatest creation of his reign. The Mexican empire lasted two months and a week after the last of the French troops had been withdrawn. Maxi- milian endeavored to raise an army of his own and to defend himself against the daily increasing strength of Juarez. He showed all the courage which might have been expected from his rare and from his own previous history. But in an evil hour for himself, and yielding, it is stated, to the persuasion of a French officer, he had issued a decree that all who resisted his authority in arms 162 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. should be shot. By virtue of this monstrous ordinance, Mexican officers of the regular army, taken prisoners while resisting, as they were bound to do, the invasion of a European prince, were shot like brigands. The Mexican general, Ortega, was one of those thus shamefully done to death. When Juarez conquered, and Maximilian in his turn, was made a prisoner, he was tried by court-martial, condemned, and shot. His death created a profound sensation in Europe. He had in all his previous career Avon respect everywhere, and even in the Mexican scheme he was universally regarded as a noble victim who had been deluded to his doom. The conduct of Juarez in thus having him put to death raised a cry of horror from all Europe; but it must be allowed that, by the fatal decree which he had issued, the unfortunate Maximilian had left himself liable to a stern retaliation. There was cold truth in the remark made at the time, that if he had been only General and not Archduke Maximilian, his fate would not have aroused so much surprise or anger. The French empire never recovered the shock of this Mexican failure. It was chiefly in the hope of regaining his lost prestige that the emperor tried to show himself a strong man in German affairs. More than three years be- fore the fall of Maximilian, the present writer, in com- menting on Louis Napoleon's scheme, ventured to predict that Mexico would prove the Moscow of the second em- pire. Time has not shown that the prediction was rash. The French empire outlived the Mexican empire by three years and a few weeks. From the entering of Moscow to the arrival at St. Helena the interval was. three years and one month. We need not follow any further the history of the American civil war. The restoration of the Union, the assassination of President Lincoln, and the emanci- pation of the colored race from all the disqualifica- tions, as well as all the bondage, of the slave system, be- long to American and not to English history. But the Alabama dispute led to consequences which are especially important to England, and which shall be described in their due time. Meanwhile, it is necessary for the proper appreciation of the final terms of settlement, that we should see exactly how the dispute arose, and what was the condition of public feeling in this country at the time A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 163 when it grew into serious proportions. If the final settle- ment was felt to be humiliating in England, it must be owned that those who are commonly called the governing classes had themselves very much to blame. Their convic- tion that the civil war must lead to the disruption of the Union was at the bottom of much of the indifference and apathy which for a long time was shown by English officials in regard to the remonstrances of the United States. The impression that we might do as we liked with the north was made only too obvious. The United States must, indeed, then have felt that they were receiving a warning that to be weak is to be miserable. It is not surprising if they believed at that time that England was disposed to adopt Sir Giles Overreach's way of thinking — " We worldly men, when we see friends and kinsmen Past hope sunk in their fortunes, lend no hand To lift them up, but rather set our feet Upon their heads to press them to the bottom. It is not certain that the supporters of the southern side at any time actually outnumbered the champions of the north and of the Union; but they seemed for the great part of the war's duration to have the influence of the country mainly with them. A superficial observer might have been excused at one time if he said that England as a whole was on the side of the secession. This would have been a very inaccurate statement of the case; but the inaccuracy would have been excusable, and even natural. The vast majority of what are called the governing classes were on the side of the south. \\\ far the greater number of the aristocracy, of the official world, of members of par- liament, of military and naval men, were for the south. London club life was virtually all southern. The most powerful papers in London, and the most popular papers as well, were open partisans of the Southern Confederation, in London, to he on the side of the Union was at one time to be eccentric, to be un-English, to be Yankee. On the other hand, most of the great democratic towns of the midland and of the north were mainly in favor of the Union. The artisans everywhere were on the same side. This was made strikingly manifest in Lancashire. The supply of cotton from America nearly ceased in conse- quence of the war, and the greatest, distress prevailed in 164 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. that country, The "cotton famine," called hy no exagger- ated name, set in. All- that private benevolence could do, all that legislation, enabling money to be borrowed for public works to give employment, could do, was for a time hardly able to contend against the distress. Yet the Lan- cashire operatives were among the sturdiest of those who stood out against any proposal to break the blockade or to recognize the south. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, and the Manchester school generally, or at least all that were left of them, were for the north. A small but very influ- ential number of thoughtful men, Mr. John Stuart Mill at their head, were faithful to their principles, and stood firmly by the cause of the Union. But the voice of Lon- don, that is the voice of what is called society, and of the metropolitan shopkeeping classes who draw their living from society — all this was for the south. It was not a question of Liberal and Tory. The Tories, on the whole, were more discreet than the Liberals. It was not from the Conservative benches of the House of Commons that the bitterest and least excusable denunciations of the northern cause and of the American Republic were heard. It was a Liberal who declared with exultation that "the republican bubble" had burst. It was a Liberal — Mr. Roebuck — who was most clamorous for English inter- vention to help the south. It was Lord Russell who described the struggle as one in which the north was striving for empire and the south for independence. It was Mr. Gladstone who said that the president of the South- ern Confederation — Mr. Jefferson Davis — had made an army, had made a navy, and, more than that, had made a nation. On the other hand, it is to be remarked that among the Liberals, even of the official class, were to be seen some of the stanchest advocates of the northern cause. The Duke of Argyll championed the cause from warm sympathy; Sir George Lewis from cool philosophy. Mr. Charles Villiers and Mr. Milner Gibson were frankly and steadily on the side of the north. The Conservative leaders on the whole behaved with great discretion. Mr. Adams wrote, in July, 18(53, that "the opposition leaders are generally disinclined to any demonstration whatever. Several of them in reality rather sympathize with us. But the body of their party continue animated by the same feelings to America which brought on the revolution, and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 165 which drove us into the war of 1812." Lord Derby, indeed, expressed his conviction that the Union never could be restored; but Lord Palmerston had done the same. Mr. Disraeli abstained from saying anything that could offend any northerner, and gave no indication of partisan- ship on either side. Lord Stanley always spoke like a fair and reasonable man, who understood thoroughly what he was talking about. In this he was, unfortunately, some- what peculiar among the class to which he belonged. Not many of them appeared precisely to know what they were talking about. They took their opinions for the most part from the Time* and from the talk of the clubs. The talk of the clubs was that the southerners were all gentle- men and very nice fellows, who were sure to win; and that the northerners were low, trading, shopkeeping fellows, who did not know how to fight, were very cowardly, and were certain to be defeated. There was a theory that the northerners really rather liked slavery and would have it if they could, and that a negro slave in the south was much better off than a free negro in the northern states. The geography of the question was not very clearly understood in the clubs. Those who endeavored to show that it was not easy to find a convenient dividing line for two federa- tions on the North American continent were commonly answered that the Mississippi formed exactly the suitable frontier. It was an article of faith with some of those who then most eagerly discussed the question in London, that the Mississippi flowed east and west, and separated neatly the seceding states from the states of the north. The Times was the natural instructor of what is called society in London, and the T'uih-s was, unfortunately, very badly informed all through the war. After the failure of General Lee's attempt to carry invasion into the north and the simultaneous capture of Yicksburg by General Grant, any one, it might have been thought, who was capable of forming an opinion at all, must have seen that the flood- tide of the rebellion had been readied and was over; that the south would have to stand on the defensive from that hour, and that the overcoming of its defense, considering the comparative resources of the belligerents, was only a question of time. Yet for a whole year or more the Lon- don public were still assured that the Confederates were sweeping from victory to victory; that wherever they 16(3 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. seemed even to undergo a check, that was only a part of their superior policy, which would presently vindicate itself in greater victory; that the north was staggering, crippled and exhausted; and that the only doubt was whether General Lee would not at once march for Washington and establish the southern government there. Almost to the very hour when the south, its brave and brilliant de- fense all over, had to confess defeat and yield its broken sword to the conquerors, the London public were still invited to believe that Mr. Davis was floating on the full flood of success. While the hearts of all in Richmond were filled with despair, and the final surrender was accounted there a question of days, the southern sympathizers in London were complacently bidden to look out for the full triumph and the assured independence of the Southern Confederation. On the last day of December, 1864, the Times complained that " Mr. Seward and other teachers or flatterers of the multitude still affect to anticipate the early restoration of the Union"— and in three months from that date the rebellion was over. Those who read and believed in such instruction — and up to the very last their name was legion — must surely have been bewildered when the news came of the capture of Richmond and the sur- render of Lee. They might well have thought that only some miraculous intervention of a malignant fate could thus all at once have converted victory into defeat, and turned the broken, worthless levies of Grant and Sherman into armies of conquerors. In the end the southern population were as bitter against us as the north. The southern states fancied themselves deceived. They too had mistaken the unthinking utter- ances of what is called society in England for the expres- sion of English statesmanship and public feeling. It is proper to assert distinctly that at no time had the English government any thought of acting on the suggestion of the emperor of the French and recognizing the south. Lord Palmerston would not hear of it, nor would Lord Russell. What might have come to pass if the southern successes had continued a year longer it would be idle now to con- jecture, but up to the turning-point our statesmen had not changed, and after the turning-point change was out of the question. There is nothing to blame in the conduct of the English government throughout all this trying time, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 167 except as regards the manner in which they dismissed the remonstrances about the building of the privateers. But it is not likely that impartial history will acquit them of the charge of having been encouraged in their indiffer- ence by the common conviction that the Union was about to be broken up, and that the north was no longer a for- midable power. CHAPTER XLV. PALMER STONES LAST VICTORY. During the later months of his life the prince consort had been busy in preparing for another great international exhibition to be held in London. It was arranged that this exhibition should open on May 1, 1802; and although the sudden death of the prince consort greatly interfered with the prospects of the undertaking, it was not thought right that there should be any postponement of the open- ing. The exhibition building was erected in South Ken- sington, according to a design by Captain Fowke. It cer- tainly was not a beautiful structure. None of the novel charm which attached to the bright exterior of the Crystal Palace could be found in the South Kensington building. It was a huge and solid erection of brick, with two enor- mous domes, each in shape so strikingly like the famous crinoline petticoat of the period that people amused them- selves by suggesting that the principal idea of the architect was to perpetuate for posterity the shape and structure of the Empress Eugenie's invention. The fine arts department of the exhibition was a splendid collection of pictures and statues. The display of products of all kinds from the colonies was rich, and was a novelty, for the colonists con- tributed little indeed to the exhibition of 1851; and the intervening eleven years had been a period of immense colonial advance. But the public did not enter with much heart into the enterprise of 18(52. No one felt any longer any of the hopes which floated dreamily and grace- fully round the scheme of L851. There was no talk or thought of a reign of peace any more. The civil war was raging in America. The continent of Europe was trem- bling all over with the spasms of war just done, and the 1G8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. premonitory symptoms of war to come. The exhibition of 1862 had to rely upon its intrinsic merits, like any ordinary show or any public market. Poetry and prophecy had nothing to say to it. England was left for some time to an almost absolute inactivity. As regards measures of political legislation, after the failure of the reform bill, it was quite understood, as we have already said, that there was to be no more of reform while Lord Palmerston lived. At one of his elections for Tiverton, Lord Palmerston was attacked by a familiar antagonist, a sturdy Kadical butcher, and asked to explain why he did not bring in another reform bill. The answer was characteristic. " Why do we not bring in another reform bill? Because we are not geese." Lord Palmer- ston was heartily glad to be rid of schemes in which he had neither belief nor sympathy; and his absence of politi- cal foresight in home affairs made him satisfied that the whole question of reform was quietly shelved for another generation. It is not, perhaps, surprising that a busy statesman, whose intellect was mostly exercised on ques- tions of foreign policy, should have come to this conclu- sion, when cool critics on public affairs were ready to adopt with complacency a similar faith. The Quarterly Review said, in 1863, " Reform is no longer talked of now. Mr. Bright has almost ceased to excite antipathy." "Our statesmen," it went on to say with portentous gravity, " have awakened to the fact that the imagined reform agi- tation was nothing but an intrigue among themselves, and that the nation was far too sensible to desire any further approximation to the government of the multi- tude." Lord Palmerston was free to indulge in his taste for foreign politics. Between Palmerston and the Radical party in England there was a growing coldness. He had not only thrown over reform himself, but he had apparently induced most of his colleagues to accept the understanding that nothing more was to be said about it. He had gone in for a policy of large expenditure for the purpose of securing the country against the possibilities of invasion. He had lent himself openly to the propagation of what his adversaries called, not very unreasonably, the scare that was got up about another Napoleonic invasion. When drawn into argument by Mr. Cobden on the subject, Lord A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 169 Palmerston had betrayed a warmth of manner that was almost offensive, and had spoken of the commercial treaty with France as if it were a thing rather ridiculous than otherwise. He was unsparing whenever he had a chance in his ridicule of the ballot. He had very little sympathy with the grievances of the nonconformists, some of them even still real and substantial enough. He took no man- ner of interest in anything proposed for the political bene- fit of Ireland. Although an Irish landlord, an Irish peer, and occasionally speaking of himself in a half-jocular way as an Irishman, he could not be brought even to affect any sympathy with any of the complaints made by the repre- sentatives of that country. He scoffed at all proposals about tenant-right. "Tenant-right," he once said, "is landlord's wrong;" and he was cheered for saying this by the landlords on both sides of the House of Commons; and he evidently thought he had settled the question. He was indeed impatient of all "views;" and he regarded what is called philosophic statesmanship with absolute contempt. The truth is that Palmerston ceased to be a statesman the moment he ■ came 'to deal with domestic interests. When actually in the home office and compelled to turn his atten- tion to the business of that department, he proved a very efficient administrator, because of his shrewdness and his energy. But as a rule he had not much to do with English political affairs, and he knew little or nothing of them. He was even childishly ignorant of many things which any ordinary public man is supposed to know. He was at home in foreign — that is, in continental politics; for lie had hardly any knowledge of American affairs, and almosl up to the moment of the fall of Richmond was confident that the Union never could be restored, and that separa- tion was the easy and natural way of settling all the dis- pute. He gave a pension to an absurd and obscure writer of doggerel, and when a question was raised about this singular piece of patronage in the House of Commons, it turned out that Lord Palmerston knew nothing about the man, but had got it into his head somehow that he was a poet of the class of Burns. When he read anything except despatches he read scientific treatises, for he had a keen interest in some branches of science; but he cared little for modern English literature. The world in which he de- lighted to mingle talked of continental politics generally, 170 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and a great knowledge of English domestic affairs would have been thrown away there. Naturally, therefore, when Lord Palmerston had nothing particular to do in foreign affairs and had to turn his attention to England, he relished the idea of fortifying her against foreign foes. This was foreign politics seen from another point of view; it had far more interest for him than reform or tenant-right. There were, however, some evidences of a certain differ- ence of opinion between Lord Palmerston and some of his colleagues, as well as between him and the Eadical party. His constant activity in foreign politics pleased some of his cabinet as little as it pleased the advanced Liberals. His vast fortification schemes, and his willingness to spend money on any project that tended toward war or, what seemed much the same thing, on any elaborate preparation against problematical war, was not congenial with the temperament and the judgment of some members of his administration. Lord Palmerston acted sincerely on the opinion which he expressed in a short letter to Mr. Cob- den, that "man is a fighting and quarreling animal." Assuming it to be the nature of man to fight and quarrel, he could see no better business for English statesmanship than to keep this country always in a condition to resist a pos- sible attack from somebody. He differed almost radically on this point from two at least of his more important col- leagues, Mr. Gladstone and Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Mr. Evelyn Ashley, in his "Life of Lord Palmerston," has published some interesting letters that passed between Palmerston and these statesmen on this general subject. Palmerston wrote to Sir George Lewis on November 22, 1 860, arguing against something Lewis had said, and which Palmerston hopes " was only a conversational paradox, and not a deliberately adopted theory." This was a dissent on the part of Lewis from the maxim, that in statesmanship prevention is better than cure. Each had clearly in his mind the prevention which would take security against the perils of war; Lord Palmerston therefore goes on at once in his letter to show that in many cases the timely adoption of spirited measures by an English government would have actually prevented war. Lewis argues that "if an evil is certain and proximate, and can be averted by diplomacy, then undoubtedly prevention is better than cure;" but that " if the evil is remote and uncertain, then I think it A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 171 is better not to resort to preventive measures, which insure a proximate and certain mischief." The purpose of the discussion is made more clear in Lewis' concluding sen- tence: "It seems to me that our foreign relations are on too vast a scale to render it wise for us to insure systematic- ally against all risks; and if we do not insure systematic- ally, we do nothing." On April 29, 1802, Lord Palmer- ston writes to Mr. Gladstone about a speech that the latter had just been making in Manchester, and in which, as Lord Palmerston puts it, Mr. Gladstone seems " to make it a reproach to the nation at large that it has forced, as you say it has, on the parliament and the government the high amount of expenditure which we have at present to provide for." Palmerston does not "quite agree" with Mr. Gladstone "as to the fact;" "but admitting it to be as you state, it seems to me to be rather a proof of the superior sagacity of the nation than a subject for reproach. ■' Lord Palmerston goes on to argue that the country, so far from having, as Cobden had accused it of doing, "rushed head- long into extravagance under the influence of panic," had simply awakened from a lethargy, got rid of "an apathetic blindness on the part of the governed and the governors as to the defensive means of the country compared with the offensive means acquired and acquiring by other powers." "We have on the other side of the channel a people who, say what they may, hate us as a nation from the bottom of their hearts, and would make any sacrifice to inflict a deep humiliation upon England. It is natural that tins should be so. They are eminently vain, and their passion is glory in war. They cannot forget or forgive Ahoukir, Trafalgar, the Peninsula, Waterloo and St. Helena. . . . Well, then, at the head of this neighboring nation, who would like nothing so well as a retaliatory blow upon England, we see an able, active, wary, counsel-keeping but ever- planning sovereign; and we see this sovereign organizing an army which, including his reserve, is more than six times greater in amount than the whole of our regular forces in our two islands, and at the same time laboring hard to create a navy equal, if not superior, to ours. Give him a cause of quarrel, which any foreign power may at any time invent or create, if so minded; give him the command of the channel, which permanent or accidental naval supe- riority might afford him, and then calculate if you can — for 172 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. it would pass my reckoning power to do so — the disastrous consequences to the British nation which a landing of an army of from one to two hundred thousand men would bring with it. Surely even a large yearly expenditure for army and navy is an economical insurance against such a catastrophe. " The reader will perhaps be reminded of one of the most effective arguments of Demosthenes. Consider, he says, what even a few days of the occupation of the coun- try by a foreign enemy would mean, and then say whether as a mere matter of economy it would not be better to spend a good deal of the resources we have in striving to avert such a calamity. There is a great difference, how- ever, in the purpose and the application of the two argu- ments. Demosthenes puts the case in a way that is from its point of view perfect. He is speaking of a danger that lies at the gates; of an enemy who must be encountered one way or. another; and he is pleading for instant and offensive war. It is a very different thing to argue for enormous expenditure on the ground that someboody who is now professing the most peaceful intentions may possibly one day become your enemy, and try to attack you. In such a case, the first thing to be considered is whether the danger is real and likely to be imminent, or whether it is merely speculative. Even against speculative dangers a wise people will always take precautions; but it is no part of wisdom to spend in guarding against such perils as much as would be needed to enable us actually to speak with the enemy at the gate. It is a question of proportion and com- parison. As Sir George Lewis argues, it is not possible for a nation like England to secure herself against all specula- tive clangers. France might invade us from Boulogne or Cherbourg, no doubt. But the United States might at the same time assail us in Canada. Russia might attack, as she once thought of doing, our Australian possessions, or make an onslaught upon us in Asia. Germany might be in alliance with Russia; Austria might at the same time be in alliance with France. These are all possibilities; they might all come to pass at one and the same time. But how could any state keep fleets and armies capable of en- suring her against serious peril from such a combination? It would be better to make up our minds to wait until the assault really threatened, and then fight it out the best way we could. Lord Palmerston seemed to forget that in the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 173 campaign against Russia it did not prove easy for France to send out an army very much smaller than his " one or two hundred thousand men;" and that Louis Napoleon was gJad to finish up prematurely his campaign in Lombardy even though he had won in every battle. He had also made the mistake of assuming that all these military and naval insurances must insure. If he had lived to 1870 he would have seen that a sovereign may engage himself for years in preparing of an immense armament, that it may be the armament of a people, "eminently vain" and whose "passion is glory in war," and yet that the armament may turn out a vast failure, and may prove at the hour of need a defense like Rodomonte's bridge in Ariosto, which only conducts its owner to ignominious upset and fall. All the resources of France were strained for years, and by one who could do as he pleased, for the single purpose of creat- ing a great overmastering army; and when the time came to test the army, it proved to be little better than what Prince Bismarck called "a crowd of fighting persons." This is surely a matter to be taken account of when we are thinking of going to vast annual expense for the pur- pose of maintaining a great armament. We may go to all the expense, and yet not have the armament when we fancy we have need for it. That, Lord Palmerston would doubt- less have said, is a risk we must run. Mr. Gladstone and Sir George Lewis would no doubt have thought problematic invasion a risk more safe to run. That had been the view of Sir Robert Peel. Whatever maybe thought of the merits of the argument on either side — and the decision will be made more often probably by temperament than by reasoning — the contro- versy will serve to illustrate the sort of difference that was gradually growing up between Lord Palmerston and some of his own colleagues. Lord Palmerston had of late fallen again into a policy of suspicion and distrust as regards France. We are convinced that he was perfectly sincere; and, as has been said already in these pages, we do not think there was any inconsistency in his conduct. He had for a long time believed in the good faith of the em- peror of the French; but the policy of the Lombardy campaign, and the consequent annexation of Savoy and Nice, had eotne on him as a complete surprise, and when he found that his friend Louis Napoleon could keep such 174 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. secrets from him, he possibly came to the conclusion that he could keep others still more important. Lord Palmer- ston made England his idol. He loved her in a pagan way. He did not much care for abstract justice where she was concerned. He was unscrupulous where he believed her interests were to be guarded. Nor had he any other than a purely pagan view of her interests. It did not seem to have occurred to him that England's truest interest would be to do justice to herself and to other states; to be what Voltaire's Brahmin boasts of being, a good parent and a faithful friend, maintaining well her own children and endeavoring for peace among her neighbors. Palmerston's idea was that England should hold the commanding place among European states, and that none should even seem to be in a position to do her scathe. Lord Palmerston's taste for foreign affairs had now ample means of gratification. England had some small troubles of her own to deal with. A serious insurrection sprang up in New Zealand. The tribe of the Waikatos, living near Auckland in the northern island, began a move- ment against the colonists, and this became before long a general rebellion of the Maori natives. The Maoris are a remarkably intelligent race, and are skillful in war as well as in peace. Not long before this the governor of the colony, Sir George Grey, had written in the warmest praise of their industrial capabilities and their longing for mental improvement. They had a certain literary art among them; they could all, or nearly all, read and write; many of. them were eloquent and could display considerable diplomatic skill. They fought so well in this instance that the British troop actually suffered a somewhat serious repulse in endeavoring to take one of the Maori palisado- fortified villages. In the end, however, they were of course defeated. The quarrel was a survival of a long-standing dispute between the colonists and the natives about land. It was, in fact, the old story ; the colonists eager to increase their stock of land, and the natives jealous to guard their quickly-vanishing possession. The events led to grave dis- cussion in parliament. The legislature of New Zealand passed enactments confiscating some nine million acres of the native lands and giving the colonial government some- thing like absolute and arbitrary power of arrest and im- prisonment. The government at home proposed to help the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 175 colonists by- a guarantee to raise a loan of one million to cover the expenses of the war, or the colonial share of them, and this proposal was keenly discussed in the House of Commons. It was on this occasion that Mr. Roebuck laid down a philosophical theory which gave a good deal of offense to sensitive people; the theory that where "the brown man" and the white meet, the brown man is destined to disappear. The doctrine is questionable enough, even as a theory. No doubt the brown man is destined to dis- appear if the white man, with his better weapons and greater cleverness and resources, makes it his business to extirpate him; and it was justly pointed out that whatever Mr. Roebuck may have personally meant by his theory, its in- culcation at such a moment could only tend to strengthen this idea in the minds of some colonists who were already only too willing to entertain it. But until the brown man has had full fair play somewhere alongside of the white man, it is rash to come to any distinct conclusions as to his ultimate destiny. Mr. Roebuck always loved theories neatly cut and sharpened. He gave them out with a pre- cision which lent them an appearance of power and of authority; they seemed to argue a mind that had "swal- lowed formulas," as Mr. Carlyle puts it, and was above the cant of humanitarianism. But such theories are more sat- isfactorily broached and discussed in scientific societies than in parliamentary debate. The ultimate destiny of the brown man did not particularly help the House of Com- mons to any conclusions concerning the New Zealand insurrection, because even Mr. Roebuck did not put for- ward his theory as an argument to prove that in every con- troversy we were bound to take the side of the white man and assist him in his predestined business of extinguishing his brown rival. The government passed their guarantee bill, not without many a protest from both sides of the house that colonists who readily engaged in quarrels with natives must some time or other be prepared to bear the expenses entailed by their own policy. Trouble, too, arose on the gold coast of Africa. Some slaves of the king of Ashantee had taken refuge in British territory; the governor of Cape Coast Colony would not give them up; and in the spring of 1863 the king made threatening demonstrations, invading the territories of neighboring chiefs, destroying many of their villages, and I 7^ A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. approaching within forty miles of our frontier. The gov- ernor, assuming that the settlement was about to be invaded by the Ashantees, took it upon him to anticipate the move- ment by sending an expedition into the territory of the king. He ordered troops to be moved for the purpose; the season was badly chosen ; the climate was pestilential ; even the black troops from the West Indies could not endure it and began to die like flies. The ill-advised under- taking had to be given up; and the government at home only escaped a vote of censure by a narrow majority of seven. Two hundred and twenty-six members supported Sir John Hay's resolution declaring that the movement was rash and impolitic, and two hundred and thirty-three sustained the action of the government. Much discussion, too, was aroused by occurrences in Japan. A British sub- ject, Mr. Richardson, was murdered in the English settle- ment of Japan and on an open road made free to English- men by treaty. This was in September, 1862. The murder was committed by some of the followers of Prince Satsuma, one of the powerful feudal princes, who then practically divided the authority of Japan with the regular govern- ment. Reparation was demanded both from the Japanese government and from Prince Satsuma; the government paid the sum demanded of them, £100,000, and made an apology. Prince Satsuma was called on to pay £25,000 and to see that the murderers were brought to punishment, the crime having been committed within his jurisdiction. Satsuma did nothing, and in 1863 Colonel Neale, the English charge cV affaires in Japan, called upon Admiral Kuper to go with the English fleet to Kagosima, Satsuma's capital, and demand satisfaction. Admiral Kuper entered the bay on August 11, 1863, and after waiting for a day or two proceeded to seize on some steamers. The Kagosima Forts opened fire on him, and he then bombarded the town and laid the greater portion of it in ashes. The town, it seemed, was built for the most part of wood ; it caught fire in the bombardment and was destroyed. Fortunately the non-combatant inhabitants, the women and children, had had time to get out of Kagosima, and the destruction of life was not great. The whole transaction was severely condemned by many Englishmen who did not belong to the ranks of those professed philanthropists whom it is sometimes the fashion to denounce in England as if hu- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 177 manity and patriotism were irreconcilable qualities, and as if a true Englishman ought to have no consideration for the sufferings and the blood of Japanese and Maoris and people of that sort. The House of Commons, however, sustained the government by a large majority. The gov- ernment, it should be said, did not profess to justify the destruction of Kagosima. Their case was that Admiral Kuper had to do something; that there was nothing he could very well do when he had been fired upon but to bombard the town; and that the burning of the town was an accident of the conflict for which neither he nor they could be held responsible. Satsuma finally submitted and paid the money, and promised justice. But there were more murders and more bombardings yet before we came to anything like an abiding settlement with Japan; and Japan itself was not far off a revolution, the most sudden, organic, and to all appearance complete, that has ever yet been seen in the history of nations. In the meantime, however, our government became involved in liabilities more perilous than any disputes in eastern or southern islands could bring on them. An insurrection of a very serious kind broke out in Poland. It was provoked by the Stratford-like thoroughness of the policy adopted by the Russian authorities. It was well known to the Russian government that a secret political agitation was going on in Poland, and it was determined to anticipate matters and choke off the patriotic movement by taking advantage of the periodical conscription to press into the military ranks all the young men in the cities who could by any possibility be supposed to have any sympathy with it. The attempt to execute this resolve was the occa- sion for the outbreak of an insurrection which at one time showed something like a claim to success. The young men who could escape fled to the woods, and there formed themselves into armed bands, which gave the Russians great trouble. The rebels could disperse and come together with such ease and rapidity that it was very difficult indeed to get any real advantage over them. The frontier of Aus- trian-Poland was very near, and the insurgents could cross it, escape from the Russian troops, and recross it when they pleased to resume their harassing operations. Austria was not by any means so unfriendly to the Polish patriots as both Russia and Prussia were. Austria had come 178 A HISTOR Y OF OUR OWN TIMES. unwillingly into the scheme for the partition of Poland, and had got little profit by it; and it was well understood that if the other powers concerned could see their way to the restoration of Polish nationality, Austria, for her part, would make no objection. The insurgents counted with some confidence on the passive attitude of the Austrian authorities, and the positive sympathy of many officers and soldiers in the Austrian army. They converted the Austrian frontier for awhile into a military basis of opera- tions against Russia. To some extent the same thing was attempted on the Prussian frontier, too; but Prussia was still very much under the dominion of Russia, and was prevailed upon or coerced to execute an odious convention with Russia, by virtue of which the Russian troops were allowed to follow Polish insurgents into Prussian territory. This convention created a strong feeling against Prussia through the whole of western Europe, and for awhile made her much more an object of general dislike than even Russia herself. It was plain from the first that the Poles could not under the most favorable circumstances hold out long against Russia by virtue of their own strength. It was evident that wherever the insurrection could be got into a corner Russia could crush it with ease. Nevertheless, the plans of the Poles were not so imprudent as they seemed. On the contrary, they had a certain chance of success. The idea, whether clearly and definitely expressed or not, was to keep the insurrection up, by any means and at any risk, until some of the great European powers should be induced to interfere. The insurrection was a great drama, a piece of deliberate stage-play. We do not say this in any spirit of disparagement; the stage-play was got up by patriots with a true and noble purpose, and it was the only statesmanlike policy left to the Poles. Let us keep it up long enough — such was the conviction of the Polish leaders — and western Europe must intervene. Despite the lesson of subsequent events, the Poles were well justified in their political calculations. Their hopes were at one time on the very eve of being realized. The Emperor Napoleon was eager to move to their aid, and Lord Russell was hardly less eager. The Polish cause was very popular in England. It had been the political first love of many a man, who now felt A HISTORY OF O'UR OWN TIMES. 179 his youthful ardor glow again as he read of the gallant struggle made in the forests of Poland. Russia was hated; Prussia was now hated even more. There was no question of party feeling about the sympathy with Poland. There were about as many Conservatives as Radicals who were ready to favor the idea of some effort being made in her behalf. Lord Ellenborough spoke up for Poland in the House of Lords with poetic and impassioned eloquence. Lord Shaftesbury from the opposite benches denounced the conduct of Russia. The Irish Catholic was as ardent for Polish liberty as the London artisan. .. Among its most conspicuous and energetic advocates in England were Mr. Pope Hennessy, a Catholic and Irish member of parlia- ment; and Mr. Edmond Beales, the leader of a great Radi- cal organization in London. The question was raised in parliament by Mr. Hennessy, and aroused much sympathy there. Great public meetings were held, at which Russia was denounced and Poland advocated, not merely by popu- lar orators, but by men of high rank and grave responsi- bility. War was not openly called for at those meetings, or in the House of Commons; but it was urged that England, as one of the powers which had signed the treaty of Vienna, should join with other states in summoning Russia to recognize the rights, such as they were, which had been secured to Poland by virtue of that treaty. In France the greatest enthusiasm prevailed for the cause of Poland. The eloquent pen of Montalembert pleaded for the "nation in mourning." Prince Napoleon spoke with singular eloquence and impressiveness in the French senate on the justice and the necessity of intervention. The same cause was pleaded by Count Walewski, himself the son of a Polish lad v. The Emperor Napoleon required little pressing. He was ready for intervention if he could get England to join him. Lord Russell went so far as to draw up and despatch to Russia, in concert with Frame and Austria, a note on the subjeel of Poland. It urged on ili'' attention of I he Russian government six points, as the outline of a system of pacification for Poland. These were: a complete amnesty; a national representation; a distiucl national administration of Poles for the kingdom of Poland; full liberty of conscience, with the repeal of all the restrictions imposed on Catholic worship; the recogni- tion of the Polish language as official; the establishment 180 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of a regular system of recruiting. There was an almost universal impression at one moment that in the event of Kussia declining to accept these recommendations, England, Austria, and France would make war to compel her. There was hardly any party in England absolutely opposed to the idea of intervention, except the Manchester school of Radicals. Some of these were consistently opposed to intervention in any foreign cause whatever. Others had an added impression that Poland had managed her national affairs very badly when she had a chance of managing them for herself, and tlmt therefore there was little use in trying to set her on her feet again. Such opposition would, how- ever, have counted for even less than it did at the time of the Crimean War, if the government had resolved on going in with France and striking a blow for Poland. Looking back now calmly on the events of that day, and those which followed them, it does not seem that such a policy would have been unwise. There was much in the claims of Poland which deserved the sympathy of every lover of liberty and believer in the development of civiliza- tion. If this were the time or place for such a discussion, it would not be difficult to show that the faults found with Poland's old system of government had nothing to do with the condition of the present; and that a new Poland would no more be likely to fall into the errors of the past, than a new Irish parliament would be likely to refuse the right of representation to Catholics. There would assuredly have been a distinct advantage to the stability of European affairs in the resuscitation of Poland as a dis- tinct and independent part of the Russian state system, even if she were not to be a wholly independent nation once again. This probably could not have been done without Avar; but it seems more than merely probable that that war would have averted the necessity for many other wars which have since been fought out with less profitable result to European stability. Whether the English alarms about the aggressive designs of Russia be founded or unfounded, the legislative independence of Poland would have made it superfluous to take much thought concerning them. The new Poland would undoubtedly have been a state with representative institutions; and set in the midst of Russia and of Prussia, her example could hardly have been without a contagious influence of a very salutary kind on each. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 181 It soon became known, however, that there was to be no intervention. Lord Palmerston put a stop to the whole idea. It was not that he sympathized with Russia. On the contrary, he wrote a letter to Baron Brunnow, the Russian ambassador, on February 4, 1863, in which he bluntly told him that he regarded the Polish insurrection as the just punishment inflicted by heaven on Eussia for Russia's having done so much to stir up revolution in the dominions of some of her neighbors. But Lord Palmerston had by this time grown into as profound a distrust of the Emperor Napoleon as any representative of the social and democratic republic could possibly entertain. He was con- vinced that the emperor was stirring in the matter chiefly with the hope of getting an opportunity of establishing himself in the Rhine provinces of Prussia, on the pretext of compelling Prussia to remain neutral in the struggle, or of punishing her if she took the side of Russia. Probably Lord Palmerston was mistaken in this instance. It is not likely that Louis Napoleon ever cared for any war project or annexation scheme except with the view of mak- ing his dynasty popular in France; and he may well have thought that the emancipation of Poland would gain him popularity enough to enable him to dispense with other contrivances for the remainder of his reign. However that may be, Lord Palmerston was firm. He described a pro- posal of the emperor for an identical note to be addressed to Prussia on the.subject of the convention with Russia as a trap laid for England to fall into; and he would have nothing to do with it. After awhile it became known that England had decided not to join in any project for armed intervention; and from that moment Russia became merely contemptuous. The emperor of the French would not and could not take action single handed; and Prince Gortschakoft' politely told Lord Russell that England had really better mind her own business and not encourage movements in Poland which were simply the work of "cosmopolitan revolution." Lord Russell had spoken of the responsibility which the emperor of Russia was incur- ring; and Prince Gortschakotf drily replied that the em- peror knew all about that and was quite prepared to accept any responsibility. It used to be said at the time that Priuce Gortschakoff gently intimated in diplomatic con- versation that if the English government were inclined to 182 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. occupy themselves in redressing the grievances of injured nationalities they would find in Ireland a legitimate and sufficient object for the exercise of their reforming energies. It is certain that England received a snub, and that Prince Gortschakoff intended his reply to be thus accepted by England and thus interpreted by Europe. ' After this Austria found it necessary to secure her fron- tier line more carefully and not allow it to be made any longer a basis of operations against Russia. The insur- rection was flung wholly on its own resources. It was kept up gallantly and desperately for a time; but the end was certain. Tbe Russians carried out their measures of pacification with unflinching hand. Floggings and shoot- ings and hangings were in full vigor. The Russian authori- ties recognized the equal rights of women by administering the scourge and the rope and the bullet to them as well as to men. Droves of prisoners were sent to Siberia. New steps were taken for denationalizing the country and affec- ting its moral as well as physical subjugation. After a time the words of Marshal Sebastiani's famous announce- ment in 1831 became applicable once more, and order reigned in Warsaw. The intervention of England had done much the same service for Poland that the interposi- tion of Don Quixote did for the boy whose master was flogging him. There was, to be sure, a certain difference in the conditions. Don Quixote did intervene practically; and while he remained in sight the master pretended to be forgiving and merciful. It was only when the hero had ridden away that the master grimly tied up the boy again and flogged him worse than ever. In the case of England there was no such show of forbearance. The sufferer was tied up under our very eyes and scourged again, and more fiercely, for the express reason that England had ventured to interfere with an unmeaning and ineffectual remonstrance. We have spoken of that school of Liberals who would not have intervened at all on behalf of Poland or any other nation. Many, perhaps most persons will refuse to accept their principle. But we can hardly believe there is any one who will not admit that such a course of policy is wise, manly, and dignified when compared with that which intrudes its intervention just far enough to irritate the oppressor and not far enough to be of the slightest benefit to the oppressed. A BISTORT OF OUli OWN TIMES. 183 The effect of the policy pursued by England in this case was to bring about a certain coldness between the Emperor Napoleon and the English government. This fact was made apparent some little time after when the dispute between Denmark and the Germanic Confederation came up in relation to the Schleswig-Holstein succession. We need not go very deeply now into the historical bearings of this dispute, which long tormented philologists, juris- consults, and archaeologists as well as statesmen. An irre- verent Frenchman once declared that the heavens and the earth shall pass away, but the Schleswig-Holstein question shall not pass away. Practically, however, the Schleswig- Holstein question would seem to have passed away so far as our times are concerned. It was in substance a question of the right of nationalities combined of later years with a dispute of succession. Schleswig-Holstein, and Lauenburg were duchies attached to Denmark. Holstein and Lauen- burg were purely German in nationality and only held by the king of Denmark as Duke of Holstein and Lauenburg on much the same tenure as that by virtue of which our kings so long held Hanover. The king of Denmark sat as Duke of Holstein and Lauenburg in the old Germanic diet which used to hold its meetings in Frankfort, the diet of the Germanic Confederation which was abolished by the Prussian victory at Sadowa, and which Talleyrand once with grave sarcasm urged not to be precipitate in its deci- sions. Schleswig was attached more directly to the Danish crown; but a large proportion of the population, much the larger proportion in the southern districts, were German, and there had long been an agitation going on in Germany about the claims and the rights of Scldeswig. One of the claims was that Schleswig and Holstein should be united into one administrative system, and should be governed independently of the kingdom of Denmark, the king of Denmark to be the ruler of this state as the emperor of Austria is king of Hungary. There can be no doubt that the heart of the German people was deeply interested in the condition of the Schleswigers and Ilolsteiners. It was only natural that a great people should have been unwill- ing to see so many of their countrymen, on the very edge of Germany itself, kept under the rule of the Danish' king. The tendency of Denmark always was toward an amal- gamation of the duchies into her own state system. The 184 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tendency of the Germans was to regard with extreme jealousy any movement that way, to descry evil purpose in even harmless innovations on the part of Denmark, and to make constant complaint about the tampering of the Danish authorities with the tongue and the right of the Teutonic populations. In truth the claims of Germany and Denmark were irreconcilable. Put into plain words the dispute was between Denmark, which wanted to make the duchies Danish, and Germany, which wanted to have them German. The arrangement which bound them up with Denmark was purely diplomatic and artificial. Any one who would look realities in the face must have seen that some day or other the Germans would carry their point, and that the principle of nationalities would have its way in that case as it had done in so many others. Suddenly the whole dispute became complicated with a question of succession. The king of Denmark, Frederick VII., died in November 1803, and was succeeded by Chris- tian IX. Prince Frederick of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonder- burg-Augustenburg, claimed the succession to the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. The late king of Denmark had no direct heir to succeed him, and the succession had been arranged in 1852 by the great powers of Europe. The treaty of London then settled it on Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, the father of the Princess of Wales. The settlement, however, was brought about by persuading the Duke of Augustenburg, Prince Frederick's father, heir of Holstein and claimant of Schleswig, to renounce his rights, and now Prince Fred- erick, the son, disputed in his own case the validity of the renunciation. The previous pretensions of Denmark to encroach on the rights of the German populations in the duchies, had roused an angry feeling in Germany, and German statesmen were willing to take advantage of any claim and any claimant to dispute the succession of the king of Denmark so far as the the duchies were concerned. The affairs of Prussia were now in the hands of a strong man ; one of the strongest men modern times have knoAvn. Daring, unscrupulous, and crafty as Cavour, Von Bismarck was even already able to wield a power which had never been within Cavour's reach. The public intelligence of Europe had not yet recognized the marvelous combination of qualities which was destined to make their owner A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 185 famous, and to prove a dissolving force in the settled sys- tems of Germany, and indeed of the whole European con- tinent. As yet the general opinion of the world set down Ilerr Von Bismarck as simply a fanatical reactionary, a coarse sort of Metternich, a combination of bully and buffoon. The Schleswig-Holstein question became, how- ever, a very serious one for Denmark when it was taken up by Von Bismarck. There does not seem the slightest reason to suppose that Bismarck ever had any idea of maintaining the pretensions of the Prince of Augusten- bnrg. Bismarck had always ridiculed them without any affectation of concealment. From first to last the mind of Bismarck was evidently made up that the duchies should be annexed to Prussia. But for the time the claim of the Augustenburg prince came in conveniently, and Prussia put on the appearance of giving them her sanction and support. The result of all this was that the Germanic diet and the king of Denmark could not come to any terms of arrangement; and — to cut preliminaries short and get to what strictly concerns our history — war became certain. The Germanic diet entrusted the conduct of the war to the hands of Austria and Prussia, who entered into joint agreements for the purpose. The German troops entered, first, Holstein, which under the command of the diet they had a legal right to do, and then Schleswig, and war began. Denmark, one of the smallest and weakest kingdoms in the world, found herself engaged in conflict with Austria and Prussia combined. The little Danish David had defied two Goliaths to combat at one moment. Were the I Janes ami their sovereign and their govern- ment mad? Not at all. They well knew that they could not hold out alone against the two German great powers. But they counted on the help of Europe. Especially they counted on the help of England. For a long time they had got it into their heads thai England was pledged to defend them against any assauH from the side of Germany. Lord Russell in multitudinous despatches had very often given the Danish government sound and sensible advice, lie had constantly admonished them that they must for their own Bakes deal fairly with the German populations. He had urgently recommended them to leave to the Ger- mans and the German governments no fairground for com- plaint. He had never countenanced or encouraged any of 186 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the acts which tended to the enforced absorption of Ger- man populations into a Danish system. He had on the con- trary more than once somewhat harshly rebuked the Dan- ish government for neglect or breach of engagements, and sternly pointed out the certain consequences of such a policy. But he had at the same time implied that if Den- mark took the advice of England, England would not see her wronged. He had at all events declared, that if Den- mark did not follow England's advice England would not come to her assistance in case she were attacked by the Germans. Denmark interpreted this as an assurance that if she followed England's counsels she might count on England's protection, and she insisted that she had strictly followed England's counsels for this very reason. When the struggle seemed approaching, Lord Palmerston said some words in the House of Commons at the close of a session, which seemed to convey a distinct assurance that England would defend Denmark in case she should be attacked by the German powers. On July 23, 1863, he was questioned with reference to the course England intended to pursue in the event of the German powers pressing too hardly on Denmark, and he then said: "We are convinced — I am convinced at least — that if any violent attempt were made to overthrow the rights and interfere with the independence of Denmark, those who made the attempt would find in the result that it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend." These words were afterward explained as intended to be merely prophetic to indicate Lord Palmerston's private belief that in the event of Denmark being invaded, France, or Eussia, or some state somewhere, would prob- ably be generous enough to come to the assistance of the Danes. But when the words were spoken it did not occur to the mind of any one to interpret them in such a sense. The part of Lord Palmerston's speech which contained them was dealing distinctly and exclusively with the policy of England. It was not supposed that an English minister could expect to satisfy the House of Commons by merely giving a specimen of his skill in forecasting the probable policy of other states. Every one believed that Lord Palm- erston was answering on behalf of the English government and the English poeple. The Danes counted with confidence on the help of A HISTORY OF OUli OWN TIMES. 187 England. They refused to accept the terms which Ger- many would have imposed. They prepared for war. Pub- ' lie opinion in England was all but unanimous in favor of Denmark. Five out of every six persons were for England's drawing the sword in her cause at once. Five out of every six of the small minority who were against war, were never- theless in sympathy with the Danes. Many reasons com- bined to bring about this condition of national feeling. In the first instance very few people knew anything whatever of the merits of the controversy. Even professed politi- cians hardly understood the question. The general im- pression was, that it was purely the case of two strong powers oppressing in wanton and wicked combination a weak but gallant people. Austria was not popular in England; Prussia was detested. Many Englishmen were angry with her because her government had made the con- vention with Russia which has already been mentioned, and because she had a reactionary minister and a half- despotic king. A large number of persons did not like the Germans they met in the city and in business generally. Some had disagreeable reminiscences of their travels in Prussia, and had been unfavorably impressed by the police systems of Berlin. Moreover it was then an article of faith witb most Englishmen that Prussians were miserable fellows who could only smoke and drink beer, and who, being unable to fight with any decent adversary, were try- ing to get a warlike reputation by attacking a very weak power. Punch had a cartoon representing the conventional English soldier and sailor regarding with looks of utter contempt an Austrian and a Prussian, and agreeing that Englishmen ought not to be called on to light such fellows, but offering to kick them if it were thought desirable. In England at this time, military strength meant the army of the emperor of the French, and political sagacity was re presented by the wisdom of the same sovereign. A certain small number of persons in England sympa- thized with Denmark for. another reason. The Prince of Wales had been married to the Princess Alexandra on March 10, lS(i)5. The Princess Alexandra, was, as it has been already said, the daughter of tin- king of Denmark. She was not a Dane, excepi as we may, if we like, call the emperor of Brazil a Brazilian. But her family bad now come to rule in Denmark, and she became in that sense a 188 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Danish princess. Her youth, her beauty, her goodness, her sweet and winning ways, had made her more popular than any foreign princess ever before was known to be in England. It seemed even to some who ought to have had more judgment that the virtues and charms of the Prin- cess Alexandra, and the fact that she was now Princess of Wales, supplied ample proof of the justice of the Danish cause, and of the duty of England to support it in arms. Not small, therefore, was the disappointment spread over the country when it was found that the Danes were left alone to their defense, and that England was not to put out a hand to help them. Yet it was as impossible as it would have been absurd for England to maintain in arms the cause of Denmark. To begin with, the cause was not one which England could reasonably have supported. The artificial arrange- ments by which the duchies were bound to Denmark could not endure. They were the device of an era and a svstem of policy from which England was escaping as fast as she could. It was not a controversy which specially concerned the English people. England was only one of the parties to the diplomatic arrangements which had bound up the duchies and the Danish kingdom together. Lord Russell was willing at one moment to intervene by arms in support of Denmark if France would join with England, and he made a proposal of this kind to the French government. The Emperor Napoleon refused to interfere. He had been hurt by England's refusal to join with him in sus- taining Poland against Russia, and now was his time to make a return. Besides, he had, after the attempt at diplomatic intervention between Poland and Russia, issued invitations for a congress of European sovereigns to assem- ble in Paris and make a new settlement of Europe. The governments to which the invitation was addressed had, for the most part, returned a civil acceptance, well knowing the project would come to nothing. Lord Russell refused to have anything to do with the congress, and gave some excellent reasons for the refusal. The Emperor Napoleon was somewhat hurt by the chill common sense of Lord RusMPs reply. The emperor's invitation was evidently meant to be a document of historical and monumental interest. It was drawn up in the spirit of what Burke calls "a proud humility." It made allusion to the early A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 189 misfortunes and exile of the writer, and put him forward as the one sovereign of Europe on whose face the winds of adversity had severely blown. It must have been painful to find that so much eloquence and emotion had been put into a state paper for nothing. The emperor's turn had now come, and he would not join with England in sustain- ing the cause of Denmark. There was absolutely nothing for it but to leave the Danes to fight out their battle in the best way they could. Lord Palmerston put the mat- ter very plainly in a letter to Lord Russell. "The truth is," he wrote, "that to enter into a military conflict with all Germany on continental ground would be a serious undertaking. If Sweden and Denmark were actively co- operating with us, our 20,000 men might do a great deal ; but Austria and Prussia could bring 200,000 or 300,000 into the field, and would be joined by the smaller German states." At a later period of the struggle Lord Palmerston spoke with full frankness to Count Apponyi, the Aus- trian ambassador. He explained that the English govern- ment had " abstained from taking the field in defense of Denmark, for many reasons — from the season of the year, from the smallness of our army, and the great risk of failure in a struggle with all Germany by land." But Lord Palmerston pointed out that " with regard to opera- tions by sea, the positions would be reversed. AVe are strong, Germany is weak; and the German ports in the Baltic, North Sea, and Adriatic, would be greatly at our command." Therefore Lord Palmerston warned the Aus- trian ambassador that a collision between England and Austria might happen if an Austrian squadron were to enter the Baltic in order to help the operations against Denmark. The Austrian ambassador explained that his government (lid not intend to send a squadron into the Baltic. This was an unofficial conversation between Palm- erston and Count Apponyi, and bad no effect on the for- tunes of the war or on the diplomacy that brought it to an end. The Danes fought with a great deal of spirit; but they were extravagantly outnumbered, and their weapons were miserably unfit to contend against their powerful enemies. The Prussian needle-gun came into play with terrible e fleet in the campaign, and it soon made all attempt at- resistance on the part of the Danes utterly hopeless. The Danes lost 3 ',)() A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. their ground and their fortresses. They won one little fight on the sea, defeating some Austrian vessels in the German Ocean off Heligoland. The news was received with wild enthusiasm in England. Its announcement in the House of Commons drew down the unwonted mani- festation of a round of applause from the stranger's gallery. But the struggle had ceased to be anything like a serious campaign. The English government kept up active nego- tiations on behalf of peace, and at length succeeded in inducing the belligerents to agree to a suspension of arms, in order that a conference of the great powers might be held in London. The conference was called together. The populations of the duchies about whom the whole dis- pute had taken place, were beginning now to suspect that their claims to independent existence would very probably be overlooked altogether, and that they were only about to be passed from one ruler to another. They sent a deputation to London, and claimed to be represented directly at the conference. Their claim was rejected. They, the very people whose national existence was the question in dis- pute, were informed that diplomacy made no account of them. They had no right to a voice, or even to a hearing, in the councils which were to dispose of their destinies. The Saxon minister, Count Beust, who afterward trans- ferred his abilities and energies to the service of Austria, did the best he could for them, and acted so far as lay in his power as the representative of their claims; but they were not allowed any acknowledged representation at the conference. The deliberations of the conference came to nothing. Curiously enough the final rejection of all com- promise came from the Danes. Whether they had still some lingering hope that by prolonging the war they could induce some great power to intervene on their behalf, or whether they were merely influenced by the doggedness of sheer desperation, we cannot pretend to know. But they proved suddenly obstinate; at the last hour they rejected a proposal which Lord Palmerston described as reasonable in itself, and the conference came to an end. The war broke out again. The renewed hostilities lasted, however, but a short time. It was plain now even to the Danes themselves that they could not hold their ground alone, and that no one was coming to help- them." The Danish government sent Prince John of Denmark direct* A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 191 to Berlin to negotiate for peace — they had had enough, perhaps, of foreign diplomatic intervention — and terms of peace were easily arranged. Nothing could be more sim- ple. Denmark gave up everything she had been fighting for, and agreed to bear part of the expense which had been entailed upon the German powers by the task of chastising her. The duchies were surrendered to the disposal of the allies, and nothing more was heard of the claims of the heir of Augustenburg. That claimant only got what is called in homely language the cold shoulder when he endeavored to draw the attention of theHerr von Bismarck to his alleged right of succession. A new war was to settle the ownership of the duchies, and some much graver ques- tions of German interest at the same time. It was obviously impossible that the conduct of the English government should pass unchallenged. They were quite right, as it seems to us, in not intervening on behalf of Denmark; but they were not right in giving Denmark the least reason to believe that they ever would intervene in her behalf. It would have been a calamity if England had succeeded in persuading Louis Napoleon to join her in a war to enable Denmark to keep the duchies; it could not be to the credit of England that her ministers had invited Louis Napoleon to join them in such a policy and bad been refused. We cannot see any way of defend- ing Lord Palmerston and Lord Russell against some sort of censure for the part they had taken in this transaction. It would have been a discredit to England if she had become the means of coercing the duchies into subjection to Den- mark, supposing such a thing possible in the long run; but her ministers could claim no credit lor not having done so. They would have done it if they could. They had thus given Europe full evidence at once of their desire and their incapacity. Their political opponents could not be ex- pected to overlook such a chance of attack. Accordingly, in the two houses of parliament notices were given of a vote of censure on the government. Lord Malmesbury, in Lord Derby's absence, proposed the resolution in the Bouse of Lords, and it was carried by a majority of nine. The government made little account of that; the Lords always had a Tory majority. As Lord Palmerston himself had put it on a former occasion, the government knew when they took otlice that their opponents had a larger pack of 1 92 A HISTOR Y OF OUR OWN TIMES. cards in the Lords than they had, and that whenever the cards came to be all dealt out the opposition pack must show the greater number. In the House of Commons, however, the matter was much more serious. On July 4, 1804, Mr. Disraeli himself moved the resolution condemn- ing the conduct of the government. The resolution invited the house to express its regret that "while the course pur- sued by her majesty's government has failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the integrity and inde- pendence of Denmark, it has lowered the just influence of this country in the capitals of Europe, and thereby dimin- ished the securities for peace." Mr. Disraeli's speech was ingenious and telling. He had a case which even a far less capable rhetorician than he must have made impressive; but he contrived more than once by sheer dexterity to make it unexpectedly stronger against the government. Thus, for example, he went on during part of his opening observations to compare the policy of England and of France. He proceeded to show that France was just as much bound by the treaty of Vienna, by the London con- vention, by all the agreements affecting the integrity of Denmark, as England herself. Some of the ministry sitting just opposite the orator caught at this argument as if it were an admission telling against Mr. Disraeli's case. They met his words with loud and emphatic cheers. The cheers meant to say, "just so; France was responsible for the integrity of Denmark as much as England; why, then, do you find fault with us?" This was precisely what Mr. Disraeli wanted. Perhaps he had deliberately led up to this very point. Perhaps he had purposely allured his opponents on into the belief that he was making an ad- mission in order to draw from some of them some note of triumph. He seized his opportunity now and turned upon his antagonists at once. "Yes," he exclaimed, "France is equally responsible; and how comes it then that the posi- tion of France in relation to Denmark is so free from em- barrassment and so dignified; that no word of blame is uttered anywhere in Europe against France for what she has done in regard to Denmark, while your position is one of infinite perplexity, while you are everywhere accused and unable to defend yourselves? How could this be but be- cause of some fatal mistake, some terrible mismanage- ment?" In truth it was not difficult for Mr. Disraeli to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 193 show mistakes in abundance. No sophist could have under- taken to defend all that ministers had done. Such a de- fense would involve sundry paradoxes; for they had in some instances done the very thing to-day which they had declared the day before it would be impossible for them to do. The government did not make any serious attempt to justify all they had done. They were glad to seize upon the opportunity offered by an amendment which Mr. Kinglake proposed, and which merely declared the satisfaction with which the house had learned " that at this conjuncture her majesty had been advised to abstain from armed interference in the war now going on between Denmark and the Ger- man powers." This amendment, it will be seen at once, did not meet the accusations raised by Mr. Disraeli. It did not say whether the ministry had or had not failed to maintain their avowed policy of upholding the integrity and independence of Denmark; or whether their conduct had or had not lowered the just influence of England in the capitals of Europe, and thereby diminished the securities for peace. It gave the go-by to such inconvenient questions, and simply asserted that the house was, at all events, glad to hear there was to be no interference in the war. Many doubted at first whether the government would conde- scend to adopt Mr. Kinglake's amendment, or whether they would venture upon a distinct justification of their conduct. Lord Palmerston, however, had an essentially practical way of looking at every question. He was of O'Connell's opinion that, after all, the verdict is the thing. He knew he could not get the verdict on the par- ticular issues raised by Mr. Disraeli, but lie was in good hope that he could get it on the policy of his administra- tion generally. The government therefore adopted Mr. Kinglake's amendment. Still the controversy was full of danger to Lord Palmerston. The advanced Liberals dis- liked him strongly for his lavish expenditure in fortifica- tion schemes, and for the manner in which he had thrown over the reform hill. They were not coerced, morally or otherwise, to support him merely because he had not gone into the war againsl Germany; for no responsible voice from the opposition had said that the Conservatives, if in Office, would have adopted a policy of intervention. On the contrary, it was from Lord Stanley that there came 1J)4 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. during the debate the most unwarlike sentiment uttered during the whole controversy. Lord Stanley bluntly de- clared that " to engage in a European war for the sake of these duchies would be an act, not of impolicy, but of insanity." There were members of the peace society itself probably who would have hesitated before adopting this view of the duties of a nation. If war be permissible at all, they might have doubted whether the oppression of a small people is not as fair a ground of warlike intervention as the grievance of a numerous population. When, how- ever, such sentiments came from a leader of the party pro- posing the vote of censure, it is clear that the men who were for non-intervention as a principle were left free to vote on one side or the other as they pleased. Mr. Disraeli did not want to pledge them to warlike action any more than Lord Palmerston. Many of them would, perhaps, rather have voted with Mr. Disraeli than with Lord Palmerston if they could see their way fairly to such a course; and on the votes of even a few of them the result of the debate depended. They held the fate of Lord Palmerston's min- istry in the hollow of their hand. Lord Palmerston seems to have decided the question for them. His speech closing the debate was a masterpiece, not of eloquence, not of political argument, but of prac- tical, parliamentary tactics. He spoke, as was his fashion, without the aid of a single note. It was a wonderful spec- tacle that of the man of eighty, thus in the growing morn- ing pouring out his unbroken stream of easy effective elo- quence. He dropped the particular questions connected with the vote of censure almost immediately, and went into a long review of the whole policy of his administra- tion. He spoke as if the resolution before the house were a proposal to impeach the government for the entire course of their domestic policy. He passed in triumphant review all the splendid feats which Mr. Gladstone had accom- plished in the reduction of taxation; lie took credit for the commercial treaty with Fiance, and for other achievements in which nt the time of their accomplishment he had hardly even affected to feel any interest. He spoke directly at the economical Liberals; the men who were for sound finance and freedom of international commerce. The regular opposition, as he well knew, would vote against him ; the regular supporters of the ministry would vote for him. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 195 Nothing could alter the course to be taken by either of these parties. The advanced Liberals, the men whom possibly Palmerston in his heart rather despised as calcu- lators and economists — these might be affected one way or the other by the manner in which he addressed himself to the debate. To these and at these he spoke. He knew that Mr. Gladstone was the one leading man in the minis- try whom they regarded with full trust and admiration, and on Mr. Gladstone's exploits he virtually rested his case. His speech said in plain words: "If you vote for this resolution proposed by Mr. Disraeli you turn Mr. Glad- stone out of office; you give the Tories, who understand nothing about free trade and who opposed the French commercial treaty, an opportunity of marring all that he has made. Some of Lord Palmerston's audience were a little impatient now and then. " What has all this to do with the question before the house?" was murmured from more than one bench. It had everything to do with the question that was really before the house. That question was, "Shall Palmerston remain in office, or shall he go out and the Tories come in?" The advanced Liberals had the decision put into their hands. As Lord Palmerston reviewed the financial and commercial history of his admin- istration, they felt themselves morally coerced to support the ministry which had done so much for the policy that was especially the offspring of their inspiration. When the division was taken it was found that there were two hundred and ninety-five votes for Mr. Disraeli's resolu- tion and three hundred and thirteen for the amendment. Lord Palmerston was saved by a majority of eighteen. It was not a very brilliant victory. There were not many votes to spare. But it was a victory. The conservative miss by a foot was as good for Lord Palmerston as a miss by a mile. It gave him a secure tenure of office for the rest of his life. Such as it was, the victory was won mainly by his own skill, energy, and astuteness, by the ready manner in which lie evaded the question actually in debate, and rested bis claim to acquittal on services which no one pro- posed to disparage. The conclusion was thoroughly illogical, thoroughly practical, thoroughly English. Lord Palmerston knew his time, his opportunity, and his men. That was the last great speech made by Lord Palmerston. That was the last great occasion on which he was called 196 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. upon to address the House of Commons. The effort was worthy of the emergency and, at least in an artistic sense, deserved success. The speech exactly served its purpose. It had no brilliant passages. It had no hint of an elevated thought. It did not trouble itself with any profession of exalted purpose or principle. It did not contain a single sentence which any one could care to remember after the emergency had passed away. But it did for Lord Palmer- ston what great eloquence might have failed to do; what a great orator by virtue of his very genius and oratorial instincts might only have marred. It took captive the wavering minds, and it carried the division. CHAPTER XLVI. EBB AND FLOW. One cannot study English politics, even in the most superficial way, without being struck by the singular regu- larity with which they are governed by the law of action and reaction. The succession of ebb and flow in the tides is not more regular and more certain. A season of political energy is sure to come after a season of political apathy. After the sleeping comes the waking; after the day of work, the night of repose. A liberal spirit is abroad and active; it carries all before it for awhile; it pushes great reforms through; it projects others still greater. Suddenly a pause comes; and a whisper is heard that we have had too much of reform; and the whisper grows into a loud remonstrance, and the remonstrance into what seems to be an almost universal declaration. Then sets in a period of reaction, during which reform is denounced as if it were a treason, and shuddered at as though it were a pestilence. For a season people make themselves comfortable, and say to each other that England has attained political perfection ; that only fools and traitors would ask her to venture on any further change, and that we are all going now to have a contented rest. Just as this condition of things seems to have become a settled habit and state of existence, the new reaction begins; and before men can well note the change, the country is in the fervor of a reform fit again. It is so in our foreign policy. We seem to have settled A III8T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 197 down to a Washingtonian principle of absolute isolation from the concerns and complications of foreign countries, until suddenly we become aware of a rising sea of reaction, and almost in a moment we are in the thick of a policy which involves itself in the affairs of every state from Finland to Sicily, and from Japan to the Caspian Sea. It is the same with our colonies. We are just on the eve of a blunt and cool dismissal of them from all dependence on us, when suddenly we find out that they are the strength of our limbs and the light of our eyes, and that to live with- out them would be only death in life; and for another season the patriotism of public men consists in professions of unalterable attachment to the colonies. It is so with regard to warlike purpose and peaceful purpose; with regard to armaments, fortifications, law reform, everything. An ordinary observer ought to be able almost always to forecast the weather of the coming season in English poli- tics. When action has run its course pretty nearly, reac- tion is sure; and it ought not to be very difficult to foresee wben the one has had its season and the other is to succeed. The explanation of tins phenomenon is not to be found in the fact that the people of these countries are, as Mr. ('nil vie says, "mostly fools." They do not all thus change their opinions in sudden mechanical springs of alternation. The explanation is not to be sought in any change of na- tional opinion at all, but rather in a change in the ascend- ancy between two tolerably well-balanced parties in politics and thought. The people of these countries, or perhaps it should, be said of England especially, are born into Liberal- ism and Conservatism. In Ireland and in Scotland the condition of things is modified by other facts, and the same general rule will hardly apply; hut in England this is, roughly speaking, the law of life. Men as a rule remain in the political condition — we can hardly speak of the political convictions — to which they were born. But the majority give themselves little trouble about the mat- ter. If there is a great stir made by those just above them in politics, and to whom they look up, they will take some interest, and will exhibit it in any desirable way; but they do not move of themselves, and when their leaders appear to acquiesce in anything for a season they withdraw their attention altogether. Many a man is hardly con- scious of whether he is Liberal or Conservative until he 198 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. gets into a crowd somewhere, and hears his neighbors shouting. Then he shouts with those whom he knows to be of the opinions he is understood to hold, and he shouts himself into political conviction. This is the condition of the majority on both sides. It takes immense trouble on the part of the leaders to rouse the mass of their followers into a condition of genuine activity. The majority are like some of the heavy-winged insects who hardly ever use their wings, and who when for some reason they are anxious to hoist themselves into the air, may be seen of a summer twilight making their preparation so long and slowly that a passing observer would never suppose they meant any such unwonted movement as a flight. The political leaders, and the followers immediately within hearing of their voices, have for the most part the direction of affairs in their hands — these and the newspapers. The leaders, the House of Commons, .and the active local men in cities and boroughs — these and the newspapers make up what we commonly understand to be public opinion. The change in public opinion, or what seems to be such, is when one set succeeds for a time in getting predominance over the other. The predominance is usually transferred when one set has done or said all it is quite prepared to do or say for the moment. Then the other, having lost patience or gained courage, rushes in and gets his turn. It is like a contest in some burlesque eclogue, in which each singer has his chance only when the rival is out of breath, and he can strike in and keep singing until he too feels his lungs fail him and has to give way. The Liberals are in power, and they carry some measures by the strength of their parliamentary majority. The moment comes when they go further than the patience of their opponents will bear, or when they have nothing more to suggest at the moment. In either case the managers of the opposition arouse themselves; and they say, "We cannot endure any more of this;" or they ask each other why they have endured so much. They stir up their whole party with all the energy they can muster, and at last, after tremendous effort, they get their shard-borne beetle hoisted for his drowsy flight. The others have sunk into comparative languor. They have done what they wanted to do; they have, according to the French phrase, exhausted their mandate; and there is nothing by which they can call the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 199 whole strength of their party into action. They do not any longer see their way as well as their opponents do. They are not so angry or so resolute. Perhaps they think they have gone a little too far. The Conservative news- papers are all astir and aflame. The Conservative passion is roused. The Conservative lungs are fresh and strong; their rivals are out of breath. In a word, the Conserva- tives get what American politicians call "the floor;" and this is Conservative reaction. All the time it is probable that not one man in every ten thousand of the population has really changed his opinion. The Conservatives hold their place for a certain time until their opponents have recovered their energies, and have lost their patience; until their passion to attack is more thorough and genuine than the power of the men in possession to resist. Then the Liberal beetle is got upon his wings, and Liberalism has its time again. During all these changes, however, the Liberal move- ment is necessarily gaining ground. Reaction in English politics never now goes the length of undoing what has boon done. It only interposes a delay, and a warning against moving too far and too fast in the same direction. There- fore, after each (lux and reflux it is a matter of practical necessity that the cause which means movement of some kind must be found to have gained upon the cause which would prefer to stand still. It is almost needless to say that the Liberal party have not always been the actual means of carrying a liberal movement. All great Conserva- tive leaders have recognized in good time the necessity of accepting some principle of reform. In a practical country like England, the Conservatives could not maintain a party of any kind if it were absolutely certain that their mission was to oppose every reform, and the mission of the Liberals to promote it. As a principle, the business of Liberalism is to cry "forward;'' that of Conservatism to cry "hack." The action and reaction of which we speak is that of Liberalism and Conservatism; not of the leaders of Liberal and Tory administration. The movement of reaction against reform in domestic policy was in full force during the earlier years of Lord I'almerston's government. In home politics, and where finance and commercial legislation were not concerned, Palmerston was a Conservative minister, lie was probably 200 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. on the whole more highly esteemed among the rank and file of the opposition in the House of Commons than by the rank and file on his own side. Not a few of the Conserva- tive country gentlemen would in their hearts have been glad if he could have remained prime minister forever. His thoroughly English ways appealed directly to their sympathies. His instincts went with theirs. They liked his courage and his animal spirits. He was always ready to fling cheery defiance in the face of any foreign foe; just as they had been taught to believe that their grand- fathers used to fling defiance in the face of Bonaparte and France. He was a faithful member of the church of England, but his certainly was not an austere Protestant- ism, and he allowed religion to come no further into the affairs of ordinary life than suited a country gentleman's ideas of the fitness of things. There was among Tory country gentlemen also a certain doubt or dread as to the manner in which eccentric and exoteric genius might manage the affairs of England when the Conservatives came to have a government of their own, and when Lord Derby could no longer take command. These, therefore, all liked Palmerston, and helped by their favor to swell the sails of his popularity. Many of those who voted, with their characteristic fidelity to party, for Mr. Disraeli's reso- lution of censure, were glad in their hearts that Lord Palm- erston came safely out of the difficulty. But as the years went on there were manifest signs of the coming and inevitable reaction. One of the most striking of these indications was found in the position taken by Mr. Gladstone. For some time Mr. Gladstone had been more and more distinctly identifying himself with the opinions of the advanced Liberals. The ad- vanced Liberals themselves were of two sections or factions working together almost always, but very distinct in com- plexion; and it was Mr. Gladstone's fortune to be drawn by his sympathies to both alike. He was of course drawn toward the Manchester school by his economic views; by his agreement with them on all subjects relating to finance and to freedom of commerce. But the Manchester Liberals were for non-intervention in foreign politics; and they carried this into their sympathies as well as into their principles. They had never shown much interest in the struggles of other nations for political liberty. They did A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 201 not seem to think it was the business of Englishmen to make demonstrations about Italians, or Poles', or French Republicans. The other section of the advanced Liberals were sometimes even flightily eager in their sympathies with the Liberal movements of the Continent. Mr. Glad- stone was in communion of the movements of foreign Liberals, as he was with those of English free traders and economists. He was therefore qualified to stand between both sections of the advanced Liberals of England, and give one hand to each. During the debates on Italian questions of 1800 and 18G1 he had identified himself with the cause of Italian unity and independence. In the year 186-4 Garibaldi came on a visit to England, and was received in London with an outburst of enthu- siasm, the like whereof had not been seen since Kossuth first passed down Cheapside, and which perhaps was not seen even then. It was curious to notice how men of opposing parties were gradually swept or sucked into this whirlpool of enthusiasm, and how aristocracy and fashion, which had always held aloof from Kossuth, soon crowded round Garibaldi. At first the leading men of nearly all parties held aloof except Mr. Gladstone. He was among the very first and most cordial in his welcome to Garibaldi. Then the Liberal leaders in general thought they had better consult for their popularity by taking Garibaldi up. A lady of high rank and great political influence frankly expressed her opinion that Garibaldi was nothing more than a respectable brigand, but she joined in doing public honor to him nevertheless, acknowledging that it would lie inconvenient for her husband to keep aloof and risk his popularity. Then the Conservative leaders too began to think it would never do for them to hold hack when the prospect of a general election was so closely overshadowing them, and they plunged into the Garibaldi welcome. Men of the class of Lord Palmerston cared nothing for Gari- baldi. Men like Lord Derby disl iked and despised him; but the crowd ran after him, and the leaders on both sides, after having looked on for a moment with contempt, and another moment with amazement, fairly pulled oil' their hats and ran with the crowd, shouting and hallooing like the rest. The peerage then rushed at Garibaldi. He was beset by dukes, mobbed by countesses. He could not, by any possibility, have so divided his day as to find, 202 A HISTORY OF OtTR OWN TIMES. time for accepting half the invitations of the noble and new friends *who fought and scrambled for him. It was a perpetual trouble to his secretaries and his private friends to decide between the rival claims of a prince of the blood and a prime minister, an archbishop and a duchess, the lord chancellor and the leader of the opposition. The Tories positively outdid the Liberals in the competition. The crowd in the streets were perfectly sincere, some ac- claiming Garibaldi because they had a vague knowledge that he had done brave deeds somewhere, and represented a cause; others, perhaps the majority, because they assumed that he was somehow opposed to the pope. The leaders of society were for the most part not sincere. Three out of every four of them had always previously spoken of Gari- baldi — when they spoke of him at all — as a mere buccaneer and filibuster. The whole thing ended in a quarrel between the aristocracy and the democracy; and Garibaldi was got back to his island somehow. Had he ever returned to England he would probably have found himself unembar- rassed by the attentions of the Windsor uniform and the order of the garter. The whole episode was not one to fdl the soul of an unconcerned spectator with great respect for the manner in which crowds and leaders sometimes act in England. Mr. Gladstone was one of the few among the leaders who were undoubtedly sincere, and the course he took made him a great favorite with the advanced Radicals. Mr. Gladstone had given other indications of a distinct tendency to pass over altogether from Conservatism, and even from Peelism, into the ranks of the Radical reformers. On May 11, 18G4, Mr. Raines brought on a motion in the House of Commons for the reduction of the borough franchise from £10 rental to £0. During the debate that followed Mr. Gladstone made a remarkable declaration. He contended that the burden of proof rested upon those "who would exclude forty-nine-fiftieths of the working classes from the franchise;" "it is for them to show the unworthiness, the incapacity, and the misconduct of the working class." "I say," he repeated, "that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of the constitution." The bill was rejected, as every one knew it would be. A franchise bill A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 203 introduced by a private member on a Wednesday is not supposed to have much prospect of success. But the speech of Mr. Gladstone gave an importance to the debate and to the occasion which it would not be easy to overrate. The position taken up by all Conservative minds, no matter to which side of politics their owners belonged, had been that the claim must be made out for those seeking an ex- tension of the suffrage in their favor; that they must show imperative public need, immense and clear national and political advantage, to justify the concession ; that the mere fact of their desire and fitness for the franchise ought not to count for anything in the consideration. Mr. Glad- stone's way of looking at the question created enthusiasm on the one side — consternation and anger on the other. This was the principle of Rousseau's ".Social Contract," many voices exclaimed; the principle of the rights of man; the red republic; the social and democratic revolution; anything, everything that is subversive and anarchical. Early in the following session there was a motion intro- duced by Mr. Dillwyn, a staunch and persevering reformer, declaring that the position of the Irish state church was unsatisfactory, and called for the early attention of her maj- esty's government. Mr. Gladstone spoke on the motion, and drew a contrast between the state church of England and that of Ireland, pointing out that the Irish church ministered only to the religious wants of one-eighth or one-ninth of the community amid which it was established. In reply to a letter of remonstrance Mr. Gladstone ex- plained, not long after, that he had not recommended any particular action as a consequence of Mr. D ill wyn's resolu- tion, regarding the question as yet "remote and apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day." It was evident, however, that his mind would he found to he made up at any time when the question should become practical, and it was highly probable that his own speech had greatly hastened the coming of that time. The eyes of all Radical reformers, therefore, turned to Mr. Glad- stone as the future minister of reform in church and state. He became from the same moment an object of distrust and something approaching to detestation, in the eyes of all steady-going Conservatives. Meanwhile there were many changes taking place in the social and political life of England. Many eminent men 204 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. passed away during the years that Lord Palmerston held his almost absolute sway over the House of Commons. One man we may mention in the first instance, although he was no politician, and his death in no wise affected the prospects of parties. The attention of the English people was called from questions of foreign policy and of possible intervention in the Danish quarrel, by an event which happened on the Christmas eve of 1863. That day it be- came known throughout London that the author of "Vanity Fair" was dead. Mr. Thackeray died suddenly at the house in Kensington which he had lately had built for him in the fashion of that Queen Anne period which he loved and had illustrated so admirably. He was still in the very prime of life; no one had expected that his career was so soon to close. It had not been in any sense a long career. Success had come somewhat late to him, and he was left but a short time to enjoy it. We have already spoken of his works and his literary character. Since the publication of "The Newcomes," he had not added to his reputation; indeed it hardly needed any addition. He had established himself in the very foremost rank of English novelists; with Fielding and Goldsmith and Miss Austen and Dickens. He had been a literary man and hardly anything else; having had little to- do with politics or political journalism. Once indeed he was seized with a sudden ambition to take a seat in the House of Commons, and at the general election of 1857 he offered himself as a candidate for the city of Oxford in opposition to Mr. Card- well. He was not elected; and he seemed to accept failure cheerfully as a hint that he had better keep to literary work for the future. He would go back to his author's desk, he said good-humoredly; and he kept his word. It is not likely that he would have been a parliamentary success. He had no gift of speech and had but little interest in the details of party politics. His political views were senti- ments rather than opinions. Most of his admirers would probably have been sorry to see him involved in the parti- san debates of the House of Commons, where any practiced official trained to glibness or any overbearing declaimer would have been far more than a match for him, and where he had no special need or call to go. It is not true that success in parliament is incompatible with literary distinction. Macaulay and Grote, and two of Thackeray's A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 205 own craft, Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Lytton, may be called as recent witnesses to disprove that common impres- sion. But these were men who had a distinctly political object, or who loved political life, and were only follow- ing their star when they sought seats in the House of Commons. Thackeray had no such vocation and would have been as much out of place in parliamentary debate as a painter or a musician. He had no need to covet" parlia- mentary reputation. As it was well said when the news of his defeat at Oxford reached London, the Houses of Lords and Commons together could not have produced "Barry Lyndon" and "Pendennis." His early death was a source not only of national but of world-wide regret. It eclipsed the Christmas gaiety of nations. Thackeray was as much admired and appreciated in America as in England. Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the Times, has given an amusing account of a southern Confederate leader engaged in an attempt to run the northern blockade, who kept talking all the time and even at the most exciting and perilous moments, about the various characters in Thack- eray's novels. If Thackeray died too soon, it Avas only too soon for his family and his friends. His fame was secure. Ee could hardly with any length of years have added a cubit to his literary stature. A whole group of statesmen had passed prematurely away. Sir James Graham had died after several years of a quiet career; still a celebrity in the House of Commons, but not much in the memory of the public outside it. One of his latest speeches in parliament was on the Chinese war of 1860. On the last day of the session of 1861, and when almost all the other members had left the house, he remained for awhile talking with a friend and former col- league, and as they were separating, Sir James Graham ex- pressed a cheery hope that they should meet on the first day of the next session in the same place. But Graham died in the following October. Sidney Herbert had died a few weeks before in the same year. Sidney Herbert had been raised to the peerage as Lord Herbert of Lea. He had entered the House of Lords because his breaking health rendered it impossible to stand the wear and tear of life in the Commons, and he loved politics and public affairs, and could no! he induced to renounce them and live in quiet. He was a man of great gifts, and was looked upon 206 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. as a prospective prime minister. He had a graceful and gracious bearing; he was an able administrator, and a very skillful and persuasive debater. His style of speaking was what might be called, if it is a lawful to coin an expression for the purpose, the "pointed-conversational." He never declaimed ; never even tried to be what is commonly called eloquent; but his sentences came out with a singularly expressive combination of force and ease, every argument telling, every stroke having the lightness of an eastern champion's sword-play. He had high social station, and was in every way fitted to stand at the head of English public affairs. He was but fifty-one years of age when he died. The country for some time looked on Sir George Lewis as a man likely to lead an administration; but he too passed away before his natural time. He died two years after Sir James Graham and Sidney Herbert, and was only some fifty-seven years old at his death. Lord Elgin, was dead and Lord Canning; and Lord Dalhousie had been some years dead. The Duke of Newcastle died in 1864. Mr. Gladstone, speaking at Glasgow, said of these, that " they had been swept away in the full maturity of their faculties and in the early stages of middle life — a body of men strong enough of themselves in all the gifts of wisdom and of knowledge, of experience and of elo- quence, to have equipped a cabinet for the service of the country." Nor must we omit to mention the death of Car- dinal Wiseman on February 15, 1865. Cardinal Wiseman had outlived the popular clamor once raised against him in England. There was a time when his name would have set all the pulpit-drums of no-popery rattling; he came at length to be respected and admired everywhere in Eng- land as a scholar and a man of ability. He was a devoted ecclesiastic, whose zeal for his church was his honor, and whose earnest labor in the work he was set to do had short- ened his busy life. During the time from the first outbreak of the civil war in the United States to its close all these men were removed from the scene, and the civil war was hardly over when Richard Cobden was quietly laid in an English coun- try churchyard. Mr. Cobden paid a visit to his constituents of Rochdale in November, 1804, to address them on public affairs. He was at the time struggling against a bronchial attack which made it imprudent for him to attend a public A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 207 meeting — especially imprudent to try to speak in public. He had to travel a long way in bad weather. His friends endeavored to dissuade him from going to Rochdale; but he was convinced that the condition of political affairs was so full of seriousness that he could not consistently with his strong sense of duty put off addressing his con- stituents. He had had probably some presentiment of his death; for not long before he had passed, in company with his friend Mr. Bright, the place where his only son lay buried, and he told Mr. Bright that he should soon be laid beside him. He went to Rochdale and spoke to a great public meeting, and he did not appear to have lacked any of his usual ease and energy. This speech, the last he ever made, contained the famous passage so often quoted and criticised, which compared the undergraduate's knowl- edge of Chicago with his knowledge of the Ilyssus. "I will take any undergraduate," said Cobden, "now at Ox- ford or Cambridge, and I will ask this young gentleman to walk up to a map of the United States and put his finger upon the city of Chicago, and I will undertake to say that he will not go within a thousand miles of it. When I was at Athens I sallied forth one summer morning to see the far-famed river the Ilyssus, and after walking some hun- dred yards up what appeared to be the bed of a winter torrent, I came up to a number of Athenian laundresses, and I found that they had dammed up this far-famed classic river, and that they were using every drop of the water for their linen and such sanitary purposes. I say why should not the young gentlemen who are taught all about the geography of the Ilyssus know something about the geography of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Mis- souri?" Mr. Cobden has always been charged on the faith of this contrast with a desire to throw contempt on the study of the classics, and with an intention to measure the comparative value of ancient and modern literature by the relative commercial importance of Chicago and the Ilyssus. He had no such purpose. lie merely meant to show that, the men who dogmatized about modern countries and poli- tics ought to know something of the subjects before they spoke and wrote. He contended that it is ridiculous to call a modern political writer educated because be knows something about classic Greece and nothing about the United States. The humorous illustration about the Ilyssus 208 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Mr. Cobden had used in a former speech; and curiously enough something to much the same purpose had been said by Byron about the Ilyssus before, without any one falling foul of the author of "Child© Harold," and accusing him of disparaging the culture of Greece. Byron wrote that " places without a name and rivers not laid down on maps may one day, when more known, be justly esteemed superior subjects for the pencil and the pen to the dry ditch of the Ilyssus and the bogs of Bceotia." Cobden had been a good deal provoked, as most sensible persons were, by the flood of writing poured out on the country during the American civil war, in which citations from Thucydides were habitually introduced to settle questions of military and political controversy in the United States. That was the day for public instructors, of the inspired schoolboy type, who sometimes, to say the truth, knew little of the Greek literature from which they paraded their . quotations, but who knew still less about the geography or the political conditions of America; who were under the impression that the Mississippi flowed east and west, and talked com- placently of English war steamers getting into Lake Erie, apparently making no account of so considerable an obstacle as the Falls of Niagara. This was Cobden's last speech. He did not come up to London until the March of 1865, and the day on which he traveled was so bitterly cold that the bronchial affection from which he was suffering became cruelly aggravated. One of the last private letters he ever wrote enclosed to a friend an unsolicited contribution for the relief of a poor young Englishwoman, whose husband, an American sea- man, had just died in London, leaving her with a newly- born infant. He sank rapidly, and on April 2nd he died. The scene in the House of Commons next evening was very touching. Lord Palmerston and Mr. Disraeli both spoke of Cobden with genuine feeling and sympathy; but Mr. Bright's few and broken words were as noble an epitaph as friendship could wish for the grave of a great and a good man. Some critics found fault with Lord Palmer- ston for having spoken of Cobden's as "Demosthenic elo- quence." That simple conversational style, it was asked — does Lord Palmerston call that Demosthenic? Did he not use the word as a piece of unmeaning praise, merely be- cause it came first to his lips? On the contrary, it is prob- A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 209 able that Palmerston thought the word expressed exactly what he wished to say. We are apt to think of the elo- quence of Demosthenes as above all things energetic, com- manding, overbearing by its strength and its action. But this is a superficial way of regarding the great orator. What is the essential characteristic of the oratory of De- mosthenes, in which it differs from that of almost every other orator, ancient and modern? Surely its intensely practical nature; the fact that nothing is spoken without ;i present and determinate purpose; that no word is used which does not bear upon the argument the speaker would enforce. Cobden had not the power or the polish of Demosthenes, nor can his manner have been at all like that of the Athenian; but his eloquence Avas always moulded naturally and unconsciously in the true spirit of Demosthenes. It was the eloquence of one who claimed only to be heard for his cause, and for the arguments with which he should commend it to the intelligence of his audience. Those who found fault with Lord Palmerston's epithet only failed to understand its application. The Liberal party then" found themselves approaching a general election, with their ranks thinned by many severe losses. The government had lost one powerful member by an event other than death. The lord chan- cellor, Lord Westbury, had resigned his office in conse- quence of a vote of the House of Commons. Lord West- bury had made many enemies. He was a man of great capacity and energy, into whose nature the scorn of forms and of lesser intellects entered far too freely. His charac- ter was somewhat wanting in the dignity of moral eleva- tion. He had a tongue of marvelous bitterness. His sar- castic power was probably unequaled in the House of Com- mons, while he sat there; and when he came into the House of Lords he fairly took away the breath of stately and formal peers by the unsparing manner in which he em- ployed his most dangerous gift. His style of cruel irony was made all the more effective by the peculiar suavity of the tone in which he gave out his sarcasms and his epithets. With a face that only suggested soft bland benevolence, with eves half closed as those of a mediaeval saint, and in accents of subdued mellifluous benignity, the lord chancellor was wont to pour out a stream of irony that corroded like some deadly acid. Such a man was sure 210 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to make enemies; and the time came when, in the Scrip- tural sense, they found him out. He had been lax in his manner of using his patronage. In one case he had allowed an official of the House of Lords to retire, and to receive a retiring pension, while a grave charge con- nected with his conduct in another public office was to Lord Westbury's knowledge impending over him; and Lord Westbury had appointed his own son to the place thus vacated. Thus at first sight it naturally appeared that Lord Westbury had sanctioned the pensioning off of a pub- lic servant against whom a serious charge was still awaiting decision, in order that a place might be found for the lord chancellor's own son. In the other case, that of an appointment to the Leeds bankruptcy court, the authority of Lord Westbury had been made use of by a member of his family to sanction a very improper arrangement. In this case, however, it was shown that Lord Westbury knew nothing of the proposal, and had never had any idea of assisting any member of his family by his influence in the matter. No one believed that even in the former case he had been influenced by any corrupt motive. He had been led into error by a too easy good-nature toward certain members of his family, and by a carelessness which the engrossing character of his other duties might at least have excused, if it could not have justified. Still there could be no doubt that the manner in which he had exercised his patronage, or allowed it to be exercised, was deserving of reprehension. The question was taken up by the House of Commons; and somewhat unfortunately taken up in the first instance by a strong political opponent of the government. On July 3, 1865, Mr. Ward Hunt moved a distinct vote of censure on the lord chancellor. The house did not agree to the resolution, which would have branded the lord chan- cellor's conduct as " highly reprehensible, and calculated to throw discredit on the administration of the high offices of the state." It, however, accepted an amendment which, while acquitting Lord Westbury of any corrupt motive, declared that the granting of the pension showed a laxity of practice and a want of caution with regard to the public interests on the part of the lord chancellor. The govern- ment were not able to resist this resolution. Lord Palmer- ston made the best effort he could to save the lord chan- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 211 cellor; but the common feeling of the house held that the words of the resolution were not too strong; and the gov- ernment had to bow to it. The lord chancellor imme- diately resigned his oilice. No other course was fairly open to him. The government lost a man of singular ability aud energy. Lord Westbury's fall was not perhaps so much the result of the one or two transactions for which the censure was passed, as of the growing dislike which both houses had come to feel for an intellect too keen to be scrupulous, and a nature which brought even to the uninspiring business of law reforms some of the fierce animosities to which the tongue of a Swift would hardly have given a more bitter expression. Many thought, when all was done, that he had been somewhat harshly used. He would, perhaps, have been greatly surprised himself to know how many kindly things were said of him. The hour of political reaction was evidently near at hand. Five years had passed away since the withdrawal of Lord John Russell's reform bill; and five years may represent in ordinary calculation the ebb or flow of the political tide. The dissolution of parliament was near. Lord Derby described the speech from the throne, at the opening of the session of 1865, as a sort of adekess very proper to be delivered by an aged minister to a moribund parliament. The parliament had run its course. It had accomplished the rare I'eat of living out its days, and hav- ing to die by simple efflux of time. On July (5, 1865, par- liament was dissolved. Mr. Disraeli's address to the electors of Buckinghamshire, sent out before the dissolu- tion, distinctly declared that the issue which the country would have to decide concerned the national church and the franchise. "The maintenance of a national church," he said, "involves the question whether the principle of religion shall be an element of our political constitution; whether the state shall be consecrated; or whether, dis- missing the sanctions that appeal to the higher feelings of man, our scheme of government should degenerate into a mere system of police." " I see nothing," he proclaimed, " in such a result but the corruption of nations and the fall of empires." As regards the franchise he was vaguely grandiloquent; and both the vagueness and grandiloquence were doubtless deliberate and to serve a purpose. "On the extension of the electoral franchise," he observed, 212 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. "depends the distribution of power." He was of opinion that " the primary plan of our ancient constitution, so rich in various wisdom, indicates the course we ought to pur- sue." What that course was Mr. Disraeli took good care not to explain too clearly. The ancient constitution, he showed, had "secured our popular rights by entrusting power not to an indiscriminate multitude, but to the estate or order of the Commons; and a wise government should be careful that the elements of that estate should bear a due relation to the moral and material development of the coun- try." Public opinion, he suggested, might not be yet ripe enough to legislate on the subject; but the country "might ponder over it with advantage, so that when the time comes for action we may legislate in the spirit of the English constitution, which would absorb the best of every class, and not fall into a democracy, which is the tyranny of one class, and that one the least enlightened." Translated into plain English, these pompous generalities meant clearly enough, although perhaps men did not all see it just then, that Mr. Disraeli would be prepared, if his turn should arrive, to bring in a reform bill, and that he still had hopes of being able to satisfy the country without going too far in the direction' of popular suffrage. But it seems evident now that he had left it open to him to take eveu that course should it come in his way. No matter how wide the extension of the franchise which he found himself driven to make, he could always say that in his opinion it only absorbed the best of a class, and did not allow us to fall into a democracy. "Which spills the foremost foeman's life, that party conquers in the strife." The first blow was struck in the city of London, and the Liberals carried all the seats. Four Liberals were elected. In Westminster the contest was somewhat remarkable. The constituency of Westmin- ster always had the generous ambition to wish to be repre- sented by at least one man of distinction. Westminster had been represented by Fox. It had more lately had Sir Francis Burdett for one of its representatives and Cochrane for another. Byron's friend Ilobhouse long represented Westminster. More lately still it had had Sir de Lacy Evans, not much of a politician to be sure, but a very gal- lant soldier, a man whose name was, at all events, to adopt tli" I'Vciich phrase, "in the plav hill >" This timp \i "•. A UISTOR T OF OUR OWN TIMES. 2 1 3 Mill was induced to come out of his calm retirement in Avignon and accept the candidature for Westminster. He issued an address embodying his well-known political opinions. He declined to look after local business, and on principle he objected to pay any part of the expenses of election. It was felt to be a somewhat bold experiment to put forward such a man as Mill among the candidates for the representation of a popular constituency. His opinions were extreme. He was not known to belong to any church or religious denomination. He was a philosopher, and English political organizations do not love philosophers. He was almost absolutely unknown to his countrymen in general. Until he came forward as a leader of the agitation in favor of the northern cause during the civil war, he had never, so far as we know, been seen on an English political platform. Even of the electors of Westminster very few had ever seen him before his candidature. Many were under the vague impression that he was a clever man who wrote wise books, and died long ago. He was not supposed to have any liking or capacity for parliamentary lift'. More than ten years before it was known to a few that he had been invited to stand for an Irish county and had declined. That was at the time when his observations on the Irish land tenure system and the condition of Ireland generally had filled the hearts of many Irishmen with delight and wonder — delight and wonder to find that a cold English philosopher and economist should form such just and generous opinions about Irish questions, and should express them with such a noble courage. Since that time he had not been supposed to have any inclination for public life; nor we believe had any serious effort been made to tempt him out of his retirement. The idea now occurred to Mr. James Heal, a popular Westminster politi- cian, and he pressed it so earnestly on Mill as a public duty that Mill did not feel at liberty to refuse. Mill was one of the few men who have only to be convinced that ;i thing was incumbent on them as a public duty to set about doing it forthwith, no matter how distasteful it might be to them personally, or what excellent excuses they might offer for leaving the duty to others. He had written things which might well make him doubtful about the prudence of courting the suffrages of an English popular constit- uency. He was understood to be a rationalist ; he wasa .sup- 214 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. porter of many political opinions that seemed to ordinary persons much like "fads," or crotchets, or even crazes. He had once said in his writings, that the working-classes in England were given to lying. He had now to stand up on platforms before crowded and noisy assemblies where everything he had ever written or said could be made the subject of question and of accusation; and with enemies outside capable of torturing every explanation to his disad- vantage. A man of independent opinions and who has not been ashamed to change his opinions when he thought them wrong, or afraid to put on record each opinion in the time 'when he held to it, is at much disadvantage on the hustings. He will find out there what it is to have written books and to have enemies. Mill triumphed over all the difficulties by downright courage and honesty. When asked at a public meeting chiefly composed of working- men, whether he had ever said the working-classes were given to lying, he answered straight out, "I did;" a bold, blunt admission without any qualification. The boldness and frankness of the reply struck home to the manhood of the workingmen who listened to. him. Here they saw a leader who would never shrink . from telling them the truth. Mr. Mill has himself described what followed his answer. " Scarcely were these two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause resounded through the whole meeting. It Avas evident that the working people were so accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those who sought their suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead of being affronted they concluded at once that this was a person they could trust. . . . The first workingman who spoke after the incident I have mentioned (it was Mr. Odger) said that the working-classes had no desire not to be told of their fault; they wanted friends, not flatterers; and felt under obligation to any one who told them anything in themselves which he sincerely believed to require amendment. And to this the meeting heartily responded." One is in doubt whether to admire more the frankness of the speaker or the manly good sense of those to whom he spoke. "As much to my surprise," says Mr. Mill, "as to that of any one, I was returned to parliament by a majority of some hundreds over my Con- servative competitor." A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 215 In many other instances there was a marked indication that the political tide had turned in favor of Liberal opinions. Mr. Thomas Hughes, author of "Tom Brown's School-- days," a Radical of the "muscular Christianity" order, as it was called, was returned for Lambeth. Mr. Duncan M'Laren, brother-in-law of Mr. Bright, and an advanced Radical, was elected 'for Edinburgh, unseating a mild Whig. Mr. G. 0. Trevelyan, a brilliant young Radical, nephew of Macaulay, came into parliament. In Ireland some men of strong opinions, of ability, and of high char- acter found seats in the House of Commons for the first time. One of these was Mr. J. B. Dillon, a man who had been concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1848. He had long opposed the idea of an armed rising, believing it in- opportune and hopeless, but nevertheless when the move- ment was precipitated by events he went and took his place in front of it with his leader. Mr. Dillon had lived for some years in the United States, and had lately returned to Ireland under an amnesty. He at once reassumed a lead- ing part in Irish politics, and won a high reputation for his capacity and his integrity. He promised to have an influ- ential part in bringing together the Irish members and the English Liberals, but his untimely death cut short what would unquestionably have been a very useful career. Wherever there was a change in the character of the new parliament it seemed to be in favor of advanced reform. It was not merely that the Tories were left in a minority, but that so many mild Whigs had been removed to give place to genuine Liberals. There seemed to be little doubt that this new parliament would do something to make its existence memorable. No one surely could have expected that it would vindicate its claim to celebrity in the peculiar manner that its short history illustrates. Mr. Disraeli himself expressed his opinion of the new parliament after it had been but a short time sitting. He spoke of it as one which had distinctly increased the strength and the following of Mr. Bright. No one could fail to see, he pointed out, that Mr. Bright occupied a very different I)osition now from that which hi' had held in the late par- iament: New men had come into the House of Commons, men of integrity and ability, who were above all things ad- vanced reformers. The position of Mr. Gladstone was markedly changed. lie had been defeated at the Univer- 216 A II ISTO II Y OF UIl WN TIMES. sity of Oxford by Mr. Gathorne Hardy, but was at once put in nomination for Soutb Lancashire, which was still open, and he was elected there. His severance from the university was regarded by Liberals as his political eman- cipation. The reformers then would have at their head the two great parliamentary orators (one of them undoubt- edly the future prime minister), and the greatest philosoph- ical writer and thinker of the day. This Liberal tri- umvirate, as they were called, would have behind them many new and earnest men, to whom their words would be a law. The alarmed Tories said to themselves that between England and the democratic flood there was left but one barrier, and that was in the person of the old statesman, now in his eighty-first year, of whom more and more doubt- ful rumors began to arrive in London every day. CHAPTER XLVII. THE DEATH OF LORD PALMERSTON". "Unarm, Eros; the long day's task is done, and we must sleep!" A long, very long day's task was nearly done. A marvelous career was fast drawing to its close. Down in Hertfordshire Lord Palmerston was dying. As Mirabeau said of himself, so Palmerston might have said, he could already hear the preparations for the funeral of Achilles. He had enjoyed life to the last as fully as ever Churchill did, although in a different sense. Long as his life was, if counted by mere years, it seems much longer still when we consider what it had compassed, and how active it had been from the earliest to the very end. Many men were older than Lord Palmerston ; he left more than one senior behind him. But they were for the most part men whose work had long been done ; men who had been consigned to the arm-chair of complete inactivity. Palmer- ston was a hardworking statesman until within a very few days of his death. He had been a member of parliament for nearly sixty years. He entered parliament for the first time in the year when Byron, like himself a Harrow boy, published his first poems. He had been in the House of Commons for thirty years when the queen came to the throne. He used to play chess with the unfortunate Caro- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 217 line of Brunswick, wife of the prince regent, when she lived at Kensington as Princess of Wales. In 1808, being then one of the lords of. the admiralty, he had defended the Copenhagen expedition of the year before, and insisted that it was a stroke indispensable to the defeat of the designs of Napoleon. During all his political career he was only out of office for rare and brief seasons. To be a private member of parliament was a short occasional episode in his successful life. In the words of Sadi, the Persian poet, he had obtained an ear of corn from every harvest. It was only during the session of 18(35 that Lord Palmer- ston began to give evidence that he was suffering severely at last from that affliction which has been called the most terrible of all diseases — old age. Up to the beginning of that year he had scarcely shown any signs of actual decay. He had, indeed, been for a long time a sufferer from occa- sional fits of gout, lately in hands as well as feet. During the winter of the Trent seizure he had been much disabled and tortured by a visitation of this kind, which almost entirely crippled him. But in this country the gout has long ceased to be an evidence of old age. It only too commonly accompanies middle life; and, indeed, like black Care in the poet's verse, seems able to cling on to any horseman. But during the session of 1805 Lord Palmerston began to show that he was receiving the warnings which death, in Mrs. Thrale's pretty poem, is made to give of his coming. He suffered much for some of the later months. His eyesight had become very weak, and even with the help of strong glasses he found it difficult to read. He was getting feeble in every way. He ceased to have that joy of the strife which inspired him during parliamentary debate even up to the attainment of his eightieth year. He had kept up his bodily vigor and the youthful elasticity of his spirits so long, that it must have come on him with the shock of a painful surprise when he first found that his frame and his nerves were beyond doubt giving way, and that he too must succumb to the cruel influence of years. The collapse of his vigor came mi almost at a stroke. On his eightieth birthday, in October, L864, he started, Mr. Ashley tells us, at "half-past eight from Broadlands, taking his horses by train to Fareham, was met by engineer officers, and rode along the Portsdown anc| Hilsea lines of forts, getting off hi- borseswl inspecting some, qJ them, 218 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. crossing over to Anglesey forts and Gosport, and not reach- ing home till six in the evening." Earlier in the same year he rode one day from his house in Piccadilly to Harrow, trotting the distance of nearly two miles within one hour. Such performances testify to an energy of what one would almost call youthful vitality, rare indeed even in the his- tory of our long-living time. But in 18G5 the change set in all at once. Lord Palmerston began to discontinue his attendances at the house; when he did attend, it was evi- dent that he went through his parliamentary duties with difficulty, and even with pain. The Tiverton election on the dissolution of parliament was his last public appear- ance. He went from Tiverton to Brocket, in Hertford- shire, a place which Lady Palmerston had inherited from Lord Melbourne, her brother; and there he remained. The gout had become very 'serious now. It had flown to a dan- gerous place; and Lord Palmerston had made the danger greater by venturing with his too youthful energy to ride out before he had nearly recovered from one severe attack. On October 17th a bulletin was issued, announcing that Lord Palmerston had been seriously ill, in consequence of hav- ing taken cold, but that he had been steadily improving for three days, and was then much better. Somehow this announcement failed to reassure the people in London. Many had only then for the first time heard that Palmer- ston was ill, and the bare mention of the fact fell ominously on the ear of the public. The very next morning these suspicions were confirmed. It was announced that Lord Palmerston's condition had suddenly altered for the worse, and that he was gradually sinking. Then every one knew that the end was near. There was no surprise when the news came next day that Palmerston was dead. He died on October 18th. Had he lived only two days longer he would have completed his eighty-first year. He was buried in Westminster Abbey with public honors on October 27th. No man since the death of the Duke of Wellington had filled so conspicuous a place in the public mind. No man had enjoyed anything like the same amount of popularity. He died at the moment when that popularity had reached its very zenith. It had become the fashion of the day to praise all he said and all he did. It was the settled canon of the ordinary Englishman's faith that what Palmerston said England |j ( u.st feel. To stand |-,. M \ : , n | as the oppo- A BISTOli Y OF OUR WN TIMES. 2 1 9 nerit, or even the critic, of anything done or favored by him was to be unpopular and unpatriotic. Lord Palmerston had certainly lived long enough in years, in enjoyment, in fame. It seems idle to ask what might have happened if a man of more than eighty could have lived and held his place in active public life for a few years more. But if one were to indulge in such speculation, the assumption would be that in such an event there must have been some turn iu the tide of that almost unparalleled popularity and success. Fortunate in everything during his later years, Lord Palmerston was withdrawn from chance and change just when his fortune had reached its flood. It is hardly necessary to say that the regret for Palmer- ston was very general and very genuine. Privately, he can hardly have had any enemies. He had a kindly heart, which won on all people who came near him. He had no enduring enmities, or capricious dislikes; and it was there- fore very hard for ill-feeling to live in his beaming, friendly presence. He never disliked men merely because he had often to encounter them in political war. He tried his best to give them as good as they brought, and he bore no mal- ice. There were some men whom he disliked, as we have already mentioned in these volumes, but they were men who for one reason or another stood persistently in his way, and who he fancied he had reason to believe had acted treacherously toward him. He liked a man to be "English," and he liked him to be what he considered a gentleman; but he did not restrict his definition of the word "gentle- man" to the mere qualifications of birth or social rank. Eis manners were frank and genial rather than polished ; and his is one of the rare instances in which a man con- trived always to keep up his personal dignity without any stateliness of bearing and tone, lie was a model combatant ; when the combat was over, he was ready to sit down by his antagonist's side and be his friend, and talk over their ex- periences and exploits. He was absolutely free from affec- tation. Tins very fact gave sometimes an air almost of roughness to his manners, lie could he so plain-spoken and downright when suddenly called on to express his mind. He was not in the highest sense of the word a truthful man; that is to say, there were episodes of his career in which for purposes of statecraft he allowed the House of Commons and the count rv to become the dupes of an 220 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. erroneous impression. Personally truthful and honorable of course it would be superfluous to pronounce him. A man of Palmerston's bringing up is ascertain to be person- ally truthful as he is to be brave, and to be fond of open- air exercise and the cold bath. But Palmerston was too often willing to distinguish between the personal and the political integrity of a statesman. The distinction is com- mon to the majority of statesmen ; so much the worse for statesmanship. But the gravest errors of this kind which Palmerston had committed were committed for an earlier generation. The general public of 1865 took small account of them. Not many would have cared much then about the grim story of Sir Alexander Burnes' despatches, or the manner in which Palmerston had played with the hopes of foreign Liberalism, conducting it more than once rather to its grave than to its triumph. These things lived only in the minds of a few at the time when the news of his death came, and even of that few not many were anxious to dwell upon them. It was noticed at the time that the London newspaper which had persistently attacked his policy and himself since the hour when it came into exist- ence, appeared in deep mourning the day after his death. Some thought this show of regret inconsistent; some declared it hypocritical. There is no reason to think it either the one or the other. Without retracting one word of condemnation uttered concerning Palmerston's policy, it was surely natural to feel sincere regret for the death of one who had tilled so large a space in the public eye; a man of extraordinary powers, and whose love for his coun- try had never been denied. "Dead! that quits all scores !" is the exclamation of the gypsy in "Guy Mannering;" only a simple untaught version of the "sunt lachramce rerum" of Virgil, which Fox quoted to explain his feelings when he grieved for the death of the rival Avhose public actions he could not even at such a moment pretend to approve. Whether Lord Palmerston belonged to the first order of statesmen can be only matter of speculation and discussion. He was not afforded any opportunity of deciding the ques- tion. It was the happy fortune of his country during all his long career to have never been placed in any position of organic danger. Not for one moment was there any crisis of the order which enables a man to prove that he is a statesman of the foremost Qja§§. It would be almost as A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 221 profitable to ask ourselves whether the successful captain of one of the Cunard steamers might have been a Nelson or a Columbus, as to ask whether under the pressure of great emergency Palmerston might have been a really great statesman. If we were to test him by his judgment in matters of domestic policy, we should have to rate him somewhat low. The description which Grattan gave of Burke would have to be reversed in Lord Palmerston's case. Instead of saying that "he saw everything; he fore- saw everything," we should have to say, he saw nothing; he foresaw nothing. He was hardly dead when the great changes which he had always scoffed at and declared im- possible came to pass. Marshal MacMahon once said that in some given contingency the chass&pots of the French soldiers would go off of themselves. Such seemed to be the condition of the very reforms which Palmerston had persuaded himself to regard as un-English and impossible. They went off of themselves, one might, say, the moment he was gone. Nor was it that his strength had withstood them. If he had been ten years younger they would prob- ably have gone on in spite of him. They waited out of courtesy to him, to his age, and to the certainty that before very long he must be out of the way. But of course Lord Palmerston is not to be judged by his domestic policy. We might as well judge of Frederick the Great by his poetry, or Richelieu by his play. Palmer- ston was himself only in the foreign office, and in the House of Commons. In both alike the recognition of his true capacity came very late. His parliamentary training had been perfected before its success was acknowledged. lie was therefore able to use his faculties at any given mo- ment to their fullest stretch. He could always count on them. They had been so well drilled by long practice that they would instantly come at call. He understood the moods of the House of Commons to perfection. He could play upon those moods as a performer does upon the keys of an instrument. The doctor in one of Dickens' stories contrives to seem a master of bis business by simply observ- ing what those around the patient have been doing and wish to do, and advising that just those things shall be done. Lord Palmerston often led the House of Commons after the same fashion. He saw what men were in the mood to do, and he did it; and they were clear that that 222 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. must be a great leader who led them just whither they felt inclined to go. The description which Burke gave of Charles Townshend would very accurately describe what Lord PaJmerston came to be in his later days. He became the spoiled child of the House of Commons. Only it has to be added, that as the spoiled child usually spoils the parent, so Palmerston did much to spoil the house that petted him. He would not allow it to remain long in the mood to tolerate high principles, or any talk about them. Much earnestness he knew bored the house, and he took care never to be much in earnest. He left it to others to be eloquent. It was remarked at the time that "the prime minister who is now, and has been for years, far more influ- ential in England than ever Bolingbroke was, wielding a political power as great as any ever owned by Chatham or Pitt; as supreme in his own country as Cavour was in Sardinia; holding a position such as no French statesman has held for generations in France, has scarcely any preten- sion whatever to be considered an orator, and has not dur- ing the whole course of his long career affixed his name to any grand act of successful statesmanship." Lord Palmer- ston never cared to go deeper in his speeches than the sur- face in everything. He had no splendid phraseology; and probably would not have cared to make any display of splendid phraseology even if he had the gift. No speech of his would be read except for the present interest of the subject. No passages from Lord Palmerston are quoted by anybody. He always selected, and doubtless by a kind of instinct, not the arguments which were most logically cogent, but those which were most likely to suit the char- acter and the temper of the audience he happened to be addressing. He spoke for his hearers, not for himself; t<> affect the votes of those whom he was appealing, not for the sake of expressing any deep irrepressible convictions of his own. He never talked over the heads of his audience, or compelled them to strain their intellects in order to keep pace with his flights. No other statesman of our time could interpose so dexterously just before the divisiou to break the effect of some telling speech against him, and to bring the house into a frame of mind for regarding all that had been done by the opposition as a mere piece of political ceremonial, gone through in deference to the traditions or the formal necessities of party, on which it A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 223 would be a waste of time to bestow serious thought. A writer quoted by Mr. Ashley has remarked upon Lord Palmerston's habit "of interjecting occasionally a sort of guttural sound between his words, which must necessarily have been fatal to anything like true oratorical effect, but which somehow seemed to enhance the peculiar effective- ness of his unprepared, easy, colloquial style." The writer goes on to say that this occasional hesitation "often did much to increase the humor of some of the jocular hits in which Lord Palmerston so commonly delighted." "The joke seemed to be so entirely unpremeditated ; the audience were kept for a moment in such amusing suspense, while the speaker was apparently turning over the best way to give the hit, that when at last it came it was enjoyed with the keener relish." Nothing is more rash than to attempt to convey in cold words an idea of the effect which a happy phrase from Lord ralmerstou could sometimes produce upon a hesitating audience, and how it could throw ridicule upon a very serious case. Let us, however, make one experiment. Mr. Disraeli had once made a long and heavy attack on the ministry, opened quite a battery of argument and sarcasm against them for something they had done or had left undone. Toward the close of his speech he observed that it was no part of his duty to suggest to the ministry the exact course they ought to pursue; he would abstain 'from endeavoring to influence the house by offering any opinion of his own on that subject. Lord Palmerston began bis reply by seizing on this harmless bit of formality. "The right honorable gentleman, [' be said, "has declared that he abstained from endeavoring to influence the house by any advice of his own. Well,' .Mr. Speaker, 1 think that is indeed patriotic." The manner in which PalmerstoD spoke the words; the peculiar pause before he found the exact epithet with which to commend Mr. Disraeli's conduct; the twinkle of the eye; the tone, of the voice— all made this ironical commendation more effective than the finest piece of satire would have been just then. Lord Palmer- ston managed to put it as it' Mr. 'Disraeli, conscious <»(' the impossibility of his having any really sound advice to oiler, had out of combined modesty and love of country deliberately abstained from offering an opinion that might perhaps have misled the ignorant. " The effect of Mr. l')is- 224 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. raeli's elaborate attack was completely spoiled. The house was uo longer in a mood to consider it seriously. This, it may be said, was almost in the nature of a practical joke. Not a few of Palmerston's clever instantaneous effects par- took to a certain extent of the nature of a good-humored practical joke; but Palmerston only had recourse to these oratorical artifices when he was sure that the temper of the house and the condition of the debate would make them serve his momentary purpose. It was hardly better than a mere joke when Palmerston, charged with having acted unfairly in China by first favoring the great rebellion, and then indirectly helping the Chinese government to put it down, blandly asked what could be more impartial conduct than to help the rebels first and the government after. It was a mere joke to declare that a member who had argued against Palmerston's scheme of fortifications, had himself admitted the necessity of such a plan by saying that he had taken care to " fortify himself" with facts in order to debate the question. These were not, however, the purely friv- olous jests that when thus told they may seem to be. They had all of them the distinct purpose of convincing the house that Lord Palmerston thought nothing of the arguments urged against him ; that they did not call for any serious consideration ; that a careless jest was the only way in which it would be worth his while to answer them. It is certain that not only was the opponent, not only were other possi- ble opponents, disconcerted by this way of dealing with the question, but that many listeners became convinced by it that there could be nothing in the case which Lord Palmer- ston treated with such easy levity. They had all, and more than all, the effect of Pitt's throwing down his pen and ceasing to take notes during Erskine's speech, or O'Con- nell's smile and amused shake of the head at the earnestness of an ambitious young speaker, who thought he was mak- ing a damaging case against him, and compelling a formi- dable and elaborate reply. The jests of Lord Palmerston always had a purpose in them, and were better adapted to the occasion and the moment than the repartees of the best debater in the house. At one time, indeed, he flung his jests and personalities about in somewhat too reckless "a fashion, and he made many enemies. But of late years, whether from growing discretion or kindly feeling, he sel- dom indulged in any pleasantries that could wound or A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 225 offend. During his lust parliament he represented to the full the average head and heart of the House of Commons; singularly devoid of high ambition or steady purpose; a house peculiarly intolerant of eccentricity, especially if it were that of genius; impatient of having its feelings long strained in any one direction, delighting only in ephemeral interests and excitements; hostile to anything which drew heavily on the energy or the intelligence. Such a house naturally acknowledged a heavy debt of gratitude to the statesman who never either puzzled or bored them. Men who distrusted Mr. Disraeli's antitheses, and were frightened by Mr. Gladstone's earnestness, found as much relief in the easy, pleasant, straightforward talk of Lord Palmerston, as a schoolboy finds in a game of marbles after a problem or a sermon. We have not now to pronounce upon Lord Palmerston's long career. Much of this " History of Our Own Times" is necessarily the history of the life and administration of a statesman who entered parliament shortly after Austerlitz. We have commented so far as comment seemed necessary on each passage of his policy as it came under our notice. His greatest praise with Englishmen must be that he loved England With a sincere love that never abated. He had no predilection, no prejudice, that did not give way where the wel fare of England was concerned. He ought to have gone one step higher in the path of public duty; he ought to have loved justice and right, even more than he loved Eng- land. He ought to have felt more tranquilly convinced that the cause of justice and of right must be the best thing which an English minister could advance even for Eng- land's sake in the end. Lord Palmerston was not a states- man who took any lofty view of a minister's duties. Ili> statesmanship never stood on any high moral elevation. Ee sometimes did things in i he cause of England which we may well believe he would not have done Eor any con- sideration in any cause of his own. His policy was neces- sarily shifting, uncertain, and inconsistent; for he molded it always on the supposed interests of England as they showed themselves to his eyes ;it the time. His sympathies with liberty were capricious guides. Sympathies with liberty must he so always when! there is no clear principle defiumg objects and guiding conduct. Lord Palmerston • •■>i prevented by His liberal sympathies from sustaining 22G A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the policy of the coup d'etat; nor did his hatred of slavery, one. of his few strong and genuine emotions apart from English interests, inspire him with any repugnance to the cause of the southern slaveholders. But it cannot be doubted that his very defects were a main cause of his pop- ularity and his success. He was able always with a good conscience to assure the English people that they were the greatest and the best, the only good and great people in the world, because he had long taught himself to believe this, and had come to believe it. He was always popular, because his speeches invariably conveyed this impression to the English crowd whom he addressed in or out of parlia- ment. Other public men spoke for the most part to tell English people of something they ought to do which they were not doing, something which they had done and ought not to have done. It is not in the nature of things that such men should be as popular as those who told England that whatever she did must be right. Nor did Palmerston lay on his praise with coarse and palpable artifice. He had no artifice in the matter. He believed what he said, ami his very sincerity made it the more captivating and the more dangerous. A phrase sprang up in Palmerston's days which was employed to stigmatize certain political conduct beyond all ordinary reproach. It was meant to stamp such conduct as outside the pale of reasonable argument or patriotic consideration. That was the word "un-English." It was enough with certain classes to say that anything was "un-English" in order to put it utterly out of court. No matter to what principles, higher, more universal, and more abiding than those that are merely English, it might happen to appeal, the one word of condemnation was held to be enough for it. Some of the noblest and the wisest men of our day were denounced as un-English. A stranger might have asked in wonder at one time whether it was un- English to be just, to be merciful, to have consideration for the claims and the rights of others, to admit that there was any higher object in a nation's life than a diplomatic success. All that would have made a man odious and in- sufferable in private life was apparently held up as belonging to the virtues of the English nation. Rude self-assertion, blunt disregard for the feelings and the claims of others, a self-sufficiency which would regard all earth's interests as made for England's special use alone — the yet more out- A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 221 rageous form of egotism which would fancy that the moral code as it applies to others does not apply to us — all this seemed to be considered the becoming national characteris- tic of the English people. It would be almost superfluous to say that this did not show its worst in Lord Palmerston himself. As in art, so in politics, we never see how bad some peculiar defect is until we see it in the imitators of a great man's style. A school of Palmerston's, had it been powerful and lasting, would have made England a nuisance to other nations. Certainly a statesman's first business is to take care of the interests of his own country. His duty is to prefer her interests to those of any other country. In our rouglp and-ready human system he is often compelled to support her in a policy, the principle of which he did not cordially ap- prove in the first instance. He must do his best to bring her with honor out of a Avar, even though he would not himself have made or sanctioned the war if the decision had been in his power. He cannot break sharply away from the traditions of his country. Mr. Disraeli often succeeded in throwing a certain amount of disrepute on some of his opponents by calling them the advocates of "cosmopolitan- ism." If the word had any meaning, it meant, we presume, that the advocates of "cosmopolitanism" were men who had no particular prejudices in favor of their country's inter- ests, and were as ready to take an enemy's side of a question as that of their own people. If there were such politicians — and we have never heard of any such since the execution of Anacharsis (Jlootz— we could not wonder that their countrymen should dislike them, and draw back from put- ting any trust in them at a critical moment. r l"lioy might he held to resemhle some of the pragmatical sentimentalists that at one time used to argue that the ties of family are of no account to the truly wise and just, and that a good man should love all his neighbors as well as he loved his wife and children. Such people are hopeless in practical affairs. Taking no account of the very springs of human motive, they are sure to go wrong in everything they try to do or to estimate. An English minister must be an English minister first of all; hut he will never be a great minister if he does not in all his policy recognize the truth that there are considerations of higher account for him, and for England too, than England's immediate interests. oo S A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. If he deliberately or heedlessly allows England to do wrong, he will prove an evil counsellor for her; he will do her harm that may be estimated some day even by the most practical and arithmetical calculation. There is a great truth in the fine lines of the cavalier-poet, which remind his mistress that he could not love her so much, loved he not honor more. It is a truth that applies to the statesman as well as to the lover. No man can truly serve his country to the best of his power who has not in his mind all the time a service still higher than that of his country. In many instances Lord Palmerston allowed England to do things which, if a nation had an individual conscience, he and every one else would say were wrong. It has to be re- membered, too, that what is called England's interest comes to be defined according to the minister's personal interpretation of its meaning. The minister who sets the interest of his country above the moral law is necessarily obliged to decide according to his own judgment at the moment what the interests of his country are, and so it is not even the state which is above the moral law, but only the statesman. We have no hesitation in saying that Lord Palmerston's statesmanship on the whole lowered the moral tone of English politics for a time. This consideration alone, if there were nothing else, forbids us to regard him as a statesman whose deeds were equal to his opportunities and to his genius. To serve the purpose of the hour was his policy. To succeed in serving it was his triumph. It is not thus that a great fame is built up, unless, indeed, where the genius of the man is like that of some Caesar or Napoleon, which can convert its very ruins into monumen- tal records. Lord Palmerston is hardly to be called a great man. Perhaps he may be called a great "man of the time." CHAPTER XLVIII. THE NEW GOVERNMENT. Lord Russell was invited hy the queen to form a government after the death of Lord Palmerston. For a few days a certain amount of doubt and speculation pre- vailed in London and the country generally. It was A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 229 thought not impossible that, owing to his advanced years, Lord Russell might prove unwilling to take on him the burden of such an office as that of prime minister. The name of Lord Clarendon was suggested by many as that of a probable head of the new administration. Some talked of Lord Granville. Others had a strong conviction that Mr. Gladstone would himself be invited to take that com- manding position in name which he must have in fact. Even when it became certain that Lord Russell was to be the prime minister, speculation busied itself as to possible changes in the administration. Many persuaded themselves that the opportunity would be taken to make some bold and sweeping changes, and to admit the Radical element to an influence in the actual councils of the nation such as it had never enjoyed before, and such as its undoubted strength in parliament and the country now entitled it to have. According to some rumors, Mr. Bright was to be- come secretary for' India in the new cabinet; according to others, the great free-trade orator was to hold the oihee of president of the board of trade, which had once been offered to his friend Mr. Cobden'; and Mr. Mill was to be made secretary for India. It was soon found, however, that no such novelties were to be announced. The only changes in the cabinet were that Lord Russell became prime minister, and that Lord Clarendon, who had been chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, succeeded him as foreign secretary. One or two new men were brought into offices which did not give a seat in the cabinet. Among these were Mr. Forster, who became under secretary for the colonies in the room of Mr. Chichester Fortescue, now Irish secretary, and Mr. Goschen, who succeeded Mr. Hutt as vice-presi- dent of the board of trade. Both Mr. Forster and Mr. Goschen soon afterward came to hold high official position and to have seats in the cabinet. In each instance the appointment was a, concession to the growing liberal feel- ing of the day; but the concession was slight and cautious. The country knew little about either Mr. Forster or .Mr. Goschen at the time; and it will easily be imagined that, those who thought a seat, in the cabinet for Mr. Brighl was due to the people more even than to the man, and who bail some hopes of seeing a similar place offered to Mr- Mill, were not satisfied by the arrangement which called two comparatively obscure men to unimportant office. r J M " 230 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. outer public did not quite appreciate the difficulties which a Liberal minister had to encounter in compromising be- tween the Whigs and the Radicals. The Whigs included almost all the members of the party who were really influ- ential by virtue of hereditary rank and noble station. _ It was impossible to overlook their claims. In a country like England one must pay attention to the wishes of "the dukes." There is a superstition about it. The man who attempted to form a Liberal cabinet without consulting the wishes of the "the dukes" would be as imprudent as the Greek commander who in the days of Xenophon would venture on a campaign without consulting the auguries. But it was not only a superstition which required the Liberal prime minister to show deference to the claims of the titled and stately Whigs. The great Whig names were a portion of the traditions of the party. More than that, it was cer- tain that whenever the Liberal party got into difficulties, it would look to the great Whig houses to help it out. Many Liberals began to speak with more or less contempt of the Whigs. They talked of these shadows of a mighty name as Thackeray's Barnes Newcome talks of the senior mem- bers of his family, his uncle more particularly. But when the Liberal party fell into disorganization and difficulty some years after, the influence of the great Whig houses was sought for at once in order to bring about an improved condition of things. Liberalism often turns to the Whigs as a young scapegrace to his father or his guardian. The wild youth will have his own way when things are going smooth; when credit is still good, and family affection is not particularly necessary to his comfort. He is even ready enough to smile at old-fashioned ways and antiquated coun- sels; but when the hour of pressure comes, when obligations have to be met at last, and the gay bachelor lodgings with the fanciful furniture and the other expensive luxuries have to be given up, then he comes without hesitation to the elder, and assumes as a matter of course that his debts are to be paid and his affairs put in order. Lord Russell had to pay some deference to the authority of the great Whig houses. Some of them probably looked with alarm enough at the one serious change brought about by the death of Lord Palmerston: the change which made Mr. Gladstone leader of the House of Commons. _ Mean- while, there were some changes in the actual condition ot A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 231 things which did not depend on the mere alteration of a cabinet. The political complexion of the day was likely to be affected in its color by some of these changes. The House of Commons, elected just before Lord Palmerston's death, was in many respects a very different house from that which it had been his last ministerial act to dissolve. We have already mentioned some of the changes that death had made. Palmerston was gone, and Cobden, and Sir George Lewis, and Sidney Herbert, and Sir James Graham. There were changes, too, not brought about by death. The Lord John Russell of the reform bill had been made a peer, and sat as Earl Russell in the House of Lords. Mr. Lowe, one of the ablest and keenest of political critics, who had for awhile been shut down under the responsibilities of office, was a free lance once more. Mr. Lowe, who had before that held office two or three times, was vice-president of the committee of council on education from the begin- ning of Lord Palmerston's administration until April, 1864. At that time a vote of censure was carried against his de- partment, in other words against himself, on the motion of Lord Robert Cecil, for alleged "mutilation" of the reports of the inspectors of schools, done, as it was urged, in order to bring the reports into seeming harmony with the edu- cational views entertained by the committee of council. Lord Robert Cecil introduced the resolution in a speech singularly bitter and offensive. The motion was carried by a majority of one hundred and one to ninety-three. Mr. Lowe instantly resigned bis office; but he did not allow the matter to rest there. He obtained the appointment of a committee to inquire into the whole subject; and the re- sult of the inquiry was not only that Mr. Lowe was entirely exonerated from the charge made against, him, but that the resolution of the House of Commons was actually rescinded. It is probable, however, that Mr. Lowe felt that the govern- ment of which he was a member had not given him all the support he might have expected. It is certain that if Lord Palmerston and his leading colleagues had thrown any great energy into their support of him, the vote of censure never could have been canned, and would not have had to be rescinded. This fact was brought hack to the memory of many not long after, when Mr. Lowe, still an outside]-, became the very Coriolanus of a sudden movement against the reform policy of a Liberal government. The vigil 232 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of him who treasures up a wrong, if we suppose Mr. Lowe to have had any such feeling, had not to be very long or patient in this instance. On the other hand, Mr. Layard, once a daring and somewhat reckless opponent of govern- ment and governments, a very Drawcansir of political de- hate, a swashbuckler and soldado of parliamentary conflict, had been bound over to the peace, quietly enmeshed in the discipline of subordinate office. Not Michael Peres himself the " Copper Captain" of Beaumont and Fletcher, under- went a more remarkable and sudden change when the strong-willed Estifania once had him fast in wedlock, than many a bold and dashing free lance submits to when he has consented to put himself into the comfortable bonds- manship of subordinate office. Mr. Layard was therefore now to be regarded as one subdued in purpose. He seemed what Byron called an "'extinct volcano;" a happy phrase more lately adopted by Lord Beaconsfield. Yet the volcanic fire was not wholly gone; it flamed up again on opportunity given. Perhaps Mr. Layard proved most formidable to his own colleagues, when he sometimes had to come into the ring to sustain their common cause. The old vigor of the professional gladiator occasionally drove him a little too heedlessly against the opposition. So combative a temper- ament found it hard to submit itself always to the prosaic rigor of mere fact and the proprieties of official decorum. The change in the leadership of the House of Commons was of course the most remarkable, and the most momen- tous, of the alterations that had taken place. From Lord Palmerston; admired almost to hero-worship by Whigs and Conservatives, the foremost position had suddenly passed to Mr. Gladstone, whose admirers were the most extreme of the Liberals, and who was distrusted and dreaded by all of Conservative instincts and sympathies, on the one side of the house as well as on the other. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli were now brought directly face to face. One led the house; the other led the opposition. With so many points of difference, and even of contrast, there was one slight resemblance in the political situation of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli. Each was looked on with a certain doubt and dread by a considerable number of his own followers. It is evident that in such a state of things the strategical advantage lay with the leader of the opposi- tion. He had not to take the initiative in anything and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 233 the least loyal of his followers would cordially serve under him iu any effort to thwart a movement made by the min- istry. The Conservatives naturally have always proved the more docile and easily disciplined party. Of late years their policy has necessarily been of a negative character: a policy of resistance or of delay. There is less opportunity for difference of opinion in a party acting with such a pur- pose than in one of which the principle is to keep pace with changing times and conditions. It came to be seen, however, before long that the Conservative leader was able to persuade his party to accept those very changes against which some of the followers of Mr. Gladstone were found ready to revolt. In order that some of the events to fol- low may not appear very mysterious, it is well to bear in mind that the formation of the new ministry under Lord Kussell had by no means given all the satisfaction to cer- tain sections of the Liberal party which they believed themselves entitled to expect. Some were displeased be- cause the new government was not Radical enough. Some were alarmed because they fancied it was likely to go too far for the purpose of pleasing the Radicals. Some were vexed because men whom they looked up to as their natural leaders had not been invited to office. A few were annoyed because their own personal claims had been overlooked. One thing was certain : the government must make a dis- tinct move of some kind in the direction of reform. So many new and energetic Liberals and Radicals had entered the House of Commons now that it would be impossible for any Liberal government to hold office on the terms which had of late been conceded to Lord Palmerston. Mr. Gladstone had always been credited with a sensitive earn- estness of temper which was commonly believed to have given trouble to his more worldly and easy-going colleagues in the cabinet of Lord Palmerston. lie had what Condor- cet has happily called an impatient spirit. It was to many people a problem of deep interest to see whether the genius of Mr. Gladstone would prove equal to the trying task of leadership under circumstances of such peculiar difficulty. Tact, according to many, was the quality needed for the work — not genius. Some new men were coming up on both sides of the political field. They were needed. Many conspicuous figures during former years of debate would be missed 234 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. when the new parliament came to meet. Among the new men we have already mentioned Mr. Forster, who had taken a conspicuous part in the debates on the American civil war. Mr. Forster was a man of considerable parliamentary aptitude; a debater, who, though not pretending to elo- quence, was argumentative, vigorous, and persuasive. He had practical knowledge of English politics and social affairs, and was thoroughly representative of a very solid body of English public opinion. In the House of Lords the Duke of Argyll was beginning to take a prominent and even a leading place. The Duke of Argyll was still looked upon as a young man in politics. Nothing can be more curious than the manner in which the landmarks of youth and age have of late years been re-arranged in our political life. What would be regarded as approaching to middle-age in ordinary society is now held to be little better than un- fledged youth in parliamentary life. It is doubtful whether any advantages of family influence or personal capacity could in our day enable men to lead a house or a party at the age when Pitt and Fox were accepted political chiefs. Human life should indeed have stretched out almost to what are called patriarchal limits in order to give a politi- cal leader now an opportunity of enjoying a fairly propor- tionate tenure of leadership. The Duke of Argyll would have passed as a middle-aged man in ordinary life, but he was looked on by many as a sort of boy in politics. He had, indeed, begun life very soon. At this time he was some forty-three years of age, and he had been a prominent public man for more than twenty years. Lord Houghton, in proposing his health at a public dinner some years ago, said good-humoredly that " the duke was only seventeen years old" — he was in fact nineteen — "when he wrote a pamphlet called 'Advice to the Peers,' and he has gone on advising us ever since." Pursuing the career of his friend, Lord Houghton went on to say that "soon after he got mixed up with ecclesiastical affairs, and was excom- municated." The ecclesiastical controversy in which the Duke of Argyll engaged so early was the famous struggle concerning the freedom of the church of Scotland which resulted in the great secession headed by Dr. Chalmers, and the foundation of the free church. Into this contro- versy the Duke of Argyll, then Marquis of Lome, rushed with all the energy of Scottish youth, but in it he main- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 235 tained himself with a good deal of the proverbial Scottish caution. Dr. Chalmers welcomed the young controversial- ist as an able and important adherent. But the Marquis of Lome was not prepared to follow the great divine and orator into actual secession. The heirs to dukedoms- in Great Britain seldom go very far in the way of dissent. The marquis declined to accept the doctrine of Chalmers, that lay patronage and the spiritual independence of the church were "like oil and water, immiscible." The free church movement went on, and the young marquis drew back. He subsequently vindicated his course, and reviewed the whole question in an essay on the ecclesiastical history of Scotland. Meanwhile the young controversialist had become Duke of Argyll, on the death of his father in 1847. He did battle in the House of Lords as he had done out of it. He distinguished himself by plunging almost instantane- ously into the thick of debate. He very much astonished the staid and formal peers, who had been accustomed to discussion conducted in measured tones and with awful show of deference to age and political standing. The Duke of Argyll spoke upon any and every subject with astonishing fluency, and without the slightest reverence for years and authority. The general impression of the House of Lords for a long time was that youthful audacity, and nothing else, was the chief characteristic of the Duke of Argyll; and for a long time the Duke of Argyll did a good deal to support that impression. He had the temerity before he had been very long in the house to make a sharp personal attack upon Lord Derby. The peers were as much astonished as the spectators round the tilt-yard in " Ivanhoe," when they saw the strange young knight strike with his lance's point the shield of the formidable templar. Lord Derby himself was at first almost bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of his inexperienced opponent. But he soon made up his mind, and bore down upon the Duke of Argyll with all the force of scornful invective which he could summon to his aid. For the hour the Duke of Argyll was as completely overthrown as if he had got in the way of a charge of cavalry. He was in a meta- phorical sense left dead on the field. Elderly peers smiled gravely, shook their heads, said they knew GLOW it would be, and congratulated themselves that there was an end of 236 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the audacious young debater. But tliey were quite mis- taken. The Duke of Argyll knew of course that he had been soundly beaten, but he did not care. He got up again, and went on just as if nothing had happened. His courage was not broken; his self-confidence moulted no feather. After awhile he began to show that there was in him more than self-confidence. The House of Lords found that he really knew a great deal and had a wonder- fully clear head, and they learned to endure his dogmatic and professorial ways; but he never grew to be popular among them. His style was far too self-assured; his faith in his own superiority to everybody else was too evi- dent to allow of his having many enthusiastic admirers. He soon, however, got into high office. With his rank, his talents, and his energy, such a thing was inevitable. He joined the government of Lord Aberdeen in 1852 as lord privy seal, holding an office of dignity, but no special duties, the occupant of which has only to give his assist- ance iu council and general debate. He was afterward postmaster-general for two or three years. Under Lord Palmerston, in 1859, he became lord privy seal again, and retained that office in the cabinet of Lord Russell. Mr. Stansfeld was believed to be one of the rising men of the day. He was an advanced Radical, especially known for his sympathies with the movements and the cause of the more energetic of the Italian leaders. He had made a speech during one of the reform debates of 1800 which called forth a high compliment from Mr. Disraeli, who was always ready to welcome new ability and promise on whatever side it displayed itself. He had proposed a reso- lution in favor of reduction of expenditure when Lord Palmerston was most active in swelling the war costs of the country. The resolution was well supported, and ap- parently had a fair chance of success, until Lord Palmer- ston contrived to alarm the house with the idea that if he did not get his way he would resign; and in the eyes of not a few members the resignation of Lord Palmerston appeared to be much the same thing as the coming again of chaos. Mr. Stansfeld, however, became a person of a certain political importance, and in 1803 Lord Palmerston invited him to take office as one of the lords of the admir- alty. While he held that office an incident occurred which gave rise to a controversy of rather a curious nature. A A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 237 plot was discovered in Paris for the assassination of the emperor of the French. The French government believed, or said they believed, that Mazzini was connected with the plot. Mazzini was a close friend of Mr. Stansfeld, and it appeared was in the habit of having his private letters sent for him under a feigned name to Mr. Stansfeld's house. At the trial of the accused men in Paris, it was stated by the procnreur imperial in his speech, that a paper had been found in the possession of one of the prisoners authorizing him to write for money to "Mr. Flowers," at the address of Mr. Stansfeld, in London. Now it seemed that Maz- zini's letters were sometimes addressed to him as Mr. "Fiori,"or Flowers. After what we have already told in this history concerning the opening of Mazzini's letters in the post office here, it is not very surprising that Maz- zini should prefer not to have his letters addressed to his own name. On these facts, however, some members of the House of Commons, Liberals as well as Tories, got up a sort of charge against Mr. Stansfeld. Not that any man in his senses seriously believed that Mr. Stansfeld had any- thing to do with an assassination plot; nor, indeed, that there was any evidence to show that Mazzini was acquainted with the peculiar designs of the accused persons in this case. Still it seemed a good chance for an attack on the ministry, through Mr. Stansfeld; and no one could deny that there was a certain amount of indiscretion, not to say impropriety, in Mr. Stansfeld's good-natured arrangement with Mazzini. A man holding ministerial office, however subordinate, is not warranted in allowing his house to be the receptacle of secret letters for one engaged, like Mazzini, in revolutionary plots against established governments. Mr. Stansfeld felt himself called on to resign his office; and Lord Palmerston, though at first he politely pressed him to reconsider the resolve, consented after awhile to accept the resignation. Mr. Stansfeld, however, was sure to be invited to take office again, and the whole episode would probably have been soon forgotten if it were not for one odd incident. During the discussions Mr. Disraeli strongly condemned Mr. Stansfeld for his avowed friend- ship with Mazzini, and reminded the house of a statement made by Mr. Gallenga, an Italian politician ami journalist, to the effect that Mazzini once encouraged him, then a young man of wild and extravagant notions, in a design to 238 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. kill Charles Albert, king of Sardinia. Mr. Bright came to Mr. Stansfeld's defense in a very kindly and generous speech, made the more effective because of his well-known lack of sympathy" with the schemes of revolutionists any- where. He pointed out that the evidence of Mazzini's distinctly sanctioning regicide was by no means clear, and that Mr. Stansfeld might well be excused if he attached little importance to a story told of Mazzini at such a dis- tant time. Mr. Bright went on good-humoredly to show that high-flown talk about tyrannicide was unfortunately almost a commonplace with a certain class of- young rhap- sodical political writers, and added that he believed there would be found in a poem called " A Revolutionary Epick," written by Mr. Disraeli himself some five-and-twenty or thirty years before, certain lines of eloquent apostrophe in praise of the slaying of tyrants. Mr. Disraeli rose at once, and with some warmth denied that any such sentiment, or any words suggesting it, could be found in the poem. Mr. Bright, of course, accepted the assurance. He explained that he had never seen the poem himself, but had been positively informed that it contained such a passage, and he withdrew the statement with a handsome apology. Every one supposed the matter would have dropped there. The " Revolutionary Epick" was a piece of metrical bom- bast, published by Mr. Disraeli a generation before, and forgotten by almost all the living. Mr. Disraeli, however, declared that he attached great importance to the charge made against him, and that he felt bound to refute it by more than a mere denial. He, therefore, published a new edition of the poem, which he dedicated to Lord Stanley, in order to settle the controversy. " I have therefore, thought it," he explains, "the simplest course, and one which might save me trouble hereafter, to publish the 'Revolu- tionary Epick. ' It is printed from the only copy in my possession, and which, with slight exceptions, was corrected in 1837, when, after three years' reflection, I had resolved not only to correct, but to complete the work. The cor- rections are purely literary." The poem thus republished seemed more a literary curiosity than a work of art. It had a preface which was positively grotesque in its grandil- oquence. "It was on the plains of Troy," the writer in- formed the world, "that I first conceived the idea. of this work." On that interesting spot it seems to have occurred A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 239 to him for the first time that "the most heroick incident of an heroick age produced in the 'Iliad an Heroick Epick;' thus the consolidation of the most superb of empires pro- duced in the VEneid a Political Epick;' the revival of learning and the birth of vernacular genius presented us in the 'Divine Comedy' with a national epick; and the reformation and its consequences called from the rapt lyre of Milton a religious epick." Then the author naturally was led to ask, should the spirit of his time "alone be un- celebrated?" As naturally came the answer that the spirit of Mr. Disraeli's time ought to be celebrated; and that Mr. Disraeli was the man to celebrate it. " Standing upon Asia and gazing upon Europe," the inspiration descended on him. "For me," he exclaimed, "remains the revolu- tionary epick." There was so much of the youth, not to say of the schoolboy, in these bursts of extraordinary elo- quence, that no one could have thought of making any serious accusation against Mr. Disraeli in his graver days, even if the pages of such a poem had been enlivened by some nonsense about tryrannicide. The work, as reprinted, certainly contained no passage to show that the young writer entertained any such opinions. Unfortunately, however, it was found that in the republication the questionable passages had somehow undergone a process of alteration. Very few copies of the original edition were in existence. But the British museum treasured one, and from this it was found that the new version was not quite the same as the original. Thus in the new edition, published specially for the purpose of repelling the charge about tyrannicide, the lines about Brutus were very harm- less: " Koine's strong career Was mine; the blow bold Brutus struck, her fate." But in the original edition it ran thus to a much more audacious note — " The spirit of her strong career was mine; And the bold 'Brutus but propelled the blow Her own and nature's laws alike approved." There were other slight modifications, too, into which it is not necessary to enter. Enough has I teen said, to 240 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. show that, by what we must suppose to have been some unlucky accident, Mr. Disraeli came to publish as a final and complete refutation of the charge founded upon his " Kevolutionary Epick" a version of that work which was altered from the original in several passages, and in the passage most important of all. We have spoken of a charge made against Mr. Disraeli; but that is giving by far too serious a name to the good-humored statement made by Mr. Bright. Neither Mr. Bright nor any one else supposed for a moment that Mr. Disraeli ever seriously approved of regicide. Neither Mr. Bright nor any one else would have thought of holding Mr. Disraeli gravely responsible for some youthful rhodomontades published in a forgotten attempt at poetry. All that Mr. Bright apparently meant to say was: "Don't be too rigid in cen- suring the incautious utterances of men's early and foolish years. Did not you yourself, in a poem published thirty years ago, talk some nonsense about nature's approval of tyrannicide?" The only seriousness given to the matter was when Mr. Disraeli published the new edition for the purpose of finally repudiating the charge, and the new edition was found to have the peculiar passages altered. That was unlucky. If Mr. Disraeli printed from the only copy in his 'possession, and which he had corrected after three years reflection, it still was a pity he did not leave the disputed passages uncorrected, or restore them to their original shape. The question was not whether after three years' reflection Mr. Disraeli was entitled to alter in 1837 what he had published in 1834. The question was only as to what he had published in 1834. Nor is it easy to un- derstand how, considering what the controversy was about, he could have regarded the corrections as purely literary. We are bound to say, however, that the incident did Mr. Disraeli no particular harm. The English public has always been curiously unwilling to take Mr. Disraeli seriously. The great majority laughed at the whole thing, and made no further account of it. There were some rising men on the Tory side. Sir Hugh Cairns, afterward lord chancellor and a peer, had fought his way by sheer talent and energy into the front rank of opposition. A lawyer from Belfast, and the son of middle-class parents, he had risen into celebrity and influence while yet he was in the very prime of life. He A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 241 was a lawyer whose knowledge of his own craft might fairly be called profound. He was one of the most effective debaters in parliament. His resources of telling argument were almost inexhaustible, and his training at the bar gave him the faculty of making the best at the shortest notice of all the facts he was able to bring to bear on any question of controversy. He showed more than once that he was capable of pouring out an animated and even a passionate invective. An orator in the highest sense he certainly was not. No gleam of imagination softened or brightened his lithe and nervous logic. No deep feeling animated and inspired it. His speeches were arguments not eloquence; instruments not literature. But he was on the whole the greatest political lawyer since Lyndhurst; and he was probably a sounder lawyer than Lyndhurst. He had above all things skill and discretion. He could do much for the aboriginal Tories, if we may use such a word, which they could not do of or for themselves; and his appearance in the front rank of conservatism made it much more formidable than it was before. lake Mr. Disraeli himself, however, Sir Hugh Cairns was an imported auxiliary of Toryism. The Conservative party had always to retain their foreign legion, as the Frerych kings had their Scottish archers, their Swiss guard, or their Irish brigade. In the House of Commons there were very few genuine English Tories capable of sustaining with Mr. Disraeli the brunt of debate. The Conservative leader's most effective adjutants were men like Sir Hugh Cairns, an Irish lawyer; Mr. Whiteside, a voluble, eloquent, sometimes rather boisterous speaker, also an Irishman and a lawyer; Mr. Seymour Fitzgerald, a clever Irishman, who had at least been called to the bar. Sir Stafford Nprthcote was a man of ability, who had had an excellent financial training under no less a teacher than Mr. Gladstone himself. But Sir Stafford Northcote, although a fluent speaker, was not a great debater, and, moreover, he had but little of the genuine Tory in him. He was a man of far too modern a spirit ami training to be a genuine Tory. He was not, one whit more conservative than most of the Whigs. Mr. Gathorne Hardy, afterward Lord Cranbrook, was a man of ingrained Tory instincts rather than convictions. He was a power- ful speaker of the rattling declamatory kind; fluent as the sand in an hour-glass is fluent; stirring as the roll of a 242 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. drum is stirring; sometimes dry as the sand and empty as. the drum. A man of far higher ability and of really great promise was Lord Robert Cecil, afterward Lord Cranborne, and now Marquis of Salisbury. Lord Robert Cecil was at this time the ablest scion of noble Toryism in the House of Commons. He was younger than Lord Stanley, and he had not Lord Stanley's solidity, caution, or political information. But he had more originality; he had brilliant ideas; he was ready in debate; and he had a positive genius for saying bitter things in the bitterest tone. The younger son of a great peer, he had at one time no appar- ent chance of succeeding to the title and the estates. He had accepted honorable poverty, and was glad to help out his means by the use of his very clever pen. He wrote in several publications, it was said; especially in the Quarterly Review, the time-honored and somewhat time- worn organ of Toryism ; and after awhile certain political ar- ticles in the Quarterly came to be identified with his name. He was an ultra-Tory; a Tory on principle, who would hear of no compromise. One great object of his political writings appeared to be to denounce Mr. Disraeli, his titular leader, and to warn the party against him. For a long time he was disliked by most persons in the House of Commons. His gestures were ungainly; his voice was singularly unmusical and harsh; and the extraordinary and wanton bitterness of his tongue set the ordinary listeners against him. He seemed to take a positive delight in being gratuitously offensive. One night during the session of 1862 he attacked Mr. Gladstone's financial policy, and likened it to the practice of a "pettifogging attorney." This was felt to be somewhat coarse, and there were many murmurs of disapprobation. Lord Robert Cecil cared as little for disapprobation or decorum as the son of Tisander in the story told by Herodotus, and he went on with bis speech unheeding. Next night, when the debate was re- sumed, Lord Robert rose and said he feared he had on the previous evening uttered some words which might give offense, and which he felt that he could not justify. There were murmurs of encouraging applause; the House of Commons admires nothing more than an unsolicited and manly apology. He had, Lord Robert went on to say, compared the policy of Mr. Gladstone to the practice of a pettifogging attorney. That was language which on A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 243 cooler consideration he felt that he oudht not to have used, and therefore he begged leave to tender his sincere apology — to the attorneys. There was something so wanton, something so nearly approaching to mere buffoon- ery in conduct like this, that many men found themselves unable to recognize the really high intellectual qualities that were hidden behind that curious mask of offensive cynicism. Lord Robert Cecil, therefore, although a genuine Tory, or perhaps because he was a genuine Tory, could not as yet be looked upon as a man likely to render great service to his party. He was just as likely to turn against them at some moment of political importance. lie would not fall in with the discipline of the party; he would not subject his opinions or his caprices to its supposed interests, lie was not made to swear in the words of the leader who then guided the party in the House of Com- mons. Some men on his own side of the house disliked him. Many feared him; some few admired him; no one regarded him as a trustworthy party man. At this period of its career, as at almost all others, Toryism, as a parlia- mentary party, lived and won its occasional successes by the guidance and the services of brilliant outsiders. Had it been left to the leadership of genuine Tories it would probably have come to an end long before. At this partic- ular time to which we have now conducted it, it lived and looked upon the earth, had hope of triumph and gains, had a present and a future, only because it allowed itself to he led by men whom it sometimes distrusted ; whom, according to some of its own legitimate princelings, it ought to have always disavowed. CHAPTER XLIX. THE TROUBLES IX JAMAICA. Demosthenes once compared the policy of the Athe- nians to the manner in winch a barbarian boxes. When the barbarian receives a blow his attention is at once turned to the pari which has got the stroke, and he hastens to defend it. When he receives another blow in another place his hand is there just too late to stop it. But he never seems to have any idea beforehand of what 244 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. he is to expect or whither his attention ought to be directed. The immense variety of imperial, foreign, and- colonial interests that England has got involved in compels a reader of English history, and indeed often compels an English statesman, to find himself in much the same condition as this barbarian boxer. It is impossible to know from moment to moment whither the attention will next have to be turned. Lord Russell's government had hardly come into power before they found themselves compelled to illustrate this truth. They had scarcely been installed when it was found that some troublesome business awaited them, and that the trouble as usual had risen in a wholly unthought-of quarter. For some weeks there was hardly anything talked of, we might almost say hardly anything thought of, in England, but the story of the rebellion that had taken place in the island of Jamaica, and the manner in which it had been suppressed and punished. The first story came from English officers and soldiers who had themselves helped to crush cr to punish the supposed re- bellion. All that the public here could gather from the first narratives that found their way into print was, that a negro insurrection had broken out in Jamaica, and that it had been promptly crushed but that its suppression seemed to have been accompanied by a very carnival of cruelty on the part of the soldiers ami their volunteer auxiliaries. Some of the letters sent home reeked with blood. Every writer seemed anxious to credit himself with the most monstrous deeds of cruelty. Accounts were given of battues of negroes as if they had been game. Englishmen told with exulting glee of the number of floggings they had ordered or inflicted; of the huts they had burned down; of the men . and women they had hanged. "I visited," wrote an English officer to his superior, " several estates and villages, rburned seven houses in all, but did not even see a rebel. On returning to Golden Grove in the evening, sixty-seven prisoners had been sent in by the Maroons. I disposed of as many as possible, but was too tired to continue after dark. On the morning of the 24th, I started for Morant Bay, having first flogged four and hung six rebels. I beg t<> state that I did not meet a single man upon the road up to Keith Hall; there were a few prisoners here, all of whom I flogged, and then proceeded to Johnstown and Mrckford. At the latter place T 1 »n n, e.| seven houses p,pj A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 245 one meeting house; in the former four houses." Another officer writes : " We made a raid with thirty men, flogging nine men and burning their negro houses. We held a court-martial on the prisoners, who amounted to about fifty or sixty. Several were flogged without court-martial, for a simple examination." Then the writer quietly added, "This is a picture of martial law. The soldiers enjoy it; the inhabitants here dread it. If they run on their approach, they are shot for running away." It will be seen that in these letters there is no question of contend- ing with or suppressing an insurrection. The insurrection such as it was, had been suppressed. The writers only give a description of a sort of hunting expedition among the negro inhabitants for the purpose of hanging and flogging. The soldiers are pictured as enjoying the work; the inhabitants, strange to say, are observed to dread it. Their dread would seem to have been unfortunate, although certainly not unnatural ; for if they ran away at the ap- proach of the soldiers, the soldiers shot them for their want of confidence. It also became known that a colored member of the Jamaica House of Assembly, a inan named George William Gordon, who was suspected of inciting the rebellion, and had surrendered himself at Kingston, was put on board an English war vessel there, taken to Morant Bay, where martial law had been proclaimed, tried by a sort of drumhead court-martial, and instantly hanged. Such news naturally created a profound sensation in England. The Aborigines' Protection Society, the Anti- slavery Society, and other philanthropic bodies, organized a deputation, immense in its numbers, and of great influ- ence as regarded its composition, to wait on Mr. Gardwcll, secretary for the colonies, at the colonial office, and urge on him the necessity of instituting a full inquiry and re- calling Governor Eyre. The deputation was so numerous that it had to be received in a great public room, and in deed the whole scene was more like that presented by some large popular meeting than by a deputation to a minister. Mr. Cardwell was so fortunate as to discover a phrase exactly suitable to the occasion. In the course of his reply to the deputation, he laid it down that every one must be Careful not to "prejudge" the question. It was pointed out, to him that it can hardly he called prejudging if you take 246 A UI8T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. men's own formal and official statements of what they have done, and declare that on their own acknowledgments you are of opinion they have done wrong. The word "pre- judge" carried thousands of uncertain minds along with it. All over the country there was one easy form of protest against the proceedings of the philanthropic societies. It was apparently enough to utter the oracular words "we must not prejudge." Mr. Cardwell, however, did so far prejudge the case himself as to suspend Mr. Eyre tempo- rarily from his functions as governor, and to send out a commission of inquiry to investigate the whole history of the rebellion and the repression, and to report to the government. Sir Henry Storks, a man of great ability and high reputation, both as soldier and administrator, who had been lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, was summoned from Malta, where he was then governor and commander-in- chief, to take the governorship of Jamaica for the time, and to act as president of the commission. He had associ- ated with him Mr. Russell Gurney, recorder of London, a lawyer of high standing and a distinguished member of parliament; and Mr. J. B. Maule, recorder of Leeds. The philanthropic associations which had taken up the question sent out two barristers to act as counsel for the widowed Mrs. Gordon during the investigation ; Mr. Gorrie, after- ward chief justice of the Fiji Islands, and Mr. J. Home Payne. The commission held a very long and careful inquiry. No one could question either the ability or the impartiality of the commissioners. There was a general disposition to receive any report they might make as authoritative and decisive. Meanwhile, however, it nerd hardly be said that there was no disposition to wait for the story of all that had happened until the commission should have got through its patient inquiries and pre- sented its formal report. The English public have long learned to look to the newspaper press as not only the quickest, but on the whole the most accurate, source of intelligence in all matters of public interest. In this case, as in most others, the newspapers differed in their judg- ment as to the conduct of the princijDal actors in the drama; but, in this case, as in all others of late' years, each newspaper endeavored to gave a correct representation of the facts. Many wild exaggerations had found their way into some newspapers. These came from private letters, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 24? It sometimes happened that men who had been engaged in putting down the insurrection represented* themselves as having done deeds of savage vengeance of which they were not really guilty. In some instances it actually turned out that Mr. Card well's appeal to the public not to prejudge was warranted even when men deliberately affirmed them- selves to have committed the acts which made people at home shudder and exclaim. Such seemed to have been the fervor of repression in Jamaica, that persons were found eager to claim an undue share of its honors by ascribing to themselves detestable excesses which in point of fact they had not committed. It is needless to say that there was exaggeration on the other side, and that af- frighted colored people in Jamaica sent forth wild rumors of wholesale massacre which would have been impossible, even in the high fever of repression. As the letters of the accredited correspondents of the newspapers began to arrive, the true state of affairs gradually disclosed itself. There was no substantial discrepancy as to the facts; and the report of the commissioners themselves, when it was received, did not add much to the materials for forming a judgment which the public already possessed, nor probably did it alter many opinions of many men. The history of the events in Jamaica, told in whatever way, must form a sad and shocking narrative. The history of this genera- tion has no such tale to tell where any race of civilized and Christian men was concerned. Had the repression been justifiable in all its details; had the fearful vengeance taken on the wretched island been absolutely necessary to its future tranquility, it still would have been a chapter of history to read with a shudder. It will be seen, however, that excesses were committed which could not possibly plead the excuse of necessity; that some deeds were done which most moralists would say no human authority could warrant, or human peril justify. Jamaica had long been in a more or less disturbed con- dition; at least, it had long been liable to periodical fits of disturbance. We have already described in this history some of the difficulties occasioned by the condition of things existing in the island. When giving an account of the Jamaica bill during the Melbourne administration, it was mentioned that the troubles then existing were in fact a survival of the slave system. .So were the troubles of 248 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 1805. "I suppose there is no island or place in tlie world," said Chief Justice Cockburn in his celebrated charge to the grand jury at the central criminal court in 18G7, "in which there has been so much of insurrection and disorder as the island of Jamaica. There is no place- in which the curse which attaches to slavery, both as regards the master and the slave, has been more strikingly illustrated." What we may call the planter class still continued to look on the negroes as an inferior race, hardly entitled to any legal rights. The negroes were naturally only too ready to listen to any denunciations of the planter class, and to put faith in any agitation which promised to secure them some property in the land. The negroes had undoubtedly some serious grievances. It may be that some of the wrongs they complained of were imaginary or were exaggerated. But it is a very safe rule in politics to assume that no popu- lation is ever disturbed by wholly imaginary grievances. In such cases, unquestionably, where there is smoke there is fire. Man is by far too lazy an animal to trouble him- self much with agitation about purely unreal and non-ex- isting wrongs. The negroes of Jamaica had some very sub- stantial wrongs. They constantly complained that they could not get justice administered to them when any dis- pute arose between white and black. The government had found that there was some ground for complaints of this kind at the time when it was projjosed by the Jamaica bill to suspend the constitution of the island. Perhaps if the Melbourne ministry had been stronger and inspired by greater earnestness of purpose at that time, the calamities and shames of 18G5 might have been avoided. In 1865, however, the common causes of dissatisfaction were freshly and further complicated by a dispute about what were called the "back lands." This was a question which might under certain circumstances have arisen in Ireland ; at least it will be easily understood by those who are ac- quainted with the condition of Ireland. Lands belonging to some of the great estates in Jamaica had been allowed to run out of cultivation. They were so neglected by their owners that they were turning into mere bush. The quit- rents due on them to the crown had not been paid for seven years. The negroes were told that if they paid the arrears of quit-rent they might cultivate these lands and enjoy them free of rent. It may be remarked that the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 249 tendency in Jamaica had almost always hitherto been for the crown officials to take the part of the negroes, and for the Jamaica authorities to side with the local magnates. Trusting to the assurance given, some of the negroes paid the arrears of quit-rent and brought the land into cultiva- tion. The agent of one of the estates, however, reasserted the right of his principal, who had not been a consenting party to the arrangement, and he endeavored to evict the negro occupiers of the land. The negroes resisted, and legal proceedings were instituted to turn "them out. The legal proceedings were still pending when the events took place which gave occasion to so much controversy. Jamaica was in an unquiet state. " Within the land," as in the territory of the chiefs round Lara's castle, "was many a malcontent, who cursed the tyranny to which he bent." There, too, "frequent broils within had made a path for blood and giant sin, that waited but a signal to begin new havoc such as civil discord blends." On Octo- ber 7, 1805, some disturbances took place on the occasion of a magisterial meeting at Morant Bay, a small town on the south-east corner of the island. The negroes appeared to be in an excited state, and many persons believed that an outbreak was at hand. An application was made to the governor for military assistance. The governor of Jamaica was .Mr. Edward John Eyre, who had been a successful explorer in central, west, and southern Australia, had acted as resident magistrate and protector of aborigines in the region of tin; Lower Murray in Australia, and had afterward been lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, of the Leeward Islands, and of other places. All Mr. Eyre's dealings with native races up to this time would seem to have earned for him the reputation of a just and humane man. The governor despatched a small military force by sea to the scene of the expected disturbances. Warrants had been issued meanwhile by the custos or chief magis- trate of the parish in which Morant Bay is situated, for tin; arrest of some of the persons who had taken part in the previous disturbances -which, it may be stated, had for their object the rescue of a man on trial for a trilling offense. When the warrants were about to he put into execution, resistance by force was offered. In particular, the attempt to arrest a leading negro agitator, named Paul Hogle, was strenuously and sncc.-sfullv opposed. The 250 A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. police were overpowered, and some were beaten, and others compelled to swear that they would not interfere with the negroes. On the 11th the negroes, armed with sticks, and the "cutlasses" used in the work of the sugar- cane fields, assembled in considerable numbers in the square of the court house in Morant Bay. The magistrates wore holding a meeting there. The mob made for the courthouse; the local volunteer force came to the help of the magistrates. The riot act was being read when some stones were thrown. The volunteers fired, and some negroes were seen to fall. Then the rioters attacked the court house. The volunteers were few in number, and were easily overpowered ; the court house was set on fire; eighteen persons, the custos among them, were killed, and about thirty were wounded; and a sort of incoherent insur- rection suddenly spread itself over the neighborhood. The moment, however, that the soldiers sent by the governor, at first only one hundred in number, arrived upon the scene of disturbance, the insurrection collapsed and vanished. There never was the slightest attempt made by the rioters to keep the field against the troops. The soldiers had not in a single instance to do any fighting. The only business left for them was to hunt out supposed rebels and bring them before the military tribunals. So evanescent was the whole movement that it is to this day a matter of dispute whether there was any rebellion at all, properly so called; whether there was any organized attempt at insur- rection ; or whether the disturbances were not the extem- poraneous work of a discontented and turbulent mob, whose rush to rescue some of their friends expanded sud- denly into an effort to wreak old grievances on the nearest representatives of authority. On October loth, the governor proclaimed the whole of the county of Surrey, with the exception of the city of Kingston, under martial law. Jamaica is divided into three counties; Surrey covering the eastern and southern portion, including the region of the Blue Mountains, the towns of Port Antonio and Morant Bay, and the considera- ble city of Kingston, with its population of some thirty thousand. Middlesex comprehends the central part of the island, and contains Spanish Town, then the seat of govern- ment. The western part of the island is the county of Cornwall. At this time Jamaica was ruled by the governor A HISTORY OF OUR )VN TIMES. 251 and council, and the house of assembly. The council was composed of twelve persons, nominated, like the governor, by the crown; and the house of assembly consisted of forty- five members elected by the freeholders of each parish. The council had the place of an upper house; the assembly was the representative chamber. Among the members of the assembly was a colored man of some education and property, George William Gordon. Gordon was a Baptist by religion, and had in him a good deal of the fanatical earnestness of the field-preacher. lie was a vehement agitator and a devoted advocate of what he considered to be the rights of the negroes. ' lie appears to have had a certain amount of eloquence, partly of the conventicle and partly of the stump. He was just the sort of man to make himself a nuisance to white colonists and officials who wanted to have everything their own way. Indeed, he belonged to that order of men who are almost sure to be always found in opposition to officialism of any kind. Such a man may do mischief sometimes, but it is certain that out of his very restlessness and troublesomeness he often does good. No really sensible politician would like to see a legislative assembly of any kind without some men of the type of Gordon representing the check of perpetual opposition. On the other hand, Gordon was exactly the sort of person in the treatment of whom a wise authority would be particularly cautious, in order not to allow its own prejudices to operate to his injury and the injury of political justice together. Gordon was in constant dis- putes with the authorities, and with Governor Eyre him- self. He had been a magistrate, but was dismissed from the magistracy in consequence of the alleged violence of his language in making accusations against another justice, lb' had taken some part in getting up meetings of the colored population; he had made many appeals to the colonial office in London against this or that act on the part of the governor or the council, or both. He had been appointed churchwarden, hut was declared disquali- fied for the office in consequence of his having became a "Native Baptist;" ami he had brought an action to recover what he held to be his rights. lie had come to hold the position of champion of the rights and claims of the black man against the white. lie was a sort of constitutional opposition in himself. The governor seems to have at 252 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. once adopted the conclusion urged on him by others, that Gordon was at the bottom of the insurrectionary move- ment. In the historical sense he may no doubt be regarded as in some measure the cause of any disturbance, whether insurrectionary or not, which broke out. A man who tells people they are wronged is to that extent the cause of any disturbance which may come of an attempt to get their wrongs righted. A great many persons declared that Fox was the author of the Irish rebellion of 1798, because he had helped to show that the Irish people had wrongs. In this sense every man who agitates for reform anywhere is responsible should any rebellious movement take place; and the only good citizen is he who approves of all that is done by authority, and never uplifts the voice of opposi- tion to anything. Gordon was a very energetic agitator, and he probably had some sense of self-importance in his agitation; but we entirely agree with Chief Justice Cock- burn in believing that, "so far from there being any evidence to prove that Mr. Gordon intended this insur- rection and rebellion, the evidence, as well as the probabil- ity of the case, appears to be exactly the other way." There does not seem to have been one particle of evidence to connect Gordon with a rebellious movement more than there would have been to condemn Mr. Bright as a pro- moter of rebellion, if the workingmen of the reform period, soon to be mentioned in this history, had been drawn into some fatal conflict with the police. In each case it might have been said that only for the agitator who denounced the supposed grievance all would have been quiet; and in neither case was there anything more to be said which could connect the agitator with the disturbance. Mr. Eyre and his advisers, however, had made up their minds that Gordon was the leader of a rebellious conspiracy. They took a course with regard to him which could hardly be excused if he were the self-confessed leader of as formi- dable a conspiracy as ever endangered the safety of a state. We have mentioned the fact, that in proclaiming the county of Surrey under martial law, Mr. Eyre had specially excepted the city of Kingston. Mr. Gordon lived near Kingston, and had a place of business in the city; and he seems to have been there attending to his business, as usual, during the days while the disturbances were going on. The governor ordered a. warrant to W issued for Gor- A IIISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 253 don's arrest. When this fact became known to Gordon he went to the house of the general in command of the forces at Kingston and gave himself up. The governor had him put at once on board a war steamer, and conveyed to Morant Bay. Having given himself up in a place where martial law did not exist, where the ordinary courts were open, and where, therefore, he would have been tried with all the forms and safeguards of the civil law, he was pur- posely carried away to a place which had been put under martial law. Here an extraordinary sort of court-martial was sitting. It was composed of two young navy lieuten- ants and an ensign in one of her majesty's West India regiments. Gordon was hurried before this grotesque tribunal, charged with high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The sentence was approved by the officer in command of the troops sent to Morant Bay. It was then submitted to the governor, and approved by him also. It was carried into effect without much delay. The day following Gordon's conviction was Sunday, and it was not thought seemly to hang a man on the Sabbath. He was allowed, therefore, to live over that day. On the morning of Monday, October 23rd, Gordon was hanged. He bore his fate with great heroism, and wrote just before his deatli a letter to his wife, which is full of pathos in its simple and dignified manliness. lie died protesting his innocence of any share in disloyal conspiracy or insurrec- tionary purpose. The whole of the- proceedings connected with the trial of Gordon were absolutely illegal: they were illegal from first to last. It is almost impossible to conceive of any transaction more entirely unlawful. Every step in it was a separate outrage on law. But for its tragic end the whole affair would seem to belong to the domain of burlesque rather than to that of sober history. The act which. conveyed Mr. Gordon from the protection of civil law to the authority of a drumhead court-martial was grossly illegal. The tribunal was constituted in curious defiance of law and precedent, it is contrary to all author- ity to form a court-martial by mixing together the officers of the two different services. It was an unauthorized tribunal, however, even if considered as only a military court-martial, or only a naval court-martial. Whatever way we take it, it was irregular and illegal. It would have 254 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. been so had all its members been soldiers, or had all been sailors. Care seemed to have been taken so to constitute it that it must in any case be illegal. The prisoner thus brought by unlawful means before an illegal tribunal was tried upon testimony taken in ludicrous opposition to all tbe rules of evidence. Chief Justice Cockburn says: " After tbe most careful perusal of the evidence which was adduced against him, I come irresistibly to the conclusion that if the man had been tried upon that evidence" — and here the chief justice checked himself and said — " I must correct myself. He could not have been tried upon that evidence; I was going too far, a great deal too far, in assuming that he could. He could not have been tried upon that evidence. No competent judge acquainted with the duties of his office could have received that evidence. Three-fourths, I had almost said nine-tenths, of the evidence upon which that man was convicted and sentenced -to death was evidence, which, according to no known rules — not only of ordinary law, but of military law — ac- cording to no rules of right or justice could possibly have been admitted ; and it never would have been admitted if a competent judge had presided, or if there had been the advantage of a military officer of any experience in the practice of courts-martial." Such as the evidence was, however, compounded of scraps of the paltriest hearsay, and of things said when the prisoner was not present; of depositions made apparently to supplement evidence given before, and not thought strong enough; strengthened prob- ably in the hope of thus purchasing the safety of the wit- nesses, and on which the witnesses were never cross- examined — such as the evidence was, supposing it admissi- ble, supposing it trustworthy, supposing it true beyond all possibility of question, yet the chief justice was convinced that it testilied rather to the innocence than to the guilt of the prisoner. By such a court, on such evidence, Gordon was put to death. Meanwhile the carnival of repression was going on. The insurrection, or whatever the movement was which broke out on October 11th, was over long before. It never offered the slightest resistance to the soldiers. It never showed itself to them. An armed insurgent was never seen by them. Nevertheless, for weeks after, the hangings, the floggings, the burnings of houses, were kept A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 255 up. Men were hanged, women were flogged merely "sus- pect of being suspect." Many were flogged or hanged for no particular reason but that they happened to come in the way of men who were in a humor for flogging and hanging. Women — to be sure they were only colored women — were stripped and scourged by the saviors of society with all the- delight which a savage village population of the mid- dle ages might have felt in torturing witches. The report of the royal commissioners stated that four-hundred and thirty-nine persons were put to death, and that over six hundred, including many women, were flogged, some under circumstances of revolting cruelty. Cats made of piano- wire were in some instances used for the better effect of flagellation. Some of the scourges were shown to the commissioners, who observe that it is "painful to think that any man should have used such an instrument for the torturing of his fellow-creatures." The commissioners summed up their report by declaring that the punishments inflicted were excessive; that the punishment of death was unnecessarily frequent; that the floggings were reckless, and in some cases positively barbarous; that the burning of one thousand houses was wanton and cruel." The fury at last spent itself. La&sata necdum satiata. When the story reached England in clear and trust- worthy form, two antagonistic parties were instantly formed. The extreme on the one side glorified governor Eyre, and held that .by his prompt action he had saved the white population of Jamaica from all the horrors of trium- phant negro insurrection. The extreme on the other side denounced him as a mere fiend. The majority on both sides- were more reasonable; but the difference between them was oidy less wide. An association called the Jamaica Committee was formed for the avowed purpose of seeing that justice was done. It comprised some of the most illustrious Englishmen. Men became members of that committee who had never taken part in public agita- tion of any kind before. Another association was founded, on the opposite side, for the purpose of sustaining (Jovernor Eyre, and it must be owned that it too had great names. Mr. Mill may be said to have led the one side, and .Mr. Carlyle the other. The natural bent of each man's genius and temper turned him to the side of the Jamaica negroes, or of the Jamaica governor. Mr. Tennyson, Mr. 256 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Kingsley, Mr. Ruskin, followed Mr. Carlyle; we know now that Mr. Dickens was of the same way of thinking. Mr. Herbert Spencer, Professor Huxley, Mr. Goldwin Smith, were in agreement with Mr. Mill. We have pur- posely omitted the names of politicians, whom any reader can range without difficulty according to his knowledge of their career and ways of thinking. No one needs to be told that Mr. Bright took the side of the oppressed, and Mr. Disraeli that of authority. The case on either side may be briefly stated. We put out of consideration altogether the position taken up by only too many of those who .pro- claimed themselves advocates of Mr. Eyre, and who volun- teered a line of defense on his behalf for which he would probably have given them little thanks. That was what some one at the time in blunt expressive words described as the " damned nigger" principle ; the principle that any sort of treatment is good enough for negroes, and generally speaking serves them right. This kind of argument was very effective among considerable classes of persons, but it was not allowed to makes its appearance much in public debate. In the House of Commons it never, at all events, got higher than the smoking-room; the reporters in the gallery were not allowed any opportunity of recording it. Perhaps, on the other side, we may fairly put out of our consideration the view of those who, having from the most benevolent motives identified themselves all their lives long with the cause of oppressed negroes, fell instinc- tively and at once into the ranks of any movement profess- ing to defend a negro population. The more reasonable of those who supported Mr. Eyre did not concern themselves to vindicate the legality or even the justice of all that he had done. Lord Carnarvon, the new colonial secretary, frankly admitted that in his opinion acts of cruelty and injustice had been done during and after the rebellion. Many were quite willing to admit that the trial of Gordon had been irregular, and that his hasty execution was to be deplored. What they did contend was, that at a terrible crisis Mr. Eyre did the best he could; that he was con- fronted with the fearful possibility of a negro insurrection, where the whites were not one in twenty of the blacks, and where a moment's success to the rebels might have put the life of every white man, and the honor of every white woman, at the mercy of furious mobs of savage negroes. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 257 "Say what you will," they urged, "he stamped out the rebellion. He acted illegally, because there was no time for being legal. lie sanctioned unmerciful deeds, because he had to choose between mercy to murderous blacks and mercy to loyal and innocent whites. You complain of the flogging of black women; he was thinking of the honor and the lives of white women. He crushed the rebellion utterly; he positively frightened it into submission, lie was dealing with savages; he took the only steps which could have saved the loyal people he had in charge from an orgy of cruelty and licentiousness. Had he stayed his hand a moment all was lost. Many things were done which we deplore; which we would not have done; which he would not have done, or sanctioned, if there were time to balance claims and consider nicely individual rights. But he saved the white population, and put down the insurrection; and we feel gratitude to him first of all." Such is, we think, a fair statement of the case relied upon by the more reasonable of the defenders of Mr. Eyre. To this the opposite party answered that in fact the insur- rection, supposing it to have been an insurrection, was all over before the floggings, the hangings, and the burnings Bel in. Not merely were the troops masters of the field, but there was no armed enemy anywhere to be seen in the field or out of it. They contended that men are not war- ranted in inflicting wholesale and hideous inmishments merely in order to strike such terror as may prevent the possibility of any future disturbance. As an illustration of the curious ethical principles which the hour called forth, it may be mentioned that one of the best-instructed and ablest of the London journals distinctly contended that excess of punishment would be fully justified as a means of preventing further outbreaks. "Consider," such was the argument, "what the horrors of a successful out- break in Jamaica might be, or even of an outbreak suc- cessful for a, \'v\v days, consider what blood its repression would cost even to the negroes themselves; and then say whether any one 'ought to shrink from inflicting a few superfluous floggings and hangings if these would help to strike terror, and make new rebellion impossible? Even the flogging of women -disagreeable work, no doubt, fur English soldiers to have to do — if it struck terror into their li unhands and brothers, and thus discouraged rebel- 258 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. lion, would it too not be justified?" One cannot better deal with this argument than by pushing it just a little further. Suppose the burning alive of a few women and children seemed likely to have a deterrent effect on disloyal husbands and fathers generally, would it not be well to light the pile? What would the torture and death of a score or so of women and children be when compared with the bloodshed which such a timely example might avert? Yet any sane man would answer that rather than that he would brave any risk; and so we get to the end of the argument at once. We have only arrived at an acknowl- edgment of the fact that the repression of insurrection, like everything on earth, has its restraining moral code, which custom and civilization, if there were nothing else, must be allowed to establish. The right of Englishmen to rule in Jamaica is a right which has to be exercised with, and not without, regard for human feelings and Christian laws. Not a few persons endeavored to satisfy their own and the public conscience by praising the virtues of Gover- nor Eyre's career, and casting aspersions on the character of the unfortunate Gordon. Professor Huxley disposed once for all that sort of argument by the quiet remark that he knew of no law authorizing virtuous persons as such to put to death less virtuous persons as such. The report of the commissioners was made in April, 1866. It declared in substance that the disturbances had their immediate origin in a planned resistance to authority, arising partly out of a desire to obtain the land free of rent, and partly out of the want of confidence felt by the laboring class in the tribunals by which most of the dis- putes affecting their interests were decided; that the dis- turbance spread rapidly, and that Mr. Eyre deserved praise for the skill and vigor with which he had stopped it in the beginning; but that martial law was kept in force too long; that the punishments inflicted were excessive; that the punishment of death was unnecessarily frequent; that the floggings were barbarous, and the burnings wanton and cruel; that although it was probable that Gordon, by his writings and speeches, had- done much to bring about ex- citement and discontent, and thus rendered insurrection possible, yet there was no sufficient proof of his complicity in the outbreak, or in any organized conspiracy against the government; and, indeed, that there was no widespread A IIJ STORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 25!) conspiracy of any kind. Of course this finished Mr. Eyre's career as a colonial governor. A new governor, Sir J. P. Grant, was sent out to Jamaica, and anew con- stitution was given to the island. The Jamaica committee, however, did not let the matter drop there. They first called upon the attorney-general to take proceedings against Mr. Eyre and some of his subordinates. The government had, meanwhile, passed into Conservative hands, in conse- quence of events which have yet to be told ; and the attor- ney-general declined to prosecute. Probably a Liberal attorney-general would have done just the same thing. Then the Jamaica committee decided on -prosecuting Mr. Eyre and his subordinates themselves. They took various proceedings, but in every case with the same result. We need not go into the history of these proceedings, and the many controversies, legal and otherwise, which they occasioned. The bills of indictment never got beyond the grand jury stage. The grand jury always threw them out. On one memorable occasion the attempt gave the lord chief justice of England an opportunity of delivering the charge to the grand jury from which we have already cited some passages : a charge entitled to the rank of an historical declaration of the law of England, and the limits of the military power even in cases of insurrection. Mr. Carlyle found great fan It with the chief justice for having merely laid down the law of England. "Lordship," he wrote, "if you were to speak for six hundred years, instead of six hours, you would only prove the more to us that, unwritten if you will, but real and fundamental, anterior to all written laws and first making written laws possible, there must have been, and is, and will be, coeval with human society from its first beginnings to its ultimate end, an actual martial law of more validity than any other law whatever." The business of the lord chief justice, however, was not to go in philosophical quest of those higher laws of which Mr. Carlyle assumed to be the interpreter. His was the humbler but more practical part to expound the laws of England, and he did his duty. The prosecutions can hardly be said to have bee*n with- out use which gave opportunity for this most important exposition from such high authority. But they had no effect as against Mr. Eyre. Even the chief justice, who exposed with such just severity the monstrous misuse of 260 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. power which had heen seen in Jamaica, still left it to the grand jury to say whether after all — considering the state of things that prevailed in the island, the sudden danger, the consternation, and the confusion — the proceedings of the authorities, however mistaken were not done honestly and faithfully in what was believed to be the proper admin- istration of justice. After many discussions in parliament, the government in 1872 — once again a Liberal govern- ment — decided on paying Mr. Eyre the expenses to which he had been put in defending himself against the various prosecutions; and the House of Commons, after a. long debate, agreed -to the vote by a large majority. The Jamaica committee were denounced by many voices, and in very unmeasured language, for what they had done. Yet no public body ever were urged on to an unpopular course by purer motives than those which influenced Mr. Mill and his associates. They were filled with the same spirit of generous humanity which animated Burke when he pressed the impeachment against Warren Hastings. They were sustained by a desire to secure the rights of British subjects for a despised and maltreated negro popu- lation. They were inspired with a longing to cleanse the name of England from the stain of a share in the abomi- nations of that unexampled repression. . Yet we do not think, on the whole, that there was any failure of justice. A career full of bright promise was cut short for Mr. Eyre, and for some of his subordinates as well ; and no one ac- cused Mr. Eyre personally of anything worse than a fury of mistaken zeal. The deeds which were done by his authority, or to which, when they were done, he gave his authority's sanction, were branded with such infamy that it is almost impossible such things could- ever be done again in England's name. Even those who excused under the circumstances the men by whom the deeds were done, had seldom a word to say in defense of the acts themselves. The cruelties of that saturnalia of vengeance are absolutely without parallel in the history of our times ; perhaps the very horror they inspired, the very shame of the few argu- ments employed to defend them, may make for mercy in the future. The one strong argument for severity, on which so many relied when upholding the acts of Mr. Eyre, is curiously confuted by the history of Jamaica itself . That argument was, that severity of an extraordinary kind A HISTORY OF OUli OWN TIMES. 261 was necessary to prevent the repetition of rebellion. Rigor of repression had been tried long enough in Jamaica with- out producing any such effect. During one hundred and fifty years there had been about thirty insurrections, in some of which the measures of repression employed were sweeping and stern enough to have shaken the nerves of a Couth on and disturbed the conscience of a Claverhouse. The chief justice declared that there was not a stone in the island of Jamaica which, if the rains of heaven had not washed off from it the stains of blood, might not have borne terrible witness to the manner in which martial law had been exercised for the suppression of native discontent. The deeds, therefore, that were under the authority of Mr. Eyre found no plea to excuse them in the history of the past. Such policy bad been tried again and again, and had failed. _ The man who tried it again in 1SD5 undertook the responsibility of defying the authority of experience, as well as that of constitutional and moral law. CHAPTER L. DRIVEN HACK ACROSS THE RUBICON. Tin; queen opened the new parliament in person. She then performed the ceremony for the first time since the death of the prince consort. The speech from the throne contained a paragraph which announced that her majesty had directed that information should be procured in refer- ence to the right of voting in the election of members of parliament, and that when the information was complete, " the attention of parliament will he called to the result thus obtained, with a view to such improvements in the laws which regulate the right of voting in the election of mem- bers of the House of Commons as may fend to strengthen our free institutions and conduce to the public welfare." Some announcement on the subject of reform was expected by every one. Nobody could have had any doubt that the new government would at once bring forward some measure to extend the franchise. The only surprise felt was perhaps at the cautious and limited way in which the proposed measure was indicated in the royal speech. Some of the more extreme! reformers thought there was some- 202 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tiling ominous in this way of opening the question. A mere promise to obtain information on the subject of the franchise appeared to be minimizing as much as possible the importance of the whole subject. Besides, it was asked, what information is required more than we have already? Is this to be merely an investigation as to the number of persons whom this or that scale of franchise would add to the constituencies? Is the character of the reform to be decide by the mere addition which it would . make to the voters' lists rather than by the political prin- ciples which an extended franchise represents? Is thereto be what Burke calls "a low-minded inquisition into numbers," in order that too many Englishmen should not be allowed the privilege of a vote? There was something ominous, therefore, in the manner in which the first mention of the new reform bill was received, as well as in the terms of the announcement. Many circumstances too made the time unpropitious for such an undertaking. The cattle plague had broken out toward the close of the previous year, and had spread with most alarming rapidity. At the end of 1805 it was an 7 nounced that about eighty thousand cattle had been attacked by the disease, of which some forty thousand had died. From six thousand to eight thousand animals were dying every week. The government, the cattle-owners, and the scientific men, were much occupied in devising plans for the restriction of the malady. Some keen con- troversy had arisen over the government proposals for making good the losses of the cattle-owners whose animals had to be killed in obedience to official orders to prevent the spread of disease. There were already rumors of the approach of that financial distress which was to break out shortly in disastrous commercial panic. Cholera was be- lieved to be traveling ominously westward. There were threatened disturbances in Ireland and alarms about a gigantic Fenian conspiracy. It did not need to be particu- larly keen-eyed to foresee that there was likely soon to be a collision of irreconcilable interests on the continent. There was uneasiness about Jamaica; there was uneasiness about certain English men and women who were detained as prisoners by Theodore, king of Abyssinia. Moreover the parliament had only just been elected, and a reform bill would mean a speedy dissolution, with a renewal of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 263 expense and trouble to the members of tbe House of Com- mons. Certainly the time did not seem tempting for a sudden revival of tbe reform controversy which bad been allowed to sleep in a sort of Kyffhaiiser cavern during tbe later years of Lord Palmerston's life. Many Conservatives did not believe that tbe studied moderation of the announcement in the queen's speech could really be taken as evidence of a moderate intention on the part of the ministry. While Radicals generally insisted that the strength of tbe old Whig party, "the dukes," as the phrase went, had been successfully exerted to compel a compromise and keep Mr. Gladstone down, most of the Tories would have it that Mr. Gladstone now had got it all his own way, and that the cautious vagueness of the queen's speech would only prove to be the prelude to very decisive and alarming changes in the constitution. Not since the introduction by Lord John Russell of the measure which became law in 1832 had a reform bill been expected in England with so much curiosity, with so much alarm, with so much disposition to a foregone conclusion of disappointment. On March 12th Mr* Gladstone intro- duced the bill. His speech was eloquent; but tbe House of Commons was not stirred. It was evident at once that the proposed measure was only a compromise; and a com- promise of the most unattractive kind. The substance of the government scheme may be explained in a single sen- tence. The hill proposed to reduce the county franchise from fifty pounds to fourteen pounds, and the borough franchise from ten to seven pounds. There was a savings bank franchise, and a lodger franchise, but Ave need not discuss smaller details and qualifying provisions. The borough franchise of course was the central question in any reform measure; and this was to he reduced by three pounds. The man who could he enthusiastic over such a reform must have been a person whose enthusiasm was scarcely worth arousing. The peculiarity of the situation was, that without a genuine popular enthusiasm nothing could be done. The House of Commons as a whole did not want reform. For one obvious reason the house had only just heen elected; members had spent money and taken much trouble; and they did not like the idea, of having to encounter the risk and expense all over again almost immediately. All the Conservatives were of course 264 A HISTORY OF OUli OWN TIMES. openly and consistently opposed to reform; not a few of the professing Liberals secretly detested it. These latter would accept it and try to put on an appearance of wel- coming it if popular excitement and the demeanor of the government showed that they must be for it or against it. Only a small number of men in the house were genuine in their anxiety for immediate change; and of these the majority were too earnest and extreme to care for a reform which only meant a reduction of the borough franchise from ten pounds to seven pounds. It seemed a ridiculous anti- climax, after all the indignant eloquence about "unen- franchised millions," to come down to a scheme for enfranchising a few hundreds here and there. It was hard for ordinary minds to understand that a ten pounds fran- chise meant servitude and shame, but a seven pounds fran- chise was national liberty and salvation. All this for three pounds was a little too much for plain people to compre- hend. The bill was founded on no particular principle; it merely said, " we have at present a certain scale of fran- chise; let us make it a little lower, and our successors, if they feel inclined, can keep on lowering it." No well- defined basis was reached; there seemed no reason why, if such a bill had been passed, some politician might not move the session after for a bill to reduce the franchise a pound or two lower. Absolute finality in politics is of course unattainable, but a statesman would do well to see at least that a distinct and secure ledge is reached in his de- scent. He ought not to be content to slip a little way down today, and leave chance to decide whether he may not have to slip a little way further to-morrow. The announcement made by the government had only what is called in theatrical circles a, succes (Vestime. Those who believed in the sincerity and high purpose of Lord Eussell and Mr. Gladstone, and who therefore assumed that if they said this was all they could do there was noth- ing else to be done — these supported the bill. Mr. Bright supported it; somewhat coldly at first, but afterward, when warmed by the glow of debate and of opposition, with all his wonted power. It was evident, however, that he was supporting Lord Eussell and Mr. Gladstone rather than their reform bill. Mr. Mill supported the bill; partly no doubt for the same reason, and partly because it had the support of Mr. Bright. But it would have been A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 2Go hard to find any one who said that he really cared much about the measure itself, or that it was the sort of thing he would have proposed if he had his way. There were public meetings got up of course in support of the bill, and the agitation naturally gathered heat as it went on. Mr. Gladstone became for a time a popular agitator on behalf of his measure, and stumped the country during the Easter holidays. It was during this political campaign that he made the famous speech in Liverpool, in which lie announced that the government had passed the Rubicon; had broken the bridge and burned the boats behind them. He truly had done so. His career was to be thenceforward as the path of an arrow in the direction of popular reform ; but his government had to recross the Rubicon; to make use of the broken bridge somehow for the purposes of retreat. Before, however, the delivery of this celebrated speed), the defects of the bill, and the lack of public interest in it, had produced their natural effect in the House of Com- mons. The moment it was evident that the public, as a whole, were not enthusiastic about the measure, the House of Commons began to feel that it could do as it pleased in the matter. It may seem rather surprising now that the Conservatives, or at least those of them who had foresight enough to know that some manner of change was inevitable, did not accept this trivial and harmless measure, and so have done with the unwelcome subject for some time to come. Many of the Conservatives, however, were not only opposed to all reform of the suffrage on principle, but were still under the firm belief that they could stave it off for their time. Others there were who honestly believed that if a change were inevitable it would be better for the good of the country that it should be something in the nature of a permanent settlement, and that there should not be a periodical revival of agitation incessantly perplex- ing the public mind. Others, too, no doubt, saw even already that there would be partisan chances secured by embarrassing the government anyhow. Therefore the Conservatives as a man opposed the measure; but they had allies. Day after day saw new secessions of emboldened Whigs and half-hearted Liberals. The Thanes were flying from the side of the government. Mi'. Gladstone had announced his intention also to bring in a bill dealing 266 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. with the redistribution of seats; but he preferred to take this after the reform bill. At once he was encountered by an amendment from his own side of the house, and from very powerful representatives of Whig family interest, calling on him to take the redistribution scheme at once; to alter the rental to a rating franchise; to do all manner of things calculated to change the nature of the bill, or to interfere with the chances of its being passed into law. The ministerial side of the house was fast becoming de- moralized. The Liberal party was breaking up into muti- nous camps and unmanageable coteries. The fate of this unhappy bill is not now a matter of great historical importance. Far more interesting than the process of its defeat is the memory of the eloquence by which it was assailed and defended. One reputation sprang into light with tbese memorable debates. Mr. Kobert Lowe was the hero of the opposition that fought against the bill. lie was the Achilles of the anti-reformers. His attacks on the government had, of course, all the more piquancy that they came from a Liberal, and one who had held office in two Liberal administrations. The Tory benches shouted and screamed with delight, as in speech after speech of admirable freshness and vigor Mr. Lowe poured his scathing sarcasms in upon the bill and its authors. Even their own leader and champion, Mr. Disraeli, became of comparatively small account with the Tories when they heard Mr. Lowe's invectives against their enemies. Much of Mr. Lowe's success was undoubt- edly due to the manner in which he hit the tone and temper of the Conservatives and of the disaffected Whigs. Ap- plause and admiration are contagious in the House of Commons. When a great number of voices join in cheers and in praise, other voices are caught by the attraction, and cheer and praise out of sheer infection of sympathy. It is needless to say that the applause reacts upon the orator. The more he feels that the house admires him, the more likely he is to make himself worthy of the admir- ation. The occasion told on Mr. Lowe. His form seemed, metaphorically at least, to grow greater and grander on that scene, as the enthusiasm of his admirers waxed and heated. Certainly he never after that time made any great mark by his speeches, or won back any of the fame as an orator which was his during that short and to him splendid A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 267 period. But the speeches themselves were masterly as mere literary productions. Not many men could have fewer physical qualifications for success in oratory than Mr. Lowe. He had an awkward and ungainly presence; his gestures were angular and ungraceful; his voice was harsh and rasping; }iis articulation was so imperfect that he became now and then almost unintelligible; his sight was so short that when he had to read a passage or extract of any kind, he could only puzzle over its contents in a painful and blundering way, even with the paper held up close to his eyes; and his memory was not good enough to allow him to quote anything without the help of docu- ments. How, it may be asked in wonder, was such a speaker as this to contend in eloquence with the torrent- like fluency, the splendid diction, the silver-trumpet voice of Gladstone; or with the thrilling vibrations of Bright's noble eloquence, now penetrating in its pathos, and now irresistible in its humor? Even those who well remember these great debates may ask themselves in unsatisfied wonder the same question now. It is certain that Mr. Lowe has not the most distant claim to be ranked as an orator with Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright. Yet it is equally certain that he did for that season stand up against each of them, against them both; against them both at their very best; a i id that he held his own. Mr. Disraeli was thrown completely into the shade. Mr. Disraeli was not, it is said, much put out by this. He listened quietly, perhaps even contemptuously, looking upon the whole episode as one destined to pass quickly away. He did not believe that Mr. Lowe was likely to be a peer (if Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Bright — or of himself — in debate. a You know I never made much of Lowe," • he said in conversation with a political opponent some years after, and when Mr. Lowe's eloquence had already become oidy a memory. But for the time Mr. Lowe was the master spirit of the opposition to the reform bill. In sparkling sentences, full of classical allusion and of illustrations drawn from all manner of literatures, he denounced and satirized demagogues, democratic governments, and every influence that tended to bring about any political condition which allowed of an ominous comparison with something in Athe- nian history. Reduced to their logical and philosophical meaning, Mr. Lowe's speeches were really nothing but 268 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. arguments for that immemorial object of desire, the govern- ment by the wise and good. They had nothing in particu- lar to do with the small question in domestic legislation, as to whether seven pounds or ten pounds was to be the limit of a borough franchise. They would have been just as effective if used in favor of an existing seven pounds quali- fication, and against a proposed qualification of six pounds fifteen shillings. Seven pounds, it might have been insisted, was just the low-water mark of the wise and good ; any lower we shall have the rule of the unwise and the wicked. Nor did Mr. Lowe show how, if the fierce wave of democracy was rising in such terrible might, it could be dammed out by the retention of a ten pounds franchise. His alarms and his portents were in amazing contrast to his proposed measures of safety. He hoped to bind Leviathan with packthread. Alaric was at the gates; Mr. Lowe's last hope was in the power of the court of chancery to serve the invader with an injunction. The simple- minded deputies who during the coup d'etat in Paris went forth to meet the soldiers of the usurper with their scarfs of office, in the belief that they could thus restrain them from violation of the constitutional law, were on a philosophical level with Mr. Lowe when he proclaimed to England that her ancient system must fall into cureless ruin and become the shame and scandal of all time, if she abandoned her last rampart, the ten pounds franchise. But Mr. Lowe was embodying in brilliant sarcasm and vivid paradox the fears, prejudices, and spites, the honest dislikes and solid objec- tions of a large proportion of English society, Trades' unions, strikes, rumors of political disaffection in Ireland, the angry and extravagant words of artisan orators and agi- tators in London ; a steady hatred of all American prin- ciples; a certain disappointment that the American repub- lic had not fulfilled most men's predictions and gone to pieces — these and various other feelings combined to make a great many Englishmen particularly hostile to any proposals for political reform at that moment. Mr. Lowe was not merely the mouthpiece of all these sentiments, but he gave what seemed to be an overwhelming philosophical argument to prove their wisdom and justice. The conserv- atives made a hero, and even an idol, of him. Shrewd old members of the party, who ought to have known better, were heard to declare that he was not only the greatest A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 269 orator, hut even the greatest statesman, of the day. In truth, Mr. Lowe was neither orator nor statesman. He had some of the gifts which are needed to make a man an orator, but hardly any of those which constitute a states- man. He was a literary man and a scholar, who had a happy knack of saying bitter things in an epigrammatic way; he really hated the reform bill, toward which Mr. Disraeli probably felt no emotion whatever, and he started into prominence as an anti-reformer just at the right mo- ment to suit the Conservatives and embarrass and dismay the Liberal party. He was greatly detested for a time among the working classes, for whose benefit the measure was chiefly introduced. He not only spoke out with cynical frankness his own opinion of the merits and morals of the people "who live in these small houses," but he im- plied that all the other members of the house held the same opinion, if they would only venture to give it a tongue. He was once or twice mobbed in the streets; he was strongly disliked and dreaded for the hour by the Liberals; he was the most prominent figure on the stage dur- ing those weeks of excitement; and no doubt he was per- fectly happy. The debates on the bill brought out some speeches which have not been surpassed in the parliamentary history of our time. Mr. Bright and Mr. Gladstone were at their very best. Mr. Bright likened the formation of the little band of malcontents to the doings of David in the cave of Adullam when he called about him "every one that was in distress and every one that was discon- tented," and become a captain over them. The allusion told upon the house with instant effect, for many had suspected and some had said that if Mr. Horsman and Mr. Lovvehad been more carefully conciliated by the prime min- ister at the time of his government's formation, there might have been no such acrimonious opposition to the bill. The lit- tle third party were at once christened the Adullamites, and the name still survives and is likely long to survive its old political history. Mr. Gladstone's spei-oh, with which the great debate on the second reading concluded, was aflame with impassioned eloquence. One passage, in which he met the superfluous accusation, that he had come over a stranger to the Liberal camp, was tilled with a certain pathetic dignity. The closing words of the speech, 270 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. in which he prophesied a speedy success to the principles then on the verge of defeat, brought the debate fittingly up to its highest point of interest and excitement. "You cannot," he said in his closing words, fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move on in their might and majesty, and the tu- mult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb — those great social forces are against you ; they are marshaled on our side, and the banner which we now carry, though perhaps at this moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and a not distant victory." This speech was concluded on the morning of April 28th. The debate which it brought to a close had been carried on for eight nights. The House of Commons was wrought up to a pitch of the most intense excitement when the division came to be taken. The closing passages of Mr. Gladstone's speech had shown clearly enough that he did not expect much of a triumph for the government. The house was crowded to excess. The numbers voting were large beyond almost any other previous instance. There were for the second reading of the bill three hundred and eighteen: there were against it three hundred and thirteen. The second reading was carried by a majority of only five. The wild cheers of the Conservatives and the Adullamites showed on which "sword sat laurel victory." Every one knew then that the bill was doomed. It only remained for those who opposed it to put a few amend- ments on the paper as a prelude to the bill's going into committee, and the opposition must succeed. The ques- tion now was, not whether the measure would be a failure but only when the failure would have to be confessed. The time for the confession soon came. The opponents of the reform scheme kept pouring in amendments on the motion to go into committee. These came chiefly from the ministerial side of the house. As in 1860, so now in 18GG, the Conservative leader of the House of Commons had the satisfaction of seeing his work done for him very effectively by those who were in general his political oppo- nents. He was not compelled to run the risk or incur the responsibility of pledging himself or his party against all A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 271 reform in order to get rid of this particular scheme. All that he wanted was being done for him by men who had virtually pledged themselves over and over again in favor of reform. The bill at last got into committee; and here the strife was renewed. Lord Stanley moved an amend- ment to postpone the clauses relating to the county franchise until the redistribution of seats should first have been dealt with. This amendment was rejected, but not by a great majority. Mr. Ward Hunt moved that the franchise in counties be fourteen pounds rateable value, instead of gross estimated rental. This too was defeated. Lord Dunkellin, usually a supporter of the government, moved that the seven pounds franchise in boroughs be on a rating instead of a rental qualification. The effect of this would be to make the franchise a little higher than the government proposed to fix it. Houses are generally rated at a value somewhat below the amount of the rent paid on them, and therefore a rating franchise of seven pounds would probably in most places be about equivalent to a rental franchise of eight pounds. Therefore the op- ponents of reform would have interposed another barrier of twenty shillings in certain cases between England and the flood of democracy. Prudent and law-abiding men might accept with safety a franchise of eight pounds, or even say seven pounds ten shillings, in boroughs; but a franchise of seven pounds would mean the red republic, mob-rule, the invasion of democracy, the shameful victory, and all the other terrible things which Mr. Lowe had been foreshadowing in his prophetic fury. Lord Dunkellin car- ried his amendment; three hundred and fifteen voted for it, only three hundred and four against. The announcement of the numbers was received with tumultuous demonstrations of joy. The Adullamites had saved the state. Lord bus- sell's last reform scheme was a failure; and the Liberal ministry had come to an end. Lord liussell and his colleagues tendered their resigna- tion to the queen, and after a little delay and some dis- cussion, the resignation was accepted. It would hardly have been possible for Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone to do otherwise. Their reform hill was the one distinctive measure of the session. It was the measure which espe- cially divided their policy from (hat of Lord Palmerston's closing years. To abandon it would he to ahandon their 272 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. chief reason for being in office at all. They could not carry it. They had got as far in the session as the last few days of June, and everything was against them. The commercial panic had intervened. The suspension of the great firm of Overend and Gurney had brought failure after failure with it. The famous " Black Friday," Friday, May 11th, had made its most disastrous mark in the his- tory of the city of London. The bank charter had to be suspended. The cattle plague, although checked by the stringent measures of the government, was still raging, and the landlords and cattle-owners were still in a state of excitement and alarm, and had long been clamoring over the insufficiency of the compensation which other classes condemned as unreasonable alike in principle and in pro- portion. The day before the success of Lord Dunkellin's motion, the emperor of Austria had issued a manifesto explaining the course of events which compelled him to draw the sword against Prussia. A day or two after, Italy entered into the quarrel by declaring war against Austria. The time seemed hopeless for pressing a small reform bill on in the face of an unwilling parliament, and for throw- ing the country into the turmoil and expense of another general election. Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone accepted the situation, and resigned office. The one mistake they had made was to bring in a reform bill of so insignificant and almost unmeaning a character. It is more than probable that the difficulties Lord Russell had with the Whig section of his cabinet compelled him to conrpromise to a degree which his own inclinations and his own principles would not have approved, and to which Mr. Gladstone could only yield a reluctant assent. But if this be the explanation of what happened, it would have been better to put off the measure for a session or two, and allow pub- lic opinion out of doors to express itself so clearly as to convince the Whigs that the people in general were really in earnest about reform. No reform bill can be carried unless it is sustained by such an amount of enthusiasm among its sujiporters in and out of parliament as to con- vince the timid, the selfish, and the doubting that the measure must be passed. In the nature of things the men actually in parliament cannot be expected to enter with any great spontaneous enthusiasm into a project for sending them back to their constituencies to run the risk and bear A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES.- 273 the cost of a new election by untried voters. It will, therefore, always be easy for the men in possession to per- suade their consciences that the public good is opposed to any change, if no strong demand be made for the particular change in question. Now the compromise which Lord Russell's government offered in the shape of a reform bill was not calculated to stir up the enthusiasm of any one. The ardor with which in the end it came to be advocated was merely the heat which in men's natures is always generated by a growing controversy and by fierce opposi- tion. The strongest and most effective attack made by theopposition, that led by Mr. Lowe, was not directed against that particular measure so much as against all measures of reform; against the fundamental principle of a popular suffrage, and indeed of a representative assem- bly. As soon as the doubtful men in the house discov- ered that there was no genuine enthusiasm existing on behalf of the bill, its fate became certain. When the more extreme reformers came to think over the condition of things, and when their spirits were set free from the passion of recent controversy, very few of them could have felt any great regret for the defeat of the bill. Those who understood the real feelings of the yet unenfranchised part of the population, knew well that some administration would have to introduce a strong measure of reform before long. They were content to wait. The interval of delay proved shorter than they could well have expected. The defeat of the bill and the resignation of the ministry brought the political career of Lord .Russell to a close. He took advantage of the occasion soon after to make a sort of formal announcement that he handed over the task of leading the Liberal party to ]\Ir. Gladstone. He ap- peared indeed in public life on several occasions after his resignation of office. He took part sometimes in the debates of the House of Lords; he even once or twice introduced measures there, and endeavored to get them passed. During the long controversies on the Washington treaty and the claims of the United States, he took a some- what prominent part in the discussions of the peers, and was always listened to with attention and respect. About a year after the fall Of his administration he was one of the company at a breakfast given to Mr. Garrison, the American anti-slavery leader, in St. James' Hall, and he 274 vl HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. won much applause there by the frankness and good spirit of his tribute to the memory of President Lincoln, and by his manly acknowledgment of more than one mistake in his former judgments of Lincoln's policy and character. Lord Eussell spoke on this occasion with a vigor quite equal to that which he might have displayed some twenty years before ; and indeed many of those present felt sur- prised at his resolve to abandon active public life while he still seemed so well capable of bearing a part in it. Lord Russell's career, however, was practically at an end. It had been a long and an interesting career. It was begun amid splendid chances. Lord John Russell was born in the very purple of politics; he was cradled and nursed among statesmen and orators; the fervid breath of young liberty fanned his boyhood; his tutors, friends, compan- ions, were the master-spirits who rule the fortunes of nations; he had the ministerial benches for a training ground, and had a seat in the administration at his dis- posal when another young man might have been glad of a seat in an opera-box. He must have been brought into more or less intimate association with all the men and women worth knowing in Europe since the early part of the century. He was a pupil of Dugald Stewart at Edin- burgh, and he sat as a youth at the feet of Fox. He had accompanied Wellington in some of his peninsular cam- paigns; he measured swords with Canning and Peel succes- sively through years of parliamentary warfare. He knew Metternich and Talleyrand. He had met the widow of Charles Stuart, the young chevalier, in Florence; and had conversed with Napoleon in Elba. He knew Cavour and Bismarck. He was now an ally of Daniel O'Connell, and now of Cobden and Bright. lie was the close friend of Thomas Moore; he knew Byron, and was one of the few allowed to read the personal memoirs which were unfortu- nately destroyed by Byron's friends. Lord John Russell had tastes for literature, for art, for philosophy, for history, for politics; and his ajstheticism had the advantage that it made him seek the society and appreciate the worth of men of genius and letters. Thus he never remained a mere politician like Pitt or Palmerston. His public career suggests almost as strange a series of contradictions, or paradoxes, as Macau lay finds in that of Pitt. He who began with a reputation for a heat of temperament worthy A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 275 of Achilles was for more than half his career regarded as a frigid and bloodless politician. In Ireland he was long known rather as the author of the ecclesiastical titles bill than as the early friend of Catholic emancipation; in England as the parent of petty and abortive reform bills, rather than as the promoter of the one great reform bill. Abroad and at home he came to be thought of as the min- ister who disappointed Denmark and abandoned Poland, rather than as the earnest friend and faithful champion of oppressed nationalities. No statesman could be a more sincere and thorough opponent of slavery in all its forms and works; and yet in the mind of the American people Lord Russell's name was for a long time associated with the idea of a scarcely-concealed support of the slave- holder's rebellion. Much of this curious contrast, this seeming inconsistency, is due to the fact that for the greater part of his public life Lord Eussell's career was a mere course of see-saw between office and opposition. The sort of superstition that long prevailed in our politi- cal affairs limited the higher offices of statesmanship to two or three conventionally acceptable men on either side. If not Sir Robert Peel, then it must be Lord John Russell; if it was not Lord Derby, it must be Lord Palmers ton. Therefore, if the business of government was to go on at all, a statesman must take office now and then with men whom he could not mold wholly to his purpose, and must act in seeming sympathy with principles and measures which he would himself have little cared to originate. Lord Palmerston complained humorously in one of his later letters, that a prime minister could no longer have it all his own way in his cabinet. Men were coming up who had wills and consciences, ideas and abilities of their own, and who would not consent to be the mere clerks of the prime min- ister. Great popular parlies too, he might have added, were growing up in the country with powerful leaders, men whose opinions must be taken into account on every subject even though they never were to be in office. It is eas\ enough to understand how under such conditions the minister who had seemed a daring reformer to one genera- tion might seem hut a chilly compromiser to another. It is easy too to understand how the career, which at its opening was illumined by the splendid victory of the reform bill of 1832, should have been clouded at its close 276 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. by the rather ignominious failure of the reform bill of 1866. The personal 'life of Lord Kussell was consistent all through. He began as a reformer; he ended as a reformer. If the "might-have-beens" were not always a vanity, it would be reasonable as well as natural to regret that it was not given to Lord Russell to complete the work of 1832 by a genuine and successful measure of reform in 1866. CHAPTER LI. THE KEFORM AGITATION". The reform banner, then, had "drooped over the sink- ing heads" of Lord Russell and Mr. Gladstone, and the Liberal administration was at an end. The queen, of course, sent for Lord Derby. There was no one else to send for. Somebody must carry on the queen's govern- ment; and therefore Lord Derby had no alternative but to set to work and try to form an administration. He did not appear to have done so with much good-will. He had no personal desire to enter office once again; he had no inclination for official responsibilities. He was not very fond of work, even when younger and stronger, and the habitual indolence of his character had naturally grown with years, and just uoav with infirmities. There was therefore, something of a genuine patriotic self-sacrifice in the consent which he gave to relieve the sovereign and the country from difficulties by accepting at such a time the office of prime minister and undertaking to form a govern- ment. It was generally understood, however, that he would only consent to be the prime minister of an interval, and that whenever with convenience to the interests of the state some other hand could be entrusted with power, he would expect to be released from the trouble of official life. The prospect for a Conservative ministry was not inviting. Despite the manner in which Lord Russell's reform bill had been hustled out of existence, no sagacious Tory seri- ously believed that the new government could do as Lord Palmerston had done; that is, could treat the whole reform question as if it were shelved by the recent action of the House of Commons, and take no further trouble about it. Lord Derby, too, when he came .to form a government, a history of our own times. 277 found himself met by one unexpected difficulty. He had hoped to be able to weld together a sort of coalition minis- try, which should to a certain extent represent both sides of the house. It seemed to him only reasonable to assume that the men who had co-operated with the Conservatives so earnestly in resisting the reform measures of the late government would consent to co-operate with the Conserv- ative ministry which their action had forced into existence. Accordingly, he had at once invited the leading members of the Adullamite party to accept places in his administra- tion. He was met by disappointment. The Adullamite chiefs agreed to decline all such co-operation. A leading article appeared one morning in a journal which was un- derstood to have Mr. Lowe for one of its contributors, an- nouncing, in a solemn sentence made more solemn by being printed in capital letters, that those who had thrown out • the Liberal ministry on principle were bound to prove that they had not been animated by any ambition or self-seeking of their own. Indeed, the voice of public opinion freely acquitted some of them of any such desire from the begin- ning. Mr. Lowe, for example, was always thought to be somewhat uncertain and crotchety in his views. There were not wanting persons who said that he had no set and serious political opinions at all; that he was more easily charmed by antithesis than by principle; and that he would have been at any time ready to sacrifice his party to his paradox. But no one doubted his personal sincerity; and no one was surprised that he should have declined to accept any advantage from the reaction of which he had . been the guiding spirit. About the rest of the Adullam- ites, truth to say, very few persons thought at all. No one doubted their sincerity, for indeed no one asked himself any question on the subject. Some of them were men of great territorial influence; some were men of longstanding in parliament. But they were absolutely unnoticed now that the crisis was over. The reaction was ascribed to one man alone. There was some curiosity felt as to. the course that one man would pursue; but when it was known that Mr. Lowe would not take office under Lord Derby, nobody cared what became of the other denizens of the cave. They might take office or let it alone; the public at large were absolutely indifferent on the subject. The session had advanced far toward its usual time of 278 A 11 1 STORY OF OVR OWN TIMES. closing when Lord Derby completed the arrangements for his administration. Mr. Disraeli, of course, became chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons. Lord Stanley was foreign secretary. Lord Cranborne, formerly Lord Robert Cecil, was entrusted with the care of India; Lord Carnarvon undertook the colonies; General Peel became war minister; Sir Stafford Northcote was president of the board of trade; and Mr. Walpole took on himself the management of the home office, little knowing what a troublous business he had brought upon his shoulders. Sir John Pakington boldly assumed the control of the admiralty, an appropriation of office to which only the epigram of a Beaumarchais could supply adequate illustration. On July 9th Lord Derby was able to announce to the peers that he had put together his house of cards. The new ministry had hardly taken their places when a perfect storm of agitation broke out all over the country. The Conservatives and the Adullamites had both asserted that the working people in general were indifferent about the franchise; and a number of organizations now sprang into existence, having for their object to prove to the world that no such apathy prevailed. Reform leagues and re- form unions started up as if out of the ground. Public meetings of vast dimensions began to be held day after day for the purpose of testifying to the strength of the desire for reform. The most noteworthy of these was the famous Hyde Park meeting. The reformers of the metropolis de- termined to hold a monster meeting in the Park. The authorities took the very unwise course of determining to prohibit it, and a proclamation or official notice was issued to that effect. The reformers were acting under the advice of Mr. Edmond Beales, president of the reform league, a barrister of some standing, and a man of character and considerable ability. Mr. Beales was of opinion that the authorities had no legal power to prevent the meeting; and of course it need hardly be said that a commissioner of police, or even a home secretary, is not qualified to make anything legal or illegal by simply proclaiming it so. The London reformers, therefore, determined to try their right with the authorities. On July 23rd, a number of proces- sions, marching with bands and banners, set out from different parts of London and made for Hyde Park. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 279 The authorities had posted notices announcing that the gates of the park would be closed at five o'clock that eve- ning. When the first of the processions arrived at the park the gates were closed, and a line of policemen was drawn outside. The president of the reform league, Mr. Beales, and some other prominent reformers, came up in a carriage, alighted, and endeavored to enter the park. They were refused admittance. They asked for the authority by which they were refused ; and they were told that it was the authority of the commissioner of police. They then quietly re-entered the carriage. It was their intention first to assert their right, and then, being refused, to try it in the regular and legal way. It was no part of their in- tention to make any disturbance. They seem to have taken every step which they thought necessary to guard against any breach of the peace. It was clearly their interest, as it was no doubt their desire, to have the law on their side. They went to Trafalgar Square, followed by a large crowd, and there a meeting was extemporized, at. which resolutions were passed demanding the extension of the suffrage, and thanking Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and other men who had striven to obtain it. The speaking was short; it was not physically possible to speak with any effect to so large an assemblage. Then that part of the demonstration came quietly to an end. Meantime, however, a different scene had been going on at Hyde Park. A large and motley crowd had hung about the gates and railings. The crowd was composed partly of genuine reformers, partly of mere sightseers and curiosity-mongers, partly of mischievous boys, and to no inconsiderable extent of ordinary Loudon roughs. Not a few of all sections, perhaps, were a little disappointed that things had gone so quietly off. Many of the younger lookers-on felt aggrieved exactly as the boys did in the " Bride of Lammermoor," when they found that the sup- posed lire was not to end in any explosion after all, and that the castle had "gane out like an auld wife's spunk." The mere mass of people pressed and pressing round the railings would almost in any case have somewhat seriously threatened their security and tried their strength. Emer- son has said that every revolution, however great, is first of all, a thought in the mind of a single man. One disap- pointed reformer lingering in Park Lane, with his breast 98o A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. against the rails, as the poetic heroine had hers, metaphor- ically, against the thorn, became impressed with the idea that the barrier was somewhat frail and shaky. How would it be, he vaguely thought for a moment, if he were to give an impulse and drive the railing in? What, he wondered to himself, would come of that? The tempta- tion was great. He shook the rails; the rails began to give way. Not that alone, but the sudden movement was felt along the line, and into a hundred minds came at once the grand revolutionary idea which an instant before had been a thought in the mind of one hitherto unimportant man. A simultaneous impulsive rush, and some yards of railing were down, and men in scores were tumbling, and floundering, and rushing over them. The example was followed along Park Lane, and in a moment half a mile of iron railing was lying on the grass, and a tumul- tuous and delighted mob were swarming over the park. The news ran wildly through the town. Some thought it a revolt; others were of opinion that it was a revolution. The first day of liberty was proclaimed here — the breaking loose of anarchy was shrieked at there. The mob capered and jumped over the sward for half the night through. Flower-beds and shrubs suffered a good deal, not so much from wanton destruction as from the pure boisterousness which came of an unexpected opportunity for horse-play. There were a good many little encounters with the police; stones were thrown on the one side and truncheons used on the other pretty freely; a detachment of foot guards was kept near the spot in readiness, but their services were not required. Indeed, the mob good-humoredly cheered the soldiers whenever they caught sight of them. A few heads were broken on both sides, and a few prisoners were made by the police; but there was no revolution, no revolt, no serious riot even, and no intention in the mind of any responsible person that there should be a riot. Mr. Dis- raeli that night declared in the House of Commons — half probably in jest, half certainly in earnest — that he was not quite sure whether he had still a house to go to. He found his house yet standing, and firmly roofed, when he re- turned home that night. London slept feverishly, and awoke next day to find things going on very much as before. Crowds hastened, half in amusement half in fear, to look upon the scene of the previous evening's turmoil. There A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 281 were the railings down sure enough ; and in the park was still a large idle crowd, partly of harmless sight-seers, partly of roughs, with a considerable body of police keep- ing order. But there was no popular rising; and London began once more to eat its meals in peace. The sudden tumult was harmlessly over, and the one personage whose impulse first shook the railings of the park may even now console, himself in his obscurity by the thought that his push carried reform. Nothing can well be more certain than the fact that the Hyde Park riot, as it was called, convinced her majesty's ministers of the necessity of an immediate adoption of the reform principle. The government took the Hyde Park riot with portentous gravity. Mr. Beales and some of his colleagues waited upon the home secretary next day, for the purpose of advising him to withdraw the military and police from the park, and leave it in the custody of the reformers. Mr. Beales gravely lectured the government for what they had done; and declared, as was undoubtedly the fact, that the foolish conduct of the administration had 'been the original cause of all the disturbance. The home secretary, Mr. Walpole, a gentle and kindly man, had lost his head in the excitement of the hour. He mentally saw himself charged with the responsibility of civil strife and bloodshed. He was melted out of all self- command by the kindly bearing of Mr. Beales and the reformers; and when they assured him that they were only anxious to help him to keep order, he fairly broke down and wept. He expressed himself with meek gratitude for their promised co-operation, and agreed to almost anything they could suggest. It was understood that the right of meeting in Hyde Park was left to be tested in some more satisfactory way at a future day, and the leaders of the reform league took their departure undoubted masters of the situation. All through the autumn and winter meetings were held in the great towns and cities to promote the cause of reform. They were for the most part mere demonstra- tions of numbers; and every one of any sagacity knew perfectly well that it was by display of numbers the great- est effect would be produced upon the ministry. There- fore the meetings were usually preceded by processions, and the attention of the public was turned far more to the 282 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. processions than to the meetings. Hardly any one took the trouble to discuss what was said at the meetings; but a constant public controversy was going on about the nu- merical strength of the processions. A hundred witnesses on both sides of the dispute rushed to the newspapers to bear testimony to the length of time which a particular procession had occupied in passing a given point. Eival calculations were elaborately made to get at the number of persons marching which such a length of time implied. The most extraordinary differences of calculation were exhibited. It was a remarkable fact that the opponents of reform saw invariably a much smaller gathering than its supporters beheld. The calculations of the one set of observers brought out only hundreds, where those of the other resulted in thousands. A procession which one critic proved by the most elaborate and careful statistics to have contained a quarter of a million of men, a rival cal- culator was prepared to show could not by any possibility have contained more. than ten or twelve thousand. Cooler observers than the professed partisans of one side or the other, thought that the most significant feature of these demonstrations was the part taken by the organized trades' associations of workingmen. Some of the processions were made up exclusively of the members of these organ- ized trades' unions. They acted in strict deference to the resolutions and the discipline of their associations. They were great in numbers, and most imposing in their silent united strength. They had grown into all that discipline and that power unpatronized by any manner of authority; unrecognized by the law, unless indeed where the law oc- casionally went out of its way to try to prevent or to thwart the aims of their organization. They had now grown to such strength that law and authority must see to make terms with them. The most •extravagant rumors as to their secret doings and purposes alarmed the timid; and there can be no doubt that if a popular or social revolution were needed or were impending, the action taken by the workinomen's associations would have been of incalculable moment to the cause it espoused. As rank after rank of these men marched in quiet confidence through the prin- cipal streets of London, the thought must have occurred to many minds that here was an entirely new element in the calculations alike of statesmen and of demagogues well A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 283 capable of being made ;i new source of strength to a state under honest leadership and any really sound system of legislation, but qualified also to become a source of serious public danger, if misled by the demagogue or unfairly dealt with by the reactionary legislator. Home of these associa- tions had supported great industrial strikes in which the judgment and the sympathies of all the classes that usually lead was against them. The capitalist and all who share his immediate interests; the employers, the rich of every kind, the aristocratic, the self-appointed public instruc- tors, had all been against them; and they had nevertheless gone deliberately and stubbornly their own way. Some- times they, or the cause they represented, had prevailed ; often they and it had been defeated; but they had never acknowledged a defeat in principle, and they had kept on their own course undismayed, and, as many would have put it, unconvinced and unreconciled. At this very time some of the doings of trades' unions, or of those who took on themselves to represent the purposes of such organiza- tions, were creating dismay in many parts of England, and were a subject of excited discussion everywhere over the country. It could not but be a matter of the gravest moment when the "organization of labor," as it would once have been grandiloquently called, thus turned out ,of its own direct path and identified itself, its cause, its resources, and its discipline with any great political movement. Thus in England the year passed away. Men were organizing reform demonstrations on the one side and showing the futility of them on the other. The calcula- tions as to the lengths of processions and the time occupied in passing particular street-corners or lamp-posts went on unceasingly. Stout Tories vowed that the government never would yield to popular clamor. Not a few timid reformers hoped in their secret, hearts that Lord Derby would really stand fast. Many Liberals who could admit of no hope from the Tories, were already prepared with the conviction that the government would risk all on the resolution fco deny extended suffrage to the working classes. Not a few on both sides had a strong impression that Mr. Disraeli would do something to keep his friends in power, although they did not perhaps quite suspect that he was already engaged in the work of educating his party. 284 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. While England was thus occupied, stirring events were taking place elsewhere. In the interval between the resig- nation of Lord Russell and the completion of Lord Derby's ministry, the battle of Sadowa had been fought. The lead- ership of Germany had been decisively won by Prussia. The "humiliation of Olmutz" had been avenged. Venetia had been added to Italy, Austria had been excluded from any share in German affairs, and Prussia and France had been placed in that position which M. Prevost-Paradol likened to that of two express trains starting along the same line from opposite directions. The complete over- throw of Austria came with the shock of a bewildering surprise upon the great mass of the English public. Faith in the military strength of Austria had survived even the evidence of Solferino. English public instructors were for the most part as completely agreed about the utter incapa- city of the Prussians for the business of war as if nobody had ever heard of Frederick the Great. Not many days before Sadowa, a leading London newspaper had a descrip- tion, half pitiful, half contemptuous, of the unfortunate shop-boys and young mechanics of whom the Prussian army was understood to be composed, being hurried and driven along to the front to make food for powder for the well-trained legions of Austria under the command of the irresistible Benedek. Just before the adjournment of parliament for the recess, a great work of peace was accomplished ; perhaps the only work of peace then possible which could be men- tioned after the warlike business of Sadowa without pro- ducing the effect of an anti-climax. This was the com- pletion of the Atlantic cable. On the evening of July 27, 1866, the cable was laid between Europe and America. Next day Lord Stanley, as foreign minister, was informed that perfect communication existed between England and the United States by means of the thread of wire that lay beneath the Atlantic. Words of friendly congratulation and greeting were interchanged between the queen and the president of the United States. Ten years all but a month or two had gone by since Mr. Cyrus W. Field, the American promoter of the Atlantic telegraph project, had first tried to inspire cool and calculating men in Lon- don, Liverpool, and Manchester with some faith in his project. He was not a scientific man; he was not the in- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 285 ven tor of the principle of inter-oceanic telegraphy; he was not even the first man to propose that a company should be formed for the purpose of laying a cable beneath the Atlantic. So long before as 1845 an attempt had been made by the Messrs. Brett to induce the English govern- ment to assist them in a scheme for laying an electric wire to connect Europe with America. A plan for the purpose was actually registered ; but the government took no interest in the project, probably regarding it as on a par with the frequent applications which are made for the countenance and help of the treasury in the promotion o£ flying machines and of projectiles to destroy an enemy's fleet at a thousand miles' distance. But the achievement of the Atlantic cable was none the less as distinctly the work of Mr. Cyrus Field as the discovery of America was that of Columbus. It was not he who first thought of doing the thing; but it.was he who first made up his mind that it could be done, and showed the world how to do it, and did it in the end. The history of human invention has not a more inspiriting example of patience living down discouragement, and perseverance triumphing over defeat. The first attempt to lay the cable was made in 1857, but the vessels engaged in the expedition had only got about three hundred miles from the west coast of Ireland when the cable broke, and the effort had to be given up for that year. Next year the enterprise was renewed upon a differ- ent principle. Two ships of war, the Agamemnon, English, and the Niagara, American, sailed out together for the mid-Atlantic, where they were to part company, having previously joined their cables, and were each to make for her own shore, each laying the line of wire as she went. Stormy weather arose suddenly and prevented the vessels from doing anything. The cable Avas broken several times in the effort to lav it, and at last the expedi- tion returned. Another effort, however, was made that summer. The cable was actually laid. It did for a few days unite Europe and America. Messages of congratula- tion passed along between the queen and the president of the United States. The queen congratulated the presi- dent upon "the successful completion of the great interna- tional work," and was convinced that "the president will unite with her in fervently hoping that the electric cable which now connects Great Britain with the United States, 286 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. will prove an additional link between the nations whose friendship is founded in their common interest and recipro- cal esteem." The rejoicings in America were exuberant. Suddenly, however, the signals became faint; the messages grew inarticulate, and before long the power of communi- cation ceased altogether. The cable became a mere cable again; the wire that spoke with such a miraculous elo- quence had become silent. The construction of the cable had proved to be defective, and a new principle had to be devised by science. Yet something definite had been accomplished. It had been shown that a cable could be stretched and maintained under the ocean more than two miles deep and two thousand miles across. Another at- tempt was made in 18G5, but it proved again a failure, and the shivered cable had to be left for the time in the bed of the Atlantic. At last, in I860 the feat was accomplished, and the Atlantic telegraph Avas added to the realities of life. It has now become a distinct part of our civilized system. We have ceased to wonder at it. We accept it and its consequent facts with as much composure as we take the existence of the inland telegraph or the penny post. It seems hard now to understand how people got on when it took a fortnight to receive news from the United States. Since the success of the Atlantic cable many telegraphic wires have been laid in the beds of oceans. All England chafed as at an insufferable piece of negligence on the part of somebody the other day, when it was found, in a moment of national emergency, that there was a lack of direct telegraphic communication between this country and the Cape of Good Hope, and that we could not ask a question of South Africa and have an answer within a few minutes. Perhaps it may encourage future projectors and inventors to know that, in the case of the Atlantic cable as in that of the Suez Canal, some of the highest scientific authority was given to proclaim the actual hopelessness, the Avild impracticability, the sheer physical impossibility of such an enterprise having any success. "Before the ships left this country with the cable," wrote Robert Stephenson in 1857, "I very publicly predicted as soon as they got into deep water a signal failure. It was in fact inevitable." Nine years after, the inevitable had been avoided ; the failure turned to success. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. %£>* CHAPTER LIL THE LEAP IN THE DAKK. The autumn and winter of agitation passed away, and the time was at hand when the new ministry must meet a new session of parliament. The country looked with keen interest, and also with a certain amused curiosity, to see what the government would do with reform in the session of 18(i7. When Lord Derby took office he had not in any way committed himself and his colleagues against a reform hill. On the contrary, he had announced that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to see a very consid- erable proportion of the now excluded class admitted to the franchise; hut he had qualified this announcement by the expression of a doubt whether any measure of reform on which the two great political parties could agree would be likely to satisfy the extreme reformers, or to put a stop to agitation. More than once Lord Derby had intimated plainly enough that he was willing to make one other effort at a settlement of the question, hut if that effort should not succeed he would have nothing more to do with the matter. He was well known to have taken office reluctantly, and he gave it to be clearly understood that he did not by any means propose to devote the remainder of his life to the business of rolling reform lulls a little way up the parliamentary hill merely in order to see them rolled down again. Most persons assumed, however, that Mr. Disraeli would look at the whole question from a different point of view; that he had personal and natural ambition still to gratify; and that he was not likely to allow the position of his party to he greatly damaged by any lack of flexibility on his part. Tin- Conservatives were in office, but only in office; they were not in power. The defection among the Liberals, and not their own strength or success, had set the Tories on the ministerial benches. They could not possibly keep their places there without at least trying to amuse the country on the sub- ject of reform. The great majority of Liberals felt sure that some effort would he made by the government to carry a hill, but their general impression was that it would be a measure cleverly put together with the hope of ogg A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. inducing the country to accept shadow for substance; and that nothing would come of it except an interval during which the demand of the unenfranchised classes would be- come more and more earnest and impassioned. It had not entered into the mind of any one to conceive that Lord Derby's government were likely to entertain the country by the odd succession of surprises which diversified the session, and to assist at the gradual formation, by contribution from all sides, sets, and individuals, of a reform measure far more broadly liberal and democratic than anything which Lord Eussell and Mr. Gladstone would have ventured or cared to introduce. Parliament opened on February 5th. The speech from the throne alluded, as everyone had expected that it would, to the subject of reform. "Your attention," so ran the words of the speech, " will again be called to the state of the representation of the people in parliament;" and then the hope was expressed that " Your deliberations, con- ducted in a spirit of moderation and mutual forbearance, may lead to the adoption of measures which, without un- duly disturbing the balance of political power, shall freely extend the elective franchise." The hand of Mr. Disraeli, people said, was to be seen clearly enough in these vague and ambiguous phrases. How, it was asked, can the fran- chise be freely extended, in the reformers' sense, without disturbing the balance of political power unduly, in Mr. Disraeli's sense? Again and again, in session after session, he had been heard arguing that a great enlargement of the suffrage to the working classes must disturb the balance of political power; that it would in itself be a disturbance of the balance of political power; that it would give an im- mense preponderance to a class "homogeneous" — such was Mr. Disraeli's own favorite word — in their interests and fashions. How then could he now offer to introduce any such change? And what other change did any one want? What other change would satisfy anybody who wanted a change at all? More and more the conviction spread that Mr. Disraeli would only try to palm off some worthless measure on the House of Commons, and by the help of the insincere reformers and the Adullamites, endeavor to in- duce the majority to accept it. People had little idea, however, of the flexibility the government were soon to display. The history of parliament in our modern days, A HISTORY OF OUll OWN TIMES. 289 or indeed in any days that we know much of, has nothing like the proceedings of that extraordinary session. On February 11th, Mr. Disraeli announced that the gov- ernment had made up their minds to proceed "by way of resolution." The great difficulty, he explained, in the way of passing a reform bill was that the two great political parties could not be got to agree beforehand on any princi- ples by which to construct a measure. " Let us then, be- fore we go to work at the construction of a reform bill this time, agree among ourselves as to what sort of measure we want. The rest will be easy." He, therefore, an- nounced his intention to put into the parliamentary caldron a handful of resolutions, out of which, when they had been allowed to simmer, would miraculously arise the majestic shape of a good reform bill made perfect. Mr. Disraeli re- lied greatly on the example afforded by the construction of the new system of government for India as an encourage- ment to the course he now recommended. We have seen that after the suppression of the Indian mutiny there was much difficulty feltabout t he creation of a new scheme for thegov- ernment of India. The House of Commons then agreed to proceed carefully by way of resolution in the first instance, and thus got the principles on which they proposed to govern India completely settled before they set about em- bodying them in practical legislation. Only the curious ingenuity of Mr. Disraeli's mind could have discovered any resemblance between the two cases. When parlia- ment had to take on itself the government of India, the first difficulty was to settle the principles on which India could best be governed. It was not a question of party; one party was as much in a difficulty as another; neither was pledged to any particular course. It was a time for consultation, for the hearing of all opinions, for the con- sideration and comparison of all testimonies and suggest ions. It was, in short, a time of novelty and of uncertainty, when the only reasonable course was for the two great parties to take in formal counsel before either committed itself to any defined scheme or even principle of action. What resemblance did such a condition of things bear to that in which parliament found itself now that it had to consider the subject of an extended franchise? The diffi- culty arose not from a lack of knowledge, but from the existence of different opinions and different principles. 290 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. All that conlcl be got at in the way of information had been times out of mind showered out over the whole sub- ject of reform. It had been discussed down to the very dregs in parliament after parliament. Neither of the two great political parties wanted more information of any kind, but both having long been in possession of all the information accessible to the quest of man, they were unable to agree as to the course which ought to be taken, and differed absolutely in their political principles. One party was pledged by its traditions and its supposed interests to oppose a popular suffrage; the other was pledged inex- actly the same way to support it. What possible chance was there of a common ground being found by the discus- sion of a series of resolutions? If either party was willing to compromise, it had only to say so; two sentences would sufficiently explain what the compromise was to be. Each saw as distinctly as the other what it wanted to have ; if either was willing to renounce any part of its supposed claim, it would be enough to say so. A suitor asks for a girl in marriage; her father refuses to consent. Would the two be brought any nearer to an agree- ment if they were to hold a solemn conference, and draw up a series of resolutions setting forth what in the opinion of each were the true conditions of a happy union? Just as well might Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Bright have set about drawing up a series of resolutions to embody what each thought of the conditions" of a reform bill. The resolutions which Mr. Disraeli jn'oposed to submit to the house were for the most part sufficiently absurd. Some of them were platitudes which it could not be worth any one's while to take the trouble of affirming by formal resolution. What advantage could there be in declaring by resolution that "it is contrary to the constitution of this realm to give to any one class or interest a predominating power over the rest of the community?" Who ever said, or was likely to say, that to give one class a preponderat- ing power over the rest of the community was in accord- ance with the principles, of the constitution? Even if Jack Cade were prepared to demand such a power for his own class, he would not take the trouble of trying to convince people that it could be done in conformity with the exist- ing principles of the constitution. To what purpose was the House of Commons invited to declare that in any A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 291 redistribution of seats the main consideration should be " the expediency of supplying representation to places not at present represented, and which may be considered. entitled to that privilege?" What other main consideration could any sane person have in preparing a scheme for the redis- tribution of seats? It would be as wise to recommend the judges of our civil courts to declare by a formal resolution, that their main consideration in hearing causes should be to allow litigants an opportunity of setting forth their claims and obtaining justice. But then, on the other hand, it has to be observed that most of the resolutions which were not simple truisms embodied propositions such as no prime minister could possibly have expected the "house to agree on without violent struggles, determined resistance, and eager divisions. The principle of rating as a basis of qualification, the device of plurality of votes, the plan of voting by means of polling-papers — these were some of the propositions which 'Mr. Disraeli calmly sug- gested that the house should affirm along with the declara- tions that one party ought not to have all the power, and that the object of redistribution was to redistribute properly. The Liberal party, especially that section of it which acknowledged the authority of Mr. Bright, would have had to be beaten to its knees before it would consent to accept some of these devices. Mr. Disraeli seems to have learned almost at once, from the demeanor of the house, that it would be hopeless to I tress his resolutions. On February 25 th he quietly sub- stituted for them a sort of reform bill, which he announced that the government intended to introduce. The occupa- tion franchise in boroughs was to be reduced to six pounds, and in counties to twenty pounds, in each case the qualifi- cation to be based on rating; that is, the right of a man to vote was to be made dependent on the arrangements by his local vestry or other rate-imposing body: There were to be all manner of "fancy franchises." A man who had fifty pounds in the funds, or had thirtypounds in a savings bank and had kept that amount untouched for a year, was to be rewarded with the vote. If ho had given a ten- pound note to his daughter to buy her wedding clothes; or had laid out live pounds in the burial of a poor and aged parent, or lent a sovereign to a friend in distress, he would of course be disfranchised by his improvidence. If ho 292 A HISTORY Of OUR OWN TIMES. paid twenty shillings in direct taxes during the year he was to have a vote. If he bore the degree of a university, or was a .minister of religion, a lawyer, a doctor, or a cer- tified schoolmaster, he was to have the franchise: a whim- sical sort of educational franchise which wonld have refused a vote to Mr. Bright, Mr. Cobden, Mr. Mill, or to Mr. Disraeli himself. There seemed something unintelligible, or at least mysterious, about the manner in which this bill was introduced. It was to all appearance not based upon the resolutions; certainly it made no reference to some of the more important of their provisions. We need not go into the plan of redistribution which was tacked to the bill; for the bill itself never had any susbtantial existence. The House of Commons received with contemptuous' indifference Mr. Disraeli's explanation of its contents, and the very next day Mr. Disraeli announced that the govern- ment had determined to withdraw it, to give up at the same time the whole plan of proceeding by resolution, and to introduce a real and substantial reform bill in a few days. Parliament and the public were amazed at these sudden changes. The whole thing seemed turning into burlescpie. The session had seen only a few days, and here already was a third variation in the shape of the government's reform project. To increase the confusion and scandal it was announced three or four days after that three leading members of the cabinet — General Peel, Lord Carnarvon, and Lord Cranborne — had resigned. The whole story at last came out. The revelation was due to the " magnificent indiscretion" of Sir John Pakington, whose lucky inca- pacity to keep a secret has curiously enriched one chapter of the political history of his time. In consequence of the necessary reconstruction of the cabinet, Sir John Pakington was transferred from the admiralty to the war office, and had to go down to his constituents of Droitwich for re-election. In the fullness of his heart he told a story which set all England laughing. The government, it would appear, started with two distinct reform bills, one more comprehensive and liberal, as they considered, than the other. The latter was kept ready only as a last resource, in case the first should meet with a chilling recep- tion from the conservatism of the House of Commons. In that emergency they proposed to be ready to produce A HISTORY OB 1 OUR OWN TIMES. 293 their less comprehensive scheme. A shopman sometimes otters a customer some article which he assures him is the ouly thing of the kind fit to have; but if the customer resolutely declares that its price is more than he will pay, the shopman suddenly remembers that he has something of the same sort on hand which although cheaper will, he has no doubt, be found to serve the purpose quite as Avell. So the chiefs of the Conservative cabiuet had their two reform bills in stock. If the house should accept the ex- tensive measure, well and good ; but in the event of their drawing back from it, there was the other article ready to hand, cheaper to be sure, and not quite so fine to look at, but a very excellent thing in itself, and warranted to serve every purpose. The more liberal measure was to have been strictly based on the resolutions. The cabinet met on Saturday, February 23rd, and then, as Sir John Paking- ton said, he and others were under the impression that they had come to a perfect understanding; that they were unani- mous; and that the comprehensive measure was to be introduced on Monday, the 25th. On that Monday, how- ever, the cabinet were hastily summoned together. Sir John rushed to the spot, and a piece of alarming news awaited him. Some leading members of the cabinet had refused point blank to have anything to do with the com- prehensive bill. Here was a coil! It was two o'clock. Lord Derby had to address a meeting of the Conservative party at half-past two. Mr. Disraeli had to introduce the bill, some bill, in the House of Commons at half-past four. Something must be done. Some bill must be introduced. All eyes, we may suppose, glanced at the clock. Sir John Pakington averred that there were only ten minutes left for decision. It is plain that no man, whatever his gift of statesmanship or skill of penmanship, can draw up a com- plete reform bill in ten minutes. Now came into full light the wisdom and providence of those who had hit upon the plan of keeping a second-class bill, if we may use such an expression, ready for emergencies. Out came the second- class bill, and it was promptly resolved that Mr. Disraeli should go down to the House of Commons ami gravely introduce that, as if it wen- the measure which the govern- ment had all along had it in their minds to bring forward. Sir John defended thatresolui ion with simple and practical earnestness. It was not a wise resolve, he admitted; hut 294 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. who can be certain of acting wisely with only ten minutes for deliberation? If they had had even an hour to think the matter over, he had no doubt, he said, that they would not have made any mistake. But what skills talking? — they had not an hour, and there was an end of the matter. They had to do something; and so Mr. Disraeli brought in his second-class measure; the measure which Sir John Pakington's piquant explanation sent down into political history with the name of "the Ten Minutes Bill." The trouble arose, it seems, in this way. General Peel at first felt some scruples about the original measure, the comprehensive bill. Lord Cranborne pressed him to give the measure further consideration, and General Peel con- sented. So the cabinet broke up on the evening of Satur- day, February 23rd, in seeming harmony. Next day, how- ever, being Sunday, Lord Cranborne, having probably nothing else to do, bethought him that it would be well to look a little into the details of the bill, lie worked out the figures, as he afterward explained, and he found that according to his calculation they would almost amount to household suff rage in some of the boroughs. That would never do, he thought; and so he tendered his resignation. This would almost, as a matter of course, involve other resignations too. Therefore there came the hasty meeting of the cabinet on Monday, the 25th, which Sir John Pakington described with such unconscious humor. Lord Cranborne, and those who thought with him, were induced to remain, on condition that the comprehensive bill should be quietly put aside, and the ten minutes bill as quietly substituted. Unfortunately, the reception given to the ten minutes bill was, as we have told already, utterly dis- couraging. It was clear to Mr. Disraeli's experienced eye that it had not a chance from either side of the house. Mr. Disraeli made up his mind, and Lord Derby assented. There was nothing to be done but to fall back on the com- prehensive measure. Unwilling colleagues must only act upon their convictions and go. It would be_ idle to secure their co-operation by persevering farther with a bill that no one would have. Therefore it was that on February 26th Mr. Disraeli withdrew his bill of the day before, the ten minutes bill, and announced that the government would go to work in good earnest, and bring in a real bill on March 18th. This proved to be the bill based on the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 2<>5 resolutions; the comprehensive bill, which had been sud- denly put out of sight at the hasty meeting of the cabinet on Monday, February 25th, as described in the artless and unforgotten eloqueuce of Sir John Pakingtou's Droitwich speech. Then General Peel, Lord Carnarvon, and Lord Cranborne resigned their offices. Lord Carnarvon ex- plained that he did not object to have the franchise lowered, but he objected to a measure which seemed to him to leave all the political power divided between the rich and the poor, reducing to powerlessness the influence of all the intervening classes. The objection of Lord Cranborne has already been explained. General Peel, a man of straightforward, honorable character, and good abilities, was opposed to what he regarded as the distinctly demo- cratic character of the bill. For the second time within ten years a Conservative cabinet had been split up on a question of reform and the borough franchise. It must be owned that it required some courage and nerve on Mr. Disraeli's part to face the House of Com- mons with another scheme and a newly-constructed cabinet, ■after all these surprises. The first thing to do was to reorganize the cabinet by getting a new war secretary, colo- nial secretary, and secretary for India. Pefore March 8th this was accomplished. The men who had resigned carried with them into their retirement the respect of all their political opponents. During his short administration of India, Lord Cranborne had shown not merely capacity, for that everyone knew he possessed, but a gravity, self- restraint, and sense of responsibility, for which even his friends had not previously given him credit. Sir John Pakington, as we have already mentioned, became war minister, Mr. Corry succeeding him as first lord of the admiralty. The Duke of Buckingham — the Lord Chandos whose maiden speech, in the great debate of Thursday, June 25th, 1840, which closed the Peel administration, Mr. Disraeli has described in his "Lord George Bentinck" — became colonial secretary. The administration of the India department was transferred to Sir Stafford North- cote, whose place at the head of the board of trade thus vacated was taken by the Duke of Richmond. Then, having thrown their mutineers overboard, t>he government went, to work again at their reform scheme. On March 18th Mr. Disraeli introduced the bill. As regarded 290 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the franchise, this measure proposed that in boroughs all who paid rates, or twenty shillings a year in direct taxa- tion, should have the vote; and also that property in the funds and savings hanks, and so forth, should be honored with the franchise; and that there should be a certain educational franchise as well. The clauses for the exten- sion of the franchise were counterbalanced and fenced around with all manner of ingeniously devised qualifica- tions to prevent the force of numbers among the poorer classes from having too much of its own way. There was a disheartening elaborateness of ingenuity in all these devices. The machine was far too daintily adjusted ; the checks and balances were too cleverly arranged by half; it was apparent to almost every eye that some parts of the .mechanism would infallibly get out of working order, and that some others would never get into it. Mr. Bright compared the whole scheme to a plan for off ering something with one hand and quietly withdrawing it with the other. There was, however, one aspect of the situation which to many reformers seemed decidedly hopeful. It was plain to them now that the government were determined to dd anything whatever in order to get a reform bill of some kind passed that year. They would have anything which could command a majority rather than nothing. Lord Derby afterward frankly admitted that he did not see why a monopoly of reform should be left to the Liberals ; and Mr. Disraeli had clearly made up his mind that he would not go out of office this time on a reform bill. How little idea some of his colleagues had of whither they were drift- ing may be understood from a speech made by Lord Stanley on March 5th, after the resignation of Lord Cran- borne and the others. If, he said, Mr. Lowe, or any of those who sat near him, believed seriously "that it is the intention of the government to bring in a bill which shall be in accordance with the view which has always been so ably and so consistently advocated by the member for Birmingham (Mr. Bright), they are greatly mistaken." It will be seen before long that the government consented to carry a measure going much farther in the direction of demo- cracy than anything that had been ably and consistently advocated by the member for Birmingham. Mr. Disraeli himself could not possibly have had any idea at first of the length to which he would be induced to go. He told Lord A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 297 Cranborne, and with especial emphasis, at one stage of the debates, that the government would never introduce house- hold suffrage pure and simple. The bill became in the end a measure to establish household suffrage pure and simple in the towns. The leading spirits of the government were now deter- mined to carry a reform bill that session, come what would. They were partly influenced, no doubt, by the conviction that it was better to settle the question on some terms, once for all, and let the country have done with it. But, as they themselves avowed more than once, they were also influenced by the idea that if the country would have reform, the men in office might as well keep in office and give it to them. This is not high-minded statesmanship, to be sure; but high-minded statesmanship not uncom- monly conducts men out of office, instead of keeping them in it. One by one, all Mr. Disraeli's checks, balances, and securities were abandoned. The dual vote, a proposal to give a double-voting power in boroughs to a rate-paying occupier who also paid 20 shillings of assessed taxes, was laughed out of the bill. The voting-paper principle was aban- doned. The fancy franchise was swept clear away. A lodger franchise was introduced. At last it came to a struggle about the nature of the main franchise in boroughs. The bill fixed it that any one rated to the relief of the poor in a borough should have the vote, provided that he had lived two years in the house for which he was rated. An amend- ment, reducing the two years of qualification to one, was carried in the teeth of the government by a large majority. 'I 1 ho government, therefore, agreed to accept the amend- ment. At various stages of the bill Mr. Disraeli kept announcing that if this or that amendment were carried against the government, the government would not go any farther with the bill; but when the particular amendment was carried, Mr. Disraeli always announced that the minis- ters had changed their minds after all, and were willing to accept the new alteration. At last this little piece of for- mality began to be regarded by the house as mere cere- monial. The borough franchise was now reduced to house- hold suffrage with a qualification; but that qualification was one of great importance. If Mr. Disraeli could suc- ceed in inducing the house to admit the qualification, he would have good reason to say that he had kept his promise 298 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to Lord Cranborne, and that lie bad not consented to accept household suffrage pure and simple. The clause as it now stood excluded from the franchise the compound householder. The compound householder figures largely in the debates of that session. The controversialists on both sides battled for him, like the Greeks and Trojans fighting round the body of Patroclus. He sprang at once into prominence and into history. He and his claims were the theme of discussion and conversation everywhere. Those who did not know what the compound householder was could not possibly have understood the reform debates of 18G7. The story goes that a witty public man being asked by a French friend to explain who the compound householder was, described him as the male of the femme incomprise. The compound householder, in plain fact, was the occupier of one of the small houses the tenants of which were not themselves rated to the relief of the poor. By certain acts of parliament the owners of small houses were allowed to compound for their rates.- The landlord became himself responsible to the parochial authorities, and not the tenant. He paid up the rates on a number of those tenements, and he received a certain reduction in consideration of his assuming the responsibility and saving the local authorities the trouble of collecting by paying up the amounts in a lump sum. As a matter of fact, it need hardly be said that the occupier did actually pay the rates; for the landlord took good care to add the amount in each case to the rent he demanded; but the occupier's name did not appear on the rate-book, nor had he any direct dealing with the parish authorities. The com- pound householders were so numerous that they were said actually to constitute two-thirds of all the occupiers under £10. In some boroughs, it was stated, an occupier's franchise excluding compound householders would sud- denly reduce with sweeping hand the number of existing voters, and the reform bill of Lord Derby's government would be a disfranchising, instead of an enfranchising, measure. A meeting of the Liberal party was held at Mr. Glad- stone's house to decide upon the course which should be taken. Mr. Gladstone had a device of his own to meet the difficulty. His idea was that a line should be drawn, below which houses should not be rated in any form; but that . A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 299 hi every case where a house was rated, the occupier should be entitled to a vote, whether he or his landlord paid the rates. Mr. Gladstone was anxious that the very poorest occupiers should at once be relieved of the obligation to pay rates and not allowed to give a vote. He, and Mr. Bright as well, were haunted by the fear of carrying the vote down too low in the social sale, and introducing to the franchise that class which Mr. Bright described as the residuum of the constituency. Now it must be remembered that the Liberal party, if they acted together, could com- mand a majority. They were, therefore, in a position to compel Mr. Disraeli to adopt the principle recommended by Mr. Gladstone. But a remarkable difference of opinion suddenly sprang up. After the meeting at Mr. Glad- stone's house a group made up principally of the more ad- vanced Liberals began to doubt the advantage of Mr. Gladstone's proposed low-water line. They thought it would be better to let all householders in boroughs have the vote without distinction. They held a meeting of their own in the tea-room of the House of Commons, and they resolved to inform Mr. Gladstone that they could not support his amendment. They were known from that lime forth as the "Tea-room Party;" and they came in for nearly as much condemnation as if they had been concerned in a new gunpowder plot. By their _ secession Mr. Glad- stone's scheme was defeated, and it was made certain that there were not to be two classes of householders, the rated and unrated, in the boroughs. A bold attempt was made then to get rid of the compounding system altogether; and at length, to the surprise of all parties, the government yielded to the pressure. They undertook to abolish the system absolutely, to have the name of every occupier put on the ratebook, to give every occupier the vote, and, in a word, to establish household suffrage pure and simple in the borough constituencies. The tea-room party bad con- qnered both ways. They had prevailed against Mr. Glad- stone, and prevailed over Mr. Disraeli. .Many hard words, as we have said, were flung at the tea-room party. Mr. Bright denounced them in severe and scornful language, and asked what could be done in parlia- mentary politics if every man was to pursue his own little game? "A costermonger and donkey," Mr. Bright said, "would take a week to travel from here to London" (he 300 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. was addressing a meeting in Birmingham); "and yet, by running athwart the London and North-western line, they might bring to total destruction a great express train." "Thus," he went on to say, "very small men, who during their whole political lives have not advanced the question of reform by one hair's-breadth, or by one moment in time, can at a critical hour like this throw themselves athwart the objects of a great party, and mar, it may be, a great measure that ought to affect the interests of the country beneficially for all time." The tea-room party, ventured, no doubt, upon a serious parliamentary responsibility when they thus struck out a little policy for themselves indepen- dently of their leaders. Yet it can hardly be questioned now that they were in the right as regards their principle. It was a great advantage- to get rid of all complications, and all various graduations of franchise, and come at once to the intelligible point of household suffrage. As Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright had themselves admitted and argued at various stages of the debates, it was decidedly objectionable to have the question of franchise mixed up with varying parochial arrangements of any kind, and left to depend on the views of a vestry here and a vestry there. Nor were the tea-room party mutineers who by their con- duct had enabled the enemy to triumph. On the contrary they were at the worst only adventurous volunteers who at some risk had won a more decided victory over the enemy than their regular chiefs once ventured to think pos- sible. Certain of them were, perhaps, a little inclined to give themselves airs, because of the risk they had run and the success they had won. But it is only justice to some of them at least to say that they had acted from deliberate calculation as well as from a sense of duty. They were convinced that the governm ;nt, if pressed, would give in to anything rather than allow the bill to be defeated; and they thought they saw a sudden and secure opportunity for establishing the borough franchise at once on the sound and simple basis of household suffrage. The struggle now was practically over. The bill had become from a sham a reality; from unmeaning complica- tion it had grown into straightforward clearness. It accomplished a great purpose by establishing a sound prin- ciple. It had gone much farther in the way of pure demo- cracy than Mr. Bright had ever proposed, or probably ever A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 301 desired, to go. During the discussions Mr. Mill intro- duced an amendment to admit women who were registered occupiers as well as men to the franchise; in other words, to make the qualification one of occupation only, without reference to sex. The majority of the house were at first disposed to regard this proposition as something merely droll, and to deal with it only in the spirit of pleasantry, and with facetious commentary; but the debate proved a very interesting, grave, and able discussion, and it was the opening of a momentous chapter of political controversy. Mr. Mill got seventy-three members to follow him into the lobby; and although one hundred and ninety-six voted the other way, he was probably well content with the result of the debate. He also raised the question of the representa- tion of minorities, but he did not press it to any positive test. It had, however, a certain distinct triumph before the completion of the measure. When the bill went up to the House of Lords, Lord Cairns moved an amendment to the effect that in places returning three members no elector should vote for more than two. This amendment was carried, although Mr. Disraeli had announced before- hand that the government thought such an arrangement would be " erroneous in principle and pernicious in prac- tice;" and although it had been strongly opposed by Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright. The new principle, it will be seen, acknowledges the propriety of securing a certain pro- portion of representation to minorities. In a constituency with three representatives each elector votes for only two. Obviously, then, the third is the representative of a minority. It does not by any means follow, however, that he is always the representative of a minority differing in political opinions from the majority. In some of the con- st it uencies to which the bill gave three members, it so hap- pens that there is a majority of one way of thinking large- enough to secure the return of all three members. There are electors enough for one party to secure a majority to the two candidates who are especially popular, and yet to spare as many votes as will enable them to carry a third candidate also. Thus the new principle does not in prac- tice always accomplish the object for which it was intended. Indeed, it is plain that in the very instances in which the advocates of the representation of minorities would most desire to secure it — those of places where the minority had 302 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. before no chance of obtaining any expression of their views — they would still have little chance under the new arrangement, and would be most easily overborne by com- bination, discipline, and skill on the part of the majority. The new arrangement was of moment, however, as the first recognition of a principle which may possibly yet have a fuller .development; and which if it does can hardly fail to have a serious effect on the present system of government by party. One or two clauses of some importance, not bearing on the general question of reform, were introduced. It was established that parliament need not dissolve on the death of the sovereign, and that members holding places of profit from the crown need not vacate their seats on the acceptance of another office; on their merely passing from one department to another. This was a reasonable and judicious alteration. It is of great importance that when a member of parliament joins an administration, he should give his constituents an opportunity of saying whether they are content to be represented by a member of the government. But when they have answered that question in the affirmative, it can hardly be necessary to undergo the cost and trouble of a new election if their representative happens to be transferred from one office to another. A constituency may have good reason for refusing to elect a member of the administration; but they can hardly have any good reason for rejecting a secretary for the colonies whom they were willing to retain as their representative while he was secretary for India. We are glad, however, that the change in the law was not made a little sooner. History could ill have spared Sir John Pakington's speech at his re-election for Droitwich. The reform bill passed through its final stage on August 15th, 18G7. We may summarize its results thus concisely. It enfranchised in boroughs all male householders rated for the relief of the poor, and all lodgers resident for one year, and paying not less than £10 a year rent; and in counties, persons of property of the clear annual value of £5, and occupiers of lands or tenements paying £12 a year. It disfranchised certain small boroughs, and reduced the representation of other constituencies; it created several new constituencies; among others the borough of Chelsea and the borough of Hackney. It gave a third member to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leeds; it gave a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 303 representative to the University of London. It enacted that where there were to be three representatives, each elector should vote for only two candidates; and that in the city of London, which has four members, each elector should only vote for three. The Irish and Scotch reform bills were put off for another year. We may, however, anticipate a little, and dispose of the Scotch and Irish bills at once; the more especially as both, but especially the Irish bill, proved to be very trivial and unsatisfactory. The Scotch bill gave Scotland a borough franchise the same as that of England; and a county franchise based either on £5 clear annual value of property, or an occupation of £14 a year. The government proposed at first to make the county occupation franchise the same as that in England. All qualification as to rating for the poor was, however, struck out of the bill by amendments, the rating systems of Scotland being unlike those of England. The govern- ment then put in £14 as the equivalent of the English occupiers £12 rating franchise. Some new seats were given to Scotland which the government at first proposed to get by increasing the number of members of the House of Commons, but which they were forced by amendments to obtain by the disfranchisement of some small English bor- oughs. The Irish bill is hardly worth mentioning. It left the county franchise as it was, £12, reduced the borough franchise from £8 to £4, and did nothing in the way of redistribution. While the English reform bill was passing through its several stages, the government went deliberately out of their way to make themselves again ridiculous with regard to the public meetings in Hyde Park. The reform league con- vened a public meeting to be held in that park on May 6th. Mr. Walpole, on May 1st, issued a proclamation intended to prevent the meeting, and warning all persons not to attend it. The league took legal advice, found that their meeting woidd not be contrary to law, and accordingly issued a counter-proclamation asserting their right, and declaring that the meeting would beheld in order to main- tain it. The government found out a little too late that the league had strict law on their side. The law gave to the crown control over the parks, and the right of prose- cuting trespassers of any kind; but it gave the administra- tion no power to anticipate trespass front the holding of a 304 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. public meeting and to prohibit it in advance. The meet- ing was held; it was watched by a large body of police and soldiers; but it passed over very quietly, and indeed to curious spectators looking for excitement seemed a very humdrum sort of affair. Mr. Walpole, the home secretary, who had long been growing weary of the thankless troubles of his office at a time of such excitement, and who was not strong enough to face the difficulties of the hour, resigned his post. Mr. Walpole retained, however, his seat in the cabinet. "He will sit on these benches," said Mr. Dis- raeli in announcing to the House of Commons his colleague's resignation of the home office; "and although not a min- ister of the crown, he ,will be one of her majesty's respon- sible advisers." He was a man highly esteemed by all parties; a man of high principle and of amiable character. But he was not equal to the occasion when any difficulty arose, and he contrived to put himself almost invariably in the wrong when dealing with the reform league. He exerted his authority at a wrong time, and in a wrong way; and he generally withdrew from his wrong position in somewhat too penitent and humble an attitude. He strained too far the authority of his place, and he did not hold high enough its dignity. He was succeeded in office by Mr. Gathorne Hardy, who left the poor law board to become home secretary. The reform bill then was passed. The " leap in the dark" was taken. Thus did the prime minister, Lord Derby, describe the policy of himself and his colleagues. The phrase has become historical, and its authorship is invari- ably ascribed to Lord Derby. It was in fact Lord Cran- borne who first used it. During the debates in the House of Commons he had taunted the government with taking a leap in the dark. Lord Derby adopted the expression, and admitted it to be a just description of the movement which he and his ministry had made. It is impossible to deny that the government acted sagaciously in settling the question so promptly and so decisively; in agreeing to almost anything rather than postpone the settlement of the controversy even for another year. But one is still lost in wonder at the boldness, the audacity, with which the Conservative government threw away in succession every principle which they had just been proclaiming essen- tial to Conservatism and put on Radicalism as a garment. A HISTORY OFOUROWft TIMES. 305 On a memorable occasion Mr. Disraeli said that Peel caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes. Now he himself had ventured on a still less scrupulous act of spoliation. He helped to turn the Whigs out of their clothes in order that he might get into the garments. Nothing could have been more surprising than the courage with which he undertook the series of trans- formations, unless, perhaps, the elaborate simplicity with which toward the end he represented himself as one who was acting in the truest spirit of consistency. Few could help being impressed, or at least imposed upon, by the calm earnestness of his declarations. Juvenal's Greek deceived the very eyesight of the spectators by the cleverness of his personation. Mr. Disraeli was almost equally successful. The success was not, perhaps, likely to conduce to an exalted political morality. The one thing, however, which most people were thinking of in the autumn of 1867 was that the reform question was settled at last, and for a long time. Nothing more would be heard of the unenfran- chised millions and the noble workingman, on the one hand; of the swart mechanic's bloody thumbs and the reign of anarchy, on the other. Mr. Lowe is entitled to the last word of the controversy. The workingmen, the majority, the people who live in the small houses, are enfranchised; "we must now," Mr. Lowe said, "at least educate our new masters." CHAPTER LIII. THE FENIAN MOVEMENT. The session of parliament which passed the reform bill was not many days over when the country was startled by the news that a prison van had been stopped and broken open under broad day in Manchester, and two political prisoners rescued from the custody of the police. The political prisoners were Fenians. We have spoken already of the Fenian movement as one of the troubles now gather- ing around the path of successive governments, [t was at an early period of Lord Russell's administration that the public first heard anything substantial about the movement. On February 16th, 1866,' parliament was surprised not a little 306 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. by an announcement which the government had to make. Lord Russell told the House of Lords, and Sir George Grey announced to the House of Commons, that the gov- ernment intended to suspend the habeas corpus act in Ireland, and that both houses of parliament were to be called together next day for the purpose of enabling the ministry to carry out this resolve. The next day was Sat- urday, an unusual day for a parliamentary sitting at any early part of the session; unusual, indeed, when the session had only just begun. The government could only excuse such a summons to the Lords and Commons on the plea of absolute urgency; and the word soon went round in the lobbies that a serious discovery had been made; and that a conspiracy of a formidable nature was preparing a rebel- lion in Ireland. The two houses met next day, and a measure was introduced to suspend the habeas corpus act in Ireland, and give the lord-lieutenant almost unlimited power to arrest and detain suspected persons. The meas- ure was run through its three readings in both houses in the course of the day. The House of Lords had to keep up their sitting until the document should arrive from Osborne to authorize the commissioners to give the queen's assent to the bill. The Lords, therefore, having discussed the subject sufficiently to their satisfaction at a compara- tively early hour of the evening, suspended the sitting until eleven at night. They then resumed, and waited, patiently for the authority to come from Osborne, where the queen was staying. Shortly before midnight the needful authority arrived, and the bill became law at twenty minutes before one o'clock on Sunday morning. It seems almost superfluous to say that such a bill was not allowed to pass without some comment, and even some opposition, in the House of Commons. Mr. Bright made a speech which has always since been regarded as in every sense one of the very finest he ever delivered. That was the speech in which he declared his conviction that, " if the majority of the people of Ireland, counted fairly out, had their will and had the power, they would unmoor the island from its fastenings in the deep, and move it at least two thousand miles to the west." That was in itself a sufficiently humiliating confession for au English states- man to have to make. It was .not humiliating to Mr. Bright personally; for he had always striven to obtain A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIM MS. 307 such legislation for Ireland as should enable her to feel that hers was a friendly partnership with England, and not a compulsory and unequal connection. But it was humbling to any Englishman of spirit and sense to have to acknowledge that, after so many years and centuries of experiment and failure, the government of England had not yet learned the way to keep up the connection between the countries without coercion acts and measures of repres- sion in Ireland. No Englishman who puts the question fairly to his conscience will deny that, if lie were consider- ing a matter that concerned a foreign country and a for- eign government, he would regard the mere fact as a con- demnation of its system of rule. It would be idle to try to persuade him that it was all the fault of the Poles if the Russians had to govern by mere force in Poland; all the fault of the Venetians if the Austrians could never get beyond a mere encampment in Venetia. His strong com- mon sense, unclouded in such a case by prejudice, would at once enable him to declare with conviction, that where, after long trial, a state cannot govern a population except by sheer force, the cause must be sought in the badness of the governing system rather than in the perversity of hu- man nature among the governed. Mr. Mill who spoke in the same debate, put the matter effectively enough when he observed that if the captain of a ship, or the master of a school, has continually to have recourse to violent meas- ures to keep crew or boys in order, we assume, without asking for further evidence, that there is something wrong in his system of management. Mr. Mill dwelt with force and justice on one possible explanation of the difficulty which English governments seem always to encounter in Ireland. He spoke of the "eternal political non possumus" which English statesmen opposed to every special demand for legislation in Ireland; a noil possumus which, as he truly said, only means, "we don't do it in England." The habeas corpus act was, therefore, suspended once more in Ireland. The government acknowledged that they had to deal with a new rebellion in that country. That rebellion this time might have sprung up from the ground, so suddenly did the knowledge of it seem to have came upon the vast majority of the public here. Yet there had for a long time been symptoms enough to give warning of such a movement, and it soon proved to be formidable to a degree which not many even then suspected. 308 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. The Fenian movement differed from nearly all previous movements of the same kind in Ireland, in the fact that it arose and grew into strength without the patronage or the help of any of those who might be called the natural leaders of the people. In 1708 and in 1848 the rebellion bore unmistakably what may be called the "follow-my- leader" character. Some men of great ability, or strength of purpose, or high position, or all attributes combined, made themselves leaders, and the others followed. In 1798 the rising had the impulse of almost intolerable per- sonal as well as national grievance; but it is doubtful whether any formidable and organized movement might have been made but for the leadership of such men as Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. In 1848 there were such impulses as the traditional leadership of Smith O'Brien, the indomitable purpose of Mitchel, and the impassioned eloquence of Meagher. But Fenianism seemed to have sprung out of the very soil of Ireland itself. Its leaders were not men of high position, or distinguished name, or proved ability. They were not of aristocratic birth; they were not orators; they were not powerful writers. It was not the impulse of the American civil war that engendered Fenianism ; although that war had great influence on the manner in which Fenianism shaped its course. Fenianism had been in existence, in fact, although it had not got its peculiar name, long before the American war created a new race of Irishmen — the Irish- American soldiers — to turn their energies and their mili- tary inclination to a new purpose. Agitation in the form of secret association had never ceased in Ireland. One result of prosecutions for seditious speaking and writing in Ireland is invariably the encourage- ment of secret combination. Whether it be right or wrong, necessary or unnecessary, to prosecute for seditious speaking or writing in Ireland, is not a matter with Avhich we have to concern ourselves when we make this state- ment. We state a fact which cannot be controverted. It is assuredly a fact to be taken into the gravest considera- tion by those who are entrusted with the maintenance of order. It ought at least to impress them with a sense of the necessity for being cautious how they run the risk of government prosecutions for mere indiscretions of pen gp tongue. "When popular discontent* •ire abroad,*' - A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 309 Curran, condemning the policy of the Irish administration of his day, "a wise government would put them into a hive of glass; you hid them." The suspension of the habeas corpus act, in consequence of the 1848 movement, led, as a matter of course, to secret association. Before the trials of the Irish leaders were well over in that year, a secret association was formed by a large number of young Irish- men in cities and towns. It was got up by young men of good character and education; it spread from town to town; it was conducted with the most absolute secrecy; it had no informer in its ranks. It had its oath of fidelity and its regular leaders, its nightly meetings, and even to a limited and cautious extent its nightly drillings. It was a failure, because in the nature of things it could not beany- thing else. The young men had not arms enough any- where to render them formidable in anyone place; and the necessity of carrying on their communications with differ- ent towns in profound secrecy, and by roundabout ways of communication, made a prompt concerted action impos- sible. After two or three attempts to arrange for a simul- taneous rising had failed, or had ended only in little abortive and isolated ebullitions, the young men became discouraged. Some of the leaders went to France, some to the United States, some actually to England ; and the association melted away. That was the happiest end it could possibly have had. Concerted action would only have meant the useless waste of a few scores or hundreds of brave young lives. Some years after this, the " Phoenix" clubs began to be formed in Ireland. They were for the most part associations of the peasant class, and were on that account, perhaps, the more formidable and earnest; for the secret association of which we have already spoken was mainly the creation of young men of a certain culture who felt ashamed and disappointed that the Young Ireland movement should have ended without a more gallant dis- play of arms. The Phoenix clubs led to some of the ordi- nary prosecutions and convictions; and that was all. Up to that time it did not seem to have entered into the mind of any official English statesman that such things might pos- sibly be a consequence and not a cause. It was thought enough to put them down and punish them when they came. It was accounted an offense against law and order hardly less flagrant than that of the secret agitators them- 310 A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. selves to ask whether, perhaps, there was not some real cause for all this agitation, with which serious statesman- ship could easily deal if it only took a little honest thought and trouble. After the Phoenix associations came the Fenians. " This is a serious business now," said a clever English literary man when he heard of the Fenian organi- zation; "the Irish have got hold of a good name this time; the Fenians will last." The Fenians are said to have been the ancient Irish militia. In Scott's "Antiquary," Hector M' In tyre, jealous for the honor and the genuineness of Ossian's songs of Selma, recites a part of one in which Ossian asks St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, whether he ventures to compare his psalms " to the tales of the bare-armed Fenians." There can be no doubt that the tales of the bare-armed Fenians were passed from mouth to mouth of the Celts in Ireland and the highlands of Scotland, from a time long before that at which any sooth- sayer or second-sighted sage could have dreamed of the land- ing of Strongbow and the perfidy of the wife of Breffni. There was an air of Celtic antiquity and of mystery about the name of Fenian which merited the artistic approval given to it by the impartial English writer whose observa- tion has just been quoted. The Fenian agitation began about 1858, and it came to perfection about the middle of the American civil war. It was ingeniously arranged on a system by which all authority converged toward one center, and those farthest away from the seat of direction knew proportionately less and less about the nature of the plans. They had to obey instructions only, and it was hoped by this means weak or doubtful men would not have it in their power prematurely to reveal, to betray, or to thwart the purposes of their leaders. A convention was held in America, and the Fenian association was resolved into a regular organized institution. A provisional govern- ment was established in the neighborhood of Union Square, New York, with all the array and mechanism of an actual working administration. Soon after this there began to be frequent visitations of mysterious strangers to Ireland. The emigration of the Irish to America had introduced an entirely new element into political calculations. One of the men of 1848, who took refuge in the United States at first, and who afterward went to Canada and became very influential there, wrote home from New York to say that A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 3U "we have the long arm of the lever here." There was much truth in this view of the state of things. The Irish grew rapidly in numbers and in strength all over the United States. The constitutional system adopted there enabled them almost at once to become citizens of the republic. They availed themselves of this privilege almost universally. The American political system, whatever may be thought of its various merits or defects, is peculiarly adapted to till the populations with a quick interest in politics. There are undoubtedly certain classes among the wealthier who are so engrossed in money-making and in business as to have little time left to trouble themselves about politics; and there are many who, out of genuine or affected distaste for noisy controversy and the crowd, hold aloof deliberately from all political organizations. But the working part of the community, especially in the cities, are almost invariably politicians. Every election, every political trial of strength, has its practical beginning at the primary meetings of the electors of each place. These meetings are attended largely, one might almost say mainly, by the humbler classes of voters. From the primary meet- ing to the fall elections, and from the ordinary fall elec- tions to the choice of the president, the system is so adjusted as to take the humblest voter along with it. The Irish workingman, who had never probably had any chance of giving a vote in his own country, found himself in the United States a person of political power, whose vote was courted by the leaders of different parties, and whose sen- timents were flattered by the wire-pullers of opposing fac- tions, lie was not slow to appreciate the value of this influence in its hearing on that political question which in all the sincerity of his American citizenship was still the dearest to his hear,t — the condition of Ireland. In the United States — we do not say in Canada — the differences between Irishmen of different religions and factions have not much interfered with their views on purely Irish ques- tions. Dislike of England, or at least of English govern- ments, prevails among many Irishmen from the northern province settled in the United States, who assuredly, if they had remained at home, would have brought up their children in devotion to English rule and the traditions of the House of Orange. But of course the vast, the over- whelming majority of the Irish in America is made up of. 312 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TTME8. men who have come from the provinces of Leinster, Mini- ster, and Connaught, and whose anti-English sentiments have only become stronger and stronger in proportion to the length of time and distance that divided them from their old home. If it were to he distinctly declared that every Irishman in the United States was in his heart an enemy of England, there might probably be found instances enough the other way to discredit the literal accuracy of the assertion. But we know with what contempt Dr. Johnson spoke of the literal accuracy which replied to the statement that a certain orchard contained no fruit by showing that it actually had three apples and four pears. To all who do not insist on that sort of accuracy it will be proper to say that, speaking generally, all the Irish population in the United States is animated by feelings of hostility to English dominion in Ireland. Eilled with this feeling, the Irish in the states made their political organizations the means of keeping up a constant agitation, having for its object to secure the co-operation of American parties in some designs against England. One of the great political parties into which the northern states were divided made it a part of their electioneering business to conciliate the Irish vote in the populous cities. They pro- fessed great affection for Ireland and sympathy with Irish grievances; they gave the word of order to their American followers to patronize the Irish; their leaders were often to be seen on the platform at Irish meetings; the municipal authorities of some of the great towns took part in the Irish processions on St. Patrick's Day; more than once the American mayor of an American city exhibited himself arrayed in garments of green on that anniversary. The Irish vote was at one time absolutely necessary to the democratic party in the United States; and the democratic party were ready to give a seeming countenance to any scheme which happened for the moment to allure the hopes of the Irish populations. After the civil war the feelings of almost all the political parties in the states, in the south as well as in the north, were hostile to England. At such a moment and under such a condition of things, it cannot be matter of surprise if the hopes of the Irish populations were excited to the highest degree. The confidence felt by so many persons in this country that the Alabama controversy had been dropped forever by American statesmen, had not the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 313 slightest support from the bearing or resolve of any of the great American parties. It is quite easy to imagine a con- dition of things just then, which would have led a light- hearted American president to try to bring together all classes of the American population in a war against England. The length of the almost indefensible Canadian frontier line would have given America the immense advan- tage of being able to choose her own battle-ground. Such a war would at one time have been welcomed with enthu- siasm all over the states. The objections of calm and cautious minds would have been borne down and swept away in a very wave of popular passion. It is not surpris- ing if, under such circumstances, many of the Fenian leaders in America should have thought it easy to force the hand of the government, and to bring on a war with England. At all events, it is not surprising if they should have believed that the American government would put forth little effort to prevent the Fenians from using the frontier of the United States as a basis of operations against England. The civil war had introduced a new figure to the world's stage. This was the Irish-American soldier. He had the bright, humorous countenance of the Celt, with the pecu- liar 1 idleness and military swagger of the American "boy in blue." He had some of the American shrewdness grafted on to his Irish love of adventure. In thousands of cases he spoke with an American accent, and had never set foot on the soil of that Ireland from which his fathers came, and which, to do him justice, he loved with a passion at (Hire romantic and sincere. He might have fought for the north, or he might have fought for the south. He might have ranged himself under the colors borne by Thomas Francis Meagher — "Meagher of the Sword" — or he might have followed the fearless lead of "Pat Cleburne." Per- haps he was one of the Irish brigade who joined in the desperate charges up the heights of Fredericksburg; or perhaps he was one of the equally brave men who success- fully held those heights for the south. It was all the same when the interests of Ireland came to be concerned: he was ready to forget all differences in a companion- ship on that question. .Many of these men — thousands of them — were as sincerely patriotic y.\ their way as they were simple and br&ye. it , -M. - e. gay ''i-! they 314 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. were fastened on in some instances by adventurers, who fomented the Fenian movement out of the merest and the meanest self-seeking. Men swaggered about Union Square, New York, as Fenian leaders, who had not the faintest notion of risking their own valuable lives in any quarrel more dignified than a bar-room row in the sixth ward — "the Big Sixth" of New York. Some were making a living out of the organization — out of that, and apparently nothing else. The contributions given by poor Irish hack- drivers and servant girls, in the sincere belief that they were helping to man the ranks of an Irish army of inde- pendence, enabled some of these self-appointed leaders to wear fine clothes and to order expensive dinners. Of course something of this kind is to be said of every such organiza- tion. It is especially likely to be true of any organization got up in a country like America, where the field of agita- tion is open to everybody alike, with little of authority or prescription to govern the taking of places. But, in the main, it is only fair to say that the Fenian movement in the United States was got up, organized, and manned by persons who, however they may have been mistaken as to their ends and misguided as to their means, were single- hearted, unselfish, and faithfully devoted to their cause. It is necessary that this should be said somewhat emphati- cally, for the mind of the English public has always been curiously misled with regard to the character of the Fenian organization. In this, as in other instances, the public conscience of England has too often been lulled to sleep by the assurance that all who reject the English point of view must be either fools or knaves, and that there is no occa- sion for sensible men to take any account of their demands or their protestations. It may be well, too, to emphasize the fact that the plans of the Fenians were not by any means the fantastically foolish projects that it is the custom here to believe them. They resembled in some respects the projects of the Polish insurgents, which we have described in another chapter of this work. Like the Polish schemes, they were founded on calculations which did not turn out as might have been expected, but which, nevertheless, might very easily have come right. The Polish rebellion was started in the hope that some of the European powers would come to the help of Poland; and no European power did come to its help. But there was at one time, as we A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 315 know now, ;i very great chance indeed that such help would be strongly given. The Fenian rising was inspired by the hope that the United States and England would be at war; and we know now that they were more than once on the very verge of war. It is, we believe, quite certain that the officers were already named by the American authorities who were to have conducted an invasion of Canada. Those who did not happen to have known Amer- ica and American life in the days shortly after the close of the civil war, can have hardly any idea of the bitterness of feeling against England that prevailed then all over the states, in the south just as much as in the north. If the English government had peremptorily and absolutely re- jected the idea of arbitration with regard to the Alabama claims, at any time between 1805 and 1808, it is all but certain that America would have declared war. An American invasion of Canada would have made a Fenian rising in Ireland a very different trouble from that which under the actual conditions it afterward proved to be. Meanwhile there began to be a constant mysterious influx of strangers into Ireland. They were strangers who for the most part had Celtic features and the bearing of American soldiers. They distributed themselves throughout the towns and villages; most of them had relatives or old friends here and there, to whom they told stories of the share they had had in the big wars across the Atlantic and of the preparations that were making in the states for the accomplishment of Irish independence. All this time the Fenians in the states were filling the columns of friendly journals with accounts of the growth of their organization and announcements of the manner in which it was to be directed to its purpose. After awhile things went so far that the Fenian leaders in the United States issued an address, announcing that their officers were going to Ire- land to raise an army there for the recovery of the country's independence; of course the governmenl here were soon quite prepared to receive them; and indeed the authorities easily managed to keep themselves informed by means of spies of all that was going on in Ireland. The spy system was soon flourishing in full force. Every considerable gather- ing of Fenians had among its numbers at least one per- son who generally professed a yet fiercer devotion to the cause than any of the rest, and who was in the habit of 316 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. carrying to Dublin Castle every night his official report of what his Fenian colleagues had been doing. It is posi- tively stated that in one instance a Protestant detective in the pay of the government actually passed himself Off as a Catholic, and took the sacrament openly in a Catholic church in order to establish his Catholic orthodoxy in the eyes of his companions. One need not be a Catholic in order to understand the grossness of the outrage which conduct like this must seem to be in the eyes of all who believe in the mysteries of the Catholic faith. Mean- while the head center of Fenianism in America, James Stephens, who had borne a part in the movement of 1848, arrived in Ireland. He was arrested in company of Mr. James Kickham, the author of many poems of great sweet- ness and beauty ; a man of pure and virtuous character. Stephens was committed to Richmond prison, Dublin, early in November, 1865 ; but before many days had passed the country was startled by the news that he had contrived to make his escape. The escape was planned with skill and daring. For a time it helped to strengthen the impression on the mind of the Irish peasantry that in Stephens there had at last been found an insurgent leader of adequate courage, craft, and good fortune. Stephens disappeared for a moment from the stage. In the meantime disputes and dissensions had arisen among the Fenians in America. The schism had gone so far as to lead to the setting up of two separate associations. There were of course distracted plans. One party was for ail invasion of Canada; another pressed for operations in Ireland itself. The Canadian attempt actually was made. A small body of Fenians, a sort of advance guard, crossed the Niagara river on the night of May 31st, 1866, occupied Fort Erie, and drove back the Canadian volun- teers who first advanced against them. For a moment a gleam of success shone on the attempt; but the United States enforced the neutrality of their frontier line with a sudden energy and strictness wholly unexpected by the Fenians. They prevented any further crossing of the river, and arrested several of the leaders on the American side. The Canadian authorities hurried up reinforcements; several Fenians were taken and shot ; others recrossed the river, and the invasion scheme was over. Then Stephens came to tho front ;iL r ;m>. It w$S only A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 317 for a moment. He had returned to New York, and lie now announced that he was determined to strike a blow in Ireland. Before long the impression was spread abroad that he had actually left the states to return to the scene of his proposed insurrection. The American-Irish kept streaming across the Atlantic, even in the stormy winter months, in the firm belief that before the winter had passed away, or at the farthest while the spring was yet young, Stephens would appear in Ireland at the head of an insurgent army. Not many, surely, of those actually living in Ireland could have had any faith in the possibility of such a movement having even a momentary success on Irish soil. All who knew anything of the condition of the country must have known that the peasantry were unarmed, and utterly unprepared for any such attempt; that the great majority of the populations everywhere were entirely opposed to such wild enterprises; that the Catholic clergy especially were endeavoring everywhere to keep their people back from secret organization or insurrectionary scheme. But the Irish-Americans, who had made their way into Ireland, were for the most part not acquainted with the condition of the country; and it was owing to their presence and their influence that at length an attempt at rebellion was actually made. Stephens did not reappear in Ireland. He made no attempt to keep his warlike promise. He may be said to have disappeared from the history of Fenianism. But the preparations had gone too far to be suddenly stopped. Many of his followers were idled with shame at the collapse of the enterprise on which they had risked so much, and they were impatient to give some sign of their personal energy and sincerity. It was hastily decided that something should be done. One yen- ture was a scheme for the capture of Chester Castle. The plan was that a sufficient number of the Fenians in England should converge toward the ancient town of Chester, should suddenly appear there on a given day in February, 1807, capture the castle, seize the arms they found there, cut the telegraph wires, make for Holyhead, but a short distance by rail, seize on some vessels there, and then steam for the Irish coast. The government were fully informed of the plot in advance; the police were actually on the look-out for the arrival of strangers in Chester, and the enterprise melted away. In March, l!S far as public influence was concerned, it was believed to be so influenced. There had therefore been for a long time an opinion growing up that something must be done 366 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to bring about a reform, and in 1867 a parliamentary select committee reported in favor of abandoning altogether the system of referring election petitions to a tribunal com- posed of members of the House of Commons. The pro- posal of this committee was, that every petition should be referred to one of the judges of the superior courts at Westminster, with power to decide both law and fact, and to report not only as to the seat but as to the extent of bribery and corruption in the constituency. The judges themselves strongly objected to having such duties imposed upon them. The lord chief justice stated on their behalf that he had consulted with them, and was charged by them one and all to convey to the lord chancellor " their strong and unanimous feeling of insuperable objection to undertaking functions the effect of which would be to lower and degrade the judicial office, and to destroy, or at all events materially impair the confidence of the public in the thorough impartiality and inflexible integrity of the judges, when in the course of their ordinary duties political matters come incidentally before them." Notwithstanding the objections of the judges, however, the government, after having made one or two unsuccessful experiments at a measure to institute a new court for the trial of election petitions, brought in a bill to refer such petitions to a single judge, selected from a list to be made by arrange- ment among the judges of the three superior courts. This bill, which was to be in operation for three years as an ex- periment, was carried without much difficulty. It has been renewed since that time, and slightly altered. The prin- ciple of referring election petitions to the decision of a legal tribunal remains in force, and it is very unlikely indeed that the House of Commons will ever recover its ancient privilege. Many members of that house still regret the change. They say, and not unreasonably, that with time and the purifying effect of public opinion the objections to the old system would have died away. A committee of the House of Commons would have come to regard bribery as all honest and decent men must in time regard it. They would acknowledge it a crime and brand it accordingly. So too it is surely probable that members of the House of Commons sitting to hear an election petition would have got over that low condition of political morals which allowed them to give or be suspected of giving their decis- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 367 ion for partisan purposes without regard to facts and to justice. On the other hand, it seems a strange anomaly that a judge may not only declare the candidate of the majority disentitled to a seat, hut declare the candidate of the minority entitled to it. In one celebrated case of an Irish election the candidate elected by an overwhelming majority was unseated by the decision of the judge; the candidate who had a very small minority of votes in his favor was installed in the seat. It was obviously absurd to call such a man the representative of the constituency. It is right to say that none of the effects anticipated by the chief justice were felt in England. The impartiality of the judges was never called in question. In Ireland it was otherwise, at least in some instances. Judges are rarely appointed in Ireland who have not held law office; and law office is usually obtained by parliamentary, in other words, by partisan service. There is not therefore always the same confidence in the impartiality of the judges in Ireland that prevails in England, and it must be owned that in one or two instances at least, the effect of referring an election petition to the decision of an Irish judge was not by any means favorable to the public faith either in the dignity or the impartiality of the bench. Of late years sonic really stringent measures have been taken against bribery. Several boroughs have been disfranchised altogether because of the gross and seemingly ineradicable corruption that prevailed there. Time, education, and public opinion will probably before long cleanse our political system of the stain of bribery. Before long surely it will be accounted as base to give as to take a bribe. The House of Lords too abandoned about this time one of their ancient usages; the custom of voting by proxy. A select, committee of the peers had recommended that the practice should be discontinued. It was defended of course, as every antiquated and anomalous practice is sure to be defended. It was urged, for example, that no men can be better qualified to understand the great political questions of the day than members of the House of Peers who are employed in the diplomatic service abroad, and that it is unfair to exclude these men from affirming their opinion by a vote, even though they cannot quit their posts and return home to give the vote in person. This small grievance, if it were one, was very properly held to 368 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. be of little account when compared with the obvious ob- jections to the practice. The House of Lords, however, were not willing absolutely and forever to give up the privil- ege. They only passed a standing order " that the practice of calling for proxies on a division be discontinued, and that two days' notice be given of any motion for the suspension of the order." It is not likely that any attempt will be made to suspend the order and. renew the obsolete practice. The government ventured this year on the bold but judicious step of acquiring possession of all the lines of telegraph, and making the control of communication by wire a part of the business of the post office. They did not succeed in making a very good bargain of it, and for a time the new management resulted in the most distracting confusion. But the country highly approved of the pur- chase. The post office has long been one of the best man- aged departments of the civil service. An important event in the year's history was the success- ful conclusion of the expedition into Abyssinia. We have already mentioned that much alarm had long been felt in the country with regard to the fate of a number of British subjects, men and women, who were held in captivity by Theodore, king of Abyssinia. A vague, mysterious interest hung around Abyssinia. It is a land which claims to have held the primitive Christians, and to have the bones of Saint Mark among its treasury of sacred relics. It held fast to the Christian faith, according to its own views of that faith, when Egypt flung it aside after the Arab inva- sion. The Abyssinians trace the origin of their empire back to the time of Solomon when the queen of Sheba visited him. The emperor or king of Abyssinia was the Prester John, the mysterious king-priest of the middle ages. If Sir John Mandeville may be accepted as any authority, that traveler avers that the title of Prester John rose from the fact that one of the early kings of Abyssinia went with a Christian knight into a Christian church in Egypt, and was so charmed with the service that he vowed he would thenceforth take the title of priest. He further declared, that " he wolde have the name of the first preest that wente out of the chirche; and his name was John." A traveler whom not a few Avere disposed to class with Sir John Mandeville, brought back to Europe in a later day some marvelous tales of the Abyssinians. An advertisement A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 369 prefixed to the third volume of Buffou's "History of Birds" acknowledges " the free and generous communica- tion which I had of the drawings and observations of Mr. James Bruce, who, returning from Numidia and the interior parts of Abyssinia, stayed in my house for several days, and made me a partaker of the knowledge which he had acquired in a tour no less fatiguing than hazardous." The publication of Brace's " Travels in Abyssinia," excited an interest which was further inflamed by the fierce con- troversy as to the accuracy of his statements and descrip- tions. Some at least of Brace's most disputed assertions have been confirmed since his day by the observations of other travelers. The curiosity as to the laud of Prester John was revived for modern times by Bruce and the con- troversy Bruce called up, and in addition to the public anxiety on account of the English prisoners, there was in England a certain vague expectation of marvelous results to come of a military expedition into the land of ancient mystery. Among the captives in Theodore's hands were Captain Cameron, her majesty's consul at Massawah, with his secretary and some servants; Mr. Hormuzd Eassam, a Syrian Christian and naturalized subject of the queen; Lieutenant Prideaux, and Dr. Blanc. These men were made prisoners while actually engaged on official business of the English government, and the expedition was there- fore formally charged to recover them. But there were several other captives as well, whom the commander-in- chief was (.'u joined to take under his protection. There were German missionaries and their wives and children, some of the women being English ; some teachers, artists, and workmen, all European. The quarrel which led to the imprisonment of these people was of old standing. Some of the missionaries had been four years in duress be- fore the expedition was scut out to their rescue. In April, L865, Lord Chelmsford had called the attention of the House of Lords to the treatment which certain British sub- jects were then receiving at the hands of Theodore, the negus or supreme ruler of Abyssinia. Theodore was a usurper. Few eastern sovereigns who have in any way made their mark on history, from Haroun-al-Kaschid and Saladin downward, can be described by any other name than that of usurper. Theodore seems to have been a man of strong barbaric nature, a compound of savage vir- 370 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tue and more than savage ambition and cruelty. He was a sort of wild and barbarous Philip of Macedon. He was open to passionate and lasting friendships; his nature was swept by stormy gusts of anger and hatred. His moods of fury and mildness came and went like the thunderstorms and calms of a tropic region. He had had a devoted friendship for Mr. Plowden, a former English consul at Massowah, who had actually lent Theodore his help in putting down a rebellion, and was killed by the rebels in consequence. When Theodore had crushed the rebellion, he slaughtered more than a hundred of the rebel prisoners as a sacrifice to the manes of his English Patroclus. Cap- tain Cameron was sent to succeed Mr. Plowden. It should be stated that neither Mr. Plowden nor Captain Cameron was appointed consul for any part of Abyssinia. Massowah is an island off the African shore of the Red Sea. It is in Turkish ownership and forms no part of Abyssinia, although it is the principal starting point to the interior of that country from Egypt, and the great outlet for Abyssinian trade. Consuls were sent to Massowah, accord- ing to the terms of Mr. Plowden's appointment in 1848, "for the protection of British trade with Abyssinia and with the countries adjacent thereto." Mr. Plowden, how- ever, had made himself an active ally of King Theodore, a course of proceeding which naturally gave great dissatisfac- tion to the English government. Captain Cameron, there- fore, received positive instructions to take no part in the quarrels of Theodore and his subjects, and was reminded by Lord John Russell that he held "no representative character in Abyssinia." It probably seemed to Theodore that the attitude of England was altered and unfriendly, and thus the dispute began which led to the seizure of the missionaries. Captain Cameron seems to have been much wanting in discretion, and Theodore suspected him of intriguing with Egypt. Theodore wrote a letter to Queen Victoria requesting help against the Turks and for some reason the letter remained unanswered. A story went that Theodore cherished a strong ambition to become the hus- band of the queen of England, and even represented that his descent from the queen of Sheba made him not unworthy of such an alliance. Whether he ever put his proposal into formal shape or not, it is certain that misunderstand- ings arose; that Theodore fancied himself slighted; and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 371 that he wreaked his wrongs by seizing all the British sub- jects within his reach, and throwing them into captivity. They were put in chains and kept in Magdala, his rock- based capital. Consul Cameron was among the number. He had imprudently gone back into Abyssinia from Massowah, and was at once pounced upon by the furious descendant of Prester John. The English government had a difficult task before them. It seemed not unlikely that the first movement made by an invading expedition might be the signal for the massacre of the prisoners. The effect of conciliation was therefore tried in the first instance. Mr. Rassam, who held the office of assistant British resident at Aden, a man who had acquired some distinction under Mr. Layard in exploring the remains of Nineveh and Babylon, was sent on a mission to Theodore with a message from Queen Victoria. Lieutenant Prideaux and Dr. Blanc were appointed to accompany him. Theodore played with Mr. Rassam for awhile, and then added him and his companions to the number of the captives. Theodore seems to have become more and more possessed with the idea that the English government were slighting him; and one or two unlucky mishaps or misconceptions gave him some excuse for cherishing the suspicion in his jealous and angry mind. At last an ultimatum was sent by Lord Stanley, demand- ing the release of the captives within three months on penalty of war. This letter does not seem to have ever reached the king's hands. The government made prepara- tions for war, and appointed Sir Robert Napier, now Lord Napier of- Magdala, then commander-in-chief of the army of Bombay, to conduct the expedition. A winter sitting of parliament tfas held in November, L867, supplies were voted, and the expeditionary force set out from Bombay. The expedition was well managed. Its work was, if we may use a somewhat- homely expression, done to time. The military difficulties were not great; hut the march had to be made across some four hundred miles of a moun- tainous and roadless country. The army had t<» make its way, now under burning sun, and now amid storms of rain and sleet, through broken and perplexing mountain gorges and over mountain heights ten thousand feet above the Bea level. Anything like a skillful resistance, even such resistance as savages oiighl well, have been expected 372 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to make, would have placed the lives of all the force in the utmost danger. The mere work of carrying the supplies safely along through such a country was of itself enough to keep the energies of the invading army on the utmost strain. Meanwhile the captives were dragging out life in the very bitterness of death. The' king still oscillated between caprices of kindness and impulses of cruelty. He sometimes strolled in upon the prisoners in careless undress; perhaps in European shirt and trousers, without a coat; and he cheerily brought with him a bottle of wine, which he insisted on the captives sharing with him. At other times he visited them in the mood of one who loved to feast his eyes on the anticipatory terrors of the victims he has determined to destroy. He had still great faith in the righting power of his Abyssinians. Sometimes he was in high spirits, and declared that he longed for an encounter with the invaders. At other moments, however, and when the steady, certain march of the English soldiers was bring- ing them nearer and nearer, he seems to have lost heart and become impressed with a boding conviction that nothing would ever go well with him again. One descrip- tion given of him as he looked into the gathering clouds of an evening sky and drew melancholy auguries of his own fate, makes him appear like a barbaric Antony watch- ing the rack dislimn and likening its dispersion to his own vanishing fortunes. Sir Robert Napier arrived in front of Magdala in the beginning of April, 1808. One battle was fought on the tenth of the month. Perhaps it ought not to be called a battle. It is better to say that the Abyssinians made such an attack on the English troops as a bull some- times makes on a railway train in full motion. The Abyssinians attacked with wild # courage*and spirit. The English weapons and the English discipline simply swept the assailants away. Others came on; wild charges were made again and again ; five hundred Abyssinians were killed and three times as many wounded. Not one of the English force was killed, and only ninteeen men were wounded. Then Theodore tried to come to terms. He sent back all the prisoners, who at last found themselves safe and free under the protection of the English flag. But Theo- dore would not surrender. Sir Robert Napier had there- fore no alternative but to order an assault on his strong- hold. Magdala was perched upon cliffs so high and steep, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 373 that it was said a cat could not climb them except at two points — one north, and one south — at each of which a nar- row path led up to a strong gateway. The attack was made by the northern path, and despite all the difficulties of the ascent, the attacking party reached the gate, forced it, and captured Magdala. Those who first entered found Theodore's dead body inside the gate. Defeated and despairing he had died in the high Roman fashion : by his own hand. The rock-fortress of King Theodore was destroyed by the conqueror. Sir Robert Napier was unwilling to leave- the place in its strength, because he had little doubt that if he did so it would be seized upon by a fierce Moham- medan tribe, the bitter enemies of the Abyssinian Chris- tians. He therefore dismantled and destroyed the place. "Nothing," to use his own language, "but blackened rock" remains of what was Magdala. The expedition returned to the coast almost immediately. In less than a week after the capture of Madgala it was on its march to the sea. On June 21st, the troopship Crocodile arrived at Plymouth with the first detachment of troops from Abyssinia. Nothing could have been more effectively planned, con- ducted, and timed than the whole expedition. It went and came to the precise moment appointed for every move- ment, like an express train. That was its great merit. Warlike difficulties it had none to encounter. No one can doubt that such difficulties too, had they presented them- selves, would have been encountered with success. The struggle was against two tough enemies, climate and moun- tain; and Sir Robert Napier won. He was made Baron Napier of Magdala, and received a pension. The thanks of both houses of parliament were voted to the army of Abyssinia and its commander. It was on this occasion that Mr. Disraeli delivered that astonishing burst of elo- quence which for the hour turned the attention of the country away from Lord Napier's triumph, and almost succeeded in making the capture of Magdala seem ridicu- lous. Lord Napier, Mr. Disraeli declared, had led the elephants of India bearing the artillery of Europe through African passes which might have startled the trapper of Canada and appalled the hunter of the Alps; and he wound ap by proclaiming, that "the standard oi St. George was hoisted upon the mountains of Rasselas." All 374 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. England smiled at the mountains of Easselas. The idea that Johnson actually had in his mind the very Abyssinia of geography and of history, when he described his Happy Valley, was in itself trying to gravity. Of the rhetorical passage, it is proper to speak in the words with which the author of " Easselas " once interrupted the too ambitious eloquence of a friend. "Sir, this is sorry stuff," said Dr. Johnson, "let me not hear you say it any more." The worst of Mr. Disraeli's burst of eloquence was, that it could not be got rid of so easily. The orator himself might ' have gladly consented to let it be heard no more. But the world would not so willingly let it die. Ever since that time, when the expedition to Abyssinia is mentioned in any company, a smile steals over some faces, and more than one voice is heard to murmur an allusion to the mountains of Easselas. The widow of King Theodore died in the English camp before the return of the expedition. Theodore's son Alamayou, aged seven years, was taken charge of by Queen Victoria, and for awhile educated in India. The boy was afterward brought to England; but he never reached maturity. All the care that could be taken of him here did not keep him from withering under the influence of an uncongenial civilization. His young life was as that of some exotic that will not long bear the transplantation to a foreign air. Doubtless too the premature tumult and troubles of his early years told heavily against him. " There is little difficulty," says the grim leach in the "Fair Maid of Perth," "in blighting a flower exhausted from having been made to bloom too soon." No attempt was made to interfere with the internal affairs of Abyssinia. Having destroyed their monarchy, the invaders left the Abyssinians to do as they would for the establishment of another. Sir Eobert Napier declared one of the chiefs a friend of the British, and this chief had some hopes of obtaining the sovereignty of the coun- try. But his rank as a friend of the British did not pre- vent him from being defeated in a struggle with a rival, and this latter not long after succeeded in- having himself crowned king under the title of John the Second. Another Prester John was set up in Abyssinia. A HISTORY OF OUli O WN TIMES. 375 CHAPTEE LVII. THE IRISH CHURCH. "The Irish Peasant to his Mistress" is the name of one of Moore's linest songs. The Irish peasant tells his mistress of his undying fidelity to her. "Through grief and through danger," her smile has cheered his way. "The darker our fortunes the purer thy bright love burned;" it turned shame into glory; fear into zeal. Slave as he was, with her to guide him he felt free. She had a rival; and the rival was honored, "while thou wert mocked and scorned." The rival wore a crown of gold; the other's brows were girt with thorns. The rival wooed him to temples, while the loved one lay hid in caves. " Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas, are slaves!" "Yet," he declares, "cold in the earth at thy feet I would rather be than wed. one I love not, or turn one thought from thee." The reader already understands the meaning of this poetic allegory. If he failed to appreciate its feeling it would be hardly possible for him to understand the modern history of Ireland. The Irish peasant's mistress is the Catholic church. The rival is the state church set up by English authority. The worshipers in the Catholic faith had long to lie hid in caves, while the followers of the state church worshiped in temples. The Irish peasant remained through centuries of persecution devotedly faithful to the Catholic church. Nothing could win or wean him from it. The Irish population of Ireland — there is meaning in the words — were made apparently by nature for the Catholic faith. Hardly any influence on earth could make the genuine Celtic Irishman a materialist, or what is called in France a Voltairean. For him, as for Schiller's immortal heroine, the kingdom of the spirits is easily opened. Half his thoughts, half his life, belong to a world other than the material world around him. The supernatural becomes almost the natural for him, The streams, the valleys, the hills of his native country are peopled by mystic forms and melancholy legends, which are all but living things for him. Even the railway has not banished from the land his familiar fancies and dreams. The "good people" still linger around the raths and glens. The banshee even 376 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. yet laments, in dirge-like waitings, the death of the repre- sentative of each ancient house. The very superstitions of the Irish peasant take a devotional form. They are never degrading. His piety is not merely sincere: it is even practical. It sustains him against many hard trials, and enables him to bear in cheerful patience, a life-long trouble. He praises God for everything; not as an act of mere devo- tional formality, but as by instinct; the praise naturally rising to his lips. Old men and women in Ireland who seem, to the observer, to have lived lives of nothing but privation and suffering, are heard to murmur with their latest breath the fervent declaration that the Lord was good to them always. Assuredly this genuine piety does not always prevent the wild Celtic nature from breaking forth into fierce excesses. Stormy outbursts of passion, gusts of savage revenge, too often sweep away the soul of the Irish peasant from the quiet moorings in which his natural piety and the teachings of his church would hold it. But deep down in his nature is that faith in the other world and its visible connection and intercourse with this; his reverence for the teaching which shows him a clear title to immortality. For this very reason, when the Irish peasant throws off altogether the guidance of religion, he is apt to rush into worse extravagances and excesses than most other men. He is not made to be a rationalist; he is made to be a believer. The Irishman was bound by ties of indescribable strength and complication to his own church. It was the teacher of that faith which especially commended itself to his nature and his temperament. It was made to be the symbol and the synonym of patriotism and nationality. Centuries of the cruel, futile attempt to force another religion on him in the name of his English conquerors had made him regard any effort to change his faith, even by argument, as the attempt of a spy to persuade a soldier to forsake his flag. To abandon the Catholic Church was, for the Irish- man, not merely to renounce his religion, but to betray his country. It seemed to him that he could not become a Protestant without also becoming a renegade to the national cause. The state church set up in Ireland was to him a symbol of oppression. It was Gessler's hat stuck up in the market-place; only a slave would bow down to it. It was idle to tell him of the free spirit of Protestantism ; A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 377 Protestantism stood represented for him by the authority which had oppressed his fellow-countrymen and fellow- Catholics for generations; which had hunted men to the caves and the mountains for being Catholic, and had hanged and disembowelled them for being Irish. Almost every page of the history of the two countries was read with a different interpretation by the Irishman and the English- men. To the English student Spenser was a patriot as well as a poet ; to the Irish scholar he was the bitterest and most un- thinking enemy of Ireland. To the Englishman of modern days Cromwell was a great statesman and patriot; the Irish- man thought of him only as the remorseless oppressor of Ire- land and the author of the massacre of Drogheda. The Eng- lishman hated James II. because he fought against England at the Boyne; the Irishman despised him because he gave up the fight so soon. Chesterfield was to Englishmen a fribble and a fop; he was to Irishmen of education the one English lord-lieutenant who ever seemed to have any com- prehension of the real needs of Ireland. Fox was denounced in England and adored in Ireland because he made himself the champion of the principle of governing Ireland accord- ing to Irish ideas. One of Bryon's chief offenses in the eyes of English Conservatives was that his enthusiasm for Ireland was almost equal to his enthusiasm for Greece. Again and again, in every generation, the object of ad- miration to Englishmen was the object of distrust or dis- like, or both, to all Irishmen who professed to have in thctn anything of the sentiment of nationality. All this feeling of antagonism was undoubtedly strengthened and sharpened by the existence of the state church. There was not one rational word to be said on principle for the maintenance of such an institution. Sydney Smith said, in his humorous way: "There is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have heard of Timbuctoo." No foreign states- man probably ever admired English institutions more than Count Cavour did. Yet Cavour wrote that the state church in Ireland "remains to the Catholics a representative of the cause of their miseries, a sign of defeat and oppression. It exasperates their sufferings and makes their humiliation more keenly felt." Every argumenl in favor of the state church in England was an argument against the state church in Ireland. The English church, as an institution, 378 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. is defended on the ground that it represents the religious convictions of the great majority of the English people and that it is qualified to take welcome charge of those who would otherwise be left without any religious care or teaching in England. The Catholics in Ireland were, to all other denominations together, as five to one; the state church represented only a small proportion of a very small minority. There was not the slightest pretext for affecting to believe that it could become the mother and the guardian orphans and waifs among the Irish people. In many places the Protestant clergyman preached to a dozen lis- teners; in some places he thought himself lucky when he could get half a dozen. There were places with a Protes- tant clergyman and Protestant church and absolutely no Protestant worshipers. There had not of late years been much positive hostility to the state church among the Irish people. Since the abolition of the system of tithes, since the dues of the parson were no longer collected by an armed military force with Occasional accompaniment of bloodshed, the bitterness of popular feeling had very much mitigated. The Irish people grew to be almost indifferent on the subject. "With Henry II." says Sydney Smith, "came in tithes, to which, in all probability, about one million of lives may have been sacrificed in Ireland." All that was changed at last. So long as the clergyman was content to live quietly and mind his own flock, where hie had any to mind, his Catholic neighbors were not disposed to trouble themselves much about him. If, indeed, he attempted to do that which, by all strict logical reasoning, he must have regarded himself as appointed to do — if he attempted any work of conversion, then he aroused such a storm of anger that he generally found it prudent to with- draw from the odious and hopeless enterprise. If he was a sensible man he was usually content to minister to his own people and meddle no further with others. In the large towns he generally had his considerable congregation, and was busy enough. In some of the country places of the south and west he preached every Sunday to his little flock of five or six, while the congregation of the Catholic chapel a short distance off were covering great part of the hillside around the chapel door, because their numbers were many times too great to allow them to find room within the building itself. Sydney Smith has described, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 379 in a few words, the condition of things as it existed in his time: "On an Irish Sabbath the bell of a neat parish church often summons to church only the parson and an occasionally conforming clerk; while two hundred yards olf a thousand Catholics are huddled together in a miser- able hovel and pelted by all the storms of heaven." In days nearer to our own the miserable hovel had for the most part given place to a large and handsome church; in many places to a vast and stately cathedral. Nothing could be more remarkable than the manner in which the voluntary offerings of the Irish Catholics covered the face of the country with churches dedicated to the uses of their faith. Often the contributions came in liberal measure from Irishmen settled in far-off countries who were not likely ever again to see their native fields. Irish Catholic priests crossed the Atlantic, crossed even the Pacific, to ask for help to maintain their churches; and there came from Quebec and Ontario, from New York, New Orleans and Chicago, from Melbourne and Sydney, from Tasmania and New Zealand, the money which put up churches and spires on the Irish mountain-sides. The proportion between the Protestants and the Catholics began to tell more and more disadvantageous^ for the state church as years went on. Of late the influx of the Catholic working population into the northern province threatens to overthrow the supremacy of Protestantism in Protestantism's own stronghold. . It has often been said that if England had not persecuted the Catholics, if she had not thrust her state church on them under circumstances which made it an insolent badge of conquest, the Irish people might have been gradually won over to the religion of England. To us nothing seems more unlikely than any such change. The Irish people, we are convinced, would under any circumstances whatever have remained faithful to the Catholic Church. As we have already endeavored to show, it is the church which seems specially appointed to be the guide of their feelings and their nature, lint it is certain that if there had been no persecution and no state church the feelings of the Irish people toward England would have been very differ- ent from what they actually are even at this day. There would have been no rebellion of L798. There would have been no hatred of Protestant to Catholic, Catholic to Pro- 380 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. testant. All this is obvious; every one says as much now. But there is another view of the question; there is another harmful effect of the state church and its surroundings, which is not so often considered nor so commonly admitted. This is the indirect harm which was done by the setting up in Ireland of a " British party," to employ a phrase once familiar in politics, a party supposed to represent the inter- ests of the English government, and indeed to be, as it was commonly called, the Protestant garrison in Ireland. Naturally the government always acted on the advice of that party, and as a matter of course they were frequently deceived. The British party had no way of -getting at the real feelings of the Irish people; they were among them, but not of them. They kept on continually assuring the government that there was no real cause of dissatisfaction in Ireland; that the objection to this or that odious insti- tution or measure came only from a few agitators, and not from the whole population. It will not be forgotten that down to the very outbreak of the American War of Inde- jiendence there were the remnants of a British party in the northern states, who assured the English government that there was no real dissatisfaction among the American colo- nists, and no idea whatever of severing the connection with England. The same sort of counsel was given, the same fatal service was rendered, on almost all important occasions by the British party in Ireland. It was probably from ob- serving this condition of things that Mr. Gladstone came to the conclusion that the Fenian outbreak, the Manchester rescue, and the Clerkenwell explosion furnished a proper opportunity for a new system of legislation in Ireland. Few actions on the part of a public man have been more persistently misrepresented or more obstinately misunder- stood than the course taken by Mr. Gladstone. It has been constantly asserted that he declared himself impelled to propose new legislation for Ireland by the violence of the Fenian enterprises, and that he thus*held out a premium to political agitation of the most audacious kind by offering an assurance to the agitator that if he would only be daring and lawless enough he might have full gratification of his demands. Yet Mr. Gladstone's meaning was surely plain. He saw that the one great difficulty in the way of substantial legislation for Irish grievances had always been found in the fact that the English parliament and public A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 381 did not believe in the reality of the grievance. English- men put aside every claim made on behalf of Ireland with the assurance that the Irish people were entirely indifferent on the subject; that the Irish people felt no grievance, and therefore had not complained of any. The Fenian movement was in Mr. Gladstone's eyes the most substan- tial refutation of this comfortable belief. The most easy- going and self-complacent Philistine could not feel satis- fied that there was no grievance pressing on the minds of the Irish people when he found rebellion going on under his very eyes, and Fenian devotees braving death for their cause and its captains in his very streets. Mr. Gladstone was right. One of the sad defects of our parliamentary system is that no remedy is likely to be tried for any evil until the evil has made its presence felt in some startling way. The Clerkenwell explosion was but one illustration of a common condition of things. We seldom have any political reform without a previous explosion. On March 1G, 18G8, a remarkable debate took place in the House of Commons. It had for its subject the condi- tion of Ireland, and it was introduced by a series of resolu- tions which Mr. John Francis Maguire, an Irish member, proposed. Mr. Maguire was a man of high character and great ability and earnestness. He was a newspaper pro- prietor and an author; he knew Ireland well, but he also knew England and the temper of the English people. He was ardent in his national sympathies; but he was opposed to any movement of a seditious or a violent character. He had more than once risked his popularity among countrymen by the resolute stand which he made against any agitation that tended toward rebellion. Mr. Maguire always held that the geographical situation of England and Ireland rendered a separation of the two countries impossible. He had often expressed his belief that even in the event of a war between England and some foreign state — the American republic, for instance — and even in the event of England's losing temporary possession of Ireland, one of the condi- tions of peace which the foreign power would most freely accept would be the handing back of Ireland to Great Britain. To his mind, then, separation was a result not to be seriously thought of. lint he accepted cordially the saying of Grattan thai if the ocean forbade separation, the sea denied union. He was in favor of a domestic legis- 382 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. lature for Ireland, and he was convinced that such a meas- ure would be found the means of establishing a true and genial union of feeling, a friendly partnership between the two countries. Mr. Maguire was looked on with respect and confidence by all parties in England as well as in his own country. Even the Fenians, whose schemes he con- demned as he had condemned the young Ireland movement of 1848, were willing to admit his honesty and his courage, for they found that there was no stauncher advocate in parliament for a generous dealing with the Fenian prisoners. A speaker of remarkable power and earnest- ness, although occasionally too vehement of words and ges- ture, he was always listened to with attention in the House of Commons. It was well-known that he had declined tenders of office from both of the great English parties; and it was known too that he had done this at a time when his personal interests made his refusal a consid- erable sacrifice. When therefore he invited the attention of the House of Commons to the condition of Ireland, the house knew that it was likely to have a fair and a trust- worthy exposition -of the subject. In the course of his speech, Mr. Maguire laid great stress upon the evil effect wrought upon Ireland by the existence of the Irish church. He described it as " a scandalous and monstrous anomaly." During the debate Lord Mayo, then Irish sec- retary, made a speech in which he threw out some hint about a policy of equalizing all religious denominations in Ireland without sacrificing the Irish church. He talked in a mysterious way of "leveling up, and not leveling down." It has never since been known for certain whether he was giving a hint of a scheme actually in the mind of the government; whether he was speaking as one set up to feel his way into the opinion of the House of Commons and the public; or whether he was only following out some sudden and irresponsible speculations of his own. The words, however, produced a great effect on the House of Commons. It became evident at once that the question of the Irish church was making itself at last a subject for the practical politician. Mr. Bright in the course of the debate strongly denounced the Irish establishment, and enjoined the government and all the great English parties to rise to the occasion and resolve to deal in some serious way with the condition of Ireland. Difficulties of the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 383 gravest nature lie fully admitted were yet in the way, but he reminded the house in tones of solemn and penetrating earnestness that, " to the upright there ariseth light in the darkness." But it was on the fourth night of the debate that the importance of the occasion became fully manifest. Then it was that Mr. Gladstone spoke, and declared that in his opinion the time had come when the Irish church as a state institution must cease to exist. Then every man in the house knew that the end was near. Mr. Maguire withdrew his resolutions. The cause he had to serve was now in the hands of one who, though not surely more earnest for its success, had incomparably greater power to serve it. The Protestant garrison in Ireland was doomed. There was probably not a single Englishman capable of forming an opinion who did not know that from the moment when Mr. Gladstone made his declaration, the fall of the Irish state church had become merely a question of time. • Men only waited to see how Mr. Gladstone would proceed to procure its fall. Public expectation was not long kept in suspense. A few days after the debate on Mr. Maguire's motion, Mr. Gladstone gave notice of a series of resolutions on the subject of the Irish state church. The resolutions were three in number. The first declared that in the opinion of the House of Commons it was necessary that the estab- lished church of Ireland should cease to exist as an estab- lishment, due regard being had to all personal interests and to all individual rights of property. The second reso- lution pronounced it expedient to prevent the creation of new personal interests by the exercise of any publie patronage; and the third asked for an address to the queen, praying that her majesty would place at the dis- posal of parliament her interest in the temporalities of the Irish church. The object of these resolutions was sim- ply to prepare for the actual disestablishment of the church by providing that no further appointments should bo, made, and that the action of patronage should be stayed, until parliament should decide the fate of the whole insti- tution. On March 30, 1868, Mr. Gladstone proposed his resolutions. Not many personscould have bad much doubt as to the result of the debate. But if there were any such their doubts must have begun to vanish when they read the notice of amendment to the resolutions which was 384 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. given by Lord Stanley. The amendment proclaimed even more surely than the resolutions the impending fall of the Irish church. Lord Stanley must have been supposed to speak in the name of the government and the Conservative party; and his amendment merely declared that the house, while admitting that considerable modifications in the temporalities of the church in Ireland might appear to be expedient, was of opinion "that any proposition tending, to the disestablishment or disendowment of that church ought to be reserved for the decision of the new parlia- ment." Mr. Gladstone seized on the evidence offered by the terms of such an amendment. He observed that be- fore the hour at which notice was given of that amendment, he had thought the thread of the remaining life of the Irish established church was short, but since the notice was given he though it shorter still. For, as Mr. Glad- stone put it, suppose his resolutions had been declarations calling for the abolition of the House of Lords, was it pos- sible to conceive that the government would have met them by an amendment admitting that the constitution of the upper house might appear to stand in need of considerable modification, but offering the opinion that any proposal tending to the abolition of that house ought to be left to the decision of a new parliament? If such an amendment were offered by the government, the whole country would at once understand that it was not intended to defend the existence of the House of Lords. So the country now understood with regard to the Irish church. Lord Stan- ley's amendment asked only for delay. It did not plead that to-morrow would be sudden; it only asked that the stroke of doom should not be allowed to fall on the Irish church to-day. The debate was one of great power and interest. Some of the speakers were heard at their very best. Mr. Bright made a speech which was well worthy of the occasion and the orator. Mr. Gathorne Hardy was in his very element. He flung aside all consideration of amendment, compromise, or delay, and went in for a vehement defense of the Irish church. He spoke in the spirit of M. Eouher's famous Jamais! Mr. Hardy was not a debater of keen logical power nor an orator of genuine inspiration, but he always could rattle a defiant drum with excellent effect. He beat the war-drum this time Avith tremendous energy. On the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 385 other hand Mr. Lowe threw an intensity of bitterness remarkable even for him into the unsparing logic with wbich he assailed the Irish church. That church, lie said, was "like an exotic brought from a far country, tended with infinite pains and useless trouble. It is kept alive with the greatest difficulty and at great expense in an nngenial climate and an ungrateful soil. The curse of barrenness is upon it. It has no leaves, puts forth no blossom, and yields no fruit. Cut it down; why cum- bereth it the ground V" Not the least remarkable speech of the debate was that made by Lord Cranbourne, who denounced the government of which he was not long since a member with an energy of hatred almost like ferocity. He accused his late colleagues of having in every possible way betrayed the cause of Conservatism, and he assailed Mr. Disraeli personally in a manner which made older members think of the days when Mr. Disraeli was denounc- ing Sir Robert Peel. No eloquence and no invective how- ever could stay the movement begun by Mr. Gladstone. When the division was called there were three hundred and thirty-one votes for the resolutions and only two hun- dred and seventy against them. The doom of the Irish church was pronounced by a majority of sixty-one. Mr. Disraeli made a wild effort by speech and by letter to get up an alarm in the country on the score of some imaginary alliance or conspiracy between "High Church Ritualists" and " Irish Romanists." The attempt was a complete failure; there was only a little flash; no explosion came. The country did not show the slightest alarm. An interval was afforded for agitation on both sides. The House of Commons had only decided against Lord Stanley's amend- ment. Mr. Gladstone's resolutions had yet to be discussed. Lord Russell presided at a great meeting held in St. dames' Hall for the purpose of expressing public sym- pathy with the movement to disestablish the Irish church. Many meetings were held by those on the other side of the question as well; hut, it was obvious to every one that there was no great force in the attempt at a* defense of the Irish church. That institution had in truth a position which only became less and less defensible the more it was studied. Every example and argument drawn from the history of the church of England was but another con- demnation of the church of Ireland. During one of the 386 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. subsequent debates in tbe House of Lords, Lord Derby introduced with remarkable effect an appropriate quota- tion from Scott's "Guy Mannering." He was warning his listeners that if they helped the enemies of the Irish church to pull it down, they would be preparing the way for the destruction of the English church as well. He turned to that striking passage in "Guy Mannering." where Meg Merrilies confronts the laird of Ellangowan after the eviction of the gypsies, and warns him that " this day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if the tire in your ain parlor burn the blyther for that; ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses — look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster." Nothing could be more apt as a political appeal or more effective in a rhetorical sense than this quotation. But it did not illustrate the relations between the English and the Irish church. The real dan- ger to the English church would have been a protracted and obstinate maintenance of the church of Ireland. It is not necessary here to enter upon any of the general argu- ments for or against the principle of a state church. But it will be admitted by every one that the claim made on behalf of the church of England is that it is the church of the great majority of the English people, and that it has a spiritual work to do which the majority of the nation admit to be its appropriate task. To maintain the church of England on that ground is only to condemn the church of Ireland. The more strongly an Englishman was inclined to support his own church, the more anxious he ought to have been to repudiate the claim of the Irish church to a similar position. The state church in Ireland was like a mildewed ear blasting its wholesome brother. If the two institutions had to stand or fall together, there could be but one end to the difficulty; both must fall. Mr. Gladstone's first resolution came to a division about a month after the defeat of Lord Stanley's amendment. It was carried by a majority somewhat larger than that which had rejected the amendment. Three hundred and thirty votes were given for the resolution; two hundred and sixty-five against it. The majority for the resolution was therefore sixty-five. Mr. Disraeli quietly observed that the government must take some decisive step in con- sequence of that vote; and a few days afterward it was announced that as soon as the necessary business could be A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 387 got through, parliament would be dissolved and an appeal made to the country. On the last day of July the dissolu- tion took place, and the elections came on in November. Not for many years had there been so important a general election. The keenest anxiety prevailed as to its results. The new constituencies created by the reform bill were to give their votes for the first time. The question at issue was not merely the existence of the Irish state church. It was a general struggle of advanced Liberalism against Toryism. No one could doubt that Mr. Gladstone, if he came into power, would enter on a policy of more decided Liberalism than had ever been put into action since the days of the reform bill of Lord Grey and Lord John Russell. The result of the elections was on the whole what might have been expected. The Liberals had a great majority. But there were many curious and striking instances of the growing strength of Conservatism in cer- tain parts of the country- Lancashire, once a very strong- hold of Liberalism, returned only Tories for its county divisions, and even in most cases elected Tories to repre- sent its boroughs. Eight Conservatives came in from the county of Lancaster, and among those whom their election displaced were no less eminent persons than Mr. Gladstone and Lord Eartington. Mr. Gladstone was defeated in south-west Lancashire, but the result of the contest had been generally anticipated, and therefore some of his sup- porters put him up for Greenwich also and he was elected there. He had been passing step by step from less popular to more popular constituencies. From the University of Oxford he had passed to the Lancashire division, and now from the Lancashire constituency lie went on to a place where the Liberal portion of the electors were inclined, for the most part, to be not merely radical but democratic. The contest in North Lancashire was made- more interest- ing than it would otherwise have been by the fact that it was not alone a struggle between opposing principles and parties, but also one between two great rival houses. Lord Partington represented the great Cavendish family. Mr. Frederick Stanley was the younger son of Lord Derby. Lord Hartington was defeated by a large majority, and was left out of parliament for a few months. He was afterward elected for the Radnor Boroughs. Mr. Mill was defeated at Westminster. His defeat was brought 388 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. about by a combination of causes. He bad been elected in a moment of sudden enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm had new had time to cool away. He had given some offense in various quarters by a too great independence of action and of expression. On many questions of deep interest he had shown that he was entirely out of harmony with the views of the vast majority of his constituents, whatever their religious denomination might be. He had done some things which people called eccentric, and an English popular constituency does not love eccentricity. His oppo- nent, Mr. W. H. Smith, was very popular in Westminster, and had been quietly canvassing it for years. Perhaps it may be hinted too that Mr. Mill's manly resolve not to pay any part of his election expenses did not contribute to make him a favorite candidate with a certain proportion of the constituency. He was known to be a generous and a charitable man. He gave largely out of his modest for- tune toward any purpose which he thought deserving' of support. But he disapproved of the principle of calling on a candidate to pay for permission to perform very oner- ous public duties, and he would not consent to recognize the principle by contributing anything toward the cost of his own candidature. This was against him in the mind of many. In every great coutsituency there is a certain proportion of voters who like the idea of a man's being liberal of his money in a contest, even though they do not expect to have any share of it. Some of the Westminster electors had probably grown tired of being represented by one who was called a philosopher. Some other prominent public men lost their seats. Mr. Eoebuck was defeated in Sheffield. His defeat was partly due to the strong stand he had made against the trades-unions; but still more to the bitterness of the hostility he had shown to the northern states during the American civil war. Mr. Milner Gibson and Mr. Bernal Osborne were also unseated. The latter got into parliament again. The former disappeared from public life. He had done good service at one time as an ally of Oobden and Bright. Mr. Lowe was elected the first representative of the University of London, on which, as it will be remembered, the Conservative reform bill had conferred a seat. Mr. Disraeli afterward humorously claimed the credit of having enabled Mr. Lowe to carry on his public career by providing for him the only consti- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 389 tnency in England which would have accepted him as its representative. One curious fact about the elections was that the extreme democratic candidates, and those who were called the workingman's candidates, were in every instance rejected. This was the first general election with household suffrage in boroughs and a lowered franchise in counties. It might have been supposed that the votes of the workingmen, of " the people who live in those small houses" would have decided many a contest in favor of the candidates representing their cause or their class. But the candidates who appealed especially to workingmen failed in every instance to secure election. Mr. Ernest Jones, Mr. Beales, Mr. Mason Jones, Mr. Odger, Mr. Bradlaugh, tried and failed. Either our new masters were not so powerful as they were expected to prove, or they were very much like our old masters in their taste for representation. The new parliament was to all appearance less marked in its Liberalism than that which had gone before it. But so far as mere numbers went the Liberal party was much stronger than it had been. In the new House of Com- mons it could count upon a majority of about one hundred and twenty, whereas in the late parliament it had but sixty. Mr. Gladstone it was clear would now have every- thing in his own hands, and the country might look for a career of energetic reform. While the debates on Mr. Gladstone's resolutions were still going on, there came to England the news that Lord Brougham was dead. He had died at Cannes in his nine- tieth year. His death was a quiet passing away from a world that had well-nigh forgotten him. Seldom has a political career been so strangely cut short as that of Lord Brougham. From the time when the Whig administration Avas formed without him, he seemed to have no particular business in public life. He never had from that hour the slightest influence on any political party or any political movement. His restless figure was seen moving about the House of Lords like that of a man who felt himself out of place there, and was therefore out of humor with himself and his company. He often took part in debate, and for many years he continued to.showall the fire and energy of his earlier days, lint of late he had almost, entirely dropped out of politics. Happily for him the Social Science Association was formed, and he acted for a long time as its 390 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. principal guide, philosopher, and friend. He made speeches at its meetings, presided at many of its banquets, and sometimes showed that he could still command the resources of a massive eloquence. His social science had a curious air of unreality about it. It seemed as if it had been hastily put together out of that Penny Cyclopwdia in which at one time he had so much concern. The men of the younger generation looked at him with interest and wonder; they found it hard to realize the fact that only a few years before he was one of the most conspicuous and energetic figures in political agitation. Now he seemed oddly like some dethroned king who occupies his leisure in botanical studies; some once famous commander, long out of harness, who amuses himself with learning the flute. There were perhaps some who forgot Brougham the great reformer altogether, and only thought of Brougham the patron and orator of the Social Science Association. He passed his time between Cannes, which he may be said to have discovered, and London. At one time he had had the idea of actually becoming a citizen of France, being of opinion that it would set a good example for the brotherhood of peoples if he were to show how a man could be a French and an English citizen at the same moment. He had out-lived nearly all his early friends and foes. Melbourne, Grey, Durham, Campbell, Lyndhurst, had passed away. The death of Lyndhurst had been a great grief to him. It is said that in his failing, later years he often directed his coachman to drive him to Lord Lynd- hurst's house, as if his old friend and gossip were still among the living. At last Brougham began to give unmis- takable signs of vanishing intelligence. His appearances in public were mournful exhibitions. He sometimes sat at a dinner-party and talked loudly to himself of something which had no concern with the time, the place, or the company. His death created but a mere momentary thrill of emotion in England. He had made bitter enemies and cherished strong hatreds in his active years; and like all men who have strong hatreds, he had warm affections too. But the close friends and the bitter enemies were gone alike; had "passed like snow, long, long ago, with the time of the Barmecides;" and the agitation about the Irish church was scarcely interrupted for a moment by the news of his death. Brougham's writings are not read now. No A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 391 one turns to his speeches : those speeches that once set England aflame. His philosophy, his learning, his science, his Greek were all so curiously superficial, that it is no wonder if enemies sometimes declared them to be mere sham. As the memoirs of his contemporaries begin to be published we receive more and more evidence of the pro- digious vanity which made Brougham believe that no one could do anything so well in any department as he could do everything in every department. The Edinburgh Review he appears to have regarded as a means by which he was to display the genius and acquirements, and others were to puff the speeches of Henry Brougham. A strange sight was seen one day at a meeting of the Social Science Associa- tion, when Lord Brougham, then on the eve of his com- plete intellectual decline, introduced to the company a man so old that he seemed to belong to an elder world alto- gether; a man with a wasted, wrinkled, wizard-like face, who wore a black silk skull-cap and a gaberdine. This was Robert Owen, and it was Owen's last appearance in public. He died a few days after in his ninetieth year. Brougham at that time was ten years younger, and ho introduced Owen with all the respectful and almost filial carefulness which sturdy youth might show to sinking age. For the moment it would almost seem as if the self-conceit which made Brougham believe himself a great critic and a great Greek scholar had made him also believe that for him time was nothing, and that he was still a young man. CHAPTER LVIII. "HUSH IDEAS." Seventy years before Mr. Gladstone's accession to the office of first lord of the treasury, Fox had enunciated the principle that Ireland ought to be governed by Irish ideas. "I would have the Irish government," said Fox in 1797, "regulated by Irish notions and Irish prejudices; and I firmly believe, according to an Irish expression, that the aiore she is under Irish government, the more she will be bound to English interests." Now for the first time a great statesman at the head of an English government was about to make an effort at the practical realization of Fox's 392 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. principle. At all other times even the most considerate of English ministers had only thought of doing good to Ire- land after the English notion of 'what was good. The highest idea of statesmanship went no farther than that of giving Ireland what were called equal laws with England. What England had and liked must be the best for Ireland. Such was the position assumed with quiet, sincere compla- cency in the course of many a parliamentary debate. What more, it was asked, can Ireland want? Has she not equal laws with England? We have a state church; she has a state church. She has the same land laws that are found to suit England, or, at least, that are found to suit the landlord class in England. What can England do for her more than to give her the same legislation that England herself enjoys? Now, for the first time, the man at the head of an English government was equal to an acknowl- edgment of what one might have thought the simple and elementary fact in politics, that the system which is a bless- ing to one country may be a curse to its neighbor. That which is called equality of system is sometimes only such equality as that illustrated by the too often quoted yet very appropriate example of Procrustes' bed. Ireland had been stretched upon that bed for centuries, often with the best possible intentions on the part of some well-meaning political Procrustes, who could not for the life of him see why she should not like to be lengthened or shortened, pulled this way or that, in order to bring her into seeming harmony with the habitudes and the constitutional systems of England. The parliament which was called together in the close of 1868 was known to have before it this great task of endeav- oring to govern Ireland according to Irish ideas. Mr. Glad- stone had proclaimed this purpose himself. He had made it known that he would endeavor to deal with Ireland's three great difficulties — the state church, the tenure of land, and the system of national education. Men's minds were wrought up to the enterprise. The country was in a temper to try heroic remedies. The public were tired of government which merely tinkered at legislation, putting in a little patch here, and stopping up for a moment a little hole there. Perhaps, therefore, there was a certain disappointment as the general character of the new parlia- ment began to be understood. The eminent men on whom A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 393 all eyes turned in the old parliament were to be seen of all eyes in the new. It was clear that Mr. Gladstone would be master of the situation. But there did not seem any- thing particularly hero-like in the general aspect of the new House of Commons. Its composition was very much the same as that of the old. Vast sums of money had been spent upon the elections. Rich men were, as before, in immense preponderance. Elder and younger sons of great families were as many as ever. The English constituencies under the new suffrage were evidently no whit less fond of lords, no whit less devoted to wealth, than they had been under the old. Not a single man of extreme democratic opinions had a seat in the new House of Commons. Where any marked change had been made, it showed itself in removing such men from parliament rather than in returning them to it. Mr. Disraeli did not meet the new parliament as prime minister. He decided very properly that it would be a mere waste of public time to wait for the formal vote of the House of Commons, which would inevitably command him to surrender. He at once resigned his office, and Mr. Gladstone was immediately sent for by the queen, and invited to form an administration. Mr. Gladstone, it would seem, was only beginning his career. He was nearly sixty years of age, but there were scarcely any evidences of advancing years to be seen on his face, and he had all the fire of proud, indomitable youth in his voice and his man- ner. He had come into office at the head of a powerful party. There was hardly anything he could not do with such a following and with such personal energy. The gov- ernment he formed was one of remarkable strength. The one name upon its list, after that of the prime minister himself, which engaged the interest of the public was that of Mr. Bright. Speaking to his Birmingham constituents on his re-election after accepting the office of the president of the board of trade, Mr. Bright referred to his new posi- tion in a few sentences of impressive and dignified elo- quence. He had not sought office, he said; it had come to him. "I should have preferred much to remain in the common rank of the simple citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a charming story contained in a single verse of the Old Testament, which has often struck me as one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that 394 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the prophet, in journeying to anfl fro, was very hospitably entertained by what is termed in the Bible a Shunammite woman. In return for the hospitality of his entertainment he wished to make her some amends, and he called her and asked her what there was that he should do for her. 'Shall I speak, for thee to the king or to the captain of the host?' and it has always appeared to me a great answer that the Shunammite woman returned. She said, 'I dwell among my own people.' When the question was put to me whether I would step into the position in which I now find myself, the answer from my heart was the same — I wish to dwell among my own people." It was impossible, however, that a ministry could now be formed without Mr. Bright's name appearing in it. Mr. Gladstone at first offered him the office of secretary of state for India. The state of Mr. Bright's health would not allow him to under- take the very laborious duties of such a place, and probably in any case it would have been repugnant to his feelings to accept a position which might have called on him to give orders for the undertaking of a war. Every man in a cabinet is of course responsible for all its acts; but there is still an evident difference, so far as personal feeling is con- cerned, between acquiescing in some inevitable policy of war and actually directing that war shall be made. The position of president of the board of trade was that which had been offered by Lord Palmerston to Mr. Bright's old friend, Richard Cobden, and it seemed in every way well suited to Mr. Bright himself. Many men felt a doubt as to the possibility of Mr. Bright's subduing his personal independence and his outspoken ways to the discipline and reticence of a cabinet, and Mr. Bright himself appeared to be a little afraid that he should be understood as thor- oughly approving of every measure in which he might, by official order, feel compelled to acquiesce. He cautioned his Birmingham constituents not to believe that he had changed any of his opinions until his own voice publicly proclaimed the change, and he made what might almost be called an appeal to them to remember that he was now one man serving in a band of men ; no longer responsible only for himself, no longer independent of the acts of others. Lord Granville was secretary for the colonies under the new administration; Lord Clarendon foreign secretary. The Duke of Argyll was entrusted with the India office. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 395 Mr. Card well, to all appearance one of the coldest and least warlike of men, was made secretary for war, and had in his charge one of the greatest reforms of the administra- tion. Lord Hartington, Lord Dnfferin, Mr. Childers, and Mr. Brace had places assigned to them. Mr. Layard be- came first commissioner of public works. Mr. W. E. Forster had the office of vice-president of the council, and came in for work hardly less important than that of the prime minister himself. The lord chancellor was Lord Hatherley, formerly Sir William J 'age Wood. Many years before, when Lord Hatherley was only known as a rising man among advanced Liberals, and when Mr. Bright was still regarded by all true Conservatives as a Radical dema- gogue, Mr. Bright and Mr. Wood were talking of the poli- tical possibilities of the future. Mr. Bright jestingly ex- pressed a hope that whenever he came to be member of a cabinet, Mr. Wood might be the lord chancellor. Nothing could then have seemed less likely to come to pass. As Lord Hatherley and Mr. Bright met on their way to Windsor to wait on the queen, Mr. Bright reminded his colleague of the jest that had apparently been prophetic. Mr. Gladstone went to work at once with his Irish policy. The new parliament was opened by commission on December 10th, for the election of speaker and the swearing in of the members. The real work of the session began on the 16th of the following February, 1869. The royal speech declared that the ecclesiastical arrangements of Ireland would be brought under the consideration of the house at a very early (late, and that " the legislation which will be necessary in order to their final adjustment will make the largest demands on the wisdom of parlia- ment." The queen expressed her conviction that parlia- ment, in considering that legislation, would "be governed by the constant aim to promote the welfare of religion through the principles of equal justice; to secure the action of the undivided feeling and opinion of Ireland on the side of loyalty and law; to efface the memory of former conten- tions, and to cherish the sympathies of an affectionate people." On March 1st the prime minister introduced his measure for the disestablishment and the partial disendow- ment of the Irish state church. He introduced the meas- ure in a speech which occupied more than three hours in the delivery, but which even Mr. Disraeli admitted did not 396 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. contain one sentence that the subject and the argument could well have spared. The proposals of the government were, that the Irish church should almost at once cease to exist as a state estab- lishment, and should pass into the condition of a free Episcopal Church. As a matter of course the Irish bishops were to lose their seats in the House of Lords. A synodal, or governing body, was to be elected from the clergy and laity of the church and was to be recognized by the govern- ment, and duly incorporated. The union between the churches of England and Ireland was to be dissolved, and the Irish ecclesiastical courts were to be abolished. There were various and complicated arrangements for the protec- tion of the life interests of those already holding positions in the Irish church, and for the appropriation of the fund which would return to the possession of the state when all these interests had been fairly considered and dealt with. It must be owned that the government dealt with vested interests in no niggard spirit. If they erred at all they erred on the side of too much generosity. But they had arrayed against them adversaries so strong that they prob- ably felt it absolutely necessary to buy off some of the opposition by a liberal compensation to all those who were to be deprived of their dignity as clergymen of a state church. When, however, all had been paid off who could establish any claim, and some perhaps who had in strict fairness no claim whatever, there remained a large fund at the dis- posal of the government. This they resolved to set apart for the relief of unavoidable suffering in Ireland. It was not made very clear in the bill itself what the precise pur- poses were to which the surplus was to be applied, and there was a good deal of disputation afterward as to the appro- priation of the money. Mr Gladstone's words, and the words used in the preamble of the bill, were the relief of "unavoidable calamity and suffering." Mr. Gladstone spoke of making provision for the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, for reformatories, the training of nurses, and the support of county infirmaries. In a speech delivered at a later stage of the debate, Mr. Bright asked the house whether it would not be better to dispose of the money in such charitable dealing than in continuing to maintain three times the number of clergymen that could be of the slightest use to the church with which they were connected. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 39? "We can," he said, "do but little, it is true. We cannot re-illume the extinguished lamp of reason ; we cannot make the deaf to hear; we cannot make the dumb to speak; it is not given to us " ' From the thick film to purge the visual ray, And on the sightless eyeballs pour the day ; ' but at least we can lessen the load of affliction, and we can make life more tolerable to vast numbers who suffer." The sum to be disposed of was very considerable. The gross value of the Irish church property was estimated at sixteen millions. From this sum would have to be deducted nearly five millions for the vested interests of incumbents; one million seven hundred thousand for com- pensations to curates and lay compensations; half a million for private endownments; for the Maynooth grant and the Regium Donum about a million and a quarter. There would be left nearly nine millions for any beneficent pur- pose on which the government and the country could make up their minds. The Maynooth grant and the Regium Donum were to go with the Irish church, and the same principle of compensation was to be applied to those who were to be deprived of them. The Regium Donum was an allowance from the sovereign for the maintenance of Presbyterian ministers in Ireland. It was begun by Charles II. and let drop by James, but was restored by William III. William felt grateful for the support given him by the Presbyterians in Ireland during his contest with James and indeed had little preference for one form of the Pro- testant faith over another. William, in the first instance, fixed the grant as a charge upon the customs of Belfast. The Maynooth grant has been already described in these pages. Both these grants, each a very small thing in itself, now came to an end, and the principle of equality among the religious denominations of Ireland was to be established. We need not carry the reader through the long course of the debates which took place in the House of Commons. The bill was stoutly resisted by Mr. Disraeli and his party. They resisted it as a whole, and they also fought it in detail. They proposed amendment after amendment in committee, and did all they could to stay its progress as 398 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. well as to alter some of its arrangements. But there did not seem to be much of genuine earnestness in the speeches made by Mr. Disraeli. The fact that resistance was evidently hopeless had no doubt some effect upon the style of his eloquence. His speeches were amusing rather than impressive. They were full of good points; they sparkled with happy illustrations and allusions, odd con- ceits and bewildering paradoxes. But the orator had evi- dently no faith in the cause he advocated; no faith, that is to say, in the possibility of its success. He must have seen too clearly that the church as a state establishment in Ireland was doomed, and he had not that intensity of interest in its maintenance which would have made him fight the course, as he had fought many a course before, with all the passionate eloquence of desperation. One of his lieutenants, Mr. Gathorne Hardy, was more effective as a champion of the sinking Irish church than Mr. Disraeli proved himself to be. Mr. Hardy was a man so constituted as to be only capable of seeing one side of a question at a time. He was filled with the conviction that the government were attempting an act of spoliation and sacrilege, and he stormed against the meditated crime with a genuine energy which occasionally seemed to supply him with something like eloquence. * A peculiar interest attached to the part taken in the debate by Sir Rounded Palmer. It was natural that Sir Rounded Palmer should be with Mr. Gladstone. Every one expected in the first instance that he would have held high office in the new administration. He was one of the very foremost lawyers and the best parliamentary debaters of the day, and the woolsack seemed to be his fitting place. But Sir Rounded Palmer could not conscientiously agree to the disestablish- ment of the Irish state church. He was willing to consent to very extensive alterations and reductions in the establish- ment, but he could not go with Mr. Gladstone all the way to the abolition of the church; and he therefore remained outside the ministry, and opposed the bill. Some of the debates in the House of Lords were more interesting than those in the Commons. We have already referred to the eloquence and fervor with which Lord Derby opposed the proposition of the government. Two speeches delivered from the bench where the bishops sit attracted special attention. One may be said to have marked the close, the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 390 other the opening of a career. One was by Dr. Thirlwall, the bishop of St. David's, the other by Dr. Magee, bishop of Peterborough. The bishop of St. David's spoke in favor of the bill, and addressed himself particularly to the demolition of the superstitious sophism which would lead people to believe that the revenues "of a purely human institution like the Irish church were the sacred possession of heaven, and that to touch them even with the hand of reforming legislation would be an act of sacrilege. Dr. Thirlwall well maintained on this occasion his noble repu- tation both as an orator and as a man of intellect. Mr. Mill, in his "Autobiography," has given an interesting account of his first hearing Dr. Thirlwall at one of the public discussions of a society in London some forty years before. "The speaker with whom I was most struck," Mr. Mill says, "was Thirlwall, the historian, since bishop of St. David's, then a chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austin and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, 1 set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard any one whom I placed above him*" Dr. Magee, on the other hand, was only beginning Ids career in the House of Lords. lie had been but a short time bishop of Peterborough, lie had been raised to the Episcopal bench, it was said, chiefly because Mr. Disraeli when in office believed he saw in him the capacity to make a great parliamentary debater and champ- ion of the political interests of the church. Dr. Magee de- livered a speech of remarkable fluency, energy, and vivid- ness; a speech which might fairly be classed among the best efforts of the leading orators on either side of the con- troversy. It was more like the speech of a layman than of a prelate; although indeed it recalled in some of its pug- nacious passages the recollection of the fighting bishops of the middle ages. If the fate of the Irish church could have been averted or even postponed by impassioned elo- quence, the bishop of Peterborough might alone have done something to stay the stroke of doom. But the fate of the institution was sealed at the moment that Mi', (i lad- stone returned from the general elections in command of a Liberal majority. The House of Lords were prudent enough not to set themselves against- the clear declaration 400 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of national opinion. Many amendments were introduced and discussed; and some of these led to a controversy between the two houses of parliament; but the controversy ended in compromise. There were at one time rumors that the peers would reject or greatly delay the bill, and Mr. Bright wrote an angry letter on the subject addressed to a Birmingham meeting, in which he warned the House of Lords that by throwing themselves athwart the national course they might meet with " accidents not pleasant for them to think of." Such a letter coming from a cabinet minister created a good deal of amazement, and was made the subject of some sharp discussion in both houses of parliament. It was clear that Mr. Bright did not intend to allow his official position to interfere greatly with the emphatic nature of his utterances on public questions. Shocked and scandalized as some of the peers professed to be, it is not impossible that the letter did some public serv- ice by virtue of its very indiscretion. It may have given timely warning to the House of Lords of the dangerous agitation that would arise if they were to set themselves in deliberate opposition to the will of the vast majority of the people. Humors too were in circulation about the same time of the determination of the government to create new peers in such a number as to make the passing of the bill a certainty. Happily, however, it proved that there was no need for any such intervention on the part of the ministers and the crown. The time had gone by when the House of Lords cared to exhibit itself as a mere instru- ment of resistance to the measures of the representative chamber. The most formidable step the peers took was to carry on the debate on the second reading of the bill until three o'clock in the morning. The second reading was carried by one hundred and seventy-nine to one hundred and forty-six votes; and the remainder of the work done by the lords was only a series of attempts, generally unsuccess- ful, to obtain here and there a small compromise on some of the less important clauses of the bill. On July 26, 1869, the measure for the disestablishment of the Irish church received the royal assent. Meanwhile the wildest excitement prevailed out of doors among the defenders of the state church. Furious denun- ciations of the government resounded from platform and from pulpit. Even in measured and solemn convocation A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 401 itself the most impassioned and vehement outcries were heard. One divine spoke of the measure as a great national sin. Another stigmatized it as altogether ungodly, wicked, and abominable. A third called upon the queen to interfere personally, and exhorted her rather to jeopard- ize her crown in the effort than leave the Irish church to be destroyed before her eyes. A great meeting was held in Exeter Hall, at which Mr. Gladstone was stigmatized as "a traitor to his queen, his country, and his God," and one reverend gentleman described the government as "a cabinet of brigands." At a meeting held in Ireland a Protestant clergyman reminded the pastors of every Protestant church that, sooner than give their churches up to any apostate system, a barrel of gunpowder and a box of matches would send them flying to the winds of heaven. This was, how- ever, only superfluous fury. No one proposed to turn the Protestant clergymen out of their churches. It is not im- possible that the fiery ecclesiastic who gave this Guy Fawkes advice was himself ministering in a church which had been taken by force from its Catholic owners. The agi- tation against the bill, produced, however, no sensible effect upon the mind of the country at large. It thun- dered and blazed for a few days or weeks here and there, and then, after occasional grumblings and sputterings, sank into mere silence. The Irish church was therefore disestablished, and it was to a certain extent disendowed. Only to a certain ex- tent. As fortunate as Cleopatra, it contrived to retain enough to purchase what it bad made known. The time during which the measure was in progress was turned to good account by the authorities of the establishment. The bill provided that no new interests should be created in the interval between its passing and the actual disestablish- ment, which was to take place on January 1, 1871. But while the measure whs still under discussion some of the rulers of the church thought it convenient to create as many new interests as possible. New curates entitled to compensation were made with an astonishing rapidity, and the incomes of some of the clergy were increased with liberal hand. Some sharp controversy was afterward created by the manner in which the period of grace was thus turned to worldly and profitable account, and then 1 can he little doubt that the effect of the policy of disestah- 402 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. lishment was deprived of some of its satisfactory influence on the mind of Ireland by the over-liberal opportunities for compensation allowed to vested interests. It would be impossible, however, not to admit that the difficulties in Mr. Gladstone's way must have warned him that a rigorous dealing with such interests would prove dangerous to the success of his measure. The great fact was that by dis- establishing the Irish church he proclaimed that the policy of religious ascendency was banished forever from Ireland, and that the reign of equality had begun. Lord Derby did not long survive the passing of the meas- ure which he had opposed with such fervor and so much pathetic dignity. His last speech was that which he deliv- ered in the House of Lords against the second reading of the Irish church bill on June 17, 18G9. "I am an old man," he said; "I have already passed three score years and ten. My official life is entirely closed, my political life is nearly so, and in the course of nature my natural life cannot now be long." It was sooner ended perhaps than any one expected who heard him deliver that last elo- quent protest against a measure of reform which he was unable to resist. He died before the Irish state church had ceased to live. Doomed as it was, it outlasted its elo- quent champion. In the interval between the passing and the practical operation of Mr. Gladstone's bill, on October 23rd, Lord Derby died at Knowsley, the residence of the Stanleys in Lancashire. His death made no great gap in English politics. He had for some time ceased to assert any really influential place in public affairs. His career had been eminent and distinguished; but its day had long been done. Lord Derby never was a statesman ; he was not even a great leader of a party; but he was a splendid figure-head for Conservatism in or out of power. He was, on the whole, a superb specimen of the English political nobleman. Proud of soul, but sweet in temper and genial in manner; dignified as men are who feel instinctively that dignity pertains to them, and therefore never think of how to assert or how to maintain it, he was eminently fitted by temperament, by nature, and by fortune for the place it was given him to hold. His parliamentary oratory has already become a tradition. It served its purpose admi- rably for the time; it showed, as Macaulay said that Lord Derby possessed the very instinct of parliamentary debate. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 403 It was not weighted with the thought which could have secured it a permanent place in political literature, nor had it the imagination which would have lifted it into an atmosphere above the level of Hansard. In Lord Derby's own day the unanimous opinion of both houses of parlia- ment would have given him a place among the very fore- most of parliamentary orators. Many competent judges went so far as to set him distinctly above all living rivals. Time has not rati lied this judgment. It is impossible that the influence of an orator could have faded so soon if he had really been entitled to the praise which many of his contemporaries would freely have rendered to Lord Derby. The charm of his voice and style, his buoyant readiness, his rushing fluency, his rich profusion of words, his happy knack of illustration, allusion, and retort — all these helped to make men believe him a much greater orator than he really was. Something, too, was due to the influence of his position. It seemed a sort of condescension on the part of a great noble that he should consent to be an elo- quent debater also, and to contend in parliamentary sword- play against professional champions like Peel and" O'Con- nell and Brougham, it must count for something in Lord Derby's fame that, while far inferior to any of these men in political knowledge and in mental capacity, he could compare as an orator with each in turn, and — were it but for his own day, were it but while the magic of his pres- ence and his voice was yet a living influence — could beheld by so many to have borne without disadvantage the test of comparison. When the Irish church had been disposed of, Mr. Glad- stone at once directed his energies to the Irish land system. The state church had been declared by many to be merely a sentimental grievance. The land system of Ireland, if it was to be accounted a grievance at all, must have been acknowledged to be one of a terribly practical character. Ireland is essentially an agricultural country. It has few manufactures, no! many large towns. Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford— these are the only towns that could be called large; below these we come to places that in most other countries would he spoken of as villages or hamlets. The majority of the population of Ireland live on the land and by the land. The condition of the Irish tenantry may he painted effectively in a single touch when 404 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. it is said that they were tenants-at-will. That fact would of itself be almost enough to account for the poverty and the misery of the agricultural classes in Ireland. But there were other conditions, too, which tended the same way. The land of Ireland was divided among a compara- tively small number of landlords, and the landlords were, as a rule, strangers, the representatives of a title acquired by conquest. Many of them were habitual absentees, who would as soon have thought of living in Ashantee as in Munster or Connaught. An able writer, Mr. James Godkin, in his "Land War in Ireland," endeavors to make the condition of Ireland clear to English readers by asking them to consider what England would be under similar circumstances. "Imagine," he says, "that in consequence of rebellions" (against the Normans) " the land of England had been confiscated three or four times, after desolating wars and famines, so that all the native proprietors were expelled, and the land was parceled out to French soldiers and adventurers, on condition that the foreign planters should assist in keeping down the "mere English" by force of arms. Imagine that the English, being crushed by a cruel penal code for a century, were allowed to reoccupy the soil as mere tenants-at-will, under the abso- lute power of their French landlords. If all this be imag- ined by English legislators and English writers, they will be better able to understand the Irish land question, and to comprehend the nature of " Irish difficulties" as well as the justice of feeble, insincere, and baffled statesmen in casting the blame of Irish misery and disorder on the unruly and barbarous nature of Irishmen." In truth, the Irish agri- cultural population turned out exactly as any other race of human beings would have done under similar conditions. They held the land which was their only means of living at the mercy of the landlord or his agent. They had no interest in being industrious and improving their land. If they improved the patch of soil they worked on, their rent was almost certain to be raised, or they were turned out of the land without receiving a farthing of compensa- tion for their improvements. Of course there were many excellent landlords, humane and kindly men — men, too, who saw the wisdom of being humane and kind. But in the majority of cases the landlords and the agents held firmly by what seemed to them the right of property the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 405 right to get as high a price for a piece of land as it would fetch in open competition. The demand for land was so great, the need of land was so vital, that men would offer any price for it. Men would offer prices which they must have known they could never pay, which they must have known the land would never enable them to pay. Offering hind for hire in Ireland was like offering money on loan to needy spendthrifts; any terms would be snatched at by the desperate borrower to-day, no matter what was to hap- pen to-morrow. When the tenant had got hold of his piece of land, he had no idea of cultivating it to the best of his strength and opportunities. Why should he? The moment his holding began to show a better appearance, that moment he might look to having his rent raised, or to being turned out in favor of some competitor who offered higher terms for occupation. Why should he improve? Whenever he was turned out of the land he would have to leave his improvement for the benefit of the landlord or the newcomer. He was, therefore, content to scratch the soil instead of really cultivating it. He extracted all he could from it in his short day. He lived from hand to mouth, from hour to hour. The whole system of feudal tenure of land under a master Avas new to Ireland. It began with Ireland's conquest, and it was identified in the mind of the Irish peasant with Ireland's degradation. Everything was there that could make oppression bitter. The landlord began to be looked upon at last as the tenant's natural enemy. Ribbon societies were formed for the pro- tection of the tenant. The protection afforded was only too often that of terrorism and assassination. The ribbon- ism of the south and west of Ireland was as strictly the product of the land system of the country as the trades- union outrages in England were the offspring of the unequal and unjust legislation that gave all the power to the master and lent no protection to the workmen. All the while five out of every six English writers and political speakers were discoursing gravely on the incurable idleness and lawlessness of the Celtic race and the Irish peasant. The law gave the Irish tenant no security for the fruit of his labor, and Englishmen wondered that he was not labo- rious. The law told him that when he had sown he should not be entitled to reap, and Englishmen were angry that he would not persist in sowing. Imperial legislation 406 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. M showed itself his steadfast enemy, and Englishmen mar- veled at his want of respect for the law. In one province of Ireland indeed a better condition of things existed. Over the greater part of Ulster the tenant- right system prevailed. This system was a custom merely, but it had gradually come to acquire something like the force of law. The principle of tenant-right was that a man should be allowed to remain in undisturbed possession of his holding as long as he paid his rent; that he should be entitled, on giving up the land, to compensation for unexhausted improvements and that he should be at liberty to sell the " good-will" of his farm for what it would fetch in the market. The tenant was free to do what a man who has a long lease of any holding may do; he might sell to any bidder of whom his landlord approved the right to enter on the occupancy of the place. Wherever this tenant-right principle prevailed there was industry, there was prosperity; where it did not prevail was the domain of poverty, idleness, discontent and crime. The one demand of the Irish agricultural population everywhere was for some form of fixity of tenure. Let it be sought by legalizing the Ulster custom everywhere, or by declaring that men should hold their land as long as they paid a fair rent, to be fixed by authorized and impartial valuation, or by some plan of establishing a peasant proprietary — let the demand be made as it would, there was substantially one demand and one only — security of tenure. The demand was neglected or refused by generations of English states- men, chiefly because no statesman would take the trouble to distinguish between words and things; between shadowy, pedantic theories and clear, substantial facts. "Tenant- right," said Lord Palmerston, amid the cheers of an assem- bly mainly composed of landlords, " is landlords' wrong. " Lord Palmerston forgot that the landlord, like every one else in the commonwealth, holds even his dearest rights of property subject to the condition that his assertion of them is not inconsistent with the general weal. The landlord holds his land as the shipowner holds his ship and the rail- way company its lines of rail: subject to the right of the state to see that the duties of possession are properly ful- filled, and that the ownership is not allowed" to become a public danger and a nuisance. Land is, from its very nature, from the fact that it cannot be increased in extent, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 407 and that the possession by one man is the exclusion of another — land is the form of property over which the state would most naturally be expected to reserve a right of ultimate control. Yet English statesmen for generations complacently asserted the impossibility of any legislative interference with the right of the landlord, as if legisla- tion had not again and again interfered with the right of the factory owner, the owner of mines, the possessor of railways shares, the shopkeeper; the right of the master over his apprentice, the mistress in the hire of her maid- of-all-work. Long years: before Lord Palmerston talked so decisively of the landlord's right, a man of far more truly Conservative mind than Lord Palmerston had defined in a few sentences the limits of private or corporate rights." In his speech on Fox's East India measure Burke frankly met this difficulty about individual and corporate rights. He was speaking for the moment especially of chartered cor- porations; but of course a single owner of property can claim no greater right than a company of property-owners. "It has been said, if you violate this charter, what security has the charter of the bank, in which public credit is so deeply concerned, and even the charter of London, in which the rights of so many subjects are involved? I answer: in the like case they have no security at all; no, no security at all. If the bank should, by every species of mismanage- ment, fall into a state similar to that of the East India Company, if it should be oppressed with demands it could not answer, engagements which it could not perform, and with bills for which it could not procure payment, no charter should protect such mismanagement from correc- tion, and such public grievances from redress. If the city of London had the means and will of destroying an empire, and of cruelly oppressing and tyrannizing over millions of men as good as themselves, the charter of the city of Lon- don would prove no sanction to such tyranny and such oppression. Charters are kept when their purposes are maintained; they are violated when the privilege is sup- ported against its end and its object." If ever there was a creature of law and of authority acting in the place of law, it was the landlordism of Ireland. It was a plantation made by the orders of English sovereigns and governments. It was- not a growth of the soil; it was strictly an exotic. It was imposed upon the country and the people. It 408 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. could uot plead in support of any of its alleged rights even that prescriptive title which grows up with the growth of an institution that has held its place during all the ages to which tradition or memory goes hack. The landlordism of Ireland was, compared with most European institutions, a thing of the day before yesterday. It was the creation of conquest, the impost of confiscation. It could plead no title Avhatever to maintain an unlimited right of action in opposition to the welfare of the people on whom it was forced. At least it could claim no such title when once the time had passed away which insisted that the right of conquest susperseded all other human rights, that the tenant, like the slave, had no rights which his master was boifnd to respect, and that the common weal meant simply the interests and the privileges of the ruling class. The moment the title of the Irish land system came to be fairly examined, it was seen to be full of flaws. It was depend- ent on conditions that had never been fulfilled. It had not even made the landlord class prosperous. It had not even succeeded, as no doubt some of its founders intended that it should succeed, in colonizing the island with English and Scotch settlers. When the famine of 1846 and 1847 had tried the whole system with its gaunt, stern hand, legislation had perforce to interfere with the fancied rights of landlordism, and invent a new judicial machinery for taking from the broken-down owner what he could keep no longer with profit to himself or the country. For gen- erations the land tenure system of Ireland had been the subject of parliamentary debate and parliamentary inquiry. The Devon Commission had made ample investigation of its principles and its operation. Mr. Sharman Crawford had in vain devoted an honest life to the advocacy of tenant-right. Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Chichester Fortescue, Lord Naas had introduced measures trying more or less feebly to deal with Irish land tenure. Nothing came of all this. The supposed right of the landlord stopped the way. The one simple demand of the occasion was, as we have shown, security of tenure, and it was an article of faith with English statesmanship until Mr. Gladstone's time that security for the tenant was confiscation for the landlord. Mr. Gladstone came into power full of genuine reforming energy and without the slightest faith in the economic , I II IS TO UY OF OUR OWN 1 1ME8. 40 ( .) wisdom of our ancestors. In a speech delivered by hi in during his electioneering campaign in Lancashire, he had declared that the Irish upas-tree had three great branches: the state church, the land tenure system, and the system of education, and that he meant to hew them all down if he could. His figure of speech met with a good deal of contemptuous literary criticism; but it expressed a very resolute purpose. On February 15, 1870, Mr. Gladstone introduced his Irish land bill into the House of Commons. The measure was one of far greater importance as regarded its principles than it proved to be in its practical operation. In plain words, what it did was to recognize the fact that the whole system of land tenure in Ireland, so far as it was the creature of law, was based upon a wrong principle. Mr. Gladstone's measure overthrew once for all the doc- trine of the landlord's absolute and unlimited right. It recognized a certain property or partnership of the tenant in the land which he tilled. Mr. Gladstone took the Ulster tenant-right as he found it, and made it a legal insti- tution. In places where the Ulster practice, or something analogous to it, did not exist, he threw upon the landlord the burden of proof as regarded the right of eviction. The tenant disturbed in the possession of his land could claim compensation for improvements, and the bill reversed the existing assumption of the law by presuming all improve- ments to be the property of the tenant, and leaving it to the landlord, if he could, to prove the contrary. The bill established a special judicial machinery for carrying out its provisions. It allowed the tribunals thus instituted to take into consideration not merely the strict legal condi- tions of each case, but also any circumstances that might affect the claim of the tenant as a matter of equity. Mr. Gladstone's great object was to bring about a state of things by virtue of which a tenant should not be dispossessed of his holding so long, as he continued to pay his rent, and should in any case be entitled to full compensation for any substantial improvements which his energy or his capital might have effected. The bill met on the whole with a cordial reception from the Irish members of parliament, although some of its clauses were regarded with a doubt and disfavor which subsequent events, we believe, showed to be well-founded. Mr. Gladstone allowed landlords, under certain conditions, to contract themselves out of the 410 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. provisions of the bill, and these conditions were so largely availed of in some parts of Ireland, that there were more evictions after the bill had become law than before it had yet been thought of. On this ground the measure was actually opposed by a small number of the popular repre- sentatives of Ireland. The general opinion, however, then and since was, that the bill was of inestimable value to Ireland in the mere fact that it completely upset the fundamental principle on which legislation had always previously dealt with Irish land tenure. It recognized a certain ownership on the part of the tenant as well as that of the landlord. The new principle thus introduced might well be denounced as revolutionary by certain startled Irish landlords. It put an end to trie reign of the landlord's absolute power; it reduced the landlord to the level of every other proprietor, of every other man in the country who had anything to sell or to hire. It recognized the palpable fact that there are certain conditions which make the ownership of land a more responsible possession than the ownership of property which admits of limitless ex- pansion. The existing system of legislation had been founded not merely on injustice but on untruth. It had denied the presence of conditions which were as certain and as palpable as the substance of the land itself. There- fore the new legislation might in one sense have well been called revolutionary. It decided once for all against Lord Palmerston's famous dogma, and declared that tenant- right was not landlord's wrong. That was in itself a revolution. The bill passed without substantial alteration. The Conservatives as a party did not vote against the second reading. A division was forced on, but only eleven mem- bers voted against the motion that the bill be read a second time, and of these only two or three belonged to the Conservative party, and only one, Mr. Henley, was of any mark among Conservatives. The small minority was chiefly made up of Irish members, who thought the bill inefficient and unsatisfactory. Long discussions in com- mittee followed, but the only serious attempt made to in- terfere with the actual principle of the measure, an attempt embodied in an amendment moved by Mr. Disraeli, was defeated by a majority of more than seventy votes. The bill was read a third time in the Commons on May 30th. A HISTORY OF OUR I) WN TIMES. 411 A debate of three nights took place in the House of Lords on the motion for the second reading, and many nights of discussion were occupied in committee. On August 1, 1870, the bill received the royal assent. The second branch of the upas-tree had been hewn down; but the woodman's ax had yet to be laid to a branch of tougher fiber, well calculated to turn the edge of even the best weapon, and to jar the strongest arm that wielded it. .Mr. Gladstone had dealt with church and land; he had yet to deal with university education, lie had gone with Irish ideas thus far. CHAPTER LIX. "REFORMATION in a flood." On June 10, 1870, men's minds were suddenly turned away from thought of political controversy by a melan- choly announcement in the morning papers. The Irish land bill, the question of national education, the curiously ominous look of affairs in France, where the emperor had just been obtaining by means of the plebiscite "a new guar- antee of order and liberty;" the terrible story of the capture and massacre of young English tourists by Greek brigands in the neighborhood of Marathon, these and many other ex- citing topics were forgotten for the hour, and the thoughts of millions were suddenly drawn away to a country house near the Gad's Hill of Shakespeare, on the road to Roches- ter, where the most popular author of his day was lying dead. On the evening of June 8th, Mr. Dickens became suddenly seized witli paralysis. He fell into an uncon- scious state and continued so until his death, the evening after. The news was sent over the country on the 10th, and brought a pang as of personal sorrow into almost every home. Dickens was not of an age to die; he had scarcely passedhis prime. Born early in February, 1812, he had not gone far into his fifty-ninth year, [n another part of this work an attempt has been made to do justice to Dickens as a- novelist; here it is only necessary to record the historical fact of his death and of the deep impression that it made. No author of our time came near him in popularity; perhaps no English author ever was so popular 412 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. during his own life. To an immense number of men and women in these countries, Dickens stood for literature; to not a few his cheery teaching was sufficient as philosophy and even as religion. Soon after his death, as might have been expected, a certain reaction took place, and for awhile it became the fashion to smile cjuietly at Dickens' teaching and his influence. That mood too will have its day and will pass. It may be safely predicted that Dickens will be found to have made a firm place in English litera- ture, although that place will probably not be so high as his admirers would once have claimed for him. Londoners were familiar with Dickens' personal appearance as well as with his writings, and certain London streets did not seem quite the same when his striking face and energetic movements could be seen there no more. It is likely that Dickens overworked his exuberant vital energy, his superb resources of physical health and animal spirits. In work and play, in writing and in exercising, he was unsparing of his powers. Like the lavish youth with the full purse in "Gil Bias," he appeared to believe that his stock could never be spent. Men who were early companions of his, and who had not half his vital power, outlived him many years. He was buried m Westminster Abbey, although his own desire was to be laid quietly in Kochester churchyard. It was held that the national cemetery claimed him. We cannot help thinking it a pity the claim was made. All true admirers of Scott must be glad that he rests in his dear and congenial Dryburgh; most of the admirers of Dickens would have been better pleased to think that he lay beneath the green turf of the ancient churchyard, in venerable and storied Rochester, amid the scenes that he loved and taught so many others to love. Nothing in modern English history is like the rush of the extraordinary years of reforming energy on which the new administration had now entered. Mr. Gladstone's government had to grapple with five or six great questions of reform, any one of which might have seemed enough to engage the whole attention of an ordinary administration. The new prime minister had pledged himself to abolish the state church in Ireland and to reform the Irish land tenure system. He had made up his mind to put an end to the purchase of commissions in the army. Recent events and experiences had convinced him that it was A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 413 necessary to introduce the system of voting by ballot. lie accepted for his government the responsibility of originat- ing a complete scheme of national education. Meanwhile, there were many questions of the highest importance in foreign policy waiting for solution. The American govern- ment did what every cool and well-informed observer must have known they would do; they pressed for a settlement of the claims arising out of the damage done by the Ala- bama and other southern cruisers which had been built in English dockyards and had sailed from English ports. In the mid-career of the. government the war broke out between France and Prussia. Kussia took advantage of the opportunity to insist that the treaty of Paris must be altered by the canceling of the clause which "formally and in perpetuity" refused to every power the right of having a fleet in the Black Sea. Each of these questions was of capital importance; each might have involved the country in war. It required no common energy and strength of character to keep closely to the work of domes- tic reform amid such exciting discussions in foreign policy all the while, and with the war-trumpet ringing for a long- time in the ears of England. Mr. Forster's education bill may be said to have been run side by side with the Irish land bill. The govern- ment undertook a great and a much-needed work when it set about establishing a national system of elementary education. The manner in which England had neglected the education other poor children had long been a reproach to her civilization. She was behind every other great country in the world; she was behind most countries that in nowise professed to be great. Prussia and nearly all the German countries were centuries in advance of her; .so were some, if not actually all, of the American states. We have already shown in these pages by what pitiful patch- work of compromises and make-shift expedients England had been trying to put together something like a plan for the instruction of the children of the poor. Private charity was eked out in a parsimonious and miserable manner by a scanty dole from the state; and as a matter of course, where the direst poverty prevailed, and naturally brought the extremest need for assistance to education, there the wants of the place were least efficiently supplied. For years the statesmanship of England had been kept from 414 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. any serious attempt to grapple with the evil by the doc- trine that popular education ought not to be the business of a government. The idea prevailed that education con- ducted by the state would be something un-English; some- thing which might do very well for Germans and Ameri- cans and other such people, but which was entirely unsuited to the manly independence of the true Briton. It therefore came about that more than two- thirds of the children of the country were absolutely without instruction. One of the first great tasks which Mr. Gladstone's govern- ment undertook was to reform this condition of things, and to provide England for the first time in her history with a system of national education. On February 17, 1870, Mr. Forster introduced a bill having for its object to provide for public elementary education in England and Wales. The basis of the measure was very simple, but also very comprehensive. Mr. Forster proposed to establish a system of school boards in England and Wales; and to give to each board the power to frame by-laws compelling the attendance of all children, from five to twelve years of age, within the school district. The government did not see their way to a system of direct and universal compul- sion. They therefore fell back on a compromise, by leav- ing the power to compel in the hands of the local authori- ties. Existing schools were, in many instances, to be adopted by the bill, and to receive government aid, on con- dition that they possessed a certain amount of efficiency in education, that they submitted themselves to the examinu- tion of an undenominational inspector, and that they ad- mitted a conscience clause as part of their regulations. The funds were to be procured partly by local rate, partly by grants from the treasury, and partly by the fees paid in the paying schools. There were of course to be free schools provided where the poverty of the population was such as, in the opinion of the local authorities to render gratuitous instruction indispensable. The bill at first was favorably received. But the general harmony of opinion did not last long. The task proved to be one of the most difficult that the government could have undertaken. The whole body of the English and Welsh nonconformists soon declared themselves in strong hos- tility to some of the bill's provisions. Mr. Forster found, when he came to examine into the condition of tht$ A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. 415 machinery of education in England, that there was already a system of schools existing under the charge of religious bodies of various kinds: the state church, and the Eoman Catholic church, and other authorities. These he proposed to adopt as far as possible into his scheme; to affiliate them, as it were, to the governmental system of education. But he had to make some concession to the religious prin- ciples on which such schools were founded. He could not by any stroke of authority undertake to change them all into secular schools. He therefore proposed to meet the difficulty by ad oj) ting regulations compelling every school of this kind which obtained government aid or recognition to accept a conscience clause by means of which the religious convictions of parents and children should be scrupulously regarded in the instruction given during the regular school hours. On this point the nonconformists as a body broke away from the government. They laid down the broad principle that no state aid whatever should be given to any schools but those which were conducted on strictly secular and undenominational principles. It ought to be superfluous to say that .the nonconformists did not object to the religious instruction of children. It ought not to be supposed for a moment that they attached less importance to religious instruction than any other body of persons. Their principle was that public money, the contributions of citizens of all shades of belief, ought only to be given for such teaching as the common opinion of the country was agreed upon. The contribution of the Jew, they argued, ought not to be exacted in order to teach Christianity; the Protestant ratepayer ought not be compelled to pay for the instruction of Roman Catholic children in the tenets of their faith; the Irish Catholic in London or Birmingham ought not to be called upon to pay in any way for the teaching of dis- tinctively Protestant doctrine. Therefore, they said, let us at any cost establish a strictly national and secular system in our public elementary schools; let us teach there what we are all agreed upon; and let us leave the duty <»!' teaching religion to the minis- ters of religion, and to the parents of the children. About the truths of arithmetic and geography, about spelling and writing, we are all agreed; let our common contributions be given to common instruction, and let each denomination 416 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. provide in its own way for the religions training of its young people. This way of looking at the question left out of notice one most important element in the contro- versy : the existence of large bodies of citizens who con- scientiously objected to any school teaching which was divorced from religious instruction, and who did not believe that there could be any education in the true sense with- out the influence of religion accompanying and inspiring it. We shall not here discuss the relative worth of these two opposing and irreconcilable theories of public educa- tion. The fact that they existed made it well-nigh im- possible for the government to satisfy the demands of the nonconformists. Mr.Forster could not admit the principle for which they contended. He could not say that it would be a fair and equal plan to offer secular education, and that alone, to all bodies of the community; for he was well aware that there were such bodies who were conscientiously opposed to what was called secular education, and who could not agree to accept it. He therefore acknowledged existing and very palpable facts, and endeavored to estab- lish a system which should satisfy the consciences of all the denominations. But the nonconformists would not meet him on this ground. They set up their shibboleth of undenominational education; they made a fetish of their theory of state aid; and they fought Mr. Forster long, and ably, and bitterly. The Liberal minister was compelled to accept more than once the aid of the Conservative party; for that party as a whole adopted the principle which insisted on religious instruction in every system of national education. It more than once happened, therefore, that Mr. Forster and Mr. Gladstone found themselves appealing to the help of Conservatives and of Roman Catholics against that dissenting body of Englishmen who were usually the main support of the Liberal party. It hap- pened, too, very unfortunately, that at this time Mr. Bright's health had so far given way as to compel him to seek complete rest from parliamentary duties. His pres- ence and his influence with the nonconformists might perhaps have tended to moderate their course of action, and to reconcile them to the. policy of the government even on the subject of national education; but his voice was silent then, and for long after. The split between the gov- ernment and the nonconformists became something like a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4 1? complete severance. Many angry and bitter words wore spoken in the House of Commons on both sides. On one occasion there was an almost absolute declaration on the part of Mr. Gladstone and of Mr. Miall, a leading noncon- formist, that they had parted company forever. The edu- cation bill was nevertheless a great success. The school boards became really valuable and powerful institutions, and the principle of the cumulative vote was tested for the first time in their elections. When school hoards were first estahlished in the great cities, their novelty and the evident importance of the work they had to do attracted to them some of the men of most commanding intellect and position. The London school board had as its chairman, for instance, Lord Lawrence, the great Indian statesman, lately a viceroy, and for one of its leading members Professor Huxley. An important peculiarity of the school boards, too, was the fact that they admitted women to the privi- leges of membership; and this admission was largely availed of. Women voted, proposed amendments, sat on com- mittees, and in every way took their part of the duties of citizenship in the business of national education. When the novelty of the system wore off, some of the more emi- nent men gradually fell out of the work, but the school boards never failed to maintain a high and useful standard of membership. They began and continued to he strictly representative institutions. From the peer to the working- man, from evangelical churchman to Catholic; from non- conformist to rationalist; from old-fashioned, middle-class paterfamilias to eager young woman shrilly representing the rights of her sex, they became a mirror of English public and business life. Most of their work even still remains to be done. The school system of the country needs many improvements and many relaxations, probably, before it can be pronounced to he in fair working order. Its existence has in many parts of England brought thus far not peace but a sword. The struggle between the con- scientious belief of one class of persons and the political dogma of another is still going on. Many attempts were made to induce the government to go as far as direct com- pulsory education, and much dissatisfaction was expressed at the refusal of ministers to venture on the adoption of such a principle. It is therefore not unreasonable t<> saj that the national system of education has hardly yet had a 418 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. fair and full trial. But so faf as it has gone, there can he no doubt of the success it has achieved. No man exists who would, if lie could, see England return to the condi- tion of things which prevailed before the days of the Glad- stone administration. But it must he owned that the Gladstone administration was weakened and not strength- ened by its education scheme. One of the first symptoms of coming danger to Mr. Gladstone's government was found in the estrangement of the English nonconformists. They clung to their adopted principle with a genuine Puritan pertinacity. They admitted no respect of persons where that was concerned. Honest, conscientious and narrow, they were ready to sacrifice any party and any minister, rather than tolerate concession or compromise. The government were a little unfortunate too as regarded another great reform : that of the organization of the army. Mr. Cardwell, the war minister, brought forward a scheme for the reconstruction of the army, by combining under one system of discipline the regular troops, the militia, the volunteers, and the reserve. One most important part of the scheme was the abolition of the purchase system for officers' commissions, and the substitution of promotion according to' merit. Except in certain regiments, and in certain branches of the service outside England itself, the rule was, that an officer obtained his commission by pur- chase. Promotion was got in the same way. An officer bought a step up in the service. A commission was a vested interest; a personal property. The owner had })aid so much for it, and he expected to get so much for it when he thought fit to sell it. The regulation price recognized by law and the Horse Guards was not by any means the actual price of the commission. It became worth much more to the holder, and of course he expected to get its real price, not its regulation, or nominal and imaginary price. The regulation price was to the real price what the cost of the ticket bought at the door of an Italian theater is to the sum which has to be paid inside for a seat from which to see the play. This anomalous and extra- ordinary system had grovvn up with the growth of the English army, until it seemed in the eyes of many an essen- tial condition of the army's existence. It found defenders almost everywhere. Because the natural courage, energy and fighting power of Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotch- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES, 419 men bad made a good army in spite of this unlucky prac- tice, because the army did not actually collapse or wither away under its influence, many men were convinced that the army could not get on without it. The abolition of the purchase system had been advocated by generations of reformers without much success. For years, a stout old soldier, Sir De Lacy Evans, had made an annual motion on the subject, which was regarded by not a few as merely one of the necessary bores of parliamentary life. More lately Mr. Trevelyan had taken up the cause with vivacity, spirit, and good effect. Lord Stanley had always sup- ported the proposed reform, as he had supported the sys- tem of open competition for appointments in the civil ser- vice. But the question did not become really pressing and practical until Mr. Gladstone, on his accession to power, resolved to include it in his list of reforms. Of course Mr. Cardwell's proposition was bitterly and pertinaciously opposed. The principle of army purchase was part of a system in which large numbers of the most influential class had a vested interest. It was part of the aristocratic principle. To admit men to commissions in the army by pure merit and by mere competition would be to deprive the service of its specially aristocratic character. Few of those who opposed the reform on this ground were actually conscious that they were fighting merely for the mainte- nance of a class privilege and a selfish advantage. They had schooled themselves into the conviction that the aristocratic system was the only principle of existence for an English army; that a system of open promotion by merit would be too French or too American, or something of the kind; that it would fill the higher places in. the service with persons of no rank and of vulgar habits; and they had worked themselves into the belief that in resist- ing Mr. Cardwell's measure they were performing a patriotic duty. A large number of the Conservative party set them- selves, therefore, not merely to oppose but to obstruct the hill. They proposed all manner, of amendments, and raised all manner of discussions, in which the same argu- ments were repeated over and over again by the same speakers in almost the same words. Men who had never before displayed the slightest interest in the saving of the public money were now clamorous opponents of the hill on the ground that the abolition of purchase would render 420 A HI STORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. necessary the outlay of a large sum for compensation to officers thus deprived of their vested interests. This out- lay the Liberal government, usually censured by their opponents on the ground of their pinching parsimony, were quite willing to meet. Mr. Caldwell was prepared to make provision for it. Economy, however, became sud- denly a weapon in the hands of some of the Conservatives. Tbe session was going on, and there seemed little prospect of the opposition being discouraged or slackening in their energy. The government began to see that it would be impossible to carry through the vast and complicated scheme of army reorganization which they had introduced; and Mr, Gladstone was resolved that the system of pur- chase must come to an end. It was thought expedient at last, and while the bill was still fighting its way through committee, to abandon a great part of the measure and persevere for the present only with those clauses which related to the abolition of the system of purchase. Under these conditions the bill passed its third reading in the Commons on July 3, 1871, not without a stout resistance at the last and not by a very overwhelming majority. This condition of things gave the majority in the House of Lords courage to oppose the scheme. A meeting of Con- servative peers was held, and it was resolved that the Duke of Richmond should offer an amendment to the motion for the second reading of the army purchase- bill. The Duke of Richmond was exactly the sort of man that a party under such conditions would agree upon as the proper person to move an amendment. He was an entirely respectable and safe politician; a man of great influence so far as dignity and territorial position were concerned ; a seemingly moderate Tory who showed nothing openly of the mere partisan and yet was always ready to serve his party. When the motion for the second reading came on, the Duke of Richmond moved an amendment declaring that the House of Lords was unwilling to agree to the motion until a comprehensive and complete scheme of army reorganization should have been laid before it. This amendment was cleverly constructed. It did not pledge the House of Lords to reject the bill; it did not directly oppose the second reading; it merely said that before pass- ing the second reading, the house was anxious to know more fully the plans of the government for the general A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES, 421 reorganization of the army. The government had brought in a scheme of vast reorganization, and had then with- drawn nearly all of it, with the avowed intention of intro- ducing it again at a more convenient opportunity. It looked reasonable enough therefore that the House of Lords should hesitate about abandoning the system of pur- chase before knowing exactly what the government pro- posed to do as a supplement and consequence of so impor- tant a measure. But of course the object of the House of Lords was not to obtain further information ; it was sim- ply to get rid of the bill for the present. The amendment of the Duke of Richmond was adopted. Then Mr. Gladstone took a course which became the sub- ject of keen and embittered controversy. Purchase in the army was permitted only by a royal warrant. The whole system was the creation of royal regulation. The House of Commons had pronounced against the system. The House of Lords had not pronounced in favor of it. The House of Lords had not rejected the measure of the gov- ernment, but only expressed a wish for delay and further information. Delay however would have been fatal to the measure for that session. Mr. Gladstone therefore devised a way for checkmating what he knew to be the design of the House of Lords. It was an ingenious plan; it was almost an audacious plan; it took the listener's breath away to hear of it. Mr. Gladstone announced that as the system of purchase was the creation of royal regulation, he had advised the queen to take the decisive step of can- celing the royal warrant which made purchase legal. A new royal warrant was therefore immediately issued, de- claring that, on and after November 1st following, all regu- lations made by her majesty or any of her predecessors regulating or fixing the prices at which commissions might be bought, or in any way authorizing the purchase or sale of such commissions should be canceled. As far as regarded purchase, therefore, the controversy came sud- denly to an end. The House of Lords had practically nothing to discuss. All that was left of the government scheme on which the peers could have anything to say was that partof the bill which provided compensation for those whom the abolition of the system of purchase would deprive of certain vested interests. For the Lords to reject the bill as it now stood would merely be to say that 422 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. such officers should have no compensation. The Lords were, to use a homely expression, sold. To adopt a phrase which would have been good English once, and would not have been too strong to illustrate their own views of what had happened, they were "bubbled." Astonishment fell upon the minds of most who heard Mr. Gladstone's determination. After a moment of bewilder- ment it was received with a wild outburst of Liberal ex- ultation. It was felt to be a splendid party triumph. The House of Lords had been completely foiled. The tables had been turned on the peers. They were as utterly baffled as Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's play, when pulling out the document on which he is to rely, he finds it only "a fair skin of parchment," with "neither wax nor words." "What prodigy is this? I am o'erwhelmed with wonder," an astounded peer might have exclaimed; "what subtle spirit hath razed out the inscription?" Nothing was left for the House of Lords but to pass the bill as quickly as possible, coupling its passing, however, with a resolution announcing that it was passed only in order to secure to officers of the army the compensation they were entitled to receive, and censuring the government for having attained, "by the exercise of the prerogative and without the aid of parliament," the principal object which they contemplated in the bill. The House of Lords was then completely defeated. The system of purchase in the army was abolished by one sudden and clever stroke. The government were victorious over their opponents. Yet the hearts of many sincere Liberals sank within them as they heard the announcement of the triumph. Mr. Disraeli condemned in the strongest terms the sudden exercise of the prerogative of the crown to help the ministry out of a difficulty; and many a man of mark and influence on the Liberal benches felt that there was good ground for the strictures of the leader of the opposi- tion. Mr. Fawcett in particular condemned the act of the government. He insisted that if it had been done by a Tory minister it would have been passionately denounced by Mr. Gladstone amid the plaudits of the whole Liberal party. Mr. Fawcett was a man who occupied a remarkable position in the House of Commons. In his early manhood he met with an accident which entirely destroyed the sight of his eyes. He made the noble resolve that he would A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 433 nevertheless follow unflinching the career he had previously mapped out for himself, and would not allow the terrible calamity he had suffered to drive him from the active life of the political world. His tastes were for politics and political economy. He published a manual of political economy; he wrote largely on the subject in reviews and magazines; he was elected professor of the science in his own university, Cambridge. He was in politics as well as in economics a pupil of Mr. Mill ; and with the encourage- ment and support of Mr. Mill he became a candidate for a seat in parliament. He was a Liberal of the most decided tone; but he was determined to hold himself independent of party. He stood for Southwark against Mr. Layard in 1857 and was defeated; he contested Cambridge and Brighton at subsequent elections, and at last in 1865 he was successful at Brighton. He was not long in the House of Commons before it was acknowledged that his political career was likely to be something of a new force in parlia- ment. A remarkably powerful reasoner, he was capable notwithstanding his infirmity of making a long speech full of figures and of statistical calculations. His memory was fortunately so quick and powerful as to enable him easily to dispense with all the appliances which even well-trained speakers commonly have to depend upon when they enter into statistical controversy. In parliament he held faith- fully to the purpose with which he had entered it, and was a thorough Liberal in principles, but absolutely independent of the expedients and sometimes of the mere discipline of party. If he believed that the Liberal minis- ters were going wrong, he censured them as freely as though they were his political opponents. On this occa- sion he felt strongly about the course Mr. Gladstone had taken, and he expressed himself in language of unmeasured condemnation. It seems hard to understand how any inde- pendent man could have come to any other conclusion. The exercise of the royal prerogative was undoubtedly legal. Much time was wasted in testifying to its legality. The question in dispute was whether its sudden introduc- tion in such a manner was a proper act on the part of the government, whether it was right to cut short by virtue of the queen's prerogative a debate which had previously been carried on without the slightest intimation that the con- troversy was to be settled in any other way than that of 424 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the ordinary parliamentary procedure. The'-e seems to be only one reasonable answer to this question. The course taken by Mr. Gladstone was unusual, unexpected, unsus- tained by any precedent; it was a mere surprise ; it was not fair to the House of Lords, it was not worthy of the occa- sion, or the ministry, or the Liberal principles they pro- fessed. Great stress was laid upon an opinion which was obtained from Sir Rounded Palmer in justification of the action of the government. But Sir Roundell Palmer merely gave it as his opinion that the issuing of the war- rant canceling purchase was within the constitutional power of the crown. On that subject there could be no reasonable doubt. But that was not the question which people were discussing so eagerly. They were asking whether it was fair to begin a measure of reform on the ordinary principles of parliamentary procedure,and suddenly to bring it to a close by the unexpected intervention of the royal prerogative. On this question, the only one really at issue, Sir Roundell Palmer's letter was a condemnation, not a justification, of the course taken by the govern- ment. "I should have been glad," Sir Roundell Palmer wrote to Mr. Card well, "if it had been generally and clearly understood from the beginning that, subject to the sense of parliament being ascertained with reference to the point of compensation, the form of procedure would be that which was eventually adopted, because it is certainly an evil that the adoption of one constitutional mode of pro- cedure rather than another should appear to arise from an adverse vote of the House of Lords." The introduction of the prerogative in this curious way did much to damage the influence of Mr. Gladstone's gov- ernment. Every one in the end came to approve of the principle of promotion in the army by merit, and the aboli- tion of the anomalous system of purchase. But this great reform could at most have been delayed for only a single session by the House of Lords. It would have been car- ried, as the ballot was carried, the moment it was sent up a second time from the representative chamber. It is not even certain, that the House of Lords, if firmly met, would have carried their opposition long enough to delay the measure by a single session. In any case the time lost would not have counted for much; better by far to have waited another session than to have carried the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 425 point at once by a stroke of policy which seemed impa- tient, petulant, and even unfair. It is evident that among the independent men of his own party Mr. Gladstone suffered discredit by the manner in which he swept the purchase system away, and "bade his will vouch it." Among the many influences already combining to weaken his authority, the impression produced by this stroke of policy was not the least powerful. The ballot bill was not carried without a struggle. It was introduced by Mr. Forster on February 20, 1871, and was a measure embodying some remarkable changes. Its principal object was of course the introduction of the sys- tem of secret voting. This Mr. Forster proposed to do by compelling each voter to use only an official voting-paper which he was to obtain at the polling-place, and there alone. Entering the polling-place, the voter was to go to the official in charge, and mention his name and his place of residence. The official, having ascertained that he was properly on the register, would hand him a stamped paper on which to inscribe his vote. The voter was to take the paper into a separate compartment and there privately mark a cross opposite the printed name of the candidate for whom he desired to record his vote. He was then to fold up the paper in such a manner as to prevent the mark from being seen, and in the presence of the official, drop it into the urn for containing the votes. By this plan Mr. Forster proposed not only to obtain secrecy, but also to prevent personation. The bill likewise undertook to abolish the old practice of nominating candidates publicly by speeches at the hustings. Instead of a public nomina- tion it was intended that the candidates should be nomi- nated by means of a paper containing the names of a ] no- poser and seconder and eight assentors, all of whom must, be registered voters. This paper being handed to the; returning officer would constitute a nomination. Tims was abolished one of the most characteristic and time-dishonored peculiarities of electioneering. Every humorous writer, every satirist with pencil or pen, from Hogarth to Dickens, had made merry with the scenes of the nomination day. No ceremonial could be at once more useless and more mischievous. In England the candidates were proposed and seconded in face of each other on a public platform in some open street or market-place in the presence of a vast 426 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tumultuous crowd, three-fourths of whom were generally drunk, and all of whom were inflamed by the passion of a furious partisanship. Fortunate indeed was the orator whose speech was anything more than dumb show. The Conservative part of the crowd usually made it a point of honor not to listen to the Liberal candidate or allow him to be heard; the Liberal partisans in the street were equally resolute to drown the eloquence of the Tory candi- date. Brass bands and drums not unusually accompanied the efforts of the speakers to make themselves heard. Brickbats,, dead cats, and rotten eggs came flying like bewildering meteors around the ears of the rival politicians on the hustings. The crowds generally enlivened the time by a series of faction fights among themselves. Anything more grotesque, more absurd, more outrageous it would be impossible to imagine. The bill introduced by Mr. Forster would have deserved the support of all rational beings, if it proposed no greater reform than simply the abolition of this abominable system. But the ballot had long become an indispensable necessity. Bribery, corrup- tion, intimidation, were the monstrous outcome of the system of open voting. Yet for long years no reform had seemed more unlikely than the adoption of the ballot. In Mr. Grote's days there used to be an annual debate on the motion in favor of the ballot, and Mr. Grote generally found himself supported by a very respectable minority, and by some speakers of great influence. Still his proposal was even then regarded by parliament and the public in general rather as a crotchet than as a practical scheme. In " The Song of the Box" Thomas Moore made easy ridicule of Grote and his ballot. " And oh, when at last even this greatest of Grotes Must bend to the power that at every door knocks, May he drop in the urn like his own silent votes, And the tomb of his rest be a large ballot-box." Lord Palmerston made precisely the same joke years after about Mr. Henry Berkeley and his annual motion for the adoption of the ballot. He expressed a hope that when the inevitable hour came for Mr. Berkeley to quit the scene of his mortal labors, his tomb might be made in the likeness of a ballot-box. Lord Palmerston evidently was not acquainted with Moore's lines about Mr. Grote, and was under the impression that he was making an original A II I STORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 427 joke. Iu Mr. Berkeley's hands, the ballot debate became less important than it had been with Mr. G-rote. On one remarkable occasion, indeed, Mr. Berkeley contrived to carry a sort of snap vote against the government. The division was taken unexpectedly in a very thin house, and eighty-six voted for the ballot and eighty against it. But nothing came of this, and the whole question seemed at one time in a fair way to be closed with Mr. Spooner's motion for the withdrawal of the Maynooth grant or Mr. Newdegate's appeal for the inspection of convents. Lord Palmerston used to argue complacently that the franchise was not a right but a trust; that the trust was exercised on behalf of the community in general, and that the voter was bound to discharge his duty in public so that those for whom he acted should know that he was acting fairly. This way of treating the question held out a temptation to long and futile controversy as to whether the franchise was or was not the right of a free man, and in what we may call the metaphysics of the subject the really practical object of the discussion became lost. Lord Palmerston's description of the franchise did not in the slightest degree affect the argument in favor of the ballot. If the franchise was a trust, and only a trust, there was none the less neces- sity that the trustee should be so protected as to enable him to discharge his trust conscientiously and properly. The objection to the open vote was that in a vast number of instances the voter could not safely vote according to his conscience and his convictions. If he was a tenant he was in terror of his landlord; if he was a workman he was afraid of his employer; if he was a small shopkeeper in a country town he was in dread of offending some wealthy customer; if he was a timid man he shrank from exposing himself to the violence of a mob. In many cases a man giving a conscientious vote would have had to do so with the certainty that he was bringing ruin upon himself and his family. In Ireland the conflicting power of the land- lord and of the crowd made the vote a mere sham. A man in many places dared not vote but as the landlord bade him. Sometimes, when he thought to secure safety by pleasing the landlord, he ran serious risk by offending the crowd who supported the popular candidate. Voters were dragged to the poll like slaves or prisoners by the landlord and his agents. It was something worse than ridiculous 428 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to tell the House of Commons and the public that it was necessary such a system should be kept up because it enabled everybody to see that the voter properly discharged his trust. Yet this argument about the trust and the need of publicity was almost the only piece of reasoning which for many years Lord Palmerston thought it worth his while to offer to the House of Commons. Mr. Mill, who had begun by advocating the ballot, became an opponent of the system, chiefly on the ground that it was unmanly to conceal one's vote. This way of arguing the question only furnished one other illustration of the generous weak- ness which impaired the effect of much of Mr. Mill's polit- ical and social philosophy : the tendency to construct sys- tems based on what Burke called the heroic virtues; the belief that human affairs can be regulated on the assump- tion that all men can not only become heroic, but that they can be heroic always. It would be a nobler world indeed if in the giving of our votes as in everything else we could all make up our minds to do right and to defy the consequences. It would be a far finer sight for the moralist or the philosopher to see a concourse of Irish tenants going openly to the poll to vote against their land- lords, and calmly accepting eviction as a consequence, than to see the same men screened from the penalty of their patriotic conduct by the mechanical protection of the ballot. The small shopkeeper who offended his most influ- ential customer in the cause of what he believed to be the right, would be a nobler subject for contemplation than the small shopkeeper enabled to do as he thought right with- out any risk or loss. But an electoral system constructed on these lofty principles would be sure to turn out exactly as the open voting system proved to be : a source of almost boundless demoralization. It is curious to note that in one of the very speeches in which he condemned the ballot on this higher ground, Mr. Mill actually quoted with approval that sentence of profound practical philosophy in which Burke declared that "the system which lays -its foundations in rare and heroic virtues will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption." A change, however, suddenly took place in English public feeling. The gross and growing profligacy and violence which disgraced every election began to make men feel that something must be done to get rid of such hideous A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 429 abuses. Mr. Bright had always been an earnest advocate of the ballot system; and partly no doubt under his influ- ence, and partly by the teaching of experience and observa- tion, Mr. Gladstone became a convert to the.same opinion. In 1809 a committee of the House of Commons was appointed on the motion of Mr. Bruce, the home secretary, to inquire into the manner of conducting parliamentary and municipal elections. Lord Hartington was chairman of the committee. Its report was on the whole decidedly in favor of the principle of secret voting. Public opinion came round in a moment. Not many years had passed since the very words " secret voting" used to be considered enough to stigmatize the ballot, and to make all true men disclaim any approval of it. Now under the impulse of that marvelous breath of reforming energy which was scat- tering so many ancient traditions, the repugnance to the secret vote seemed to have disappeared. We are speak- ing now of the public out of doors; for a great many mem- bers of both houses of parliament were still unconverted. Mr. Forster's bill was stoutly resisted by the Conservatives. It was not merely resisted in the ordinary way; its progress was delayed by that practice of talking against time which has more recently become famous under the name of obstruction. A good many Liberal members liked the bal- lot in their hearts little better than the Tories did. The bill contained a wise and just proposal for throwing the legitimate expenses of elections on the public rates. This was rejected in committee by a large majority. A similar proposal, it may be stated, was introduced again and again in more or less differing forms during the progress of the ballot bills, and it was invariably rejected. The majority of the House of Commons is composed of rich men ; the majority, it is not unfair to say, is composed also of men who are not recommended to their constituencies by great intellect or distinguished public services. There will always therefore be many persons found to object to any change of system which tends to place a poor man and a rich man more nearly on a footing of equality in a candi- dature for a seat in parliament. The long delays which interposed between the introduction of Mr. Forster's bill and its passing through the House of Commons gave the House of Lords a plausible excuse for rejecting it altogether. The bill was not read a third time in the Commons until 430 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. August 8th; it was not sent up to the Lords until the 10th of that month — a date later than that usually fixed for the close of the session. Lord Shaftesbury moved that the bill be rejected on the ground that there was no time left for a proper consideration of it, and his motion was carried by ninety-seven votes to forty-eight. The manner in which the measure had been dealt with in the House of Commons made it seem clear to the Lords that there was really a very general feeling of dislike to the ballot among the members of the representative chamber, and embold- ened them to think that they would be rendering a grate- ful service by throwing it out. The House of Lords was right enough in assuming that many members of the House of Commons were not particu- larly anxious for the introduction of the ballot. The pro- posal of the government was welcome to the voters in general; but it was naturally regarded with hostile feelings by many men who felt small assurance that their seats would be safe if the franchise were to be exercised by every one in security and independence. The ballot was intro- duced, we do not hesitate to say, in defiance of the secret prejudices of the majority of the House of Commons which consented to pass it. Mr. Gladstone was determined to pass it in the interest of the voters, of political independ- ence, and of public morals. He was now as thoroughly convinced as Mr. Bright himself that the ballot in these countries would be the very keystone of political independ- ence. Kecent publications have enabled us to know that on one occasion, at least, Lord Palmerston did all he could privately to encourage the House of Lords to reject an im- portant measure introduced and passed in the Commons by his own chancellor of the exchequer, Mr. Gladstone. This fact which would be incredible if it were not made known upon authority impossible to question, was not likely to furnish an example which Mr. Gladstone would follow. Mr. Gladstone accepted the decision of the Lords as a mere passing delay, and with the beginning of the next session the ballot came up again. It was presented in the form of a bill to amend the laws relating to procedure at parliamentary and municipal elections, and it included of course the introduction of the system of secret voting. The bill passed quickly through the House of Commons. Those who most disliked it began now to see that they A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 431 must make up their minds to meet their fate. When the bill went up to the Lords an amendment was introduced into it with the view of making the ballot optional. This preposterous alteration was of course objected to by the Commons, and finally the House of Lords gave it up. There would obviously be no protection whatever for the class of voters whom it was necessary to protect, if the ballot were made simply optional. The tenant who exer- cised his option of voting secretly against his landlord might just as well have voted openly. The landlord would not be slow to assume that the secrecy was adopted for the purpose of giving a vote against him. At the instance of the House of Lords, however, the ballot was introduced as an experiment, and the act was passed to continue in force for eight years; that is, until the end of 1880. We may anticipate matters a little by saying that no measure of reform introduced through all that season of splendid reforming energy has given more universal satisfaction or worked with happier effect than the ballot. There is indeed much still to he done to purify the electoral system. The ballot has not extinguished corruption in small boroughs. It is still perfectly possible to carry on the most demoraliz- ing system of bribery there. The plan of what we may (•all payment by results still flourishes in many a small constituency. It is quietly given out that if a certain can- didate be elected there will be money flowing through the borough after the election; and every voter who is open to corruption goes to the polling-place determined to vote for this candidate, because he knows that his vote adds to the chances of the borough's coming in for the refreshing golden shower. Probably nothing could put a stop to the corruption in very small boroughs but their utter disfran- chisement, or some system which would group several of them into one constituency. But in all other objects sought by the ballot act it has been successful. It has put an end to an enormous amount of corruption, and it may be said to have almost altogether extinguished the illegiti- mate influence of the landlord, the employer, and the patron. During, a debate on woman's suffrage in 1811, Mr. Gladstone stated that if the ballot were once intro- duced there would lie no harm done by allowing women to vote. Nearly ten years have passed since that remark- able declaration, and the proposal to extend the franchise 432 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. to female householders does not seem to have made much practical progress. But it must be admitted that the adoption of the ballot makes a great difference in the con- ditions of the controversy. It was one thing to ask that Avomen should have imposed on them the duty of going np to the open poll and recording their votes in public, and quite another thing to ask that they should be allowed to enter a quiet compartment of the polling-place and record an independent vote under the saving shelter of the ballot. The university tests bill was one of the great measures carried successfully into legislation during this season of unparalleled activity. The effect of this bill was to admit all lay students of whatever" faith to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge on equal terms. This settled practically a controversy, and removed a grievance which had been attracting keen public interest for at least five- and-thirty years. Gradually the restrictions which Oxford and Cambridge drew around their systems of education had been relaxed. Dissenters had been admitted first to the advantages of education within the sphere of the uni- versities, and next to the honors which success in the university course was fitted to command. Twice over within a very few years had a measure for the purpose been carried through the Commons only to be rejected by the Lords. In this busy year of 1871, the Liberal government introduced the bill again, and this time, after some remon- strances and futile struggle, the Conservative majority in the House of Lords allowed their prejudices to succumb, and affirmed the principle of religious equality in the dis- tribution of the honors which the two universities have to award to those who win success as students within the sphere of their teaching. The government also passed a trades-union bill, moderating as has already been shown the legislation which bore harshly on the workmen. They established by act of parliament the local government board, a new department of the administration entrusted with the care of the public health, the control of the poor law system, and all regulations applying to the business of districts throughout the country. The government re- pealed the ridiculous and almost forgotten ecclesiastical titles bill. The popularity of Mr. Gladstone's government was all A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 433 the time somewhat impaired by the line of action, and even perhaps by the personal deportment, of some of its members. Mr. Lowe's budgets were not popular; and Mr. Lowe had a taste for sarcasm which it was pleasant no doubt to indulge in at the expense of heavy men, but which was, like other pleasant things, a little dangerous when enjoyed too freely. One of Mr. Lowe's budgets contained a proposition to make up for deficiency of income by a tax on matches. It seems not unlikely that the whole propo- sition first arose in Mr. Lowe's mind in connection with a pretty play upon words which he offered as its motto. "Ex luce luceUum" he suggested should be a device im- printed on every taxed match-box. The joke had to be ex- plained ; its humor wholly vanishes when it is put into English — "a little profit out of light;" not much drollery in that, surely. The country laughed at the joke and not with it. The match trade rose up in arms against the proposal. It was shown that the trade was really a very large one, employing vast numbers of poor people, both in the manufacture and the sale, especially in the east end of London; and it was proved that the imposition recom- mended by Mr. Lowe would put out the light most effect- ually. All the little boys and girls of the metropolis whose poor bread, whose miserable lucellum depended on the trade, arose in infantile insurrection against Mr. Lowe. There were vast processions of match-makers and match- sellers to Palace Yard to protest against the tax. The con- test was pitiful, painful, ludicrous; no ministry could endure it long. Mr. Lowe, who had not the slightest idea when he proposed his tax of being regarded as a worse than Lucifer by the vendors of lucifer matches, was only too glad to withdraw from his unenviable position. It was not pleasant to be regarded as a sort of ogre by thousands of poor little ragged boys and girls. Mr. Lowe had ven- tured on the proposal chiefly because of the example of the United States, where the whole system and social condi- tions are so different from ours as to afford no guarantee whatever that a tax which is found endurable by the one community is likely to be found endurable by the other. He, withdrew his unlucky proposal along with his ill-omened joke, and set himself to work to repair by other ways and means the ravages which warlike times had made in his financial system. No particular harm was done to anybody 434 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. but the government. They were made to seem ridiculous. The miserable match-tax was just the sort of thing to im- press the popular mind as something niggling, paltry, and pitiful. Mr. Lowe did not hear the end of it for a long time. The attempt and not the deed confounded him. Another member of the administration, Mr. Ayrton, a man of much ability but still more self-confidence, was con- stantly bringing himself and his government into quarrels. He was blessed with a gift of offense. If a tiling could be done either civily or rudely, Mr. Ayrton was pretty sure to do it rudely. He was impatient with dull people, and did not always remember that those unhappy persons not only have their feelings, but sometimes have their votes. He quarreled with officials; he quarreled with the news- papers; he seemed to think a civil tongue gave evidence of a feeble intellect. He pushed his way along, trampling on people's prejudices with about as much consideration as a steam-roller shows for the gravel it crushes. Even when Mr. Ayrton was in the right, he had a wrong way of showing it. CHAPTER LX. THE BLACK SEA CLAUSE — THE ALABAMA ARBITRATION". Meanwhile the portentous changes which were taking place on the continent of Europe had, as was natural, their effect on England and the English government. The Emperor Napoleon having taken to himself a Liberal min- ister, M. Emile Ollivier, one of the famous five who for years had represented opposition in the French legislative; chamber, had sought to get a renewed charter for himself and his dynasty by means of a plebiscite. Representing the question at issue as one of revolution or social order, the' emperor obtained a very large majority of ayes in favor of his policy and his house, seven and a quarter million ayes against one and a half million noes. But the minority was considerable, and one peculiarity made it specially ominous. There were more than fifty-two thousand "noes" among the votes of the army and navy. The Mexican expedition and its ghastly failure had much injured the prestige of the emperor with the two services. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 435 The truth could not be concealed that he had been per- emptorily ordered out of Mexico by the United States gov- ernment and that he had obeyed the command, leaving Maximilian to his fate. Louis Napoleon saw that he must do something to recover his military popularity. The overthrow of Austria by Prussia had roused a strong feel- ing of jealousy in France. M. Thiers in particular had endeavored to keep up an angry mood against the imperial government. He constantly reproached the emperor for not interposing in some way to protect Austria and restrict the ambition of Prussia. Louis Napoleon there- fore found himself driven to try the gamester's last and desperate throw. He seized the first excuse for forcing a Avar on Prussia. It is probable that war would have come in any case. M. Prevost-Paradol had compared France and Prussia to two express trains started from opposite points along the same line of rails. The collision must come ; it was merely a ques- tion of time. The comparison was happy. Prussia knew very well that her success over Austria had aroused the jeal- ousy and the fears of France. France began to revive the old talk of the frontier on the Rhine. Bismarck had probably made up his mind that the quarrel would have to be fought out one day. Still it was a fatal mistake of the Emperor Napoleon to force the quarrel on such a pretext as the fact that the Spanish people had invited a distant relation of the king of Prussia to become sovereign of Spain. Louis Napoleon managed to put himself completely in the wrong. The king of Prussia at once induced his relative to with- draw from the candidature in order not to disturb the sus- ceptibilities of France; and then the French government pressed for a general pledge that the king of Prussia would never on any future occasion allow of any similar candi- dature. When it came to this, there was an end to nego- tiation. It was clear then that the emperor was resolved to have a quarrel. Count Bismark must have smiled a grim smile. His enemy had delivered himself into Bismarck's hands. The emperor had been for some time in failing health. He had not been paying much attention to the details of Ins administration. False security and self-conceit had Operated among his generals and his war department to the utter detriment of the army. Nothing was ready. The 436 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. whole system was falling to pieces. Long after France had declared war, the army that was to go to Berlin was only dragging heavily toward the frontier. The experience of what had happened to Austria might have told any one that the moment Prussia saw her opportunity she would move with the direct swiftness of an eagle's flight. But the French army stnck as if it was in mud. What every one expected came to pass. The Prussians came down on the French like the rush of a torrent. The fortunes of the war were virtually decided in a day. Then the French lost battle after battle. The emperor dared not return to Paris. The defense — for the Prussians, had long since become the invaders — was carried on with regard to the em- peror's political fortnnes rather than to the military neces- sities of the hour. There was nothing but French defeats until there came at last the crowning disaster of Sedan. The emperor surrendered his sword, and was a captive in the hands of his enemies. The second empire was gone in a moment. Paris proclaimed the republic; the Empress Eugenie fled to England ; the second empire was all in the dust; the conqueror at Versailles was hailed as German emperor. We need not follow the fortunes of the war. France made many a brave and brilliant attempt to rally; but it was too late. Official neglect and mismanagement had done their work. No courage, no patriotism, could now retrieve the fortunes of the field. Marshal Bazaine, the ill-omened soldier of the Mexican campaign, surrendered at Metz with a vast army; Paris was invested, was besieged; had to give up, or famine would have done the work for her. The conquering enemy had to be spoken with at the gate. France had nothing for it but to accept the terms imposed on her. She lost two provinces and had to pay an enormous fine; and the war was over. The sympathies of the English people generally were at first almost altogether with Prussia. The policy of the Emperor Napoleon had seemed so gross and outrageous that the public voice here applauded the resistance of Ger- many to his attempted dictation. But when the empire fell the feeling suddenly changed. It was the common idea that the Prussians ought to have been content with Sedan and the complete destruction of the Bonapartist em- pire and have made generous terms with the republic. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 437 Great popular meetings were held in Trafalgar Square, London, and in various provincial cities, to express sym- pathy with the hardly-entreated French. The sympathy of the Irish populations had been with France all through. The old bonds of comradeship dating from the Irish brigade and from long before it had still their hold upon the emo- tional and impassioned Irish nature. Many persons every- where thought the government ought to do something to assist the French republic. Some were of opinion that the glory of England would suffer if she did not get into a fight with some power or other. It came out in the course of the eager diplomatic discussions which were going on that there had been some secret talk at different times of a private engagement between France and Prussia which would have allowed France on certain conditions to annex Belgium. This astounding revelation excited alarm and anger in England. The government met that possible danger by at once pressing upon France and Prussia a new treaty by which these powers bound themselves jointly with England to maintain the independence of Belgium and to take up arms against any state invading it. The government might fairly claim to have thus provided satis- factorily against any menace to the integrity and independ- ence of Belgium, and they prepared against the more general dangers of the hour by asking for a large vote to enable them to strengthen the military defenses of the country. But they were seriously embarrassed by the manner in which Russia suddenly proposed to deal with the treaty of Paris. One article of that treaty declared that "the Black Sea is neutralized; its waters and its ports, thrown open to the mercantile marine of every na- tion, are formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the flag of war, either of the powers possessing its coast or of any other power," and the sultan of Turkey and the emperor of Russia engaged to establish or maintain no military or maritime arsenals on the shores of that sea. Russia now took advantage of the war between France and Prussia to say that she would not submit to he bound by that article of the treaty any longer. The Russian statesmen pleaded as a justification of this blunt and sudden proceeding that the treaty of Paris had been ignored by other powers and in a variety of ways since the time of its signature, and that Russia could not hi: expected to endure forever an 438 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. article which he-re heavily, directly, and specially upon her. The manner of making the announcement was startling, ominous, and offensive. But there really was not much that any English statesman could do to interfere with Russia's declared intentions. Two of the great powers con- cerned in the treaty of Paris were occupied too gravely Avith concerns of their own to have much interest in the neutralization of the Black Sea. It was not likely that France or Prussia would stop just then from the death- grapple in which they were engaged to join in coercing Russia to keep to the disputed article in the treaty. Aus- tria of course would not under such circumstances undertake to interfere. It would have been a piece of prej)os- terous quixotry on the part of England to take on herself alone the responsibility of maintaining the sanctity of the treaty. Besides, it had long been clear to every practical politician that sooner or later, by one process or another, Russia would shake herself free from the obligation imposed on her by the clause which she now challenged. Literally it affected all the great powers alike, but in fact it only concerned Russia, and it was devised as a means of restrain- ing her alone. The Black Sea is virtually a Russian lake. At least it may be thus described if we think of military and political questions only; for Turkey's use of the Black Sea could hardly be of vital moment to Europe, and Turkey and Russia divide between them the Euxine shores. How- ever wise and just, therefore, the desire of the western powers to have the war flag of Russia kept out of the waters of the Black Sea, it must have been clear to every statesman, even at the time when the treaty was made, that should Russia ever be in a position to demand a release from the conditions which her defeat in the Crimea imposed upon her, she would take advantage of the oppor- tunity. It must have been expected that she would insist upon the abrogation of the clause in the treaty of Paris which shut her navy out of the waters that washed her own southern shores. But the manner of demanding the abro- gation of the clause surprised and offended even more than the demand itself. There was something Calmuck in the coarse bluntness of the obvious admission that Russia now insisted on new conditions because she found that there was no possibility of any western alliance to interfere with her will. If England had gone to war with Russia, she A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 43!) would have gone to war for the maintenance of an article in the treaty of Paris, which no one believed could be long maintained in any case, and for which most of the Euro- pean powers cared nothing either way. Lord Granville confined himself to remonstrating against the extraordinary assumption that any power which signed a treaty could legitimately and of its own motion repudiate any part of the treaty at any moment when it thought fit. If Russia cared about argument it must be admitted that Lord Granville's argument was beyond reply. Lord Granville merely affirmed that when several parties have entered into a joint engagement it cannot be open to any one of them to withdraw from it whenever he pleases, without consult- ing the others. But of course Russia cared nothing about argument or fairness in the matter. She saw that she had an unprecedented chance — a chance perhaps never to occur again — for getting out of her engagement with impunity ; and she seized upon it and held to it. We do not see how even a Russian, outside the official world, could undertake to justify the action of the Russian government. On the other hand, we fear that the Russian emperor might find a good deal in the events then passing in Europe to plead in excuse of his policy. Public law did not seem for the time to be held in very high regard. The transactions between Prussia and France with regard to Belgium were disgraceful to the statesmen who took part in them. They were cynically avowed by Count Bismarck when he found it suited his convenience to betray his late accomplices. A feeble attempt was made on the part of the accomplices to disavow them, or deny them, or escape in some way from the shame of having set them going. Each party fell back upon the policy of the husband and wife meeting by chance at the masked ball, each of whom makes overtures to the unrecognized other, and each of whom on a mutual recognition insists that the overtures were only made with the object of trying the other's virtue. Thus Europe was amused for a few days, and ought no doubt to have been scandalized, by the controversy between France and Prussia as to which was the tempter, which was the tempted, and what was the real motive of the temptation. Then again the king of Italy took advan- tage of the withdrawal of the French army of occupation from Rome to announce that in the interest of order and 440 A HISTORY OF OUU OWN TIMES. to deliver Rome and the pope from the tyranny of the pope's foreign guards, he felt compelled to march the Italian troops into the city, take forcible possession of it, and make it the capital of his dominions. We do not propose to discuss or even to touch upon the religious ques- tion then at issue between the Vatican and the king of Italy. We are willing to look at all that took place from the point of view of those who desired that Italy should become one united kingdom and should have Rome for her capital. Even from this point of view it seems absolutely impossible to justify the course taken by the king of Italy. It is easy to understand how Italians and other men should say to themselves, "now that the thing has been done, we are glad it is done, and is over." But it would baffle the ingenuity of any casuist to find a justification for such a mode of solving a great political question unless on the bold assumption that the stronger has always a right to do anything he thinks proper with the weaker. At all events it is not surprising that when the emperor of Russia saw such strokes of policy approved of by the cabinets of great powers like England, he should have said to himself that there was no reason why he alone of all other sovereigns on the European continent should not be at liberty to lay rude hands on opportunity. There was apparently a gen- eral scramble going on; and the Emperor Alexander may not have seen why there should be any law of morality or honor specially binding on him which was not binding on his neighbors. Such of course would not have been the view of a moralist; but the Emperor Alexander was perhaps of the way of thinking of that philosopher who has argued that it is immoral to be in advance of the morality of one's age. Perhaps Alexander thought that in acting as he did he was only acting up to the morality of his contemporaries. . Lord Granville, however, continued to remonstrate. It was necessary to find some way of getting the European powers decently out of the difficulty in which they were placed. To enforce the treaty was out of the question; but on the other hand it did not look seemly that they should put up quite tamely with the dictatorial resolve of Russia. The ingenious mind of Count Bismarck found a way of putting a fair show on the action of Europe. He suggested that a conference should be held in London to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 441 talk the whole matter over. On November 26, 1870, he addressed a circular to Austria, Turkey, Italy, and Russia, requesting them to authorize their representatives to assemble in London at a conference of the powers which had signed the treaty of March :50, 1856, in order " to dis- cuss the questions which are raised in connection with the communications in the circular of the imperial Russian cabinet." This invitation was stated to have been issued after the English cabinet had assured Count Bismarck of its assent. Lord Granville politely assumed that the Rus- sian government had merely announced its wish to have the clause in the treaty abrogated as a matter for the con- sideration of the European powers, and that the conference was to be assembled " without any foregone conclusion as to its results." This graceful little fiction was welcomed by all diplomatists. The conference met with every be- coming appearance of a full belief in the minds of all its members that they were about to consider a proposal which they might either accept or reject as their free judgment should determine. The conference assembled on January 17, 1871, and began its labors by an abstract declaration of principle. A special protocol was signed, affirming it to be an essential principle of the law of nations that no state could release itself from the engagements of a treaty unless with the consent of the other contracting powers. This important declaration, which amounted exactly to the announcement of the fact that there must be at least two parties to a bargain, was solemnly agreed upon, and then the conference felt itself quite free to finish its work on March 13, 1871, by agreeing to a treaty abrogating the clause for the neutralization of the Black Sea. There was something a little farcical about the whole transaction. We learn from Madame de Remusat that when the great Napoleon played chess he liked to move the pieces occa- sionally in any way that suited his plans, and without any particular regard to the established rules of the game. If it seemed advantageous to him at some particular moment to give to his king the unlimited movement of the queen, he was in the habit of composedly adopting this new prin- ciple. Now we can perhaps imagine a few old-fashioned courtiers being a little offended at this arbitrary and one- sided plan of action, and conscious at the same time of their own inability to overrule the will of the great con- 442 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. queror. What could be a more honorable and prudent way of reconciling principle and interest than to hold a chess conference, pass a resolution that it is one of the essential principles of the game that no player can alter its laws merely to please himself; and then after this saving protest proceed to authorize the Emperor Napoleon to make the particular moves that he happened just then to desire? Something like this was the policy pursued by the conference held in London. It did not tend to raise the credit or add to the popularity of the English govern- ment. We do not know that there was anything better to do; we can only say that the government deserves com- miseration which at an important European crisis can do nothing better. Other troubles began to press upon Mr. Gladstone's gov- ernment. A few weeks after the issue of the Russian cir- cular repudiating the neutralization clause in the treaty of Paris, General Grant in opening the congress of the United States announced that the time had come when the Ameri- can government must take some decided steps for the set- tlement of the Alabama claims. This dispute had reached what we may call its second stage. The first was when the English government declined to admit any responsi- bility for the losses inflicted on American commerce. The second was arrived at when the more sober judgment of Lord Stanley acknowledged a willingness to submit the question to some manner of arbitrament. When matters had gone so far it was natural that attempts should be made at a convention for the settlement of the claims. In one instance a convention, devised by Mr. Eeverdy John- son, then American minister in England, had actually been signed by Lord Clarendon, foreign secretary, whose death in June, 1870, was followed by Lord Granville's removal from the colonial to the foreign office. The senate of the United States, however, rejected this conven- tion by a majority of fifty-four to one, and Mr. Reverdy Johnson resigned his office. The doom of the convention was chiefly brought about by the efforts of Mr. Charles Sumner, a leading member of the senate of the United States. Most readers are probably aware of the fact that treaties concluded on behalf of the American government have to be referred for confirmation to the United States senate, and that it is in the power of the senate either to A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 443 confirm or to reject them. In the foreign policy of the American republic the senate exercises a direct and most important influence. Mr. Sumner was at that time the most eloquent and the most influential member of the senate. He was a man of remarkable force of character, a somewhat "masterful" temperament, to use an expressive provincial word, a temperament corresponding with his great stature, his stately presence, and his singularly hand- some and expressive face. He was one of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement, and the murderous assault made upon him some twelve years before in the old senate chamber at Washington by a southern planter had filled the world then with horror and alarm. Sir George Cornewall Lewis happily described it as the first blow in a civil war. Mr. Sumner had been for the greater part of his life an enthusiastic admirer of England and English institutions. He had made himself acquainted with England and Englishmen, and was a great favorite in English society. He was a warm friend of Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, the Duke of Argyll, and many other eminent English public men. He was particularly enthusiastic about England because of the manner in which she had emancipated her slaves and the emphatic terms in which English society always expressed its horror of the system of slavery. In his own country Mr. Sumner passed for an Anglomaniac. When the American civil war broke out he expected with full confidence to find the sympathies of England freely given to the side of the north. He was struck with amaze- ment when he found that they were to so great an extent given to the south. But when he saw that the Alabama and other southern cruisers had been built in England, manned in England, and allowed to leave our ports with apparently the applause of three-fourths of the representative men of England, his feelings toward this country underwent a sudden and a most complete change. He now persuaded himself that the sympathies of the English people were actually with slavery, and th.it England was resolved to lend her best help for the setting up of a slave-owning republic? to the destruction of the American Union. In this Mr. Sumner was mistaken. Great wrong was thoughtlessly done to the American Union by the acts of statesmen and others in England, hut it is not true that there was any general sympathy with slavery or any 444 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. national treachery to the American Union. The whole question has been already discussed in these pages, and the writer has not hesitated to condemn in the strongest terms much of the policy and many of the utterances of some of the leading statesmen of England. But Mr. Sumner was mistaken in his main conclusion; the conclusion that love of slavery and hatred of the union dictated the foolish things that were often said, and the unrightful things that were sometimes done. His mind, however, became filled with a fervor of anger against England. The zeal of his cause ate him up. All his love for England turned into hate. He was as little under the influence of sober reason, when he discussed the conduct of England, as Burke was when he declaimed against the French revolution. Dur- ing all his career, Mr. Simmer had been a professed lover of peace; had made peace his prevailing principle of action; and yet he now spoke and acted as if he were determined that there must be war between England and the United States. Mr. Sumner denounced the convention made by Mr. Beverdy Johnson, with a force of argument and of passionate eloquence which would have borne down all opposition if the senate had not already been almost unani- mously of one mind with him. It is right to say that the particular convention agreed on between Lord Clarendon and Mr. Beverdy Johnson does not seem to have been one that the American senate could reasonably be expected to accept, or that could possibly give satisfaction to the American people. Mr. Beverdy Johnson was a Mary- lander, and may possibly have had some tinge of southern sympathies. With a kindly and good-natured purpose to put an end to an international quarrel he does not seem to have considered the difference between skinning over a wound and healing it. The defect of his convention was that it made the whole question a mere matter of indi- vidual claims. It professed to have to deal with a number of personal and private claims of various kinds, pending since a former settlement in 1853 — claims made on the one side by British subjects against the American government, and on the other by American citizens against the- English government; and it proposed to throw in the Alabama claims with all the others, and have a convention for the general clearance of the whole account. Now it must be evident to any one, English or American, who considers A HISTORr OF OUR OWN TIMES. 445 what the complaints made by the American government were, that this way of dealing with the question could not possibly satisfy the American people. It is surprising that a statesman like Lord Clarendon could for a moment have persuaded himself that there would be the slightest use in presenting such a convention to the American senate. That he did so persuade himself and others is only one additional illustration of the curious ignorance of the con- dition of American political and national feeling which misguided England's policy during the whole of the American war. The claim set up by the United States on account of the cruise of the Alabama was first of all a national claim. The American government and people said, " The course you have taken has prolonged the war against us. You have given comfort and strength to our enemies. You have allowed them to use your ports as arsenals and points of departure for their attacks on us; your flag has protected their cruisers; your sailors have manned their vessels and shotted their guns. We claim of you as a nation injured by a nation." To this the con- vention signed by Lord Clarendon made answer, " We are willing that the two nations should go into arbitration as to any individual claims for personal damages which a few Englishmen may have on the one side and a few Americans on the other. We are willing to look into the items of any little bill which Mr. Thompson, of New York, may present for injuries done to his property, provided that you will do us the favor of perusing in the same spirit any bill which may be presented to you on behalf Mr. John- son, of Manchester." This is really a fair statement of the difference between the convention which the United States senate rejected and that which the American government afterward accepted. The English government wisely gave way. They con- sented to send out a commission to Washington to confer with an American commission, and to treat the whole question in dispute as national and not merely individual. The commission was to enter upon all the various subjects of dispute unsettled between England and the United States; the Alabama claims, the San Juan boundary, and the Canadian fishery question. The Dominion of Canada was to be represented on the commission. The Knglish com- missioners were Earl de (I rev and Ripon (afterward created, 446 A HISTORY OF OUR IVN TIMES. Marquis of Ripon, in return for his services at Washington), Sir Stafford Northcote, Mr. Montague Bernard, professor of international law at the University of Oxford ; and Sir Edward Thornton, English minister at Washington. Sir John A. Macdonald represented Canada. The American commissioners were Mr. Hamilton Fish, secretary of state, General Schenck, afterward American minister in England ; Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Mr. Justice Nelson, Mr. Justice Williams, and Mr. E. R. Hoar. The commissioners held a long series of meetings in "Washington, and at length arrived at a basis of arbitration'. This was set forth in a memorable document, the treaty of Washington. The treaty of Washington acknowledged the international character of the dispute ; and it opened with a remarkable admission on the part of the English govern- ment. It announced that " Her Britannic majesty has authorized her high commissioners and plenipotentiaries to express, in a friendly spirit, the regret felt by her majesty's government for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed by those vessels." This was a very unusual acknowledgment to make as the opening of a document intended to establish a tribunal of arbitra- tion for the claims in dispute. It ought not in itself to be considered as anything of a humiliation. In public, as in private life, it ought to be honorable rather than otherwise to express regret that we should even unwittingly have done harm to our neighbor, or allowed harm to be done to him; that we have shot our arrow o'er the house and hurt our brother. But when compared with the stand which English ministers had taken not many years before, this was indeed a considerable change of attitude. It is not surprising that many Englishmen chafed at the appearance of submission which it presented. The treaty then pro- ceeded to lay down three rules which it was agreed should be accepted by the arbitrators as applicable to the case. These rules were : " a neutral government is bound : first, to use due diligence to prevent the fitting out, arming or equiping, within its jurisdiction, of any vessel which it has reasonable ground to believe is intended to cruise or to carry on war against a power with which it is at peace, and also to use like diligence to prevent the departure from its jurisdiction of any vessel intended to cruise or carry A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 44? on war as above, such vessel having been specially adapted, in whole or in part, within such jurisdiction to warlike use. ►Secondly, not to permit or suffer either belligerent to make use of its ports or waters as the base of naval operations against the other, or for the purpose of the renewal or augmentation of military supplies or arms, or the recruit- ment of men. Thirdly, to exercise due diligence in its own ports and waters, and as to all persons within its jurisdic- tion, to prevent any violation of the foregoing obligations and duties." The British commissioners followed up the acceptance of these three rules by a saving clause, declaring that the English government could not assent to them as a " state- ment of principles of international law which were in force at the time when the claims arose;" but that, "in order to evince its desire of strengthening the friendly relations between the two countries, and of making satisfactory pro- vision for the future," it agreed that in deciding the ques- tions arising out of the claims these principles should be accepted, "and the high contracting parties agree to observe these rules between themselves in future, and to bring them to the knowledge of other maritime powers, and to invite them to accede to them." The treaty then went on to provide for the settlement of the Alabama claims by a tribunal of five arbitrators, one to be appointed by the queen, and the others respectively by the president of the United States, the king of Italy, the president of the Swiss confederation, and the emperor of Brazil. This tribunal was to meet in Geneva, and was to decide by a majority all the questions submitted to it. The treaty further pro- vided for a tribunal to settle what may be called individual claims on either side, and another commission to meet afterward at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and deal with the fishery question, an old outstanding dispute as to the reciprocal rights of British and American subjects to fish on each other's coasts. It referred the question of the northern boundary between the British North American territories and the United Slates to the arbitration of the German emperor. It also opened the navigation of the St. Lawrence and other rivers. Some delay was caused in the meeting of the tribunal of arbitration at Geneva by the sudden presentation on the part of the American government of what were called the 448 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. indirect claims. To the surprise of everybody, the Ameri- can case when presented was found to include claims for vast and indeed almost limitless damages, for indirect losses alleged to be caused by the cruise of the Alabama and the other vessels. The loss by the transfer of trade to English vessels, the loss by increased rates of insurance, and all imaginable losses incident to the _ prolongation of the war, were now made part of the American claims. It was clear that if such a principle were admitted there was no possible reason why the claims should not include every dollar spent in the whole operations of the war, and in sup- plying any of the war's damages, from the first day when the Alabama put to sea. No one could undertake to say as a matter of certainty that the southern Confederates might not have submitted at once if only the Alabama had been seized and detained, and therefore indirect claims might just as well be stretched out at once so as to cover all the' subsequent expenses of the war. In truth, the indirect claims were not only absurd, but even monstrous, and the English government had not for one moment the slightest idea of admitting them as part of the case to be laid before the arbitrators at Geneva. The bare suggestion seemed more like a rude practical joke than a statesman- like proposition. Even men like Mr. Bright, who had been devoted friends of the north during the war, protested against this insufferable claim. It was at last withdrawn. We now know on the best possible authority that the American government never meant to press it. Mr. John Bussell Young's interesting account of his journey " Around the World with General Grant" gives an account of a con- versation he had with the late president of the United .States on the subject of the indirect claims. Mr. Young assures his readers that all his reports of statements made by General Grant have been submitted to General Grant's own revision. General Grant told Mr. Young that he was personally opposed to the presentation of the indirect claims, and that his secretary of state, Mr. Fish, was also opposed to them. " I," said General Grant, "never believed in the presentation of indirect claims against England. I did not think it would do any good. I knew England would not consider them, and that it would complicate our meritorious case by giving her something to complain about." Mr. Fish agreed in this view, but was of opinion A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 449 that Mr. Sumner had to be considered. Mr. Sumner was the chairman of the senate's committee on foreign affairs, a formidable man at such a time. He was not cordial to the treaty, and was displeased because General Grant and Mr. Fish had already overruled one of his suggestions, " that the first condition of peace with England should be the withdrawal of her flag from the North American conti- nent." That suggestion General Grant rightly described as a declaration of war, and "I wanted peace, not war." Mr. Sumner had laid great stress on indirect claims, and not to offend him, and not to leave an opening for future complaints on the part of "demagogues," it was thought by Mr. Fish that the best way of getting rid of the indirect claims would be to let them go to the Geneva arbitration. General Grant allowed himself to be convinced against his will. " But neither Mr. Fish nor myself expected any good from the presentation. It really did harm to the treaty by putting our government and those in England who were our friends in a false position. It was a mistake, but well intended. It is a mistake ever to say more than you mean, and as we never meant the indirect claims, we should not have presented them, even to please Mr. Sumner." It was indeed a profound mistake. It was a stroke of policy which no statesman should ever have stooped to sanction. The arbitration was on the point of being broken off. The ex- citement in England was intense. The American govern- ment had at last to withdraw the claims. The Geneva arbitrators of their own motion declared that all such claims were invalid and contrary to international law. The mere fact of their presentation went far to destroy all the credit which the United States would have obtained by the firm maintenance of their just demands and their recognition by the court of arbitration. The decision of the Geneva tribunal went against England. The court were unanimous in finding England responsible for the actsof the Alabama. A majority found her responsible for the acts of the Florida and for some of those of the. Shenandoah, but not responsible for tbose of other vessels. They awarded a sum of about three mil- lions and a quarter sterling as compensation for all losses and final settlement of all claims including interest. Sir Alexander Cockburn, who attended the sittings of the court as the representative of Kngland, presented a long 450 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. and eloquent protest against a great part of the finding of the tribunal. While admitting the decision in the case of the Alabama, and recommending submission to the general award, Sir Alexander Cockburn made a sort of historical vindication, or apologia, of the conduct of the English government during the civil war. It was an eloquent, patriotic, and impassioned plaidoyer, which seemed oddly out of place in the somewhat dry and business-like records of the tribunal's transactions. It occupied two hundred and fifty pages of the London Gazette. Many readers ad- mired it; some smiled at it. The great majority of Englishmen did not read it. It was not so much preserved as entombed in the ponderous pages of the official journal. The German emperor was left to decide as to the owner- ship of the small island of San Juan, near Vancouver's Island, a question remaining unsettled since the Oregon treaty, and already explained in this work. The emperor decided that the American claim to the island was just. San Juan had for years been in a somewhat hazardous con- dition of joint occupation by England and the United States. It was evacuated by England, in consequence of the award, at the close of November, 1873. The principle of arbitration had not thus far worked in a manner calculated greatly to delight the English people. In each case the award had gone decidedly against them. No doubt it had gone against them because the right of each case was against them; and those who submit to arbitration have no business to complain because the deci- sion is not given in their favor. England had in any case gained much by the policy which submitted the dispute to a peaceful tribunal. She had saved her own people and her opponents as well from the terrible ordeal of a war in which victory would have been only one degree better than defeat. She had avoided all the legacy of reciprocal hate which is the inevitable penalty of war. She had done her part toward the establishment of a great principle for the benefit of all coming generations. Yet it would be impos- sible to say that the feeling of the English people was one of unmixed satisfaction. The bulk of a population is not made up of moral philosophers; and what most of the English people saw was that England had been compelled in homely phrase to "knuckle down" to America. The policy which accepted the arbitration seems to us to have A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 451 been entirely wise, honorable, statesmanlike and just. The fault to be found was with that earlier policy which gave the United States only too fair a ground for asserting their claims. But it is certain that Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues suffered in public esteem by the mere fact of their having accepted the arbitration which went so signally against England. They were somewhat in the position of a government who have to submit to rigorous and humiliat- ing terms of peace. They may not have been responsible for the war. It may have been no act of theirs which made the acceptance of the harsh terms a cruel necessity. It may not be open to any one to say that they had any practical alternative but to submit to the demands of the occasion. All this may be true. Yet none the less is the government to be pitied which has to submit to any terms of peace by which its people seem .to be humbled. The conservative party made it for a long time a great point against Mr. Gladstone's government that he had accepted the treaty of Washington. They did not always seem to reflect that a leading Conservative, Sir Stafford Northcote, had been made one of the joint commissioners in order that the arrangement might not seem the mere act of a political party. Perhaps in one or two instances the manner in which the treaty was vindicated may have helped to em- bitter the sacrifice. Mr. Lowe, for instance, put it as a clear saving of money, pointing out that a war would have cost much more than the expense of paying off the award. This was not the happiest way of commending the trans- action to the sympathies of a proud and somewhat unrea- soning public. However that may be, it is certain that the effect of the Geneva arbitration was to create a sore and angry feeling among Englishmen in general. The feeling found expression with some; smoldered in sullenness with others. It was unreasonable and unjust; but it was not altogether unnatural; and it had its effects on the popula- rity of Mr. Gladstone's government. The opening of the session of 1872 was made melancholy by the announcement thai Lord .Mayo, the viceroy of India, had been killed by a fanatical assassin in a convict settle- ment, on one of the Andaman Islands, which the viceroy was inspecting. Lord Mayo had borne himself well in his difficult position, and had won the admiration of men of all parties by his firmness, his energy, his humanity, and his justice. 452 ^ HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. CHAPTER LXL THE TIDE ON THE TUKN. The Liberal ministry continued somehow to fall off in popularity. They made a great many enemies. This fact was for the most part rather to their credit than otherwise. They came into office pledged to carry out certain reforms, and they did carry them out regardless of the offense they gave to class privileges and vested interests. A great reforming administration must always count on making enemies, and enemies whose hostility will be subtle and enduring. The prime minister himself was personally too much absorbed in the zeal of his cause not sometimes to run counter to the feelings, the prejudices, the sensitive jealousies of men less .earnest and less self-forgetting. Mr. Gladstone was profoundly serious in his purposes of reform; and very serious men are seldom popular in a society like that of London. The long series of bold and vigorous reforms was undoubtedly causing the public to lose its breath. People were getting tired of going on, as an ordi- nary walker gets tired of trying to keep up with some man who is bent on walking as fast and as far as he possibly can without rest or interruption. The inevitable reaction was setting in. It must have come in any case. No popularity, no skill, no cunning in the management of men, no quality or endowment on the part of the prime minister, could have wholly prevented that result. Mr. Gladstone was not cunning in the management of men. He would probably have despised himself for availing of such a craft had he possessed it. He showed his feelings too plainly. If men displeased him he seldom took the trouble to conceal his displeasure. He was too often "pre- occupied," as the French phrase puts it, to think of petty courtesies and small social arts. It was murmured among his followers that he was dictatorial; and no doubt he was dictatorial in the sense that he had strong purposes himself, and was earnest in trying to press them upon other men. His very religious opinions served to interfere with his social popularity. He seemed to be a curious blending of the English high churchman and the Scottish Presby- terian. He displeased the ordinary English middle class by leaning too much to Ritualism, and, on the other hand, he A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 453 often offended the Roman Catholics by his impassioned diatribes against the pope and the church of Rome. _ One ' or two appointments made by or under the authority of Mr. Gladstone gave occasion to considerable controversy and to something like scandal. One of these was the appointment of the attorney-general, Sir Robert Collier, to a puisne judgeship of the court of common pleas, in order technically to qualify him for a seat on the bench of a new court of appeal — that is to say, to become one of the paid members of the judicial committee of the privy coun- cil. The statute required that every judge of the court of appeal should have been a judge of one of the ordinary courts; and Sir Robert Collier was passed through the court of common pleas in order that he might have the technical qualification. There was not the slightest sug- gestion of any improper motive on the part of Mr. Glad- stone, or lack of legal or judicial fitness on the part of Sir Robert ('oilier. On the contrary, it was admitted that Sir Robert (Jollier had helped the government out of a diffi- culty by taking an appointment which several judges had declined and which had not quite such a position as that which the traditions of his office entitled him to expect. It seemed, however, as if there was something of a trick in the act which thus passed him through the one court in order to give him a technical qualification for the other. A vote of censure on the government was moved in the House of Lords, and the universal impression was that it would be carried. Some of the opposition leaders did all they could to make it the means of injuring the government, and even went the length of including in their complaints the fact that the lord chancellor had given an appointment as judge of a county court to the Mr. Beales who was president of the reform league when the Hyde Park railings were thrown down. The vote of censure was,- however, rejected by eighty-nine against eighty-seven. A similar attempt was made in the House of Commons, and was defeated; only, however, by a majority of twenty-seven, a small majority in the house where the strength of the gov- ernment was supposed to lie. Another appointment which led to controversy was that of the Rev. W. \Y. Harvey to the rectory of Kw'elme. The law required that the rector of Ewelme should be a member of the Convocation of Oxford, and Mr. Harvey, who had been educated at Cam- 454 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. bridge, was made a member of Oxford Convocation — by Oxford, not by Mr. Gladstone — in order to qualify him for the appointment. In this instance, too, there was no ques- tion either as to the motives of the minister or the merits of the appointment. But, as in the former case, there seemed to many persons something like a trick in the man- ner of obtaining the qualification. Each case gave a chance to Mr. Gladstone's enemies which they were not slow to use. He was accused of casuistry, which to many English- men seems a sort of crime; and of Jesuitry, which to some Englishmen seems the worst of crimes. It was part of Mr. Gladstone's curious fortune to be denounced by certain enemies as a Roman Catholic in disguise, at the very time when he was estranging and offending some of his most earnest Catholic supporters by the energy of his attacks upon the political influence of their church. There can be no doubt that, although in neither house of parliament could any expression of censure be obtained, the "Colliery explosion," as it was called, and the "Ewelme scandal," gave a downward push to the declining popularity of Mr. Gladstone's administration. The "liquor interest," too, soon was in arms against him. The United Kingdom Alliance "for the suppression of the liquor traffic" had of late years been growing so strong as to become a positive influence in politics. Its object was to bring about the adoption of legislation which should leave it in the power of a two-thirds majority in each locality to stop altogether, if it were so thought fit, the public sale of intoxicating drinks. The parliamentary leader of the agitation was Sir Wilfrid Lawson, a man of position, of great energy, and of thorough earnestness. Sir Wilfrid Lawson was not, however, merely energetic and earnest. He had a peculiarly effective style of speak- ing, curiously unlike that which might be expected from the advocate of an austere and somewhat fanatical sort of legislation. He was a humorist of a fresh and vigorous order, and he always took care to amuse his listeners and never allowed his speeches to bore them. The alliance was always urging on the government and public opinion against the drink traffic, and it became clear that some- thing must be done to regulate the trade. Mr. Bruce, the home secretary, brought in a bill Avhich the alliance con- demned as feebleness, and which the publicans resented as A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIM HIS 455 oppression. The bill increased the penalties for drunken- ness, and shortened the hours during which public-houses might be kept open on Sundays and on week days as well. The effect- of the passing of this measure was to throw the publicans into open hostility to tbe government. The publicans had an old grudge against Mr. Gladstone himself. In former days he had been guilty of passing a measure which allowed the light wines of France to be sold in bottles by the grocers, and drunk in pastry-cook shops and refreshment houses; and the publicans highly disapproved of such innovations on the traditional ways of the British constitution. Some of their advocates indeed had denounced with a generous ardor the policy which would promote intemperance by allowing anyone but a public-house keeper to sell a glass of wine. The debaucheries of the pastry- cook shops were described in language that recalled the days of Colonel Sibthorp's prognostications as to the cor- rupting influence of French wines and French morals. Mr. Brace's licensing act was a new wrong charged at the door of Mr. Gladstone. Gin Lane and Beer Street rose in rebellion against him. The publicans were a numerous body; they were well organized; the network of their trade and their association spread all over the kingdom. The hostile feelings of some were perhaps not unnaturally embittered by the fact that many speakers and writers treated all publicans alike, made no distinction between the reputable and the disreputable, and involved in a com- mon condemnation honest "Mine Host of the Garter," and roguish Boniface of "The Beaux' Stratagem." It was well known that a large proportion of the publicans carried on a respectable trade, and were losers rather than gainers by drunkenness. Yet in many instances these men found themselves classed with the owners of the most disreputable gin-palaces, with persons who flourished on the viciousness and the degradation of their fellow- creatures. The natural result of indiscriminate attack was to cause an indiscriminate alliance for the purposes of defense. These were difficulties thickening across the path of Mr. Gladstone's government. All the time, too, a sullen sus- picion prevailed among many classes that there had been a lowering of the national pride. Many men regarded the reopening of the treaty of Paris as a triumph for Russia at 450 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the expense of England, and the Washington treaty as a submission of this country to the arrogance of the United States. No one undertook to say that there was anything the government could have done other than what they did; but the world must have changed indeed, when men will cease to associate a government with the untoward events that occur during its time, or to hold the minister who has to make the apology responsible for the humiliation which a moralist would see in the original fault, and not in the atonement. The establishment of a republic in France could not be without its influence on English politics. A certain amount of more or less vague republican sentiment is always afloat on the surface of English radicalism. For some time be- fore the founding of the French republic this vague senti- ment had been undergoing a crystallizing and strengthening process under the influence of two causes; the success of the north in America, and the gradual degradation of the French empire under Napoleon III. De Tocqueville had observed long before that the great doubt he felt as to the stability of the American republic was on the question whether it could stand the stress of a great war. Now it had stood the stress of a great war and had come out all the stronger for the trial. Imperial France, or rather the empire imposed on France, had come for a moment into peril of collision with the American republic, and had gone down before it without even making an effort to maintain its arrogant attitude. Facts like these naturally produced a distinct impression upon certain classes in England. The establishment of the French republic now came as a climax. "We have already spoken of the great meetings which were held in London, and in most of the English cities, to ex- press sympathy with the struggling republic; and at some of these meetings a good deal of very outspoken republi- canism made itself heard. There could be no doubt that a considerable proportion of the workingmen in the cities were republicans in sentiment. English writers who were not by any means of the sentimental school, but on the contrary were somewhat hard and cold in their dogmatism, began to publish articles in "advanced" reviews and maga- zines, distinctly pointing out the logical superiority of the republican tbeory. Men were already discussing the pos- sibility of a declared republican party being formed both in A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 457 and out of parliament. Not, indeed, a party clamoring for the instant pulling down of the monarchy — no one thought of that; but a party which would avow itself republican in principle, and acknowledge that its object was to bring about such a change in public sentiment as might prepare the way for a republic in the time to come. Mr. Frederic Harrison, a writer of ability and reputation, declared in one of the reviews that the adoption of the republican form of government by the English people at some time or other was as certain as "the rising of to-morrow's sun." Of course there have always been republican sentiments among certain classes of Englishmen; and any breath of change on the continent is sure to fan them into a little flame that flickers for awhile. This time, however, many people thought that the sentiment was really going to convert itself into a principle, and that the principle might see itself represented by a political party. France, which had given the impulse, gave also the shock that brought reaction. The wild theories, the monstrous excesses, the preposterous theatricism of the Paris com- mune had a very chilling effect on the ardor of English republicans. The movement in England had, however, one or two curious episodes before it sank into quiescence. In March, 1872, Sir Charles Dilke brought on a motion, in the House of Commons, for inquiring into the manner in which the income and allowances of the crown are expended. Sir Charles Dilke had been for some months of the preceding autumn the best abused man in Great- Britain. His name appeared over and over again in the daily papers. He monopolized for weeks the first leading article in every journal. The comic papers caricatured "Citizen Dilke" every week. In the theatrical burlesques, his name was the signal for all manner of drolleries and buffooneries. The telegraph-wires carried his doings and speeches everywhere. American correspondents "inter- viewed" him, and pictured him as the future president of England. He went round the towns of the north of England, delivering a lecture on the expenses of royalty; and his progress was marked by more or less serious riots everywhere. Life was sacrificed in more than one of these tumults. A Paris journal described his progress as a sort of civil war. The workingmen of London and of the north held great meetings to express their approval of his 458 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. principles and conduct, and to pass resolutions in support of the young baronet who had dared to condemn the ex- penses of royalty, and to avow himself a republican. Many people really thought that for good or ill the vague, fluent, incoherent movement toward republicanism in England had found its leader at last — that the hour had come, and the man. To increase and perplex the excitement, the Prince of Wales fell ill, and if Sir Charles Dilke had per- sonally caused his illness he could not have been more bit- terly denounced by some speakers and writers. He was represented as a monster of disloyalty, who had chosen to assail the queen (against whom it is only fair to say he had never uttered a disparaging word) while her eldest son lay struggling with death. The Prince of Wales, given over by all the doctors, recovered ; and in the outburst of public gladness and loyalty that followed his restoration to health, Sir Charles Dilke was almost forgotten. But he had been challenged to repeat in the House of Commons the state- ments that he had made in the country. He answered the challenge by bringing forward the motion to inquire into the manner in which the income and allowances of the crown were spent. There was unmistakable courage in the cool, steady way in which he rose to propose his motion. He faced his houseful of antagonists with dogged calmness. It is a hard trial to the nerves to face such an audience. Sir Charles Dilke knew that every one in that house, save three or four alone, was bitterly opposed to him. He knew that the most overpowering eloquence was to pour out on him the moment he had finished his speech. But neither then nor after did he show the slightest sign of quailing. His speech was well got up as to facts, well arranged, and evidently well committed to memory, but it was not eloquent. The house began to grow apathetic before Sir Charles Dilke had nearly finished his address. The warmth of Mr. Gladstone's reply was almost startling by sheer force of contrast to Sir Charles Dilke's quiet, dry, and labored style. No one expected that Mr. Gladstone would be so passionately merciless as he proved to be. His vehemence, forcing the house into hot temper again, was one cause at least of the extraordinary tumult that arose when Sir Charles Dilke's friend and ally, Mr. Auberon Herbert, rose to speak and declared himself also a republican. This was the signal for as extraordinary a scene as the House A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 459 of Commous has ever exhibited. The tumult became so great, that if it had taken place at any public meeting, it would have been called a riot, and would have required the interference of the police. Some hundreds of strong, ex- cited, furious men were shouting and yelling with the ob- ject of interrupting the speech and drowning the voice of one man. The speaker of the House of Commons is usually an omnipotent authority. Seldom indeed does any one presume to question his decision or to utter a word when he enjoins silence. One of the peculiarities of the House of Commons, which all strangers admire, is the respect and deference it usually shows to the president whom it has itself chosen. But on this occasion the speaker was literally powerless. " What care these roarers for the name of king?" asks the boatswain in "The Tem- pest," as he points, to the furious waves. What cared the roarers in the House of Commons for the name of speaker? There was no authority which could overawe them. They were all men of education and position — university men, younger sons of peers, great landowners, officers in crack cavalry regiments, the very elite, most of them, of the English aristocracy. Rut they became for the moment a merely furious mob. They roared, hissed, gesticulated, with the fury of a sixpenny gallery disappointed in some boxing-night performance. The shrill "cock-crow," unheard in the House of Commons for a whole generation, shrieked once more in the ears of the bewildered officials. Probably nobody now reads Samuel Warren's once popu- lar novel, "Ten Thousand a Year," but those who did rend it long ago may remember that when Mr. Tittlebat Tit- mouse got into parliament, his one only contribution to debate was his admirable and distracting imitation of the crowing of a cock. Every one supposed that Titmouse and his ways were dead and gone; but it would positively seem that some of his kith and kin were alive and in good voice that night in the House of Commons. The debate was chiefly remarkable for the fact that it noted the exact level to which the republican sentiment had arisen in English political society. Three members of the House of Commons acknowledged, in more or less qualified terms, their theoretical preference for the repub- lican form of government. These were Sir Charles Dilke. Mr. Auberon Herbert, and Professor Fawcctt. There were, 460 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. doubtless, some other men in the house who sympathized with republican principles, but who, well convinced that the monarchy had hitherto suited England and was not likely to be soon changed, gave themselves no more trouble about the matter than if it were some purely speculative ques- tion. Such men could not be called republicans. The name could only be given to the few who frankly declared that they would prefer to see England a republic, and even to these it must be given only in a qualified sense. Not one of them was anxious to see any sudden change. Not one of them was even inclined to set on foot any agitation for the propagation of republican principles. The excesses of the commune and the illness of the Prince of Wales were combining influences too strong for theory to con- tend against. Nothing more was then heard of republicanism in England. It was clear that there was no republican party, properly so called, in the country. Some of the " philoso- phical Radicals," who were most strongly republican in sentiment and conviction, declared in the most explicit words that they would not make the slightest effort to agi- tate in favor of a republic; that they did not think the difference between a republic and the British constitution was worth the trouble of a long agitation. If a republic were to come, they said, it would come in good time. England could afford to wait. When this philosophical mood of mind prevailed among republicans it was clear that the question of a republic had not, as the phrase is, " come up." Mr. Bright expressed his opinion on the subject with his usual blunt good sense. Some one wrote to him, asking him what he thought of republicanism. Mr. Bright replied that, "as to opinions on the question of monarchy or republicanism, I hope and believe it will be a long time before we are asked to give our opinion. Our ancestors decided the matter a good while since, and I would suggest that you and I should leave any further decision to our posterity." The whole condition of things was fairly set out in Mr. Bright's letter. There was no practical ques- tion then as to the relative advantages of monarchy and republic. If that question is to come up at some time, it had not come up then. A new figure did, however, arise about that time in English politics. It was one less expected than even the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 461 portentous form of a cosmopolitan republican. It was that of the English agricultural laborer as a political agitator and member of a trades-union. For years and years the work- ingman in cities had been a conspicuous personage. He had played an influential part in every agitation. Orators had pleaded for him and sought his applause; statesmen had paid court to him; the newspapers were always filled with him; his trades-unions were a scare to half society; he figured in novels, in poetry, in satire; he was positively beginning to be a sort of fourth power in the state. All the while the rural laborer was supposed to be entirely out of the play. No one troubled about him. When he appeared in the papers it was only as the subject of some horrifying paragraph about the miseries of a laborer's family, who, nine in number, had all to sleep in one room, four of the unfortunate group being afflicted with fever or small-pox. Sometimes a London newspaper sent down a special cor- respondent to explore the condition of some village, and he wrote back descriptions which made the flesh creep and the blood run cold. Let any one picture to himself a poorly-fed, half-clad and wholly ignorant family of eight or nine, including, say, two grown young men and two grown young women, who habitually slept in one room, and in not a few instances in one bed. Let him think of all this, and imagine what the worst consequences must be, and his imagination will probably have fallen short of the fearful reality. That was the rural laborer at his worst. At his best he seemed a picture of hard-working, cleanly, patient, and almost hopeless poverty. Mr. Disraeli and the Tory landlords said he was too contented and happy to need a change; most other people thought that he was ren- dered too stolid by the monotonous misery of his condi- tion. Suddenly, in the spring of 1872, not long after the opening of parliament, vague rumors began to reach Lon- don of a movement of some kind among the laborers of South Warwickshire. It was first reported that they had asked for an increase of wages; then that they were actually forming a laborers' union, after the pattern of the artisans; then that they were on strike. There came accounts of meetings of rural laborers — meetings positively where men made speeches. Instantly the London papers sent down their special correspondents, and for weeks the movement among the agricultural laborers of South Warwickshire — 4G2 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the country of Shakespeare — became the sensation of Lon- don. The Geneva arbitration, which was then giving par- liament something to talk about every night, was thrown into the shade. Even the Tichborne case, the civil part of which had just come to a close, did not divert public atten- tion altogether from the agitation among the rural laborers. How the thing first came about is not very clear. But it seems that in one of the South Warwickshire villages was a wonderful man — a laborer who had traveled, a wanderer who had seen men and cities. This adventurous man had led a wild life; he had traveled out of his native village, away, far away, quite into the next county, and even it was reported into the county beyond that, and had seen strange and unfamiliar ways of life. He had been in the iron manufacturing regions, the Black Country, and he had heard about strikes, and had been present at meetings of grimy workingmen, who talked out and made their demands as boldly as the masters themselves could do. The wanderer returned to his native village, and he told of all the wonders he had seen, and perhaps found incredulous listeners. But there came a somewhat harder time than usual in South Warwickshire. The wages of eight or ten shillings a week utterly failed to keep up the family. There was sad and sullen talk of starvation. The farmers refused to give higher wages, declaring that the rents they had to pay to the great landlords would not alloAV them. The great landlords said they got no more than their land was worth, and that they could do nothing. Meanwhile it was evident that the farmers had plenty to eat, drink and wear, that the landlords were living rather better than most princes, and that the laborer was on the verge of starvation. The traveled man whispered in his village the one word "Strike." The thing took fire somehow. A few men accepted it at once. In the neighboring village was a man who, although only a day laborer, had been long accustomed to act as a volunteer preacher of Methodism, and who by his superior intelligence, his good character, and his effective way of talking, had acquired a great influ- ence among his fellows. This man was Joseph Arch. He was consulted and he approved of the notion. He was asked if he would get together a meeting and make a speech, and he consented. Calling a meeting of day laborers then was almost as bold a step as proclaiming a A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 403 revolution. Yet it was done somehow. There were no circulars, no placards, none of the machinery which we all associate with the getting up of a meeting. The news had to be passed on by word of mouth that a meeting was to be held and where, the incredulous had to be convinced that there was really to be a meeting, the timid had to be prevailed on to take courage and go. The meeting was held under a great chestnut tree, which thereby acquired a sort of fame. There a thousand laborers came together and were addressed by Joseph Arch. He carried them all with him'. His one great idea — great and bold to them, simple and small to us — was to form a laborers' union like the trades-unions of the cities. The idea was taken up with enthusiasm. New brandies were formed every day. Arch kept on holding meetings and addressing crowds. The whole movement passed, naturally and necessarily, into his hands. How completely it was a rural laborers' movement, how little help or guidance it received in its origin from other sources, how profoundly isolated from the outer and active world was its scene, maybe understood from the fact that it was nearly six weeks in action before its very existence was known in London. Then the special correspondents went down to the spot, and turned a blaze of light on it. Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Edward Jenkins, and other active reformers, appeared on the scene and threw themselves into the movement. Meetings were held in various villages, and Mr. Arch found himself in the con- stant companionship of members of parliament, leaders of political organizations, and other unwonted associates. The good sense of the sturdy laborer never forsook the leader of the movement, nor (lid lie ever show any inclina- tion to subordinate his enterprise to any political agitation. The danger apprehended by many, that the rural laborers would allow their organization simply to drift in the wake of the mere political agitators, proved to be unreal. The Laborers took the help of Mr. Herbert and Sir Charles Dilko, and of Mr. Odger and Mr. George Potter, so far as the mere conduct of the organization was concerned, but they did not show any inclination to allow their project to ex- pand as yet beyond its simple and natural limits. On the other hand, it was clear that, so far as the laborers had any political sympathies, they were with Liberalism and against Toryism. This, too, was a little surprise for the pub- 404 A HISTORY OF OUll OWN TIMES. lie. Most persons had supposed that a race of beings brought up for generations under the exclusive tutorship of the landlord, the vicar, and the wives of the landlords and the vicars, would have had any political tendencies they possessed drilled and drummed into the grooves of Toryism. The shock of surprise with which the opposite idea impressed itself upon the minds of the Conservative squires found ready and angry expression. The landlords in most places declared themselves against the movement of the laborers. Some of them denounced it in unmeasured language. Mr. Disraeli at once sprang to the front as the champion of feudal aristocracy and the British country squire. The one great delight of the author of " Vivian Grey," when he was not engaged in parliament, was to play at being a country squire. In Scott's " Guy Manner- ing," the attorney, Gilbert Glossin, who has managed to get possession of an estate, makes it his grand ambition to pass off for a country gentleman, and once gives a beggar half-a-crown because the knowing vagrant has accosted him as "Ellangowan," according to the old-fashioned Scottish custom which declares it the privilege of the landlord to be addressed by the name of his estate. Mr. Disraeli seemed to have the same ambition. In birth, in national- ity, in mental training, in appearance, in" his instinctive way of looking at things, he was essentially a foreigner in English society. Of all classes of English society, that with which by intellect, temperament and training he might be expected to have the least sympathy was the English land- lord class. Yet it seemed that his pride was to be consid- ered an English landlord, or rather to be mistaken for an English landlord. It used to be a remarkable sight to see Mr. Disraeli presiding on certain occasions of annual cele- bration when, by the bounty and subscriptions of some of the landlords, the prize of a blue coat with brass buttons was to be conferred on the venerable laborer who had for the longest number of years contrived to support the largest family without having recourse to parish relief. The dignified gravity with which Mr. Disraeli admonished and blessed the happy recipient of this noble prize; the seeming assumption that a long life of privation and labor was well worth any true man's endurance for the glory of being publicly endued, at the age of seventy-five, with a remark- ably high-collared blue swallow-tail coat, the indignant A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 465 repudiation of the unworthy levity of persons in London, newspaper-writers and such-like, who tried to make this ceremonial seem ridiculous; all this made up a performance of which caricature itself could hardly exaggerate the peculiarities. Joseph Arch himself mentioned in a speech the unlucky fact that one of the fortunate rustics who had actually been rewarded with this Monthyon prize, one of the proud wearers of this singular robe of honor, had been compelled after all to seek shelter in the workhouse, where they probably would not allow him to parade in the brass- buttoned blue coat even on Sundays. However that may be, Mr. Disraeli was none the less entitled and none the less willing to constitute himself the champion of the country squires, and when the agitation became public he stood forward to vindicate and glorify the impugned state of things. Mr. Disraeli insisted that everything was as it ought to be, and that the English laborer in the midland and southern counties was but another Corydon in an English Arcadia, piping for very happiness as though, like the shepherd boy in Sir Philip Sidney's tale, he could never grow old. The controversy was taken up in the House of Commons, and served, if it did nothing else, to draw all the more attention to the condition of the British laborer. An amusing little side controversy arose between Mr. Newdegate and Mr. Arch's party. As a landlord and Tory of the Tories, Mr. Newdegate was of course an opponent of the laborers' strike. It so happened that at one of the public meetings in London, where Joseph Arch spoke, Cardinal Manning was likewise a speaker. That was enough for Mr. Newdegate. He immediately pro- claimed his discovery of a new popish plot, and bluntly charged Mr. Arch with being a disguised emissary and agent of the Jesuits. Poor Arch, who so short a time be- fore was only an obscure laborer with a turn for preaching Methodism 'in a little country village, found himself acclaimed by half England as the apostle of a new social revolution, and denounced by the Tories generally as the pioneer of a lawless Jacquerie; he heard his name men- tioned every day in the speeches of statesmen and the debates in parliament; he bad to defend himself against the charge of being a secret agent of the Vatican, and to disclaim any intention of conducting an agitation for the establishment of a republic. 406 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. One indirect but necessary result of tbe agitation was to call attention to the injustice done to the rural population when they were left unenfranchised at the time of the passing of the last reform bill. The injustice was strongly pressed upon the government, and Mr. Gladstone frankly acknowledged that it would be impossible to allow things to remain long in their anomalous state. In truth, when the reform bill was passed nobody supposed that the rural population were capable of making any use of a vote. Therefore the movement which began in Warwickshire took two directions when the immediate effects of the par- tial strike were over. A permanent union of laborers was formed corresponding generally in system with the organi- zations of the cities. The other direction was distinctly political. The rural population through their leaders joined with the reformers of the cities for the purpose of obtaining an equal franchise in town and country; in other words, for the enfranchisement of the peasantry. The emancipation of the rural laborers began under that chest- nut tree where the first meeting answered ■ the appeals of Joseph Arch. The English peasant was the newest and latest figure on the political stage of the world. He fol- lowed the Virginian negro, and he came long after the Rus- sian serf. Unlike these, however, he had for his leader no greater man than one of his own class. The rough-and- ready peasant preacher, Joseph Arch, had probably little idea when he began his speech under the chestnut tree, that he was speaking the first words of a new chapter of the coun- try's history. A few lines ought perhaps to be spared to the Tichborne trial which has just been mentioned. A claim was sud- denly made upon the Tichborne baronetcy and estates by a man who came from Australia and who announced him- self as the heir to the title and the property. He declared that he was the Sir Roger Tichborne who was supposed to have gone down with the wreck of the Bella, sailing from Rio in South America years before. The Tichborne case is certainly one of the most remarkable instances of dis- puted identity on record. Just now the most wonderful thing about it seems to be the extraordinary amount of popular sympathy and credit which the "claimant," as he was. called, contrived to secure. He was undoubtedly an impostor; that is, if the most overwhelming accumulation A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 467 of evidence, positive and negative, could establish any fact. The person who presented himself as the long-lost Roger Tichborne bore not the slightest resemblance to the young man who sailed in the Bella and was believed to have per- ished with her. " The claimant" Avas indeed curiously unlike what people remembered Roger Tichborne, not only in face, but in figure and in manners. A slender, delicate, somewhat feeble young man, of fair although not finished education, who had always lived in good society and showed it in his language and bearing, went down in the Bella or at least disappeared with her; and thirteen years afterward there came from Australia a man of enormous bulk, igno- rant to an almost inconceivable degree of ignorance, and who if he were Roger Tichborne had not only forgotten all the manners of his class, but had forgotten the very names of many of those with whom he ought to have been most familiar, including the name of his own mother; and this man presented himself as the lost heii and claimed the property. If this were the whole story, it might be said that there was nothing particularly wonderful in it. A preposterous attempt was made to carry on an imposture, and it failed; such things happen every day; in this case the attempt was only a little more outrageous and ridiculous than in others. But the really strange part of the tale is to come. Despite all the obvious arguments against the claimant, it is certain that his story was believed by the mother of Roger Tichborne, and by a considerable number of persons of undoubted veracity ami intelligence .who had known Roger Tichborne in his youth. True, it seems im- possible that a slender Prince Hal could in a few years grow into a Falstaff. But so much the more difficult must it surely bave been for the Falstaff to persuade people that he was actually the Prince Hal. So much the more won- derful is it that he did actually succeed in persuading many into full belief in himself and his story. The man who claimed to be Roger Tichborne utterly failed to make out his claim in a court of law. It was shown upon the clearest evidence that he had gradually put together and built up around him a whole system of imposture. lie was then put on trial for his frauds, found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude. Yet thousands of ignorant persons, and some persons not at all ignorant, continued, and to this day continue, to believe in him. 468 A HT8T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. He became the figure-head of a new and grotesque agita- tion. His own imposture was the parent and the patron of other impostures. His story opens up a far more curious study of human credulity than that of Johanna Southcote, or that of Mary Tofts, or Perkin Warbeck, or the Cock Lane ghost. CHAPTER LXIL THE FALL OF THE GREAT ADMINISTRATION. The first few days of 1873 were marked by an event which, had it occurred four or five years before, would have filled the world with a profound sensation. Happening as it tlid it made comparatively little stir in the political waters. It was the death of Louis Napoleon, late emperor of the French, at his house in Chislehurst, Kent. After his imprisonment, if it can be called so, at Wilhelmshohe, in Cassel, where he was treated as an honored guest rather than a captive, the fallen emperor came to England. He settled with his wife and son at Chislehurst, and lived in dignified semi-retirement. The emperor became a sort of favorite with the public here. A reaction seemed to have set in against the dread and dislike with which he had at one time been regarded. He enjoyed a certain- amount Of popularity. He sometimes showed himself in public; as for example at a lecture given by Mr. Stanley, the adven- turous New York "special correspondent" who had gone out to Africa and discovered Dr. Livingstone. Louis Napo- leon had for a long time been in sinking health. His life had been overwrought in every way. He had lived many lives in a comparatively short space of time. Most of his friends had long been expecting his death from week to week, almost from day to day. He died on January 9th. The event created no great sensation. Perhaps even the news of his death was but an anti-climax after the news of his fall. For twenty years he had filled a space in the eyes of the world with which the importance of no man else could pretend to compare. His political bulk had towered up in European affairs like some huge castle dominating over a city. All the earth listened to the lightest word he spoke. For good or evil his influence and his name were A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 4^9 potent in every corner of the globe. His nod convulsed continents. His arms glittered from the Crimea to Cochin- China, from Algeria to Mexico. A signal from him and the dominion of the Anstrians over Lombardy was broken at Solferino, and a new Italy arose on the horizon of Europe. A whisper from him, and Maximilian of Aus- tria hastens across the ocean in hope to found a Mexican empire, in reality to find a premature grave. A wave of his hand, and Garibaldi is crushed at Mentana. What won- der if such a man should at one time have come to believe himself the special favorite and the spoiled child of destiny? The whole condition of things seemed changed when Louis Napoleon fell at Sedan. Some forty years of wandering, of obscurity, of futile, almost ludicrous enterprises, of exile, of imprisonment, of the world's contempt, and then twenty years of splendid success, of supreme sovereignty, had led him to this — to the disgrace of Sedan, to the quiet fading days of Chislehurst. He had overshadowed France and Europe with "the gloom of his glory," and now, to borrow John Evelyn's words, "is all in the dust." In one of his Napoleonic ballads Beranger, speaking of the fall of the first emperor, bitterly declares that the kings of Europe who despise him in his exile once crawled round his throne, and still bear on their brows the traces of the dust which his footprints left when he set his conqueror's heel upon their heads. Europe had certainly at one time shown an inclination to grovel before Louis Napoleon's throne. He was regarded as a statesman of mysterious, infallible, superhuman wis- dom. He was understood to be a Brutus who had for a long time professed idiocy in order to conceal inspiration. When he fell, the world shook its wise head pityingly, and seemed inclined to fall back upon the opinion that it must have been only idiocy trying to assume the oracular ways of inspiration. Toward the closing days there was a revival of a kindlier feeling and a fairer judgment. Louis Napoleon had in his early and obscure days lived in lodg- ings in King Street, St. James', and when he became a great emperor a tablet was set up in the outer wall of the house to inform all the world of the fact, lie came to London in the zenith of his power and his fame, and he drove by the house and looked at the tablet and said some- thing oracular and appropriate no doubt, and the newspapers chronicled the event, and the world admired. When he 470 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. came back again after Sedan there was no account of his driving past the old place, if he did so. But the tablet had not been taken down ; it is only right to say that much. It was allowed to remain there even though Louis Napoleon had fallen never to hope again. Perhaps we cannot better illustrate the manner in which the English public received him on his late return. There was no further allusion to the tablet; but it was not taken down. Death was very busy about this time with men whose names had made deep marks on history or letters. Lord Lytton, the brilliant novelist, the successful dramatist, the composer of marvelous parliamentary speeches, died on January 18, 1873. Dr. Livingstone, the famous missionary and explorer, had hardly been discovered among the living by the enterprise and energy of Mr. Stanley when the world learned that he was dead. So many false reports of his deatli had been sent about at different times that the statement was now received with incredulity. The truth had to be confirmed on testimony beyond dis- pute before England would accept the fact that "the long career of devotion to the one pursuit was over, and that Africa had had another victim. John Stuart Mill died on May 8, 1873, at his home at Avignon, where the tomb of his wife was made. "There's a great spirit gone," was the word of all men. A loftier and purer soul, more truly devoted to the quest of the truth, had not mingled in the worldly affairs of our time. There were clear evidences in the later writings of Mr. Mill, published after his death, that he had been turning toward a different point in quest of the truth from that on which early training and long habit had formerly fixed his mind. His influence over the thought and the culture of his day was immense. Time has even already begun to show it in some decay; but most of Mr. Mill's writings may safely be regarded as the possession of all the future, and he has left an example of candor in investigation and fearless moral purpose in action such as might well leaven even the most thought- less and cynical generation. A sudden accident, the stumble of a horse, brought to a close, on July 19th, the career of the bishop of Winchester, the many-sided, ener- getic, eloquent Samuel Wilberforce. He had tried to suc- ceed in everything, and he went near success. He tried to know everybody and understand everybody's way of look- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 471 ing at every question. He was a great pulpit and parlia- mentary orator, a great bishop, a wit, a scholar, an accom- plished man of the world. In a different and more honor- able sense than that conveyed in Dryden's famous line, he "was everything by starts;" but he was a good man and a good minister always. On the very day after the death of the Bishop of Winchester died Lord Westbury, who had been lord chancellor, a man of great ability, unsurpassed as a lawyer in his time, endowed with as bitter a tongue and as vitriolic a wit as ever cursed their possessor. Lord Westbury was a failure in spite of all his gifts, partly be- cause of a certain want of moral elevation in his nature. It is only justice to his memory to say that he was in many ways the victim of the errors of some to whom his affec- tions made him too lenient. From one cause and another the close of his career became but a heap of ruins. The deaths of Sir Edwin Landseer, the painter, Sir Henry Holland, the famous physician and traveler, whose patients and personal friends were emperors, kings, presidents, and prime ministers, and of Professor Sedgwick, the geologist, ought to be mentioned. Nor must we omit from our death roll the name of Dr. Lushington, who, in addition to his own personal distinction, is likely to be remembered as the depositary of a secret confided to him in an earlier genera- tion by Lady Byron, the secret of the charge she had to make against her husband. The whole story was revived before Dr. Lushington's death by a painful controversy, but he refused even by a yes or no to reveal Lady Byron's confidence. The year which saw so many deaths was a trying time for the Liberal government. The session of that year would in any case have brought them over what may be called the grand climacteric of the parliament. The novelty of the reforming administration was well-nigh worn off, and there was yet some work which Mr. Gladstone was pledged to do. Here and there, when it happened that the death or retirement of a member of parliament gave an oppor- tunity for a new election, it seemed of late to happen that the election went generally against the government. The Conservatives were plucking up a spirit everywhere, and were looking closely after their organization. Mr. Disraeli himself had taken to going round the country, doing what would be called in America stump oratory, and doing it ATI A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. remarkably well. In the Crystal Palace of London, in the Free Trade Hall and the Pomona Gardens of Manchester, in the Conservative association of Glasgow, and in other places he had addressed great assemblages and denounced and ridiculed the Liberal government. In the Manchester Free Trade Hall he made use of a remarkably happy expres- sion. His rivals had entered into office, he said, with a policy of violence, of sacrilege and of confiscation, and now having done their work they sat in a row on the treasury benches reminding him as he gazed across the table at them "of a range of extinct volcanoes." The govern- ment had been unlucky in the naval department; some of their shi]is had met with fatal accidents; and it was com- plained that there was defective organization and imperfect inspection. In one of his speeches, Mr. Disraeli had spoken of a new difficulty in Irish politics and a new form of agitation that had arisen in Ireland. The home rule organization had sprung suddenly into existence. The home rule agitation came, in its first organized form, mainly from the inspiration of Irish Protestants. The disestablishment of the church had filled most of the Protestants of Ireland with hatred of Mr. Gladstone, and distrust of the imperial parliament and English parties. It was therefore thought by some of them that the time had come when Irishmen of all sects and parties had better trust to themselves and to their united efforts than to any English minister, parliament or party. Partly in a petu- lant mood, partly in despondency, partly out of genuine patriotic impulse, some of the Irish Protestants set going the movement for home rule. But although. the actual movement came into being in that way, the desire for a native parliament had always lived among large classes of the Irish people. Attempts were always being made to construct something like a regular organization with such an object. The process of pacification was going on but slowly. It could only be slow in any case; the effects of centuries of bad legislation could not by any human possi- bility be effaced by two or three years of better govern- ment. But there were many Irishmen who, themselves patient and moderate, saw with distinctness that the feel- ing of disaffection, or at least of discontent, among the Irish people was not to be charmed away even by such measures as the disestablishment of the Irish church. They saw A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 473 what English statesmen would not or could not see, that the one strong feeling in the breast of a large porportion of the population of Ireland was dislike to the rule of an English parliament. The national sentiment, rightly or wrongly, for good or ill, had grown so powerful that it could not be overcome by mere concessions in this or that detail of legislation. These Irishmen of moderate views felt convinced that there were only two alternatives before England; either she must give back to Ireland some form of national parliament, or she must go on putting down rebellion after rebellion and dealing with Ireland as Russia had dealt with Poland. They therefore welcomed the home rule movement, and conscientiously believed that it would open the way to a genuine reconciliation between England and Ireland on conditions of fair co-partnership. The author of this history, is for obvious reasons, not inclined to discuss here the merits of the home rule de- mand. But he desires to put it on historical record that those who were chiefly concerned in promoting that move- ment were filled with the conviction that the principle of home rule contained the solution of the great problem of government which unsolved had so long divided England ami Ireland, ami offered a means of complete reconcilia- tion between the two countries. Several Irish elections took place about the time when the home rule movement had been fairly started. They were fought out on the question for or against home rule; and the home rulers were successful. The leadership of the new party came almost as a matter of course into the hands of Mr. Butt, who returned to parliament after a considerable time of exile from political life. Mr. Butt was a man of great ability, legal knowledge, and historical culture. He had begun life as a Conservative and an opponent of O'Connell. He had become one of the orators of the short-lived attempt at a protectionist reaction in England. lie was taken up by the leading protectionists who were themselves somewhat deficient in intellect and eloquence, and who could not induce men like Mr. Disraeli to trouble themselves any more about the lost cause. Mr. Butt was a lawyer of great skill and success in his profes- sion; as an advocate he had for years not a rival at the Irish bar. He had taken part in the defense of Smith O'Brien and Meagher at Clomnel, in 1848; and when the 474 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Fenian movements broke ont, lie undertook the defense of many Fenian prisoners. He became gradually drawn away from Conservatism, and brought round to National- ism. For some reason or other the Conservative chiefs had neglected him. There is extant a letter from a once con- spicuous and clever unofficial Conservative, in which, among other pieces of advice to a leader of the party, he recommends him to "buy Butt." The frank cynicism of the advice was a proof that the writer did not understand Mr. Butt. It is certain that Mr. Butt was not a prudent man, and that he did not manage his private affairs well. There can be no doubt that he often fell into embarrass- ments which might have made observers think he would have welcomed any means of extrication; but it is certain that he was politically honest even to chivalrous forgetful- ness of his own most legitimate interests. Perhaps the neglect of the Conservative chiefs came from their observa- tion of the fact that Mr. Butt was gradually passing over from their side; perhaps it was due to other and personal causes. Mr. Butt dropped entirely out of public life for awhile; and when he reappeared it was as the leader of the new home rule movement. There was not then in Irish politics any man who could pretend to be his rival. He was a speaker at once powerful and plausible; he had a thorough knowledge of the constitutional history and the technical procedures of parliament, and he could talk to an Irish monster meeting with vivacity and energy. Almost in a moment a regular home rule party was set up in the House of Commons. Popular Irish members who had been elected previous to the organization of the move- ment gave in their adhesion to it; and there was in fact a sudden revival of the constitutional movement for the satisfaction of Irish national claims which had fallen asleep after the death of O'Connell and the failure of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848. The home rule movement unquestionably put Mr. Glad- stone in a new difficulty. The press and the public men of England failed altogether at first to appreciate the strength of the demand for home rule. Many voices cried out that no English statesman must listen to it, not to say condescend to argue with it; it was to be simply brushed away as a nuisance; bidden like a fretful child to hold its tongue and go to sleep. Mr. Gladstone was not a man to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 475 deal with political questions in that sort of way. He showed an anxiety to understand the new agitation and its objects. He asked questions of one or two prominent Irish- men; he even answered questions civilly addressed to him; he showed a willingness at least to receive information with regard to home rule. In the eyes of some jealous patriots in England such conduct was in itself a tampering with the question, an encouragement of the agitation, and a conniving at the designs of wicked men who were anxious to dismember the empire. It was now certain that when parliament met, an organized home rule party would be found there; and a good many strong Conservatives and weak Liberals were inclined to hold Mr. Gladstone's Irish policy responsible for the uprise of this new agitation. There seemed to be an idea that if Irishmen got any meas- ure of justice accorded to them they ought not to ask fqr anything more; and that if they were so perverse and ungrateful as to ask for more, a large part of the guilt of their ungratitude must be put to the account of the minister who had been wrong-headed enough to give the many justice at all. The prospects were on the whole growing some- what ominous for the Liberal government. Not only the Conservative party were plucking up a spirit, but the House of Lords had more than once made it clear that they felt themselves emboldened to deal as they thought fit with measures sent up to them from the House of Com- mons. When the peers begin to lie firm and assert their dignity, it may always be taken for granted that there is not much popular force at the back of the government. Parliament met on February <;, L'873. The royal speech announced that "A measure will be submitted "to you on an early day, for settling the question of university educa- tion in Ireland. It will have for its object the advance- ment of learning in that portion of my dominions, and will be framed with a careful regard to the rights of conscience." On February 13th, Mr. Gladstone introduced his measure. It is a remarkable illustration of the legislative energy with which the government were even yet tilled, that on the very same night, at the very same hum-, twit greal schemes of re- form, reform that to slow and timid minds must have seemed something like revolution, were introduced into parliament. One was the Irish university education hill, which Mr. Gladstone was explaining in the House of Commons; the 47fi A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMER. other was a measure to abolish the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords, and establish a judicial court of appeal in its stead. This latter measure was introduced by Lord Selborne, lately Sir Roundell Palmer, who had been raised to the office of lord chancellor, on the resigna- tion of Lord Hatherley, whose eyesight was temporarily affected. Great as the change was which Lord Selborne proposed to introduce, public attention paid comparatively little heed to it at that moment. Every one watched with eager interest the development of Mr. Gladstone's most critical scheme for the improvement of university education in Ireland. Irish university education was indeed in a very anomalous condition. Ireland had two universities: that of Dublin Avhich was then a distinctly Protestant institution; and the Queen's university, which was estab- lished on a strictly secular system, and which the heads of the Catholic church had on that account condemned. In a country with a population of whom five-sixths were Catholics, there was one chartered university which would not accept the Catholic as such, and another which the Catholic as such -could not accept. This is a rough but accurate description of the condition of things. The remedy one might have thought would have been obvious in an ordinary case. The Catholics themselves asked for a chartered Catholic university. The answer made by most Englishmen was, that to grant a charter to a Catholic university would be to run the risk of lowering the national standard of education, and that to grant any state aid to a Catholic university would be to endow a sectarian institu- tion out of the public funds. The Catholic made rejoinder that a mere speculative dread of lowering the common standard of university education was hardly a reason why five-sixths of the population of Ireland should have no university education of that kind at all; that the Univer- sity of Dublin was in essence a state-endowed institution; and that the Queen's university was founded by state money, on a principle which excluded the vast majority of Catholics from its advantages. Mr. Gladstone's measure was a gallant and a well-meant effort to reconcile the conflicting claims. He proposed to make the University of Dublin the one central university of the country, and to make it a teaching as well as an examining body. Trinity college, the colleges of Cork and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 477 Belfast, the existing Catholic university, a body supported wholly by private funds and which had no charter, were at once to become members of the new university. The col- lege at Galway was to cease to exist. The theological faculty was to be taken away from Trinity college, Dublin, and handed over to the representative body of the Irish dises- tablished church. The new university was to have no chairs for theology, moral philosophy, or modern history. The governing body of the university was to be composed in the first instance of twenty-eight ordinary members to be nominated in the act. Vacancies were to be filled by the crown and by co-operation alternately for ten years; after that time four members were to retire annually, one successor to be named by the crown, one by the council, one by the professors, and one by the senate. In addition to the ordinary members, the affiliated colleges would be allowed to elect one or two members of council according to the number of pupils in each college. The money to sustain the university was to come in proportionate allot- ments from the revenues of Trinity college, a very wealthy institution, from the consolidated fund, the fees of students, and the surplus of Irish ecclesiastical property. Trinity college and each of the other affiliated colleges would be allowed to frame schemes for their own govern- ment. Thus, therefore, Mr. Gladstone proposed to estab- lish in Ireland one central university, to which existing col- leges and colleges to exist hereafter might affiliate them- selves, and in the governing of which they would have a share, while each college would make what laws it pleased for its own constitution, and might be denominational or undenominational as it thought fit. The legislature would give an open career and fair play to all alike; and in order to make the university equally applicable to every sect, it Avould not teach disputed branches of knowledge, or allow its examination for prizes to include any of the disputed questions. The colleges could act for themselves with regard to the teaching of theology, moral philosophy, and modern history; the central university would main- tain a neutral ground so far as these subjects were con- cerned, and would have nothing to do with them. This scheme looked plausible and even satisfactory for a moment. It was met that first night with something like a chorus of approval from those who spoke. But there 478 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. was an ominous silence in many parts of the house; and after awhile the ominous silence began to be very alarm- ingly broken. The more the scheme was examined the less it seemed to find favor on either side of the house. It was remarked that on the morning after the introduction of the measure, the Daily News, a journal which might have been expected to deal favorably with any proposal made by the government, came out with a criticism which, although courteous and cautious, was decidedly damaging. The defects of the scheme soon became evident. The one great defect was that it satisfied nobody. It proposed to break up and fuse together three or four existing systems, and apparently without the least prospect of satisfying any of the various sects and parties to compose whose strife this great revolution was to be attempted. The English nonconformists were indignant at the proposal to endow denominational education. The Irish Protestants com- plained bitterly of the breaking up of the old university system in Dublin. The Catholics declared that the meas- ure did not in any way meet their claims for a Catholic uni- versity. The authorities of the Catholic church in Ireland pronounced decisively against the measure. The men who proclaimed themselves devoted to culture, sneered at the notion of a national university which professed to have nothing to do with moral philosophy or modern history. It may be remarked that Mr. Mill had already suggested that history is one of the branches of human knowledge which had best be left to private cultivation. It would certainly be difficult to get a theory of modern history in an Irish national university which would be acceptable to all the sects and parties in the country. It is idle to plead that history is the study of facts; in no chapter of history, even the simplest, are the facts so clearly defined as to show the same to all eyes. Two eminent men had just been making a study of the same events in English and Irish history; one particular set of state papers was the subject of each man's examination;' on the study of the same set of papers the two men came to diametrically opposite con- clusions, not merely as to inference but as to fact. Again, how would it be possible to teach that chapter of history which describes the political career of O'Connell in such a way as to be acceptable to the Ulster Orangeman and the Munster Catholic? Let us fancy the university of London A HisTonr of our own times. 479 having a chair for the teaching of modern history, and offering prizes for proficiency in an elucidation of the politi- cal careers of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield. Yet it does seem as if the difficulty in the way of teaching his- tory from the chair of an Irish national university ought to have been a reason for not attempting under such con- ditions to set up a central and sole institution of that kind. Was it, in fact, possible that there could be one Irish national university available for all sects and parties? To us it seems that this was not possible, except at such sacrifices of the educational character of the university as to make it of little worth as a permanent institution. There was great justice in the complaint that soon began to be heard from both sides of the House of Commons: " You are spoiling several institutions, and you are not sat- isfying the requirements of anybody whatever. The agitation against the bill grew and grew. The late Professor Cairnes, then in fast-failing health, inspired and guided much of that part of the opposition which con- demned the measure because of the depreciating effect it would have on the character of the higher education of Ire- land. The English nonconformists were all against it. The Conservatives were against it, and it soon became evident that the Irish members of parliament would vote as a body against it for the second reading. The crisis came on an amendment to the motion. The amendment was moved on March 3rd by Mr. Bourke, brother of the late Lord Mayo. The debate, which lasted four nights, was brilliant and impassioned. Mr. Disraeli was exulting and his ex- ultation lent even more than usual spirit to his glittering eloquence. He taunted Mr. (iladstone with having mis- taken "the clamor of the nonconformist for the voice of the nation." "You have now had four years of it," he said. " You have despoiled churches. You have threat- ened every corporation and every endowment in the coun- try. You have examined into everybody's affairs. You have criticised every profession and vexed every trade. No one is certain of his property, and nobody knows what duties he may have to perform to-morrow. I believe that the people of this country have had enough of the policy of confiscation." There was, of course, extravagance in these charges, but their very extravagance suited the tem- per of the house, w\\i\ Mr. Disraeli understood his audience and its mood. 480 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. When Mr. Gladstone rose to speak at the close of the fourth night's debate, it soon became evident that he no longer counted on victory. How, indeed, could he? He was opposed and assailed from all sides. He knew that the senate of the University of Dublin had condemned his measure as well as the Roman Catholic prelates. He had received a deputation of Irish members to announce to him frankly that they could not support him. His speech was in remarkable contrast to the jubilant tones of Mr. Disraeli's defiant and triumphant rhetoric. It was full of dignity and resolve; but it was the dignity of anticipated defeat met without shrinking and without bravado.' A few sen- tences, in which Mr. Gladstone spoke of his severance from the Irish representatives with whom he had worked cordially and successfully on the church and land bills, were full of a genuine and a noble pathos. They touched the heart of many an Irish member who felt all that Ire- land owed to the great statesman, but who yet felt con- scientiously unable to say that the measure now proposed was equal to the demand of the Irish Catholics. Mr. Glad- stone was the first English prime minister who had ever really periled office and popularity to serve the interests of Ireland; it seemed a cruel stroke of fate which made his fall from power mainly the result of the Irish vote in the House of Commons. Such was, however, the fact. The second reading of the bill would have been carried by a large majority if the Irish members, who were unable to give their support, could even have conscientiously refrained from voting against it. The result of the division was awaited with breathless anxiety. It was what had been ex- pected. The ministry had been defeated by a small ma- jority; two hundred and eighty-seven voted against the second reading, two hundred and eighty four voted for it. By a majority of three the great Liberal administration was practically overthrown. The great minister had failed. Like the hero of Schiller's ballad, the brave swimmer had plunged once too often into the flood to bring out a prize, and he perished. The ministry did not indeed come to an end just then. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues resigned office, and the queen sent for Mr. Disraeli. But Mr. Disraeli prudently declined to accept office with the existing House of Com- mons. He had been carefully studying the evidences of A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 481 Conservative reaction, and he felt sure that the time for his party was coming. He had had hitter experience of the humil- iation of a minister who tries to govern without a majority in the House of Commons. He afterward drew an amus- ing picture of his experiences in that way. He declined to accept office with the existing parliament. Why not then, it was asked, dissolve parliament? To that Mr. Disraeli answered, not unreasonably, that it was easy for statesmen in office to dissolve parliament, but that it would be a very different thing for a man to have to form an adminis- tration and then immediately dissolve, lie could of course form a government, he said, and dissolve in May; but then he had nothing in particular to dissolve about. The func- tions of an opposition were critical; he could not pretend to have a regular policy cut and dry on which the country might be asked to pronounce an opinion at a general elec- tion. The Irish university bill was hardly a question on which to go to the country, and besides, it was not a ques- tion on which Mr. Disraeli could be expected to appeal to the constituencies, seeing that the House of Commons had decided it in a way of which he approved. The situation was curious. There were two great statesmen disputing, not for office, but how to get out of the responsibility of office. The result was that Mr. Gladstone and his col- leagues had to return to their places and go on as best they could. There was nothing else to be done. Mr. Disraeli would not accept responsibility just then, and with regard to the interests of his party he was acting like a prudent man. Mr. Gladstone returned to office. lie returned reluc- tantly; he was weary of the work; he was disappointed; he had suffered in health from the incessant administra- tive labor to which he had always subjected himself with an unsparing and almost improvident magnanimity. He must have known that, coming back to office under such conditions, he would find his power shaken, his influence much discredited. He bent to the necessities of the time, and consented to be prime minister still. lie helped Mr. Fawcett to carry a bill for the abolition of tests in Dublin university, as he could do no more just then for university education in Ireland. The end was near. During the autumn some elections happening incidentally turned out against the Liberal 482 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. party. The Conservatives were beginning to be openly triumphant in most places. Mr. Gladstone made some modifications in his ministry. Mr. Lowe gave up the chan- cellorship of the exchequer, in which he had been singu- larly unsuccessful; Mr. Bruce left the home office, in which he had not been much of a success. Mr. Gladstone took upon himself the offices of first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer together, following an example set in former days by Peel and other statesmen. Mr. Lowe became home secretary. Mr. Bruce was raised to the peer- age as Lord Aberdare, and was made president of the coun- cil in the room of the Marquis of Ripon, who had resigned. Mr. Ohilders resigned the office of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and Mr. Bright, whose health had now been restored, came back to the cabinet in charge of the merely nominal business of the duchy. There could be no doubt that there were dissensions in the ministry. Mr. Baxter had resigned the office of secretary of the treasury on the ground that he could not get on with Mr. Lowe, who had not consulted him with regard to certain contracts, and had refused to take his advice. The general impression was that Mr. Childers gave up the chancellorship of the duchy because he considered that he had claims on the office of chancellor of the exchequer, which Mr. Gladstone now had taken to himself. These various changes and the rumors to which they gave birth were not calculated to strengthen the public confidence. In truth, the Liberal regime was falling to pieces. Lord Salisbury, speaking at a Conservative banquet, expressed "his convic- tion that the Conservatives would at least be able "to draw the teeth and clip the claws of the Liberal adminis- tration," and exulted over the security obtained against revolutionary innovation by the fact that the country was likely to be governed for some time by a toothless Liberal ministry. Ne quisquam Ajacem possit superare, nisiAjax. It was Mr. Gladstone himself who dealt the stroke which brought the Liberal administration to an end. In the closing days of 1873 the Conservatives won a seat at Exeter; in the first few days of 1874 they won a seat at Stroud. Parliament had actually been summoned for February 5th. On the night of January 23rd, an astonishing rumor began to fly through various limited circles of London politicians. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 483 Men were mysteriously beckoned away from dinner-tables and drawing-rooms, and club-rooms. Agitated messen- gers hurried to ministerial doors seeking for information. There was commotion in the newspaper offices; the tele- graph was set in constant action. IN'ext morning all the world read the news in the papers. Mr. Gladstone had suddenly made up his mind to dissolve parliament, and seek for a restoration Of the authority of the Liberal gov- ernment by an appeal to the people. He vindicated his decision in an address to his constituents which was unfor- tunately all too long for genuine popular effect. What the country understood by it was, that Mr. Gladstone did not choose to bear the humiliation of seeming to have the authority he had received in 18G8 now "sunk below the point necessary for the due defense and prosecution of the public interests;" that he proposed to obtain a new lease of authority by a popular verdict; and that if restored to power he would introduce a series of financial measures which would include the total repeal of the income tax. The country was taken utterly by surprise. Many of Mr. Gladstone's own colleagues had not known what was to be done until the announcement was actually made. The feeling all over the three kingdoms was one of almost unanimous disapproval. Mr. Gladstone's sudden resolve was openly condemned as petulant and unstatesmanlike; it was privately grumbled at on various personal grounds. To us it seems to have been impatient, imprudent, irregular, but certainly spirited and magnanimous. Impolitic it no doubt was; but it ought not to have been unpopular. It must have caused great, and at that time, superfluous inconvenience to Liberal politicians everywhere; and we cannot wonder if they complained. J>ut to the country in general there ought to have been something fascinating in the very quixotry of a resolve which proclaimed that the minister disdained to remain in office one hour after he had found reason to believe that he no longer possessed the confidence of the people. It was an error indeed, but it was at least a generous error; the mistake of a sensitive and a chivalrous nature. Mr. Gladstone had surprised the constituencies. We do not know whether the constituencies surprised Mr. Glad- stone. They certainly surprised most persons, including themselves. The result of the elections was to upset com- 484 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. pletely the balance of power. In a few days the Liberal majority was gone. Mr. Gladstone fought a gallant fight himself, and addressed vast open-air meetings at Blackheath with the energy of another O'Connell. But it was a hope- less fight against reaction. When the result of the polls came to be made up it was found that the Conservatives had a majority of about fifty, even on the calculation, far too favorable to the other side, which counted every home ruler as a Liberal. Mr. Gladstone followed the example set by Mr. Disraeli six years before, and at once resigned office. The great reforming Liberal administration was gone. The organizing energy which had accomplished such mar- vels during three or four resplendent years had spent itself and was out of breatb. Many causes indeed concurred to bring about the fall of the Liberal administration. It had committed grave faults itself; some of its members had done it serious harm. Various powerful interests were arrayed against it. But when all allowance had been made for such considerations, it will probably be seen that the most potent influence which bore down the Gladstone government was the fact, that people in general had grown tired of doing great things, and had got into the mood of the lady described in one of Mr. Charles Beade's novels, who frankly declares that heroes are her abomination. The English constituencies had grown weary of the heroic and would have a change. Had the Liberal ministers consented to remain in power a few days, a very few, longer, they would have been able to announce the satisfactory conclusion of a very unsatis- factory war. This was one of the least of all our little wars; a war from which it was simply impossible to extract anything in the way of glory, and in which the only honor could be just that which the skill of the English com- mander was able to secure — the honor of success won in the promptest manner and with the least possible expendi- ture of life. The Ashantee war arose out of a sort of mis- understanding. The Ashantees are a very fierce and war- like tribe on the Gold Coast of Africa. They were at war with England in 1824, and in one instance they won an extraordinary victory over a British force of about one thousand men, and carried home with them as a trophy the skull of the British commander-in-chief, Sir Charles M'Carthy. The Ashantees were afterward defeated, and a A HISTORY OF OUll WN TIMES. 485 treaty of peace was concluded with them by the governor of our Gold Coast settlements, Mr. MacLean, the husband of Miss Landon, better known to literature by her initials "L. E. L.," a woman whose poetical gifts, not in them- selves very great, combined with her unhappy story to make her at one time a celebrity in England. In 1863, as has been already told in these pages, a war was begun against the Ashantees prematurely and rashly by the gov- ernor of the Gold Coast settlements, and it had to be aban- doned owing to the ravages clone by sickness among our men. In 1872 some Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast were transferred by purchase and arrangement of other kinds to England; and this transaction ended, like most of the same nature, by entangling us in misunderstanding, quarrel, and war. The king of Ashantee claimed a tribute formerly allowed to him by the Dutch, and refused to evacuate the territory ceded to England. He attacked the Eantees, a tribe of very worthless allies, of ours, and a straggling, harassing war began between him and our garrisons. The great danger was that if the Asbantees obtained any considerable success, or seeming success even for a moment, all the surrounding tribes would make com- mon cause with them. The government therefore deter- mined to take up the matter seriously, and send a sufficient force under an experienced and well-qualified commander with instructions to take advantage of the cool season and penetrate to the Ashantee capital, Coomassie, and there inflict a blow which would prove that the Ashantee king could not harass the English settlers with impunity. When the choice of a commander came to be discussed, only one name, as it would seem, arose to the lips of all men. That was the name of Sir Garnet Wolseley, who had commanded the successful expedition to the Red River region in 1870. Sir Garnet Wolseley had the rare good fortune to sustain the reputation conferred upon him in advance by popular acclaim. He had a very hard task to perform. Of course he could have no difficulty in fighting the Ashantees. The weapons and the discipline of the English army put all thought of serious battle out of the question. But the king of Ashantee had a force lighting on his side far more formidable than the General January and General February on whom the Emperor Nicholas of Russia vainly relied. Wordsworth in his noble ode to Toussaint L'Ouvcrture 486 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tells the fallen chief to be of good heart, for he has on his side "Powers that will work for him," "great allies;" and these are, he says, "earth, air, and skies;" "not a breath- ing of the common wind," he declares, "that will forget," to support his cause. In a literal and terrible sense the king of Ashantee had just such allies. Earth, air, and skies — the earth, the air, the skies of the Gold Coast region would at the right time work for him; not a breathing of the common wind that would forget to hreathe pestilence into the ranks of his enemies. The whole campaign must be over and done within the limited range of the cooler months, or there would come into the field to do battle for the African king allies against whom an Alexander or a Caesar would be powerless. Sir Garnet Wolseley and those who fought under him, sailors, marines, and soldiers, did their work well. They defeated the Ashantees wherever they could get at them ; but that was a matter of course. They forced their way to Coomassie, compelled the king to come to terms, one of the conditions being the prohibition of human sacrifices, and they were able to leave the country within the appointed time. The success of the campaign was a question of days and almost of hours; and the vic- tory was snatched out of the very jaws of approaching sun and fever. Sir Garnet Wolseley sailed from England on September 12, 1873, and returned to Portsmouth, having accomplished all his objects, on March 21, 1874. The war was not one to be proud of; it might easily have been avoided ; it is not certain that England was entirely in the right of the quarrel first or last; but nothing could be more satisfactory than the ease, success, and completeness with which the campaign had been pushed through to its end. The Gladstone government had also had to deal with one of the periodical famines breaking out in Bengal, and if they had remained in office might have been able within a very short time to report that their efforts had been suc- cessful. Mr. Gladstone's sudden action, however, de- prived them of any such opportunity. They bequeathed to their successors the announcement of a war trium- phantly concluded, and a famine checked; and they bequeathed to them also a very handsome financial surplus. So sudden a fall from power had not up to that time been known in the modern political history of the country. To find its parallel we shall have to come down six years A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 487 later still. The great Liberal administration had fallen as suddenly as the French empire; had disappeared like Alad- din's palace, which was erect and ablaze with light and splendor last night, and is not to be seen this morning. CHAPTER LXIII. "CONSERVATIVE REACTION." INSTALLED IN OFFICE. Mr. Disraeli was not long in forming a ministry. He reduced the number of the cabinet in the first instance to twelve. Lord Cairns became lord chancellor. Lord Derby was made foreign secretary, an appointment which gratified sober-minded men. Lord Salisbury was entrusted with the charge of the Indian department. This, too, was an appointment which gave satisfaction outside the ranges of the Conservative party as well as within it. During his former administration of the India office, Lord Salis- bury had shown great ability and self-command, and he had acquired a reputation for firmness of character and lame and liberal views. He was now and for some time after looked upon as the most rising man and the most high-minded politician on the Conservative side. The country was pleased to see that Mr. Disraeli made no ac- count of the differences that formerly existed between Lord Salisbury and himself; of the dislike that Lord Salisbury had evidently felt toward him at one time, and of the manner in which he had broken away from the Conserv- ative ministry at the time of the reform bill of L867. Lord Carnarvon became colonial secretary. Mr. Cross, a Lancashire lawyer, who had never been in office of any kind before, was lifted into the position of home secretary. Mr. (bit home Hardy was made sererctary for war, and Mr. Ward Hunt, first lord of the admiralty. Sir Stafford Xorthcote, who had been trained to finance by Mr. Glad- stone, accepted the office of chancellor of the exchequer. The Duke of Richmond, as lord president of the council, made a safe, inoffensive and respectable leader of the government in the House of Lords. The Liberals seemed to have received a stunning blow. The whole party reeled under it, and did nol appear ca- llable for the moment of rallying against the shock. Nothing could be more disheartening than the appearance ol the 488 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. front opposition benches during a great part of the session. To accumulate the difficulties, Mr. Gladstone suddenly announced his intention of retiring from the position of leader of the Liberal party. In a letter to Lord Granville, dated March 12, 1874, he explained that "for a variety of reasons personal to myself," he "could not contemplate any unlimited extension of active political service," and that it might be necessary " to divest myself of all the responsibilities of leadership at no distant time." For the present he held the rank of leader only in a sort of conditional way, and he had frankly announced to Lord Granville that he could not give " more than an occasional attendance in the House of Commons" during that session. This seemed the one step needed to complete the disorganization of the party. There were many complaints, not loud but deep, of the course taken by Mr. Gladstone. It was contrasted openly as well as secretly with the perseverance, the unwearying patience, which Mr. Disraeli had shown in keeping his place at the head of his party during long years of what must often have seemed hopeless struggle. Mr. Gladstone pleaded his advancing years; but, it was asked, are not the years of Mr. Disraeli still further advanced? Who brought us, some discontented Liberals asked, into all this difficulty? Who but the man who now deserts us in the face of the enemy?. The opposition were for a while apparently not only without a leader, but even without a policy or a motive for existence. For awhile it seemed as if, to adopt the cor- rect and concise description given by Mr. Glayden in his "England under Lord Beaconsfield," "the opposition had nothing to oppose." The ministry had succeeded to a hand- some surplus of nearly six millions. It would be hardly possi- ble under such circumstances to bring in a budget which should be wholly unsatisfactory. Mr. Ward Hunt contrived, iiideed, to get up a momentary scare about the condition of the navy. When introducing the navy estimates he talked in tones of ominous warning about his determination not to have a fleet on paper, or to put up with phantom ships. • The words sent a wild thrill of alarm through the country. The sudden impression prevailed that Mr. Hunt had made a fearful discovery — had found out that the country had really no navy ; that he would be compelled to set about constructing one out of hand. The whole of the A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 489 surplus at least, people said, would have to be given up to make a beginning; nor did men forget to point to the cheerful possibility of some foreign enemy taking advan- tage of the opportunity to assail England's unprotected coasts. Mr. Ward Hunt, however, when pressed for an explanation, explained that he really meant nothing. It appeared that he had only been expressing his disapproval on abstract grounds of the maintenance of inefficient navies, and never meant to convey the idea that England's navy was not efficient. The country breathed again ; the surplus seemed safe, and the coasts. The idea of Germany or Russia coming down upon defenseless England, like Achilles on the unarmed Hector in " Troilus and Cressida" passed away. Two new measures belonging to- the same order dis- turbed for awhile what Sir Wilfrid Lawson jocularly called " the almost holy calm which prevailed in parliament now that the Conservatives had it all their own way, and the Liberals were crushed. One was the bill for the aboli- tion of church patronage in Scotland; the other, the public worship bill for England. The church patronage bill, which was introduced by the government, is well described by Mr. Clayden as "a Liberal measure which had become a reactionary scheme by being brought into the world a gen- eration behind its time." It took away the appointment of ministers in the church of Scotland from lay patrons, but only to give it to the male communicants of the parish kirk, not to the whole body of the parishioners. The patronage system was the cause of that great secession from the church of Scotland under Dr. Chalmers which lias been described in an early chapter of this history. Such a measure as that now introduced by the government, or, at least, a measure having such a general purpose, would have prevented the seces- sion in L843; but it was useless for any purpose of recon- ciliation in 1874. Moreover, the measure of 1874, by confining the power of appointment to the actual communi- cants of each church, took away the national character of the church of Scotland, and converted it. into a sectarian organization. In a historical sense,- the passing of the measure can have little importance unless as it may have given an impulse to the question of disestablishment in Scotland. Its introduction became of some presenl in- terest to the House of Commons because it drew Mr. Glad- 490 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. stone into debate for the first time since the opening nights of the session. He opposed the bill, but, of course, in vain. Mr. Disraeli complimented him on his reappear- ance, and kindly expressed a hope that he would favor the house with his presence as often as possible; indeed was quite friendly and patronizing to his fallen rival. The bill for the regulation of public worship was not a government measure. It was introduced into the House of Lords by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and into the House of Commons by Mr. Uussell Curney. It was strongly dis- liked and publicly condemned by some members of the cabinet; but after it had gone its way fairly toward success Mr. Disraeli showed a disposition to adopt it, and even to speak as if he had had the responsibility of it from the first. Once or twice it would almost seem as if he had forgotten that it was not a measure of his own proposing. The bill illustrated a curious difficulty into which the church of England had been brought, in consequence partly of its connection with the state. We have already traced in these volumes the history of the Oxford movement which was intended to quicken the state church with new life and freshness, and which before long sent some of the greatest divines of that church into the ranks of the church of Borne* The influence of the movement made itself felt in other ways as well. It set thought stirring everywhere within the church. It appealed to much that was phil- osophical, much that was artistic and aesthetic, and at the same time much that was skeptical. One body of church- men were anxious to maintain the unity of the Christian church, and would not admit that the church of England began to exist with the Reformation. They claimed apostolical succession for their bishops; they declared that the clergymen of the church of England were priests in the true spiritual sense. Thus the tractarians, as they were called for a time, were thrown into direct antagonism with the Evangelicals. The latter maintained that the Bible was the sole authority; the former held that the New Testament derived its authority from the church. The tractarians therefore claimed a right to examine very freely into the meaning of doubtful passages in the Scrip- tures, and insisted that if the authority of the church were recognized as that of the Heaven-appointed interpreter, all difficulty about the reconciliation of the scriptural writings A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 491 with the discoveries of modern science would necessarily disappear. The tractarian party — we call them by that name now merely as a means of distinguishing them from their opponents, and not with the intention of suggesting that it properly describes them or applies at all to some of them — became divided into two sections. One section in- clined toward what may almost be called free thought; the other, to the sentiments and the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic church. The state was frequently called upon to interfere. Here the world saw the prosecution of some clergymen for having published an essay supposed to teach infidel doctrine; there the ecclesiastical courts were en- gaged in trying to find out whether the church law had been broken by ritualistic practices in some Protestant temple. The taste for beauty in decoration which was growing up in English society everywhere had already made its influence felt in the English church. Clergymen and congregations loved to have their churches adorned like those of the Catholics; they delighted in the sweet and noble music, the incense, the painted windows, the devo- tional effigies and symbols, the impressive and gorgeous ritual. The astonished Evangelists saw with dismay that the church as they knew it seemed likely to be torn asunder. On the one side was the philosophical clergymen writing his essay to show that a literal interpretation of certain parts of the Bible was absurd; on the other, there, was the high church priest setting up his altar, swinging his censor, making his genuflexions, and even establishing his confessional. The Evangelicals had their strongest supporters among the middle and lower-middle class; the others found favor at once among the rich who went in for culture, and among the very poor. The law, which was often invoked, proved impotent to deal with the difficulty. It could not punish the clergy- men who contributed to the volume called "Essays and Reviews." It could not prevent the author of the first essay in that volume from being made a bishop. It could not remove Dr. Colenso from his colonial bishopric. One clergyman, was, in L871, "deprived for heresy." He forth- with started a religion of his own, or at least found a place of worship after his own way of thinking and worshipers to fill it. But it would seem as if he mighl as well have been allowed to remain in the ranks of the clergy of the 492 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. church as many others whom the law failed to reach, or might as well have refused to go out as others had done. It was found impossible to put down ritualism by law. In some places the ritualistic practices led to grave scandal and serious riots. It happened occasionally that al- though the clergyman and the congregation liked the elaborate and ornate worship, their neighbors all around disapproved of it. In some instances the neighbors got into the way of crowding into the church and endeavoring to put down ritualism by noise and even by violence. All this was becoming scandalous to the eyes of sober people. Many who were otherwise little disposed to approve of the dictatorship of the state in matters of religion, and who did not see how any decision of a court could prove a reli- gious dogma to be right or wrong, Avere nevertheless in- clined to demand that so long as the church of England was a state institution the authority of the state should be upheld. They took very clear and simple ground. They said: "The state upholds the English church on certain conditions and to preach certain doctrines. No man is compelled to preach the doctrines if he does not feel equal in conscience to the task; but if he cannot teach them he can go out of the state church. We do not take 4t on us to condemn his opinions; we do not want the law to punish him for holding them. But we say the state employs him to teach one thing and he is teaching another. We em- ploy a man to teach German, and we find he is teaching French. We do not say that he is a wicked person because he teaches French ; we only say that we want to have German taught, and that if he cannot do so he must give his place to some one who can." On the other hand, the rit- ualists said: "You tell us that we are bound by the state- made law. We say we are only bound by the doctrines of the church. But if we are to be bound by the law, show us first that we have broken the law. Appeal to your courts of law; do your best. We say the decision has not yet gone against us." It was not easy to answer this practical argument. The law was not by any means so clear as some of the opponents of ritualism would have wished it. Moreover, even in cases where a distinct con- demnation was obtained from a court of law there was often no way of putting it into execution. A ritualistic clergyman was ordered to be suspended from his ministra- A HISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES 493 tions. He went on with bis duties at his church just the same as ever. His congregation supported him, and the practices for which he had been condemned were carried on every Sunday without the slightest modification or inter- ruption. In more than one case a clergyman was actually deposed by authority, and his successor appointed. The congregation held fast by the delinquent and would not admit the new man. The offender remained at his post just as if nothing had happened. It was clear that if all this went on much longer the establishment must come to an end. One party would renounce state control in order to get freedom; another would repudiate state control because it proved unable to maintain authority. The state of things might be likened to that which prevailed in America for some years before the civil war. There were two irreconcilable parties; if one did not soon secede the other must. To remedy all this disorder, the archbishop of Canter- bury brought in his bill for the better regulation of public worship. The object of the bill was to give 'offended pa- rishioners a ready way of invoking the authority of the bishop and to enable the bishop to prohibit by his own man- date any practices which he considered improper, or else to submit the question to the decision of a judge specially ap- pointed to decide in such cases. The discussions were chiefly remarkable for the divisions of opinion they showed on both sides of the House. Lord Salisbury opposed the bill in the House of Lords; Mr. Hardy condemned it in the House of ( 'ommons. It was condemned as too weak ; it was denounced as too strong. Mr. Gladstone came forward with all the energy of his best days to oppose it, on the ground that it threatened to deprive the church of all her spiritual free- dom merely to get a more easy way of dealing with the practices of a few eccentric men. Sir William Harcourt, who had been solicitor-general under Mr. Gladstone, rushed to the defense of the bill, attacked Mr. Gladstone vehe- mently, called upon Mr. Disraeli to prove himself the leader of the English people, and in impassioned sentences reminded him that he had put his hand to the plow and must not draw it back. Mr. Gladstone dealt with his late subordinate in a few sentences of good-humored con- tempt, in which he expressed his special surprise at the sudden and portentous display of erudition- which Sir Will- 494 A HISTORY' OF OUR OWN TIMES. iam Harcourt had poured out upon the house. Sir William Harcourt was even then a distinctly rising man. He was an effective and somewhat overbearing speaker, with a special aptitude for the kind of elementary argument and the knock-down personalities which the House of Commons can never fail to understand. The house liked to listen to him. He had a loud voice, and never gave his hearers the trouble of having to strain their ears or their attention to follow him. His arguments were never subtle enough to puzzle the simplest country gentleman for one moment. His quotations had no distracting novelty about them, but fell on the ear with a familiar and friendly sound. His jokes were unmistakable in their meaning; his whole style was good strong black and white. He could get up a case admirably. He astonished the house, and must probably even have astonished himself by the vast amount of ecclesiastical knowledge which with only the prepara- tion of a day or two he was able to bring to bear upon the most abstruse or perplexed questions of church government. He had the advantage of being sure of everything. He poured out his eloquence and his learning on the most diffi- cult ecclesiastical questions with the resolute assurance of one who had given a life to the study. Perhaps we ought rather to say that he showed the resolute assurance which only belongs to one who has not given much of his life to the study of the subject. Probably when Sir William Harcourt had forgotten all that he had read up a little time before concerning church history, and turned back to his remarkable speeches on the public worship bill, he was as much amazed as Arthur Pendennis looking over one of his old reviews and wondering where on earth he con- trived to get the erudition of which he had made such a display. Mr. Disraeli responded so far to Sir William Ilarcourt's stirring appeal as to make himself the patron of the bill, and the leader of the movement in its favor. Mr. Disraeli saw that by far the greater body of English public opinion out of doors was agaiust the Ritualists, and that for the moment public opinion accepted the whole controversy as a dispute for or against ritualism. The course taken by the prime minister further enlivened the debates by bring- ing about a keen little passage of arms between him and Lord Salisbury, whom Mr. Disraeli described as a great A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 495 master of jibes and flouts and jeers. All this was as good as a play to the unconcerned public. Nothing could be more lively and entertaining. People in general soon for- got all about the bill itself, and even about the Ritualists, in the interest which was awakened by the splitting up of political parties, the attacks of friend on friend, and the cheerful sallies of cabinet minister against cabinet minister. Mr. Gladstone brought forward a series of resolutions in the form of amendments defining his objections to the measure, but he forebore to press them to a division. The bill was passed in both houses of parliament and obtained the royal assent almost at the end of the session. Nothing in particular has come of it thus far, except law suits which it seems impossible to bring to any practical con- clusion. The new judge and the strengthening authority have tried their hands more than once against refractory clergymen, and with no better effect than to prove that the re- fractory clergyman may still bid defiance to his superiors and the law. Ritualism was not put down. Doubtless it appealed to certain instincts in many hearts which the colder ami less ornate ceremonial of the ordinary Church of England service failed to satisfy. The interference of the law seemed to have the effect common in such cases. It made the followers of some ritualistic clergymen regard their leaders not merely as an apostle but as a martyr. In some instances it exalted commonplace men into the worshiped of congregations and the idol of emotional women. In some instances it put good and pious men at the mercy of fussy and ignorant alarmists. On the whole, it promoted rather than suppressed ritualism. One useful piece of legislation, or perhaps w r e ought rather to say the first step in a new course of useful legis- lation, was forced upon the government by .Mr. Plimsoll. This was a measure for the protection of seamen against the danger of being sent to sea in vessels unfitted for tin* voyage. Mr. Plimsoll was a man who had pushed his way through life by ability and hard work into independence and wealth. He was full of human sympathy, and was es- pecially interested in the welfare of the poor. His im- passioned temperament made him apt to be eaten up by the zeal of his cause; he had many of the enthusiast's characteristic defects, but he was filled with the besl quali- ties of a genuine enthusiasm, Mr. PlimsolTs attention 490 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. happened to be turned to the condition of our merchant seamen, and he found that the state of the law left them almost absolutely at the mercy of the shipowner. The system which prevailed with regard to maritime insurances put a great temptation in the way of unscrupulous and selfish shipowners. It was easy to insure a vessel, and once insured it mattered little to such a shipowner how soon she went to the bottom. The law dealt in very arbitrary fashion with the seaman who for any reason refused to ful- fill his contract and go to sea. It gave to magistrates the power of sending him at once to the common prison. The poor seaman often made his contract with utter thought- lessness, and when once he made it he was bound to it. The criminal law bore upon him ; only the civil law applied to the employer. Mr. Plimsoll was convinced that a great many lives were lost by the unprincipled conduct of certain shipowners who sent men out in rotten but well insured vessels and left them to their fate. He actually found cases of seamen sentenced to prison because they refused to sail in crazy ships, which, when they put to sea, never touched a port, but went down in mid-ocean. Letters were found in the pockets of drowned seamen which showed that they had made their friends aware of their forebodings as to the condition of the vessel that was to be their coffin. All this stirred Mr. PlimsoH's blood to such a degree that he could not endure it. He began a regular crusade against certain shipowners. He published a book called, " Our Seamen; An Appeal," in which he made the most startling and, it must be added, the most sweeping charges. Courts of law were invoked to deal with his assertions; the author- ity of parliament was called on to protect shipowning mem- bers against the violence of the irrepressible philanthropist. The public had not much difficulty in understanding Mr. Plimsoll. They saw at once that he was a man likely enough to be betrayed into exaggeration, sometimes into very serious mistake; but that his purpose was genuine, that his cause was good, and that on the whole the case he made out was one calling for the instant attention of par- liament. He was clearly wrong in some of his charges against individuals, but a very general opinion prevailed that he was only too just in his condemnation of the system. Mr. Plimsoll brought in a bill for the better protection of the lives of seamen. It was a stringent a nisTonr of our own times. 49? measure. It proposed a compulsory survey of all ships before Leaving port, various precautions against overloading, the restriction of deck-loading, and the com- pulsory painting of a load line, the position of Avhich was to be determined by legislation. This measure was strongly opposed by the shipowners in the house, and by many others as well as they, who regarded it as too stringent, and who also feared that by putting too much responsibility on the government it would take all respon- sibility off the shipowners. The bill came to the test of a division on June 24, 1874, and was rejected by a majority of only three, one hundred and seventy voting for it, and one hundred and seventy-three against. The government then recognizing the importance of the subject, and the strong feeling which prevailed in the country with regard to it, undertook to bring in a merchant shipping bill of their own. They introduced the bill in the session of 1875. It did not go nearly so far as Mr. Plimsoll would have desired, but it did promise to be at least part of a series of legislation which, further developed, might have accomplished the object. Such as it was, however, the government did not press it, and toward the end of July Mr. Disraeli announced that they would not go further that year with the measure. The 22d of July saw one of the most extraordinary scenes that ever took place in the House of Commons. Mr. Plimsoll, under the influence of disappointment and of anger seemed to have lost all self-control. He denounced some of the shipowners of that house; he threatened to name and expose them; he called them villains who had sent brave men to death. When interrupted by the speaker and told that he must not apply the term villains to members of the house he repeated again and again and in the most vociferous tones that they were villains and that he would abide by his words, lie refused to recog- nize the authority of the speaker. He shouted, shook his fist at the leading members of the government and rushed out of the house in a state of excitemenl that seemed little less than that of an actual maniac. Thereupon Mr. Disraeli moved, "that the speaker do reprimand Mr. Plim- soll for his disorderly behavior." .Mr. A. M . Sullivan, one of the home rule members, returned for the first time at the general election, a man of remarkable eloquence and of high character, rushed into the house pallid and almost 408 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. breathless with excitement, and endeavored to interpose on behalf of Mr. Plimsoll. He pleaded that Mr. Plimsoll was seriously ill and hardly able to account for his actions, owing to mental excitement arising from an overwrought system, and from the intensity of his zeal in the cause of the merchant seamen. He asked that a week should lie given Mr. Plimsoll to consider his position. Mr. Fawcett and other members made a similar appeal, and the govern- ment consented to postpone a decision of the question for a week. Mr. Plimsoll had offended against the rules, the traditions, and the dignity of the house, and many even of those who sympathized with his general purpose thought he had damaged his cause and ruined his individual position. Nothing, however, could be more extraordinary and unex- pected than the result. It was one of those occasions in which the public out of doors showed that they could get to the real heart of a question more quickly and more clearly than parliament itself. Out of doors it was thor- oughly understood that Mr. Plimsoll's behavior in the House of Commons was a gross offense against order. It Avas thoroughly understood that he was too sweeping in his charges; that he was entirely mistaken in some of them; that he had denounced men who did not deserve denun- ciation; that he had surrounded a good cause with an unfortunate adornment of exaggeration, extravagance, and ill-temper. All this the public understood and admitted. Put the difference between the public and the House of Commons was, that while understanding and admitting all this, the public clearly saw that as to the main ques- tion at issue Mr. Plimsoll was entirely in the right. They saw that, making allowance for all exaggeration and all ebullitions of temper, Mr. Plimsoll was the first man to take a just view of the hardships inflicted on merchant seamen ; and that the heart of his case, if we may use that ex- pression, was sound. The country was, therefore, determined to stand by him. Great meetings were held all over England during the next few days, at every one of which those who were present pledged themselves to assist Mr. Plimsoll in his general object and policy. The result was that when Mr. Plimsoll appeared in the House of Commons the week after, and in a very full and handsome manner made apology for his offenses against parliamentary order, it was apparent to A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 499 every one in the house and out of it that he was master of the situation, and that the government would have to ad- vance with more or less rapid strides along the path where he was leading. Finally, the government brought in and forcibly pushed through, a merchant shipping bill, which met for the moment some of the difficulties of the case, and which they promised to supplement afterward by a complete scheme of legislation. Mr. Disraeli indeed went so far as quietly to claim for himself and for the govern- ment some of the merit of having caused the extraordinary scene in the House of Commons. He suggested that the government were perfectly aware that nothing could, be done until the temper of the country was thoroughly roused, and therefore implied, if he did not actually affirm, that it was partly by their design that Mr. Plimsoll was stirred to his extraordinary demonstration, and the assist- ance of the public thereby obtained for the passing of a strong measure. "Even if one does call them names," said Mrs. Gamp, vindicating her treatment of her patients, "it's only done to rouse them." The measure did not prove to be a very strong one,but it did something toward Mr. Plimsoll's object. The gov- ernment afterward promised to supplement it by legisla- tion, regulating in some way the system of maritime insur- ances, which they justly declared to be essential to any satisfactory and final settlement of the question. It is clear that so long as the existing system of maritime insur- ance was allowed to prevail, the temptation to unscrupulous shipowners would continue to be almost irresistible, and that no legislation merely applying to the fabric of the ship could properly secure the lives of the seamen. Other things, however, interfered with the carrying out of the government proposals, such as they were. The regulation of maritime insurance was forgotten. Mr. Disraeli's col- leagues soon had too many questions of imperial interest on their hands in all parts of the world to have time or inclination for business of so homely a nature as a measure for the protection of the lives of English merchant sea- men. Nothing further was done (luring the reign of the Conservative ministry to complete the scheme which they had promised in the beginning, and many sessions after the house saw another outburst of passion on the part of Mi. Plimsoll, another attemptof the government to put him to 500 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. censure, and another distinct declaration on the part of the country, that however Mr. Plimsoll might have offended against the rules of the house, his spirit and pur- pose were thoroughly in unison with the feelings of the public. The government seemed for awhile, however, inclined to keep plodding steadily on with quiet schemes of domes- tic legislation. They were not usually very comprehensive or drastic schemes. They were rather of the kind which ill-natured critics would describe as tinkering. The gov- ernment tinkered at a measure for the security of improve- ments made by agricultural tenants. They made it purely permissive, and therefore thoroughly worthless. This one defect tainted many of their schemes of domestic reform ; this inclination to make every reform permissive. It seemed to be thought a clever stroke of management to introduce a measure professedly for the removal of some inequality, or other grievance, and then to make it permis- sive and allow all parties concerned to contract themselves out of it. Thus it was said in effect to the agricultural tenant: "Behold, here is a bill to enable you to hold fast the fruits of your expenditure and your labor;" and to the landlord : " You have no cause to be alarmed ; for you see this is only a permissive bill, and you can contract yourself out of it if your tenants agree, and of course they must agree." Mr. Cross, the home secretary, however, proved a very efficient minister, and introduced many useful schemes of legislation, among the rest an artisan's dwell- ing bill, the object of which was to enable local authorities to pull down houses unfit for human habitation and rebuild on the sites. The government made experiments in reaction here and there. They restored the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords, which had seemed actually doomed. They got into some trouble by issuing a circular to captains of war vessels on the subject of the reception of slaves on board their ships. The principle which the circular laid down was in substance a full recognition of the rights of a slave-owner over a fugitive slave. The country rose in indignation against this monstrous reversal of England's time-honored policy ; and the circular was withdrawn and a new one issued. This, too, proved unsatisfactory. The government made excuse by pleading that something of the same kind had been done before under a Liberal ad- A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 501 ministration, and attempted to satisfy public feeling by declaring that a slave was not to be handed back if the slave's life would be endangered by the withdrawal of the shelter of the English flag. Thereupon it was at once asked, Is a woman slave to be handed back to a ravish er? The government became entangled in a whole network of contradictions and difficulties, and after having tried various expedients,' appointed commissions, and made other futile efforts jto get out of the trouble, they had at length to allow the old principle to re-assert itself and the flag of England, whether it floats on sea or land, to be a protection and a shelter for the slave. Of course it is not intended that English vessels of war shall hold out invitations to fugitive slaves or act as the propagandist agents of the principles of personal freedom. But the broad plain prin- ciple long established was, that when a slave does get on board an English vessel, just as when he touches British soil, he is free and is not to be restored to slavery; and that principle the government saw themselves at last com- pelled to re-affirm. It was impossible for them to resist the popular demand; some of their own men in the House of Commons fell away from them and insisted that the old principle must be kept up and that the slave-owner shall not take his slave from under the shadow of the English flag. All this time what was Mr. Gladstone doing? He appeared to have withdrawn from the paths of parliamen- tary life and almost from the political world. He was a very busy man indeed in another way. He had taken to polemical literature. He was writing a series of essays to prove that the doctrine of papal infallibility if strictly acknowl- edged by Catholics would place their allegiance to what- ever sovereign entirely at the disposal of the pope. He was stirring up a heated controversy by endeavoring to prove that absolute obedience to the Catholic Church was henceforward inconsistent with the principles of freedom and that the papal doctrine was everywhere the enemy of liberty. Cardinal Manning, Dr. Newman and other great controversialists had taken the held against Mr. Gladstone, and the argument went on for a considerable time without abatement of eagerness. Grave politicians were not a little scandalized at the position taken by a statesman who only the other day was prime minister. There seemed some- 502 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. thing curiously undignified and unseemly in Mr. Glad- stone's leading a theological controversy. A speaker at an evangelical meeting in Exeter Hall would have been quite in his place when using such arguments as those employed by Mr. Gladstone; but a sharp polemical controversy provoked by a great statesman was something new in the modern world. One conclusion was adopted everywhere. It seemed clear that Mr. Gladstone never meant to take any leading part in politics again. Surely, it was said, if he had the remotest idea of entering the political field anew he never would have thus gratuitously assailed the religious belief of the Roman Catholic subjects of the queen. Nor indeed did it appear as if it would be very suitable for England to have a statesman in office again Avho must have given offense to all the Catholic sovereigns and ministers of Europe. Unfriendly critics hinted that Mr. Gladstone was writing against the pope and the Vatican in order to wreak his grudge because of the condemnation of his Irish university bill by the heads of the Catholic Church in Ire- land. It is not probable that any personal motive influ- enced Mr. Gladstone in a course which all his true admirers of whatever political party must have been sorry to see him follow. He had always a keen relish for theological disputation. He had in him much of the taste and the temper of the ecclesiastic. A religious controversy came to him as the most natural sort of recreation after the fatigue and disappointments of the political arena. Car- teret driven from office "retired laughing," says Macaulay, "to his books and his bottle." Fox found relief from politi- cal work in his loved Greek authors. Talleyrand played Avhist. Mr. Gladstone sought relaxation in religious con- troversy. He was as eager about it as ever he had been about a budget or a reform bill. He assailed the pope as if he were attacking Mr. Disraeli. He declared against the Vatican as if he were overwhelming the Tory opposition with his rhetoric. There was an earnestness about him which made some men smile anft»eT8M'fe8ljsad. Most of his friends shook their heads; mositf ofiiMb'feh-femies were delighted. Out of this depth it seemed impossible that he could ever rise. Mr. Disraeli had once said " there was a Palmerston. " Did he feel tempted now to say " there was a Gladstone?" In the beginning of 1875 Mr. Gladstone had formally A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 503 retired from the office of leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. There was some difficulty at first about the choice of his successor. Two men stood intellec- tually high above all other possible competitors — Mr. Bright and Mr. Lowe. But it was well known that Mr. Bright's health would not allow him to undertake such laborious duties and Mr. Lowe was quietly assumed to have none of the leader's qualities. Sir William Harcourt had not weight enough; neither had Mr. Goschen; the time of these two men had apparently not yet come. The real choice was between Mr. Forster and Lord Hartington. Mr. Forster, however, knew that he had estranged th« non- conformists from him by the course he had taken in his education measures arid he withdrew from what he felt to be an untenable position. Lord Hartington was therefore arrived at by a sort of process of exhaustion. It is not too much to say that had he not been the son of a great Whig duke no human being would ever have thought of him as leader of the Liberal party. But it is only right to add that he proved much better than his promise. He had a robust, straightforward nature and by constant practice he made himself an effective debater. Men liked the courage and the candid admission of his own deficiencies with which he braced himself up to his most difficult task — to take the place of Gladstone in debate and to confront Disraeli. CHAPTER LXIV. THE EASTERN QUESTION AGAIN. A change soon came over the spirit of the administra- tion. It began to be seen more and more clearly that Mr. Disraeli had not come into office merely to consider the claims of agricultural tenants and to pass measures for the pulling down of what Mr. Cross, the home secretary, called "rookeries' 1 in the bark slums of great cities. The prime minister was well known to cherish loftier ambitions. He was not supposed to have any warm personal interest in prosaic measures of domestic legislation. If a great reform bill were brought forward he could light against it first and adopt it and enlarge it afterward. If any question of 504 A HISTORY OF OVR OWN TIMES. picturesque theology were under discussion he was the man to sustain religion with epigram and array himself on the side of the angels in panoply of paradox. But his inclinations were all for the broader and more brilliant fields of foreign politics. The poetic young notary in Eichter's story was found with his eyes among the stars and his soul in the blue ether. Mr. Disraeli's eyes were among the stars of imperialist ambition ; his soul was in the blue ether of high policy. Since his early years he had not traveled. He had hardly ever left England even for a few days. He knew personally next to nothing of any foreign country. Perhaps for this very reason foreign affairs had all the more magical fascination for him. The prosaic dullness of Downing Street may have sent his fancy straying over the regions of Alexander's conquests; the shortness of the daily walks between the treasury and the House of Commons may have filled him with dreams of far-extended frontiers and a new empire of the east. The marked contrast between the political aptitudes and tastes of Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone came in to influ- ence still further the difference between the policy of the new government and that of its predecessor. Mr. Glad- stone delighted in the actual work and business of admin- istration. As Dr. Johnson could grapple with whole libraries so Mr. Gladstone could grapple with whole budgets. He could assimilate almost in a moment vast masses of figures which other men would have found bewildering to look at. He could get into his mind almost in a flash all the details of the most intricate piece of legislation. Dur- ing the long, involved and complicated discussions of the Irish church bill and the Irish land bill, he had conducted the controversy chiefly himself, and argued the legal details of perlexed clauses with lawyers like Cairns and Ball and Butt. He could indeed do anything but rest. Now Mr. Disraeli had neither taste nor aptitude for the details of administration. He could not keep his mind to the dry details of a bill. He could not construct a com- plicated measure, nor could he even argue it clause by clause when other men had constructed it for him and ex- plained it to him. He enjoyed administration on the large scale; he loved political debate; he liked to make a great speech. But when he was not engaged in his favorite work he preferred to be doing nothing. It was natural therefore A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 505 that Mr. Gladstone's administration should be one of prac- tical work; that it should introduce bills to deal with per- plexed and complicated grievances; that it should take care to keep the finances of the country in good condition. Mr. Disraeli had no personal interest in such things. He loved to feed his mind on gorgeous imperial fancies. It pleased him to think that England was, what he would persist in calling her, an Asiatic power, and that he was administering the affairs of a great oriental empire. He was fond of legislation on a vague and liberal scale; legisla- tion which gave opportunity for swelling praise and exalted rhetoric. It was not without justice that his opponents constantly insisted that he was not an Englishman but a foreigner, a descendant of oriental race. There was indeed something singularly narrow and ungenerous in the con- stant taunts thrown out against Mr. Disraeli on the score of his Jewish ancestry. Every one who was at all within the limits of the actual political world knew that these taunts came from Mr. Disraeli's political supporters as well as from his political opponents. Every discontented Conservative was ready to whisper something about his chief's Jewish descent. But although there was an inex- cusable want of generosity in thus making Mr. Disraeli's extraction and ancestral faith a source of objection, it must be owned that as a matter of historical fact his for- eign extraction has had a very distinct influence on his political tendencies and his ministerial career. Mr. Disraeli had never until now had an opportunity of showing what his own style of statesmanship would be. He had always been in office only, but not in power.. Now he had for the first time a strong majority behind him. He could do as he liked. He had the full confidence of the sovereign. His party were now wholly devoted to him. They could not but know that it was he whose patience and sagacity had kept them together and had organized victory for them. They began to regard him as infallible. A great many on the other side admired him as much as they dis- liked his policy, and believed in his profound sagacity as devoutly as any of his most humble followers. He bad come to occupy in the eyes of Englishmen of all parties something of the position once accorded to Napoleon III. by the public opinion of Europe. Even those who detested still feared; men believed in his power none the less be- 50fi A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. cause they had no faith in his policy. That Mr. Disraeli could not be mistaken in anything began to be the right sort of thing to say. He was therefore now in a position to indulge freely in his own personal predilections with regard to the way of governing England. In the House of Commons he had no longer any rival to dread in debate. Mr. Gladstone had withdrawn from the active business of politics; Mr. Bright was not strong enough in physical health to care much for controversy; there was no one else who could by any possibility be regarded as a proper adversary for Mr. Disraeli. The new prime minister therefore had everything his own way. He soon showed what sort of statesmanship he liked best. He soon turned away from the dusty and plodding paths of domestic legis- lation. He ceased even to pretend to have any interest in such commonplace and homely work. He showed that he was resolved to play on a vaster stage, and to seek the applauses of a more cosmopolitan audience. Napoleon in- vited Talma to Erfurt, that he might play to a pitful of kings. Mr. Disraeli was evidently determined to play to an audience of kings and emperors. In politics as in art the weaknesses of the master of a school are most clearly seen in the performances of his imi- tators and admirers. Mr. Disraeli's admirers began to manifest his tendencies more emphatically than he allowed himself to do. At all public meetings and dinners where Conservative orators declaimed there Avas much talk about imperial instincts, imperial missions and destinies, and so forth. A distinguished member of Mr. Disraeli's cabinet proclaimed that since the Conservatives came into office there had been something stirring in the very air which spoke of imperial enterprise. The Elizabethan days were to be restored, it was proudly declared. England was to resume her high place among the nations. She was to make her influence felt all over the world, but more especially on the European continent. The cabinets and chancelleries of Europe were to learn that nothing was to be done any more without the authority of England. " A spirited foreign policy" was to be inaugurated, a new era was to begin. Enthusiastic Conservatives seemed almost literally to swell with pride when they talked of the things to be done under the administration of Mr. Disraeli. The long ignoble reign of peace and non-intervention was at an A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 507 end. Every man that did not proclaim that British influ- ence was to reign paramount over Europe and Asia was anti-English, was cosmopolitan, was a member of the peace society, was a devotee of Oobden, a defender of the Ala- bama treaty, a disciple of non-intervention, and generally speaking, a disgrace to his country, and a traitor to his sovereign. Thoughtful men who were not in any sense political partisans, men who were not engaged in politics on either side, began to shake their heads at these new political mani- festations. There was an ominous self -consciousness about them. Empires are not made, or are not made great, they said, by persons who go about proclaiming an im- perial mission. The statesmen who proved themselves truly imperial did not parade in heroic attitudes before- hand and say in pompous tones, "Behold us! — we have it for our task to be the makers of empires." Such utterances were not happy prologues to the swelling act of the im- perial theme. The greatness' of the age of Elizabeth is not to be revived by talking of an Elizabethan revival. Such attempts seemed insincere and shallow. They resem- bled some of the aesthetic pretenses and follies of the day; the sham mediaeval ism, the affectation of the affectations of the Queen Anne age. There was too much posturing about the new statecraft to give comfort to plain and thoughtful minds. Goethe has said very well of a certain kind of affectation, that it is a pleasant and harmless thing to dress up as a Turk once in a way when going to a masked ball, but that it is unpardonable waste of time for an honest western to try to make himself believe all day long that he is a Turk. Mow England saw a few middle-aged or ancient gentlemen gravely trying to per- suade themselves and their friends that they were Eliza- bethan conquerors of new worlds, I leaven-ordained makers of new empires. The ordinary English mind was not imaginative enough for this sort of thing. Sensible and sober men -would be certain to get tired of it soon. Perhaps the first indication of the new foreign policy was given by the purchase of the shares which the knedive .of Egypt held in the Suez Canal. English governments had in- the first instance opposed the scheme for the con- struction of the Sue/. Canal, and English scientific men had endeavored to prove thai the scheme could never be §08 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. carried out. Now however that the canal was open and was a success, some alarmists began to find a danger to England in the fact that it made the approach to India more easy for other European powers as well as for her. The khedive of Egypt held nearly half the four hundred thousand original shares in the canal, and the khedive was going every day faster and faster on the road to ruin. He was on the brink of bankruptcy. He had been living in the true fashion of an eastern prince, gratifying every expensive whim as it crossed his listless mind ; stimulating himself by the invention of new ways of spending money when the old caprices tired him; lavishing on the purchase and the keep of fat women treasures that might have saved millions of his wretched subjects from starvation. His one hundred and seventy-six thousand shares came into the market; on November 25, 1875, the world was astonished by the news that the English government had turned stock- jobber and bought them for four millions sterling. The idea was not the government's own. The editor of a London evening paper, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, was the man to whom the thought first occurred. He made it known in the first instance, it is believed, to a member of the cabinet, who threw cold water on it. Not discouraged, Mr. Green- wood tried the prime minister himself; and Mr. Disraeli was caught by the proposition, and the shares were instantly bought up in the name of the English government. Seldom in our time has any act on the part of a govern- ment been received with such general approbation. The London newspapers broke into a chorus of applause. The London clubs were delighted. The air rang with praises of the courage and spirit shown by the ministry. If here and there a faint voice was raised to suggest that the purchase was a foolish proceeding, that it was useless, that it was undignified, a shout of offended patriotism drowned the ignoble remonstrance. Some continental newspapers did a good deal to stimulate the feeling that prevailed in England by condemning the act as audacious, arrogant, and ominous of an intention to interfere too actively in foreign affairs. This was the very course to stir the feeling of Englishmen. There was a general sense of satisfaction at the idea that England was again regarded as an arrogant and dominating power. Men held up their heads grandly, and went about, pride in their port, defiance in their eye, A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 509 nobly over-conscious of belonging to a nation which could make her influence felt once more in foreign affairs. When parliament met, the Liberal leaders ventured some objection to the purchase and to the mode of completing it; but all wise persons declared that the very attempt only showed how entirely the Liberal leaders were out of sym- pathy with the English people. It is true that one mem- ber of the cabinet, Lord Derby, endeavored to make as little as possible of the purchase, and to represent it as a step taken merely to prevent any foreign influence from pre- ponderating in the management of a canal which was chiefly important for English commerce. Mr. Disraeli and some of his colleagues, on the other hand, spoke in a grand and mysterious way which gave people to understand that the buying of the shares was part of some great scheme of policy destined to make England mistress of the east, and to checkmate the designs of a jealous world. Nothing in particular came of the bargain in the end, and the popular enthusiasm soon cooled down. The act, however, is of his- torical importance as the first of a series of strokes made by the government in foreign policy, each of which came in the nature of a surprise to parliament and the country. It is probable that Mr. Disraeli counted upon making his government popular by affording to the public at intervals the exciting luxury of a new sensation. The public were undoubtedly rather tired of having been so long quiet and prosperous. They liked to know that their government was doing something. There are fashions in politics as in literature and in dress. "Sensationalism" was now decid- edly the mode in the political world. Mr. Disraeli led the fashion, and stimulated the public taste. The government tried to establish a south African confederation, and sent out Mr. Froudc, the romantic historian, to act as the repre- sentative of their policy. The Prince of Wales was sent on a tour to India, a very reasonable and proper thing in itself, but which the government endeavored to surround with all the radiance of a new Avatar. The prince was taken out to India and introduced to all the princes and other persons whom officialism thought it convenient for him to meet. He got no nearer to the knowledge of the real feelings of any of the Indian populations than if he had remained at Marlborough House. The government meanwhile made some changes in the relations of the India 510 A HISTO RT OF OUR WN TIMES. office here to the viceroy in Calcutta, which gave much greater power into the hands of the secretary for India. One immediate result of this was the retirement of Lord Northbrook, a prudent and able man, before the term of his administration had actually arrived. Mr. Disraeli gave the country another little surprise. He appointed Lord Lytton viceroy of India. Lord Lyttonhad been previously known chiefly as the writer of pretty and sensuous verse, and the author of one or two showy and feeble novels. In literary capacity he was at least as much inferior to his father as his father was to Scott or Goethe. All that was known of him besides was, that he had held several small diplomatic posts without either ' distinction or discredit. The world was certainly a good deal astonished at the appointment of such a man to the most important office under the sovereign; an office which had strained the intel- lectual energies of men like Dalhousie and Canning and Elgin. But people were in general willing to believe that Mr. Disraeli knew Lord Lytton to be possessed of a gift of administration which the world outside had not had any chance of discerning in him. Not much,' it was remem- bered, was known of Lord Mayo's capacity for the task of governing India when he was sent out to Calcutta; and Lord Mayo's administration had undoubtedly been success- ful. There was no reason why Lord Lytton should not turn out a born administrator. There was no reason why he should not suddenly prove the possession of unexpected gifts, like another Cromwell, Clive, or Spinola. There was something, too, which gratified many persons in the appointment. It seemed gracious and kindly of Mr. Disraeli thus to recognize and exalt the son of his old friend and companion in arms. There was a feeling all over England which wished well to the appointment and sincerely hoped it might prove a success. Another little sensation was created by the invention of a new title for the queen. At the beginning of the session of 1876 the royal speech announced that an addition was to be made to the sovereign's titles, and after several attempts on the part of the opposition to get at the nature of the change, Mr. Disraeli at last announced in a some- what hesitating way that the queen was to be called "Empress of India." A strong dislike was felt to this superfluous and tawdry addition to the ancient style of the A BISTORT OF OUR OWN TIMES. 511 sovereigns of England. The title of emperor had been a good deal tarnished of late. The emperor of the French had but recently fallen in the dust; there had been an em- peror of Mexico and an emperor of Hay ti. The title of the German emperor was in one sense only a restoration of a dignity which had been historical; and in any case the restoration was not especially popular in England. But to convert the immemorial crown of the English sovereign into a brand-new glittering imperial diadem seemed to most persons simply an act of vulgarity. The educated feeling of the country rose in revolt against this prepos- terous innovation. Some of the debates in the House of Commons were full of fire and spirit, and recalled the memory of more stirring times when the Liberal party was in heart and strength. Mr. Lowe spoke against the new title with a vivacity and a bitterness of sarcasm that reminded listeners of his famous opposition to the reform bill of 1866. Mr. Joseph Cowen, member for Newcastle, who had been in the house for some sessions without mak- ing any mark, suddenly broke into the debates with a speech which at once won him the name of an orator, and which a leading member of the government, Mr. Gathorne Hardy, described as having "electrified" the house. Mr. Disraeli chaffed the opposition rather than reasoned with it. He pointed out as one justification of the title, the fact that Spenser had dedicated his "Faerie Queene" to " the most highe mightie and magnificent Empresse Eliza- beth." Spenser of course only used the word after the fantastic ways of court flattery in his time, and because he thought empress sounded well. Milton's satan twice addresses Eve as empress. Mr. Disraeli also cited in evi- dence a letter from a young ladyat school, who had directed his attention to the fact that in "Guv's Geography" the queen was already described as empress of India. This style of argument did not add much to the dignity of the debate. Mr. Lowe spoke witli justifiable anger and eon- tempt of the prime minister's introducing "the lispings of the nursery" into a grave discussion, and asked whether Mr. Disraeli wished to make the house in general think as meanly of the subject as he did himself. The government, of course, carried their point. They deferred so far to public opinion as to put into the act a provision against the use of the imperial title in the United Kingdom. There 512 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. was indeed a desire that its use should be prohibited every- where except in India, and most of the members of the opposition were at first under the impression that the gov- ernment had undertaken to do so much. But the only restriction introduced into the act had reference to the em- ployment of the additional title in these islands. The unlucky subject was the occasion of a new and a somewhat unseemly dispute afterward. In a speech which he deliv- ered to a public meeting at East Retford, Mr. Lowe made an unfortunate statement to the effect, that the queen had endeavored to induce two former ministers tc confer upon her this new title and had not succeeded. It was a very rash act on the part of a responsible public man to make such a statement without positive certainty as to its truth ; perhaps it would not have been a very wise or proper proceeding on the part of such a man to make the statement even if it were true. Mr. Lowe proved to be absolutely wrong in his assertion. No attempt of the kind had ever been made by the queen. Mr. Disraeli found his enemy delivered into his hands. The question was incidentally and indirectly brought up in the House of Commons on May 2, 1876, and Mr. Disraeli seized the opportunity. He denounced Mr. Lowe, thundered at him from across the table, piled up a heap of negative evidence to show that his assertion could not be true, and at the very close of his speech came down on the hapless offender with the crushing announce- ment that he had the authority of the queen herself to con- tradict the statement. Nothing could have been in worse taste than Mr. Disraeli's way of making this very neces- sary contradiction. It is evident that the right course would have been to put into the fewest and the simplest words the announcement which her majesty had very properly authorized the minister to make. The dignity of the sovereign required that her name and her word should not be introduced to the house by a somewhat coarse rhetorical artifice at the end of a speech, and that they should not be preluded by impassioned sentences of boister- ous and furious denunciation. Mr. Lowe sat like one crushed, while Mr. Disraeli roared at him and banged the table at him. He said nothing that night; but on the following Thursday evening he made an apology which assuredly did not want completeness or humility. The title which was the occasion for so much debate has not A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 513 come into greater popular favor since that time. It is used in India, and Ave occasionally see evidences of an inclination to bring it quietly into use elsewhere; but there was a very general concurrence of opinion among educated persons in all parts of the country as to the impropriety of the measure adopted by the government and the vulgariz- ing effect of the new addition to the royal title. It was all part of an imperializing policy, some men said, part of a deliberate scheme to make the institutions of the country less liberal and popular. It is part, other men said, of a tawdry love for finery and frippery in language and policy; it savors of the taste which associated the banner of St. George with the mountains of Rasselas. Mr. Disraeli, however, had a large majority in both houses of parlia- ment, and he carried his proposal by about the same pre- ponderance of votes in the Gommons as in the Lords. Then the country soon forgot all about the matter. More serious questions were coming up to engage the attention of the public. When Mr. Disraeli was pressed during the debates on the royal title to give some really serious reason for the change, it was observed as significant that he made reference more or less vague to the necessity of asserting the position of the sovereign of England as supreme ruler over the whole empire of India. The prime minister spoke in the tone of one who feels more than he desires to express; of one who gives a warning which he wishes to be understood without need of fuller explanation. Every one knew what Mr. Disraeli meant. He had undoubtedly let drop words which were calculated to produce a deep effect on the public mind. They decided the wavering opinions of many people. There were men who sincerely disliked the idea of the fire-new title of empress, and who yet felt that after what- the prime minister had said it would not be prudent to oppose the acl of the government. Mr. Disraeli had purposely touched a chord which was sure to vibrate all over the country. The necessity to which he alluded was the necessity of setting lip the flag of England on the citadel of England's Asiatic empire as a warning to the one enemy whom the English people believed they had reason to dread. Mr. Disraeli had raised what has been called the Russian specter. No influence during our time has been so potent to direct the foreign, and even the 514 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. domestic policy, to disturb the relations of parties and to rouse the passions of the people, as that which is exercised by the dread and distrust of Russian ambition. A great crisis was now again at hand. It has been already mentioned that Lord Aberdeen was of opinion at the close of the Crimean war that that war might secure the peace of Europe for twenty-five years. His opinion was thought then to be hardly doing justice to the efficacy of the measures taken to sustain Turkey and to restrain the ambition of Russia. Lord Aberdeen, how- ever, had overrated instead of underrating the endurance of tha peace that was made by the treaty of Paris. Only twenty-two years had passed when Turkey and Russia were at war again. During all the interval Turkey had been occupied in throwing away every opportunity for her political and social reorganization. The influence of the statesmanship of Constantinople had been growing more and more baneful to all the populations under the control of the sultan. There had been insurrections in Crete, in the Herzegovina, in other parts of the provinces misgoverned by Turkey ; and they had been put down, when- ever the porte was strong enough, with a barbarous severity. Men on both sides of English politics were now losing all hope of Turkey's regeneration. Two plain facts were present to the consciousness of Europe. Turkey was sinking day by day; Russia was returning to the position she occupied before the Crimean war. Was Russia also returning to the ambition which she undoubtedly cher- ished before that time? She had lately been making rapid advances into central Asia. Post after post which were once believed to be secure from her approach were dropping into her hands. Her goal of one day became her starting- point of the next. Early in July, 1875, Lord Derby received an account of disturbances in the Herzegovina, and some- thing like an organized insurrection in Bosnia. The prov- inces inhabited by men of alien race and religion over which Turkey rules have always been the source of her weakness. They have always in one form or another invited foreign intervention. Where the intervention was necessary and just they had been its vindication; where it was selfish and unnecessary they had given it its excuse. The revolt which ended in the independence of Greece began in the Danubian provinces. The Crimean war had its A HISTO R7 OF OUR OWN TIMES. 515 origin in the same region. The disturbances in Herzegovina in 18(32 and Crete in 1867, had each in its turn almost provoked the intervention of western Europe. This time it became quite clear in a moment to almost every eye that a crisis had arrived, and that a new chapter of the eastern question was to be opened. It is not less Turkey's mis- fortune than her fault — certainly not less her fault than her misfortune — that her way of governing her foreign provinces has been the cause of so much trouble to western Europe. Fate has given to the most incapable and worth- less government in the world a task which would strain the resources of the loftiest public spirit and the most accom- plished statesmanship. Turkey has to rule over a great variety of nationalities and of creeds all more or less jum- bled together within a comparatively limited area. These different sects and races agree in hardly anything but in their common detestation of Ottoman rule. Among themselves their rivalries are unceasing and bitter. Again and again Turkey has made it her plausible excuse for maintaining a system of stern repression in the south-east of Europe, that if sbe lifted a strong hand from these popu- lations they would be found carrying on something like an internecine struggle among themselves. The Slav dreads and detests the Greek. The Greek despises the Slav. The Albanian objects alike to Slav and to Greek. The Mohammedan Albanian detests the Catholic Albanian. The Slavs are drawn toward Russia by affinity of race and of religion. But this very fact, which makes in one sense their political strength, brings with it a certain condition of weakness, because by making them more formidable to Greeks and to Germans it increases the dislike of their growing power, and the determination to oppose it. it would indeed take a very wise, far-seeing, and flexible sys- tem of administration to enable a central government to nde witli satisfaction and with success all these differing and contending races. The Turkish government managed the matter worse than it might seem possible for a govern- ment to do which had been brought for centuries within the action of Kuropean civilization. Turkish rule seems to exist only in one of two extremes. In certain places it means entire relaxation of authority; in others, it means the most rude and rigorous oppression. The hand of the statesman at Constantinople is absolutely unfelt in 516 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. some of the remoter provinces supposed to be under Turkish sway. The warlike inhabitants of some highland region live their wild and lawless lives, levying blackmail on travelers, and preying on the peaceable commerce of their neighbors with as much indifference to the officials of Stamboul as to the remonstrances of western statesman- ship. But it may be that not far from their frontier-line there is some hapless province whose people feel the hand of Turkey strong and cruel on their necks at every moment of their lives. It happens, as is not unnatural in such a system, that the repression is heaviest where it is least needed, and that in the only cases where severity and rigor might be excused there is an entire relaxation of all central authority. In the condition of things thus hastily sketched out, it is natural that there should be constant upheavings of political and social rebellion. To the Slav populations the neighborhood of Russia has all the disturbing effect which the propinquity of a magnet might have on the works of some delicate piece of mechanism, or which the neigh- borhood of one great planet has on the movements of another. The settlement made by the Crimean war had since that time been gradually breaking down. Servia was an independent state in all but the name. The Danubian provinces, which were to have been governed by separate rulers, came to unite themselves first under one ruler, and then into one complete system and at last emerged into the sovereign state of Roumania under the Prussian prince, Charles of Hohenzollern. Thus the result which most of the European powers at the time of the congress of Paris endeavored to prevent was successfully accomplished in spite of their inclinations. The efforts to keep Bosnia and Herzegovina in quiet subjection to the sultan proved a miserable failure. The insurrection which now broke out in Herzegovina spread with rapidity. The Turkish states- men insisted that it was receiving help not only from Russia but from the subjects of Austria as well as from Servia and Montenegro. An appeal was made to the English government to use its influence with Austria in order to prevent the insurgents from receiving any assist- ance from across the Austrian frontier. Servia and Monte- negro were appealed to in a similar planner. Lord Derby seems to have acted with indecision and with feebleness. He does not appear to have appreciated the immediate A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 51? greatness of the crisis, and lie offended popular feeling, and even the public conscience, by urging on the porte that the best they could do was to put down the insurrection as quickly as possible, and not allow it to swell to the magni- tude .of a question of European interest. Lord Derby knew the anxiety existing among many of the European powers to interfere on behalf of the Christian populations of Turkey, and it almost seemed as if he dreaded the sort of public scandal this must occasion more than the possibility of Turkey using her repressive powers with an excess of rigor. The insurrection continued to spread, and at last it was determined by some of the western powers that the time had come for European intervention. Count Andrassy, the Austrian minister, drew up a note which was to be addressed to the porte. In this note Austria, Germany, and Russia united in a declaration that the promises of re- form made by the porte had not been carried into effect, and that some combined action by the powers of Europe was necessary to insist on the fulfillment of the many engagements which Turkey had made and broken. The note declared that if something of the kind were not done, the governments of Servia and Montenegro would be com- pelled by the enthusiasm of their populations to support the insurrection in the Turkish provinces, and that the only means of preventing a general outbreak was a firm resolu- tion on the part of the western powers to compel Turkey to redress the grievances of which the Christian populations complained. This note was dated December 30, 1875, and it was communicated to the powers which had signed the treaty of Paris. France and Italy were ready at once to join in it; but England delayed. In fact Lord Derby held off so long that it was not until he had received a despatch from the porte itself requesting his -government to ioin in the note, that he at last consented to take part in the remonstrance. The Turkish government seem to have desired the presence of England in this movement as one deBires the presence of a Becret ally. Rightly or wrongly the statesmen of Constantinople had gol it into their heads that England was their devoted friend, bound by her own interests to protect them against whatever opposition. Instead, therefore, of regarding England's co-operation in the Andrassy note asone other influence brought to compel 518 J- HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. them to fulfill their engagements, they seem to have accepted it as a secret force working on their side to enable them to escape from their responsibilities. Lord Derby joined in the Andrassy note. It was sent tcthe porte. The Otto- man government showed some cleverness in their way of meeting the difficulty. They accepted politely all, or nearly all, the demands addressed to them, expressed in cool and pleasant terms their entire satisfaction with the kindly suggestions made to them, declared themselves rather gratified than otherwise to have their attention called to any little omissions on their part, and promised to carry out in the readiest manner the suggestions which the note con- tained. Turkey did nothing more than promise. She took no step to meet the demands made by the European powers. After a few weeks it became perfectly evident that she had not only done nothing but had never intended to do any- thing. Eussia, therefore, proposed that the three imperial ministers of the continent should meet at Berlin and con- sider what steps should be taken in order to make the Andrassy note a reality.. A document, called the Berlin memorandum, was drawn up, in which the three powers pointed out the increasing danger of disturbance in the south-east of Europe, and the necessity for at once carrying into effect the objects of the Andrassy note. It was pro- posed that arms should be suspended for two months between the porte and the insurgent provinces, and that meanwhile peace should be negotiated, and that the con- suls and the delegates of the European powers should watch over the carrying out of the proposed reforms. The memorandum ended by a significant intimation, that if the period of suspension of arms were allowed to pass without the desired objects being attained, or at least approached, there must be an agreement among the powers as to the further measures which might be called for in the interests of the general peace. The meaning of all this was per- fectly clear. The Andrassy note had invited Turkey's attention to her unfulfilled engagements: Turkey had admitted her deficiencies and promised to supply them. The Berlin memorandum now proposed to consider the measures by which to enforce on Turkey the fulfillment of her broken promises. It was distinctly implied that should Turkey fail to comply, force would be used to compel her, A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 519 But, on the other hand, it is clear that this was a menace which would of itself have insured the object. It is out of the question to suppose that Turkey would have thought of resisting the concerted action of England, France, Aus- tria, Germany, Russia, and Italy. The threat of com- bined action was in itself the surest guarantee of peace. The situation was described very effectively by Lord ( i ran- villeayear or two after. A man is making a disturbance in the street; if one peaceful inhabitant remonstrates and in- terferes^ is very likely that his intervention will only lead to further violence; but if half a dozen policemen come up it is more than probable that the disturber will go epiietly away. This is a fair illustration of the condition of things in Europe, and of the sense and spirit of the Berlin memorandum. Overwhelming and irresistible force was to be brought to bear against Turkey, in order that Turkey might have no possible excuse or opportunity for attempting resistance. Unfortunately, however, Lord Derby and the English government did not see their way to join in the Berlin memorandum. Lord Derby, ; t seems was of opinion that a secret agreement between Germany, Austria, and Russia had existed since 1873, and he feared to allow England to be drawn into what might have been a dangerous complication. Other English statesmen were convinced that Russia was all the while secretly stirring up that discontent in the Christian provinces which the western powers were using as an argument for interven- tion. Lord Derby had to decide, and it seems to us he decided in the wrong way. He refused to join in the Berlin memorandum. Not merely did he refuse to join in it, but he made no suggestion as to any other course which might be taken if the memorandum were abandoned. The refusal of England was fatal to the project. The memorandum was never presented. Concert between the European powers was for the time at an end. From that mpment every one in western Lurope knew that war was certain in the east. A succession of startling events kept public attention on the strain. There was an outbreak of Mus- sulman fanaticism at Salonica, and the French and German consuls were murdered. A revolutionary demonstration book place in Constantinople, and the Sultan Adbul Aziz was dethroned. The miserable Abdul Aziz committed 520 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. suicide in a day or two after. This was the sultan who had been received in England with so much official cere- mony and public acclaim. It was he who had been wel- comed at Windsor, had been entertained by the corpora- tion of London, had been the lion of the season, and the sensation of the sight-seeing public. At the time when he was feasted and applauded in London the Cretan insurrection was going on, and his troops were doing the business of repression with an unsparing cruelty wor- thy of the Soldans of the middle ages. His death by his own hand in a fit of despair, as he found himself de- throned, deserted, lonely, and hated, was a strange close for the career which had begun with so much promise and amid such universal expectation at the time of the Crimean war. His nephew Murad was made sultan in his place. Murad reigned only three mouths and was then dethroned, and his brother Hamid put in his place. Suddenly the at- tention of tbe English public was called away to events more terrible than palace revolutions in Constantinople. An insurrection had broken out in Bulgaria, and the Turkish government sent large numbers of Bashi- Bazouks and other irregular troops to crush it. They did not, however stay their hand when the insurrection had been crushed. Repression soon turned into massacre. Rumors began to reach Constantinople of hideous wholesale murders committed in Bulgaria. The Constantinople correspondent of the Daily News investigated the evi- dence, and found it but too true. In a few days after ac- counts were laid before the English public of the deeds which ever since have been known as "the Bulgarian atrocities." A story was told of the wholesale massacre of women and children, such as could hardly have found its parallel in the worst days of an earlier Byzantine rule, or under the odious reign of the later sovereigns of Delhi. Nothing could have been more ill-advised and unfor- tunate than the manner in which Mr. Disraeli at first dealt with these terrible stories. He treated them with a levity which jarred harshly on the ears of almost all his listeners. It was plain that he did not believe them or attach any importance to them. No one ever supposed that he was really wanting in humanity; it is certain that if he had believed such crimes were committed he would have been incapable of excusing them or making light of them. But A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 521 lie did not believe in any of the stories; he set them down too hastily as mere figment of rumor, and the newspaper correspondent, and what he called "coffee-house babble." He took no trouble to examine the testimony on which they rested. He therefore thought himself warranted in dealing with them as if they were merely stories to laugh at. He evidently did not know much about the Turkish provinces of our day or about Turkish affairs in general. He endeavored to make out that the Bashi- Bazouks were really the residents and occupiers of Bulgaria. He described them as Circassians who had been settled there long since with the approval of all Europe. He re- proached the Liberal party with the lack of sympathy they now showed for a race of beings in whom they once professed such an interest. Mr. Disraeli's ideas of Bulgaria were evidently drawn from vague reminiscences of Voltaire's "Candide;"and he depicted the Bulgarians as cruel oppres- sors of the Bashi-Bazouks. He expressed entire skepticism as to the tortures said to have been inflicted on their vic- tims by the Turkish soldiery. Oriental races, he gravely observed, did not usually have recourse to torture, " they generally terminated their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner." All this might have been what the German quack in Scott's "Antiquary" calls" very witty and comedy;" but the house was not exactly in the vein for mirth. Mr. Disraeli had always the faculty of persuading himself to believe or disbelieve anything accord- ing as he liked. The statesman who could really per- suade himself into the belief that oriental races did not usually have recourse to torture, might well persuade him- self of anything. Probably for the time Mr. Disraeli actually believed that the Bashi-Bazouks were gentle exiles of the class of Thaddeus of Warsaw, sweetly incapable of harming any creature. But the house and the country would have preferred the prime minister in a different mood just then. The subject proved to he Ear too serious for light-minded treatment. Mr. Disraeli Eelt this himself afterward, and made an attempt to persuade the country that there was no levity in his talk about the oriental way of terminating the connection # with a culprit. Mr. Baring, the Knglish consul, sent out specially to Bulgaria to make inquiries, and who was supposed to lie in general sympathy with Turkey, reported that no fewer than twelve thousand 522 A H [STORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. persons had been killed in the district of Philippopolis. He confirmed substantially some of the most shocking de- tails of the massacre of women and children, which had. been given by Mr. MacGahan, a correspondent whom the Daily Neivs had sent out to the spot, to see with his own eyes, and report what he saw. There was no disputing the significance of some of that testimony. The defenders of the Turks insisted that the only deaths were those which took place in fight; insurgents on one side, Turkish sol- diers on the other. But Mr. Baring, as well as the Daily News correspondent, saw whole masses of the dead bodies of women and children piled up in places where the bodies of no combatants were to be seen. The women and chil- dren were simply massacred. The Turkish government may not have known at first of the deeds that were done by their soldiers. But it is certain that after the facts had been forced upon their attention, they conferred new hon- ors on the chief perpetrators of the crimes which shocked the moral sense of all Europe. Mr. Bright happily described the agitation which fol- lowed in England as an uprising of the English people. At first it was an uprising without a leader. Soon, how- ever, it had a chief of incomparable energy and power. Mr. Gladstone came out of his semi-retirement. He threw aside polemics and criticism. He forgot for awhile Homel- and the pope. He flung himself into the agitation against Turkey with the impassioned energy of a youth. He made speeches in the House of Commons and out of it; he attended monster meetings indoors and out of doors; he published pamphlets, he wrote letters, he brought forward motions in parliament; he denounced the crimes of Turkey and the policy which would support Turkey, with an elo- quence that for the time set England aflame. After awhile no doubt there set in a sort of reaction against the fervent mood. The country could not long continue in this white heat of excitement. Some men began to protest against " the sentimental" in politics; others grew tired of hearing Turkey denounced; others again complained that they had got too much of the Bulgarian atrocities. More- over, Mr. Disraeli and his supporters were able to work with great effect on that strong deep-rooted feeling of the modern Englishman, his distrust and dread of Russia. Mr. Gladstone was accused of acting in such a manner as to A HISTORY OF OVll OWN TIMES. 523 make himself the instrument of Russian designs on Con- stantinople. He had in his pamphlet, " Bulgarian Horrors, and the Question of the East," insisted that the only way to secure any permanent good for the Christian provinces of Turkey was to turn the Turkish officials "bag and baggage" out of them. What people called the '"bag and baggage" policy was denounced as a demand for the expul- sion of the Turks, all the Turks, the Turkish men and women out of Europe. Of course what Mr. Gladstone meant was exactly what he said, that the rule of Turkish officialism should cease in the Christian provinces; that these provinces should have autonomous governments sub- ject to the sultan; not that all the individual Turks should be turned out. But the cry went forth that he had called for the expulsion of the Turks from Europe, and that the moment the Turks went out of Constantinople the Russians must come in. Nothing could have been better suited to rouse up reaction and alarm. A sudden and strong revulsion of feeling took place in favor of the gov- ernment. Mr. Gladstone was honestly regarded by millions of Englishmen as the friend and the instrument of Russia, Mr. Disraeli as the champion of England, and the enemy of England's enemy. Air. Disraeli, was like another Chatham, bidding England be of good cheer and hurling defiance at her foes. Mr. Disraeli? by this time there was no Mr. Disraeli. The 11th of August, 1870 was an important day in the parliamentary history of England. Mr. Disraeli made then his last speech in the House of Commons. It was a speech filled for the most part with banter and ridicule directed against those who were leading the agitation against the government. But toward the close Mr. Dis- raeli struck a louder and a stronger note. He sustained and defended the policy of the government as an imperial policy, the object of which was to maintain the empire of England "Nor will we ever agree to any step, though it may obtain for a moment comparative quiet and a false prosperity, r.' a , hazards the existence of thatempire." The House of Commons little knew that these were the last Words it was to hear from Mr. Disraeli. The secret was well kept. It was made known only to the newspapers that night. Next morning all England knew that Ben- jamin Disraeli had become Earl at Beaconsfield. The title 524 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. once intended for Burke had come to the author of "Vivian Grey." Everybody was well satisfied that if Mr. Disraeli liked an earldom he should have it. His political career had had claims enough to any reward of the kind that his sovereign could bestow. If he had battled for honor it was but fair that he should have the prize. Coming as it did just then, the announcement of his ele- vation to the peerage seemed like a defiance flung in the face of those who would arraign his policy. The attacks made on Mr. Disraeli were to be answered by Lord Beacons- field; his enemies had become his footstool. CHAPTEE LXV. THE CONGRESS OF BERLIN. Lord Beaconsfield went down to the county which he had represented so long, and made a farewell speech at Aylesbury. The occasion must for him have been one to call up genuine emotion. The speech was in many parts worthy of the occasion. Lord Beaconsfield set forth his reasons for consenting to quit that splendid arena on whinh he had so long played a brilliant part. Years were tell- ing on him, he explained in some sentences full of feeling and of good taste; he was no longer as young as when forty-three years before he addressed the electors of Buck- inghamshire in that same place. He said that his colleagues had been more careful of his feelings than Gil Bias was of those of the archbishop of Granada; but he added that he was less self-complacent than the archbishop. He was Avilling therefore to retire from the field in good time, and to be content to serve his country in the more quiet ways of the House of Lords. Unfortunately Lord Beaconsfield soon went on to make a fierce attack on his political oppo- nents. He marred the effect of his speech artistically as well as politically by the overwrought and acrimonious language in which he allowed himself to indulge. Speak- ing of the " sublime sentiments" which had been evoked by the crimes done in Bulgaria, he pointed to the danger of designing politicans taking advantage of them "for their own sinister ends," and described such conduct as "worse than any of those Bulgarian atrocities which now occupy A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 525 attention." Nothing could be in worse taste. It was im- possible to doubt that Lord Beaconsfield's picture of the designing politicians was meant to be understood as a pic- ture of Mr. Gladstone and those who supported him. The controversy, bitter enough before, became still more bitter now. Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone were thrown into as sharp an antagonism as that of two gladiators in a Roman arena or two duelists standing at twelve paces from each other. They had been life-long opponents; this now seemed like a duel to the death. The policy each represented may be described in a few very summary words. Lord Beaconsfield was for maintaining Turkey at all risks as a barrier against Russia. Mr. Gladstone was for renouncing all responsibility for Turkey and taking the consequences. Men who prided themselves on being prac- tical politicians above all things went naturally with Lord Beaconsfield. Men who held that sound politics cannot exist without sound morals went with Mr. Gladstone. It is our business, the one set of men said, to secure the in- terests of England: if Turkey is useful to us as a barrier against Russia, we are bound to keep her in her place for our own sake; her private character is of no account to us. The other men argued that it was the duty of England to release herself from all responsibility for the crimes of Tur- key, and to refuse to stand in the way of the developing freedom of the Christian populations. " The public con- science of England," said the one; "the in'erests of Eng- land," said the other. "Be just and fear not," Mr. Glad- stone urged. " No sentiment," rejoined Lord Beaconsfield. "The crimes of Turkey," was the cry of one party; "the ambition of Russia," made the alarm-note of the other. Bach statesman made a mistake, and each mistake was characteristic of the man. Lord Beaconsfield misunder- stood the condition of public feeling and the gravity of the case when he thought he could get rid of the Bulgarian events by a laugh and a light woid. .Mr. Gladstone after- ward made a mistake when he acted on the assumption that mere sympathy and mere sensibility could long pre- vail in the English public mind against the traditional distrust of Russia. When Lord Beaconsfield and his sup- porters once had their opportunity of playing that card they had the game absolutely in their hands. The common expectation was soon fulfilled. At the 526 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. close of June, 1876 Servia and Montenegro declared war against Turkey. Servia's struggle was short. The Servians were assisted by the advice and the active presence of a large number of Russian officers who volunteered for the purpose. The small Servian army, however, proved no match for the Turks. At the beginning of September the struggle was over, and Servia was practically at Turkey's feet. The hardy Montenegrin mountaineers held their own stoutly against the Turks everywhere, but they could not seriously influence the fortunes of a war. England proposed an armistice of not less than a month. Turkey delayed, shuffled, paltered, at length suggested an armistice till the end of the following March. The suggestion was preposterous. Such a period of suspense would have been ruinous to Servia and Monte- negro, intolerable to Europe. Russia then intervened and insisted upon an armistice at once, and her demand was acceded to by Turkey. Meanwhile the general feeling in England on both sides was growing stronger and stronger. Public meetings of Mr. Gladstone's supporters were held all over the country, and the English govern- ment was urged in the most emphatic manner to bring some stronger influence to bear on Turkey. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the common suspicion of Russia's designs began to grow more keen and wakeful than ever. Lord Derby frankly made known to the Em- peror Alexander what was thought or feared in England, and the emperor replied by pledging his sacred word that he had no intention of occupying Constantinople, and that if he were compelled by events to occupy any part of Bulgaria, it should be only provisionally, and until the safety of the Christians should be secured. Then Lord Derby proposed that a conference of the European powers should be held at Constantinople in order to agree upon some scheme which should provide at once for the proper government of the various provinces and populations sub- ject to Turkey, and at the same time for the maintenance of the independence and integrity of the Ottoman empire. The proposal for a conference was accepted by all the great powers and on November 8, 1876, it was announced that Lord Salisbury and Sir Henry Elliott, the English ambas- sador at Constantinople, were to attend as the representa- tives of England. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 527 Lord Beaconsfield was apparently determined to recover the popularity that had been somewhat impaired by his unlucky way of dealing with the massacres of Bulgaria. His plan now was to go boldly in for denunciation of Russia. He sometimes talked of Russia as he might of an enemy who had already declared war against England. On November 9, 1876, he spoke at a banquet given by the new lord mayor at the Guildhall. He glorified the strength and the resources of England. If the struggle comes, he said, there is no country so prepared for war as England. "In a righteous cause, England is not the country that will have to inquire whether she can enter upon a second or a third campaign. In a righteous cause England will commence a fight that will not end until right is done." It was clear that the allusions in the speech were to Russia. The words about the second and third campaign were of unmistakable application. Either by coincidence or otherwise, the Russian emperor delivered a speech the very next day to the nobles of Moscow, which sounded like a direct answer to Lord Beaconsfield's chal- lenge. Alexander declared that if he could not succeed in obtaining with the concert of Europe such guarantees as he thought necessary to require of Turkey, he was firmly determined to net independently, and was convinced that the whole of Russia would respond to his summons. The words of Lord Beaconsfield were spoken somewhat late on the evening of Thursday. The emperor addressed the nobles at Moscow the very next day. Still there was ample time for the ordinary telegraphic report of Lord Beacons- field's speech to be in Alexander's hands long before the hour at which he had to address the Moscow assembly. Most persons assumed that the speech of the Russian emperor was undoubtedly an answer to that of the English prime minister. The prospects of a peaceful settlement of the European controversy seemed to become heavily overclouded. Lord Beaconsfield appeared to be holding the dogs of war by the collar, and only waiting for the con- venient moment to let them slip. Every eye was turned upon him. He must have felt that his ambition was fast reaching the wrv seamark of its utmost sail. The decision of peace or war seemed to be absolutely with him. He held the destinies of millions in the hollow of his hand. Every one knew that some of his colleagues, Lord Derby 528 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. for example, and Lord Carnarvon, were opposed to any thought of war, and felt almost as strongly for the Chris- tian provinces of Turkey as Mr. Gladstone did. But people shook their heads doubtfully when it was asked whether Lord Derby or Lord Carnarvon, or both combined, could prevail in strength of will against Lord Beaconsfleld. The conference at Constantinople came to nothing. The Turkish statesmen -at first attempted to put off the diplomatists of the west by the announcement that the sultan had granted a constitution to Turkey, and that there was to be a parliament at which representatives of all the provinces were to speak up for themselves. There was in fact a Turkish parliament called together. The first meeting of the conference was disturbed by the sound of salvos of cannon to celebrate the opening of the first constitutional assembly of Turkey. Of course the western statesmen could not be put off by an announcement of this kind. They knew well enough what a Turkish parliament must mean. A parliament is not made by the decree of an autocrat calling a number of men into a room and bid- ding them debate and divide. To have a parliament there must, first of all, be something like a free people. Europe had seen a brand-new Egyptian parliament created not long before, and had felt at first a sort of languid curiosity about it; and then after awhile learned that it had sunk into the ground or faded away somehow without leaving any trace of its constitutional existence. It seems almost superfluous to say that the Turkish parliament was ordered to disappear very soon after the occasion passed away for trying to deceive the great European powers. Evidently Turkey had got it into her head that the English govern- ment would at the last moment stand by her, and would not permit her to be coerced. It is not certain, perhaps, cannot be known during this generation, whether there was any truth in the report so freely spread abroad in England, that private hints were given to Turkish states- men by an English diplomatist encouraging them to resist the demands of the great powers, and directly or indirectly promising them the support of England. What is certain is, that Turkey held out in the end and refused to come to terms, and the conference broke up without having accom- plished any good. New attempts at arrangement were made between England, Russia and others of the great A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 529 powers, but they fell through. Some unfortunate cause seemed always to prevent any kind of cordial co-operation. Then at last Russia took the field against Turkey. On April 24, 1877, Russia declared war, and on June 27th a Russian army crossed the Danube and moved toward the Balkans, meeting with comparatively little resistance, while at the same time another Russian force invaded Asia Minor. For awhile the Russians seemed likely to carry all be- fore them. Suddenly, however, it appeared that they had made many mistakes in their arrangements. They had made the one great mistake of altogether undervaluing their enemies. Their preparations were hasty and imper- fect. The Turks, to do them justice, have never wanted fighting power. They have at all times shown great strength and skill in the mere work of resistance. Long after they had ceased to be anything of a terror to Europe as an aggressive power, they again and again showed tremendous strength and energy in defense. In this in- stance they were quick to see the mistakes which the Russians had made. They turned upon them unexpect- edly and made a gallant and almost desperate resistance. One of their commanders, Osman Pasha, suddenly threw up defensive works at Plevna, in Bulgaria, a point the Russians had neglected to secure, and maintained himself there, repulsing the Russians many times with great slaughter. For a time success seemed altogether on the side of the Turks, and many people in England were con- vinced that the Russian enterprise was already an entire failure; that nothing remained for the armies of the czar, but retreat, disaster, and disgrace. Cooler observers, however, still assumed that where great superiority of strength and resourees exist, military superiority must come in the end. It was evidently only a question of time to enable Russia to make good her mistakes and to reeover her energies. Thus far the defeats of the Russians had really been inflicted by themselves. Their own blunders had given the battle into the hands of their enemies. Taught by experience the czar confided the direction of the campaign to the hands of General Todleben, the great soldier whose splendid defense of Sebastopol had made the one grand military reputation of the Crimean war. Under his directing skill the fortunes of the campaign soon turned. 530 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. Just at the very moment when English critics were pro- claiming that the campaign in Asia Minor was over, and that Plevna never could be taken, there came a succession of crushing defeats inflicted by the Russians on the Turks, both in Europe and Asia. Kars was taken by assault on November 18, 1877; Plevna surrendered on December 10th. At the opeuing of 1878 the Turks were completely pros- trate. The road to Constantinople was clear. Before the English public had time to recover their breath and to observe what was taking place, the victorious armies of Russia were almost within sight of the minarets of Stam- boul. Meanwhile the English government were taking momentous action. In the first days of 1878 Sir Henry Elliott, who had been ambassador in Constantinople, was transferred to Vienna, and Mr. Layard, who had been minister at Madrid, was sent to the Turkish capital to represent England there. This step was doubtless meant as an evidence that the English government were deter- mined to give to the sultan an energetic support, but at the same time to exert their influence more decisively than be- fore in compelling him to listen to reason and to friendly remonstrance. Mr. Layard was known to be a strong be- liever in Turkey; more Turkish in some respects than the Turks themselves. But he was a man of superabundant energy; of what might be described as boisterous energy. The Ottoman government could not but accept his appoint- ment as a new and stronger proof that the English govern- ment were determined to stand their friend; but they ought to have accepted it, too, as evidence that the English government were determined to use some pressure to make them amenable to reason. Unfortunately it would appear that the sultan's government accepted Mr. Layard's ap- pointment in the one sense only and not in the other. Parliament was called together at least a fortnight before the time usual during recent years. The speech from the throne announced that her majesty could not conceal from herself that should the hostilities between Russia and Turkey unfortunately be prolonged, "some unexpected occurrence may render it incumbent on me to adopt measures of precaution." This looked ominous to those who wished for peace, and it raised the spirits of the war party. There was a very large and a very noisy war party already in existence. It was particularly strong in Lon- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 531 don. It embraced some Liberals as well as nearly all Tories. It was popular in the music-halls aud the public- houses of Loudon. The class whom Prince. Bismarck once called the "gentlemen of the pavement" were in its favor, at least in the metropolis, almost to a gentleman of the pavement. The men of action got a nickname. They were dubbed the Jingo [tarty. The term, applied as one of ridicule and reproach, was adopted by chivalrous Jingoes as a name of pride. The Jingoes of London, like the beggars of Flanders, accepted the the word of contumely as a title of honor. In order to avoid the possibility of any historical misunderstanding or puzzlement hereafter about the meaning of dingo, such as we have heard of con- cerning that of Whig and Tory, it is well to explain how the term came into existence. Some Tyrtaeus of the tap- tub, some Korner of the music-halls, had composed a ballad which was sung at one of these caves of harmony every night amid the tumultuous applause of excited patriots. The refrain of this war song contained the spirit- stirring words: " We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too." Some one whose pulses this lyrical outburst of national pride failed to stir, called the party of its enthusiasts the Jingos. The writer of this book is under the impression that the invention of the name belongs to Mr. George Jacob Holyoake; but he declines to pledge his historical reputation to the fact. The name was caught up at once, and the party were universally known as the Jingoes. The famous adjuration of the lady in the "Vicar of Wake- field" had proved to be too prophetical. She had sworn "by the living Jingo;" and now indeed the Jingo was alive. The government ordered the Mediterranean fleet to pass the Dardanelles and go up to Constantinople. The chan- cellor of the exchequer announced that he would ask for a supplementary estimate of six millions for naval and mili- tary purposes" Thereupon Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary at once resigned, lie had been anxious to get out of the ministry before, but Lord Beaconsficld induced him to remain. He disapproved now so strongly of the despatch of the fleet to Constantinople and the supplemen- tary vote, that he would not any longer defer his resigua- 532 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. tion. Lord Derby was also anxious to resign and indeed tendered his resignation, but he was prevailed upon to withdraw it. The fleet meanwhile was ordered back from the Dardanelles to Besika Bay. It had got as far as the opening of the straits when it was recalled. The Liberal opposition in the House of Commons kept on protesting against the various war measures of the government, but with little effect. The majority of the government kept on increasing. The strength of that majority did not lie in mere jingoism. There can be no doubt that a great many members of the House of Commons voted with Lord Beaconsfield in the sincere conviction that he was the man whom it was safest to trust, and that the protestations of pacific purpose which the government were always making would be most likely to be realized if Lord Beaconsfield had full power to carry out the policy he thought best. While all this agitation in and out of parliament was going on; while the opposition was now proposing and now with- drawing amendments; while the government were pro- testing their desire for peace, and the champions of the government out of doors were screaming for war; while the music-halls were cheering for the great name of Jingo, and monster meetings in Hyde Park on either side of the question were turning into mere faction-fights, generally to the defeat and rout of the peace party, the news came that the Turks, utterly broken down, had been compelled to sign an armistice, and an agreement containing a basis of peace, at Adrianople. Then, following quickly on the heels of this announcement, came a report that the Russians, notwithstanding the armistice, were pushing on toward Constantinople with the intention of occupying the Turkish capital. A cry of alarm and indignation broke out in London. One memorable night a sudden report reached the House of Commons that the Russians were actually in the suburbs of Constantinople. The house for a time almost entirely lost its head. The lobbies, the corridors, St. Stephen's Hall, the great Westminster Hall itself, and Palace Yard beyond it, became filled with wildly excited and tumultuous crowds. If the clamor of the streets at that moment had been the voice of England, nothing could have prevented a declaration of war against Russia. Happily, bowever, it was proved that the rumor of Russian advance was un- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 537 lively. His books have been the subject of the keenest contro- versy. His picture of Henry VIII. set all the world won- dering. It set an example and became a precedent. It founded a new school in history and biography; what we may call the paradoxical school; the school which sets it- self to discover that some great man had all the qualities for which the world had never before given him credit, and none of those which it had always been content to recog- nize as his undoubted possession. The virtues of the mis- prized Tiberius; the purity and meekness of Lucrezia Borgia; the disinterestedness and forbearance of Charles of Burgundy, these and other such historical discoveries naturally followed Mr. Fronde's illustration of the domes- tic virtues, the exalted chastity, and the merciful disposi- tion of Henry VIII. Mr. Fronde has, however, qualities which raise him high above the level of the ordinary para- doxical historian. He has a genuine creative power. We may refuse to believe that his Henry VIII. is the Henry of history, but we cannot deny that Mr. Fronde makes us see his Henry as vividly as if he stood in life before us. A dangerous gift for a historian ; but it helps to make a great literary man. Mr. Froude may claim to be regarded as a great literary man, measured by the standard of our time. He has imagination; he has that sympathetic and dra- matic instinct which enables a man to enter into the emo- tions and motives, the likings and dislikings, of people of a past age. His style is penetrating and thrilling; his lan- guage often rises to the dignity of a poetic eloquence. The figures he conjures up are always the semblances of real men and women. They are never waxwork, or lay figures, or skeletons clothed in words, or purple rags of description stuffed out with straw into an awkward like- ness of the human form. The one distinct impression we carry away from Mr. Fronde's history is that of the living reality of his figures. In Marlowe's a Faustus," the doctor conjures up for the amusement of the emperor a proces- sion of beautiful and stately shadows to represent the great ones of the past. When the apparitions of Alexander the Great and his favorite pass by, the emperor can hardly re- strain himself from rushing to clasp the hero in his arms, and has to be reminded by the wizard that, " these are but shadows, not substantial." Even then the emperor ran hardly get over his impression of their reality; for ho cries: 5138 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. " I have lieard it said That this fair lady, while she lived on earth, Had on her neck a little wart or mole ;" andlo! there is the mark on the neck of the beautiful form which floats across his field of vision. Mr. Froude's shadows are like this; so deceptive, so seemingly vital and real; with the beauty and the blot alike conspicuous; with the pride and passion of the hero and the heroine's white neck and the wart on it. Mr. Froude's whole soul, in fact, is in the human beings whom he meets as he unfolds his narrative. He is a romantic or heroic portrait painter. He has painted some pictures which may almost compare with those of Titian. Their glances follow and haunt one like the wonderful eyes of Caesar Borgia, or the soul-pierc- ing resignation of that face on Guido's canvas once be- lieved to be that of Beatrice Cenci. But Mr. Fronde wants the one indispensable quality of the true historian accuracy. He wants altogether the cold, patient, stern quality which clings to facts; the scientific faculty. His narrative never stands out in that " dry light" which Bacon so commends — the light of undistorted and clear truth. The temptations to a man with a gift of heroic portrait painting are too great for Mr. Froude. His genius carries him away and becomes his master. When Titian wa& painting his Csesar Borgia, is it not conceivable that his imagination may have been positively inflamed by the con- trast between the man's physical beauty and moral guilt, and have unconsciously heightened the contrast by making the pride and passion lour more darkly, the superb bril- liancy of the eyes burn more radiantly, than might have been seen in real life? Mr. Froude has evidently been often thus ensnared by his own special gift. There is hardly anything m our modern literature more powerful, picturesque, and dramatic than his portrait of Mary, queen of Scots. It stands out and glows and darkens with all the glare and gloom of a living form, now in sun and in shadow. It is almost as perfect and impressive as Titian. But no reasonable person can douot that it is a dramatic and not an historical study. Without going into any controversj as to disputed facts, even admitting for the sake of argument that Mary was as guilty as Mr. Froude would make her, it is impossible to believe that the woman he has painted is the Mary Stuart of history and A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 569 of life. No doubt his Mary is now a reality for us. We are distinctly acquainted with her; we can see her and follow her movements. But she is a fable for all that. The poets and painters have made the form of the mermaid not one whit less clear and distinct for us than the figure of a living woman. If any of us were to see a painting of a mermaid with scales upon her neck, or with feet, he would resent it or laugh at it as an inaccuracy, just as if he saw some gross anatomical blunder in a picture of a man or woman. Mr. Fronde has created a Mary Stuart as art and legend have created a mermaid. Tie has made her one of the most imposing figures in our modern literature, to which indeed she is an important addition. His Queen Elizabeth is almost equally remarkable as a work of art. His Henry VIII. stands not quite so high and far lower comes his Cassar, which is absurdly untrue as a portrait, and is not strong even as a romantic picture. Mr. Froude's personal integrity and candor are constantly coming into contradic- tion with his artistic temptation; but the portrait goes on all the same. He is too honest and candid to conceal or pervert any fact that he knows. He tells everything frankly, but continues his picture in his own way. It may be that some rather darksome vices suddenly prove their existence in the character of the person whom Mr. Fronde had chosen to illustrate the brightness and glory of human nature. Mr. Fronde is not abashed. He deliberately states the facts; shows how, in this or that instance, truth did tell shocking lies, mercy ordered several massacres, and virtue fell into the ways of Messalina. But he still main- tains that his pictures are protraits of truth, mercy, and virtue. A lover of art, according to a story in the memoirs of Canova, was so struck witli admiration of that sculptor's Venus that lie begged to be allowed to see the model. The artist gratified him; but, so far from beholding a very god- dess of beauty in the flesh, he only saw a well-made, rather coarse-looking woman. The sculptor seeing his disap- pointment, explained to him thai the hand and the eye of the artist, as they work, can gradually and almost imper- ceptibly change the model from that which it is in the flesh to that which it ought to be in the marble. This is the process which is always going on with Mr. Fronde whenever he is at work upon some piedel in which for love or leiie he takes RBUSuaJ inter..- Therefore the histo» 570 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. rian is constantly involving himself in a welter of inconsis- tencies and errors. Mr. Fronde's errors go far to justify the dull and literal old historians of the school of Dryasdust, who, if they never quickened an event into life, never, en the other hand, deluded the mind with phantoms. The chroniclers of mere facts and dates, the old almanac-makers, are weary creatures; but one finds it hard to condemn them to mere contempt when he sees how the vivid genius of a man like Mr. Fronde can lead him astray. Mr. Fronde's finest artistic gift becomes his greatest defect for the special work he undertakes to do. A scholar, a man of high imagination, a man likewise of patient labor, he is above all things a romantic portrait- painter; and the spell by which his works allure us is the spell of the magician, not the calm power of the teacher. Mr. Buckle's "History of Civilization in England" created a sensation hardly less than that produced by Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species." Indeed for a time the in- terest it created was keener and more widely diffused. Mr. Buckle undertook to prove four great principles, which he contended were essential to the understanding of his- tory. First, that the progress of nations depends upon the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated, and the extent to which a knowledge of these laws is diffused. Second, that before any such investigation can proceed a spirit of skepticism must arise "which, at first aiding the investigation, is afterward aided by it." Third, that the results of this investigation tend to increase the influence of intellectual truths, and to dimmish not abso- lutely, but relatively, the influence of moral truths, which latter are more stationary than intellectual truths, and re- ceive fewer additions. Fourth, that the great enemy of this progressive investigation, and consequently of human civ- ilization, is the protective spirit in which governments undertake to watch over men and direct them what to do, and in which churches and teachers prescribe for them what they are to believe. Now it is plain that on the decision of the first point rested the whole issue between Mr. Buckle and his opponents. If the progress of civili- zation depended upon the discovery and right appreciation of phenomena, then the basis of the science of history would be settled beyond dispute. History would then take its ordered place like any of the phvsical sciences. A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 571 But it was on this very first point that the struggle had to he made in which, as it seems to us, Mr. Buckle's endeavor hroke down, lie labored to establish nothing less than the fact that all the movements of history, and indeed of human life through all its processes, are regulated by fixed physical laws as certain as those which rule the motions of the waves and the changes of the weather, and of which we could arrive at a sound and trustworthy knowledge if we were content to study their phenomena as we do the phenomena of the sea and the skies. Of course this was not an idea which occurred for the first time to Mr, Buckle. It is an idea which has always been more or less clearly in the minds of some men. It belongs to that principle which (Jomte laid down, when he endeavored to explain the development of human history. It was more than once put into the form of a principle by Goethe, and had been described more distinctly still by Lessing. But men like Goethe and Lessing suggested it rather as a prob- ability than endeavored to define it as an actual law. Mr. Buckle set about establishing it as the law of human life by illustration, argument, and evidence drawn from the actual facts of history and of nature. He brought to his task a vast amount of more or less arranged information, an ardent spirit full of faith in his own theory, and a power of self-will and self-complacency, which enabled him to accept as certain and settled every dogma on which he had personally made up his mind. The "History of Civilization" was never finished. The author's early death brought the task to a close. It remains a great effort, a monument of courage, energy and labor; perhaps, indeed, it might not inaptly be described as a ruin. Mr. Buckle had attempted a, task beyond the compass of one man's capacity and of men's combined know ledge thus far. He tried to build a Literary tower of Babel, by means of which man might reach the skies and look down complacently on the mechanical movenu ids of planets races, and gener- ations beneath. He died at the age of forty, lamenting almost with his latest breath that he had to leave his work unfinished, and still believing that life, mere life, was all he needed to make it complete. Mr. Kinglake's still unfinished history of the Crimean Avar is full of brilliant description and of keen, penetrating thought. It shows many -learns of the poetic, and it has 572 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. some of the brightest and bitterest satirical passages in the literature of our time. The chapters in which Mr. King- lake goes out of his way to describe the career, the charac- ter, and the companions of the Emperor Napoleon III. cut like corrosive acid. Mr. Kinglake found his mind rilled with detestation of Louis Napoleon and his compan- ions. He invented for himself the theory that the Cri- mean war arose only out of Louis Napoleon's peculiar posi- tion, and his anxiety to become recognized among the great sovereigns of Europe. The invention of this theory gave him an excuse for lavishing so much labor of love and lmte on chapters which must always remain a masterpiece of remorseless satire. They hardly pretend to be always just in their estimate of men, but no one rates them ac- cording to their justice or their injustice. They are read for their style, and nothing more. Perhaps it would not be altogether unjust to say much the same of the history as far as it has gone. It is brilliant; it is powerful; it is full of thrilling passages; but it remains after all the his- torical romance rather than history. Moreover, it is a good deal too long. The Crimean war came after a gener- ation of peace, and to many Englishmen it almost seemed as if there never had been such a war before or would be again. Mr. Kinglake set about his great book with some- thing like the same estimate of the historical importance and proportions of the war.' Even already the perspective of events is beginning to come fairly out, and it seems as if the Crimean campaign hardly needed the huge histor- ical monument at which Mr. Kinglake is still at work. Mr. Lecky has probably more of the philosophic mind than any of his contemporaries. He has treated history on a large scale and in the philosophical spirit. He has taken a wide and liberal survey of the progress of thought and of morals as a whole, and then has brought the knowl- edge and observation thus acquired to the practical pur- pose of illustrating certain passages of history and periods of human development. His "History of England in the Eighteenth Century" is not more remarkable thus far for the closeness and fullness of its details than for its breadth of view and its calmness of judgment. Mr. Lecky is always the historian and never the partisan. His works grow on the reader. They do not turn upon him all at once a sujdfn glarg like the flash of g revolving light A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 573 but they fill the mind gradually with a sense of their jus- tice, their philosophic thought, and the clear calmness of their historical observation. Dean Stanley, the pupil and the biographer of Dr. Arnold, has made some of the most valuable contributions to ecclesiastical history which our time possesses. His " Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey." fascinates the reader by its beauty of style and by the evidences of the loving care with which the author has approached his subject. Mr. John Morley has produced monographs of Burke, of Rousseau, and of Voltaire which are original in their very form and which have made a distinct mark on the literature of their day. There are many essayists in history, biography, and the criticism of art and letters who well deserve to be named in a survey of the literature of our time, but whom we are compelled to pass over. Space would hardly allow of our even classing them in schools, as, for example, the positivists, the neo-pagans, the aesthet- ics, the agnostics, the satirists, and all the rest. In an age of prodigious literary activity the essayists of various schools have certainly not been the least active and pro- ductive. The poets, however, outnumber them by far. We have had no great poet in these later days, but the number of our singers is prodigious. A great meeting of poets could be got up in London alone. Many really fine poems are the almost unnoticed result of this multitudinous labor. Sir Walter Scott once said with good-humored modesty that he had taught many ladies and gentlemen to write romances as well or nearly as well as he could himself. Of the poetic voices which literally fill the air around us, the majority must be those of mere mocking-birds, and yet it is not always easy to distinguish between the original notes and the imitation. The highest reach attained among the poets of this later day is assuredly that of Mr. Swinburne. His first volume of poems, containing " The Queen Mother," and "Rosamond," published in L861, made no mark what ever, but his "Atalanta in Oalydon," which appeared in 1805, startled the world. The mere boldness of the return to the subjects and the very forms of Greek drama would have commanded attention; but there was some- thing much more commanding in the genuine originality with which the poet breathed new life into the antique 574 a insTonr of our g \vn times. forms. Mr. Swinburne's mastery of melodious phrase and verse astonished even the age acquainted with the musical richness and softness of Tennyson's lines, and Mr. Swin- burne had a vibrating strength in his verse such as the poet laureate never tried to have. Mr, Swinburne decid- edly shot an arrow higher into the air than any of his fellows in these later days, but he only shot one arrow. To vary the illustration, we may say that the jet from his poetic source soared higher than that of any of his rivals; but it was only one thin, narrow steam and not a full fountain sending its spray and its waters broadly in the sun. His poetic ideas are very few. Even his vocabulary is not liberal. Words as well as ideas are soon exhausted. Even the greatest admirer becomes conscious of a sense of monotony as he listens again and again to the same cry of rebellion against established usages, the same hysterical appeal to lawlessness in passion and in art, poured forth in the same phraseology and with the same alliteration. Mr. Morris, the author of "Jason" and the "Earthly Para- dise," is a poet of a milder and a purer strain. Nothing can be more beautiful, tender and melancholy than some of his sweet, pathetic stories. Mr. Morris has been com- pared to Chaucer, but he is at the best a Chaucer without strength and without humor. He has such story-teller's power as one might suppose suited to absorb the evening hours of some lady of mediaeval days. She would have loved Mr. Morris' beautiful tales of love and truth and constancy and separation — tales, which, to quote the poet's own words, "would make her sweet eyes wet, at least sometimes, at least when heaven and earth on some fair eve had grown too fair for mirth." But the broad strength of Chaucer, the animal spirits, the ringing laughter, the occasional fierceness of emotion, the pain, and the passion are not to be found in Mr. Morris' exquisite and gentle verse. Mr. Dante G. Rossetti has written some sonnets which are probably entitled to rank with the best of their kind at any time, and one or two ballads of fierce, impas- sioned style, which seem as if they came straight from the heart of the old northern ballad world. Miss Christina Kossetti's " Goblin Market" is almost perfect in its way. Miss Jean Ingelow has written some tender and pathetic poems. Mr. Aubrey de Vere is a true poet, and one of a family of poets. Mr. Robert Buchanan at one time gave A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 575 promise of taking a high rank among modern poets. As- suredly he has not fulfilled all the hopes of his first days, hut he must always stand well among the singers who only claim to form the second order of the poets of our time. "The Spanish Gypsy," and other productions in verse, by the novelist, George Eliot, are the clever attempts of a woman of genius who is not a poet to write poetry. The poetry of these days may hoast of having produced a dis- tinct school, which has contrived to inoculate not only lit- erature but art, architecture, ornament, dress, and social life generally with its influence. It is possible that long after the world may have ceased to read even the best writers of the school, the school itself will live curiously in memory, with its mannerisms, its affectations, its absurd- ities, imitations, and quackeries, and at the same time with its genuine beauty and high spiritual aspirations. The prSdeuses, it is to be remembered, were not always ridiculous. They were not ridiculous at all to begin with. They were ladies of intellect and true artistic feeling. It was only when imitation and insincerity set in, when senti- ment took the place of emotion, when mannerism tried to pass itself off as originality, that the heroines of Moliere's immortal comedy could have been lifelike figures even in caricature. So it is with the pre-Raphaelite school, as a certain group of poets and painters came to be fantastically designated. Pre-Raphaelitism was in the beginning a vig- orous protest in favor of truth in nature and art, of open eyes and faithful observation in artistic critics, students, and every one else, as against conventionalities and prettiness and unrealities of all kinds. Mr. Ruskin was the prophet of the new school. Mr. Dante Rossetti, Mr. llolman Hunt, Mi 1 . Madox Brown, and Mr. Millias were its prac- tical expounders in art. A great controversy sprang up, and England divided itself into two schools. No impartial person can deny that Mr. Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites did great good, and that much of their influence and ex- ample, was decidedly healthy. But pre-Raphaelitism became a very different thing in later years, when it professed to invade all arts, and to establish itself in all the decorative business of life, from the ornamentation of a cathedral to the fringe of a dress. Lately it has become a mere alfcctation, an artistic whim. It has go1 mixed up with aistheticism, neo-paganism, and other such fantasies. The 576 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. typical pre-Eaphaelite of the school's later development is, however a figure not unworthy of description. The typical pre-Eaphaelite believed Mr. Dante Eossetti and Mr. Burne Jones to be the greatest artist of the ancient or modern world. If any spoke to him of contemporary English poetry, he assumed that there was only question of Mr. Eossetti, Mr. Swinburne, or Mr. Morris. In modern French literature he admired Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and one or two others newer to song, and of whom the outer world had yet heard little. Among the writers of older France he was chiefly concerned about Francois Villon. He was an enthusiastic admirer of the paintings of the late Henri Eegnanlt. Probably he spoke of France as " our France." He was angry with the Germans for having vexed our France. He professed faith in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner, and he was greatly touched by Chopin. He gave himself out as famil- iar with the Greek poets, and was wild in his admiration of Sappho. He made for himself a sort of religion out of wall-paper, old tea-pots and fans. He thought to order and yet above all things piqued himself on his originality. He and his comrades received their opinions as Charle- magne's converts did their Christianity, in platoons. He became quite a distinct figure, in the literary history of our time, and he positively called into existence a whole school of satirists in fiction, verse, and drawing, to make fun of his follies, whimsicalities, and affectations. The fiction of this second period has one really great name, and one only. The author of "Adam Bede" and " The Mill on the Floss" stands on a literary level with Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte. " George Eliot," as this author chooses to call herself, is undoubtedly a. great writer, merely as a writer. Her literary career began as a translator and an essayist. Her taste seemed then to lead her wholly into the somewhat barren fields where German metaphysics endeavor to come to the relief or the confusion of German theology. She became a con- tributor to the Westminster Revieiv; then she became its assistant editor, and worked assiduously for it under the direction of Dr. John Chapman, the editor. She had mastered many sciences as well as literatures. Probably no other novel-writer, since novel-writing became a business, ever possessed anything like her scientific knowledge. A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 577 Unfortunately, her scientific knowledge, "o'er informed" her later novels, and made them oppressive to readers who longed for the early freshness of " Adam Bede." George Eliot does not seem to have found out, until she had passed Avhat is conventionally regarded as the age of romance, that she had in her, high above all other gifts, the faculty of the novelist. When an author who is not very young makes a great hit at last, we soon begin to learn that he had already made many attempts in the same direction, and his publishers find an eager demand for the stories and sketches which, when they first appeared, utterly failed to attract attention. But it does not seem that Miss Marian Evans, as she then was, ever published anything in the way of fiction previous to the series of sketches which ap- peared in "Blackwood's Magazine," and were called "Scenes of Clerical Life." These sketches attracted con- siderable attention, and were much admired; but not many people probably saw in them the capacity which pro- duced "Adam Bede" and "Romola." With the publica- tion of "Adam Bede" came a complete triumph. The author was elevated at once and by acclamation to the highest rank among living novelists. In one of the first numbers of the "Cornhill Magazine" Thackeray, in a gossiping paragraph about novelists of the day, whom he mentioned alphabetically and by their initials, spoke of " E" as a " star of the first magnitude just risen on the hori- zon." Nothing is much rarer than the anion of the scien- tific and the literary or artistic temperaments. So rare is it that the exceptional, the almost solitary instance of Goethe comes up at once, distinct and striking to the mind. English novelists arc even less likely to have anything of a scientific taste than French or German. Dickens knew nothing of science, and had, indeed as little knowledge of any kind, save that which is derived from observation, as an\ respectable Englishmen could well have. Thackeray was a man of varied reading, versed in the lighter litera- ture of several languages, ami strongly imbued with artis- tic tastes; hut he had no care for science, and knew of if only what every one has to learn at school. Lord Lytton's science, wasamere sham. Charlotte Bronte was genius and ignorance. Georg€ Eliol is genius and culture. Had she peer written a page of fiction, she must have been ;regardc:| •••'ith admirfltiOH h .v all who kim\y her as a woman 578 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. of deep thought and of a varied knowledge such as men complacently believe to be the possession only of men. It was not this, however, which made her a great novelist. Her eyes were not turned inward or kept down in meta- physical contemplation. She studied the living world around her. She had an eye for external things keen almost as that of Dickens or Balzac. George Eliot is the only novelist who can paint such English people as the Poysers and the Tullivers just as they are. She looks into the very souls of such people. She tracks out their slow peculiar mental processes; she reproduces them fresh and firm from very life. Mere realism, mere photographing, even from the life, is not in art a great triumph. But George Eliot can make her dullest people interesting and dramatically effective. She can paint two dull people with quite differ- ent ways of dullness — a dull man and a dull woman, for example — and the reader is astonished to find how utterly distinct the two kinds of stupidity are, and how intensely amusing both can be made. There are two pedantic, pompous, dull advocates in Mr. Browning's "The Ring and the Book." How distinct they are; how different, how unlike, and how true are the two portraits! But then it must be owned that the poet sometimes allows bis pedants to be as tiresome as tbey would be in real life, if each successively held a weary listener by the button. George Eliot is not guilty of any such artistic fault. No one wants to be rid of Mrs. Poyser, or Aunt Glegg, or the prattling Florentines, in "Romola." There never was or could be a Mark Tapley or a Sam Weller. We put up with these impossibilities and delight in them, because they are so amusing and so full of fantastic humor. But Mrs. Poyser lives, and every one knows an Aunt Glegg, and poor Mrs. Tulliver's "cares and hopes and little fears and piti- ful reasonings are animating hundreds of Mrs. Tullivers all over England. George Eliot has infused into the novel some elements it never bad before; and so thoroughly infused them, that they blend with all the other materials, and do not form anywhere a solid lump or mass distin- guishable from the rest. There are philosophical novels — "Wilhelm Meister," for example — which are weighed down and loaded with philosophy, and which the world only admires in spite of the philosophy. There are political novels — Lord Beaconsfield's for instance — which are only in- A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 579 telligible to those who make politics and political person- alities a study, and which viewed merely as stories would not be worth speaking about. There are novels with a great direct purpose in them, such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "Bleak House," or Mr. Charles Reade's " Hard Cash." But these, after all, are only magnificent pam- pblets, splendidly illustrated diatribes. The deep philosophic thought of George Eliot's best novels quietly suffuses and illumines them everywhere. There is no sermon here, no lecture there, no solid mass interposing between this incident and that, no ponderous moral hung around the neck of this or that personage. The reader feels that he is under the spell of one who is not merely a great story-teller, but who is also a deep thinker. Mr. Anthony Trollope carries to its utmost limit the realism begun by Thackeray. He has none of Thackeray's genius; none of his fancy or feeling; none of his genuine creative power. He can describe with minute photographic faith- fulness the ways, the talks, and sometimes even the emo- tions of a Belgravian family, of a nobleman's country house, or the " women-kind" of a dean in a cathedral town. He does not trouble himself with passion or deep pathos, although he has got as far as to describe very touchingly the mental pains of a pretty girl thrown over by her lover, and has suggested with some genuine power the blended emotion, half agony of sorrow, half sense of relief, expe- rienced by an elderly clergyman on the death of a shrewish wife. It was natural that after the public had had along succession of Mr. Trollope's novels, there should come a ready welcome for the school of fiction which was called the sensational. Of this school Mr. Wilkie Collins headed one class and Miss Braddon the other. Miss Braddon dealt in what we may call simple straightforward murders and bigamies, and such-like material; Mr. Wilkie Collins made his crimes always of an enigmatic nature, and compelled the reader to puzzle them out as if they were morbid con- undrums. Mr. Trollope, however, continued to have his clientele all the time that the sensational school in its vari- ous classes or branches was flourishing ami tailing. Mi 1 . Trollope's readers may have turned away for a moment to heai- what became of the lady who dropped her husband down the well or to guess at the secret of the mysterious Woman in White. But they soon turned loyally back to 580 A H18T0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. follow the gentle fortunes of Lily Dale, and to hear what was going on in the household of Framley parsonage and under the stately roof of the Duke of Omnium. Mr. Charles Reade, with all his imperfections as an artist, belongs to a higher order than Mr. Trollope, who is so much more thoroughly a master of his own narrower art. "Peg Woffington" and "Christie Johnstone," the former published so long ago as 1852, seem almost perfect in their symmetry and beauty. "The Cloister and the Hearth" might well-nigh haye persuaded a reader that a new Walter Scott was about to arise on the horizon of our literature. In Mr. Eeade's more recent works, however, the author began to devote himself to the illustration of some social or legal grievance calling for reform,, and people came to understand that a new branch of the art of novel- writing was in process of development, the special gift of which was to convert a parliamentary blue-book into a work of fiction. The treatment of criminals in prison and in far-off penal settlements; the manner in which patients are dealt with in private lunatic asylums, became the main subject and backbone of the new style of novel, instead of the misunderstandings of lovers, the trials of honest poverty, or the struggles for ascendancy in the fash- ionable circles of Belgravia. Mr. Eeade may claim the merit of standing alone in work of this kind. He can make a blue-book live and yet be a blue-book still. He takes the hard and naked facts as he finds them in some newspaper or in the report of some parliamentary commis- sion, and he so fuses them into the other material whereof his romance is to be made up that it would require a chem- ical analysis to separate the fiction from the reality. The reader is not conscious that he is going through the boiled- down contents of a blue-book. He has no aggrieved sense of being entrapped into the dry details of some harassing social question. The reality reads like romance; the ro- mance lives like reality. No author ever indulged in a fairer piece of self-glorification than that contained in the last sentence of " Put Yourself in His Place." "I have taken," says Mr. Eeade, "a few undeniable truths out of many and have labored to make my readers realize those appalling facts of the day which most men know, but not one in a thousand comprehends, and not one in a hundred thousand realizes until fiction — which, whatever you may A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 581 have been told to the contrary, is the highest, widest noblest, and greatest of all the arts — comes to his aid, studies, penetrates, digests, the hard facts of chronicles and blue-books, and makes the dry bones live." Distinct, peculiar and lonely is the place in fiction held by Mr. George Meredith the author of "The Ordeal of Kichard Feverel," " Beauchamp's Career," " The Egoist," and other novels. Mr. Meredith has been more than once described as a prose Browning. He has indeed much of Mr. Browning's obscurity of style, not caused by any obscurity of thought, but rather by a certain perverse in- difference on the part of the artist to the business of mak- ing his meaning as clear to others as it is to himself. He has a good deal of Mr. Browning's peculiar kind of grim saturnine humor, not the humor that bubbles and sparkles — the humor that makes men laugh even while it some- times draws tears to the eyes. He lacks the novelist's first charm, the power of telling a story well. But, despite these defects, he is unquestionably one of the most remark- able of all the modern novelists, short. of the very greatest. There are times when the reader is inclined to wonder how with so many great gifts he has failed to become a great novel- ist. The story called "Beauchamp's Career," which prob- ably not one in every thousand novel-readers has even opened, seems to us to have only narrowly missed being one of the great romances of the age of Queen Victoria. It is full of beauty, of power, and of pathos. >Some of its characters are so drawn that they not merely stand out as if in life, before us, but they enable us to enter into all their thoughts and anticipate all their purposes. We can conjecture beforehand what they will do in a given conditions of things, just as Ave can tell how some friend of our .own is likely to act when we hear what the circumstances are under which he is called upon to take a decision. This story too, is not overladen, as others of Mr. Meredith's unluckily are, by epigram and antithesis, by curiosities of phrase which it is difficult to follow, and conceits which rather dazzle the eyes of the reader than light up tin' page. If .Mr. Meredith's novels were to be examined according to their intellectual worth they would deserve and demand a much fuller analysis than has been attempted here. Bui in these pages we are looking at the literature of the time from the chronicler's rather than the critic's pointof view. We tell 582 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. that a certain soldier won a battle or statesman gained a political victory, although we may ourselves be of opinion that the victory was better deserved on the other side. In the same spirit we record the fact that Mr. Meredith has not yet succeeded in gaining that place in fiction which our own judgment of his capacity would say that he is surely well qualified to attain. Mr. Blackmore's " Lorna Doone" seems to us on the whole the best novel of the second class produced in Eng- land in our time. That is to say, we rank it distinctly below the great novels of Dickens and Thackeray and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, but above any novel produced by any writer short of these, and above the in- ferior works of these great artists themselves. Mr. Wil- liam Black is the head of a school of fiction which he him- self called into existence. Scottish scenery and Scottish character, alternating with certain phases of London life, are the field in which he works, arnd in which he has no rival. lie has not as yet shown himself great in passion or in pathos. The deeper emotions of the human heart, the sterner phases of human life, he has apparently not often cared to touch. But in his own province, somewhat narroAV though that be, his art approaches to perfection. He can paint not merely scenery, but even atmosphere, with a delicacy and strength of touch which in themselves constitute an art. Mr. Hardy has done something the same for certain English counties that Mr. Black has done for Scotland. He is occasionally stronger than Mr. Black, but he has not his subtle sweetness, charm, and tender grace, and he is far less equal, far less surely master of his own craft. A word must be said of the delicate porcelain of Miss Thackeray's work in fiction — her tender, gentle, womanly stories, nor should we fail to record the fact that Mrs. Craik's "John Halifax, Gentleman," was one of the literary successes of the day. A style of novel peculiar to this age, and very unlike that of Miss Thackeray or Mrs. Craik, deserves a word of mention. That is the novel which records the lives, the rompings, the ambitions, the flirtations, and the sufferings of what we may call the roaring girl of the Victorian age. With tousled, unkempt hair, disorderly dress, occasionally dirty hands and lips bubbling over with perpetual slang, this strange young woman has bounced into fiction. She A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 583 has always a true and tender heart under her somewhat uncouth appearance and manners. When site falls in love, she falls in love very intensely, and although she may have had all manner of flirtations, she generally clings to the one true passion, and is not uncommonly found dying of a hroken heart at the end of the novel. Perhaps the one merit ahout this kind of fiction, when it is really hon- est and at its best, is that it recognizes the fact that women are not a distinct angelic order of beings, but that they have their strong passions and even their coarse desires like men. 8uch advantage as there may be insetting this fact plainly before the world, on the authority of writers who are women themselves, the school may claim to have. It is not a high, or refined, or noble, or in any way commend- able school of fiction, but at its best it is sincere. At its worst — and it very soon reached its worst — it may be de- scribed as insufferable. The fiction of this later period is, like the poetry, in- ferior to that of the period which we had to consider in our former survey. It has more names, but not such great names. It would almost seem as if the present school of fiction is, to borrow a phrase from French politics, exhaust- ing its mandate. The sensation novel has had its day, and its day was but an episode, an interruption. Realism has now well-nigh done all it can. Its close details, its trivial round of common cares and ambitions, its petty trials and easy loves, seem now at last to have spent their attractive power and to urge with their fading breath the need of some new departure for the novelist. Perhaps the one com- mon want in the more modern novel may suggest the new source of supply. Perhaps, in order to give a fresh life to our fiction, it will have to be dipped once again in the old holy well of romance. 584 A 111ST0RY OF OUR OWN TIMES. APPENDIX. The first of the many difficulties which the Gladstone administration of 1880-85 had to encounter was the Brad- laugh difficulty. Mr. Charles Bradlaugh, elected for Northampton, desired to make affirmation instead of tak- ing the oath in the usual manner. This he claimed the right to do under the parliamentary oaths act. This was the beginning of a long wrangle, lasting over many years, involving re-election, much litigation, and attempted legis- lation, creating one unhappy scene, and for long enough allotting to Mr. Bradlaugh the curious position of being at once a member and not a member of the House of Com- mons. It was not until the general election of 1885 that Mr. Bradlaugh, re-elected for Northampton, quietly took the oath, and for the first time enjoyed the full privileges of membership uncontested. Out of the Bradlaugh episode arose the fourth party, called into being by a politician who up to that time had played no part of any importance in politics, but who from that time was destined to be one of the most conspicuous figures in English politics — Lord Randolph Churchill. The fourth party, led by Lord Randolph Churchill, and composed of Mr. A. J. Balfour, Sir Henry Urummond Wolff, and Mr. (now Sir) John Gorst, came into existence primarily to oppose Mr. Bradlaugh's admission to parlia- ment, but it soon became a decided power in politics, work- ing for many aims. The house was at first inclined to smile at the fourth party; it was soon to learn that the fourth party was no smiling matter. The history of the six years from the accession of the Gladstone administra- tion to the jubilee year is in a very large degree the his- tory 'of Lord Randolph Churchill. His readiness, his irreverence, his alert pugnacity, were the terror of the leaders of his own camp, but his really remarkable ability A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 585 soon made him essential to the party of which he became in due season, and for a season, the actual if not the nom- inal leader. It is curious to note that his rise followed so closely upon the disappearance from the political scene of his great chief and example, Lord Beaconsfield, who died in April, 1881. The Irish question has been the predominant question of the last six years, casting all other questions of home ami foreign policy entirely into the shade. Mr. Parnell had come back to Westminster as the leader of the Irish parlia- mentary party with a largely increased following, and under his leadership the great majority of the Irish party sat in opposition to the government, thereby intimating that they considered themselves of necessity opposed to any government which was not prepared, to make some serious concession to the pressing needs of Ireland. At first it appeared as if the government and the Irish party might work harmoniously together. The Liberal party had received the full strength of the Irish vote during the election. The government announced that they were go- ing to abandon coercion. But the distress in Ireland was great. New legislation on the land question was urgently called for, and the queen's speech contained no reference to the land. Moreover, evictions were increasing terribly. The Irish members brought in a bill to stay evictions. The government refused to accept the Irish measure, but brought in a compensation for disturbance bill, which was rejected by the House of Lords. From this point the strife between the Irish party and the government wid- ened daily. Mr. Forster, although a capable statesman and well-meaning man, was not suited for the post of chief secretary to the lord lieutenant. There was soon open war between him and the national party in Ireland. State prosecutions, all-night sittings, coercion acts, expulsion of Irish members, imprisonment of Irish members, strife in parliament, and disturbance in Ireland, made the years from L880 to L885 a kind of political nightmare. The government were compelled, however, bo recognize the fact that the agrarian condition of Ireland was in urgent need of reform, and in L881 Mr. Gladstone brought forward a land hill, which, after long debate, was sent to the Lords in a much improved condition. For a short while there was a struggle between the two houses; the Tory majority 586 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. in the upper house anxious to destroy the bill, the Liberal majority in the lower house determined to maintain it. In the end the Lords gave way and the bill became law. The national party in Ireland received the bill with tempered enthusiasm; the land league prepared various test cases; the government seemed to be convinced that Mr. Parnell was determined to arrest the progress of the measure, and the coup d'etat of 1881 was the result. A descent was made upon the leaders of the national party; Mr. Parnell, Mr. Dillon, and many other members were arrested, the land league was proclaimed, "United Ireland" was sup- pressed, and for the time the policy of Mr. Forster reigned supreme. That policy was reversed in 1882, when Mr. Forster resigned — not to take office again, for he died in 1885. The political prisoners were released, and a new era of peace appeared to be opening for Ireland. The bright prospect was immediately and appallingly darkened by the tragedy of May 6, 1882, when the newly-appointed chief secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Mr. Burke were assassinated in the Phoenix Park. The immediate result was fresh coercion and a further parliamentary struggle before the stringent measures proposed by the government became law. Under the rule of Lord Spencer and Mr. (now Sir George) Trevelyan Ireland grew no quieter, and the Irish difficulty seem no nearer to solution. The de- bates on the so-called Kilmainham treaty, the Errington mission to Rome, the Dublin Castle scandal — each in its turn agitated parliament. After a time Mr. Trevelyan resigned and his place was taken by Mr. Campbell Banner- man. An arrears bill drafted by Mr. Parnell while in prison, was the precursor of a government measure, which passed into law in 1882. The foreign history of the Gladstone administration was stormy and warlike. It inherited, and concluded, the disastrous Afghan war of its predecessor; it had a war with the Boers, in which the Boers fought well, and gained what they fought for; it had its extraordinary war with Egypt, in order to uphold the khedive against the national party headed by Arabi Pasha; it had its evil-omened Sou- dan struggle, which gave Gordon and Khartoum to the Mahdi, and left so many brave and famous Englishmen and Irishmen the victims of the Arab spears. It had, of course, some inevitable misunderstandings with Russia. A HISTORY OF OUR WN TIMES. 587 In domestic legislature the great event was the triumph, in the face of many difficulties, of the reform and re- distribution bills. The government had scarcely completed this great task before it met its fate. On June 8, 1885, the Gladstone administration was defeated on Mr. Childer's budget, and Lord Salisbury came into power. Not for long, however. Even with the aid of Lortl Ran- dolph Churchill, who was now a cabinet minister, the new story minstry could not long hold out against the odds arrayed against it. It was in its turn defeated on a now historical amendment of Mr. Jesse Collins' ; there was a general election in the autumn of 1885, the result of which was to place Mr. Gladstone again in office. By this time Mr. Gladstone's views on the Irish question had largely developed. He had never been opposed to the principle of home rule; he was now converted to entire sympathy with it. The recent election — which had sent Mr. Parnell back to parliament with a following of eighty- six, many of whom represented Ulster constituencies — was in itself sufficient proof that the majority of the Irish people ardently desired home rule. It was soon known that Mr. Gladstone was engaged upon a home rule scheme, and the appointment of Mr. John Morley as chief secretary showed at once the sympathetic attitude of the new govern- ment toward Ireland. Mr. Gladstone's home rule scheme was not, however, entirely satisfactory to all his following. Lord Hartiugton, Mr. Chamberlain, Sir George Trevelyan, and others broke away from him. When the home rule bill was finally introduced on April 8, 188G, while it met with the warm approval of the Irish representatives and of the bulk of the Liberal party it caused a revolt among some of Mr. Gladstone's followers, who under the leadership of Lord Hartiugton, and with the title of Liberal Unionists gave battle to the measure. The home rule bill was defeated. Mr. Gladstone appealed to the country. A fierce fight was waged in the constituencies, and the result gave to the alliance of Tories and Liberal l'n- onists a majority over the (iladstonian Liberals and the Eng- lish and Irish Home Rule. The history of thenew Salis- bury administration is too recent ami too uncertain to be further touched on here. It belongs to the future. In these few pages the attempt has been made to give 588 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. the very swiftest and most comprehensive summary of the events of the last six years. No thought of consecutive exhaustive narrative has been entertained; all that has been desired, and all that has been essayed, is to give in rapid record the mere headings of the great events which make the six years from 1880 to 1886 among the most momentous of a momentous reign. J. H. McC. INDEX. Abd-elkader and Druse Massacres, ii. 123. Abdul-Aziz, Sultan of Turkey, visit of, to England, ii. dethrone- ment and death, 519. Abd-ul-Medjid, Palmerston on, ii. 128. Aberdare, Lord, ii. 482. Aberdeen, Lord, Foreign Secretary, Peel Government, 1841, i. 130; on Scotcli Church dissensious, 137, 138; and Tahiti difficulty, 202 ; and Oregon Treaty, 205 ; supports Peel's opening of the ports, 232 ; and Spanish marriages, 275 ; and Pacifico case, 312 ; and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 341 ; Premier of Coalition Minis- try, 1852, 409 ; and Czar Nicholas, 427, 429, 430 ; opposed to Crimean War, 466 ; on Newcastle as War Minister, 485 ; leaves Ministry, 488; on results of Crimean War, 505; and Crimean War, ii. 513. Abolitionists, ii. 135, 136. About, Edmond, on Ionian Islands, ii. 75. Abyssinia, King Theodore's prisoners, ii. 263 ; war with, 368, 370. Acre, bombardment of, i. 126. Adams, Mr., and English Confederate cruisers, ii. 133, 150, 151 : "this is war," 152; and Alabama, 157; and recognition of South, 157 ; and Opposition leaders, 164. Addison, Joseph influence of wine upon, i. 26. Adullamites, ii. 270 ; and Lord Derby, 276, 277 ; and indifference of working classes to franchise, 277. Afghanistan, account of, i. 144 : war of 1840, causes of, 143, 150; (see Burnes, Dost Mohammed, Cabul) ; capture of Ghuznee and Jellalabad, 151 ; defeat of Dost Mohammed, entry of Shah Soojah into Cabul, 151 ; battle of Purwandurrah, surrender of Dost Mohamemd, if).; Akhar Khan's terms accepted, 155; the with- drawal from Cabul, 100 ; Khyber Pass massacre, 162 ; interview between Akbar Khan and Lady Macnaghten, ib. ; end of the war, 168 ; rescue of hostages, 169 ; invasion of, ii. 545,546. Africa, South, war in, ii. 547-550. Agamemnon the, and Atlantic cable, ii. 285. Ahmed Shah, i. 144. Akbar Khan defends Jellalabad, i. 150 ; heads insurrection in Cabul, 154; his terms with the British, ib. ; the secret treaty, 155; kills Macnaghten, 155 ; excuses for deed, 155,156 ; interview with Lady Macnaghten, 162; at Jellalabad, 162 ; defeated at Jellalabad, 164 ; the hostages, 168, 169. 590 INDEX. Alabama the, ii. 134, 148, 152, 155 ; the American claims, 413, 442-447. Alamayou, son of Theodore of Abyssinia, ii. 374. Albert, Prince, .on tbe Queen, i. 5; Bedchamber question, 88; marriage, 91-97 ; character, 92, 93 ; his Protestantism, 94, 95 ; naturalization, 95 ; annuity, 96; receives title of Prince Con- sort, 97; regency question, ib.; position in England, 98; against dueling, 99 ; tbe attempts on the Queen's life, 100, 101 ; presence of, in House of Commons, 257 ; industrial exhibition, 318 ; Peel's death, 318 ; Great Exhibition, 344-356 ; as a public speaker, 347 ; opposition to Great Exhibition, 348-351 ; relations with Palmerston, 359 ; disagreements with Palmerston, 362 ; Kossuth deputation, 371 ; Palmerston's dismissal, 378 ; and Vienna Note, 443, 444 ; and Crimean War, 481, 482 ; and Louis Napoleon, 494, 495 ; letter about Louis Napoleon, ii. 37 ; death of, 145 and Exhibition, 167. Albert, Edward, Prince of Wales, birth of, i. 143 ; married to Princess Alexandra, ii. 187 ; illness of, 457, 458 : Indian tour, 509. Alexander II. of Russia, i. 492 ; desires peace, 499 ; and Black Sea, ii. 440 ; and Constantinople, 527 ; Moscow speech, 527. Alexandra, Princess, one cause of English sympathy with Denmark, ii. 187. Alfred, Prince, afterward Duke of Edinburgh, offered Crown of Greece, ii. 75. Allen, and Manchester Rescue, ii. 320 ; executed, 320. Allsop, an accomplice of Orsini, ii. 48. Alma, battle of, i. 474-476. Almnbagh, held by Britisb, ii. 16 ; left in charge of Outram, 17. American and Mexican intervention, ii. 161 ; and Russell. 268. American Civil War, i. 437 ; ii. 130-167 ; the secession, 131 ; Fort Sumter, 132 ; the blockade, 132 ; England recognizes Southern Confederation, 134 ; diplomatic controversy, 134 ; feeling in England, 135 ; Northern defeats, 137 ; French sympathy with South, 139, 140 ; the slave Anderson, 140 ; Trent affair, 142 ; Prince Consort, 145 ; Confederate cruisers, 148 ; the Alabama, 149; America's complaint, 150; the controversy on the Confed- erate vessel's question, 153-156, Vicksburg and Gettysburg, 158 ; Mexican intervention, 158-162 ; Richmond taken, Lee surrenders, Jefferson Davis captured, 161 ; Lincoln assassinated, 162; end of the war, 162; England's Southern sympathies 163. Anderson, case of slave, ii. 140. Andrassy note, ii. 517. Anson, General, i. 589, 590. Anti-Corn Law agitation, beginning of, i. 79 ; account of, 206-229. Antonelli, Cardinal, sympathizes with North, ii. 139. Appeal, Court of, ii. 476. Apponyi, Count, and Schleswig Holstein, ii. 189. Arch, Joseph, ii. 461-463. Ardahan, ceded to Russia, ii. 537. Argyll, Duke of, and North, ii. 162 ; account of, 234-236 ; Indian Secretary, 1868, 394 ; friend of Sumner, 442. INDEX. 591 Ariosto, the, Orlando Furoiso quoted, ii. 173. Army Purchase, ii. 418. Arnaud, St., at Crimea, i. 471, 473; ill health of, 473; at Alma, 480 ; death of, 495. Arnold, Matthew, and Goethe, i. 504, his works 527. Arrow, the lorcha, case of, i. 445-553 ; boarded by Chinese, October 8, 1856, 546 ; British or Chinese? Its registration, ib.; Consul Parkes applies for aid to Sir J. Bowring, 546 ; Sir J. Bowring's desire to enter Canton, 547 ; Yeh returns the men, Admiral Seymour bombards Canton, 548 ; Yeh offers reward for heads of Englishmen, 549 ; Lord Derby's motion, 549 ; Cobden's motion, 550 ; new plenipotentiary sent to China, 554. Artisans' Dwellings Bill, ii. 500. Ashantee, war of 1863, ii. 175, 176 ; war of 1873, 484. Ash burton Treaty, i. 204. Ashley, Evelyn, on Palmerston and Pacifico case, i. 312 ■ Palmerston's dismissal, 378. Ashley, Lord, (see Lord Shaftesbury). Assis, Francisco d', and Spanish marriages, i. 274. Atlantic cable, ii. 284, 285. Auckland, Lord, treaty with Runjeet Singh and Shah Soojah, i. 147 ; Simla Manifesto, 150; failure of, 172. Augustenburg, Prince of (see Schleswig-IIolstein). Aumale, Due d', and Spanish marriages, i. 273. Australia, discovery of gold in, settles transportation question, i. 562. Australia, South and confederation, ii. 354. Australia, Western, unsuited for convict settlement, i. 562; thought of, for convict settlement, 567; and confederation, ii. 354. Austria, war with France, i. 390 ; Kossuth in England, 368-372 ; and Russia, 421, 422 ; Prussia and Crimean War, 458-461 ; Vienna Conference, 490 ; exertions for peace, 499 ; Congress of Paris, ib. ; France and Italy, ii. 77 ; consulate at Damascus destroyed, 123; and Poland, 178, 179, 182; and Schleswig- Holstein, 184-189; war with Denmark, 189-191; war with Prussia and Italy, 272 ; excluded from German affairs, 284 ; and Berlin Treaty, 539. Ayrton, Mr., ii. 484. Azimoolah Khan, Nana Sahib's agent in England, ii. 3. Bacon, Lord, i. 357, 573. Bailey, P. J., i. 528. Baines and borough franchise, ii. 202. Bajee Hao, ii. 2. Balaklava, i. 478. Ball, ii. 504. Ballard, J. A., at Silistria, i. 468, 498. Ballot, and Lord Durham, i. 44. Ballot Bill, ii. 425, 432. Bal/.ac's " Peau de Chagrin," quoted by Huxley, ii. 561. Baring, Mr., Budgel of, in 1841, i. L29. Baring, Consul, and Bulgarian massacres, ii. 516. Bank Charter Act, i. 198 ; suspended, 270 ; suspended, ii. 36, 272. 592 INDEX i. 275, 277. Damascus, destroyed, ii. Bank, Royal British, failure and frauds of, i. 543. Banks, Post Office Savings, ii. 344. Batoum, ceded to Russia, ii. 539. Baxter, Mr., resigns, ii. 482. Bazaine, and Metz, ii. 436. Beaconsfield, Lord, speech of, at Aylesbury, ii. 524 ; speech at Guild- hall, 527 ; and Carnarvon's resignation, 531 ; and Jingoism, 530 ; and San Stefano treaty, 532 ; and Derby's resignation, 534 ; and Indian troops, ib.; at Berlin Congress, 535 ; and secret treaties, 539 ; " Peace with Honor," 541 ; his influence waning, 544 ; arid Afghanistan, 545 ; appeal to the country, 556 ; "Tancred" quoted, 560. Beal, James, and Mill, ii. 213. Beales, Edmond, and Poland, ii. 179 ; Hyde Park meeting, 278, 279 ; defeat of, 388, 453. Bean attempts the Queen's life, i. 102. Beaumarchais, ii. 278. Bedchamber question, i. 84-89. Belgians, Queen of and Spanish marriages, Belgium in 1848, i. 279 ; Consulate of, at 123 ; independence of, 437. Benedek the Irresistible, ii. 284. Bentham, Jeremy, opposed to transportation, i. 558. Bentinck, Lord George, Country Party, and Protectionists, i. 256 ; and Prince Consort in House of Commons, 257 ; and Coercion Bill, 262 ; Irish Railway grant, 271 ; slave-grown sugar, 271 ; resigns leadership, ii. 57. Bentinck, Lord William, i. 577. Bentley, Dr. and Dr. Parr, story of, ii. 90 Beranger, and Napoleon, ii 469. Berar annexed, i. 578. Berkeley, Henry, and Ballot, ii. 426. Berlin Memorandum, ii. 519 ; Congress, 535. Bermuda used for transportation by Lord Durham, i. 44 ; a tempo- rary convict settlement, 563. Bernard, Montague, and Alabama claims, ii. 445. Bernard, Simon, and Orsini affair, ii. 38 ; arrest, trial, and acquittal, 47. Berry, Mr., and Victorian deadlock, ii. 356. Berryer, defends Montalembert, ii. 27. Bessarabia, cession of, i. 500 ; ceded to Russia, ii. 537. Beust and Danish Question, ii. 190. Beyrout, Druse disturbances near, ii. 123. Birmingham enfranchised, i. 70, 214. Bismarck, a joker, i. 448 ; on Louis Napoleon, 495 ; and Schleswig- Holstein, ii. 184 ; and Russell, 274 ; and Franco-Prussian war, 435 ; and Belgium, 439 ; and Black Sea, 441 ; phrase of, and San Stefano treaty, 535. Bithoor, ii. 2. Black Friday, ii. 272. Black Sea, allied squadrons in, i. 451-455 ; 462, 469, 500 ; at Congress, Paris, 501. Black, William, ii. 582. Black Sea Question, 461, INDEX. 593 Blackie, Professor, and Ernest Jones, i. 289. Blackmore, Richard, ii. 582. Blanc, Louis, in England, ii. 42. Blanc, Dr., prisoner in Abyssinia, ii. 371. Blockades and Congress of Paris, i. 501. Bokhara captives, i. 170. Bolton-le Moors, commercial crisis in, i. 211, 212. Bomarsund, capture of, i. 503. Bombay Gazette of May 1, 1857, announces India quiet throughout, • i. 568. Bombay, troops sent from, to Persian Gulf, i. 581. Bosphorus and Dardanelles (see Black Sea), and Treaty of Paris, i. 500. Bosquet on Charge of Light Brigade, i. 478 ; at Inkermann, ib. Bouchervilleand Letellier case, ii. 353. Bourinot on Canada's three destinies, ii. 352, 354, 357. Bowlby of the Times, murdered in China War, 1860, ii. 119. Bowring, Sir John (see Arrow, Lorcha), i. 547-552. Bogle, Paul, and Jamaica rising, ii. 249. Bradlaugh defeated, ii. 389. Bradshaw, M. P., Canterbury, i. 14. Bramwell, Baron, on tickets of leave, i. 566. "Brass Band," the, i. 339. Brett, Messrs., and Atlantic Cable, ii. 285. Brett, Policeman, killed at Manchester, ii. 319. Brewster, Sir David, i. 507, 508. Bright, John, i. 22, 25, 29 ; less extreme Radical than Lord Durham, 71, 173 ; Free Trade League, 218; first meeting with Cobden, 219 ; Cobden's appeal to him to join Free Trade agitation, ib.; Free Trade and Repeal movements contrasted, 221 ; on famine aiding Free Trade, 229; entered Parliament, 245; on Irish emigration, 269 ; Ernest Jones' speeches, 289 ; Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 339 ; Kossuth compared with, 369 , compared with Gladstone, 413 ; Crimean War, 464, 465 ; on death of Czar Nicholas, 492 ; unseated, General Election, 553 ; condemns Can ning's proclamation, ii. 26; alluded to by Lord Palmerston as " honorable and reverend gentleman," 50 ; Opposition, 1858, 56 ; by nature an orator, 70 ; re-appearance in politics, 79 ; scheme of Reform Bill, 80 ; " Fancy franchises," 84 ; Willis' Rooms meet- ing, 86 ; once votes differently from Cobden, 90 ; Palmerston's reasons for not offering office to, ib. ; Commercial Treaty with France, 97 ; repeal of Paper Duties, 102 ; Reform Bill, I860, 111 and Alabama, 152; and the Northern States, 164, and Quarterly Review 168 ; and Cobden's death, 206-209 ; and Par- liament, 1865, 215-228 ; and "Revolutionary Bpick," 238 ; and Jamaica, 252-253 ; and Reform Bill, 1866, 264 ; eloquence of, 267; and Reform, 1866, 269; and Russell, 274; and Reform League, 278, 290, 291 ; mentioned by Lowe, 296 ; on Reform Bill, and " residuum," 299 ; and tea-room party, ib. ; and suspension of Habeas Corpus Act, Ireland. 367; and Manchester prisoners, 320 ; and Clerkenwell case, 323 ; and Canada, 846; and Irish Church, ;!S7 ; President of Board of Trade, 304 ; anecdote of, and W. 1'. Wood, 395 ; and Irish Church distablishment, 396. and 594 INDEX. Irish Church Bill in House of Lords, 401 ; and Ballot, 429 ; a friend of Sumner, 443 ; and indirect Alabama claims, 448 ; and republicanism, 460 ; Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster, 482 ; and Liberal leadership, 503 ; physical health of, 506 ; and Bul- garia, 522. British Columbia, founded, 1858, joined to Canada, ii. 70. British Critic, by Newman, i. 135. British Museum, Hume on Sunday opening of, i. 121. " British Party " in Ireland, ii." 380. Broadhead, and Sheffield outrages, ii. 326. Bronte, C, i. 534. Brougham, Lord, i. 4, 18, 20 ; description of, 20-22 attacks Canadian policy, 47 ; and Durham, at Reform banquet, 1834, 48 ; Bed- chamber question, 88 ; Prince Albert's precedence, 96 ; O'Connell trial, 188 ; slave-grown sugar, 272 ; opposes Great Exhibition, 350 ; Jewish claims, ii. 59 ; and slavery, 140 ; death of, 389. Brown, John, ii. 93. Browning, Mrs. E. B., i. 509, 526 ; on Napoleon and Italy, ii. 96. Browning, Robert, i. 509 ; and Tennyson, 523 ; and Druses, ii. 125. Bruce, Frederick, Minister to Chia, ii. 115. Bruce, Henry Austin, in 1868 ministry, ii. 394 ; the Licensing Act, 454 ; resigns Home-secretaryship, 482 ; made Lord Aberdare, 482. Bruce, James, and Buffon, ii. 369. Brunnow, Baron, and Palmerston's dismissal, 379. Brydon, Dr., last man of Cabul Army, arrives at Jellalabad, i. 163 ; in siege of Lucknow, ii. 19, 20. Buccleuch, Duke of, opposed to Corn Laws' repeal, i. 237 ; with- draws opposition, 240. Buchanan, Robert, ii. 574. Buckingham, Duke of, Colonial Secretary, ii. 295. Bnckle, Henry Thomas, ii. 566-570. Buffon and Bruce, ii. 369. Bulgaria, and Czar Nicholas, i. 431 ; massacres in, ii. 520 ; and Treaty of Berlin, 539. Bull, Papal, on hierarchy in England, i. 326-344. Bull Run, Battle of, ii. 138. Buller, Charles, i. 24, 31 ; with Durham in Canada, 43, 50 ; Trans- portation Committee, 1837, 558. Bulwer, i. 31. Bulwer, Sir H. (see Dalling), letter of Palmerston to, ii. 128. Burdett, Sir Francis, i. 31 ; and Cochrane, ii. 129. Burke and Warren Hastings, ii. 260 ; and "a low-minded inquisition into numbers," 262 ; and corporate rights, 407 ; and heroic virtues, 428. Burke, Colonel, trial of, ii. 319. Burmese territory annexed, i. 578. Burnaby, Captain, mentioned, i. 143. Burnes, Captain Alexander, at Cabul, i. 143, 144 ; and Dost Mohammed, 146, 147 ; despatches garbled, 147 ; murder of, 152. Burns, Robert, on William IV., i. 3, 508. Burton, Captain, mentioned, i. 143. INDEX. 595 Butler, Captain, in Crimean War, i. 468 ; killed, ib. ; 498. Butt, Isaac, and Home Rule, ii. 473, 474, 504, 544. Byron, i. 506; and Russell, ii. 274; from an Irish point of view, 377. Byron, Lady, ii. 471. Cable, Atlantic, ii. 284, 285. Cabul, Burnes at, i. 143 ; entry of Shall Soojah, 151 ; insurrection in, murder of Burnes, 152 ; withdrawn from, 160 ; occupied, ii. 547. Cadiz, Due de (see Assis), i. 274, 275. Caesar, Fronde's picture of, ii. 568. Cairnes, Professor, and Irish University Scheme, ii. 479. Cairns, Mr., afterward, Sir Hugh, capacity for debate, ii. 27; Solicitor-General, Derby Ministry, 1858, 55, 240; amendment to Reform Rill, 301 ; Lord Chancellor, 1868, 362 ; Lord Chancellor, 1874, 487, 504. Calcutta, alarm in, at outbreak of Mutiny, i. 583. Cambridge, Duke of, and Great Exhibition, i. 352. Camden Town, electric experiments at, i. 54. Cameron, Captain, prisoner in Abyssinia, ii. 369. Campbell, Lord, and O'Connell trial, i. 189 ; and Great Exhibition, 350. Campbell, Sir John, and Chartism, i. 67, 289. Campbell, Sir Colin, at Cawnpore and Lucknow, ii. 15 ; evacuates Lucknow residency, 16 ; takes Cawnpore and Lucknow, 17. Canada, rebellion in, and Lord Durham, i. 31 ; Upper and Lower Canada, 32, 34 ; British party in, 34 ; Assembly refuses to vote supplies, 34 ; excitement in England, 38 ; Upper and Lower re- united, 51 ; Fenian raids into, ii. 155 ; Confederate raids from, ib.; Fenian raid into, 316; Confederation of, 345, 349; Hudson's Bay territory acquired, 349 ; prospects of, 351-354 ; Fishery question, 445. Candahar, defense of, i. 150. Candia. and Czar Nicholas, i. 430. Canning, George, compared by Lord Beaconsfield with Sheil, i. 30 ; Monroe Doctrine, ii. 161 ; and Russell. 274. Canning, Lord, Pacjifico case, i. 312. 341 ; bis accession, 577, 581 ; his composure during the Mutiny. 584 . nicknamed Clemency, 585; disturbed by wild counsels, 586; recalls troops from China, 587; proclamation, March 3, L858, ii. 23; letter to Ver- non Smith, 26, death, 28, 32. 2<>r>. Canrobert, al A.lma, i. 47!) ; at Crimea, 495. Canterbury, Archbishop of. i. I ; national education scheme, 120; and Public Worship Hill, ii. 490, 493. Cantillon story, ii. 47. Canton, capture announced, ii. 50. Cape Of Good Hope and convict question, i. 558. Card well, and Peelites, i. 246, 341 ; condemns Ellenborough despatch, ii. 26'; failure of attack on Government, 27 ; opposes Conspiracy Bill, 50; Secretary for Ireland, is;,!), sit; Jamaica massacres, 244; Canada union. 349; war secretary 395; the Irish Land tenure, 408 ; army reform, 418, 4 lit. 421. 596 INDEX Carlisle, Lord, i. 24. Carlos, Don, i. 372 ; associations to aid in London, ii. 42. Carlyle, Thomas, and Mazzini's letters, i. 200 ; on Louis- Philippe 321, 509, 510, 514-517 ; and formulas, ii. 175 ; and people of England ; 197 and Jamaica, 255 ; on unwritten martial law, 259 quoted, 563. Carnaron, Lord, and Jamaica, ii. 256 ; Colonial Secretary, 278 resigns, 292 ; Canadian Confederation, 345 ; Colonial Secretary, 478 ; and Eastern Question, 528 ; resigns, 531. Carpentaria, Gulf of, a proposed convict settlement, i. 562. Carteret, allusion to, ii. 502. Cartridges, the greased, i. 570. Cashmere and Runjeet Singh, i. 147. Caste, institution of, i. 575. Catherine the Second, i. 421 ; and Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardii, 437. Catholic Church, loved by Irishmen, ii. 375. Catholic Emancipation, i. 16 ; and Russell, ii. 273. Cattle Plague, ii. 262. Cavagnari, Sir Louis, killed at Cabul, ii. 547. Cave, letter to, from Dr. Johnson, i. 64. Cavour, Count, born Turin August 10, 1810, died Turin June 6, 1861, i 187, 321 ; a joker, 448 ; Crimean War, 490, 495 ; Congress of Paris, 502 ; arrangement with Emperor of French, ii. 38 ; prevails on Emperor of French, 77 ; character and aim of, ib. ; determined that France, should fight Austria, 78 ; description of, ib. ; Nice and Savoy, 94 ; and Russell, 271. Cawnpore, ii. 1 ; Mutiny at, 1-13 ; Nana Sahib's treachery, 4-8 ; Massacre of the Englishwomen, 9-11 ; taken and retaken, 19. Cecil, Lord Robert, afterward Lord Salisbury, and Lorcha Arrow, i.553; censure on Lowe, ii. 231; account of, 242 ; (see Cran- bourne). Cetywayo, ii. 548. Chalmers, compared by Gladstone to Sheil, i. 29 ; 140-142. Charlotte, Princess, i. 96. Charter, the People's (see Chartism). Chartism, i. 64 ; beginning of, 67 ; Sir J. Campbell's funeral oration on, 67 ; not a cause, but a consequence, 68 ; the Charter drawn up— its name given by O'Connell, 73 ; its six points, ib. ; tne three classes of Chartists, 74 ; Feargus O'Connor, 75-76 ; Thomas Cooper, 76 ; Henry Vincent and Ernest Jones, 76 ; Chartist newspapers, ib. ; riots and imprisonments, 78 ; Fall of Mel- bourne Ministry, 79 ; new Poor Law, 80 ; Anti-Corn Law agitation, ib. ; the movement, 279-288 ; petition, 284 ; results of, 287. Chatsworth, i. 352. Chelmsford, Lord, and Lord Chancellorship, ii. 363; and Abyssinian prisoners, 368. Chelmsford, Lord, and Zulu war, ii. 551. Chester, Fenian expedition to, ii. 517. Chesterfield, from Irish and English points of view, ii. 377. Chevalier, Michael, and Louis Napoleon, ii. 97. Childers, Mr., in 1868 ministry, ii. 395 ; resigns, 483. INDEX. 597 Chillian wallah, Battle of, i. 578. China money in revenue, i. 105. China, first war with, i. 105, 106 ; (see Opium War), war of 1857, 581 ; war resumed and ended 1858, ii. 49, 50 ; war of 1860, 93, 122. China, case of Lorcha Arrow, i. 541-555. Cholera, threatened in 1866, ii. 262. Chupatties, the, i. 582. Church of England, movement in, i. 131, 132. Church of Scotland, movement in, i. 137; Dissentions in, 137-141 ; the Strathbogie case, 139 ; Dr. Chalmers, 140-142 ; Free Church, 142. Church Patronage Act, ii. 489. Cicero in Verreni, quoted by Cockburn, 317, 318. Circassians, associations in London to aid, ii. 41. Civis Roman us, speech of Lord Palmerston, 315-317. Clarence, Duke of, afterward William IV., i. 2. Clarendon, Lord, and Treaty of Kutchuk Kainanlji, i. 440; Foreign Secretary, 1865, ii. 229 ; Foreign Secretary 1868, 394 ; death of, 442, 444. Clay, Rev. John, eminent prison chaplain, i. 558. Clay, Rev. Walter, on transportion, i. 558. Clayden, P. W., his " Lord Beaconsfield " quoted, ii. 488. Cleburne, "Pat," ii. 313. Clerkenwell Explosion, ii. 322. Clicquot, King, i. 459. ('live, Lord, i. 155 ; proposed monument to, ii. 22. Clonmel, trial of Irish State prisoners at, i. 71. Clontarf meeting, i. 186, 302. Clough, Arthur, i. 528. Clyde, Lord, formerly Sir Colin Campbell, announces end of Mutiny, ii. 21. Coalition Ministry, i. 409, 415-417 ; fall of, 486. Cobden, Richard, contests Stockport, i. 23 ; and Sir Robert Peel, 29 ; less extreme a Radical than Lord Durham, 71 ; challenged, 100 ; first time in House of Commons, 130 ; attacks on, 173 ; tribute to, 175 ; his oratory, 216 ; career and character, 215, 219 ; Free Trade movement, 239 ; the Apostle of Common Sense, 217 ; and Bright, 219; and O'Connell, 221; first speech in Parliament quoted, 225 ; the would-be Russell Ministry of 1845, 239 ; de- feated, 245 ; accused by Peel of threatening assassination, 260 ; Coercion Hill, 261 ; tribute to, by Peel, 262; Pacifico case, 313; on Cockbum's speech, 318; opposes Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 338; and Crimean War, 464; the Lorcha Arrow, 550-651 ; un- seated, 558 ; on Bright's farewell address in 1857, 551 ; in Opposi- tion, ii. 56 ; declines appointment, 89 ; wrongly supposed to be more moderate than Bright, 90; only once votes different!; from Bright,///.; French Treaty, 97 ; RefornJ Bill, 1860, 111; American War, 139 ; and North, 164; and war, 171 ; French Treaty, 1(18 , last speech, 201! ; death of, 207 , mentioned, 231 ; and Russell, 271 ; and Board of Trade, 394 ; a friend of Sumner, 443. Cochrane, removed from House of Commons, ii. 62; death of, 429 ; plan for destroying Sevastopol, 130. 59S INDEX. Cock bum and Pacifico case, speech, i. 317-318 ; Jamaica, ii. 248 ; and Gordon, 252 ; Jamaica trial, 253, 259; and Geneva Convention, 449, 450. Colburne, Sir John, Council in Canada, Nominated by, i. 45. Colenso, Bishop, ii. 491. Coleridge, S. T.j and the postal system, i. 60; mentioned, 506. Collier, Sir Robert, on Alabama, ii. 151; appointment of, to new Court of Appeal, 453. Collieries' Commission, i. 193, 194. Collingwood, ii. 130. Colonels, the French, ii. 41. Colonies, ii. 345-359. Commerce, panic of, 1866, ii. 262. Commons, House of, abandons decision of election petitions, ii. 365, 366. Commune, the, and English Republicanism, ii. 457, 458. Compound householder, ii. 299. Comte, Auguste, ii. 559-571. Condon, or Shore, and Manchester rescue, ii. 319; pardoned, 321. Condorcet, phrase of, ii. 233. Confederation of the Empire, scheme for, ii. 354, 355. Confederation of the North American Provinces, ii. 345. Congress of Paris, i. 499. Conolly, Captain, killed in Bokhara, i. 170. Conservatism, the newest thing in politics, i. 31. "Conservative," first use of the word to describe the Tory party, i. 23. Consort, Prince (see Albert). "Conspiracy to Murder" Bill, ii. 44,45. Constantine, his journey from York to Rome, compared with Peel's journey from Rome to London, ii. 556. Convict system, i. 562, 563. Conyngham, Marquis of, i. 4-6. Co operation, History of, ii. 338-345. Cooke, Mr., and electric telegraph, i. 54. Cooper, Thomas, description of Feargus O'Connor in his "Autobio- graphy," i. 75, 76; anecdote told by, 80; his sufferings in prison, 81. Copyright question i. 199. Corneille, quoted, i. 158, 159. Corn Laws, the, i. 206, 263; sliding scale, 207; ves.ad interests, 208, Young England party, 209; Anti-Corn Law Association, 211; Manchester movement, 211, 212, O'Connell, 212, the propaganda of Free Trade, 213; Villiers, 213, Cobden, 215 , Bright, 218; W. J. Fox and Milner Gibson, 221; dignitv of agitation, 221, 222, Macaulay and Free Trade, 223, 224, Peel, 224, 229, the Irish famine, 229-231; Russell's conversion, 233, Peel's determination to repeal Corn Laws, 235; the announcement in the limes, 236; Peel's resignation, ib.\ withdrawn, 239; Peel's explanation 243; the debate, 253; Bill carried, 259; Corn Laws suspended, 270. Cornwall, Barry (see Proctor). Corry, Mr., ii. 297. "Costermonger's donkey," ii. 299. Cottenham, Lord, i. 189. INDEX. 599 Coup d'etat, the, i. 374, 379. Cowen, Joseph, speech of, on Queen's titles, ii. 511. Cowley, Lord, i. 435; and Walewski's despatch, ii. 46; France and Austria, 77. Craik, Mrs., ii. 582. Crampton, Mr., sent from Washington, i. 504. Cranbourne (see (Veil, Lord Robert); Indian Secretary, ii. 278; resigns, 21)4; and Reform Bill, 297; leap in the dark, 304; Irish Church, 383 (see Salisbury.) Cranbrook, Indian Secretary, ii. 534. Cranworth, Lord, and penal servitude, i. 564. Crawford, Mr. Sharman, and tenant-right, ii. 408. Crete, insurrection in, ii. 514. Crimean War — Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, i. 437; England's Ulti- matum, 455; causes of the war, 456; popular in England, 464; the Peace Society, 465, 466; Silistria, 468; Ciurgevo, ib.; invasion of Crimea, 470; Alma, 471; the Special Correspondent, 474, 475; suffering of the army, 470; Russia sinks her ships, 477: Balak- lava. 477; Inkermann, 478, 479; Napier, 480; anger against Prince Consort, 481; the gloomy winter, 482; Florence Nightingale, 484; Sebastopol, 484, 485; Roebuck's motion, 485, 486; fall of Ministry, 487, 488; Palinerstnii Premier, 488; peace negotiations, 490; death of Czar, 492 ; Vienna Conference, 492; Russell re- signs, 494; visit of the Emperor and Empress of French to England, ib.; death of Raglan, 495; the Tchernaya, 496; fall of Sebastopol, 498; Ears, ib.; Congress of Paris, 499; the foreign legions, 503; lessons of the war, 503; results of the war, 505; Cochrane's plan for destroying Sebastopol, ii. 130. Crofton, Sir Walter, his ticket- of -leave Bystem, i. 565. Croker, John Wilson, christens the Tory the "Conservative" party, i. 23; and Cochrane, ii. 130. Cromwell, Oliver, and the women of Wexford, i. 184; from Irish and English points of view, ii. 377. Cross, Mr. (afterward Sir Richard), Home Secretary, 1874, ii. 487; and Artisan's Dwellings Bill, 500; and foreign policy of Covern- ment, 545. Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of (afterward King of Hanover), i. 10, 11. Cunard line established, i. 57. Curran, on Irish discontents, ii. 308. Custody of Infants Rill, i. 118. Cyprus, occupied by England, ii. 540. Dahlmann, Frederick, i. 12. Daily Neirs. and Irish University Education, ii. 478; and Bulgaria, 520, and (Jladstone, 541. Daily Telegraph, started, ii. 102. Kalliousie, Lord, his career as Covernor-Oeneral of India, i. 577, 578; death of, ii. 206. Dalling, Lord, on Palmerston's dismissal, i. 382. Dalmatia, Duke of (Marshal Soult). i. 8-9. Damascus, l>ruse and Maronite feud at, ii. 123, 124. Dante, ii. 78. 600 INDEX Danton, prophecy of, i. 322. Danube, navigation of, and Congress of Paris, i. 500. Danubian Principalities, i. 430, 460; and Congress of Paris, 502. Dardanelles, question of, i. 461, 462; and Treaty of Paris, 505. Darwin, Charles, i. 508; ii. 558. Davis, Jefferson, President of the Southern Confederation, i. 372; ii. 131; and letters of marque, 132; captured, 161; Gladstone and, 164; Times and, 166. Davis, J. C. B., and Washington Commission, ii. 446. Davis, Thomas, the Irish nationalist poet, i. 290. Deasy, Fenian, rescue of, ii. 319. Debt, national, and Crimean War, i. 503. Defoe, Daniel, his "Colonel Jack," i. 557. Deir-el-Kamer, massacre at, ii. 127. Delhi, i. 571; siege of, 589, 590; capture of, ii. 13; murder of the princes, by Hodson, 14, 15; King of, transported, 21. Demosthenes, i. 537; argument of, ii. 170; essential characteristic of his oratory, 209; on the policy of the Athenians, 240. Denman, Lord, and O'Connell trial, i. 189. Denmark, Prince William George of, made King of Greece, ii. 75; and Schleswig-Holstein question, 187; war with Austria and Prussia, 189; and Russell, 274. Derby, Edward, late Earl of, character of, 24, 25; unsuccessful at- tempt to form a Ministry, 341; his first Administration in 1852, 394, 395; and Protection, 398; fails to form a Ministry, 488; his motion condemning the proceedings of the British authorities in China, 549; on Palmerston, the " true Protestant," 555; failure of his Indian Bill, ii. 28; mentioned, 35, his new Administration, 52; contrasted with Lord Stanley, 55; drops Conspiracy Bill, 55; and Disraeli's Reform Bill, 79; fall of Ministry. 87; against re- peal of Paper Duty, 103; American Union, .163; Garibaldi, 202; and Argyll, 235; mentioned, 275; forms a new Ministry in 1866, 276; mentioned, 283; and reform, 287; " leap in the dark," 304; Manchester prisoners, 319; illness and resignation, 361, and Irish Church, 387, 397; his last speech in the House of Lords against the second reading of the Irish Church Bill, 402, his death, ib.; character and career, 402. Derby, Lord, Foreign Secretary, 1874, ii. 487, and Suez Canal, 507; and Herzegovina, 514, and Andrassy Note, 517; and Berlin Memorandum, 519; and European Conference, 528; anxious to Tesign, 532; and Russia, 533, and San Stefano treaty, ib.; resigns, 534. Devonshire, Duke of, i. 352. Dickens, Charles, i. 75 ; as a reporter, 176; on O'Connell, ib. ; his " Old Curiosity Shop," 281 ; his renown, 509 . unequaled success of, 530, compared with Thackeray, 531; incident in one of his stories, ii. 221 ; on Governor Eyre and the Jamaica Rebellion, 255; his denunciation of public executions, 364 ; death of, 411 ; influence of, 412 ; his burial in Westminster Abbey, ib. Diderot in Russia, l. 421. Dilke, Sir Charles, and Republicanism, ii. 457 ; and Arch, 463. Dilkoosha, palace of, ii. 17. Dillon, J. B., i. 298 ; ii. 215. INDEX. 601 Dillwyn, Mr. , his motion respecting the Irish Church, ii. 203. Diogenes and his tub, ii. 76. Disraeli, Benjamin (afterward Earl of Beaconsfield), i. 22; first time in Parliament, 24 ; on Sheil's eloquence, 29, .5.0 ; his novel of "Sybil, or the Two Nations," 81 ; his challenge to O'Connell, 100 ; and education grant, 120 ; on Dr. Newman's secession, 135 ; on O'Connell's eloquence, 176; his description of O'Connell's last speech in Parliament, 192 ; his denunciations of Sir Robert Peel 207 ; and Free Trade, 228 ; educating his party, ib. ; his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," quoted, on Corn Law League in 1845, 233; his "Coningsby," quoted, 236; on Peel and O'Connell as speakers, 243 ; his reply to Peel, 243 ; first success of, ib. ; enters Parliament, 1837, ib. ; "Vivian Grey," 245 ; letter to W. J. Fox on sedition, ib. ; change from Radicalism to Conservatism, 246; his maiden speech in the House of Commons, ib. ; becom- ing conspicuous, 249 ; his controversy with O'Connell, 249, 250 ; his savage personal attacks upon Peel, 252, 256, 269 ; becomes Tory leader, 252 ; his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," quoted, on the opportune, 252 ; on Canning, 254 ; on Prince Consort, 257; on Coercion Bill, 261 ; and Bentinck, 270 ; on Peel, 321 ; his letter on the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, 334 ; his opinion of Lord John Russell's Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 338; his agricultural distress motion, the last spasmodic cry of Pro- tection, 340 ; " there was a Palmerston," 382 ; accepts office as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby, 393 394, ; his financial statement, 396, 397; abandons Protection, 397, 398; Budget of 1852, 406 ; debate on, 408 ; resigns, ib. ; Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, 437 ; on coalitions, 487 ; and leadership of House, 488 ; indignant question of, 493 ; opposed to Ministry, 494 ; his novels, 538; his Budget speeches contrasted with G. C. Lewis', 542 ; Lorclia Arrow, 550 ; his taunts to Lord Palmerston, 552 ; on the Indian Mutiny, 586 ; his speech at Slough, ii. 27 ; mentioned, 35 ; his change of attitude in regard to the Conspiracy Bill, 44, 49; Chancellor of the Exchequer again, 52 ; want of debating power in Ministry, 55 ; his Jewish descent and sympathies, 56 ; his "Life of Lord George Bentinck," quoted, upon the .lews, ib ; on Lytton s oratory, 69 ; tries his hand at a Reform Bill, 79-83 ; the attempt a complete failure, 83 ; correct estimate of power of Bright, 80 ; and Sir James Graham, 87 ; French invasion scare, 94 ; on a division in the Lords, 106; on Lord John Russell's Reform Bill, 112; and American War, 165 ; moves a vote of censure on Lord Palmer- ston's Government, 192; his tribute to Cobden 206 ; address to the electors of Buckinghamshire, 211; on Parliament of 1865, 215; and Gladstone, 232 ; his ••Revolutionary Epick," 288 ; and Jamaica, 255 ; ami Reform Bill, 266 ; Chancellor of the Exche- quer and leader of the House of Commons, 27S ; Hyde Park riots, 279 ; engaged in educating his party, 283 ; and reform, 287 ; his Reform Resolutions, 288 ; the Ten Minutes Bill, 292 ; the new Bill, 295 ; Whig clothes, 305 ; educating his party, 361 ; speech al Edinburgh, :'><>(> ; his "Vivian Grey,"quoted, 861 ; invited to form a Government on Lord Derby's retirement, 368 ; Prime Minister, 363; F. II. Hill upon, ib.; Ministerial changes, 602 INDEX. 363 ; astonishing burst of eloquence on Abyssinian expedition, 372 ; Irish Church, 384 ; dissolves Parliament, 386 ; on Lowe's election for University of London, 387 ; his resignation of office, 393 ; his speeches against the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, 397; and Dr. Magee, 399; and Irish Land Act 411; and abolition of army purchase, 422 ; and rural laborers, 461 ; on the stump, 471 ; and Home Rule, ib. ; and Irish University scheme, 479 ; sent for, but declines to take office, 481 ; the new- Ministry, 487; Public Worship Bill, 489, 493; and Plimsoll, 493 ; his phrase, " there was a Palmerston," alluded to, 502 ; and the East, 503 ; confronted with Gladstone, 504 ; ambitious ideas, 505; "spirited foreign policy," 506; and Suez Canal, 507 ; and South Africa, 509 ; and India, 509 ; and Empress of India title, 510 ; and Russia, 513 ; and Bulgarian massacres, 520 ; made Lord Beaconsfield % 523 (see Beaconsfield). Divorce Act, the, i. 505. Don Quixote, ii. 182. Dost Mohammed, i. 144 ; chararcter of, ib. ; English distrust of, 145 ; and Burnes, 146 ; Lord Auckland and, 147 ; defeated, 150; sur- render of, 151 ; restored to the throne of Cabul, 172. Doyle, Richard, and Punch, i. 540. Draper, Dr., his "History of the American Civil War," quoted, on Trent affair, ii 143; on Prince Albert, 147. Drouyn de Lhuys. M., the French Ambassador, his withdrawal from London, i. 309. Drummond, Mr. Edward Peel's secretary, assassinated, i. 260. Druses and Maronites, ii. 123. Dueling, abolition of, i. 99, 100. Dufferin, Lord, sent out to the Lebanon as English Commissioner, ii. 126 ; and 1868 Ministry, 395. Duffy, Charles Cavan, prosecuted, i. 188 ; Prime Minister of Victoria, 300 "Dukes," the, ii. 230,263. Duncannon, Lord, member of Lord Durham's Reform Committee, i. 42. Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby, i. 31 ; and Mazzina's letters, 200 ; motion to allow Baron Rothschild to sit on a Committee, ii. 65. Dundonald (see Cochrane). Dunkellin, Lord, ii. 271. Dunn, John, and Zulu War, ii. 552. Durham, Lord (John (ieorge Lambton), his manifesto to the electors cf Sunderland, i. 15; on French and English Canadians, 35 ; chosen to go to Canada, 39 ■ character of, 39 ; his speech on the Reform Bill, 41 ; his dictatorship of Canada, 43, 44 ; quarrel with Brougham, 48 ; called " Lord High Seditioner," by Times, 49; defended by J. S. Mill^ 49; death of, 51, 52; an extreme Reformer, 71 ; mentioned, 82 ; ii. 348. Eastern Question, the, i. 417-427, Nicholas and England, 427-434 ; holy places, 434 ; Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, 437 ; Russian armies cross the Pruth, 440 ; Vienna Note, 442, 443 ; Sinope, 451-453 ; Crimean War, 457, 498 ; the Congress of Paris, 499-502 ; sup- posed settlement of, 541 ; Eastern Question "again," ii. 513; INDEX. 603 Danubian principalities, 514 ; Greek and Slav, ib. ; Herzegovina rising, 515 ; Andrassy Note, 517 ; Berlin Memorandum, 518 ; Salonica, 519 ; death of Abdul Aziz, ib.; Bulgarian insurrection, 519;- Servian War, 526; European Conference, proposed, 527 ; Russian War, 529 ; the Jingoes, 530 ; the English fleet, 531 ; Russia and Constantinople, 532 ; San Stefano treaty, 532 ; the Indian troops, 534 ; the Berlin Congress, 535 ; secret treaties, 539. East India Company, charter of, with China, i. 108 ; force of, in Cavvnpore, ii. 1 ; extinction of, 28 ; protest and opposition, 32. Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, i. 326-335; introduced, 336 ; debates on, 339 ; its only practical result,341 ; resumption on, 342 ; passed, 343 ; repealed, ib.; mentioned, 398 ; and Russell, ii. 274; repeal of, 432. Echo, on Gladstone, ii. 541. Edinburgh, Macaulay elected for, i. 399 ; Presbytery of, and Lord Palmerston, 447. Education, national, and Melbourne Ministry, i. 118, 119. Education Bill, ii. 413. Egypt, and Turkey, i. 125-127; and Czar Nicholas, 430; Viceroy of, visits England, ii. 360 ; and Suez Canal, 507. Elections, General, 1837, i. 23-31 ; 1841, 130 ; 1847, 280 ; 1852, 397; 1857, 552 ; 1859, ii. 84 ; 1865, 211 ; 1868, ii. 288 ; ii. 387 ; 1874, 482 ; 1880, 555. Electric telegraph, i. 54. Elgin, Lord, and Canning, i. 587 ; envoy during China war, ii. 35 ; 51 ; and the Treaty of Tientsin, 116 ; in China, 119 ; justifica- tion of, 121 ; death*, 206. Eliot, George, as a poet, ii. 576 ; as a novelist, 577. Elizabeth, Fronde's portrait of, ii. 569. Ellenborough, Lord, Governor-General of India, i. 166; character of, 168 ; grandiose phrases of, 169 ; ami gates of Somnauth, 171 ; proclamation of, ib. ; the annexation of Scinde, 201 ; despatch to Lord Canning, ii. 24; his resignation, 25, and Derby's India Bill, 29 ; Indian Secretary, 52 ; his passionate appeal^rfr Poland, lis. El lice, Edward, and Hudson's Hay Company, ii. 349. Elliot, Captain, and the opium trade with China, i. 112. Elliott, Ebenezer, 1 1 1 « - Corn Law Poet, i* 76, 77. Elliott, Sir II., ii. 526; transferred to Vienna, 530. Elphinstone, General, i. 152, 153; accepts Akbar Khan's terms, Hi:'. ; death of, 169. Emanuel, Victor, ii. 95 ; visit to England, 96. Emerson, R. W., saying of, ii. 279. Enfantin, Pere, ii. 97. Enfield rifle, i. 570. Esterhazy, Prince, his diamonds, i. 9. Eugenie, Empress, visit to London, i. 494 ; her invention of crinoline, ii. 167. Evangelicals and public worship, ii. 491. Evans, Sir de Lacy, ii. 212. 419. Evelyn, John, saying of, ii, 169. Ewald, the < Irientalist, i. 12. 604 INDEX Ewelme case, ii. 453. Executions in public abolished, ii. 364. Exeter, Bishop of, Lord Durham's attack on, i. 41. Exeter, Conservative victory at, ii. 482. Exhibition, the Great, i. 318, 344, 856; 1862, ii. 167. Eyre, Edward John, Governor of Jamaica, suspended from his functions, ii. 246 ; character and career of, 249; his proclamation of martial law, 250; prosecuted, 258. Factories Act, the, i. 124, 194, 195, 446. Fantome, H.M.S., and Greek Government, i. 307. Faraday, Michael, i. 507, 508. Farquhar, his " Beau Stratagem," ii. 35. Fawcett, Mr., and abolition of purchase, ii. 422; and Republicanism, 459; and abolition of tests in Dublin University, 481; and Plini- soll, 499. Fenian movement, the, ii. 39, 308; antiquity of the name, 310; Gladstone and, 380; Mr. Maguire and, 382. Field, Cyrus W., his plan for constructing an electric telegraph line underneath the Atlantic, i. 544; ii. 284. Fielding, Henry, i. 531. Finlay, Mr., the historian of Greece, his claim for compensation, against the Greek Government, i. 306. Fish, Hamilton, and Washington Commission, ii. 446; and indirect claims, 448. Fitzgerald, Seymour, ii. 241. Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, ii. 308. Florida, the, ii. 148. Florida, the, and Geneva Convention, ii. 448. Forbes, Archibald, war correspondent of the Daily News, i. 475. Foreign Enlistment Act, i. 503. Forster, W. E., recognition of Southern Confederacy, ii. 133; on Alabama, 150; becomes Under-Secretary for the Colonies, 229; a good debater, 234 ; in 1868 Ministry, 395 ; Education Bill, 413 ; and Ballot Bill, 425, 429; and Liberal leadership, 503. Fortescue, Chichester, Irish Secretary, ii. 229 ; and Irish Land tenure, 408. Fowke, Captain, ii. 167. Fox, Charles James, and Russell, i. 28; a friend of W. H. Lambton, 39; on Canadian separation, 51; and Catherine of Russia, 421; on India, ii. 29; Irish rebellion of 1798, 252; and Russell, 274; from Irish and English points of Ireland ought to be governed by 407, 502. Fox, William Johnson, i. 221; letter of Disraeli to, 245. France and Tahiti, i. 202, 203; in 1848, 303; Pacifico case, 304-310; coup d'etat, 374; ambassador recalled, 309, 379, 380; Russia, 421; Holy Places, 434; Crimea, 468-479, 495, 496; Congress of Paris, 499; Treaty with England and Sweden, 501; China, ii. 49; Austria and Italy, 77; commercial treaty with England, 97; Lebanon, 126: sympathy with Southern States, 138; Polish insurrection, 178; and the plebiseitt , 411; war with Prussia, 413, 434; the Republic, 456; and Andrassv Note, 517; Franchise and Reform Bill, 1866, ii. 262, 265. view, 377 ; his principle that Irish ideas, 391; mentioned, INDEX. 605 Francis, John, bis attempt on the Queen's life, i. 101, 102 Franking abolished, i. 57, 58. Franklin, Sir John, last expedition of, i. 206. Frederick William of Prussia, marriage of, to Princess Victoria, ii 35. Free Trade (see Corn Laws), i. 46, 129; and O'Connell, 180; Sir Robert Peel and the Corn Law, 206, 228; Derby and, 393-390, Villier's Resolution, ii. 404; and Gladstone, 413. Freeman, ii. 566. Frere, Sir Bartle, and Afghan War, ii 549; and South Africa, 549 552. Friendly Societies Act, ii. 343. Frost, John, outbreak of, i. 77, 78 Froude, Richard Hurrell, i 132. Froude, J. A. and South Africa, ii 509; style as historian, 567. Fuad Pasha, ii. 126. Gallenga and Mazzini, ii 238 Garibaldi, and Gladstone's Neapolitan protest, i. 416; association in London in aid of, ii. 41; English admiration for, 96; his visit to England, 201 Gamp, Mrs., allusion to, ii. 499. Gandamak, Treaty of, ii. 546. Garrison, W L , breakfast to, ii. 274. Gaskell, Mrs. her writings, i. 536. Gavazzi, Father, his lectures against the Papacy, i 334 Genesis, passage in, i. 199 Geneva, Convention of, i. 484; ii 447 Genlis, Madame de, i. 321. George III., King, i. 2. George, IV., i. 8, 12. German Emperor, and Washington Treaty, i 205; and Exhibition, of 1851, 351; and San Juan Question, ii 450. Gervinus, i. 12 GLiunzee taken, i 171. Gibbon, quoted, i 510-512. Gibraltar, a temporary convict settlement, i 563. Gibson, Milner, and Free Trade, i. 221 ; and Lorcha Arrow, i. 553; his amendment to the second reading of the Conspiracy Bill, ii. 48; accepts office under Lord Palmerston, 90; and North, 164 ; defeated, General Election, 1868, 388. "Gil Bias," ii. 344, 412. Giurgevo, repulse at i. 468. Gladstone, William Ewart, i. 24, 29, 30; on Sheil as a speaker. 30, 89; and education grant, 119, 129; on Dr. Newman's pulpit style, 133; on the preaching and accent of Dr. Chalmers, 146 ; Irish Land Act, 196 ; his objection to the Maynooth grant, 197; Secretary of State for the Colonies. 340; ami Peelite party, 245; his attack an Lord Palmerston's policy, 315; on the death of Peel, 319, 411; Ecclesiastical Titles Act, :;:'.s. 339; his protest against the Ecclesiastical Titles Hill, 848; and Kossuth, 868; Ins reply to Mr Disraeli, 408; commencement of their long rivalry, ib. ; his early career, 409, 410; his oratory, 411-413; ->or, INDEX. his gradual conversion to Liberalism, 415, and Neapolitan question, 416: bis many-sidedness, ib. ; Treaty of Kutcbuk Kainardji, 437, 438 ; bis feelings on war, 467; bis resistance to Mr. Roebuck's Motion of Inquiry, 485, 486; resigns, 490; bis budget speeches contrasted with those of Sir G. Lewis, 542 ; Lorcha Arrow case, 551; his opposition to the Divorce Bill, 555; suspends transportation, 558; Conspiracy to Murder Bill, ii. 48, 55, 70; his rnisson to the Ionian Islands, 71; and Disraeli's Reform Bill, 84: Chancellor of tbe Exchequer, 88; and Frencb ' treaty, 97; undertakes the abolition of the Paper Duty, 102; his condemnation of the conduct of tbe Lords in throwing out tbe measure, 110; bis rash statement respecting tbe Confederate States, 148, 163; correspondence with Palmerston on war, 171; his attraction toward Advanced Liberalism, 194, 200; ominous utterance of, respecting tbe Irish Church, 203; on the early death of some of bis colleagues, 206; defeated at Oxford and returned for South Lancashire, 216; leader of the House of Commons, 231; face to face with Disraeli, 232; his sensitive earnestness of temper, ib ; attack on, by Lord R. Cecil, 243; introduces a new Reform Bill, 263; beauty and power of his voice, 267; Reform, 269; resigns, 271; Reform, 276; Liberal meeting at house of, 298; and tea room party,. 299; and Cairns, Amendment, 301; Hudson's Bay Company, 351; on new legisla tion for Ireland, 380; declares his opinion that the Irish Cburcb, as a State institution, must cease to exist, 382; proposes a series of Resolutions on tbe subject, 383 ; defeated in South Lan casbire and elected Member for Greenwicb, 387; and Ireland's tbree difficulties, 391; sent for, 393; and Irish Church Disestab- lisbment, 395. and Irisb Land land system, 403; Irish Land Bill, 409: reforms, 412; Education Bill, 413; and Army Purchase, 418, and Ballot, 425; reaction against, 451; Collier case, 453; Ewelme case, 453; liquor interest, ib.; and Dilke and repub- licanism, 457; and rural francbise, 466; and Irish Protestants, 472; and Home Rule, 472: and University Education in Ireland, 475' resigns, 480; return to office, 481; as First Lord of Treasury and Cbancellor of Exchequer, 482; dissolves Parliament, 482; retires from leadership, 488; and Public Worship Bill, 493; polemical period, 501; contrasted with Disraeli, 504; and Bui garia, 522: and Turkey, 534; and Cyprus, 540; unpopoularity of, 541- dissolution of Parliament, 554; sent for, becomes Prime Minister. 556 Glenelg, Lord. i. 51 Globe, tbe, aud secret treaty, ii. 540. Gloucester, Duchess of, 335. Hodericb, Lord, i 394. Godkin, Mr James, on the condition of Ireland, ii. 404. Godwin's "Caleb Williams," i. 536. Goetbe, quoted i. 132, 504; ballad of, quoted 523; saying of, ii. 55, 565, 571 Goldsmith, Oliver, on Burke, i. 415; his comedy of "She Stoops to Conquer," 451 Goojerat, battle of, i 578 Guidon, George William, and tbe Jamaica rebellion, ii. 245; charac- ter, of, 251 ; trial and execution of, 252. INDEX. 607 Gorham Case and Cardinal Manning, i. 136. Gorrie, Mr., and Jamaica Commission, ii. 246 Gortschakoff, Prince, i. 456; and Malakoff, 496; bis reply to Lord Russell, ii. 182. (ioscken, Mr., becomes Vice President of tbe Board of Trade, ii. 230; and Liberal leadership, 503. Gosford, Lord, and Canadian rebellion, i. 36. Gdttingen, University of, dismissal of tbe seven Professors of, by tbe King of Hanover, i. 11, 12. Gougb, Lord, and Sikh war, 202; defeat at C'billianwallab, victory of (Joojerat, 578. Ooulburn, Mr., and penny post, i. 63; one of Peel's executors, 319. Grabam, Sir .lames, i. 42, 111, 113; Home Secretary, 130; bis opening of Mazzini's letters, 200, 201; on opening of ports, 232; one of tbe Peelites, 246, 264; opposes Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, 336, 342; Napier dinner, 481; resigns, 490; and Canning's despatcb, ii. 27; Conspiracy Bill, 50, 55; passage of arms with Mr Disraeli, 87; death of, 231. "Grande Ducbesse," quoted, i. 409. Grant, Sir Hope, and Indian Mutiny, ii. 19;Cbina war, 119. Grant, Sir .1. P , sent to Jamaica after Eyre, ii. 259. Grant, Mr. Robert (see Jews, emancipation of). Grant, U. S., takes Vicksburg, ii. 158; and Alabama claims, 442; and indirect Alabama claims, 448. Granville, Lord, succeeds Palmerston i. 379; ii. 27; invited by tbe Queen to form a Ministry, 87; tbe attempt unsuccessful, 88; Bed River settlement, 351; Colonial Secretary, 394; and Black Sea Question, 438; Foreign Secretary. 442; and Mr. (iladstone's resig- nation of leadership, 488; on situation of Turkey 518; sent for, 556. Clrattan, i. 14; bis description of Burke, ii. 221; saying of, 381. Gray, Sir John, prosecuted, i. 188. Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, i. 344-356. Great Western, Transatlantic voyage, i. 55. Greece, and Pacifico case, i. 305-310; and Turkey, 420; and Nicholas 430,441; English sympathy with, in 1820, ii. 41; overthrow of Otho, 75; and Ionian Islands, ih. ; consulate of, at Damascus, destroyed, 123; massacre of Englisb tourists by brigands, 411; and Slaws, 515; and Berlin treaty, 536. Greek Church and holy places, i. 434. Green .1. R., mistake of, respecting O'Connell's trial, in bis "Sbort History," i. 19(1; bis style as an historian, ii 566. Greenwood, P., and Suez ('anal Shares, ii. 508. Gretna Green, marriage of Lord Durham, at, i. 40; marriages made illegal, 567. Greville, Mr., his description of Queen Victoria's behavior on her accession, i.5-7, 12; on Lord Palmerston, 21. Grey, Colonel, opponent to Mr. Disraeli at Wycombe, ii. 862. Grey, Lord, i. 1, 40, 41, -I*; and Free Trade, 238; Colonial Secretary, 263; and ticket of leave system. 564. Grey, SiT George, Home Secretary, i. 263; on the ticket of-leave 'system, 55S-564; .Maoris, ii. 174; Habeas Corpus (Ireland), 306. 608 INDEX Grimm, Jacob, i. 12. Gros, Baron, ii. 51, 119. Grote, George, i. 24, 31; and Ballot, ii. 426. Guizot, M., i. 9; and Egypt, 127; and Tahiti, 202, 203; liis Spanish marriage project, 274, 275. Gurney, Russell, Recorder of London, ii. 246; and Public Worship BUI, 490. Habeas Corpus Act, suspended in Ireland, ii. 306, 307. •'Hajji Baba," ii. 2-3. llakem, Druse chief and saint, ii. 123 Hall, Sir Benjamin, afterward Lord Hanover, and Jewish claims, ii. 61. Hamid, Sultan of Turkey, ii. 520. Hamilton, attempts life of Queen, i. 103. Hanover, King of (see Cumberland). Hanover, ex-King of, i. 372. Hansard and Stockdale case, i. 122, 123. Harcourt, Sir W. , and Public Worship Bill, ii. 494; and Liberal leadership, 502. Hardinge, Lord, i. 577. Hardy, Gathorne (afterward Lord Cranbrook), returned for Oxford University in place of Mr. Gladstone, ii. 216; described, 241; his defense of the Irish Church, 384, 398; War Secretary, 1874, 487; and Public Worship Bill, 494; on Cowen's speech, 511: Indian Secretary, and made Lord Cranbrook, 534. Hardy, Thomas, ii. 582. Harley, his description of a famous speech, i. 411 Haroun al Raschid, i. 426. Harrison, Frederick, on Republicanism, ii. 457. Hartington, Marquis of, ii. 86; elected for Radnor Burghs, 387; and 1868 Ministry, 395; and Ballot, 429; and Liberal leadership, 502; sent for, 556. Harvey, W. W„ and Rectory of Ewelme, ii. 453. Hastings, Lady Flora, i. 90. Hastings, Warren, i. 47, 367; ii. 22, 260. Hatherley, Lord, becomes Lord Chancellor, 395; resignation of, 476. ITatteras, the, and Alabama, ii. 149 Havelock, Henry, assists Canning, i. 587; his march upon Cawnpore, ii. 10; makes bis way to the relief of Lucknow, 16; death of, 17; his career and character, 17, 18. Hay, Sir John, on Ashantee war of 1863, ii. 176. Head, Sir Francis, his Governorship of Upper Canada, i. 37, 38; ii. 384. Heber, Bishop, ii. 22. Helen, Archduchess, i. 429. Hennessy, John Pope, and Poland, ii. 179. Henley, Mr. i., 394; Pres. Board of Trade, ii. 52; resigns, 82; and Irish Land Act, 410. Henry VIII., Froude's picture of, ii. 567 Herat and Persia, i. 144-146, 149, 150, 581. Herbert, Auberon, and Republicanism, ii. 459; and Arch movement, 468. INDEX. 600 Herbert, Sidney (afterward Lord Herbert of Lea), on opening ports, i. 232; and Peelites, 24(5; and Pacifico case, 312; and Peelites, 341; and Florence Nightingale, 4N4; oiYered otiice by Lord Derby, 488; declines office, 490 Lorcba Arrow, 541; Conspiracy Bill, ii. 50 ; a first-class debater, 56; Willis Rooms meeting, 80; War Minister, 88; deatb of, 203; character and career, ib.;26\. Herodotus, i. 37; story told by, ii. 242. Henies, Mr., i. 394. Herschel, Sir Jobn, i. 507. Herzegovina, insurrection in, ii. 514. Hicks-Beach and Letellier case, ii. 353; Victoria deadlock, 356; Colonial Secretary, 534. Hill, F. H., author of "Political Portraits," ii. 362. Hill, Matthew Davenport, i. 59. Hill, Sir Rowland, the founder of the penny post, i. 59. Hill, Thomas Wright, father of Sir Rowland Hill, i. 59. Hoar, E. R., and Washington Commission, ii. 446. Hobhouse, John Cam, ii. 212. Hodgson, Colonel, pamphlet of, on "Influence of Priestly Caste in Army in Provoking Sedition," i. 573, 574. Hodson, of "Hodson's Horse," his summary execution of the princes of Delhi, ii. 14; death of, 19. Hogarth, William, his "Marcb to Finchley," i. 407. Holkar, Maharajah of Indore, ii. 20. Holland, consulate at Damascus destroyed, ii. 123. Hoi land, Sir II., death of, ii. 471. Ilolyoake, G. J., and Jingoes, ii. 531. Holy places, custody of the, i. 434-436; dispute settled, 440. Home Rule, ii. 472. Hood, Thomas, his "Song of the Shirt," quoted, i. 125. Hope, Admiral, ii. 116. Hope, Beresford, and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, i. 337. Horace, i. 17. Home, H. II., author of "Orion," i. 528. Horsman, on French treaty, ii. 99; on taxation, 109; Cave of Adullam, 270. Houghton, Lord, on tin- Duke of Argyll, ii. 234. Bouses, inhabited, duty on, i. 407. Household suffrage, ii. 298. Howick, afterward Karl Grey, on transportation committee, i. 558. Howlt'v, Dr., Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 4. Hudson's Hay Company, ii. 849. Hughes, Thomas, author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays," ii. 215. Hugo, Victor, on weathercock politicians, i. 416; on the anti-slavery movement in America, ii. !):',. Hume, Joseph, and Orange plot, i. 12; in Parliament of is:;;. 31; and Canada, ">*: and Lord Durham's opponents, 17, on Prince Albert's annuity, 96; on British Museum and National Gallery, 121. Hungary, in 1*48, i. 309; rebellion, 368; and Russia, 423; association in London in aid of. ii. 41. Hunt, Mr. Ward, and Westbury censure, ii. 210; Reform, 271; Chan- 610 INDEX. eel lor of the Exchequer, 363; First Lord of the Admiralty, 487; and paper navy, 488. Hutt, Mr., ii. 229. Huxley, Professor, i. 508; and Gordon murder, ii.258; and school boards 416; his writings, 562. Hyde Park, exhibition in, i. 344-356; meetings in, ii. 278, 303. Ibrahim Pasha, i. 125, 126. Inchiquin, Lord, brother to Smith O'Brien, i. 290. India and Russia, i. 424; mutiny, 568; the flight to Delhi, 571; causes of sedition, 573; anniversary of Plassey, 583; alarm in Calcutta, ib. ; Lord Canning, 584; ferocity in England, 585; Punjaub saved, 587; siege of Delhi, 588; death of Henry Lawrence, 590, 591; Cawnpore, ii. 1-13; Delhi taken, 14; Lucknow relieved, 16; death of Havelock, 17; Cawnpore taken and retaken, 19; Luck- now taken, 20; the Ranee of Jhansi, ib.; Taylerof Patna, 21; end of mutiny, ib.; Canning's proclamation, 23; Lord Ellenborough's despatch, 25; end of East India Company, 28; allusion to mutiny, 289. Infanticide in India, suppressed, i. 577. Ingelovv, Jean, ii. 574. Inglis, Sir R. H., on Queen's Colleges, i. 197; on Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 337. "Ingoldsby Legends," author of, on public executions, ii. 364. Inhabited Houses Duty, i. 407. Inkermann, i. 478. Ionian Islands, complaint in, i. 307; ii. 70, 72. Ireland, Clonmel trials, i. 71; famine, 230,231, 235, 240, 264-270; Coercion Bill, 261; Poor Laws modified, 270; Young Ireland, 289-302; refugees in America, 372; tenant-rigbt, 398; and Palmerston on tenant right, ii. 168; and Prince Gortsckakoff, 182; Irish Church, 375, 376; Gladstone's Resolutions, . 383-385; Church disestablished, 401; land system, 403; home rule, 471; university education, 475; abolition of test in Dublin University, 479.- Isabella of Spain, and Spanish marriages, i. 276; association in London in aid of, ii. 41. Italy, in 1848, i. 303; and Russia, 422; and Congress of Paris, 502; and Austria, ii. 78; war with Austria, 272; obtains Venice, 283; and Rome, 439; Andrassy Note, 517. Jackson, General, story of, ii. 44. Jamaica Bill, i. 82; passed, after a fashion, 83; Jamaica troubles, ii. 244, 245; slave system in, 247, 248; Morant Bay disturbances, 249; the Gordon case, 250; quotation from report of Commission- ers, 254; opinion in England, 254; report of Commissioners, 258; Jamaica trials, 259. James, Edwin, ii. 47. James, G. P. R., i. 539. Japan, and European civilization, i 108; war with, in 1863, ii. 176. Jecker claims, i. 304; ii. 160. Jeffrey, Lord, on O'Connell's eloquence, i. 176. Jellalabad taken, i. 151. INDEX. 611 Jenkins, Mr. Edward, ii. 463. Jerrold, Douglas, i. 540. Jerusalem, threatened French occupation of, i. 436. Jews, exclusion of, from municipal offices, removed, i. 198; attempt to admit to Parliament, 542; emancipation of, ii. 57. Jhansi, annexed, i. 578; Ranee of, her heroism and death, ii. 20. Jingo war song, ii. 531. John Company (see East India Company). John, Prince, of Denmark, ii. 190. Johnson, Reverdy, and Alahama claims, ii. 442. Johnson, Dr., and penny post, i. 64; on literal accuracy, ii, 312; mentioned, 374, 502. Joly M., and Letellier case, ii. 353. Jones, companion of Frost, i. 78. Jones, Ernest, i. 76; and'Chartisin, 288; defeated, General Election. 1868, ii. 389. Jones, Mason, defeated at General Election, 1868, ii. 389. Juarez, and Mexico, ii. 158-160. Jugdulluk Pass, i. 163. Juvenal, i. 541; ii. 305. Kagosima, bombardment of, ii. 176. Kars, i. 498, 499; taken, ii. 530. Kaye, Sir J. W., and Afghan war, i. 149, 154, 161; and Sepoy war, , 573; on Hodson's murder of the Delhi princes, ii. 15. Kean, Charles, and Anti Catholic agitation, i. 334. Kearsarge, the, and Alabama, ii. 150. Keats, i. 506. Keble, John, i. 132, 135. Kelly, Fenian prisoner, rescue of, ii. 319. Kemble, John Philip and "Vortigern andRowena," ii. 114. Kennin^ton Common, meeting on, i. 284. Kent, Duke of, i. 4, 7. Kent, Duchess of, i. 7. ' Kickham, James, ii. 316. Kin burn, capture of, i. 503. King, Locke, and County Franchise, i. 340; abolition of property qualification lor Parliament, ii. 68. Kinglake, on Cobden, and Bright, i. 220; and Nesselrode Memo- randum, 427; on holy places, 134; and Lord Stratford de Red- clilfe, 443; and Palmerston, 445; on Sinope massacre, 452; policy of English Government, 4. ; and suspension of Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland, 307; and Fenian prisoners, 319; on strikes, 335; defeated at West- minster, 387; on Thirl wall, 399; and Fawci tt, 422; and ballot, 428; death of, 470; on history, 478. Miller, Hugh, i. 508. Milton, Blight's fondness for, i. 21S; mentioned. 508. Minorities, representation of, ii. 301. 616 INDEX Mirabeau, i. 320; as drawn by Carlyle, 517; bis saying of bimself, ii. 216. Mitcbel, and Young Ireland, i. 291; and United Irishmen, 294; prosecution and transportation of, 295, 296; escapes, 300; career and deatb, 301; ii. 308, 457. Mobammed Ali, i. 125, 462. Moldavia and Congress of Paris, i. 500. Molesvvortb, Sir William, a Pbilosopbical Radical, i. 24; and Pacifico case, 312; Colonial Secretary, 494; and transportation, 55b; deatb of, ii. 55. Molesvvortb, Mr., reference to bis bistory, i. 90. Moliere, i. 405. Monck, Lord, Governor-General of Canada, ii. 349. Monroe doctrine, ii. 161. Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, and Governor Pitt's diamonds, i. 9. Montalembert, Count de, panipblet on Indian debate, ii. 27 ; and Poland, 179. Montaubftn, General, afterward Palikao, and Cbina war, 1860, ii. 119. Monteagle, Lord, Amendment to Paper Duty Repeal Bill, ii. 105. Montefiore, Mr., Jewisb Sberiff of London, i. 10. Montenegro and Herzegovinian insurrection, ii. 517 ; war witb Turkey, 525; and Berlin treaty, 536. Montgomery, Robert, saves Punjaub, i. 588. Montpensier, Dae de, and Spanisb marriages, i. 273, 274, 275. . Montreal, i. 31. Moore, Sir Jobn, i. 9. Moore, Tbomas, poem of, to Lord Jobn Russell, i. 27; bis friendsbip witb Russell, 334; mentioned, 507; and Lord Russell, ii. 274; Irish Cburcb, 375: and ballot 426. Morley, Jobn, ii. 573. Morning Star, started, ii. 104. Morpeth, Lord, afterward Lord Carlisle, i. 24 ; and Bedchamber question, 84. Morris, William, ii. 574. Morse, Professor, and electric telegraph, i. 54. Miiller, Max, ii. 564. Murad, Sultan of Turkey, ii. 520. Naas, Lord (afterward Lord Mayo), ii, 34; Irish Secretary, 1858, 49; and Irish Cburcb, 382; and Irish land tenure, 408. Nagpore, annexed, i. 578. Nana Sahib (see Cawnpore), Disraeli protests against his being made the model for English officers, i. 586; comes to aid Sir Hugh Wheeler at Cawnpore, ii. 2 ; his grievance, 2-3; very attentive to English visitors at Bitboor, 4; bis wrongs genuine, 5; advised not to merge bis cause in that of Delhi, 6; treachery of, to Cawnpore garrison, 7; orders massacre of tbe Englishwomen, 11; flight and disappearance of, and rumored capture untrue, 13; aided by the Ranee of Jhansi, 20. Napier, Charles, and Egyptian war, i. 128. 480. Napier, Sir Cbarles, wins battle of Meeanee, i. 201; declares thirty Bengal regiments ripe for revolt, 573. Napier, Sir William, i. 480, INDEX. 61 7 Napier, Lord, and Abyssinia expedition, ii. 371. Naples, ex-King of, i. 372; and Italian Liberals, 416. Napoleon, I. and Soult, i. 9; bis batred of England, 387; and Well- ington, 401, 402; and Cantillon story, ii. 47; and Russell, 274; and Talma, 506. Napoleon, Louis, and C'bartism, i. 284; elected President of Frencb Republic, 303; coup d'etat, 374, 382; plebiscite, 385; tbe empire, 386; distrust of, in England, ib.; life in England 387 ; tbe invasion of England, 389; tbe five projects of invasion, 390; war witb Austria, 390; and tbe Holy Places, 434; letter to Emperor of Russia, 455; visit to London, 494; gains by Crimean War, 503; attempted assassination of, by Orsini, ii. 36; Orsini's use of London for political projects, 37; and Cantillon story, 47; and Austrian ambassador, 77; and Cavour, 77; general distrust of, in 1860, 94; and Milan and Savoy, 94; and Free Trade, 97. distrust and dislike of him in England, 98; sympathizes with South, 140; and American war, 158; and the Mexican interven- tion, 158-160; and Lombardy campaign, 173; and Poland, 178; Schleswig-Holstein question, 183; refuses to interfere, 188; war with Prussia, 434; death and career of, 468; mentioned, 505; Kinglake and, 572. Napoleon, Prince, at Alma. i. 479; suggested for King of Greece, ii. 77; and Free Trade, 97; and American War, 140; and Poland, 178. Napoleon, Prince Louis, killed in Zululand, ii. 551. Nashville, the, ii. 148. Nasmyth, Lieut., and Crimean war, i. 468, 498. National debt and Crimean war, i. 503. National Gallery, Mr. Hume on Sunday opening, i. 121. Nation newspaper, i. 182, 290, 293. 294, 297, 301. Navigation, Transatlantic, schemes for, in 1838, i. 55; laws sus- pended, 270. Neill, recaptures Allahabad, ii. 10. Nelson, Lord, allusion to, ii. 130. Nelson, Mr. Justice, and Washington Commission, ii. 446. Nesselrode, Memorandum, i. 428; and Vienna Note, 444; and Eng- gland's Ultimatum, 456. Newcastle, Duke of, opposed to Peel's Ministry, i. 240; and Crimean war, 470; and Russell, 485; and Roebuck's Motion, 486; Colo- nial Secretary, 1859, ii. 88; death of, 206. Newdegate, and convents, ii. 427; and Arch, 466. Newman, Dr., compared by Gladstone with Sheil, i. 29; and Oxford movement, 132, 133; and Gladstone, ii. 502. Newman, Francis W., i. 135. Newport, Cbartist riot at, i. 77, 78. New South Wales, ii. 354. New Zealand, foundation of, i 117; and Maoris, ii. 174, 354. Niagara and Atlantic cable, ii. 285. Nice and Savoy, surrender of, ii. 94. Nicholas, Emperor of Russia, i. 426; policy with regard to Turkey and England, 426, 429; and Sir S. II. Seymour, 439. 440; reply to French Emperor, 455; and Black Sea Fleet, 470; death of, 491, 492. 618 INDEX. Nicholson, General, killed storming Delhi, ii. 13; urges impalement, burning, and flaying alive of murderers of women and children, ib. Nightingale, Miss Florence, at Crimea, i. 484. Norfolk, Duke of, his curry powder as a charm against famine, i. 240. Norfolk Island, i. 559 (see Transportation); a lair of abomination, 561. Norman by, Lord, in Colonial Office, i. 61; mentioned, 84; letter of Palmerston to, 817; letter of Palmerston to, on Great Exhibition, 353; and coup d'etat, 374, 375. Normanby, Lady (see Bedchamber question), i 84. Northbrook, Lord, mentioned, ii. 34; retirement of, from Indian Vice-royalty, 510. Northcote, Sir Stafford, pupil of Mr. Gladstone, ii. 241; President of Board of Trade, 278; Indian Secretary, 295; and Alabama, 446; and Treaty of Washington, 451; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 487; and foreign policy of the Government, 545; not a successful leader, 554. Northern Star, the Chartist paper, owned by Feargus O'Connor, i. 77. Northumberland, Duchess of, i. 8. North west Company, ii. 349. INott, General, at Candahar, i. 164 O'Brien, Smith, supports education grant of the Melbourne Ministry, i. 120; character of, 291; and Lamartine, 293; prosecuted, 296; and confederates, 297; at Ballingarry, 298; arrested, ib. ; tried, 298; transported, 300; his pardon and death, 301; mentioned, ii. 308. O'Brien, and Manchester Rescue, ii. 319; executed, 322. O'Connell, on the plots against the Queen, i. 14, 15; on Brougham, 21; and Sheil, 25; and Free Trade, ib. ; mentioned, 29, 30; on the People's Charter, 73; his support a disadvantage to Melbourne Ministry, 82; on Bedchamber question, 87; and dueling, 100; supports education grant of Melbourne Ministry, 119; and Repeal, 173; Miss Martineau on, 174; the Big Beggarman, 175; character of, 175; appearance of, ib.; his eloquence, ib.; as a lawyer, 177; and the Lnion 178; and Free Traders, 179; and Re- peal agitation, 179; invents phrase, " Saxon," 180; a sincere loyalist, ib , the Temperance movement and Father Mathew, 181; Conciliation Hall, ib.; monster meetings, ib.; description of Duke of Wellington, 183; of limes, ib.; on Peel, ib,; on Wexford massacres, ib.; at Mullaghmast, 184; Lord Lytton on, ib.; Hill of Tara meeting, 185; Clontarf meeting and the Government, ib.; and Young Ireland, 186; trial and sentence, 188; disputes with Young Ireland, 190; death of, at Genoa, 193; on Queen's Col- leges, 197; and Free Trade, 212,221; compared with Peel, 248; controversy with Mr. Disraeli, 249; mentioned, 261, 263; and Young Ireland, 290, 291; mentioned, 339; his travesty of Dryden, 349; supports admission of Jews to Parliament, ii. 59; mentioned, 224; and Russell, 274; and Butt, 474. O'Connell, John, prosecution of, i. 188; trial of, 189. O 'Connor, Arthur, attacks the Queen, i. 103. INDEX. 610 O'Connor, Feargus, i. 75,76; owner of Northern Star, ib. ; men- tioned, 77; on Bedchamber question, 87; elected for Nottingham, 280; and Chartism, 282-284. Odger, George, ii. 214; defeated, General Election, 1868, 389; and Arch, 463. Olrnutz, humiliation of, i. 459; avenged, ii. 284. Omar Khayyam, quoted, i. 269. Omar Pasha and Crimean war, i. 468. Opium war, i. 105; causes of, 106, 107; East India Company's charter, 108; the opium question, 108, 109; parallel drawn from State of Maine, 109; Superintendents of China commerce, 110; the war, 112; Sir J. Graham on, 111, 112, 113; Palmerston on, 109; Macaulay on, 113; Peel on, 114; defeat of China, 114, 115; Well- ington on, 115. Oregon Treaty, i. 204. "Oreto," the, ii. 148. Orsini, Felice, attempts to assassinate Emperor of French, ii. 35; exe- cuted, 39; anger in France, 39-41. Ortega, executed, ii. 162. Osborne, Bernal, against Disraeli's Budget, 1852, i. 407; on Mr. Salomons' election, ii. 62; defeated at General Election, 1868, 388. Osman Pasha, and Plevna, ii. 529. Ossian, disputed genuineness of, ii. 310. Otho, King of Greece, ii. 75; overthrown, ib. Ottoman Empire (see Turkey). Oudh, King of, resident at Garden Peach, Calcutta, removed to pre- cints of Fort William by Canning, i. 584. Oudh, annexed, i. 579; Canning's proclamation to chiefs of, ii. 23; new system established in, 28. Outram, General, leaves Bombay, i. 581; defeats Persians, 587; comes to assistance of Canning, ib. ; sent to Oudh, ii. 16; reinforces Havelock's army at Lucknow, ib. ; joins Campbell, 17; left in charge of Ahuubagh, 18; objects to part of Canning's proclama- tion, 23. Overend and Gurney failure, ii. 272. Overend, Mr., Q. O, and Sheffield Trades Union Commission, ii. 327. Owen, Richard, i. 507. Owen, Robert, and Co-operation, ii. 340; and Brougham, 391. Oxford, Edward, shoots at the Queen, i. 100. Oxford movement, i. 131-137. Pacifico case, i. 304; Ccmmission to investigate, 307; settled, 308. Pakington, Sir John, in Derby Government, 1852. i. 394; First Lord of the Admiralty, ii. 5:$,* 278; and Ten Minutes Bill, 293,294; War Minister, 295; Droit wich speech, 295; his re-election, 302. Palmer, Sir Roundell, and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, i. :5:55; and Lorcha Arrow, 550; and Irish Church, ii. 398: on abolition of purchase in the army, 424. Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, i. 548. Palmerston, Lord, popularity of, i. 18, 22; Foreign Secretary, 24; in the Parliament of 1837, 31; on Opium Question, 109; on Ash- 620 INDEX burton treaty, 204; Lord Grey's objection to his foreign policy, 238; mentioned, 246; Foreign Secretary, 1846, 263; on Peel's position after tbe fall of his Ministry, ib. ; on Spanish marriages, 277; Pacifico case, i. 304, 305; on interference of France and Russia, 306; his Government censured in the House of. Lords, 308; his defense in the House of Commons, 312; triumph of his Government, 315; on Cockburn's speech, 318; on Peel's death, 320-322; on Louis Philippe, 324; his estimate of political rivals, 325; on the Papal aggression question, 335; Ecclesiastical Titles Act, ib. ; on Great Exhibition, 353; survey of his career and char- acter, 356; his home and foreign policy, 357; German lines on, 359; differences with Queen and Prince Consort, 360,361; the Queen's Memorandum, 363; effect of the rebuke, 367; interview with Prince Consort, ib. ; and Hungarian rebellion, 369; and Kossuth deputation, 373; judicious bottle- holding, ib.; approves coup d'etat, 376; dismissal, 378, 380; speech of, on dismissal, 380, 381; after dismissal, 383; defeats Russell's Militia Bill, 392; his "tit-for-tat with John Russell," 393; and Lord Derby, 394; Derby Militia Bill, 397; Amendment to Villier's Free Trade Resolution, 406; Home Secretary in the Coalition Ministry, 409; on man as a fighting animal, 418; activity in Home Office, 445, 446, resignation tendered and withdrawn, 449, 450; Black Sea question, 454; resolved on war with Russia, ib.; reasons of, for causing the Crimean war, 446; and invasion of Crimea, 470; at Reform Club dinner to Napier, 480; recommended as War Minister, 485; and Russell's resignation, ib. ; opposes Roebuck's Motion, ib.; Prime Minister, 487; Sanitary Commission to Crimea, 488; new ministerial crisis, 490; Russia's Black Sea proposals, 492; peace negotiations, 499; interview with M. de Lesseps, 544; his understanding of the temper of his countrymen, 552; "a sort of Church hero," 554; comes back to power with renewed strength, ib.; presses Divorce Bill, 555; and penal servitude, 563; East India Company Bill, ii. 29; Government of India, 35; Con- spiracy Bill, 42, 44; his triumph, 50; alludes to Bright as "honor- able and reverend gentleman," 50; defeat and resignation ib. / visits Emperor of French at Compiegne, 52; his offer of the Colonial Secretaryship to Lord Stanley, 55; in opposition, 55; at Willis' Rooms Meeting, 85; Prime Minister again, 88; offers Cobden and Milner Gibson office, ib.; his reasons for not offering office to Bright, 90; French Treaty, 98; House of Lords and Paper Duties, 106; his resolutions thereon, 107; how he dealt with the Lords, 109; Reform Bill of 1860, 111; unpopularity with advanced Liberals, 112; on possible French occupation of Syria, 128; his jest on the Northern defeat at Bull Run, 140: the Trent affair, 145; and Alabama, 154; on American Union, 166; refuses to recognize Confederation, 154; his answer to a Radical butcher, 168; French treaty, ib.; tenant-right, ib.; pensions "the poet Close," 169; correspondence with Gladstone and Lewis on national defenses, 170; the Maori war, 174; his distrust of Napoleon, 180; Poland, 180; Schleswig-Holstein question, 189; Disraeli's vote of censure, 191, 192; Palmerston's last victory, 194; his last great speech, 194; a Conservative in home politics, 199; and Garibaldi, 201; on Cobden's death, 209; death of, 216; INDEX. 621 career, 219; liis statesmanship, 220; his oratory, 220; his love for England, 225; his influence on English politics, 227; his leader- ship and Gladstone's, 231, 263, 272, 273; his opinion of tenant- right, 406, and ballot, 426; encouraged House of Lords against Mr. Gladstone, 430. Panuiure, Lord, i. 488. Papal aggression (see Ecclesiastical Titles Act). Paper Duties, repeal of, ii. 98. Paper Duty, history of, ii. 101-103. Papineaa, M. Louis Joseph, described, i. 35, escape of, 44. Paris, Congress of, i. 499-502. l'arke, Sir James, created Baron Wensleydale, i. 542. Parkes, Sir H., and Lorcha Arrow case, i. 546; and China War, ii. 115, 116. Parliament, of 1837, first of Queen's reign, i. 29; its prominent members, 29; opened in January, 1838, 30; of 1841, 130; of 1847, 399; meeting of, in 1852, 380; new Parliament of 1852, 404; of 1857, 554; of 1859, ii. 87; of 1865, 212, 262, 287; of 1868, 389; of 1874, 489; of 1880, 556; need not dissolve on death of sovereign, 302. Parnell, Mr., ii. 544. Parr, Dr., and Dr. Bentley, story of, ii. 90. Pascal, his early mastery of mathematics, i. 135. Pate, Robert, attacks the Queen, i. 103. Patna, and Mr. William Taylor's Administration, ii. 21. Paxton, Sir Joseph, builder of Great Exhibition, i. 352. Payne, J. Home, on Jamaica Commission, ii. 246. Peace Society, and Crimean War, i. 464, 465. Peel, Sir Robert, speech at Tamworth, i. 15; and Duke of Welling- ton, 19, 22, 25; character of, 25; style of speeches, 26; his greatest proof of statesmanship, 28, 30; on a " Mr. Mackenzie," 38; opposed to penny post, 63 ; declares that he has anew created the Conservative party, 82; Bedchamber question, 85; on Queen's marriage, 91; and dueling, 100; on opium war, 114; carries vote of no confidence against Melbourne Ministry, 129; forms a Ministry, ih.; his Government, 193; Factories Act, 194; Maynooth grant, 197; Queen's College scheme, 198; removal of tests from Jews, ib. ; Bank Charter Act, 199; annexa- tion of Scinde, 2(«l; Tahiti difficulty, 202, 203; Ashburton and Oregon Treaties, 2Q4; and Corn Laws, 206; admits general principles of Free Trade, 224-228; on Russell's City of London letter, 232; resigns, 387; resignation withdrawn, 389; his voice compared with O'Connell's, 243; explanation, 243; Peelites, 245; admires Disraeli's maiden speech, 248; attacked by Disraeli, 251,252; explains Free Trade pol icy, 255, 256; accuses Cobden of threatening assassination, 260, fall of Ministry on Coercion Bill, 261; panegyric on Cobden, 262; Palmereton on, 264; <>n Pacifico case, 313; last speech of, 318; death of, 318; Palmer- ston on, 320; not tried like Cavour and Pitt, 321; Prince Albert on, 323; Wellington on, 401; and transportation, 558; problem- atic invasion, ii. 173; and Russell, 273; his journey from Home to London compared with Constantino's journey from York to Rome, 557. 622 INDEX. Peel, Lady, declines peerage, i. 318. Peel, General, War Secretary, 1858, ii. 52; War Minister, 1866, 278; resigns, 292. Peel, Sir Lawrence, on Sir Robert Peel, i. 226. Peel, Sir William, son of Sir Robert Peel, died at Cawnpore, ii. 19. Peibo, river, ii. 115, 116. Pekin, ii. 120. Pelissier, at Crimea, i. 495. "Pendennis,"i. 98,524. Penny post, i. 58, 59; opposition to, 63; success of, ib.; in Dr. Jobnson's time, 64. Persia, mentioned in will of Peter tbe Great, i. 423; war in, 556, 582, 587; Sbab of, visits England, ii. 360. Persigny, Due de, bis foolisb reply to a deputation from tbe Corpor- ation of London, ii. 40. Peterloo, massacre of, i. 213. Peter tbe Great, will of, i. 423. Petion, tbe revolutionary Mayor of Paris, i. 302. Petitions against elections, removed from jurisdiction of House of Commons, ii. 365. Petrel, tbe, ii. 148. Pbilippe, Louis, and Egypt in 1840, i. 127; and Spanish marriages, 273-278; fall of, 278, 279; deatb of, 321; Carlyle on, 321; charac- ter, 322; Palmerston on, 324. Pbilipof Macedon, ii. 370. Philips, Mr., Mayor of Newport, wounded in Frost's riot, i. 78. Pbilpotts, Henry, Bishop of Exeter, i. 41. Phoenix Clubs in Ireland, ii. 309. Pierri, andOrsini attempt, executed, ii. 39. Pitt, system of Indian government, ii. 29, 276. Pitt, Governor, diamonds of, i. 9. Pius IX., sympathizes with tbe North, ii. 139. Plassey, hundredth anniversary of, i. 568. Plevna, ii. 529. Plimsoll, Mr., and seamen, ii. 495. Plowden, Consul, friend of Theodore of Abyssinia, ii. 369. Poerio, Baron, i. 416. Poland, insurrection in, ii. 177; English sympathy with, 178; proposed intervention, 179; rebellion crushed, 182; Russell and, 286. Polish Revolution, association in aid of, in London, ii. 41. "Political Portraits," author of, on Disraeli, ii. 362. Pollock, General, comes to relief of Jellalabad, i. 164. Pomare, Queen of Tahiti, i. 202, 203. Pope, the, and England, i. 326; legion formed in London to fight for, ii. 41. Porte, the, and tbe Lebanon, ii. 126. Post-office Savings Bank, ii. 344; telegraphy, 368. Potter, George, and Arcb movement, ii. 465. Pottinger, Major Eldred, i. 149, 158. Praslin case, i. 279. Pre-Raphaelitism, ii. 576. Prester John, ii. 371. Preston, and franchise, i. 70. INDEX. 623 Prevost-Paradol, ii. 283; and Franco- Prussian war, 435. Prideaux, Lieut., prisoner in Abyssinia, ii. 371. Priestley, Dr., house, i. 59. Prim, Marshal, and Mexico, ii. 160. Pritchard, and Tahiti difficulty, i. 202. Privateering question at Congress of Paris, i. 501. Procter, i. 527. Property qualification? for Members of Parliament abolished, ii. 66. Protection (see Corn Laws), meaning of, i. 208; the party in the House, 256; last cry of, 340, 392; and Derby Government, 1852, 395, 396, 405. Proxy, voting by, abandoned by Lords, ii. 367. Prussia, Prince of, and Great Exhibition, i. 352; as King of Prussia, ii. 435; hailed German Emperor, 436. Prussia, and Great Exhibition, i. 352; and Russia, 421; and Crimean war, 458-460; at Congress of Paris, 499; Foreign Enlistment Act, 502; and Poland, ii. 178; and Schleswig-Holstein, 183; war with Denmark, 186; war with Austria, 272; the leadership of Germany, 383; education in, 413; war with France, 435. Prussia, the late King of, i. 459. Public executions, ii. 364. Public Worship Bill, ii. 489. Puebla, taken, ii. 160. Punch, and Great Exhibition, i. 352; history of, 639, 640;on Prussia and Austria, ii. 187. Punjaub, annexed by Lord Dalhousie, i. 578; saved by Robert Mont- gomery, 588. Punth Seerek Dhoondoo (see Nana Sahib). Purchase in the army, ii. 419. Purwandurrah, battle of, i. 151. Pusey, Dr., i. 131-134. Quarterly Review, and the word "Conservative," i. 23; and Re- form, ii. 168. Quebec, i. 31. Queen's Colleges, i. 197. Queensland, ii. 354. "Question de Jupons," i. 81-91. Quit rents in Jamaica, ii. 249. Rabagas, i. 83. Raglap, Lord, and Crimean war, i. 468, 469; and Alma. 473; on pholera in the army, 176; and Sanitary Commission, 4*8; death of, 495. Railways, i. 32; Liverpool and Birmingham, opened 1S37, London and Croydon, 1839,55; London and Birmingham, opened 1838, ih.: Liverpool and Preston, opened 1888, w.; Act for Trans- mission of Mails by, passed, L888, ib.; London and North Western Railway Co. and the eleptric telegraph, ib.; velocity of, in early part of reign, ib.; mania, 199. Rassam, Mr. Hormuzd, Abyssinian prisoner, ii. :!71 Ra -.-la-. an.d \i'- Bslnia, ii. ■ •• Rattening 624 INDEX Reade, Charles, ii. 484, 579. Rebecca Riots, i. 199, 200. Redcliffe, Lord S. de, and Vienna Note, i. 442. Red Cross Society, i. 484. Red path frauds, i. 543. Red River Settlement, ii. 351. Reform Bill, i. 16. Reform Bill of 1832; account of, i. 69, 70; Ministerial action during, quoted as example for Irish State prisoners tried at Clonmel 71; Lord Grey's, 214; Mr. Disraeli and Reform Bill, ii. 79; Mr. Disraeli's Bill — his reasons for introducing it, ib.; indifference of Lord Derby to, 80; Mr. Disraeli sees necessity for reform, 81; principles of his Bill, ib.; resignation of Mr. Walpole and Mr. Henley in consequence of, ib.; clauses of, described by Mr. Bright as "fancy franchises," 84; Mr. Gladstone's speech on, ib.; Lord J. Russell's Resolution carried, 85; defeat of Government and dissolution, ib.; Reform Bill of Palmerston's Ministry 1860, 97; Reform Bill of 1860, obstruction of, 114; abandoned, 114; Palmerston, 168; Queen's Speech, 1866, 263; Reform Bill of 1866, ib.; introduced by Mr. Gladstone, 263; opposition to, 265; Lowe, 266; Cave of Adullam, 269; Amendments, 270; causes of failure of Bill, 272; Russell, 272; Leagues, 278; Hvde Park, 278; meetings, 281; Mr. Disraeli in 1867, 287; The Ten Minutes Bill, 294; the New Bill, 295; results of Bill, 302; Irish Reform Bill, ib.; Scotch and Irfsh Reform Bills, ib.; League at Hyde Park, 303; "leap in the dark," 304; first action of, in 1868, 386. Reform, Lord Durham's plan in 1821, to give 400 Members to certain districts of town and country, in which every householder should have a vote, i. 41. Reform projects of Melbourne Ministry, i. 117, 118. Regency question, i. 97. Rembrandt, i. 516. Reniusat, Madame, and Napoleon's chess, ii. 441. Repeal agitation contrasted with Corn Law agitation, i. 221. Repeal movement, i. 173-193. "Revolutionary Epick," ii. 238. "Revolution, the," i. 69. Revolution, year of, i. 278-280. Ribbonism, ii. 405. Richardson, Mr., murdered in Japan, ii. 176. Richmond, Duke of, President of Board of Trade, ii. 295; army pur- chase, 419; Lord President of Council, 487. Richmond, taken, ii. 161. Richter, J. P. F., on Schiller's reserve, i. 26; story of two friends, 135; Carlyle molded on, 514; quoted ib.; his story of Siebenkaes, 544. Right of search, and Congress of Paris, i. 502. Ripon, Lord, and Alabama, ii. 446; resigns, 482. Ritualism, and Public Worship Bill, ii. 490. "Rob Roy," i. 459. Robson frauds, i. 543. Rochdale co-operative movement, ii. 340, 341. Roebuck, i. 24, 25; as agent and representative of Lower Canada, INDEX. 625 heard at bar <>f House against Russell's Bill, 38; and dueling, 101; on O'Connell, 177; on Bentinck's Irisli railway grant, 269: resolution defending governors in Pacifico case, 313; on Ecclesi- astical Titles Act, 335; on Palmerston dismissed, 380; Motion about Crimean army, 485; Crimean Motion, 489; speech on Lorclia Arrow, 551; asks Government about communications be- tween England and France relative to Alien Act, ii. 44; recog- nition of Southern States, 15N, 168; on white men and brown, 176; defeated in Sheffield, 388. Romilly, opposed to transportation, i. 558. Uoumania, and the Berlin Treaty, ii. 537. Houmelia, Eastern, ii. 536. Hose, Sir Hugh, defeats the Ranee of Jhansi, ii. 20. Rossetti, Christina, ii. 574. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, ii. 574. Rothschild, Baron (see Jews, emancipation of), ii. 56, 61, 66. Rouher, M., his famous "Jamais," ii. 323. Rousseau, i. 517, 530; his "Contrat Social," ii. 203. Royal William, Transatlantic voyage of, i. 56. Rubicon, passing of, alluded to, by Gladstone, ii. 265. Rugeley poisoning case, i. 543 Runjeet Singh, i. 147. Ruskin.i. 528, 530. Russell, Lord John (afterward Earl Russell), i. 23; discription of, 27, 28, 30; introduces Bill to deal with rebellious province in Canada, 38; Russell and Durham's Canadian mission, 39; asked by Lord Durham to draw upa scheme of Reform, 42; in Colonial Office, 51; Canadian Bill Lb.; introduces Reform Bill of 1831, 70; against reopening Reform question, 72; consulted on Bed- chamber question, 85; education, 118; on trade in corn, 129; on Peel's sliding scale, 206; fixed duty disliked by Free Traders, 224; admits general principles of Free Trade, 229; letter to City of London on his conversion to Free Trade, 232, 234; sent for in 1845, fails to form a Ministry, 237, 239; on his failure to form a Ministry, 243; First Lord of the Treasury, 1846, 263; position of his Government, 264; Government and the Irish famine, 264, 270; Government and the famine, 266; verdicts of willful murder against, 267; and Pacifico case, 316; and death of Sir. R. Peel, 319; Durham letter, 331; Government and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 336; (Government defeated on Locke King's County Fran- chise Motion, 840; on Roman Catholic assumption of ecclesiastical titles. 338; and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 341; resigns, 341; Govern- ment and Mr. Disraeli's Agricultural Distress Motion, 340; and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 341; return to power of his Ministry in 1851, 342; and Thesiger clauses of Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 342; dislike to, in Ireland, ih.; contrasted with Palmerston, 357; duties of Foreign Secretary, 863; letter of Prince Albert to, 363; Queen's memorandum, 364; letter of Palmerston to, on Queen's Memorandum, :i'*>6; reception of Kossuth, 369; and Kossuth deputations, 371, 372; and roup d'etat, 31 1. 376; dismisses Ralm- erston, 378, 379; on Palmerston's dismissal, 380, 381; Militia Bill, 891; defeated, 392; resigns, 892; small results of his Ministry, 393; and Free Trade, 396; and Napoleon 1. in Elba, 402; Foreign 626 INDEX. Secretary of Coalition Ministry, 1852, 409; and treaty of Kutclmk Kainardji, 432, 4138; and Seymour disclosures, 432; and French Ambassador, 435; bis Reform Bill, 450; and Duke of Newcastle, 485; and Roebuck's motion, 485; resigns, 485; sent for after fall of Coalition Ministry, 488; Colonial Secretary, 490; at Vienna Conference, 492; resigns, 492; Education Resolutions, 541; speech on Lorcba Arrow, 551; orders in 1840 no more convicts to be sent to New South Wales, 558; on Transportation Committee of 1837, 558; on Lord Derby's India Bill, ii. 31; on laws of foreign enlistment, 41; opposition, 1858, 55; supports Jewish claims, 61; on Mr. Salomons' invasion, 01; Bill for Removal of Jewish Disabilities, 63; gives over Ionian Islands to Greece, 76; Reform attempts, 79; Resolution on Disraeli's Reform Bill, carried, 85; at Willis' Rooms meeting, ib; declines to serve under Lord Granville, 88; Foreign Secretary in 1859, under Lord Palmerston, 89; Reform Bill of 1860, 111, 114; and Southern Confederacy, 132; correspondence with Adams and Seward 134; and Trent affair, 144; on Alabama, 150; and Mr. Adams on Confederate vessels, 152; and Mexico, 159; and South, 163, 166; and Poland, 178; Note to Russia, 179; correspondence with Gortschakoff, 182; and Scbleswig-Holstein war, 188; refuses Napoleon's Congress scheme, 188; action deserving censure, 191; Government in 1865, 228; Prime Minister, 228; a peer, 229; and Reform Bill, 1832, 263; and Reform Bill, 1866, 265; resigns, 1866, 271; abandons leadership of Liberal party, 272; career of, 273; men- tioned, 276, 284; suspension of Habeas Corpus Act, 306: instruc- tion to Cameron with regard to Abyssinia, 370: death of, 542. Russell, W. H., at Crimea, i. 397; meets Azimoolah Khan in Con- stantinople and the Crimea, ii. 4. Russia, appealed to by Greece in Pacifico case, i. 307 ; sudden growth of, 421; progress of her army, 422; Napoleonic wars, ib. ; religion in, 423; will of Peter the Great, 423; Russophobia, 423; and Christian population, 423; Emperor Nicholas and Turkey and England, 426; and Holy Places, 434; armies cross the Pruth, 442; and Vienna Note, 442; victory at Sinope, 452; feeling in England after, 452; and Black Sea, 452; and Eng- land's Ultimatum, 454; and Danubian principalities, 460; Black Sea question, 461; and Vienna Conference, 492; anxious for peace, 499; a rising power in the mind of the Sepoy of 1856, 580; Russian consulate at Damascus destroyed, ii. 123; sympathizes with North, 139; and Poland, 177 ; and Black Sea clauses, 413, 437; and Eastern question, 513; and Berlin Mem- orandum, 518; dread of, in England, 524; and Servian war, 524; declares war on Turkey, 529; the war, 529; and Constantinople, 533, Treaty of Berlin, 536. Sadi (Persian poet), quoted, ii. 217. Sadleir, M. T., and Factory Acts, i. 194. Sadleirs, the 339, 343; suicide of John, 343; James expelled from the House ib. Sadowa, battle of, ii. 284. St. Charles, river in Lower Canada, i. 32. St. Lawrence, r\vhv in Lower Canada, i. "■'» INDEX. 627 St. Leonards, Lord, in Derby Ministry, 1852, i. 394. Paladin, ii. 309. Sale, Lady, Story of Cabul, i. 160; in Khyber Pass, ib. Sale, at Jellalabad, i. 163. Salisbury, Lord, on strength of Conservatives, ii. 482 ; Indian Secretary, 487; on Public Worship Bill, 493; described by Disraeli, 494; and proposed Conference, 527; Foreign Secre- tary, 534; and San Stefano Treaty, 534; at Berlin Congress, 535; and secret treaties, 539. Salomons, Mr., (see Jews disabilities of), ii. 61-63. Salonica, Mussulman outbreak at, ii. 519. Sandvvitb, of Kars, i. 499. San Juan boundary, ii. 445, 450. San Stefano, Treaty of, ii. 533, 535. Sardinia, at Conference of Vienna, i. 490; Sardinian contingent and Crimea, 495; at Congress of Paris, 499, 502. Satsuma, Prince, and murder of Mr. Richardson, ii. 176. Sattara, i. 579. Savannab, the first steam vessel to Atlantic, i. 56; Confederate cruiser, ii. 148. Savoy and Nice surrendered, ii. 94. Schenck, General, and VVasbington Commission, ii. 445. Schiller, i. 27; his •'Wallenstein," 491, 516; "Joan of Arc," ii. 375. Schleswig-Holstein question, ii. 183; war about, 185. School Board, ii. 414, 415. Science and speed, i 52, 53. Scinde annexed, i. 201. Scindia, ruler of Gwalior, his revolted army take Cawnpore, ii. 19; driven from his capital, escapes to Agra, restored by the English, 20: remains firm to the English, 20. Sclave, and Russia, i. 423. Scott, Sir Walter, his novel of the "Betrothed," quoted, i. 222; his "Ivanhoe," quoted, 349; "Kenilworth," quoted, 384; his "Touchwood," 489; his popularity, 530; his Helen Macgregor in "Hob Boy," 575; his "Betrothed," 587; his "Cuy Mannering," quoted, ii. 220; scene in "Ivanhoe," 235; his "Bride of Lammer- moor," 279; his "Antiquary," 310; his " Fair Maid of Perth," 374; his "Guy Mannering," quoted, 386; his burial at Dry- burgh, 412. Scutari, hospitals of, i. 483. Starch, right of, and Congress of Paris, i. 501. Sebastiani, and order in Warsaw, ii, 182. Sebastpool, siege of, i. 470, 471, 484; fall of, 497; Cochrane's plan for destruction of, ii. 130. Secocoeni, war with Transvaal, ii. 54S; captured, 552. Sedgwick, Professor, death of, ii. 171. Selborne, Lord, ami Ecclesiastical Titles Act, i. 282; and Court of Appeal, ii. 47(1. 477. Selkirk. Lord, and Bed Biver Settlement. 349. Sera in es, I 'aptain, ii. 148. Sepoy, strong feeling of relationship in, i. 574; the Bengal, account of, 573; of 1856 regards Russia as a rising, ami England f\8 ft decaying country, 581j va'ri-- :,-.' ,i \\u\, 628 INDEX Servia, and Czar NicLolas, i. 430; and Treaty .of Paris, 500; and Herzegovinian insurrection, ii. 516; defeat of, 526; and Berlin Treaty, 536. Servitude, penal, substituted for transportation, i. 563. Seward, and Secession, ii. 134; and Russell, ib. ; and Trent affair, 143; and fortunes of the North, 157, 166. Sewell, Chief-Justice, on Canada Union, ii. 348. Seymour, Admiral (see Arrow, the Lorcha). Seymour, Sir G. Hamilton, and Czar Nicholas, i. 429-430. Shaftesbury, Lord, and Colliery Commission, i. 193; and Factory Acts, 193; condemns Lord Ellenborough's despatch, ii. 25; and Poland, 179, and Ballot Bill, 430. Shakespeare, "Henry IV.," i. 37; quoted, 158, 316,334, 384; his supreme rank, 413; quoted, 459, 513, 536, 548; ii. 43, 50, 59, 113. Sheba, Queen of, an ancestor of Theodore of Abyssinia, ii. 368. Sheffield, trades-union outrages in, ii. 326. Sheil, Richard Lalor, i. 24; as an orator, 29. Shelton, accepts terms of Akbar Khan, i. 157. Shenandoah, the, and Geneva Convention, ii. 449. Sbepstone, Sir Theophilus, ii. 548. Shere Ali, and Afghan war, ii. 545. Sheridan's " School for Scandal," quoted, i. 165; Begum speech, 305. Shore, or Condon, and Manchester Rescue, ii. 319; pardoned, 320. Shunamite woman, alluded to by Bright, ii. 393, 394. Sibthorp, Colonel, and Prince Albert's annunity, i. 96; and Great Exhibition, ii. 100. Sidney, Sir Philip, ii. 465. Sikhs, invasion by, in 1844, i. 202. Silistria, siege of, i. 468. Simla Manifesto, i. 150. Simpson, General, succeeds Lord Raglan at Crimea, i. 495; and Malakoff, 497. Simpson, Sir George, and Hudson's Bay Company, ii. 350. Sinope, massacre of, i. 452. Sirius, Transatlantic voyages of, in 1838, i. 56. Slav and Greek, ii. 515. Slave Circular, the, ii. 500. Slavery in Southern States of America, ii. 135; abolished, 162. Slidell and Mason, the Confederate envoys, refusal of England to receive, i. 372; seizure of, ii. 142. Sliding scale, introduced by Peel, i. 207. Smith, Alexander, i. 528. Smith, Baird, Colonel, urges, assault on Delhi, ii. 13. Smith, Goldwin, and Jamaica, ii. 256. Smith, Mr. Vernon, (afterward Lord 'Lyveden), letter to, from Can ning, ii. 25. Smith, Sidney, on Lord Melbourne i. 17; on Russell, 27; opposed to penny post, 62; storv of a young Scotchwoman, 223; quoted, 566; Irish State Church, ii. 379. Smith Sir Sidney, ii. 130. Smith, W. H., elected for Westminster, ii. 388. INDEX. 629 Smollett, i. 480, 531. Smyth, P, J., and escape of Mitchel and Meagher, i. 300. Solferino, battle of, ii. 85, 284. Somerville, Mary, i. 521. Somnauth, gates of, i. 171. Soojah-ool Moolk, and Cabul, i. 148; assassinated, 164. Soult, Marshal, i. 8, 9. Southern Confederation, association in London, in aid of, ii. 41. Sou they, i. 50(1. Soyer, Alexis, the celebrated French cook, i. 268. Spain in 1848, i. 303; and Mexico, ii. 158. Spanish marriages, i. 273, 276. Spencer, Herbert, and Jamaica case, ii. 256; his works, and position as a thinker, 563. Spenser, Edmund, and Ireland, ii. 377. Spooner, Mr., and Maynooth grant, i. 197; ii. 427. Spurgeon, Rev. Charles, i. 139. Stamp duty abolished, ii. 102. Stanley, Dean, ii. 573. Stanley and Livingston, ii. 468, 470. Stanley, Lord (afterward Lord Derby), i. 24, 31; Melbourne educa- tion grant, 119; Colonial Secretary, 1841, 130; repeal of Corn Laws, 230, 235, 237; and Pacifico case, 310; and Lord Palmer- ston, 310; sent for, 341; (see Derby, late Earl of). Stanley, Lord, his son (afterward Lord Derby), Indian Secretary, ii. 31; Colonial Secretary, 52; character and high promise of, 53; compared with his father, 54; and American war, 154; Reform in 1866, 270, Foreign Secretary 1866, 278; and Atlantic cable, 284; and Reform, 298; announces Lord Derby's retirement, 361; and ultimatum to Abyssinia, 371 ; and Irish Church, 383; and army purchase, 419; and Alabama claims, 443; (see Derby, Lord). Stanley, Colonel, Minister of War, ii. 534. Stanley, Mr. Fred., elected for North Lancashire, ii. 387. Stanley of Alderly, Lord, i. 447. Stanstield, Mr., account of, ii. 236; his friendship for Mazzini, 237. Steam, navigation by, i. 54, 55. Stephens, James, ii. 316. Stephenson, Robert, i. 54; prophesies failure of Atlantic cable, ii. 286. Stewart, Dugald, and Russell, ii. 274. StoeUdale case, i. 109, 110. Stockmar, Baron, i. 92,98, 325, 352. Stoddart, Colonel, murdered in Bokhara, i. 170. Storks, Sir Henry, appointed Governor of Jamaica, ii. 246. Si rath bogie case. i. 139. Slrathtieldsave, Wellington's homage for, i. 3. Strikes, ii. 332. 461. Stroud, Conservative victory at," ii. 482. Stuart, Charles, ii. 274. Stubbs, < 'anon, ii. 566. Sturt, Mrs., in Khyher Pass, i. 160. Suez Canal, purchase of shares in, ii. 507. Suez, Isthmus of, i. 544. 630 INDEX. Sullivan, Mr. A. M., and Mr. Plimsoll, ii. 497. Sumner, Mr., and Alabama claims, ii. 443; and indirect claims, 449. Sumter Fort, taken, ii. 134. Sumter, the, ii. 149. Sunderland, Lord Durham's address to electors of, i. 15. Sussex, Duke of, against Prince Consort as Regent, i. 97. Suttee system, put down by Lord Dalbousie, i. 577. Sweden, treaty between England and France and, i. 501. Swinburne, Algernon Charles, defends Manchester prisoners, ii.322; his poems, 574. Switzerland in 1848, i. 303. Sydenham, Lord (Mr. C. P. Thomson), succeeds Lord Durham at Canada, i. 51. Sydney, constitution of, under transportation system, i. 559, 5G0. Syria, i. 125; Lebanon difficulty, ii. 124, 125. Tahiti, dispute with France about, in 1844, i. 202, 203. Talleyrand and Russell, ii. 274; played whist, 502. Talma at Erfurt, ii. 506. Talookdars, recognized as responsible land-holders by new system established in Oudh by Canning, ii. 28. Tarn worth, Sir R. Peel's speech at, i. 15. "Tancred," ii. 560. Tantia Topee arranges for safe conduct of Cawnpore garrison, ii. 8, aided by Ranee of Jhansi, 20; executed, 21. Tasmania, protests against convict transportation, i. 558; as part of an Australian confederation, ii. 557. Tayler, Mr. William, his administration of Patna, ii. 21. Taylor, Sir H., i. 527. Tchernaya, the, i. 496. "Tea room Party," ii. 300. Teesdale, of Kars, i. 498. Telegraph (see Electric Telegraph). Telegraph lines taken by Government, ii. 368. Tenant-right in Ireland, i. 397; and Palmerston, ii. 168 410 Ten Minutes Bill, ii. 294. Tenniel. and Punch, i. 540. Tennyson's " Form, form," i. 385; "Maud," 419; compared as a poet with Browning, 522-525. supports Eyre, ii. 256. Thackeray, and Great Exhibition, i 344. and' Dickens. 530-532, ar_d Punch. 539; death of, ii. 204, on public executions, 364 Thackeray, Miss, ii. 582. Theodore of Abyssinia, ii. 262; (see Abyssinia); and his capture, 568; his friendship for Mr. Plowden, 3*70; and the Queen, ib. ; death of. 373: death of his widow and son. 374. Thesiger. Sir Fred, (afterward Lord Chelmsford), and Ecclesiastical Titles Act, i. 342; and Lorcha Arrow, 549; (see Lord Chelmsford). Thiers, Louis Adolphe, opposed to French Treaty, ii. 98; and Mohammed Ali, i. 126, 127: and Franco Prussian war, ii 435 Thirlwall, Dr., and Irish Church, ii. 399. Thorn, and his mission, i. 65, 66. Thompson, of Kars, i. 498. Thompson, Mr ci,arles PouMf. (see Sydenham, Lord), INDEX. 631 Thornton, Sir E., and Alabama, ii. 446. Thug system, put down by Lord Dalhousie, i. 577. Tichborne trial, ii. 466. Ticket-of leave system, and failure in England, but not in Ireland, i. 565; alarm respecting, 566. Tientsin, Treaty of, ii. 119. Times, the, i. 13, 16; on Lord Durham, 49; Carlyle's letter to, on opening of Mazzini's letters, 200; announces Peel's intended repeal of Coin Laws, 236; and (Jreat Exhibition, 352; and Palmerston's resignation, 450; and invasion of Crimea, 469; and W. H. Russell, 475; and slavery, ii. 135; and American war, 166. Tippoo Sahib, sons of, in mutiny at Vellore, i. 572. Tithes in Ireland, ii. 376. Todleben, and Crimean war, i. 505; and Russo Turkish war, ii. 529. Tone, Wolfe, ii. 308. Tory, first called Conservative, i. 23; described by Mill as the "stupid party," ii. 53. Townshend, Charles, his "champagne speech," i. 251. Tractarians and Public Worship Bill, ii. 490. "Tracts for the Times," i. 131; 132. Trades-unions, ii. 281,' 325-345; Bill, 432. Transatlantic navigation, i. 55, 56. Transportation, early, i. 556,569; approved by Committees of both houses as late as 1856, 562; practically abolished, 567. Transvaal annexed, ii. 547, 548. Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, i. 437; of Unkiar Skelessi, ii. 460; Treaties with Turkey, 1809, 1841, etc., 460; of Paris, 496; of Washington, i. 204; ii. 445; Trent affair, ii. 135, 142, 143, 147. Trevelyan, Mr. G. O., his Cawnpore, ii. 1; again, 8; enters Parlia ment 1865, 215; on army purchase, 419. Trevor, Mrs., and children in Kliyber Pass, i. 160. Trollope, Anthony, ii. 579. Truro, Lord, and "No Popery" agitation, i. 334. Tiirgot, and roup d'etat, i. 375. Turk, the, in Europe, i. 420. Turkey, and Egypt, i. 125; and Kossuth, 369; Christian populations of, 122; an Asiastic power, 423; and Treaty of Kutchuk Kain- ardji, 437; and Vienna Not*-. 142; declares war against Russia, 444; and English Cabinet, 450; defeat at Sinope, 451; and Black Sea question, 461; at Congress of Paris, 498; and Lebanon case, ii. 124-127; and her provinces, 517; and Andrassy Note, 518; and Berlin Memorandum, 51S; change of Sultans, 519; and Bulgaria, 520; new constitution of, 528; war with Russia, 529; and Layard, 530; and Berlin Treaty, 537. Tyndall, Professor, i. 508. Ulster custom, ii. 406. Union between England and Ireland, i. 178. United Irishmen, newspaper, i. 294, 29."); .suppressed, 296. United States, held up as an example to Lower Canada at Papineau's meetings, i. 85; compared with Russia, 121; and privateering, 501; and Foreign Enlistment Act, 522; and Canada, ii. 352. 632 INDEX University education in Ireland, ii 476; Bill, 476, 477. Unkiar, Skelessi, treaty of, i. 462. Urqubart, David, and Lebanon question, ii. 125. Vancouver's Island (see Oregon Treaty,), joined to Britisb Columbia, in 1865, ii. 70. Varna, Allies sail from, i. 468. Veliore, mutiny at, in 1806, i. 572. Venetia, added to Italv, ii. 283. "Vicar of Wakefield,'' ii. 531. Viceroyalty of India (see East India Company), ii. 32. Victor Emmanuel, legion formed in London to figbt for, ii. 41; in Edinburgb, 96. Victoria, deadlock in, ii. 357. Victoria, Princess, marriage of, ii. 35. Victoria, Queen, as Princess Victoria, i.4; accession to tbe tbrone, 7- 11, 13-16; Conservative bostility to, ib.; and Lord Melbourne, 17, 18, 23; Bedcbamber question, 84; marriage of, 91; attempts against life of, 100; opens Parliament in person, 1846, 240; on Prince Consort's visit to House of Commons, 257; Spanisb mar- riages, 274; Ecclesiastical Titles Act, 335; sends for Lord Stanley, 341; on tbe opening of tbe Great Exbibition, 253; severe'memo randum to Lord Palmerston on bis conduct of foreign affairs, 363; renewed complaint respecting Lord Palmerston and Kossutb deputation, 373; and coup d'etat, 374; and Baron Brunnow, 379, and Louis Napoleon's visit to England, 494; restores bis bonors to Lord Cocbrane, ii. 129, deatb of Prince Albert, 147; opens Parliament, 1866, 261; and Atlantic cable, 285; speecb of, 1869, 395; issues Royal Warrant to abolisb purcbase in tbe army, 422; and Empress of India title, 513. Vienna, negotiation at, i.436; Note, 442; Conference of, 490; failure of, 493. Villafranca, peace of, ii 93 Villiers, i. 29, 31, Amendment to Peel's sliding scale, 206, and Free Trade League. 213, 227: and Corn Laws. 511; and Free Trade Resolutions, 405; supports cause of tbe Nortb, ii. 166. Vincent, Henry, i. 76; imprisoned, 77, attempts to rescue, ib. Virgil, i. 262; ii. 220. '•Vivian Grey," i. 245; ii. 361. Voltaire, ii. 51, 174. "Candide," 521. Volunteer movement, i 384, 391; increasing in 1860, ii 95: Wababis, supposed plot of , ii. 21. Wakefield, Edward Gibbon accompanies Lord Durbam to Canada, i. 43, 50. Wales, birtb of Prince of. i 143. Wales, NewSoutb, protests against transportation of convicts, i. 557; condition of convict settlement, 558, 559 Walewski, Count and coup d'etat, i 374; despatcb about Simon Bernard, ii. 39, 46, 48;. and Poland 180. Wallace, Mr., supports penny postage system, i. 62. Wallacbia, and Treaty of Paris, i 500. Walpole, in Derby Government, 1852, i. 394; Home Secretary, ii. INDEX. 633 52; resigns, 82, Home Secretary, 1866, 278; and Hyde Park meeting, 281, resigns, 304. Warburton, Noah, supports penny post system, i. 62. Ward, i. 81. Warren, Samuel, ii. 459. Washington, Treaty of, i. 204, ii. 445. Wellesley, Lord, in 1801 "closes mortgage," and Cawnpore lapses into possession of East India Company, ii. 1. Wellington, Duke of, i. 3, 7, 9, and Duke of Cumberland, 11; and accession of Queen, 18, opposed to penny post system, 63; opposed Reform BUI of 1832, 70, sent for, 84, on Prince Albert's Protea tantism, 95; on precedence question, 95; vote of thanks to Heet on China war, 115; on causes of failure of Afghan war, 173, O'Connell's description of, 182; opposed to opening of ports, 231; reasons for supporting Peel's repeal of Corn Laws, 235; and Chartist movement, 2^3, effort to form Ministry in 1851, 342, and F. 0. despatches, 364; "Who? who?" Ministry, 395; death of, 399, 401; funeral, 404; and Peel's death, 401; contrasted with Napoleon, 402; and Czar Nicholas, 427, and Cantillon story, ii. 47; and Russell, 274. Wensleydale peerage, dispute about, i. 542. Westbury, Lord, scandal, ii. 210; death of, 470. WharnclifTe, Lord, and O'Connell trial, i. 190. Wheatstone, Professor, electric improvements, i. 54. Wheeler, Sir Hugh, applies for aid for Cawnpore to Sir Henry Lawrence, then to Nana Sahib, ii. 2; takes refuge in military hospital in Cawnpore, 4. Whiteside, Mr., on Lorcha Arrow, i. 550; ii. 241. "Who? who?" Ministry, i. 395. Wilberforce, Samuel, Bishop of Winchester, death of, ii. 470. Wilkes, Captain, and "Trent" affair, ii. 143. William IV., death of, i. 1-3; mentioned, 9, 11, and Cochrane, ii. 129. Williams, companion of Frost, sentence on, i. 78. Williams, Fen wick, of Kars, i. 498. Williams, Mr. Justice, and Washington Commission, ii. 446. Willis' Rooms, meeting at, ii. 86. Wilson, Archdale, General in command at Delhi, ii. 13. Windham, General, defeated at Cawnpore, ii. 19. Wiseman, Cardinal, Westminster, i. 328; letter out of "Flaminian Gate," 329, stoned by anti Papal mob, 335, mentioned, 843; death of, ii. 206. Wodelmuse, Lord, and the new era for Turkey, ii. 129. Wolfe, victories of, in Canada, mentioned, i. 32. Wolff, Dr., Bokhara expedition, i. 170. Women, franchise for, ii. 301; .suffrage question, 431. Wood, William Page, afterward Lord Hatlierlev, ancedote of, and Bright, ii. 395. Wood, Sir Charles, Chancellor of Exchequer, 1846, i. 263; attacked by Disraeli, 408; First Lord of the Admiralty, 490, Indian Secretary, 1859, ii. 89. Wordsworth, work of, i. 507; reference to, 507. 634 INDEX. Wrottesley, Sir Jobn, curious argument, against Jewish emancipation. ii. 59. Wycombe, the election for, in 1832. ii 362. Wyuu, Miss, i. 4. Wyse, Mr , and Pacificocase, i. 308. Yakoob Khan, and Afgban War, ii. 546. Yancey, W. L , envoy of Southern States, ii. 142. Yeh, Commissioner (see Arrow, Lorcha, case of), i. 544, 546, 553. captured, ii. 51; death of, lb.; stories of his cruelties, ib. "Young England" party, i. 208. "Young Ireland" party and O'Connell, i. 191, 286. 289, 302; prosecu tion of leaders, 295; Felony Transportation Act, 295; Habeas Corpus Act suspended, 296; the rising, 296; fate of the leaders, 297, end of movement, 302. Young, John Russell, and General Grant, ii. 448. Zanzibar, Sultan of, ii. 549. Zulu War, ii. 547. THE END. BURT'S HOME LIBRARY. Comprising two hundred and fifty titles of standard works, em- bracing fiction, essays, poetry, history, travel, etc., selected from the world's best literature, written by authors of world-wide repu- tation. Printed from large type, on good paper, and bound in handsome cloth binding, uni- form with this volume, Price, 75 cents per copy. A.dam Bede. By George Eliot. ^F.sop's Fables. Alhambra, The. By Washington Irving. Alice Lorraine. By R. D. 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