THE IARQUIS/IALISBURY H.D.TRAILL. D.C.L SOUTHERN COUNTIES CIRCULATING LIBRARY. ESTABLISHED 1832. 37 and 39, LONDON ST., READING. CATALOGUES and TERMS SENT ON APPLICATION. Subscriptions from Half-a-Guinea. (prime (nUnfe&rff of lueen EDITED BY STUART J. REID LORD SALISBURY THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY H. D. TRAILL, D.C.L. LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & COMPANY (LIMITED) St. Dunstan's House FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.C. 1891 [Alt rights reserved} PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON CONTENTS CHAPTER I Birth and ancestry Three Cecils Early years Eton and Christ Church Foreign travel Enters Parliament] . CHAPTER II State of parties The Coalition Government The Crimean war University legislation Maiden speech Seconds 'previous question' on Mr. Roebuck's motion From the Crimea to China Defeat of Lord Palmerston's Government Dissolution . ... 6 CHAPTER III First essay in original legislation Marriage Fall of Lord Palmerston Supports the union of the Danubian Princi- palities The Reform question Views of parties The ' Oxford Essay 'The Reform Bill of 1859 Its reception- Lord John Russell's amendment Defeat of the Government Dissolution and new Parliament . . . 17 20GG191 vi THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER IV FACE The Whig feud healed Lord John Russell's Reform Bill Its neglect and withdrawal Lord Robert Cecil in opposition His militant attitude The Paper Duties Ministers and the 'attorneys' Succeeds to the title of Lord Cranborne New Parliament and death of Lord Palmerston Reform Bill of 1866 Lord Cranborne on the working-man And on the Bill Defeat and resignation of the Russell Government . . 33 CHAPTER V Enters Lord Derby's Cabinet as Secretary for India The casuistry of the Great Surrender Lord Derby's and Mr. Disraeli's respective shares in it The Reform resolutions Resignations of Lords Cranborne and Carnarvon, and General Peel The confessions of Sir John Pakington 'Ten Minutes Bill' Household suffrage with checks Their disappearance Votes and speeches of Lord Cranborne Final protest The Bill becomes law 61 CHAPTER VI Relations of Lord Cranborne with Mr. Disraeli The Irish Church resolutions His attitude with regard to them Becomes Marquis of Salisbury The Suspensory Bill In the Lords- Lord Salisbury's speech Rejection of the Bill Dissolution and new Parliament 93 CHAPTER VII Irish Church Disestablishment Bill Lord Salisbury accepts and assists to pass it with amendments Negotiates compromise Parliamentary Procedure and Life Peerage Bills Elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford Irish Land Act of CONTENTS vii PACK 1870 Lord Salisbury on 'the Oracle ' Army Purchase Bill and Royal Warrant Increasing unpopularity of the Govern- ment Collier and Ewelme Rectory Scandal Defeat of the Irish University Bill Dissolution and Conservative victory at the polls Mr. Gladstone resigns 104 CHAPTER VIII The New Government Again Secretary for India The Bengal Famine Lord Northbrook and Sir George Campbell The Public Worship Regulation Bill Opposed by Lord Salisbury in the Lords Mr. Gladstone's Six Resolutions The Prime Minister adopts the Bill Sadducees and phylacteries The Bill returned to the Lords Lord Salisbury rebukes ' bluster ' The Prime Minister on his colleagues A ' master of flouts and jeers ' Sessions of 1875 and 1876 . . .116 CHAPTER IX The Eastern Question Differences of English opinion thereon The views of the Government Lord Salisbury's mission to Constantinople His policy and that of his colleagues The preliminary sittings The Conference Obstinacy of the Turks A final appeal Returns to London Lord Beacons- field's defence .129 CHAPTER X Declaration of war The ' Charter of English Policy ' Anxiety in England The 'large maps' Progress of the war and fall of Plevna Differences in the Cabinet Lord Carnarvon on the Crimean war His resignation Fleet despatched to the Bosphorus The Reserves called out Resignation of Lord Derby Explanations in the House of Lords . . 149 Vlii THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER XI PACE Lord Salisbury becomes Foreign Secretary The Salisbury Circular Its effect Agreement for a congress The ' un- authentic' memorandum Ministerial answers and their defence The Treaty of Berlin The Afghan war Mr. Gladstone's ' passionate pilgrimage ' The elections of 1880 . 167 CHAPTER XII Mr. Gladstone's ' little bills ' Compensation for disturbance Death of Lord Beaconsfield Lord Salisbury chosen leader of the Conservative peers His tactics The Kilmainham Treaty and Arrears Bill A chance missed The Franchise Bill Fall of Khartoum and escape of the Government The Spirit Duties and fall of the Government Lord Salisbury Prime Minister His Cabinet Dissolution and new Parliament Eighty-six Irish votes, three acres, and a cow Mr. Glad- stone in office again ' Examination and inquiry ' The Home Rule Bill Its defeat Dissolution and its results . 185 CHAPTER XIII Lord Salisbury enters upon his second Administration Proposal to Lord Hartington The Premier as Foreign Secretary His record Qualifications for the office Personal charac- teristics Eloquence and wit Relations to his party and the country His present position His Ministerial career as a whole 205 INDEX 221 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER I Birth and ancestry Three Cecils Early years Eton and Christ Church Foreign travel Enters Parliament. ' WE have in 1890 a Prime Minister whose ancestors were similarly employed, to the great benefit of England, ten generations ago. Is not this a good ? Is not this tie of lineage for him a link binding him to honour and to public virtue.' Thus, in defence of our English mode of regulating the devolution of property, honours, and oppor- tunities of public service, wrote Mr. Gladstone, in November of the year to which he refers. The passage has assuredly more grace of spirit than of form ; but the sentiment which animates it may well excuse its inelegance. Undoubtedly it is 'a good,' both for the country and for himself, that an English Prime Minister should be the descendant of men who were ' similarly employed ' assuming that to mean men who were eminent Ministers themselves three hundred years ago. Such hereditary attachments to ' honour and public virtue' have never been wanting, one is glad to B 2 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY remember, at any period of our history ; but it may be doubted whether the tie has ever been so strong, or the common eminence of the founders and the inheritor of the tradition so conspicuous as in the case of Lord Salisbury. There have of course been examples of English Ministers able to trace descent from men who have themselves stood high in the confidence of their sovereign, and who, from that post of vantage, have exerted an influence over the destinies of their country. But from the point of view of authority and opportunity, the positions of the ancestor and of the descendant have seldom been so directly comparable as here. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, has been the abler, the more powerful, the more renowned. In one ever-memorable instance, two statesmen, of whom each left an indelible mark on English and European history, stood one to the other in the relation of father and son. But that was an instance of the immediate succession to political genius, not of the atavism that ' throws back ' to it. Our annals furnish no other earlier example of the highest place in the State being filled, at an interval of nearly ten generations between the second and third of the series, by three statesmen of the same family, each in turn supreme in the councils of the Crown, and each so pre-emi- nent in ability and authority among their contemporaries as William Cecil, first Earl of Burleigh, Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, and Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne Cecil, third Marquis of the latter name. This distinguished descendant of famous forefathers was born at Hatfield on February 13, 1830, and is the second son of James Brownlow William, second Marquis of Salisbury. His father, also in his degree an inheritor of the family inclination towards an active public life, was ETON AND CHRIST CHURCH 3 himself a politician of some note and importance, who twice in his career attained to the dignity of Cabinet Minister. He held the office of Lord Privy Seal in Lord Derby's first Administration in 1852, and that of Lord President of the Council under the second Premiership of the same Minister in 1858. His son Robert was trained for public life in those two famous seminaries which have reared so many distinguished statesmen, his eminent pre- decessor in his present post among the number. He left Eton for Christ Church in 1847, and after a stay of two years at Oxford took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1849. Circumstances prevented him from offering himself as a candidate for honours, but the credit with which he ac- quitted himself in the pass examination was rewarded,' as was then the custom, by the unsolicited (and what was often the undesired) distinction of an ' honorary fourth.' His short career at the University was marked by intellectual activities of other than the strictly academic kind. Like many another young Englishman destined, in later years, ' the applause of listening senates to command,' he took an active part in the debates of the Oxford Union Society, and held at one time the office of treasurer, a post filled many years later by one of his sons. There is, unfortunately, no Hansard of the Oxford Union ; it lacks and has always lacked that vates safer of the political orator ; and the debating club speeches of Lord Robert Cecil between his seventeenth and nine- teenth years must be left, like the doughty deeds of the heroes before Agamemnon, to 'rest in endless night un- known.' The records of the Society supply us only with particulars of the subjects which stirred him to eloquence We know that on one occasion he ' supported the drama with Professor Conington against the late Professor Shirley 4 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY and the present (now the late) Dean of Chichester.' 1 Here imagination is left without much assistance from any later deliverances of the speaker, in the work of conjectur- ally reconstructing his argument. We can speculate with much more confidence on the kind of speech in which he urged upon the Conservative party, rent asunder by the repeal of the Corn Laws, the necessity of reuniting to ' provide England with a stronger government than the Liberals were able to give her ' ; or on the line adopted by him in moving a resolution deprecatory of the endowment of the Roman Catholic priesthood in Ireland ; or, above all, on the tenor of his ' strong condemnation of the disso- lution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.,' and his ' emphatic protest against the disestablishment of the English Church.' It is in oratory almost more than in anything else, as has been truly said, that the boy's paternal relation to the man is the most distinctly traceable, and could we recover these lost speeches of Lord Robert Cecil, we should doubtless find much in them to remind us of Lord Cranborne and perhaps even something which we still notice in Lord Salisbury. It does not seem very hazardous to surmise that these speeches were of the militantly controversial rather than the academical and didactic order ; that they were vehement in tone, confident in statement, caustic in criticism, more remarkable for the dash and spirit with which the youthful combatant attacked the position of the enemy than for the prudence with which he selected and fortified his own. 1 Life and Speeches of the Marquis of Salisbury \ K. G. , by F. S. Pulling, M.A. ; a carefully compiled record of the Prime Minister's public acts, and an excellently selected collection of extracts from the reports of his public utterances, in both of which characters it has been consulted with much advantage in the preparation of this volume. ENTERS PARLIAMENT 5 The next year or two after quitting Oxford were spent in foreign travel not merely on the 'grand tour,' whereby the young aspirant to political distinction was wont in the last century to prepare himself for public life, but in a far wider kind of peregrination, which took in many of the British Colonies, and extended even to so distant a portion of the Empire as New Zealand. On his return to England, in 1853, Lord Robert Cecil was elected a fellow of All Souls ; and, shortly afterwards, the retirement of Mr. Herries from the representation of Stamford created for him the desired opportunity of entering Parliament. That constituency was, of course, one to which the name of Cecil would have recommended a candidate of less promise than he who was now offering himself, in the summer of 1853, to its electors. On August 22 he was returned without opposition, and at the beginning of the next session took that seat in the House of Commons which he was to hold with unbroken tenure and with steadily growing reputation for the next fifteen years. THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER II State of parties The Coalition Government The Crimean war- University legislation Maiden speech Seconds ' previous ques- tion' on Mr. Roebuck's motion From the Crimea to China Defeat of Lord Palmerston's Government Dissolution. THE prospect before the Parliamentary party in whose ranks the young recruit had taken his place was discouraging enough. A brief tenure of office two years earlier had sufficed to prove that the effect of the great convulsion of 1846 was far from having exhausted itself. Numerically strengthened though they had been by the election of 1852, the Conservatives had made no progress towards removing the main cause of their moral weakness the schism in their party on the policy of Free Trade. Protectionism still survived among them as an aspiration and a pious opinion, with no power to express itself as a principle or a policy. Free Traders accordingly, of whatever party, regarded them with more or less distrust ; and their own seceding Free Traders, the Peelites, were drifting daily closer and closer to that abyss of Liberalism in which they were destined to be engulfed. The formation of the Coalition Ministry under Lord Aberdeen appeared, doubtless, to many Conservatives to be no very hopeful experiment ; but it was rightly recognised by them as irrevocably determining the connec- tion of the leading Peelites with their former party. No one STATE OF PARTIES 7 expected that Mr. Gladstone, or Sir James Graham, or Mr. Sidney Herbert would ever sit again in a Tory Cabinet ; and they were men whom, whether as debaters or counsel- lors, a Tory Cabinet of the future could ill spare. For the Tory party, although not wanting in politicians of marked ability, well considered among their own order, had but little in the way of approved and accredited statesman- ship to offer to the country. Their leader, Lord Derby, commanded the almost unbounded respect which always attaches among Englishmen to any public man who reinforces the hereditary claims of a great noble, born of an historic house, with the graces of the accomplished orator and scholar. But his name was not then, and never at any time became, a name ' to conjure with.' The reputation of his brilliant lieutenant, Mr. Disraeli, was almost wholly confined to the House of Commons ; and, though his con- summate powers as a debater almost assured to him the leadership of his party in that assembly, whatever vicissitudes might be in store for him and them, he had notthen succeeded, and he did not, in truth, for many years to come succeed, in winning the confidence of the nation. His staff in the Lower House was made up of men like Sir John Pakington, Mr. Spencer Walpole, and others politicians of un- questioned competence in affairs, but not exactly towers of strength either in a Parliamentary debate or an electoral cam- paign. In repute for high administrative capacity and financial talent, the Opposition were, to say the least of it, somewhat weak ; yet it was for finance and administration that the public of that day were most anxious to provide. The admin- istrative capacity of the Coalition Government was largely, though as the event proved disastrously, taken on trust ; but there was some ground for the belief that the national 8 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY finances might be more safely entrusted to the disciples than to the enemies of Peel. Meanwhile those other supremely important desiderata in an English Cabinet fore- sight, to wit, in foreign affairs, and judgment and resolution in dealing therewith had almost disappeared from the list of ministerial qualifications. The prophets of the Man- chester Millennium were in the heyday of their confidence in themselves, and at the zenith of their influence over others. That deceptive flush which enthusiasts mistook for the dawn of a new era had not yet faded from the sky. The gigantic Hyde Park Conservatory of 1851 was still supposed to have effectually done its work as a forcing-house for the plant of international good-will. Cobden was still, with widespread acceptance, preaching the doctrine that Free Trade was destined to overrun the globe, and become an oecumenical peacemaker. In a word, the beatific vision of a kindly earth asleep, or about to sink in slumber, ' lapped in universal law,' glowed still before the eyes of multitudes of Englishmen ; and if a few others perceived on the eastern horizon a little cloud shaped like the hand of the Czar Nicholas outstretched in the direction of Constanti- nople, it is probable that fewer still foresaw how soon the heaven would be 'black with clouds and wind,' and still less how short a time was to elapse before the great storm actually burst. In short, the English public of that day had made up their mind and the per- suasion tended naturally to strengthen the 'Ins' and to weaken the ' Outs ' that the country was ' in for a long innings ' of peace and prosperity ; that all it wanted in the way of Government was a Cabinet of men of business who would keep internal order, and manage its finances husband- like, and for the rest let the people alone as much as possible UNIVERSITY LEGISLATION 9 to ' develop the material resources ' of the country, as a now consecrated phrase has it, by means of Free Trade ; while as for any risk of external quarrel, why, if it were too much to say that the soldier might definitively deliver up sword and spear for conversion into ploughshare and pruning-hook, there was at least no reason why the Foreign Minister should not lock up his despatch boxes, and give himself an indefinite holiday. Rude, indeed, was the awakening of these dreamers ; and it was now near at hand. In August 1853, when Lord Robert Cecil was elected for Stamford, the unconscious nation and its nerveless Government were drifting fast to- wards the catastrophe which was to open the eyes of both. The troops of the Czar were already in occupation of the Danubian Principalities, the Vienna Note had failed, and the war feeling was rising not only among the people but even in a certain section of the Cabinet. When Par- liament met in February 1854, the crisis was imminent, for on the 27th of that month Lord Clarendon despatched the ultimatum to Russia, upon the rejection of which by the Czar Nicholas war was declared. It seems a strange moment at which to illustrate the Roman poet's Cedantarma toga by the introduction of a piece of academical legislation. But Governments after all can hardly occupy their whole time, and employ the energies of all their various depart- ments, in merely blundering into European wars. In those days it was not, as in these, considered a point of honour with Administrations to shield a session from the reproach of ' barrenness ' ; but most Governments even then liked to have something to show in the way of legislation, and accordingly Lord John Russell, who in 1850 had procured the appoint- ment of a Royal Commission to inquire into the condition of IO THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the Universities, now came forward with a Bill for giving legislative effect to the recommendations contained in the voluminous report presented by the Commission in 1852. It was on the second reading of this measure, on April 7, 1854, that Lord Robert Cecil delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons. Lord John Russell's Bill was the first invitation to the Legislature and the Universities to enter on that path along which they have since travelled so far and with such increasingly doubtful results. It was the beginning of that course of academic horticulture which has uprooted a few weeds of comparatively harmless abuse to plant and rear a crop of noxious crotchets in their place. It was the initial step in the attempted realisation of that pretentious policy which sought to achieve a visionary restoration of the Oxford of the twelfth century, by laying the axe to the noble growths of the thirteenth and fourteenth, and their succeeding ages the policy which has since gone far to destroy the colleges without re-animating the ancient idea of the University, which has multiplied prelections and diminished hearers, fattened professors and thinned audiences, endowed new branches of learning with one hand, while with the other bribing honour-hunting students to neglect them, and which has now at last carried the peculiar principles of its advocates to such a pitch of unexpected and undesired success, that they are helplessly calling out for a third Commission to undo- the work of the other two. The issues of this notable movement were not ot course to be fully foreseen when the Oxford University Bill was presented for second reading to the House of Commons ; but its spirit was manifested with sufficient MAIDEN SPEECH II clearness to arouse against it all the Conservative instincts of the young member for Stamford. He fastened at once upon that fundamental iniquity which an older member of his University, Professor Mansel, was afterwards to hold up to public reprobation, in one of the wittiest and most eloquent pieces of verse which the immortal mockery of Aristophanes has ever inspired. It was the thesis of the admirable dis- putation between Adikos and Dikaios Logos, in the ' Phrontisterion,' which Lord Robert Cecil sought in the following passage to enforce : What seemed to him the main objection to the Bill was that it swept away at one blow all the preferences which the founders of colleges had shown for the place of their birth, all the pre- ferences for the schools with which they had been connected, all the preferences for kindred, with the exception of one, the generosity of which could not fail to be appreciated it proposed to admit the lineal descendants of the founders. This exception was little better than an insult, for, with two exceptions, he believed not one of the founders had left lineal descendants at all. An hon. gentleman who supported the confiscation of fellowships argued that the founder had no right to tie up the property for generations and for centuries. But then, if that were so, the analogy of private estates ought to be followed, and if the will of the founder was to be overturned, let the pro- perty return to the heir in the natural course of law. Sir John Pakington, he went on to say, had very ably argued the constitutional grounds on which this Bill ought to be rejected. But he would himself prefer, he said, to rely upon a ' narrower and mere commercial ground which, he thought, would appeal more closely to popular sym- pathies ; namely, that if they squandered in this manner the endowments of the various founders, they would have no more endowments to deal with again.' And the speaker 12 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY concluded with a warning, destined to be abundantly justified, against attaching credit to the assurance of ' finality,' with which the academic ' reformer,' like every other variety of the same species, accompanied their proposals of reform. The compliments which, by the good-natured tradition of the House, are generally bestowed upon a maiden speech, are not, of course, to be accepted literally in all cases ; but there was a note of more than common earnestness in the graceful eulogy pronounced by Mr. Gladstone, speaking evidently some hours afterwards, on the young member whose ' first efforts, rich with future promise, indicate that there still issue forth from the maternal bosom of the University men who, in the first days of their career, give earnest of what they may afterwards accomplish for their country.' There is, however, still better evidence of the rapid Parliamentary success of the member for Stamford in the fact that little more than a year after the delivery of his maiden speech he received the honour of being ' cast ' for a part of no little distinction in a Parliamentary drama of historic celebrity. To be selected on behalf of a controlling section of a great party to second a motion of the ' previous question ' in the debate on a Vote of Censure means some- thing much more, of course, than the complimentary selec- tion of a young member to move or second the Address in reply to a Speech from the Throne ; and it was to no less impor- tant a function than the former that Lord Robert Cecil was designated on July 17, 1855. This was the night on which Mr. Roebuck moved that famous resolution founded upon the report of the Sebastopol Committee, which, if it had been carried, would have affixed the seal of Parliament to the sentence of condemnation which history has pronounced MR. ROEBUCK'S RESOLUTION 13 on the incapable administrators responsible for the disasters of the Crimea. It invited the House to record its sorrow for the sufferings of our army during the previous winter, to approve of the resolution of its Committee that ' the conduct of the Administration was the first and chief cause of the calamities that befell that army,' and to ' visit with severe reprehension every member of that Cabinet whose counsels led to such disastrous results.' No one doubts now, as few doubted then, that this stern sentence of condemnation was deserved. But the peccant Government had been expelled from office with ignominy six months before ; their successors, now purged of the Peelite element of weakness which they had inherited from the defunct Cabinet, and cleared by Lord John Russell's resignation of the national distrust to which his presence in the Government had exposed them, seemed inclined to prosecute the war with vigour ; and on the whole, therefore, it appeared to an in- fluential section of the Opposition that a Vote of Censure upon past Ministerial mismanagement would be inopportune. It was accordingly resolved among them that Mr. Roebuck's resolution should be shelved, and General Peel, a Tory of unimpeachable orthodoxy, was deputed to move, and Lord Robert Cecil to second, the ' previous question.' It is not impossible that the selection of a seconder may have been in part determined by the able speech in which some weeks before he had reviewed the Vienna negotiations in a debate on a motion of Mr. Disraeli's, and had adversely criticised, on grounds which the events of fifteen years later did much to justify, the proposal to close the Black Sea in perpetuity to the Russian flag of war. The Parliamentary manoeuvre in which he was now called upon to take a leading part was one the prudence 14 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY and patriotism of which would hardly, I imagine, be contested by any Conservative of the present day. But it was not the line of the official Opposition. Party feeling ran high, and was complicated in many cases by personal antipathies. Mr. Roebuck's motion, nominally directed against the extinct Coalition Ministry, was in reality aimed (as its mover showed by ostentatiously excepting the late War Minister and two of his Peelite colleagues from his censure) at Lord Palmerston ; and its adoption by the House would have compelled the Premier's resignation. The public mind had been deeply shocked at the state of things which the Sebastopol Committee had brought to light ; and it was, no doubt, technically open to the Oppo- sition leaders to plead the novelty of these disclosures in reply to those who taunted them with having been willing to form a Government in conjunction with Lord Palmerston six months before. Nevertheless it is impossible to justify the course pursued on that occasion by the official Opposition from any national point of view. Lord Palmerston was at that moment, as was well known nay, as had been experimen- tally proved the only possible First Minister of the Crown. Not only every other candidate but every other combination had been tried in vain. After the fall of the Aberdeen Government, Lord Derby had vainly attempted, at her Majesty's request, to construct another Coalition Cabinet ; Lord Lansdowne had been sent for to advise the Queen ; even Lord John Russell, the Minister who had abandoned his colleagues at the first whisper of the rising storm, had been solicited to attempt, and had attempted, the hopeless task of persuading the men whom he had deserted to rally to his side. It was only after a prolonged and anxious ministerial crisis that Lord Palmerston had at last succeeded THE 'PREVIOUS QUESTION' 15 in forming a Government ; which, moreover, within a few days after meeting Parliament, was convulsed by the re- signation of three of its not least important members. To displace it at such a moment a moment when an appeal to the constituencies was out of the question meant leaving the country indefinitely without a Government, or at the mercy of a series of ' transient and embar- rassed ' ministerial phantoms : and this in the very throes of a European war ! Undoubtedly the leaders of the Opposition would have incurred a very grave responsibility if Mr. Roebuck's motion had been carried, and they owed (though it is probable that they were very far from feeling) gratitude to General Peel, Lord Robert Cecil, and their followers for having saved them. The mover of the 'previous question ' supported it mainly from the point of view of a military critic who held that the House had not at present before them the materials for a safe judgment either on the policy or the conduct of the expedition to the Crimea. Lord Robert Cecil opposed Mr. Roebuck's resolution as ' historical and retrospective,' and pointed out the dangers of establishing a precedent for attacking the policy of ex- Ministers. The resolution was supported in the debate by Mr. Disraeli, Sir John Pakington, and other official or influential members of the Opposition, and the minority of 182 which voted for it contained a considerable majority of the Conservative party. Early in the year 1856, the conclusion of peace with Russia left Parliament at liberty to devote itself to matters of domestic interest, and the member for Stamford, who was evidently animated in full measure with those feelings of dislike and regret with which the Conservative party in general regarded the Crimean war, returned, no doubt with 1 6 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY a sense of relief, to the undistracted consideration of questions connected with elementary education and the improvement of the reformatory system. His interest in these subjects, especially in the former, had always been lively, and the part active and watchful, without de- generating into fussiness which he took in the discussion of them during the session of 1856, gave further proof to the House of Commons that he possessed constructive as well as critical ability. His opportunities, however, of promoting or opposing legislation in the then existent Parliament were to be speedily cut short. In the Spring of 1857 the Chinese Government were ill-advised enough to present Lord Palmerston with one of those chances for a display of what would now be called 'Jingoism,' but was then more flatteringly described as a 'spirited foreign policy,' which that veteran swaggerer seldom missed. In the previous autumn the Chinese had seized the lorcha ' Arrow,' under circumstances raising a contention not necessary here to be revived; and in a trice we found ourselves engaged in a Chinese war. The Conservative party united with the Peelites and Radicals in denouncing Lord Palmerston's proceed- ings ; Lord Robert Cecil spoke and voted with his party. A motion of censure was carried against Ministers by 263 votes to 247 ; whereupon they appealed to the country, and were sent back again to power with a largely-increased majority. The popular verdict was beyond question pronounced not only on the author of the Chinese war, but on the Minister who had ' stood in the gap ' in the midst of the Crimean struggle. Vengeance descended on the peace party, and Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden lost their seats. Lord Robert Cecil was returned for Stamford unopposed. CHAPTER lii First essay in original legislation Marriage Fall of Lord Palmer- ston Supports the union of the Danubian Principalities The Reform question Views of parties The ' Oxford Essay ' The Reform Bill of 1859 Its reception Lord John Russell's amend- ment Defeat of the Government Dissolution and new Parlia- ment. IT was in the first session of the new Parliament which met in April 1857 that Lord Robert Cecil made his first appearance as a proposer of legislation. He introduced a Bill to amend the procedure at Parliamentary elections by substituting a voting-paper system for that of personal attendance at a polling station for the purpose of recording the vote. To use his own words, he wished that ' the poll should be brought to the elector, instead of the elector to the poll.' Such a proposal, obvious as are its superficial recommendations, is no doubt obnoxious to several more or less serious objections ; it is interesting to note that by far the weightiest of them the objection, that is to say, to the private performance of so responsible a public duty has been stultified by the introduction of the ballot. The interests of public order and of private freedom of action would unquestionably have been the gainers by the adoption of a voting-paper system. Riot and disorder would have been put an end to ; intimidation within doors and without, by mob or master, would have become the one c 1 8 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY impossible, the other much more difficult than in the case of open polling ; the number of electors actually voting at any contested election would have been largely in- creased. Against each of these recommendations, however, it was possible in 1858 to set its countervailing draw- back. Popular turbulence, it might have been said, should never be allowed such a triumph over the peaceful citizen as to drive him to perform in private an act which ought certainly to be performed, if possible, in the presence of his fellows. As to intimidation, the capacity of resisting it is a pre-supposed condition of the elector's fitness to exercise the franchise, and the best test of that capacity is to require him to exercise it in public. And whether the habitual abstentionist were prevented by timidity or by indifference from recording his vote under the present system, he was disentitled, on either hypothesis, to claim the proposed alteration of the law. Except upon the assump- tion that the citizen not only has opinions, and the courage of them, but cares enough about them to desire their prevalence in the national policy, representative government becomes an absurdity. And if the citizen has, in fact, opinions, and the courage of them, and the desire to assert them, the least he can do in proof thereof is to take what- ever trouble and incur whatever risk of disagreeable incidents may be involved in the journey to a public polling-booth to record his vote. Replies of this kind had cogency and consistency enough in 1858 ; and they availed. The demand for the ballot only flourished in those days as a 'hardy annual,' introduced each session by Mr. Berkeley, and supported by a mere handful of Radicals. Hence the majority of Lord Robert Cecil's Liberal opponents on the question may, perhaps, be MARRIAGE 19 charitably acquitted of insincerity, as not having foreseen that they were themselves one day destined to accept a legislative measure which would make their professed repugnance to private voting appear retrospectively hypo- critical. The Bill had, of course, to be withdrawn ; but the eminent applicability of its principle to the case of the University constituencies the electors of which may reside in many cases a couple of hundred miles from the scene of the contest was recognised in the Reform Act of ten years later. The year 1857 is rendered further notable to the bio- grapher of Lord Robert Cecil as being the date of his marriage with Georgina Caroline, eldest daughter of Sir Edmund Hall Alderson, Baron of the Exchequer, and a judge whose brilliant academical career had given promise of the distinction both for profound learning and for judicial acumen which he was afterwards destined to attain. The following year was politically eventful : for it was in 1858 that the attack on the life of the Emperor Napoleon III. impelled Lord Palmerston to that ill-starred attempt to amend the English law of conspiracy which, by one of the most surprising catastrophes ever recorded in our political history, resulted in the defeat of a Minister whom the con- stituencies had less than a year before re-established in power at the head of a triumphant majority. Lord Derby received and obeyed the Queen's commands to form a new Government, and, despite the comparative weakness of the Conservative party, his conduct of the national affairs both at home and abroad during the remainder of the session of 1 858 was conspicuously successful. The new Administration not only effected an amicable settlement of the unfortunate misunderstanding with France, but succeeded in passing the 20 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY very important measure by which the East India Company was abolished, and the control of Indian administration vested in a Secretary of State, advised by a council. In the course of the session two questions drew the member for Stamford into participation in debate, and the opinions respectively expressed by him upon each of them supply a good illustration of his contrasted views upon foreign and domestic policy. In his strenuous oppo- sition to the Bill for the total abolition of Church rates, he proved the unimpeachable orthodoxy of his ecclesiastical Toryism ; in his support of the claims of the two Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia to effect the union denied to them by the Treaty of 1856, he shewed himself more Liberal in his foreign policy than the Liberals them- selves. The Whig diplomatist of the old school was seriously* apprehensive of the danger to the ' integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire ' which such a union seemed to him to portend. Lord Robert Cecil contended with much ability and earnestness that the consolidation of the two Principalities would strengthen Turkey by provid- ing her with a new bulwark against Russian aggression. Here, then, we have an anticipation by exactly twenty years of the arguments of the famous despatch in which Lord Beaconsfield's colleague at the Berlin Congress de- fended the emancipation of Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia from Ottoman rule. Opinions may differ as to trie sound- ness of the analogy on which this argument is founded ; and events have certainly not been quite so complaisant to the later contention as to the earlier. If Turkey has gained strength from the erection of the two Danubian Principalities into the kingdom of Roumania, it can hardly be said that she is the stronger for the existence of that REFORM ' IN THE AIR ' 21 Principality over which Ferdinand of Coburg maintains a precarious and distracted rule. The replacement of a Liberal by a Conservative Administration produced its usual effect of scandalised astonishment upon the ousted party. They felt, as Whigs in Opposition always have felt, such an incident to be a reproach to Parliamentary Government to which it behoved them, not merely as partisans but as patriots, to put a speedy end ; and by a happy, but not an unprecedented, coincidence it struck them at the same moment that the settlement of a great political question, in which they had seemed to take but a languid interest while in office, would now brook no longer delay. The national demand for a Reform Bill had become in their opinion too imperious to be safely left unsatisfied ; and by way of proving its impe- riousness they proceeded to enter upon what might have been thought a superfluous campaign of agitation in its favour. The labours of the stump-orator were prosecuted with unintermittent assiduity throughout 1858, and agitators did their best, by the incessant emission of the popular catch- word from their lips on scores of platforms, to justify their assertion that Reform was ' in the air.' Endeavours to dis- cuss it after a more methodical and reflective fashion than commends itself to the stump-orator were not however wanting. The volume of ' Oxford Essays ' published in this year contained a paper by Lord Robert Cecil on 'The Theories of Parliamentary Reform' which is of much interest, not only as an exposition of his then opinions, but as an indication of his future conduct at a momentous political crisis. The writer's views on the existing condition of the electoral system were substantially those held by the main 22 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY body of the Conservative party, and, it may be added, in all probability by a clear majority of the Liberals of that day. The position, in fact, of both the schools of political opinion may be defined with substantial accuracy by saying that they were not opposed to such enlargement of the electorate as would extend to the then unrepresented classes of the community as large a share of the national represen- tation as could be given them without making mere numbers predominant over every other element of power in the State. I believe that, if we exclude a few high Tories on the one hand and the, in those days, insignificant group of Radical Reformers on the other, the above formula would, with virtually complete accuracy, express the views of the two great political parties, and would have defined the principle on which, but for 'the party system,' they could and might have united to pass a Reform Act. Of course it does not need saying that any two distinct groups of politicians might hold this common doctrine ' with a difference,' and with a difference of much practical importance. One of them, that is to say, might be of opinion that while the reconstruction of our electoral system on the above lines was theoretically defensible it was not practically needful, and certainly not urgent ; that the existing anomalies of the system were the source of no appreciable injury either to the State or the individual ; and that there was no national demand for their removal. The other group of politicians might contrariwise contend that the case for electoral reform was not less strong on the practical than on the theoretical side ; that the anomalies of the existing system were mischievous as well as disfiguring ; and that their removal was demanded, if not with passion, at any rate with earnestness, by the nation at large. THE 'OXFORD ESSAY 1 23 It is natural to expect, and it is not difficult to infer from the tone of this particular Oxford essayist, that he would belong to the former class of politicians. Probably it included most of the Conservative party of that day. A few of them may have been misled by the agitation into believing in the existence of a genuine and effective popular demand for an enlargement of the franchise. The majority of them held, one may suspect, and as the event proved rightly held, that in the year 1858 the cry which the agitators professed to hear was simply the echo of their own voices. As to the Liberals, they seem to have entertained two successive and not easily reconcilable views on the subject. They must have arrived, by 1859 at any rate, at the conclu- sion that the country was greatly interested in the question of Parliamentary Reform. At least, it is only charitable to assume as much, because in that year they threw out a moderate Franchise Bill on the ground of its inadequacy to the satisfaction of the national wishes, and expelled its authors from power. Inasmuch, however, as after succeeding to office their leaders shelved the question for six years to their apparently complete contentment, we are bound to assume that at some time after the general election and the vote of want of confidence which displaced Lord Derby, their opinion on this point underwent an entire change. Lord Robert Cecil's Oxford essay pretty clearly ranks him, as has been said, among that plainer-spoken section of the Tory party, who, while admitting that our electoral system was theoretically open to improvement, made no conceal- ment of their opinion that it were better left alone. Re- formers, the essayist pointed out, might be divided into three classes, two of them contemplating ends desirable in themselves, but impracticable of attainment and hazardous 24 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY ' of pursuit, the third frankly seeking such changes in the representative system as would, in the writer's opinion, be dangerously disturbing to the political equilibrium of the nation. The first description of reformer, the Educational, as the essayist calls him, started from the principle that go- vernment should be in the hands of the wisest men, but had never been able to propound any practical means of giving effect to that principle in our electoral system. This class of reformer is therefore dismissed by the writer as speedily as is consistent with respect for his character and motives. His presence made itself felt once more for a moment in certain clauses of the Conservative Reform Bill of the fol- lowing year ; but that brief appearance was his last. The painful duty of bowing him, however politely, out of court has not since devolved upon any political writer, and there is no reason to expect that it ever will again. The philo- sopher who theorised, thirty years ago, on the possibility of committing the work of government to the hands of the ' wisest men ' is not likely to trouble the ' practical politician ' any more. He is, indeed, understood to have transferred his energies to the task of discovering a finite arithmetical ratio between the diameter and the circumference of the circle. The 'Symmetrical Reformer,' as Lord Robert Cecil names his second sort of doctrinaire, we have still with us, though somewhat in the state of the jaded Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer. His share in carrying that Reform of the representative system which was then in prospect was less important than that of the third, the ' Democratic ' order of reformer (' Geographical,' as the essayist alternatively styles him, he hardly became till six- teen years later), whose ideal of a bare numerical system of THE 'OXFORD ESSAY* 25 representation was in effect realised in 1867. It is interest- ing to remark, and it reflects credit upon the stability and consistency of Lord Robert Cecil's political judgment, that the views to which he was destined to sacrifice place and power nine years afterwards, are plainly indicated in his remarks on reform of the Democratic variety. He would be pre- pared, he said, to accept even universal suffrage modified by a plural vote based upon a property qualification ; but the notion of placing the dominant political power with- out any check or counterpoise in the hands of the least educated and least responsible class in the country, was not, he held, to be for a moment entertained. Little did he then dream that his leader was destined to do this very thing ; and perhaps that leader suspected it as little himself. Nevertheless, it was the Democratic Reformer's prin- ciples that distinctly triumphed in the Reform Act of 1867. He too, it was, who in 1884 succeeded, as Demo- cratic Reformer, in adding ' two millions of capable citizens ' to the register, and, as Geographical Ditto, in carving up the counties into approximately equal electoral districts. In the two latter operations he was, of course, assisted by the Symmetrical Reformer, who, indeed, has taken much of the moral responsibility off his shoulders. This coadjutor pointed out, with considerable effect, that the consequences of the Reform Act of 1867 had been to create a grossly unjust distribution of political power as between the urban and the rural population. In other words, he contended that since the Democratic Reformer had, in the name of political justice, enormously aggravated an unfair disparity in repre- sentation as between two large classes of the community, he himself had thereby, in the character of the Symmetrical Re- 26 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY former, acquired a right to make another enormous addition to the roll of household-voters for the purpose of correcting the anomaly. In 1858, however, he had not gained such a hearing as he afterwards enjoyed. Lord Robert Cecil admitted, in his essay, the existence of many anomalies in our repre- sentative system, and he laid especial stress on the dispro- portion of the borough to the county electorate. But he was not prepared to correct anomalies for symmetry's sake alone, and without adequate security against the imperilling of those main objects of wise government and national sta- bility for which representative systems exist. And this leads him to the conclusion, fatal, of course, from a Conservative point of view, to any proposals of innovation, that ' we must either change enormously, or not at all.' It is ' undoubtedly to be desired,' he continues, ' that every anomaly should be removed at which hostile critics can laugh or cavil ; still more that every person in the kingdom should have his just share, and no more than his just share, in the government of the country. On the other hand, it is of vital importance that the Legislature should not be deteriorated, or the safety of property endangered.' And though the writer admits, of course, that it might be theoretically possible to devise a system of representation in which all three objects should be exactly and regularly attained, yet ' most statesmen,' he argues, ' will hesitate before they prefer a paper constitution to the time-hardened trusty machine whose working they have thoroughly tried.' Then with a parting stroke at that school of reformers who refused to see anything in the pro- blem except a demand of the unenfranchised for enfran- chisement, he concludes with the following pregnant observations : REFORM BILL OF 1859 2? Political justice to one side, and not to the other, is worse than a set-off of injustice on both sides ; political symmetry on a faulty plan is worse than chaos. Better far to reconstruct the whole ; better still to let that which has worked well work on. But which- ever course is taken, the condition in the representative system which it is our duty to maintain, even at the cost of any restric- tion or any anomaly, is that the intellectual status of the Legis- lature shall not be lowered, and that sufficient weight, direct or indirect, shall be given to property to secure it from the possi- bility of harm. The new Conservative Government, partly, it is to be presumed, in deference to the largely factitious agitation out of doors, and partly from their perception of the fact that, as the Ministry of a minority, they were at the mercy at any moment of a coalition of the contending factions opposite, determined to take up the Reform question themselves; and, in February of the following year, Mr. Disraeli intro- duced a Bill. Lord Robert Cecil should have been flattered by the compliment which it paid to his opinions ; for, in truth, it might almost have been drafted by the author of the Oxford essay on the ' Theories of Parliamentary Reform. Or if the politician in him would have disclaimed responsi- bility for some of the provisions of the measure, the political thinker would have recognised the inspiration of his principles in all of them alike. Disraeli in 1859 was as uncompromising an opponent of the ' Geographical,' or ' Symmetrical,' Re- former as his follower, and no less hostile than he to the crude doctrine that political power ought to be simply apportioned as per head of the population. At the same time, he was equally sensible with him of the anomaly created by the inequality between the borough and county representation, and no less conscious of the impossibility of framing any acceptable Reform Bill which did not deal with it. 28 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Hence the measure introduced by him this year was the resultant of these forces. It proposed to leave the borough franchise untouched, but to reduce the fifty pound franchise of the counties to the level of the boroughs. Concurrently with this, however, and by way of makeweight for the popu- larisation of the suffrage in that branch of our elective system which had been supposed to give special representa- tion to property, a variety of new franchises, founded upon certain special qualifications, and designed to extend the political influence of the order of smal capitalists and of the professional and cultivated classes, were added to those already in existence. Thus, the possession of property to the extent of io/. a year in the Funds, in Bank Stock, or in East India Stock, or of a sum of not less than 6o/. lodged in a savings-bank, or of a pension amounting to 2O/. a year and upwards in the Naval, Military, or Civil Service, was to qualify for a vote, as also was residence in a portion of a house whose aggregate rent was 2o/. a year. And the franchise was further conferred upon graduates of the uni- versities, ministers of religion, members of the legal and medical professions, and certain schoolmasters. The weak points of such a measure as this, at any rate as it would present itself to the English mind, are too obvious to need indication. It was loyally defended from his place in the House by Lord Robert Cecil, but he must have doubted, one would think, whether its attempt to found an educational franchise favourable as he was to the principle of such an endeavour was happily conceived. Undoubtedly it excited more wonder than enthusiasm outside the House of Commons. People ridiculed it as fantastic, and pinned the expressive nickname of 'fancy franchises' to the new qualifications which it would introduce. REFORM BILL OF 1859 29 The great majority of the persons who constituted the selected classes being on the electoral roll already, Mr. Disraeli's proposals were not likely to find any very energetic advocacy in that quarter, or, indeed, among Conservatives in general ; while the maintenance of the borough qualifica- tion unreduced was, of course, sufficient to array the united forces of the Liberals and Radicals in opposition to the Bill the latter because they really desired a popular extension of the suffrage, the former because they felt the party neces- sity of ' trumping their opponents' lead.' The Government were further unfortunate in having displeased two sections of their followers represented respectively by Mr. Walpole and Mr. Henley, who resigned concurrently with the introduction of the Bill on two distinct and even con- flicting grounds. Mr. Walpole strongly disapproved of the assimilation of the county and borough franchises ; Mr. Henley objected to drawing any hard and fast line of rental or rating qualification, and declaring that every man above it should have a vote, and no man below it, and prophesied, in a well-remembered phrase, that this must inevitably lead later on to ' an ugly rush ' to break through the barrier. Still, with all its defects, the Bill might have been made into a workable and satisfactory measure, and have postponed the final degradation of the franchise for another thirty or forty years. Nor is it easy to believe that, if party objects could have been excluded and party instincts suppressed, there would have been any difficulty in procuring a general Parliamentary agreement to remodel and pass the Bill. It had been brought in by a minority legislating, as it were, on sufferance, whose leaders, unless they meant to abandon their attempt as soon as commenced, were bound to, and did, in fact, signify their willingness to agree to its indefinite 30 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY revision, if not, indeed, its complete reconstruction, in ac- cordance with the general sense of Parliament. What was wanting was simply the desire on the Opposition side of the House to co-operate with the Government. Had this desire been present and effective, the only real danger which the Bill would then have had to encounter would have been in the apathy with which, in Parliament as outside it, the prematurely named Reform ' movement ' was regarded. There would in any case have been a strong effort made to shelve the whole question, and the attempt might possibly have prevailed. But, on the other hand, it is con- ceivable and not improbable that the leaders of the two parties loyally acting together might have succeeded in convincing the rank and file of their followers that now was the appointed time, and that not only the cause of Con- servatism, but that of orderly progress as distinguished from violent change, would gain by a readjustment of the electoral system in advance of the popular demand. As things stood, however, there was not, and never had been, any chance of the experiment being tried. The Reform Bill of 1859 was doomed from its birth, nay, predestined before its conception, to a place among the lost, though not so much from the ' eternal purpose and foreknowledge' of anyone as from the lack of both. Its rejection was the inevitable consequence of its presentment to a group of jealous and jarring political sections, led for this purpose, but this only, by the incarnation of Whig factiousness himself. The three or more parties who sat at that day on the left of the Speaker were united in nothing except their determination not to let the Tories get the credit of settling the only political question that promised to provide them with a chance of restoration to the offices CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT 31 \vhich they had been wrangling over, and intriguing them- selves into, and jockeying each other out of, for the last dozen years, and from which the incompetence of some, the untrustworthiness of others, and the dissensions of all seemed at last in danger of excluding the entire gang. Lord John Russell sounded a note of opposition to the Bill on the night of its introduction, and moved a hostile amendment to it on the second reading. A prolonged and interesting debate followed, in which it can hardly be said that the weight of argument was on the side of the Opposi- tion, and Ministers were defeated on a division by 330 votes to 291. Lord Derby on this advised an immediate disso- lution, and in the general election which followed, his party gained twenty-nine seats. They could still, however, be placed in a minority whenever their adversaries could bring themselves to combine ; and, as a matter of fact, their ad- versaries brought themselves to do so in the first week of the Session. Parliament met on May 31 ; an amendment to the Address in the usual form expressive of a withdrawal of Parliamentary confidence from the Government was moved by Lord Hartington on June 7 ; and three days later the Government were put in a minority of 13, in one of the largest divisions ever taken in the House of Commons. Ministers at once tendered their resignations, and after some curious negotiations, in which Lords Granville, Palmerston, and John Russell took part, and in which the third of these three statesmen is understood to have refused to serve under the first, though willing to accept office in a Government to be formed by the second, the crisis ended in the elevation of Lord Palmerston to the Premier- ship, which he held until his death six years afterwards. Liberty and Progress having thus been safeguarded by the 32 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY restoration to power of their traditional patrons, it seems hardly worth recording, even as a mere matter of detail, that a Reform Bill, introduced by Lord John Russell in the year following, was shelved with exceeding unanimity and expe- dition, and that the entire question was suffered to remain from 1860 to 1866 in absolutely unbroken repose. 33 CHAPTER IV The Whig feud healed Lord John Russell's Reform Bill Its neglect and withdrawal Lord Robert Cecil in opposition His militant attitude The Paper Duties Ministers and the 'attorneys'- Succeeds to the title of Lord Cranborne New Parliament and death of Lord Palmerston Reform Bill of 1866 Lord Cranborne on the working-man And on the Bill Defeat and resignation of the Russell Government. BETWEEN Lord Palmerston's last accession to office and his death there elapsed a period of six years, which though one of the least eventful, is from another point of view one of the most interesting in our Parliamentary history. Its interest, indeed, is mainly due to its very lack of incident, and to the signal illustration of the nature and working of the English party system which it thereby afforded. At the close of the last chapter a brief glance was cast at the abortive Reform Bill of 1860. The briefest glance would be enough to devote to a measure which probably had not a single genuine admirer, and with the possible exception of its author, not even a friend, in the House of Commons. The state of Wordsworth's Lucy the ' maid whom there was none to praise and very few to love ' was exactly re- produced, in its peculiarity at least if not in its graciousness, by Lord John Russell's scheme. It is hard to say whether its introduction was an act of conventional homage to political consistency, or a ceremony performed to celebrate 34 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the happy pacification of a long-standing personal conflict. But perhaps the rite which solemnised Lord John's union with Lord Palmerston was more appropriately typified by the sacrifice of Lord Granville. Commanded by her Majesty, who was unwilling to decide between the con- flicting claims of the two veteran statesmen, to form a Government, Lord Granville succeeded only, as no doubt he was only expected both by his sovereign and himself to succeed, in showing what Government was capable of being formed by others. Lord Palmerston apparently was not un- unwilling he did not at any rate positively refuse to serve under him. Lord John Russell was and did. Lord Granville's mission was in fact as instantaneously enlighten- ing as the instructions given, together with a sword, by King Solomon to one of his attendants on a certain memorable occasion. It was at any rate made clear forthwith that Lord John Russell was not prepared to immolate his love of power on the altar of rivalry. Rather, to be sure, than yield precedence to Lord Granville, he would have remained out of office ; but rather than remain out of office, he would give place to Lord Palmerston. Thus all was amicably arranged. Lord Granville made a graceful bow and retired to the office of President of the Council ; Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister, and Lord John Russell Foreign Secretary ; and so, with the ancient Whig feud healed, and a consolidated Whig Government established firmly in power, it became once more possible for the thoughtful Whig politician to recognise that all was for the best in the best of all possible Whig worlds. The only thing which remained to be done was to pay the last tribute of decent respect to the pretext on which the new Government had driven their predecessors from THE SHAM REFORM BILL 35 office, and df recognition of the services of the party leader Who had led the attack, by allowing Lord John Russell to bring in a Reform Bill. Hende the introduction of a measure which was received With apathy, was debated with ever-increasing languor, and finally, after only narrowly escaping on more than one occasion the last indignity of a count-out, expired in derision. The truth, in fact, had to be at last acknowledged that there was no effective demand for reform in any quarter. The middle classes that order of which Mr. Lowe was a few years later destined to become the eloquent champion were naturally content with things as they were ; the working classes, in spite of the efforts of Mr. Bright and others to awaken their political ambitions, were largely indifferent to the whole subject ; and the personal popularity of the Premier, who was known to be no Reformer, did the rest. Thus it came about that from the end of the Parliamentary session of 1860 till the end of the Parliament itself in 1865, the demand for the extension of the suffrage seemed to have completely died out, and that at the general election of the latter year, it was possible for the veteran Prime Minister, who had ridden into power over the corpse of a Franchise Bill, slain for its ' inadequacy,' to silence a Tiverton ' heckler ' with the jauntily audacious utterance, 'My friend there asks me why' we have not brought in another Reform Bill. My answer is, Because we are not geese ! ' Such periods of enforced inaction are usually borne with more composure by the commander of a political army than by the younger and more ardent of his lieutenants. The Tory party as a whole acquiesced with a mixture of philosophy and patriotism in the Palmerstonian regime. That is to say, they perceived as practical politicians the 36 THE MARQUIS 0? SALISBURY hopelessriess of contending against the Pririle Minister's popularity, and as good citizens they were conscious that the best interests of the country were served by his ascen- deiicy. A Liberal Administration governing on Conservative pririciples is Indeed the cdnsciehtibus Tory's ideal, just as a Conservative Administration legislating to Liberal orders is or should be the object of his deepest aversion. The former arrangement represents the maximum of political stability attainable under a democratic suffrage and the party system ; the latter is calculated to aggravate the dangers of democracy and the vices of faction to their utmost. Those who can recall our political history during the last years of Lord Palmerston's life will not have forgotten the terms in which the situation used to be discussed in private by those moderate members of the two parties who ap- proached nearest to each other and therefore to the joint creation of a Centre group. They frankly and unreservedly agreed in recognising that Palmerston's rule secured the dominance of virtually Conservative principles while pro- tecting their official exponents against the factiousness of Liberal attack ; and if any Tory of that day was ever in a mood either to doubt or to resent the existence of such a state of things, a single glance at the malcontent yet im- potent band of resentful Radicals by which the veteran Minis- ter was surrounded, was always sufficient to convince him of, and to reconcile him with, the fact. Still the situation was naturally and necessarily irksome to a ' fighting ' member of the Opposition ; and one may be permitted perhaps to surmise that on not a few occasions in the years 1860-65, Lord Robert Cecil may have been no stranger to those feelings of impatience which twenty years later were to agitate the breast of a young follower of his A NEW 'RISING HOPE' 37 own, and to find vent in the irregular campaigning operations of Lord Randolph Churchill. Anyhow we find the member for Stamford displaying every now and then during those years an eagerness for the fray which would have done no discredit in point of activity and vivacity to the member for Woodstock. Mr. Gladstone, then as now, not only combative himself, but the cause of combativeness in others, supplied him with chal- lenges not a few. On the Church rate question, and gene- rally on all matters in which the Anglican Establishment was concerned, Lord Robert Cecil had by a strange irony succeeded to the position occupied twenty years before by ' the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories.' It was to him and not to his leader, whose Churchmanship, though thoroughly orthodox in principle, was at all periods of his career distinctly opportunist in practice, that the High Anglican party in Parliament and outside it began to turn whenever any new legislation directly or indirectly affecting the Church of England was afoot. Nor was it in this alone that his vigorous Toryism dis- played itself. When in the year 1860 the Chancellor of the Exchequer first proposed the repeal of the paper duties, Lord Robert Cecil was one of the few members who had the courage to resist that measure on any other than oppor- tunist grounds. There was indeed plenty of standing room from which to oppose it, without questioning the value of the popular 'boon' which Mr. Gladstone was offering. The repeal of the paper duties a measure for which Lord Palmerston cannot be suspected of any personal enthusiasm was, according to the Conservative contention, the price paid to the Radical malcontents for continuing to the Government their sulky support. It could only be 38 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY effected by the addition of a penny to the income tax. Those who would lose by this fiscal readjustment were an ascertained class, and their immediate loss was indisputable; those who would immediately gain by it were, with the ex- ception of a few large traders and manufacturers, difficult to indicate, while the ultimate benefit to the community, if admitted to be certain of realisation, was uncertain in amount. It was accordingly on these grounds that the Con- servatives as a body opposed the repeal of the paper duties, save when indeed they took up the still narrower ground that the project was financially inadmissible in the Budget of the current year. The abstract advantages of multiplying cheap literature were, if not exactly assumed by these ob- jectors, at any rate not as a rule openly contested by them. How much bolder was the line taken by the member for Stamford may be gathered from the following passage in a speech delivered by him on the Budget proposals for 1 860-61. 'Could it be maintained that a person of any education could learn anything worth knowing from a penny paper ? It might be said that people might learn what had been said in Parliament. Well, would that contribute to their education ? ' These two downright questions sufficiently define the views of the politician who propounded them. They must receive their answer from persons better qualified to consider them impartially than the present writer, who may, how- ever, be permitted to record his opinion that one of them still exacts, and perhaps more peremptorily than ever, a negative reply. 1 1 Those of us who are moved to exult over what they may think a reproach to Lord Robert Cecil's political foresight in this matter, would do well to note that events, while refuting one of his implied THE PAPER DUTIES 39 The position taken up by the Conservative majority in the House of Lords was less uncompromising than this. The Opposition peers contented themselves with maintaining that the state of the finances was not such as to justify the immediate abandonment of so large a head of revenue ; and somewhat to the surprise of the more timid order of Con- servatives, the Paper Duties Repeal Bill was rejected on the second reading. The cry, of course, was at once raised that this action was ' unconstitutional ' a sort of perpetual adjective employed by some politicians to describe any action on the part of any person or power in the State which such politicians would have liked such person or power to refrain from. There was never much real question about the rights of the House of Lords in the case in ques- tion ; and such as there was was obligingly if undesignedly disposed of in favour of the Lords by their Radical assailants. Three propositions which may be affirmed with complete confidence emerge from the controversy : (i.) The House of Lords, although by its acts it may be taken to have tacitly acknowledged the sole right of the Commons to originate Bills of Supply, has never formally or expressly recognised any limitation of its own rights of dealing with them. (2.) The House of Lords has, by the practice of two centuries, acquiesced in the resolution of the Commons in 1678 declaring that 'aids and supplies ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords,' and have never during that period so changed or altered them. judgments, have confirmed the other. For the increase in the number of things ' worth knowing ' which can be learnt from the penny papers, has been accompanied, as everybody is aware, by a more than pro- portionate abridgment of their Parliamentary reports. 4O THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY (3.) Their right to reject an aid or supply, in other words a Money Bill, without amendment has never been challenged by the Commons, and is implied in the fact that the assent of the Upper House is just as necessary to the validity of a Money Bill as of any other enactment. From these propositions it of course follows that the action of the Lords in rejecting the Paper Duties Bill was, putting its policy out of the question, every whit as consti- tutional as its rejection of the first Reform Bill. If anything unconstitutional is to be found in the entire transaction and the consequences thereon ensuing, it is to be sought rather in the three resolutions subsequently agreed to by the Commons on the motion of the Government, The first of these declared 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, manner, measure, and time is only in them.' The second was to the effect that ' although the Lords have exercised the power of rejecting Bills of several descriptions relating to taxation, by negativing the whole, yet the exercise of that power by them has not been frequent and is justly regarded by this House with peculiar jealousy as affecting the right of the Commons to grant the supplies and to provide the ways and means for the service of the year.' The third ran : ' That to guard for the future against the undue exercise of that power by the Lords, and to secure to the Commons their rightful control over tax- ation and supply, this House has in its own hands the power so to impose and remit taxes and to frame Bills of Supply that the right of the Commons as to matter, manner, measure, and time may be maintained inviolate.' Of these resolutions it may be observed that the first LORDS AND COMMONS 41 asserts what is not the fact ; that the second by implication contradicts it ; and that the third is unnecessary if the first is true, and either untrue or unconstitutional if it is not. This is clear if we examine the three resolutions in detail. Thus, it is not true that ' the right of granting aids and supplies to the Crown is in the Commons alone ; ' but only the right of proposing such grants, for they cannot be legally completed or take effect without the co-operation of the House of Lords. This, indeed, is implicitly admitted by the second resolution, which recognises the existence of a ' power ' in the House of Lords to reject Money Bills, and goes on to affirm, not that such rejection is unconstitutional as it would be if ' the right of granting aids and supplies ' were ' in the Commons alone ' but merely that it is of infre- quent occurrence and 'jealously regarded by the Lower House.' The third resolution would be superfluous if it were designed to guard against the ' undue exercise of a power ' that did not exist, while if intended to imply that any such exercise of its constitutional privileges by the House of Lords as may be ' regarded with peculiar jealousy ' by the House of Commons becomes thereby an ' undue ' exercise of such privileges which the latter House ' has it in its power ' so to frame Money Bills as to prevent, it is clear that this resolu- tion embodies a proposition which is contrary either to fact or to constitutional principle. For except in the barren and limited sense in which an individual may say that he has ' power ' to disobey a law, or to violate a contract, or to refuse to be bound by an understanding, the embodied proposition is simply untrue. In any other than this sense it amounts to affirming that one House has ' the power ' under the constitution of limiting the constitutional power of the Other, which is a contradiction in terms and absurd. 42 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY What, however, the resolution practically meant was not long after made clear. It meant that whether the Commons had or had not a constitutional power of preventing the Lords from rejecting a Money Bill, the Government intended to act as if they had. They intended in other words so to frame the most important of their Money Bills in the following year as that the power of the House of Lords to accept or reject it should be, not indeed in form, but in fact extinguished. After laying his financial statement before the House in the session of 1861, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acting in conformity with the principle asserted in the aforesaid third resolution, embodied all his Budget propositions, including resolutions for the repeal of the Paper Duties, in one Bill. 1 Great exception was taken to this course by a section of the Opposition, of whom Lord Robert Cecil made himself an eloquent and powerful spokesman. He protested against the attack on the privileges of the House of Lords, in the name not only of the rights of that House but of the representative principle itself, which he stoutly declared to have as much at stake in upholding the free action of one branch of the Legislature as of the other. This view, which contains a truth not unworthy the attention even of the democrat of our own days, was effectively set forth in the following passages. It seems to me that the right hon. gentleman the member 1 It was no doubt natural and legitimate enough that Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, should have been held chiefly re- sponsible for this high-handed proceeding. Still it is only fair to re- member (what, however, a recent critic seems to have forgotten) that the conciliatory and Conservative Prime Minister himself moved the resolutions of 1860, and that if the third of them did not mean that Mr. Gladstone's financial tactics of 1861 were arranged and agreed to by his chief and his colleagues in the previous year, it meant nothing. 'ATTORNEYS AND STATESMEN* 43 for Birmingham and others who take a strong view against the House of Lords wholly mistake the question of last year. They seem to imagine the question was one of jurisdiction, that the two Houses were righting in the arena by themselves, and that there was no one else whose behests they ought to consider and obey. The Government seem to think it was a fight of procedure and forms, and precedent and parchment. We are accused of reaction on this side of the House. It is said we fancy we are living in past centuries, and that we are applying to the present the passions of the past. But in listening to the speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, we might be excused for thinking that we are still living and fighting in the days of the Stuarts. They do not see that behind, and acting through the House of Lords, there was the great educated public of the country, of which that House, and this House too, are merely the vehicles and instruments, and not seeing that they imagine that the fight will be settled by a conflict between the two Houses, and that they can fetter the action of the Lords by an imperious decree. The Government, however, were resolved to persevere with their ingenious device. On the adoption of the financial resolutions, they introduced a Budget Bill in which the proposed repeal of the paper duties was asso- ciated with various other readjustments of taxation ; but before reaching this stage of matters, the Government had evinced a disposition to press forward the preliminary proceedings in Committee of Ways and Means in a manner which provoked bitter rebuke from Lord Robert Cecil, who spoke of the devices by which the scheme had been characterised from beginning to end as ' more worthy of an attorney than of a statesman.' Referring to this phrase in a subsequent debate, he admitted that the expression was thought to be too violent, and that when a speaker, in the heat of debate, dropped an expression which, on 44 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY reflection, he felt to be stronger than was necessary, he ought to take the first opportunity either to apologise or to retract. ' Therefore ' he went on to say, in words still re- membered and quoted by his opponents, ' he felt that he was only doing justice to his own feelings when he owned that on that occasion he did a great injustice (cries of " hear, hear ") to the attorneys. They were a very honour- able set of men, and he was sure ' (he was evidently going on to say, amid the interruptions which ensued) ' that they were incapable of the chicanery of which he had accused the Government.' This explanation shed no oil on the troubled waters, and adverse critics professed at the time, and still do profess, to detect in it a deliberate design of driving home the original sarcasm. If, however, they had remembered their 'Boswell,' they would have seen that it is at least patient of a more innocent interpretation. ' Do you know,' said Goldsmith, in the story told of him in the great biography, to Lord Shelburne, ' that I never could conceive the reason why they call your lordship " Malagrida " ; for Malagrida was a very good sort of man.' ' This,' said Dr. Johnson, commenting on it years afterwards, ' was only a blunder in emphasis. It meant, " I wonder they should use Malagrida as a term of reproach." ' Now if the inventors of this nickname had subsequently apologised to the shade of that Italian Jesuit and visionary for having used his name as a term of reproach, they would have done mutatis mutandis exactly what Lord Robert Cecil did. Yet it would in such a case have been clearly perverse to accuse them of thereby intending a reiteration of their charges against Lord Shelburne. The modern instance indeed is the stronger of the two, For the attorneys were alive ; and it is A blSAPPOItfflNCi APOLOGY 4$ surely riot denied, even by the most hostile of the critics aforesaid, that they were in fact entitled to an apology. Well, they got it ; and the mere cifcumstahce that certain other persons who were expecting an apology did not get it may have been a disappointment to them, but could not possibly constitute an additional grievance. Whether Lord Robert Cecil's sentence was designedly so framed as to arouse the expectations which he was about to disappoint, is no doubt an interesting and arguable question ; but it is one which no biographer can hope to answer. It remains and must remain between the speaker and his own conscience. One is not surprised to find, however, that Ministers and Ministerialists of the more solemn order were not a little scandalised at the sally ; and, indeed, that they were generally somewhat discomposed at the vivacity which the member for Stamford threw into his attacks on the Government. As usual in such cases they looked eagerly for some sign that the leader of the Opposition disapproved of his follower's ardour. But Mr. Disraeli was the last man from whom any such indication was to be expected. He had raised Ministerialist hopes by observing, on the occasion when the devices of the Government were denounced as more worthy of an attorney than a statesman, that 'the discussion appeared to be characterised by a great deal of unnecessary heat ; ' but when later on in the debate the Chancellor of the Exchequer took upon himself to ' invite the noble lord the member for Stamford, to reconsider the vocabulary in which he has addressed us,' Mr. Disraeli promptly interposed with a congratulation of his noble friend upon Mr. Gladstone's public acknowledgment of ' the efficiency of his powers of expression. I confess,' he continued, ' that I have listened with satisfaction to the 46 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY noble lord both last night and to-night, as it appeared to me that I never heard more constitutional opinions expressed in more effective language. I hope that on Thursday the noble lord the member for Stamford will be prepared to take that part in our debates in which I think he has greatly distinguished himself.' And in truth the noble lord the member for Stamford was just then prepared to take part in debate on any subject which appealed to his keenly critical intellect, or touched those Tory principles to which he held with such convic- tion, and for which he was always so ready to do battle. In some respects, indeed, the period of 1860-66 forms the most interesting stage in Lord Robert Cecil's career ; for in it one watches not only the gradual development of his great powers as a political thinker and reasoner, but the naturally more rapid process by which he perfected his brilliant aptitudes for parliamentary conflict. The states- man in his composition had still of course to reach maturity ; as, indeed, statecraft is an art in which a man may, and no doubt should, continue to be a learner to his life's end. But considered as a debater and political controversialist in general, the Lord Robert Cecil of the last Palmerstonian Parliament was to all intents and pur- poses the Lord Salisbury of to-day. His criticisms on Mr. Gladstone's ill-conceived and ill-conditioned attempt to introduce the principle of the taxation of charitable endow- ments ; his contribution to the debate on the motion of censure upon the Government for their dealings with the Danish Question ; and even such less important, but no less characteristic efforts as his speech on the long-forgotten Brazilian difficulty when he accused Lord Russell of adopting 'a sort of tariff of insolence' in his correspon- BECOMES LORD CRANBORNE 47 dence with foreign Powers show him in full mastery of those oratorical powers which he still so effectively wields. On June 14, 1865, Lord Robert Cecil succeeded, by the death of his elder brother, Lord Cranborne, to the second title of the family. On July 6, 1865, the Parliament of 1859 was dissolved. Its life had been of a length which has seldom if ever been equalled since the passing of the Septennial Act, and which even in this instance only a special combination of circumstances the popularity of the Conservative-Liberal Lord Palmerston, the discredit into which Lord Russell and the Reforming Liberals had fallen, and the general lassitude of parties which prevailed in consequence would have enabled it to attain. Long, however, as the Parliament had lived and it had now entered on the last year of its statutory term it may be doubted whether from the Tory point of view its end did not come three months too soon. When the dissolution took place in the first week in July Lord Palmerston was living. His name was a name to conjure with, and the elections were held under its spell; but he did not live to meet the new Parliament. On October 18 he died, and the Reform question was immediately thrust upon a Legislature, the Liberal element in which was largely Palmerstonian and as such disposed to look with coldness and misgiving on the policy of popularising the franchise. In such an assembly it was to be anticipated that a Reform Government would meet with the difficulties that in fact beset it ; that their attempts to settle the question would be thwarted and ultimately defeated by a mutinous section of their followers ; and that thereupon that hateful compe- tition of parties for popular favour at the expense of public 48 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY interest which the country rues to this day, would, with all its disastrous consequence, set in. If a forward step is to be taken in the democratic direc- tion, it is not desirable that the attempt should be made either by a Liberal Government too numerically strong, or by one which internal discord renders too weak. The Ad- ministration that enters upon such an undertaking should be supported by a party united enough to enable it to carry a moderate measure, but should be at the same time held in check by an Opposition formidable enough to deter it from ' heroic ' schemes. This latter condition might or might not have been ful- filled in the Parliament of 1865 ; there was no opportunity of testing the question, for the non-fulfilment of the former condition became immediately apparent. No time was lost, on the part of the Moderate Liberals, in showing that a Russell-Gladstone Administration, with Reform as the prin- cipal item in the programme, was not to their taste. The Times, which in those days still retained its full prestige as the unerring exponent of middle-class Liberal sentiment, and to which in its then period of supremacy it was a far more important matter not to commit the capital journalistic blunder of pledging itself irrevocably to the losing side than it is to-day, made a ' dead set ' against the succession of Lord John (now Lord) Russell to the Premiership. ' Leader ' after ' leader ' appeared in those usually reserved and prudent columns in deprecation of it ; and the editorial protest was emphasised by a scathing historical review of the many political errors and obliquities with which the name of Lord Russell had been associated. Her Majesty, if I remember rightly, was almost passionately en- treated to refrain from sending the naturally and universally REFORM BILL OF 1 866 49 expected summons to the veteran statesman, and to lay her commands for the reconstitution of the Liberal Government upon someone else. When the Times had burnt its last boat, it was officially announced that Lord Russell would be the new Prime Minister, and that Mr. Gladstone would succeed as Chancellor of the Exchequer to the leadership of the House of Commons. The Moderates, however, though defeated for the moment, had no idea of surrendering. The bulk of the party rallied, of course, to the reconstituted Ministry, and the ' leading journal ' had to fall into line with the rest. But there was an able and powerful group of members on the Speaker's right distinguished, several of them by their eloquence, and one of them by his almost lyrical enthusiasm for middle-class government who had little belief in the wisdom and statesmanship of Mr. Gladstone, and none at all in the political virtue of Reform. And these men, fore- seeing, as of course they did, and indeed as the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the eventful session of 1866 informed them, that the Reform question would now be raised in earnest, armed themselves for a conflict in which they were destined to win a Pyrrhic victory. Yet it might have been thought, when Mr. Gladstone on March 1 2 introduced the Ministerial Bill for the extension of the franchise, that the Government would succeed in averting a conflict, at any rate within their own ranks. It was not a measure which need have greatly alarmed anyone who believed as some at least of the recalcitrant Liberals professed to believe in the prudence of any downward extension of the suffrage. It proposed a 7/. franchise in the towns, and a franchise of i4/. in the counties. Mr, Gladstone's calculation was that it would add K 50 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY a total of 400,000 new voters to the electoral roll, 172,000 by the county franchise, 204,000 by the borough rating franchise, and 24,000 by the lodger and savings-bank franchises. Lord Cranborne, who opposed the measure strenuously on the first reading, preferred the arithmetic of his own statistical contention that it would give the control of 168 boroughs, or a clear majority of the borough representation of England and Wales, to the working-classes. But he laid his finger upon a yet graver defect in the measure, though one which was curable and in fact cured before the final rejection of the Bill : namely, that it con- tained no scheme for the redistribution of seats, or in other words that it left Parliament uncertain what or whether any compensation would be provided by the Government for the swamping of the county constituencies with a large number of urban voters. 'The golden link,' said Lord Cranborne ironically, ' which connects the Chancellor of the Exchequer's many phases of opinion and great varieties of character is his persistent undying hatred of the rural interest.' The counties, he pointed out, were, as matters stood, to a great extent unrepresented, and should have sixty or seventy members added to them to bring them up to the level of the borough representation as judged by the population standard. Yet the new Reform Bill, so far from doing anything to remedy this inferiority, would enormously aggravate it. The Liberal malcontents were not slow to seize upon this objection, and before the Bill came on for second reading, Lord Grosvenor gave notice of an amendment to the effect that the House was of opinion that it was inex- pedient to consider the Bill for the reduction of the fran- chise ' until it had before it the whole scheme of the Govern- BURNING THE BOATS 51 ment for the amendment of the representation of the people.' It is not probable, one must in fairness admit, that the concession of this eminently reasonable demand would have disarmed the Adullamite opposition to the Bill. Later on, when party passions were more thoroughly aroused, and when the opponents of the Government had almost tasted blood in the narrow division on the above amendment, the concession was made ; but it was then of course too late. It might not have saved the Bill at any time, but the ob- stinate withholding of it was certainly an example of those unwisely high-handed tactics which have been not in- frequently, but seldom with the justification of success, adopted by Mr. Gladstone in the conduct or attempted conduct of the various legislative measures with which he has been concerned during his political career. The Easter recess intervened between this notice of amendment and the date fixed for the second reading ; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer took occasion during that interval to address a great public meeting at Liverpool and to denounce Lord Grosvenor and Lord Stanley, the intending seconder of the amendment, as ' coming forward combinedly for the purpose of defeating an act of grace, and what is likewise an act of justice to a great community of the country.' He went on to say that the Government staked their existence as a Government and their political cha- racter on the adoption of the Bill as it stood ; that the sound given forth by their trumpet had not been, and he trusted would not be, uncertain ; that they had passed the Rubicon ; that they had broken the bridges and burned the boats behind them ; that, in short, they were pledged, as deeply as this wealth of metaphors could pledge anyone, to stand or fall by their Bill. E2 52 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY All this, whether prudent or not, was legitimate enough ; but not so the charges against certain of his political oppo- nents with which Mr. Gladstone coupled it. He, in fact, re- peated before his Liverpool audience a memorable accusation which he had made against Lord Robert Montagu and others in a previous debate in the House of Commons, namely, that they seemed to dread the working men as ' an invading and destroying army instead of their own flesh and blood 'which, however, by the way, invading and de- stroying armies usually are. For this he was severely taken to task in the debate on the second reading of the Bill by Lord Cranborne, whose admirable definition of the only manly and self-respecting attitude to be adopted by a politician towards the working- class voter shall here be extracted entire. The member for Stamford recalled the incident of the former debate and of Mr. Gladstone's imputation, and after repudiating with just resentment the charge of having ' readily and earnestly accepted it,' he went on to deliver himself of the following spirited and eloquent protest against an attitude and mode of address which even at that day was much too commonly adopted towards the working classes, and which nowadays may be fairly described as the normal and habitual posture of a majority drawn, it must be admitted, from both parties of English politicians : For myself I will venture to make my confession of faith on the subject of the working classes. I feel that there are two tendencies to avoid. I have heard much on the subject of the working classes in this House which I confess has rilled me with feelings of some apprehension. It is the belief of many hon. gentlemen opposite that the working classes are to be our future sovereign, that they are to be the great power in the State, against which no other power will be able to stand ; and FLATTERERS OF THE COMING KING 53 it is with feelings of no small horror and disgust that I have heard from many hon. gentlemen phrases which sound, I hope unduly, like adulation of the sovereign they expect to reign over them. Now if there is one claim which the House of Commons has on the respect of the people of the country, it is the great historic fame it enjoys ; if it has done anything to establish the present balance of power among all classes of the community, and prevent any single element in the Constitution from over- powering all the rest, it is that in presence of all powers, however great and terrible they may have been, the House of Commons has always been free and independent in its language. It never in past times, when kings were powerful, fawned upon them. It has always resisted their unjust pretensions ; it always refused to allow any courtierly instincts to suppress in it that solicitude for the freedom of the people of the country which it was insti- tuted to cherish. I should deeply regret, if at a time when it is said we are practically about to change our sovereign, and when some may think that new powers are about to rule over the country, a different spirit were to influence and inspire the House of Commons. Nothing could be more dangerous to the reputation of the House, nothing more fatal to its authority, than that it should be suspected of sycophancy to any power, either from above or below, that is likely to become predominant in the State. Proceeding to the merits of the Bill and the amendment, Lord Cranborne dwelt, as other speakers had done before him, with much force upon the inconvenience and unfair- ness to the House of the course which the Government had insisted on pursuing. At the same time, and with equally telling effect, he pointed out that their outward show of imperiousness hid much inward hesitation, and went on to recount the history of their successive retreats from the various positions they had taken up. They began, he said, by 'holding very cavalier language on the Franchise Bill. They at first did not in the least care to deal with the redistribution of seats. It is true the right honourable 54 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not ab- solutely say so, but he used language which bore no other interpretation than that he intended to bring in the Seats Bill next year. Well, the right hon. gentleman was driven from that position, and then he said the Seats Bill was to be brought in this year, but only formally. But then the right hon. gentleman again gave way, and stated that the Bill should be made a matter of standing or falling by the Government. And now we are told that a yet further step is to be made, and that the Seats Bill is to be pressed pari passu with the Franchise Bill, in order to satisfy the scruples of some of the supporters of the Government.' Even this, however, as Lord Cranborne went on to show, would not be sufficient security for the House, whose desire it was ' not that the Seats Bill and the Franchise Bill should proceed pari passu, that is to say, one after the other,' but that they should proceed together, that is, in one and the same Bill. ' We wish, indeed, for information ; but informa- tion is not our main object. What we wish for most is control. It is a small matter to be told what the Govern- ment will do, for the Government is not all-powerful ; what we wish is that the form of the Bill shall be such that from the first to the last the House of Commons shall enjoy an undisputed and undiminished control over both branches of the subject.' The attack was gratuitously invited ; and although no doubt the Ministerial measure would have been assailed on some other ground if it had contained full particulars of the redistribution scheme of the Government, and though it is pretty certain that on some ground or other it would have been defeated, it is not good generalship to make the enemy's work easier for him than it need be, even though MINISTERIAL BLUNDERS 55 his ultimate victory be inevitable. Again, it is always obviously wrong to 'put your foot down,' or to make as though you would do so, unless you can keep it down. Ministers must have known that they could never make a signum stantis vel cadentis Camarilla out of the doctrine that an Administration may call upon a Legislature to pass a Franchise Bill with its eyes shut and without a fact or a figure to show how the general distribution of political power among the various classes and local communities throughout the United Kingdom would be affected by it. That would have been too monstrous a pretension. Full particulars on the point would have, they well knew, to be communicated by them to Parliament long before the final stages of the Franchise Bill received or could receive Parlia- mentary approval ; and any such paltering with the House of Commons in the matter as might seem to indicate a desire to limit or hamper a Parliamentary control unwillingly submitted to, ought by all means to have been avoided. It gave excuse to hostile critics like Lord Cranborne to treat the secrecy in which that part of the Ministerial policy had been shrouded as something highly suspicious; and when by a superfluity of maladroitness an important member of the Government proceeded to justify a policy of concealment in the language of defiance, the hands of opponents were of course still further strengthened. When Lord Cranborne declared that he was not prepared to follow a guide who ' said he was going into an unexplored region, but declined to state what he knew of its nature and its inhabitants, and would give no other information than that he had burnt his boats and broken down the bridges,' it is the wit of the remark which first strikes us ; but there is a weight of solid sense and justice behind it which sends home the barb. 56 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Lord Grosvenor's amendment was rejected only by the narrow majority of five, and it, of course, became evident that the Government would have to give way on the point at issue. Some hostile criticism was, indeed, levelled at them for not resigning after a victory almost as discreditable as a defeat. It was said that the ' stand or fall ' declaration of the speech at Liverpool bound Ministers to resignation in such a case as had arisen ; but Mr. Gladstone denied that he had ever pledged the Government not to accept any alteration in the Bill, or (it was necessary to his argument that he should have added) in their Parliamentary tactics with respect to it. As long as the Bill stood, the Government stood, and the Bill had not yet fallen. Meanwhile, Minis- ters would bow to the decision of the House, and introduce the Redistribution Bill at once. On May 7, this measure was introduced. It was severely criticised, the Conservatives attacking, in particular, the pro- posed destruction of the small boroughs, and the grouping together of certain other constituencies. Mr. Disraeli, in fact, advised the Government to withdraw the Bill, and to introduce it the next Session, with a backing of more care- fully .prepared electoral statistics of the borough and county franchise. This Ministers, of course, refused to do, and the measure was prosecuted to its historic result in their defeat on June 18 by a majority of eleven, on an amendment moved by Lord Dunkellin, then member for Galway, an event which led to the abandonment of the Bill and the resignation of the Government. This ' Waterloo ' of Lord Russell's or Mr. Gladstone's whichever claims to be its Napoleon was, in some respects, a singular catastrophe, and greatly divided opinion then and afterwards. There is no doubt that the instinct which RATING AND RENTAL 57 impelled her Majesty to refuse the resignation of her Ministers at its first offer, and to direct them to reconsider its propriety, was shared by a very considerable body of her subjects. Many people were and continued unable to see that the proposed substitution of rateable for rental value as the basis of the franchise, could possibly be a vital point the more so as the amendment carried against the Government was quite general in its terms, and did not commit them to any hard and fast line of rateable qualification. Ministers, it was argued, merely wished to extend the suffrage to a certain number of unenfranchised citizens, and to do this, they proposed to give votes to all householders sitting at a 7/. rental. If Parliament, however, preferred to go by the rate-book, why, in the name of common sense, could not the Government defer to their wishes, ascertain what rating qualification 6/., 5/., or what not would enfranchise as many persons as would get votes under a 7/. rental, and remodel their Bill accordingly ? It was shown by Mr. Gladstone in his subsequent state- ment in the House of Commons that this operation would have been no easy one. In some boroughs, the rateable value equivalent to a 7/. rental for enfranchising purposes would have been 6/., in others 4/., and in others lower still. Nevertheless, it would no doubt have been possible to fix an average rateable value which, taking the whole electorate throughout, would have represented an extension of the suffrage equal to that contemplated by the Government in their original Bill. Hence it may be doubted whether this portion of the Ministerial explanation really went, or was intended to go, to the root of the matter. It is the latter part of Mr. Gladstone's statement which contained its real gist and significance, and no one, be he Tory or Liberal, can, in my 58 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY judgment, read that portion of it at this distance of time, without feeling that the resignation of the Government was amply justified. On April 27, Mr. Gladstone reminded the House, Lord Grosvenor had come within half a dozen votes of defeating the Government on the question of producing the Seats Bill before inviting the decision of Parliament on the principle of the Franchise Bill. On May 2, Sir Rainald Knightley car- ried against them, by a majority of ten, and despite their earnest protests, an instruction to the Committee to include in the Bill clauses dealing with bribery and corruption. On June 4, another motion was made, which ended without a division, but which was debated for three nights, and which evidently must have had, and was intended to have, the effect of putting aside the consideration of the Bill for the year. On June 7, Lord Stanley, without notice, moved to postpone the enfranchisement clauses to the redistribution clauses, and mustered no fewer than 260 against 287 votes in favour of his proposal. Then Mr. Walpole moved to raise the county franchise from \\L to 2o/., and was beaten only by fourteen votes. And lastly, and immediately before Lord Dunkellin's successful motion to substitute a rating for a rental qualification in the boroughs, a similar amendment had been moved with respect to the county franchise, and rejected only by a minority of seven. Surely this catalogue of rebuffs, either actually sustained or barely averted, told its own tale, and that a tale which no Administration with a particle of self-respect could pos- sibly mistake. It is, in fact, idle to affect doubt as to the general attitude of parties outside the mere disciplined rank and file of the Ministerialists towards the Bill. They did not mean it to pass ; and nothing that its authors would or MIDDLE CLASS RULE 59 could have done to meet their professed objections would have disarmed their real hostility to it. It has been already admitted that the Government went out of their way to make the work of their opponents unduly easy for them ; let it be again admitted that that work would in any case have been done. The so-called Adullamites of that day the seceders from the Ministerial ranks on this question did not want any Parliamentary Reform at all. Few among them, per- haps, were quite such passionate admirers of middle-class government as Mr. Lowe ; but substantially they agreed with him on that point. They held, at any rate, that the regime set up in 1832 had worked well, that the country had ad- vanced under it in prosperity and strength, and that there was no justification for overthrowing it in order to try a vast and doubtful democratic experiment in its stead. And there is a good deal to be said to-day for their contention. It is at least true that middle-class government bourgeois government, if we like to call it so had an unfairly short trial in this country. The aristocratic oligarchy which pre- ceded it played a glorious part in the making and the defence of our empire, but it was allowed 140 years from the Revolution to the Reform Act to do its work in. Five- and-thirty was the whole period granted to its successor. The Adullamite Whigs wished to give it a longer trial from a genuine confidence in it, and as regards some of them, a positive admiration for it. Tories naturally wished to extend its lease of power on their general principle of disinclination to risk going further and faring worse ; and between these two opposing parties the Reform Bill of 1866 was doomed. Lord Cranborne, as has been seen, exerted himself with energy, and doubtless with the heartiest good- will, to defeat it. Better had he helped it to pass, as I dare 60 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY say he has thought many times since ; but there is no reasort why such regret as he may feel should have any admixture of self-reproach. Superhuman, indeed, would have been the foresight to which the amazing event of 1867 had revealed itself in 1866. Small blame to Lord Cranborne, or any other sincere Conservative, not to have guessed to what lengths the leaders of his party were capable of going. As well might one reproach a garrison, betrayed by their officers into an unconditional and ignominious surrender, with having rejected a previous offer of permission to evacuate the fortress with all the honours of war. One may regret, for the sake alike of their cause and of its defenders, that the offer was not accepted ; but it would indeed be hard to condemn those who rejected it. Soldiers can hardly be ex- pected to ' transact ' with the enemy on the footing of an assumption that if they do not agree with him quickly, their commanders may lead them over, bag and baggage, into his camp. 6i CHAPTER V Enters Lord Derby's Cabinet as Secretary for India The casuistry of the Great Surrender Lord Derby's and Mr. Disraeli's respective shares in it The Reform resolutions Resignations of Lords Cranborne and Carnarvon and General Peel The confessions of Sir John Pakington 'Ten Minutes Bill' Household suffrage with checks Their disappearance Votes and speeches of Lord Cran- borne Final protest The Bill becomes law. HAVING regard to the composition of the House of Commons, and to the nature of the events which had brought about the downfall of Lord Russell's Adminis- tration, it was to be expected that his successor wou!d endeavour to strengthen the Government which her Majesty had commanded him to form by the enlistment of recruits from the opposite party. The Liberals still pos- sessed a large nominal majority in the House of Commons, and Lord Derby was of course well aware that he could only maintain himself in office on one of two conditions. Either he must definitively detach from the Liberal party its Adullamite section, and by the admittance of some member of it into a Coalition Cabinet, purchase its consistent and united support in Parliament, or he would have to content himself with a tenure of power at the mere will and pleasure of these malcontents, who might at any moment, or for any whim, renew their allegiance to the leaders whom they had abandoned. Naturally, he would have preferred the 62 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY former alternative, and overtures were made by him to Mr. Lowe and others with the view of inducing them to join his Administration. Had they consented, the whole course of political history might, and in all probability would, have been changed ; for a representation of the Adullamite group in Lord Derby's Cabinet would have so strengthened the hands of Lord Cranborne and the other dissentients from the principle of household suffrage as to have rendered it a moral impossi- bility for that historic ' leap in the dark ' to be taken. Lord Derby's proposals were, however, declined, and he was compelled to form a purely Conservative Cabinet, in which Lord Cranborne was offered, and accepted, the post of Secretary of State for India. It was high preferment for a politician who had not undergone the usual preparation for Cabinet office by service in a subordinate ministerial post ; but so brilliant was the reputation which his parliamentary abilities had won for him, that it surprised few and dis- satisfied none. Such indications of administrative capacity as success in the House of Commons affords are too often illusory; but in this instance they were amply justified. The new Secretary for India had been hardly a fortnight in office, and had had to spend part even of that brief period in seeking and obtaining re-election by his constituents of Stamford, when it fell to his lot to introduce the Indian Budget of the year, and the remarkable mastery of this intricate subject which was displayed in his speech on that occasion surprised many, even of those who imagined that they had taken the full measure of his abilities. In his speech to his constituents on July 12, 1866, he referred to the fall of the late Government, which he attri- buted, as from the point of view of the parliamentary strategist he fairly might attribute it, to the concealment practised by THE GREAT BETRAYAL 63 the Government with respect to their Reform policy ; and he went on to promise that the Conversative party would treat the question in a more open and confidential spirit. Within less than a fortnight after these words were uttered, there occurred that singular outbreak of popular ' horseplay ' for it was really nothing else which a combination of administrative weakness at the Home Office, with ill-judged tactical dispositions in Scotland Yard, had, if not precipitated, at least rendered possible, and which has gone down to history under the far too portentous title of ' The Hyde Park Riots.' That the incident materially affected the counsels of the Government in the sense of influencing the direction and determining the magnitude of their Reform Bill it might be too much to say ; but one can hardly doubt that, like all other such noisy demonstrations, it succeeded in persuading Ministers that more people cared about Re- form than they had suspected, and that the recess must be devoted, as in fact it was, to maturing their legislative plans on the subject. There is probably no event in the entire political history of our country which has provoked, and will always continue to provoke, such keen controversy as the introduction and passing of the Second Reform Act by Mr. Disraeli and the Administration and party which assisted him to carry it. The gran rifiuto of 1846, which is sometimes classed with the volte-face of 1867, cannot, as a matter of fact, com- pare with it for wealth of controversial issues. It does not, I think, even raise such difficult and disputable questions as to the personal character, conduct, and motives of the statesmen who played the principal part in it, while in point of strictly political casuistry, the difference between the later and the earlier incident is the difference between 4 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY complexity of the most formidable character and simplicity itself. Indeed, it is the casuistic intricacy of the situation in 1867 which makes it so much harder to pronounce an pff-hand verdict on the conduct of the chief actors. Substantially there were and are but two issues to be determined with respect to Peel's policy in 1846. Was it politically right to substitute Free Trade for Protection? Was Peel the right man to effect the substitution ? And although other questions may arise ancillary to the deter- mination of this latter issue such, for instance, as whether Peel's conversion was genuine, at what date it occurred, and whether he was justified, even as a genuine if an eleventh-hour convert, in carrying the very measure which he and his party were sent to Parliament to oppose yet still that one great and knotty question of political casuistry which is most prominent, which is, in fact, the question of questions, in Lord Derby's case, does not arise at all in Peel's. It may be stated in the one sentence : What con- cessions is it lawful and wise for a statesman to make to the political principles of his adversaries in the interests of his own creed 1 When Sir Robert Peel abolished the Corn Laws, he had, ipso facto and avowedly, to lay aside the creed of the Protectionist. When Mr. Disraeli introduced house- hold suffrage, he not only did not avowedly abandon the principles of Conservatism, but he professed to be taking the course by which, in the peculiar circumstances of the situation, those principles would best be promoted, or perhaps could alone be defended. : There lies, the difference between the two cases. It goes deep down. It unquestionably furnishes Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli with a far better theoretical defence of their policy than Peel was ever able to plead for his ; but THE GREAT BETRAYAL 65 at the same time it opens out a wide field for controversy upon the question whether actual facts and probabilities can be brought within its protection. With Peel, it is possible at least for a strict doctor of political ethics to adopt a ' short method.' The power which he received from the Conservative electors was given him expressly to defend Protection. He used it to establish Free Trade. Politically, that may have been wise, patriotic, self-sacrificing, what you will j personally, it was immoral and dishonourable. No such charge as this could have been justly brought against the authors of the Reform Act of 1867. They had received no specific mandate from the Conserva- tive electorate to resist any reduction of the franchise, or even to insist that reduction should not go beyond a speci- fied point. The only mandate given to them was the general commission that every Conservative Administration receives at all times from every Conservative electorate the commis- sion to maintain the Constitution, to uphold the great social interests which are founded on property and contract, and to withstand such legislative proposals, and such only, as may threaten those interests or that Constitution with im- mediate or prospective damage. Nor can it, I think, be reasonably disputed that the Government which succeeded to power in 1866 were clothed with full moral authority to make, in the name and on the behalf of the Con- servative party throughout the country, such terms with Democracy as might to them, the negotiators, seem best calculated to avert or mitigate, or if neither of these opera- tions were in their judgment possible, to postpone, any dangers with which, from the point of view of Conserva- tism, our institutions might be threatened. If this be the correct view of the situation in 1867, it is F 66 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY clear that the latitude of legislative action which might fairly be claimed by the new Administration was very extensive ; and that, startling as was the concession which they in fact made to the Radical Reformers, it would, on one condition, admit of being validly defended. Given, that is to say, a bonafide belief on the part of the authors of the Reform Act of 1867 that the Constitution would incur less immediate danger, that the great national interests de- pendent on the maintenance of public honesty and respect for private rights would be, in the long run, better safe- guarded by boldly and at once enfranchising the urban householder than by taking any one of the other courses open to them, why then, no doubt that Act might be practically and substantially justified, as we know, of course, that it has since been again and again theoretically and formally justified by Conservative apologists on genu- inely Conservative grounds. But did any such bonafide belief exist in the Ministerial mind? Did it exist, I mean, in any shape worthy to be called a belief? Did it exist as a reasoned conviction so far as it applied to contemporary facts, and as a reasonably grounded calculation so far as it concerned the future ? Or was it merely a hit-or-miss speculation, an expedient desperately adopted by a Government acting under the conjoint influences of an honest if not very heroic anxiety to buy off a popular agitation, and a determined if not particularly patriotic resolve to score a point, at all hazards, against their political adversaries ? Fortunately or unfortunately the answer to these ques- tions is not entirely a matter of conjecture. We know what was thought of the Reform Act of 1867 by the head of the Administration that passed it ; for on two separate occasions, LORD DERBY'S SHARE 67 and in two memorable phrases, he opened his mind upon the subject : and though it was long the fashion to believe that the head of the Administration that passed the Act was not the ' head ' that planned it, that belief has of late been considerably shaken. That ' cast ' of the characters in the drama which assigned the part of Mephistopheles to Mr. Disraeli and of Faust to Lord Derby was picturesquely conceived ; but there was never any historic warrant for it, and whatever later evidence has come out is opposed to it. It has been affirmed in more than one authoritative quarter that Lord Derby and not Mr. Disraeli was the real father of household suffrage, and the positive statements of third parties to this effect are supported by antecedent prob- abilities. It must never be forgotten that the Prime Minister's early training and associations were those of a Parliamentary Reformer ; that prudence was not among his prominent qualities as a statesman, nor punctilious scruple, it must be added, his distinctive characteristic as a parliamentary tactician ; and that in his capacity as leader of the party, his credit was far more deeply engaged in winning the party battle than was that of his lieutenant. Moreover, there has been too little notice taken of the various significant admissions let fall by him here and there in his speeches in the House of Lords with reference to the history of Ministerial counsels on the Reform question. It is impossible to study these utterances, considered as indications of the date at which he formed his conviction as to the necessity of introducing an extensive measure of Reform, and took the necessary steps to bring this con- viction before his principal colleague, without arriving on one's own part at the conclusion that Lord Derby's responsi- F 2 68 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY bility for the great change was, in fact as well as in theory, paramount. But of course the strongest evidence for this is to be found in his subsequent utterances. In public he admitted that the passing of the Act was a ' leap in the dark,' and in private he commended it because it ' dished the Whigs.' Lord Derby was a considerable orator in his day, but one may safely affirm that no other utterance of his will live, or deserves to live, as long as these two remarkable sayings. That they revealed the inmost thoughts of the man who uttered them it is impossible to doubt ; his whole character and record, and his well-known views (substantially identical with those of Mrs. Battle as a whist-player) on the game at which he was so experienced and so expert a hand, go bail for their sincerity. That they gave expression to the secret sentiments of every ' fighting ' member of his party, or in other words of that large majority who in every party ' play to win,' is equally certain. And the only remaining question is whether the leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons advised the enfranchisement of the householder in any other spirit than that in which his chief proposed and his followers accepted it. In a phrase which will go down to posterity along with the ' leap in the dark ' and the ' dishing of the Whigs,' Mr. Disraeli boasted that he ' had had to educate his party.' What was the ' true inwardness ' of his teaching ? Did he himself hold, and did he endeavour to instil into them the belief, that the wholesale democratisation of the franchise was, despite all appearances, in reality a Conservative measure ? Or did he merely strive to impress them with the necessity of practically recognising the force of the aphorism that ' needs must when the devil drives ? ' Did MR. DISRAELI'S SHARE 69 he, in other words, persuade the party to accept household suffrage because he, too, was bent upon dishing the Whigs, and found that they could not be dished on any less exor- bitant terms, or because he really held the Hyperborean theory so happily satirised by the Mr. Lowe of that day because he really believed in the existence of a zone of a warmer temperature ' at the back of the north wind,' and had genuinely convinced himself that by penetrating beneath the layer of Radicalism in the lower middle class, he would reach among the workmen a Conservative stratum of the population ? This, I am well aware, is the theory which finds favour with Conservatism of the Primrose League variety. Nor do I doubt that it contains an element of truth. It is easy to believe that an experiment in democratic legislation, which might seem hazardous enough to a statesman of inherited Conservative instincts and traditions, would have fewer terrors for the author of Coningsby and Sybil. But it is one thing to admit that certain vague and romantic aspirations of youth may possibly have survived in the breast of a middle- aged statesman, and quite another thing to believe that they had ripened in that soil into settled and confirmed con- victions. It may be true that Disraeli ' shot Niagara ' with more of hope and less of fear than did his fellow-voyagers, but that he went over the fall deliberately, and in the con- fident expectation of arriving safely at the bottom, and find- ing himself in quiet waters when he got there, is no better, in my humble judgment, than a pious legend. I believe, and I think the whole course of his Parliamentary tactics shows, that he would not have shot Niagara at all if he could have gained his object in any other way ; and I believe further that that object was substantially the same 70 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY for him as for his chief and his colleagues : that is to say, that his motive, like theirs, was compounded of the dis- interested and patriotic anxiety to settle the question which was disturbing the peace of the country, and the, in a party sense, interested desire to prevent the honour and glory of effecting that settlement from falling into the hands of political adversaries. In what proportions these two motives were originally distributed, it would be hard to determine, and indeed of little profit to inquire; for it is unfortunately of the nature of the last-mentioned motive to play the part of Aaron's rod, in periods of vehement party contention, to every other ; and there is little doubt that as the battle grew fiercer, the restraints of prudence, and patriotism were swept away like dykes before a flood by the torrential desire for victory at any cost. Rumours of dissension in the Cabinet had been rife during the autumn and winter of 1866. It was profoundly uncertain whether Ministers would be able to agree upon any scheme of Parliamentary Reform, and it was even doubted by some whether enough unanimity would be found among them to admit even of the attempt being made. Nevertheless, Mr. Disraeli and his colleagues met Parliament on February 5, 1867, with an unbroken front, and the Queen's Speech announced that 'attention would again be called to the state of the representation of the people in Parliament.' The paragraph containing this announcement was made to conclude with the expression of her Majesty's trust that the deliberations of Parliament ' conducted in a spirit of moderation and mutual forbearance, may lead to the adoption of measures which, without unduly disturbing the balance of political power, shall freely extend the elec- toral franchise.' This somewhat unusual reference to A GENEROUS INVITATION ?I ' moderation and mutual forbearance ' was soon to receive an authoritative interpretation. What it meant, as the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer announced six days later, was that the Government proposed to attempt the settlement of the Reform question by a new process, and on the principle of ' co-operation ' instead of that of ' competition.' On February n, Mr. Disraeli thus interpreted it in an elaborate speech, in which he fully reviewed the history of Parliamentary Reform, and invited the House to restore the question to the position which, as he contended, it had ori- ginally occupied in that House, and from which it had only been displaced by the action of private members, notably of Lord John Russell in his intervals of private membership and official eclipse the position, that is to say, not of a party question, but of a ' House of Commons question.' In short, the meaning which Ministers attributed to the ' moderation and mutual forbearance ' phrase in the Speech from the Throne was that 'under the circumstances in which the House found itself,' it was, in their opinion, 'expedient that Parliamentary Reform should no longer be a question which should decide the fate of Ministries. Excellent advice ! Nothing was wanting to its value but that it should have been given and followed five-and-thirty years before, and on half a dozen occasions since. Ad- dressed as it was now by the leader of a party which had a few months before assisted to dislodge its opponents from power to the opponents whom it had dislodged and nominally on the great question whether rating or rental should be the basis of the electoral franchise it is not surprising that it should have been received with some laughter on the Oppo- sition side of the House. It struck the Liberals, no doubt, as a remarkable illustration of that yearning after the noble 72 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY ideal of a polity, where ' none were for a party, but all were for the State,' which is usually found to glow so much more warmly in the breasts of the ' Ins ' than in those of the ' Outs.' To assist Parliament to realise it, Mr. Disraeli proposed to proceed by way of resolution. Not that it was to be sup- posed, he was careful to add, that Ministers were asking the House to go into Committee, and allow them to propose resolutions, because they were ' angling for a policy.' They were doing nothing of the kind. They had ' distinct princi- ples which would guide them, and which they would ask the House to sanction. But ' for there must always be a ' but ' when a Government, with distinct principles to guide them, do not see their way to embodying these principles after the more usual fashion in a Bill they would, ' in the application of these principles, consult in every way the sense and accept the suggestions of the House. The course we adopt,' continued Mr. Disraeli, with that engaging candour of his in which there was always so piquant a difficulty of distin- guishing between cynicism and naivete, ' is not one flattering to ourselves ; but it is more flattering to a statesman to assist, however humbly, in effecting that which he thinks is for the public good than to bring forward mock measures which he knows the spirit of party will not pass. And let me tell the Member for Birmingham, who gave me that ironical cheer, that there are others beside himself who think it desirable that this question should be settled, but who wish it to be settled in the spirit of the Constitution.' The real ' flattery,' if we can suppose it to have been listened to, must have rather come from that tale told by Hope, which could induce an experienced Parliamentary tactician to believe that there was the slightest chance of his THE REFORM RESOLUTIONS 73 being allowed to remove this question from the arena of party politics. Meanwhile, we need concern ourselves with only one of the ' distinct principles ' by which Ministers had been guided in framing their resolutions. It is to be found in the passage in which Mr. Disraeli deprecated any scheme of Reform which would change the historic character of the House of Commons. ' We do not find,' he said, ' that there is any security for its retaining that character, unless we oppose a policy which gives to any class in this country I care not whether it be high or low, whether it be influenced by a democratical or an oligarchical feeling a preponderant power in this House. And therefore, in any measures that we may bring forward, we shall assert that the elective fran- chise must be regarded as a popular privilege and not as a democratic right.' The events of the next three months were to furnish a truly remarkable commentary on this declaration. The resolutions, thirteen in number, were soon in the hands of the House. As might from the first have been anticipated, their introduction failed to attain the object contemplated by their authors. Until they had been ex- plained in debate, they were little more than vague affirma- tions of abstract political doctrine. Explanation, on the other hand, at once exposed them to criticism, as in some cases questionable, in others superfluous. The first, which recited that 'the number of electors for counties and boroughs in England and Wales ought to be increased,' was practi- cally, of course, the affirmation of a truism. It was the recital, under another form of words, of the proposition that a reform of the representative system was desirable. Resolutions 2 and 3, which affirmed respectively that the increase should be effected by a reduction of the existing 74 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY franchise, and ' the addition of other franchises not dependent on value,' and ' that no one class or interest could constitu- tionally be invested with a predominant power over the rest of the community,' were, in the absence of details as to the contemplated amount and character of the reduction and additions aforesaid, absolutely uninforming. When these details were supplied, as they afterwards were by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the statement that the occupation franchise would be reduced to 6/. in boroughs, and that four new so-called ' fancy franchises ' would be created alongside of it, there was obviously no longer any reason why his proposals should not be embodied in a Bill. The procedure by resolution was obnoxious, in short, to highly plausible objections ; and we may further be quite certain that objections, whether plausible or not, would have been made. Neither the Reform party in the Oppo- sition nor the section of that body who were by conviction opposed to Reform, had any notion of allowing the Govern- ment to shift any share of its responsibility on the House. ' Why,' asked Mr. Lowe, with that deadly directness of his, ' is it an irresistible reason, because Whigs and Tories have alike failed on this question, that the right honourable gentleman and his colleagues should enjoy absolute impunity ? Why are they to have the mark of Cain set upon them that nobody may kill them ? ' The question would have come with better grace from one who had not taken so prominent a part as the querist in the murder ot Abel in the previous year ; but there was no answer to it. At a meeting of the Opposition, held at Mr. Gladstone's house on February 26, it was agreed to meet the resolutions with an amendment, inviting the Government to with- draw them, and proceed by way of Bill. Upon this, Mr. A SPLIT IN THE CABINET 75 Disraeli gave way, and announced on the same evening in the House of Commons that the resolutions would be with- drawn, and a Bill introduced. Ten days afterwards, on March 4, the political world was agitated by the news that Lord Cranborne and two other members of the Cabinet, General Peel and Lord Carnarvon, had resigned. The history of this catastrophe has been recorded with exceptional fulness, not only in official explanations tendered according to custom by the retiring Ministers in the two Houses, but in the quite unofficial, but by no means un- amusing, narrative which was furnished by one of the colleagues whom they left behind them Sir John Paking- ton. From this the public learnt that the Six-pound Franchise Bill, foreshadowed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the speech explanatory of the resolutions on the night of February 25, was but one and the more moderate of two alternative schemes of Reform which had been under the consideration of the Cabinet. The other was a measure the suggestion of which is to be found in the fifth resolution, the only formula of all that phantom group which was destined to attain a position of even temporary importance, and which affirmed that ' the principle of plurality of vote, if adopted by Parliament, would facilitate the settlement of the borough franchise on an extensive basis.' In explaining this resolution to the House of Commons, Mr. Disraeli contented himself with saying that the intention of the Government had been that any person who possessed one of the four new franchises which it was proposed to introduce namely, the educa- tional qualification, the 3o/.-in-a-savings-bank qualification, the 5o/.-in-the-Funds qualification, and the 2o^.-a-year- direct-taxation qualification should vote, not merely by his 76 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY franchise as occupier, but also ' for any one other of the new franchises which he might possess, and that Ministers believed that, if that principle were adopted, it might have led to results very satisfactory to large numbers of people in this country.' He added, however, 'that they were bound to state frankly that this was not a view of the case which, if they were permitted to bring in a Bill, they should at all insist upon. It was not desirable, it seemed to them, ' to make any proposition on these questions which they had not a fair prospect of carrying to a successful issue.' No one could have guessed from this that the propo- sition they had been contemplating embodied a political change of no less magnitude than the introduction of house- hold suffrage, subject to the ' check ' of the dual vote, and still less that that proposition was but a few hours before on the point of being submitted to Parliament and had only at the last moment been abandoned. This, however, was the case. It was on Saturday, February 23, that the final, or what was supposed to be the final, scheme of the projected Re- form Bill was settled in Cabinet Council. On the following Monday morning, however, Lords Cranborne and Carnarvon having come to the conclusion in which they received the adhesion of General Peel, who had already previously tendered his resignation on the same ground that the Bill was one which they could not support, informed Lord Derby of their wish to retire from the Cabinet. A Council was hastily summoned to consider the new situa- tion ; and to continue the story in the almost breathless words of good Sir John Pakington : ' Imagine the diffi- culty and embarrassment in which the Ministry found themselves placed. It was then past two o'clock ; Lord Derby was to address the party at half-past two ; at half- THE TEN MINUTES BILL 77 past four Mr. Disraeli was to unfold the Reform scheme before the House of Commons. Literally, they had not half an hour ; they had not more than ten minutes to make up their minds as to what course the Ministry was to adopt. The public know the rest. They determined to propose, not the Bill agreed to on the Saturday, but an alternative measure which they had contemplated in the event of their large and liberal scheme being rejected by the House of Commons.' On March 4, some time before these trank disclosures of Sir John Pakington (which were made by him on offering himself to his constituents for re-election), Lord Cran- borne, speaking after General Peel, had given his own account of matters from his place in Parliament. Less animated and picturesque than that of the new Secretary for War, it substantially confirmed that agreeable narrative of the events which revolutionised the English polity. Lord Cranborne had, he told the House, assented to the larger scheme of Reform on the faith of an understanding that the ' checks and balances supplied by the new franchises and the dual vote would adequately restrict its too excessive representation of mere numbers. The operation, however, of these checks and balances had not been fully investigated and exhibited when the resolutions were laid on the table of the House.' No exact statistics of the new borough elector- ate under household suffrage and of its numerical relation to the voters added by the new franchises had been prepared or was at any rate forthcoming ; but when General Peel made his original objection to the larger scheme, and talked of resigning if it were adopted, ' it was in the hope,' said Lord Cranborne, ' that the figures might be so adjusted as to permit the desire of the great majority of my colleagues 78 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY to be carried out with perfect safety to the constitution . . - that I was one of those to urge him to remain.' It is not quite clear whether at this stage of the Minis- terial deliberations the ' larger scheme ' had definitely taken shape as a project for the establishment of household suffrage ; but at the Council of February 16, at any rate, this project was formally broached, and Lord Cranborne there and then declared it to be a proposition which was ' to his mind inadmissible.' He believed it to have been abandoned, but on the following Tuesday, the igth, it was revived, and with the accompaniment of certain statistics upon the accuracy of which, since they related to the ' com- pensation or counterpoise of the enfranchisement scheme, the whole value of the arrangement of course depended.' The figures were imperfect, and after discussion it was agreed to supplement them by further reference to the department which had furnished them, and to resume their consideration on Saturday the 23rd. Upon an inspection of these enlarged statistics on that day Lord Cranborne admitted that they ' seemed to be favourable ' ; but further consideration of them in private convinced him that any political safeguards based upon them would be illusory. A comparison of notes with his other doubting colleagues showed that they had independently arrived at the same conclusion. The resignations were accordingly tendered, as described by Sir John Pakington, and the so-called ' Ten Minutes Bill ' which, however, never reached the stage of introduction at all, was substituted for the larger scheme. The rest of the story is soon told. A six-pound franchise pleased nobody, and was attacked from all quarters. Radi- cals denounced it as inadequate ; Liberals exclaimed upon the profligacy of Ministers who could introduce such a THE 'LARGER SCHEME* 79 measure but a few months after tripping up their adversaries in their attempt to carry a measure based upon a seven- pound qualification ; and even Conservatives so far felt the force of this criticism as to be ripe for surrender to that most immoral of all arguments, that one ' may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.' Doubtless one may ; but though it is the same thing to the thief it is not so to the owner of the stolen property. And the question which the followers of Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli should have asked themselves was not whether they would be as severely punished by the tongues of their adversaries for passing a six-pound franchise Bill as for taking the plunge into household suffrage, but whether the consequences to the country would not be infinitely more serious in the one case than the other. This, however, seems unhappily to have been a neglected side of the question. The party meaning that consider- able section which in every party under our political system puts victory first and principle afterwards brought pressure to bear upon a Government who needed sadly little pressure, it is to be feared, to urge them onward ; and the combined force of these influences determined the Prime Minister to submit to that rupture of the Cabinet against which he had been hitherto struggling, and to revert to the larger scheme. The resignations were accordingly accepted ; the Minis- terial explanations were delivered in the two Houses ; Sir Stafford Northcote, Sir John Pakington, and the Duke of Buckingham respectively succeeded to the orifices vacated by Lord Cranborne, General Peel, and Lord Carnarvon. A fortnight's interval was interposed in order to enable the appointment of the new Ministers to be ratified by their constituents, and on March 18 the Reform Bill was launched. 8O THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Between that day and July 15, when it was read a third time in the House of Commons, there extends a period of nearly four months, the history of which it is impossible I will not say for any convinced and consistent Tory, lest I should be idly wasting words on an extinct political species, but for anyone who wishes to retain his respect for Par- liamentary government under the English party system to look back upon without shame. It is the history of a continuous surrender of political positions by party leaders, bound, not only by traditional principles but by recent, repeated, and emphatic pledges, to defend them. It is the history of the abandonment, one by one, of safeguards de- clared to be vital to the national welfare, and of the adoption, one by one, of legislative changes admitted by those who as- sented to them to be fraught with the gravest peril to the future of the State. The powerful and, though strictly measured in its language and temperate in its tone, the scathing speech delivered by Lord Cranborne on the motion for leave to introduce the Bill, was strangely prophetic of the course which legislation was destined to take. It fell short of entire accuracy only in under-estimating the rate of speed at which events were destined to advance, and in assuming that it would be reserved for a future Government and Parlia- ment to complete a revolutionary work which was to be consummated in a few months, and by the hands of the men in whose counsels he had so lately shared. The Bill was concisely but accurately described by Lord Cranborne as a ' Household Suffrage Bill, practically with two compensations.' Those two compensations were, ' first, the dual vote, and secondly, personal payment of rates ' ; and of these, he went on to say, he regarded one as ineffective for its purpose, and the other, though effective, 'almost LORD CRANBORNE Otf ?HE 'CHECKS 1 #1 Wo effective ' for its purpose, as certain to be swept away. The dual vote could only operate in very large towns, and only there so as to affect a very few seats, while in all the middle-sized and smaller boroughs the over- whelming mass of voters brought in by household suffrage would rule unchecked. Besides that, it was a proposal thoroughly unpalatable to the House of Commons. It Would not pass, and would do no good. As to the personal payment of rates, that, he admitted, was a very important limitation, but what chance had they of sustaining it ? What it meant was that in towns where the Small Tenements Act was in force, no one whose house was ' compounded ' for would be allowed to vote unless he paid, over the sum he had hitherto been accustomed to pay the landlord, an advance of some 25 per cent. The result of that would be that in all those ninety-eight out of our then total of two hundred boroughs in which the Small Tenements Act was in operation, ' you would find in one parish a "compound householder " l who would have to pay $s. a year for his vote, while in an adjoining parish a man of exactly the same social status living in a house of exactly the same size would enjoy his vote without any such payment. Was it likely that this galling and vexatious inequality would be long tolerated, or was 1 The figure of the ' compound householder,' around whom raged so fierce a battle in 1867, has no doubt become rather dim to the present generation ; and it may therefore be necessary to explain that this name was given to the occupiers of tenements, the landlords of which were permitted, under certain Acts of Parliament, to compound with the local authorities for the rates due from them as such occupiers. Hence, as one of the proposed ' checks ' on household suffrage was that ' per- sonal payment of rates should be a condition of the electoral qualifi- cation, these 'compound householders,' a very large body, would, as such, have been excluded from the franchise. G 83 THE MARQUIS Of SALISBURY it not rather certain that the first use which the new elec* torate would make of the franchise would be to insist on their representatives sweeping it away ? Thus,' continued Lord Cranborne, ' you will come to simple undiluted house- hold suffrage, and without discussing the general arguments for or against democracy, I am content to fall back upon what seems to me a simple proposition of political morality, that the party which behaved in Opposition as ours did last year is not the party to propose household suffrage.' This was plain speaking, but it was not more true as a proposition of morals than was this, which followed as an anticipation of events : ' We are told that the Con- servative party as a body have so far advanced in principles and sentiments that they will accept this Bill. Well, if that is so, I think they will be committing political suicide. . . . I feel certain that if the Conservative party listens so much to party discipline, and listens so little to the dictates of those principles in which they have been accustomed to protest they believed, it will be their ruin politically, and that no preservative of party discipline, and no support of individual statesmen will compensate to them for that result.' Those who, looking round the House of Commons to-day and seeing that the benches opposite to those occu- pied by the Liberals seem still pretty well filled, are dis- posed to sneer at this prophecy as falsified, must be simply in the unhappy or is it happy? case of those to whom words supply as much mental and moral susten- ance as facts. There is indeed 'a Conservative party,' and the statesman who uttered the above prediction has lived to lead it ; but no one knows better than its leader that its true name is not Conservative, but Opportunist, and that the one principle upon which true Conservatism in any THE PRINCIPLE THAT PERISHED 83 age and in any country must depend for its vitality disap- peared finally from English politics in 1867. For what perished in that fateful year was not merely a particular set of opinions as to what measures will in this or that respect be beneficial or injurious to the State. Such a loss as that would have been altogether a matter of minor importance. Opinions change, and ought to change, in the natural course of human affairs ; .they mu'st often, whether Liberal or Conservative, be, through the natural infirmities of the human mind, mistaken. It was not the triumph of Liberal over Conservative doctrines at this crisis which really mattered ; what really mattered was the con- current abandonment of the principle not a monopoly, it is fair to admit, of the Tory party that the rule of wisdom, justice, and, in the highest sense of the word, of policy for a State, is not necessarily determined by the popular demands of the moment. Sacrifices to this principle, regarded as the supreme dictator of political conduct, had been more than once submitted to by political parties in the course of our history. Each had at times shown its willing- ness, in days when parties were better than their ' system/ and the hands of their leaders had not yet been thoroughly ' subdued to what they worked in,' to undergo long sentences of exclusion from office rather than surrender to popular movements which they deemed mistaken each assuming that there was a 'better mind,' a saner judgment of the nation to which they might confidently appeal for a later approval of their action. But now for the first time one English party competing with its rival had determined to hand over the constitution and destiny of the country as a gift to Numbers, thereby not merely trampling under foot for that occasion the principle which sets the conscience and G 2 84 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY conviction of the statesman before the will or whim of the majority, but rendering it to the last degree improbable that that principle would ever raise its head again. And it never has. The Conservative Der Freyschutz, to adapt Prince Bismarck's picturesque apologue, was some years in obtaining the ' enchanted bullets ' for which he had bartered his soul. He got them in '74, and brought down his adversary with them ; but he has been paying the penalty ever since. Max was not more completely submissive to the commands of Robin than is the modern Conservative party compelled to be to the Spirit of Democracy. The reply of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to these damaging criticisms of his late colleague was no less memor- able than the speech which called them forth. Mr. Disraeli did not admit his ' checks ' or at least one of them, for he wisely refrained from saying anything about the dual vote to be illusory. 'Were the checks placed upon the suffrage by the Act of 1832 swept away,' he asked, 'in a moment ? ' On the contrary, the ratepaying clauses of that Act, though they had been made at various times the object of much hostile agitation, were maintained. And so would it be with the checks introduced into the present Bill. It is a pity the experiment was never tried. Lord Cranborne may have desponded over much as to the probable stability of the provision insisting on the personal payment of rates. He may have been unduly pessimistic in predicting that this breakwater against the inrush of Democracy would be swept away at the first flow of the tide. But his late chief did not allow events to have the chance of refuting the prediction. He demolished the breakwater himself. But that of course was yet to come. On March 18, ANOTHER HISTORIC 'NEVER' 85 his mind was full of the ' checks and balances ' of his Bill, and deeply impressed with the conviction that, thanks to them, he had been guilty of no political inconsistency in introducing it. How sadly and strangely reads this quotation of his words from Hansard in the light of sub- sequent events : Let my noble friend, or any hon. gentleman who has spoken, point to any conclusion during the debates of last year, to any vote that was given, to any resolution inconsistent with the course we have taken. (Oh !) VISCOUNT CRANBORNE. I never imputed any inconsistency to the course taken by the Government. What I said was that if the Government introduced household suffrage pure and simple, I then thought they would be guilty of inconsistency. THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER. The Govern- ment will never introduce household suffrage pure and simple. Nothing, perhaps, was further from Mr. Disraeli's thoughts than such a step when he made this reply. Nothing was further from Hazael's thoughts than the evil which Elisha prophesied that he would do unto the Children of Israel. And his repudiation of the prophecy was conveyed, as students of the Second Book of Kings may remember, in a metaphor, which lent it even more emphasis than Mr. Disraeli threw into his disclaimer. Nevertheless, the Bill was destined to become a measure for the introduction of 'household suffrage pure and simple,' and the process of fulfilling that destiny began early. The dual vote was the first of the ' checks ' to disappear. On March 26, the Bill was read a second time, after two nights' debate, without a division ; and on April i, the Chancellor of the Exchequer stated, in answer to a question from Mr. Gladstone, that, before going into Committee on the 8th, he 86 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY would move the omission of the clause by which it was pro- posed to confer this privilege. It was dropped without a single protest, having never indeed had the good word of anyone from the first, unless, to be sure, we accept as such Lord Cranborne's benevolent but not enthusiastic reference to it as 'just and fair in principle, though an absolute futility in practice.' This disposed of, the struggle now centred on the question of the personal payment of rates. Had the original scheme of the Government been adhered to on this point, and had the leader of the House really treated this principle as ' vital ' to his scheme, the enfranchising operation of the Reform Act of 1867 would beyond doubt have been greatly restricted, and the descent into downright Democracy correspondingly delayed, though for how long is a question of considerable uncertainty. But to abandon this principle was to take the plunge at once, and though it might have been impossible, as Lord Cranborne and others contended, to moor the boat for any length of time in the stream, it would have shown better faith and more conscientiousness to have made the attempt at any rate than it did to ' shoot Niagara ' forthwith. Nor has it ever been'shown that the Government were on this point, at least, under any clear compulsion to give way. On others of the so-called ' compensations ' for household suffrage, the duress under which they acted was conspi- cuous enough. The two years' residential qualification was cut down to one year by an adverse majority of eighty-one ; and Ministers might reasonably have held themselves justi- fied in bowing on this point to the decision of the House. But the attempt of the Opposition to break down the ' personal rating ' restriction never at any time prospered like this. The Adullamites had no mind for helping Mr. EXIT THE COMPOUND HOUSEHOLDER 87 Gladstone to make the Bill more democratic than it was. At the ' Tea Room Conference,' as one of the secessionist meetings was called, they succeeded in emasculating the instruction which Mr. Coleridge was to have moved on going into Committee ; and though the Government ac- cepted that part of it which informed the Committee that they ' had power to alter the law of rating,' they certainly never pledged themselves thereby to such an alteration as they afterwards made by the repeal of the Compounding Acts. Again, Mr. Gladstone's amendment, proposing to enfran- chise the occupier ' whether he in person or his landlord is rated to the relief of the poor,' though lost, it is true, by a majority of only twenty-one, was still, in fact, defeated ; and a Government with a ' vital principle ' at stake should at least have paid so much respect to its vitality as to sur- render it only upon actual rejection by the House. The Adullamites were divided ; but there was a section of them, headed by Lords Grosvenor and Elcho, which would have stood by the Government and seen them through. But the agitation, hollow as it was, which was got up during the Easter recess, appears to have influenced their minds ; and it is difficult to doubt that it sealed their [determination not merely to carry the Bill, but to ' dish the Whigs ' with it by showing an equal willingness to democratise the suffrage. Lord Cranborne spoke and voted in favour of Mr. Glad- stone's amendment. That speech and vote were consistent enough with the convictions which he had avowed in the debate on the first reading. He did not believe in the stability and resisting power of the barrier which ' personal rating' would set up, and he expressed special apprehension of the impetus likely to be given to corrupt canvassing by a provision which would encourage political organisations 88 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY to pay men's rates wholesale in order to get them on the register. In any case, however, and as a piece of legitimate Parliamentary tactics, Lord Cranborne would have been justified in supporting Mr. Gladstone with the same motive that induced men like Mr. Lowe and Mr. Horsman to vote with him that, namely, of defeating the Bill. It is probable that even their late colleague had not yet taken the full mea- sure of the pliability of Ministers, but imagined that if the House of Commons pronounced against their ' vital ' princi- ple of personal rating, the Government would feel bound to abandon their Bill and tender their resignations. He could hardly have foreseen that his late leader would volunteer to deprive the Bill of its ' vital principle ' with his own hand. But, on May 13, the Government assented to the principle of an amendment creating a lodger franchise, and, taxed by Sir Rainald Knightley with this derogation from the principle of the ' personal payment ' .of rates, the Chancellor of the Exchequer let fall these significant words : ' The hon. baronet is not for a moment, I suppose, prepared to contend that the payment of rates is the entire principle of the Bill.' Here a laugh followed, apparently from some honourable members who detected these preparations for a new retreat. ' Does any gentleman who laughs,' continued the Chancellor of the Exchequer, ' pretend that it is the entire principle of the Bill? Is it the principle of the franchise which is founded on the possession of a sum in the savings-bank ? Is it the principle of the franchise which is founded on the possession of a certain amount in the Funds ? Is it the principle of the franchise which is founded on the payment of a certain amount of direct taxes ? ' No, truly ; it was not the principle of any of these fran- chises ; but unfortunately, none of them were to escape DISAPPEARANCE OF THE CHECKS 89 destruction themselves. The check which was to be dis- pensed with because three other checks remained was finally abandoned on May 17, and when, on the 28th, Sir Roundell Palmer moved to omit the clause by which these three other checks were to be established, Mr. Disraeli concluded a speech of brief valediction to the group of surviving ' safeguards ' with the observation that, as the morning sitting then in pro- gress was drawing near its appointed hour of adjournment, and as the Government, by not passing the clause, would just have time to complete the first part of the Bill, they would accept Sir Roundell Palmer's motion ' without troubling the Committee to divide ' ! Ministers, in other words, having thrown overboard one ' vital principle,' embodied in the compound householder, were now allowing these remaining principles to follow it with- out a struggle. Between April 8 and May 28 all had gone : dual vote, personal rating, two years' residential qualifica- tion, educational franchise, savings-bank franchise, taxing franchise, fundholding franchise all ; and when the Re- port stage of the Bill was reached, Parliament stood face to face with that 'household suffrage pure and simple,' which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had vowed that the Government would ' never introduce.' It must have been a source of unfailing gratification to the present Prime Minister to reflect, amid all the vicissitudes of his subsequent political career, that he at least was not ' art or part ' in this disastrous measure ; that he bore testi- mony against it on every lawful occasion ; that he sacrificed place and power, and what is harder to a statesman con- scious of administrative ability, opportunities of public service, to the duty of resisting it ; and that in unhesitating defiance of the reproaches of the political partisan, he 90 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY steadily opposed by speech and vote its passage through the House of Commons. It was on July 15 that the motion for the third reading of the Bill was made, and that the member for Stamford found his last opportunity for liberating his soul. And thus he proceeded to review the history of the measure and of the successive transformations which it had under- gone. When it passed its second reading it ' bristled with precautions, guarantees, and securities.' Now that the House had reached the third reading, all these precautions, guarantees, and securities had disappeared. It had been proposed by the member for Northamptonshire that beside the Bill as it now stood there should be printed a copy of the Bill as it was originally introduced. Lord Cranborne would have liked ' to see yet another document,' contain- ing the demands made by the right hon. gentleman the member for South Lancashire (Mr. Gladstone) on the occasion of the second reading of the Bill. They were ten in number. First, he demanded the lodger franchise. Well, the lodger franchise has been given. Secondly, and this is the only doubtful one, provisions to prevent traffic in votes. Such provisions, however, are to be con- tained in another Bill, about the probable success of which I know nothing. My impression is that traffic in votes will be one of the results of this Bill. The right hon. gentleman next demanded the abolition of obnoxious distinctions between com- pounders and non-compounders. Not only have those obnoxious distinctions been abolished, but all distinctions whatever have disappeared. The fourth demand of the right hon. gentleman was that the taxing franchise should be omitted. It has been omitted. Fifthly, that the dual vote should be omitted. It has been omitted. Sixthly, that the redistribution of seats must be considerably enlarged. It has been enlarged full fifty per cent. Seventhly, that the county franchise must be reduced, It has THE PARTING SHOT 9! been reduced to something like that point at which it stood in the proposal of last year. Eighthly, that the voting papers must be omitted. To my extreme regret the voting papers have been omitted. The last two demands were that the educational and savings-bank franchises should be omitted Here some uneasy conscience on the Ministerial benches attempted to relieve itself with a cry of ' Question ! ' Why what, sir, is the question but this ? Remember that the history of this Bill is quite peculiar. I venture to say that there is no man in this House of Commons who can remember any Bill being treated in the way that this Bill has been dealt with. No man in the House can remember a Government who have introduced a Bill of this importance, and who have yielded in Committee amendments so vitally altering the whole consti- tution and principle of the Bill as has been done in the present instance. ... I venture to impress this upon the House be- cause I have heard it said that this Bill is a Conservative triumph. If it is a Conservative triumph to have adopted the principles of your most determined adversary ; if it is a Conser- vative triumph to have introduced a Bill guarded with precau- tions and securities, and to have abandoned every one of those precautions and securities at the bidding of your opponents, then in the whole course of your annals I will venture to say the Conservative party has won no triumph so signal as this. The ' signal triumph ' was not yet quite won, but it was drawing very near its consummation. On July 16 the Bill was sent up to the House of Lords and was read a second time on the 23rd of that month. It was some five or six days in passing through Committee, and returned at the expiration of that time to the Lower House with a series of amendments, among which only one of any importance that introducing the principle of the ' three-cornered con- stituency ' in certain boroughs and counties, and in the City of London was agreed to by the Commons, The modi- 92 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY fications introduced by the Lords into the clauses relating to the lodger and to the county occupation franchises were, on division, disagreed with, as also was the new clause, inserted on the motion of Lord Salisbury, in restoration of the original proposal of the Bill to allow votes to be taken by means of voting papers. Thus, therefore, this momentous measure of legislation, to which the Royal Assent was given on August 1 5, took its place in the statute book in substantially the same form as that in which it left the House of Commons. CHAPTER VI Relations of Lord Cranborne with Mr. Disraeli The Irish Church resolutions His attitude with regard to them Becomes Marquis of Salisbury The Suspensory Bill In the Lords Lord Salisbury's speech Rejection of the Bill Dissolution and new Parliament. DIFFERENCES between public men are always apt to be exaggerated by the observer from without. Yet the breach which had been created between Lord Cranborne and his chief by the events of 1867 might well seem serious, even to experienced politicians. It is likely, indeed, that smaller men would have been permanently estranged. A statesman of a different temperament from that of Mr. Disraeli might have cherished a grudge against the colleague by whose retirement at a critical juncture his position had been seriously endangered, and who afterwards had not hesitated to oppose him again and again by speech and vote on more than one question, which, if carried against him, would have been fatal to his Government. On the other hand, there are men who in Lord Cranborne's position would have bitterly resented the sudden arrest of an official career of high success and still higher promise, by the uninvited duty of resisting a measure which ought never to have been introduced. But the retired Minister was animated by the patriotism that merges private in public considerations ; his chief had the politic magnanimity of the thorough man of the world ; and both enjoyed the inestimable advantage 94 THE MARQUIS- OF SALISBURY of being opposed by a politician whose influence in tin- designedly healing feuds among his political adversaries has so often earned him the benediction pronounced upon the peacemakers. Mr. Gladstone, ere many months had elapsed, established a fresh claim to inclusion among the blessed of the Ninth Beatitude by announcing a departure in policy which was sure to reunite the Conservatives of all schools in opposition to him. In consultation with his friends during the Parlia- mentary recess of 1867, he discovered the existence of a ' upas-tree ' in Ireland, of which one of the stems was repre- sented by the Established Church in that country. Accord- ingly, almost immediately after the reassembling of Parlia- ment in 1868, Mr. Gladstone gave notice of his intention to move that the House resolve itself into a Committee ' for the purpose of considering the condition of the Established Church in Ireland,' and on March 30, this motion was brought forward. It was, of course, opposed alike by Ministers and their late colleagues, but it did not in the first instance effect a complete reunion between them. The Government met Mr. Gladstone's proposition by an amend- ment protesting against any prejudgment of the question in an expiring Parliament elected under an extinct repre- sentative system. Lord Cranborne held that the Conserva- tive party ought to pronounce clearly and emphatically against the object of the motion, and in favour of the principle of a Protestant Church establishment in Ireland. Nor can it be denied, in the light of subsequent events, that the bolder mode of meeting Mr. Gladstone's motion might well have been the wiser even from a tactical point of view. That the Parliament of 1867 was absolutely without authority to pronounce condemnation on the Irish PARLIAMENT AND THE IRISH CHURCH 95 Church is no doubt technically true enough. Of such jurisdiction as it might have poasessed over the question it had deliberately divested itself, and upon no possible theory of the constitution could its pronouncement carry any constitutional weight whatever. But undoubted as these truths are, they are of the truths that profit little. The utterances of six hundred and fifty however elected repre- sentatives of a people do not lose all the moral authority which would otherwise have belonged to them simply be- cause the composition of the electorate has been changed. By none save those who adopt the very lowest and most mechanical view of the representative function could any such contention be possibly maintained ; for its mainten- ance must, to all save these, involve the further assumption, notoriously at variance with the facts, that a reform of the electoral system entails an entire, or at least a considerable change in the personnel of the elected. Apart, however, from all question as to individual prospects of re-election, the Parliament of 1867, and any political party contained in it, still collectively possessed, and could not, indeed, divest itself of, its moral right and duty as a body or a portion of a body chosen for its assumed fitness for that purpose to advise the country on any political question arising during its term of service. The Conservatives in this Parliament would have lost nothing at the then approaching election by frankly declaring themselves against disestablishment. What they lost by the opposite course it is easy to see. They took the first step in deliberate abnegation ot that duty by the faithful and energetic discharge of which they could alone hope to atone for the democratisation of the suffrage the duty of leading, or at least endeavouring to lead, the unskilled multitudes whom they had enfranchised. p6 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY They set the first example of inviting the people to issue their 'mandate' to their delegates. They made the first public recognition of the new doctrine that right and wrong should be what the constituencies upon consultation shall declare them to be ; that the path of duty lies only and always in the direction in which ' the cat jumps ' ; that the sole canon of justice is the 'length of the foot' of Demos. Or, if we prefer, we may call It the second lesson in Opportunism, the passing of the Reform Bill being itself the first. It was an attempt to 'stand in' with the new electorate, in case they should desire the overthrow of the Irish Church. It was conceived in the same spirit as the great ' Whig-dishing ' enterprise of the year before, and was, indeed, inspired largely by apprehension lest the ' dishers ' should do something to offend the prejudices of their newly- created masters before the profits of the ' dishing ' operation had been reaped. Their solicitude, as we know, was thrown away, and it is difficult to imagine that any display of courage in speaking out their real minds to the new electorate on this or any other subject could have earned them a more crushing rebuff than they actually received. Lord Cranborne approached the motion in no such temporising spirit. All that is most truly and deeply Conser- vative in his mind and temperament has ever been called into activity by questions of this kind. The fibre of attach- ment to the principle of an Established Church goes down to the very root of those convictions from which his secular politics spring. He could not, as he told Mr. Gladstone in the course of this debate, confess, like that distinguished person, to the experience of having escaped ' from the spell of the sentiment in favour of an Established Church.' ' That sentiment,' he frankly admitted and the simple candour of SUCCEEDS TO MARQUISATE 97 the avowal seems to carry us back much more than three- and-twenty years from the age of Parliamentary cynicism in which we now live' still exercises a hold over me which I regard as sacred.' So strong was it that Lord Cran borne owned his inability to emancipate himself from it, even in a case in which, as he candidly acknowledged, the principle of an Established Church was put to a very severe test, and its defenders had to rely more upon abstract and a priori argument and less upon appeals to expediency than could have been wished. ' Even as applied to Ireland,' said he, ' it is a principle which I will not desert ; it is a principle which has done so much good in past times ; it is a principle from which we may hope so much hereafter . . . that even if I were inclined to doubt of its soundness, it would not be in this moment of its trial and adversity that I should shrink from upholding it.' In this interesting and courageous speech, Lord Cran- borne was unconsciously taking leave of the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone's resolution was carried by a majority of fifty-six on April 3, and Parliament immediately afterwards adjourned for the Easter recess. On April 12, the second Marquis of Salisbury died, and on May 7 his son took his seat in the House of Lords. Not every debater of eminence in the Lower House finds acceptance among the more fastidious audience on the other side of the Central Hall, but Lord Salisbury's oratory had always combined the pungency and animation which win favour in one House with the power of argument and dignity of utterance which are the qualities chiefly prized in the other. Almost immediately upon his entrance into the Upper Chamber, he stepped into his natural place as one of the leaders of its debates, and only a week after he took his 98 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY seat he delivered a short but pregnant speech upon a pro- posal to give legislative effect to some of the recommenda- tions of the Royal Commission on Ritual, which had then just presented its Report. The warning which he addressed to Lord Shaftesbury on that occasion, as to the danger of hasty and partisan legislation against ritual, and the strife which it would stir up in the Church, was destined a few years after to be amply confirmed. The future opponent of the Public Worship Regulation Act was vainly admonishing the most active of its future sponsors. A question, however, of more immediate urgency was soon to engage the attention of the House of Lords and its new member. Having carried his Irish Church resolutions through the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone had there- upon brought in a Bill to suspend appointments to all vacant ecclesiastical offices in the Church of Ireland. The propriety of this measure could no doubt be defended by Mr. Gladstone ; and by him possibly with an inexhaustible wealth of argument. But to less gifted persons it still presents itself in the light of a fresh step in advance along that path of usurpation upon which the majority of the House ot Commons had been prevailed upon to enter. For if it was, constitutionally speaking, ultra vires of the unreformed Parliament to pronounce judgment on the Irish Church, it was going still further beyond those powers to assume that this judgment would be ratified by the new constituencies. Yet nothing less than that assumption was implied in the attempt to arrest the usual course of appointment to eccle- siastical offices. If it was desired to avoid the appear- ance of prejudging the electoral question, the status quo should have been studiously maintained ; and it was clearly part of the status quo that vacancies should be filled up as THE SUSPENSORY BILL 99 they occurred. Obviously, however, the intention was to force the hand of the new Parliament, and indirectly to commit the House of Lords to a recognition of the right of an unreformed House of Commons to condemn the existence of the Established Church of Ireland. The Bill, carried by large majorities through the Lower House, came on for second reading in the House of Lords on June 25, and on the second night of the adjourned debate its purpose was exposed and denounced in a speech of much force and eloquence by Lord Salisbury. He pointed out that the promoters of the measure which thus affected, but only affected, to reserve the question for the decision of the new electorate, were themselves irrevocably pledged to the disendowment and disestablishment of the Irish Church ; and he insisted on the truth that there is no essential dis- tinction between private and so-called ' public ' property, or between the plunder of a corporation and the robbery of an individual. Though there might, he admitted, be reason for reforming the Irish Church, the only argument for dis- endowing it was that a certain number of persons envied it the possession of its property, and he contended that to yield to an attack so inspired would be to endanger the tenure of all kinds of property whatever. As to the appli- cation of the ' test of numbers ' to the question of maintaining the Irish Church, he protested, and with true prescience, against the admission of an argument which would be equally available for employment, and has, as we all know, been since employed, to justify the disestablishment of the Church in Wales. But it was later on in this remarkable speech that Lord Salisbury gave the most striking proof of statesmanlike quality in the penetration which enabled him to pierce to the heart of the Irish trouble. IOO THE MARQUIS OP SALISBURY Your proposal (he said) seems to be to still the waters of this agitating time by offering up a victim to the avenging deities ; but are you quite sure that the avenging deities will accept your offering ? I have heard many elaborate attempts to prove that Fenianism is the true necessity that has caused this movement. But is it not an extraordinary phenomenon that, for the first time in the history of rebellion, we have rebels who do not know the cause of their rebellion ? This is an age of rebellion : we have seen them in all countries ; but I have never before heard of one where rebels were at a loss to state the grievances they desired to see removed. You tell us that though the Fenians never raised a cry against the Established Church, it is the Established Church which is really at the bottom of their agitation. It is impossible to conceal from ourselves that something very different is at the bottom of the Fenian movement ; and I suspect that when the Irish people hear that many Liberal landlords have joined in the attack on the Irish Church, they will say the reason is that they think they will save themselves by making the parson their Jonah, and throwing him overboard. My lords, it is against the land and not against the Church that the Fenian agitation is really directed. You offer them what they do not ask for ; you offer them that which will not pacify them. Talk of the monuments of conquest : the landlord is a much more complete monument of conquest than the clergyman. The clergyman does not hurt the peasant ; if the clergyman be taken away the peasant would be no richer but rather poorer ; but the landlord holds the property which the peasant in his traditions will remember once to have belonged to his sept. If you seek to appease the danger by mere concession ; if you yield to the mere demands of anger, or to use the euphemistic language we have heard, if Fenian outrages are to make you reason calmly and dispassionately it is to the landlord and not to the clergyman that you should really turn your attention. To us of to-day these observations read, no doubt, like truisms, but that is because we read them by the light of nearly a quarter of a century's subsequent experience. Those REPLY TO LORD CLARENDON IOI who can recall the talk of the doctrinaire Liberalism of 1868- 74, will well remember the stress which was laid upon the 1 healing ' effect of the policy of disestablishment. It was not, indeed, denied that land legislation would also be neces- sary, but undoubtedly, at that date, the message of peace which was finally despatched to Ireland in 1869 was repre- sented as likely to be quite as important and far-reaching in its pacificatory effects as the boon which was to be given the tenant in the following year. It was not enough, however, to expose the fatuity of this expectation : Lord Salisbury had still to deal with the inva- riable argument if overbearing bluster can be so de- scribed which is called out for service on these occasions. He had still to answer those who contended that because the House of Commons had voted in favour of a certain course of policy it was the duty of the House of Lords to bow to it forthwith. Lord Salisbury's answer was an amplification of the views expressed by him in the controversy with Mr. Gladstone on the question of the repeal of the paper duties. Lord Clarendon, as became a conscientious, not to say a superstitious, Whig, had contended that it was the duty of the Peers to ' pay greater attention to the majorities of the other House of Parliament,' a process which, with eminently Whiggish confidence, he appears to have regarded as neces- sarily identical with ' watching public opinion more closely.' To Lord Salisbury it occurred to ask his noble friend ' whe- ther he had considered for what purpose the House exists, and whether he would be willing to go through the humili- ation of being a mere echo and supple tool of the other House in order to secure for himself the luxury of mock legislation.' And he went on to lay down what is un- doubtedly the sound constitutional principle of action to be 102 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY observed by the House of Lords in all its dealings with the other branch of the Legislature the principle which he has himself invariably upheld, both in its injunctions and its prohibitions, both on its positive and its negative side, throughout his political life, and his staunch fidelity to which has enabled him to hold steadily on his course between the Opportunist and the Impracticable, during the three- and-twenty years which have passed since the government of the country was handed over to Numbers. When the opinion of your countrymen has declared itself, and you see that their convictions their firm, deliberate, sus- tained convictions are in favour of any course, I do not for a moment deny that it is your duty to yield. It may not be a pleasant process ; it may even make some of you wish that some other arrangement were existing ; but it is quite clear that whereas a member of a Government, when asked to do that which is Contrary to his convictions, may resign, and a member of the House of Commons when asked to support any measure contrary to his convictions may abandon his seat, no such course is open to your lordships ; and therefore in those rare and great occasions on which the national mind has fully declared itself I do not doubt your lordships would yield to the opinion of the country, otherwise the machinery of government could not be carried on. But there is an enormous step between that and being the mere echo of the House of Commons. And he added, in words well calculated to appeal to the pride of an historic assembly : I have no fear of the conduct of the House of Lords in this respect. I am quite sure, whatever judgment may be passed on us, whatever predictions may be made, be your term of existence long or short, you will never consent to act except as a free, independent House of the Legislature, and that you will consider any other more timid or subservient course as at once unworthy of your traditions, unworthy of your honour, and most of all, unworthy of the nation you serve. THE WAGES OF POLITICAL SIN 103 The Suspensory Bill was deservedly rejected by the Lords, and nothing more remained but to wind up the business of the session and prepare for the appeal to the new constitu- encies. Parliament was prorogued on July 31, and dissolved on November n. 'Derby told his friends,' Lord Shaftes- bury had written in a letter of March 1867, 'that if they passed his Bill they would be in office many years.' The Con- servatives were now to test the value of his promises. They went to the vast multitudes whom, by an unparalleled act of tergiversation, they had converted into electors, .and asked for their reward ; and the new electors replied to them by sending back their opponents to Parliament in a majority of over a hundred. The losers were aghast at the alleged ingratitude of the constituencies ; the winners delighted with their assumed intelligence. Inexperienced as they were, said the latter, they had already proved that they could distin- guish between the real and the pretended authors of their enfranchisement. Others were of opinion that the electors were thinking less of services past than of favours to come. It matters not which was right. One thing was certain, that the gigantic adventure of the Conservatives in legis- lative bribery had ended in electoral disaster. And so may it ever be ! 104 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER VII Irish Church Disestablishment Bill Lord Salisbury accepts and assists to pass it with amendments Negotiates compromise Parlia- mentary Procedure and Life Peerage Bills Elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford Irish Land Act of 1870 Lord Salisbury on ' the Oracle ' Army Purchase Bill and Royal Warrant Increasing unpopularity of the Government Collier and Ewelme Rectory Scandals Defeat of the Irish University Bill Dissolution and Conservative victory at the polls Mr. Gladstone resigns. LORD SALISBURY was now to be called upon to prove the loyalty and sincerity of his adherence to those principles of action which, in the debate on the Suspensory Bill, he had pressed upon the House of Lords. He had admitted that ' whenever the opinion of their countrymen had declared itself, and they saw that their convictions their firm, delibe- rate, sustained convictions were in favour of any course, it was the duty of that House to yield.' Whether the verdict against the Irish Church Establishment which Mr. Glad- stone succeeded in ' rushing ' through the masses of newly enfranchised electors, many of whom had probably never heard of the question before, could be accurately described as the expression of ' a firm, deliberate, sustained conviction,' may well be doubted ; but Lord Salisbury had too much moderation and political wisdom to cavil at it on this score. He had realised what the ' leap in the dark ' meant, and was more resigned to its consequences than many of those who had taken it with a lighter heart. He knew that the pro- THE IRISH CHURCH ACT IO5 nouncement of the constituencies against the Irish Church was as ' deliberate ' a decision as we were likely to get, at any rate for many years to come, from the new demo- cracy, and he accepted it accordingly. A recently published biography of Archbishop Tait has shown the admirable spirit in which, when Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church Act reached the Upper House, Lord Salisbury exerted himself to over- come the objections of its more vehement opponents in the Peers, and to avert the grave constitutional crisis to which its rejection would have given rise. The session of 1869 was mainly occupied, of course, in the ' heroic ' measure of disestablishment ; but spasmodic attempts were made, with the abortive results invariable in sessions dedicated to heroic measures, to pass useful mea- sures of legislation. With one such measure Lord Salisbury's name was connected as originator and promoter, and to another, of more doubtful policy perhaps, he gave his active support. Their fate may be shortly indicated by observing that the propriety of the changes proposed by them has been again discussed within the last two years. The former measure, introduced in March 1869, was directed to the repeal of that rule of Parliamentary pro- cedure which requires that Bills should pass through both Houses of the Legislature in the same session in order to become law. Assuming that legislation is a desirable end in itself which few people ever have the courage to deny, and the absolute denial of which might possibly be too sweeping a proposition it is difficult to defend the existence of this rule. Even a partial justification of it is possible only to those who hold again a proposition beyond the sustainment of any but the exceptionally courageous that the mischievous Bills introduced in any given session so 106 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY much outnumber the salutary or merely harmless ones that the gain of arresting the former outweighs the loss incurred by interposing obstacles to the latter. By Lord Salisbury's Parliamentary Proceedings Bill, introduced during this session, it was proposed to enact that any measure which had passed one House might, subject to the assent of the Crown and the two Houses to such procedure, be considered by the other House in the ensuing session. By this means Parliament would have been enabled not only to avoid the enforced extinction of measures which it desired to pass, but to obviate the necessity of hurriedly and inadequately considering their provisions at the fag-end of the session, to the discomfort and indignation of the judges who have subsequently to interpret them, and sometimes to the serious loss and injury of the Queen's lieges. Lord Salisbury's Bill was read a second time in the House of Lords and referred to a joint committee of the two Houses. Ministers, however, declined to bestow their patronage upon it ; and as in that pre- Parnellite period, Governments with substantial majorities behind them knew not what it was to be compelled to drop Ministerial measures, over which weeks of public time had been spent, at the end of a session, its urgency was naturally not very apparent to the official mind. Yet it seemed, and seems still to most of us, a safe and salutary reform enough in its way, and one cannot help feeling some surprise that after the experience of Administrations of both parties during the last fifteen years, there should still be apparently so general a reluctance on the part of what are called, apparently by way of distinction, ' responsible politicians ' though it is to be hoped that all, even the most mischievous or most tedious, members of Parliament will have to answer some- LIFE PEERAGES BILL IO? where, either here or hereafter, for their political conduct to take up the proposal seriously and procure its adoption. The other measure which Lord Salisbury endeavoured, in this case only as supporter, to promote during the present session was Lord Russell's Life Peerage Bill. Of the principle of this Bill, which aimed at supplying the House of Lords with ' new blood ' that very old desideratum in the minds of many reformers by the creation of life peers, subject to certain stringent rules as to the maximum number who might be created in the same year or sit at the same time, he heartily approved. He contended that the chief deficiency in the House of Lords was a want of representa- tives of the mercantile and industrial interests, who would bring their practical knowledge and experience to bear on many subjects which came before the Lords, especially such as related to the health and moral condition of the people. And to this contention, which is at least practical in spirit, if the policy advocated in it be not easily practicable in fact, he added another of a more abstract, and it must be said also, of a more questionable kind. 'We must try,' he declared, ' to impress on the country the fact that because we are not an elective House, we are not a bit the less a repre- sentative House, and not until the constitution of the House plainly reveals that fact shall we be able to retain perma- nently in face of the advance of the House of Commons, the ancient privileges and constitution of this House.' It was hardly with such energy of language that the Lord Salisbury of 1889 recommended to the House of Lords the Bill for the creation of life peerages which he introduced in that year. In the interval of twenty years which has elapsed between these two essays in legislation he has no doubt learnt two things : first, that no attempt to emphasise 108 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the ' representative ' character of the House by admitting a few members on a different footing from the rest of the peers would be in the least likely to conciliate that Radical hos- tility which will be satisfied with nothing short of the destruc- tion, actual or virtual, of a Second Chamber altogether ; and, secondly, that it is doubtful whether, in the face of this hostility, any concession which should visibly modify the immemorial character and constitution of the Upper House would not tend rather to weaken than to strengthen it for its struggle with its democratic assailants. Such change of attitude on Lord Salisbury's part, however, towards the Bill, would not in any case have affected its fortunes one way or the other ; for in 1869, as in 1889, it was the malignant reception openly preparing for it in the Commons, and foreshadowed in the former year by an intemperate utterance of Mr. Bright, which led to the disap- pearance of the measure, in one case by positive rejection, in the other by withdrawal in the House of Lords. In October of this year the dignified office of Chancellor of the University of Oxford, which has been held by so many illustrious Englishmen, was vacated by the death of Lord Derby, and the almost unanimous voice of the University designated Lord Salisbury as his successor. The selection was one of singular fitness, and it may indeed be doubted whether, wise and fortunate as our two ancient Universities have been throughout their history in their choice of occupants for the Chancellor's chair, there has ever been a case in which office and incumbent were more obviously and indisputably ' made for each other.' Lord Salisbury's election to the Chancellorship was carried in a Convocation holden on November 12, 1869, without a dissentient voice, '^GUIDANCE' OR 'GOVERNMENT'? 109 The history of the years 1869 and 1870 was destined to afford a fresh proof of the vanity of attempting to bribe the agents and instruments of Irish disorder into tranquillity by the bestowal of so-called legislative ' boons ' on an entirely different class of people. The disestablishment of the Church in the former year produced no improvement in the state of Ireland. Crime and outrage abounded during the winter, and early in the following year Ministers were com- pelled to introduce a stringent Peace Preservation Bill for the re-establishment of something like law and order in the dis- tracted country. It was a melancholy confirmation of Lord Salisbury's predictions in the debate on the Irish Church Suspensory Bill of 1868. The supporters of that measure had urged the constituencies to overthrow an institution of which no one complained, in order to quiet a number of people who were loudly denouncing an institution which they had not yet succeeded in shaking. The inevitable result had followed, and the opportunity seemed favourable for reminding the men who had now assumed the responsi- bilities of government that whereas in this country we are ' content and have long been content to guide, in Ireland it is essential that we should govern. Until,' said Lord Salisbury, ' you have learnt that, until you have established it deeply in the minds of the Irish people, you will not get them to listen to your views and arguments, nor will you gain the full result of those remedial measures which, as far as they are just, I heartily approve of.' Another of these ' remedial measures,' perhaps not going beyond what was at the moment just, but destined to open the way for subsequent legislation of the greatest injustice and the worst possible example was to be introduced the same year. The Irish Land Act was accepted by the 110 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Conservative party, Lord Salisbury among them, and allowed to pass unopposed. Without the gift of supernatural pre- science, it would have been difficult for the Opposition of that day to adopt any other attitude. The disputes, how- ever, between the supporters of the Bill and its adversaries as to whether a measure which forbade Irish landlords and tenants to ' contract themselves out of ' its operation was or was not conformable to the true doctrines of political economy, afforded Lord Salisbury an opportunity for a characteristic exercise of his powers in that kind of sarcastic raillery of which he is a master. Political economy (he said) is an oracle whose utterances we profoundly respect ; but which, like a certain oracle of old, is apt to suit its utterances to the wishes of those who have the guardianship of it for the time being. On a certain occasion, when the Delphic Oracle was in the power of the Macedonian army, its utterances were said to be ' Philippised,' and I am afraid that the utterances of political economy nowadays are only too apt to be ' Gladstbnised.' l When I first entered Parliament it used to be regarded as an axiom that could not be controverted, that commercial treaties were founded on erroneous and unsound principles, and could not be for the benefit of the countries entering into them. Circumstances, however, have changed ; political economy has reviewed its doctrines, and commercial treaties are regarded as the most orthodox things imaginable. Again, some time ago it was a fundamental doctrine of political economy that Government should not enter into manufacturing operations, whereas it is now actually proposed that our Government shall manufacture coin for foreign states, and I presume that political economy 1 It is not often that Lord Salisbury is caught tripping in his scholarship ; but it will be seen that in this case he has misemployed the Greek expression (which was ' to Philip pise,' ' to Medise,' &c., not to be Philippised, Medised, &c.) to the weakening, perhaps of his own epigram. THE 'DELPHIC ORACLE' III has altered its language accordingly. And so it is with respect to liberty of contract. Formerly it was supposed that political economy required that the power of contract should be unre- stricted ; whereas nothing now can be more admirable or more just than that people should be deprived of that power. Amid all the vagueness and uncertainty that prevails upon the subject, there is at least one proposition in which we feel absolutely certain, and that is, that political economy is the property of the Liberal party, and that, therefore, its doctrines must take whatever form may best suit their views for the time being. And the arrangement thus described did in fact subsist for another ten or eleven years ; at the end of which period the complaisance of even this most pliable of oracles was exhausted, and Mr. Gladstone found it necessary formally to evict the Pythia, tripod and all, without a penny of ' compensation for disturbance,' and to bid her take up her abode on one or other of the more distant planets of our system. In Lord Salisbury's attitude towards the Irish legislation of the Government, and generally in his whole action during the Parliament of 1868-74, the marks of a continuous political development are, I think, quite plainly discernible ; and they prepare us for the statesman who holds the first post in the councils of the Crown to-day. Strenuously as the distinguished seceder from Lord Derby's Cabinet had fought against the Reform Act of 1867, he shewed himself fully prepared, in our practical English spirit, to accept, and, so far as was needful for the effective defence of new Conservative positions, accommodate himself to, its conse- quences. There was nothing of the spirit of the irrecon- cilable French Legitimist a picturesque figure, but an abso- lutely impotent factor, in the politics of his country in Lord Salisbury's Parliamentary action and tactics. He recognised 112 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the necessity of compromise on many political questions in which, under the old franchise, he would doubtless have counselled the Peers to resistance ; while at the same time he was careful never to yield up a single stronghold to the mere bouncing demonstrations of its assailants. Thus the attempt to force the Army Organisation Bill through Parliament in the shape of a simple measure for the abolition of purchase was one which he held it legiti- mate to resist, if only on grounds of legislative propriety and of due respect to a legislative body ; and when Mr. Glad- stone's imperious temper led him to reply to the rejection of the measure in the Lords by procuring the issue of a Royal Warrant giving effect to the proposed changes, Lord Salisbury was one of the most energetic supporters of the vote of censure upon the Government which was moved and carried in the Upper House by way of protest against so high-handed an appeal to the prerogative. In like manner he was to be found among those Peers who resented and foiled the endeavour to ' rush ' the Ballot Bill through the Upper House in the month of August. Nor did he shrink from facing the storm of Radical abuse which he knew would be showered on the Peers for insisting, even at the cost of a year's delay, on having due time allowed them to discuss a measure which had been nearly half a century before the House of Commons, and had been rejected by that branch of the Legislature no fewer than twenty-eight times. Meanwhile, save for these occasional assertions of prin- ciple, there was really little or nothing for an Opposition to do except, for the reason of the well-known adage, to give the Government ' plenty of rope.' From the first it had been a Ministry of ' all the talents ' save those of tact and THE END APPROACHING 113 discretion ; two or three of its most conspicuous members had applied themselves as industriously to making enemies for the Administration ever since their appointment as some men do to the work of making private friends ; and by the end of the session it was fast filling up the measure of its unpopularity. The defiant insolence with which Russia had been allowed to tear up the Black Sea Treaty in the face of its signatories, and the transparent pretence of Lord Granville's attempt to give an air of firmness to his sur- render, had disgusted even peace-loving Englishmen. Ministers had fallen generally into disfavour before the rising of Parliament in the autumn of 1871, and the events of the recess that followed brought them into contempt as well. Two unlucky, and so far as one can judge, gratuitously devised and wantonly perpetrated jobs the appointment of Sir Robert Collier, by an evasion of the terms of a statute, to a seat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and the presentation of Mr. Harvey, by a strictly analogous process, to the living of Ewelme gave just offence to public opinion, and were vigorously attacked in both Houses of Parliament. The Government escaped a vote of censure, but they emerged from the conflict, not only with increased discredit in popular estimation, but sensibly weakened in their hold over their followers. The hours, in fact, were fast ' engendering of the day ' of Mr. Gladstone's downfall, and few probably of those who had correctly measured the difficulties of the task which he set himself in the following year, and the disadvantages of shaken prestige and authority under which he approached it, can have been surprised at his defeat over the Irish University Bill in 1873. This event was of course followed by the resignation of the Government, and a summons from i 114 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the Crown to the leader of the Opposition, who, however, legitimately and wisely declined the task of attempting to conduct the affairs of the country, with a minority behind him, in an exhausted Parliament. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues resumed office on the tacit understanding that public business should be wound up as expeditiously as might be, and that the appeal to the constituencies should then be made. Another ten months were, however, to elapse before the dissolution. One morning in the month of January 1874 there appeared a lengthy manifesto from the Prime Minister, stating briefly the reason for having advised her Majesty to dissolve Parliament, and setting forth with considerably greater fulness an array of reasons why the electorate should renew his lease of power. In spite, however, of the many words in which they were clothed, they were substantially only three in number, and consisted first of a bribe to the direct taxpayer, secondly of a bribe to the indirect tax- payer, and thirdly of a bribe to the local ratepayer. Mr. Gladstone anticipated a surplus of over five millions, and with this he promised that he would remit the income tax, 'free the breakfast table,' and largely reduce the burden of local taxation. It was far and away the biggest money bribe ever offered by a political party in the State to the constituencies ; and it wa the most decisively rejected. Mr. Gladstone went to the country with his hands full of gifts, and the country responded with a blow which laid him prostrate. The boldest bid ever made for success at a general election earned only the most crushing defeat that has overtaken any Minister of modern times. It was three-and-thirty years since the country had pronounced so decisively against any Liberal Government and so over- ANOTHER 1841 115 whelmingly in favour of their opponents. Never since 1841 had the Conservatives returned from the polls with a working majority ; and their majority in 1874 was much more than a working majority : it was a commanding one. Ministers did not remain in office to meet its condemnation, but resigned as soon as the result of the election had declared itself. Il6 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY CHAPTER VIII The New Government Again Secretary for India The Bengal Famine Lord Northbrook and Sir George Campbell The Public Worship Regulation Bill Opposed by Lord Salisbury in the Lords Mr. Gladstone's Six Resolutions The Prime Minister adopts the Bill Sadducees and phylacteries The Bill returned to the Lords Lord Salisbury rebukes ' bluster ' The Prime Minister on his colleague A ' master of flouts and jeers ' Sessions of 1875 and 1876. RUMOUR was, of course, busy during the few days imme- diately succeeding the resignation of the Government with the imaginary difficulties which were being encountered by Mr. Disraeli in the attempt to carry out the Royal com- mands to form a new Administration. Six months before, when Mr. Gladstone's defeat on the Irish Education Bill had compelled him to place his resignation in her Majesty's hands, political gossips had been in a position to inform the world that it was Lord Derby, and not Mr. Disraeli, who would become his successor. Under the latter statesman, so these omniscient persons declared of their own know- ledge, Lords Salisbury and Carnarvon would inflexibly refuse to serve ; and as no worthy Conservative Cabinet could be formed without them, a compromise would have to be arranged by Mr. Disraeli's waiving his claims to the Premiership in favour of Lord Derby. As the Leader of the Opposition prayed to be excused from obedience to her Majesty's commands on that occasion, these political gobe-mouches were never exposed, and their THE BENGAL FAMINE 1 1/ ' information ' was now, of course, reproduced for a brief currency of some twenty-four hours. By the afternoon of the day following the summons of Mr. Disraeli to Windsor, he had already filled the principal places in his Cabinet, and it was officially known that Lord Salisbury would return to his old post at the India Office, and Lord Carnarvon again resume his administration of the Colonies. The moment was a critical one for the former of the two new Ministers, for before the end of the previous year it had become clear that a great famine was impending in India, and, to add to the difficulties of the Secretary of State, a grave difference of opinion on a vital point in the question as to the proper measures to be adopted for deal- ing with the calamity had already arisen between the Viceroy of India and the highest of the local administrators responsible to him. The Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir George Campbell, whose name and opinion carried weight in those days, urged that the exportation of grain from India should be absolutely prohibited as long as the scarcity in Bengal lasted, and that the rice, which in ordinary circumstances would have found its way to European merchants, should be sent into the famine-stricken dis- tricts. Lord Northbrook, on the other hand, insisted that the export trade should continue as before, and that the Government should import rice into Bengal. Sir G. Campbell's plan he regarded as a dangerous interference with the freedom of trade, and as certain to injure, if not permanently to cripple, the grain trade of India. One need hardly say which of these two views would be the more likely to find favour with public sentiment, uninformed by economic insight, in this country, or to commend itself in consequence to a timid or popularity-hunting Minister. Il8 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY As a matter of fact, much pressure was put upon Lord Salisbury by the supporters of Sir George Campbell's con- tention, and it needed no little firmness on the part of the Secretary for India to stand stoutly by the sounder policy of the Viceroy. In his speech in its defence in the House of Lords a speech which concluded with a generous tribute to the ability with which Lord Northbrook, a political opponent, had met the crisis Lord Salisbury convincingly showed that, while from the financial point of view the difference between the two alternative courses was scarcely worth considering, from the administrative point of view it was all-important. The export of grain would not imperil the supply for the distressed districts because there was a large surplus crop in some parts of Bengal, and the difficulty had been, not to procure grain, but to bring the supplies to the homes of the starving population. On the other hand, an official prohibition of exports would have paralysed private trade, and, by causing private traders to abandon the idea of attempting the conveyance of grain on their own account to these parts of the country, would have tended to aggravate a real famine by an artificial one. The wise and courageous course thus adopted by the Secretary for India was crowned with complete success. The impending scarcity turned out to the full as serious as those best acquainted with the country had expected ; but the preparations for dealing with it proved thoroughly effective, and the dreaded visitation passed off without even so much as causing any increase in the death-rate of Bengal. As regards domestic affairs, the session of 1874 bade fair at first to be of an absolutely uneventful character. A year which begins with a dissolution, followed by a com- A MODEST PROGRAMME 119 plete turn of the political tables and the elevation of a weak Opposition to power at the head of an overwhelming majority is not usually marked by any other very important or exciting political incidents. After such a somersault, parties naturally require some little time to recover their breath, and they usually spend the session that follows in awaiting the gradual subsidence of the rate of respiration to a normal point. Nor is there any reason to suppose that when the new Parliament of 1874 adjourned on the night of March 19, after listening to the Speech from the Throne, there was expectation in any quarter, Ministerial or other, of a departure from this precedent. The Government set before the House a very modest bill of legislative fare. An amend- ment of the system of Land Transfer, a Royal Commission on the Law of Master and Servant, of Conspiracy, and of Trade Offences, an extension of the Judicature Reform to Ireland, and a Friendly Societies Bill of these and other like measures did the programme consist. No one suspected that the session would be rendered one cannot exactly say memorable, but certainly remarkable, by a piece of legislative work at once so irritating and so impotent as to send us back nearly a quarter of a century for its parallel, and one attended by passages of Parliamen- tary history so curious that we have to extend our retrospect for yet another hundred years and more to find their pre- cedents. A measure as gratuitously introduced or at least, as needlessly adopted by the Government as noisily and in- temperately supported, and almost as void of result as the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, was passed through the House of Commons in a series of debates which seem to transport us to the days when Ministers, sitting side by side on the Treasury Bench, were in the habit of rising to denounce 120 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY each other's policy to an assembly to whom such an incident appeared the most natural thing in the world. Yet nobody anticipated either the Ministerial patron- age of the measure, or the strange accompaniments of its passage, when, on April 20, the Archbishop of Canterbury introduced the Public Worship Regulation Bill. One may perhaps, without much rashness, venture a little further and say that even when that measure had been read a third time in the Upper, and sent down to the Lower, House the anticipation of such a future for it had not yet dawned. For it is no very hazardous assumption that if Mr. Gladstone had not attacked it or even if he had only attacked it on principles which were a less direct challenge to the ' Protestantism of the Protestant religion ' Mr. Disraeli would never have stood forth as its uncompromising champion, still less have identified his Government with its Parliamentary fortunes, least of all espoused its cause in language which gave such deep offence to a large body of Conservative Churchmen. In the House of Lords a division of Ministerial opinion with regard to the merits of the Bill had already disclosed itself. The Duke of Richmond had supported it, and the Chancellor had joined Lord Shaftesbury and the two Arch- bishops in ' screwing up ' the measure by the substitution of a lay for an ecclesiastical judge, and generally rendering it more distasteful, not to Ritualists alone, but even to mode- rate High Churchmen. On the other hand, it had been opposed by Lord Salisbury on the second reading in a speech of statesmanlike breadth and moderation, and one which displayed a far sounder view of the true attitude to be adopted by the State towards a Church of such a constitu- tion and with such a history as ours than that which his THE THREE SCHOOLS IN THE CHURCH 121 leader was afterwards to proclaim. The three schools which exist within the Anglican Communion the High, the Low, and the Broad, or, as Lord Salisbury preferred to style them, the Sacramental, the Emotional, and the Philosophical have, he pointed out, been found, except when one or other of them has been temporarily crushed by the strong hand of power, in the Church in every age : They arise (he continued) not from any difference in the truth itself, but because the truth must necessarily assume different tints as it is refracted through the media of different minds. But it is upon the frank and loyal toleration of these schools that the existence of your Establishment depends. The problem you have to solve is how to repress personal and indi- vidual eccentricities if you will, how to repress all exhibitions of wilfulness, of lawlessness, of caprice ; but at the same time that you do that you must carefully guard any measures which you introduce from injuring the consciences or suppressing the rights of either of the three schools of which the Church consists. On this condition alone can your legislation be safe. If you accomplish this end, if you solve this problem, no doubt you will remove causes of irritation, and conciliate many hearts and minds to the Church which are now alienated, and you will have done a good work. But if you legislate without solving the problem ; if you disregard this condition ; if you attempt to drive from the Church of England any one of the parties of which it is composed ; if you tamper with the spirit of toleration of which she is the embodiment, you will produce a convulsion in the Church and imperil the interests of the State itself. The House of Lords, however, which is just as liable on occasion to attacks of the No Popery fever as the popular assembly, was deaf to this wise and eloquent appeal. The Bill was read a second time, ' screwed up ' as aforesaid in Committee not to 'Concert,' but to 'discord pitch' and was ultimately sent down to the House of Commons early 122 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY in July. On the Qth of that month the second reading was moved by Mr. Russell Gurney, and was opposed by Mr. Gladstone in an impassioned speech, at the conclusion of which he laid on the table six resolutions which he thought should form the basis of any legislation on the subject. They were such as to supply a watchful opponent with a plausible excuse for appealing to the strong and in many respects the just and reasonable English jealousy of eccle- siastical encroachment on the authority of the State. It was not likely that such a chance would escape Mr. Disraeli, and upon this hint he spake. Without a moment's hesita- tion, he stepped to the front, and undertook the patronage of the Bill. The debate was adjourned, and on the next Government night the Prime Minister stated that Mr. Glad- stone's resolutions, directly raising, as he declared they did, the question of the entire emancipation of the Church from State control, must be regarded as a challenge which the Government was bound to take up, and that every facility would consequently be given for the discussion of the Bill. On the following Wednesday the standing orders having been suspended to allow the debate to proceed on that day a singular scene occurred. Mr. Hardy, the Secretary of State for War, speaking from his usual place on the Treasury Bench, energetically attacked the measure, and later on the same afternoon his chief announced his inten- tion of giving it his hearty support. After describing the three parties in the Church, whose respective characteristics he denned with considerably less precision, especially as regards the second of them, than Lord Salisbury as Cere- mony, Enthusiasm, and Free Speculation, and declaring that no attack was contemplated upon any of them, he went on to use the long-remembered and resented words : 'TO PUT DOWN RITUALISM' 123 ' I take the primary object of the Bill, whose powers, if it be enacted, will be applied and extended impartially to all subjects of her Majesty, to be this to put down Ritualism.' Going on to comment upon Mr. Gladstone's declaration that he did not know what Ritualism was, the Prime Minister declared that that ignorance was not shared by the House of Commons or the country. What the House of Commons and the country understood by Ritualism were practices by a portion of the clergy avowedly symbolic of doctrines which the same clergy are bound in the most solemn manner to refute and repudiate. ' Therefore I think there can be no mistake among practical men as to what is meant when we say that it is our desire to discourage Ritualism.' The statesmanship of the course adopted on this occa- sion by Mr. Disraeli has often been, and is to this day, ques- tioned ; but of its immediate popularity with most members of his party and of its consonance with the temper of the House of Commons, there can be no doubt. Its success was also greatly assisted by the general political stagnation of the period and the consequent eagerness wherewith the question was seized upon by the press, which, of course, in most instances took the popular that is, the ' Protestant ' side. To journalists, moreover, as to certain distinguished members of Parliament, the subject had for a time, at any rate, all the charm of the unfamiliar, and they experienced something of that pleasure which must have attended Sir William Harcourt in his excursions among the Canonists. The learning, not to say the unction, with which they dis- coursed daily on ritual observances, and sometimes even on theological mysteries, was most edifying. It was remarked with caustic wit by the ' Spectator ' that ' the newspapers, 124 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY written principally by Sadducees,' were 'hot with discus- sions on phylacteries.' The jealous Erastianism of Parlia- ment and the alarmed Protestantism of Fleet Street acted and reacted upon each other, and the Public Worship Bill was converted into a more efficient instrument, or what was intended and supposed to be a more efficient instrument, for the putting down of Ritualism. An amendment, giving complainants an appeal to the archbishop where the bishop refused to act or, in other words, an amendment removing what the minority considered to be the only safeguard against an abuse of the powers of the Bill was carried against the opposition of Mr. Glad- stone, and, thus ' strengthened,' the measure was sent back to the Upper House. Here Lord Salisbury, in a well- remembered speech, which was misunderstood at the time, and has often been both honestly and dishonestly misrepre- sented since, recommended that the new clause should be struck out. ' Much,' he observed, ' has been said of the majority in another place, and of the peril in which the Bill would be if the clause under discussion is rejected. There is a great deal of that kind of bluster when any particular course has been taken in the other House of Parliament. But it should be borne in mind that the majority was only twenty-three, and that those who are most interested in sup- porting the amendment are the very persons who, above all things, desire that the Bill shall pass. It is absurd, then, to suppose that if the clause be rejected, there will not be found twelve men among them with sufficient common sense to accept the Bill without it rather than lose it altogether.' This shrewd calculation was verified by the event ; for the Commons, after a debate enlivened by more than one 'A MASTER OF FLOUTS AND JEERS* 12$ remarkable incident, agreed to the Lords' amendment, thus submitting to the elision of the obnoxious clause ; and the Bill became law, with the ' Bishop's veto ' left absolute. But Lord Salisbury was taken severely to task for the impropriety of his assumed reference to the House of Commons by Sir William Harcourt, who described and deplored his language as the ' ill-advised raillery of a rash and rancorous tongue.' It was in reply to this speech that Mr. Disraeli made his famous reference to his colleague as ' not a man who mea- sures his phrases,' but as 'one who is a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers ' ; and putting the same con- struction upon the reference to ' bluster ' as Sir William Harcourt had done, the Premier went on, in his half-serious, half-ironic manner, to ascribe to Lord Salisbury a deliberate intention of irritating his adversaries into a false move. ' My noble friend,' said Mr. Disraeli, ' knows the House of Commons well, and he is not, perhaps, superior to the con- sideration that by making a speech of that kind, and taunting respectable men like ourselves with being a blustering majority, he probably might stimulate the amour propre of some individuals to take the course which he wants and to defeat the Bill.' This, of course, was a very free paraphrase of the precise words of Lord Salisbury, who not only had never used the expression 'a blustering majority,' but, as he hastened to explain the following day, had not even had that particular majority in his mind. The ' bluster ' against which he pro- tested was in the Upper and not the Lower House. It had been argued, he said, by one of the members of the former assembly, ' that we were bound to take a particular course because the House of Commons were very resolved, and because, if we did not take that course, the Bill would 126 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY be lost. My Lords, I have always objected to the argument when there is a difference of opinion between the two Houses, that it is the privilege of the House of Commons always to insist, and the duty of the House of Lords always to yield. It is not uncommon to use that argument when we come to the last discussions in conflicts of that kind, and I venture to think it is an argument of a nature which may be justly designated by the term " bluster." But whether that be the case or not, what I am now concerned to say is, that it never entered my head to use a term in the least degree disrespectful to the other House of Parliament. I regret that the statement should have been made, because I should exceedingly dislike to have it attached to my name, and by such distinguished authorities, or to have it thought that I could be guilty of such an offence at all.' This explanation, at once spirited and courteous, of course closed the incident in its public aspect. And in further making it clear that Mr. Disraeli's somewhat pungent retort upon his colleague's former speech had been delivered under a misapprehension of its import, Lord Salisbury might have reasonably reckoned on satisfying the curious that the pas- sage of arms between his chief and himself if, indeed, a single thrust, dexterously parried, but not 'riposted,' can be so described had left no coolness behind it. It would seem, however, that stupidity and malevolence were not convinced of this until after the Prime Minister had publicly complimented his colleague at a Lord Mayor's dinner on the ability of his Indian administration. So much for the piquant episode which has rescued the Parliamentary history of one of the most pretentiously and irritatingly futile pieces of modern legislation from otherwise well- merited oblivion. 'MAN PROPOSES' 127 The subsequent history of this Parliament and Adminis- tration forms the most eloquent of sermons on the text of 'Man proposes.' Ministers, as Lord Salisbury told the Upper House in 1875, in tne course of a trenchant reply to an attack from Lord Granville upon the unambitious character of their programme, looked forward to a period of comparative political tranquillity during which the country might have rest from the ' harassing legislation ' with which it had been agitated by their predecessors, and Parliament might devote itself to the consideration of measures of the socially useful rather than of the politically heroic order. Far was it from entering into the minds, either of the Go- vernment or the Opposition, to anticipate that events abroad were destined to take such a course as to thrust all questions of domestic policy into the background, and to bring the career of the Parliament of 1874, and the Government there- with associated, to its close through as stormy a period of three years as has occurred in the lifetime of the present generation. For a session or two the fair . promise of the political situation was maintained. Throughout the year 1875 and until the autumn of 1876, it appeared as if the Government were destined to live out their official lives in peace. The harvest of legislation in the former year was fairly plentiful, and was reaped without any excessive toil. Such measures as the Agricultural Holdings Act, the Land Transfer Act, the Artisans' Dwellings Act, and the Acts for the consolidation of the law of public health, and for the amendment of the law of conspiracy in connection with trade offences, had, of course, to encounter the sneer of the Radicals on the score of their ' permissive,' or, as was alleged, their otherwise in- effective character; but those who sneered at them did 128 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY not care to risk the unpopularity of opposing them, and if some of them have disappointed their authors, others have proved valuable contributions to the statute book. In other matters, too, as well as these, the failure of the Opposition to find any available means of seriously damaging the Govern- ment became more and more conspicuous every day. The factious and factitious outcry against the Royal Titles Bill, and the desperate endeavour to make political capital out of the imaginary wrongs of the Gaikwar of Baroda who, in spite of his easily explained acquittal by a curious Mixed Commission of English officials and Indian native princes on a charge of attempting the murder of the British Resident, was legitimately and most wisely deposed by the Secretary for India spoke volumes as to the desperate straits to which the constitutional critics of the Government were reduced. It looked as if they might have whistled for a wind for ever, and in vain ; and, so far as home politics were con- cerned, perhaps they might. But in the meantime, and while even the most sanguine weather prophets of the Opposition were beginning to despair of the desired gale, a breeze was rising in an obscure corner of South-eastern Europe, which was destined to fill their sails to their hearts' content, and which for a moment threatened to wreck the vessel of their adversaries. 129 CHAPTER IX The Eastern Question Differences of English opinion thereon The views of the Government Lord Salisbury's mission to Constanti- nopleHis policy and that of his colleagues The preliminary sittings The Conference Obstinacy of the Turks A final appeal Returns to London Lord Beaconsfield's defence. THE story of the three momentous years 1876-78 has been often told, and it does not fall within the purpose of this work to rehearse it or at any rate its earlier chapters in anything like fulness of detail. During the first few stages of that prolonged crisis, as one may without exaggeration call it, which began with the trouble in the Herzegovina in the summer of 1875, and ended, so far as Europe was con- cerned, with the conclusion of the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878, Lord Salisbury's public part in foreign affairs was in no way more conspicuous than that of the majority of his colleagues. The main burden of our foreign policy rested of course during these months on the shoulders of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs ; and though Lord Salisbury, as chief of the India Office, may well have watched the course of events in Eastern Europe with more than ordinary Ministerial concern, it had not as yet become his duty to take any special measures for the protection of our great Asiatic dependency against the consequences or incidents of the attack which Russia was preparing to make upon the head of the Mahommedan faith. It was not until K 130 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY after the excesses committed by the Turkish irregulars in the suppression of a Bulgarian rising had led to a violent agitation in England, and Russia had been encouraged, by the consequent estrangement of English sympathies from the cause of Turkey, to intervene in the struggle between the Porte and the Principality of Servia, that Lord Salisbury was summoned to take a prominent part in the negotiations which thereupon ensued. On October 31 the Russian Government sent an ulti- matum to the Porte demanding its immediate assent to an armistice in the war with Servia, and threatening, in the event of refusal, to withdraw its representative from Con- stantinople. With this demand the Sultan and his advisers at once complied, and the British Government there- upon proposed to the Powers that a European Conference should at once assemble at Constantinople and endeavour to settle with Turkey the terms of an arrangement for the pacification of the disturbed territories within and upon her borders. And at the Guildhall Banquet of November 9, Lord Beaconsfield announced in a memorable speech that the Powers had assented to the proposal, and that Lord Salisbury would attend the Conference as the representative of this country. The crisis had by this time become acute, and many English observers, not being either partisans in home politics or dominated by their sympathies with Russia on the one hand or Turkey on the other, were already beginning to suspect that war was inevitable. Many of those who had honestly lost their heads over the ' Bulgarian atrocities ' were by this time in a way to recover them ; but though they were thereby enabled to take a calmer and truer view of the policy of Russia than in those impassioned moments when STATE OF ENGLISH OPINION 131 the most corrupt and barbarous of Christian States had appeared to them in the light of a righteously indignant Power inspired only by a holy wrath against oppression and cruelty, the opening of their eyes did but disclose to them a still darker prospect for the peace of Europe. They were now forced to admit that if Russia, considered as a disinterested crusader on behalf of humanity, had been likely to attack Turkey, a descent of Russia, regarded as a calculating aggressor in quest of increased territory, upon her neighbour was still more to be feared. For in the latter case, modera- tion and even meekness on the part of the intended victim would obviously fail to avert attack, and, supposing the victim to suspect the design upon him, would be far less likely to be displayed. In other words, if Russia meant war on one pretext or another, which seemed daily growing more and more probable, and if Turkey knew that she meant it, which to say the least of it was far from improb- able, a European Conference would be idle. The two contending Powers would simply join in it for their own purposes, and would be merely awaiting the completion of their preparations to break it off. While, however, this desponding view was generally gaining ground among Englishmen, their agreement for the most part ended here. From any half-dozen men who concurred in thinking that before many months were over there would be war between Russia and Turkey, it was often possible to collect at least half as many different opinions as to the way in which such a war would affect British interests, and as to the policy which, in consequence, it behoved us to pursue. There were a few extreme partisans on Cither side who held respective-ly that England was absolutely un- concerned with the fate of the Ottoman Empire, and that 132 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY its ' integrity and independence ' in the strictest sense of the word, ought, on mere grounds of self-preservation, to be defended by force of arms against attack. And ranging between these two extremes, there were those who agreed in thinking that in certain given conditions of danger to the existence of the Turkish Empire, intervention for its protec- tion might be imperatively demanded by British interests, but who held indefinitely varying views, both as to the point at which that demand would arise and the particular steps by which it should be met. That these differences of opinion were reflected in Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet is likely enough ; indeed, we know by the evidence of subsequent facts that two Ministers differed not only from their colleagues to the point of resig- nation, but from each other on the last of the questions above referred to. But reviewing matters from the stand- point of the present day, it seems but reasonable to believe that the dissensions of the Cabinet were both antedated and exaggerated by public rumour. It is doubtful whether, in spite of all the gossip current in those days, there was much divergence even of sympathies among them, but there is anyhow no solid ground for believing that at this particu- lar juncture, or indeed for more than a year to come there was any material disagreement among them as to the proper lines of British policy. The saying of the Foreign Secretary, that ' the greatest of British interests was peace,' commanded, we may be sure, an equally hearty assent from all his colleagues alike. No doubt their modes of ' seeking peace and ensuing it ' varied with their respective tempera- ments, and one Minister may have entertained as strong a belief in the salutary effect of ' firm ' language as others did in the efficacy of conciliatory utterances. LORD BEACONSFIELD AND HIS COLLEAGUES 133 Adequate, however, as was this explanation of the differ- ences occasionally noticeable between the speech and attitude of one member of the Cabinet and another, its adequacy was not admitted and indeed not recognised by the deeply interested and somewhat excited public opinion of the time. The belief prevailed in many minds that as early as the autumn of 1876 Lord Beaconsfield and certain of his colleagues were pulling opposite ways : that the Prime Minister, in obedience to his ' Semitic instincts,' was bent upon dragging England into a war for the mainte- nance of the ' integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire ' in the fullest and oldest-fashioned sense of the phrase ; and that the more ' English ' and more prudent members of his Cabinet were straining every nerve in op- position to the rash policy of their chief. This idea found favour, as it happened, in two quite opposite quarters, and in both the wish was father to the thought. Turcophil Tories and Russophil Radicals alike hoped that it might be true the former because its realisation would to their thinking demonstrate the political genius and patriotism of the Prime Minister ; the latter because it would, as they thought, justify their severest denunciations of his wickedness. To each of them in short the statesman who was supposed to regard British interests as bound up with those of the people whom the Radical, described as the ' Unspeakable,' and the Tory as ' Our Ancient Ally,' was the Beaconsfield of their imagi- nation. Such a conception satisfied, on opposite moral grounds, their respective ideals, and they vied with each other in the endeavour to popularise it. Lord Salisbury's appointment was first publicly an- nounced, as has been said, at the Guildhall Banquet, and the speech in which the announcement was made contained 134 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY the famous reference to the 'resources' of England, as a country which would have no need to ' inquire whether she could enter into a second or a third campaign.' The effect of this flourish was exactly what might have been anticipated. ' Magnificent ! ' exclaimed the ' Jingo,' and ' Monstrous ! ' echoed his opponents. ' The Prime Minister,' said the former, 'is with equal spirit and judgment notifying to Russia that England is not going into the Conference to ratify a Three Emperors' scheme for the partition of Turkey, but to uphold the treaty law of Europe.' ' Lord Beacons- field,' cried the latter, ' is bent on reassuring his friends at Constantinople as to the import of English assent to the Conference. For fear they should mistake him for a serious supporter of the just demands of Europe, he takes this means of telling them that, if they reject those demands, they will be backed by England.' Yet the two sets of critics who thus substantially con- curred in their description of Lord Beaconsfield's admir- able or detestable designs at Constantinople agreed also, curiously enough, in believing that he had made the worst possible choice of an instrument. The friends of the Turk shook solemn heads over the selection of Lord Salisbury to represent her Majesty's Government at the Conference; Mr. Gladstone effusively welcomed it at the St. James's Hall meeting, whereat, of course, the heads shook the more. How the legend of Lord Salisbury's antagonism to the policy of the Prime Minister arose and gained ground it is somewhat difficult to say. Partly, no doubt, it was due to a belief, dating from the days of the Reform Bill, and revived absurdly enough, it is true by more recent incidents, that the two statesmen failed to ' see eye to eye ' on most subjects, and that, if Lord Beaconsfield's sym- A MUCH DEBATED APPOINTMENT 135 pathies were strongly Turkish, it might be fairly assumed that Lord Salisbury's would set in the opposite direction. But in addition to this, it was with much seriousness re- marked that Lord Salisbury was a High Anglican, and that some High Anglicans were enthusiastic partisans of the Eastern Christian communities : wherefrom the conclusion that Lord Salisbury was himself an enthusiastic partisan of these interesting races was driven home with all the poignant force of a syllogism barbed with an ' undistributed middle.' His selection by the Prime Minister to thwart 'the policy of Lord Beaconsfield ' was not, to be sure, a step which exactly explained itself. Nevertheless, a plausible explanation of it was not beyond the resources of the quid- nunc's ingenuity. It was the result of a 'compromise,' abso- lutely necessary (' I assure you ') to prevent a break-up of the Cabinet. Lord Salisbury, indeed, threatened (' I have it on the best authority ') to resign if he were not sent to Con- stantinople, and Lord Beaconsfield had to give way. The ultimate arrangement of the matter was that Lord Derby (a prudent and humane statesman if left to himself, but ' hypno- tised ' by the Prime Minister, according to the Radicals of that day, into a mere tool of 'Semitic 'policy) should furnish Lord Salisbury with instructions framed as far as possible in the interests of the Turkish Government, and that Lord Salisbury should then go to Constantinople, and proceed to interpret and act upon these instructions as far as possible in the interests of the rebellious Christian subjects of the Porte. Of course, observed the 'Daily News' cheerfully, ' Lord Salisbury is in theory subordinate to the Cabinet and to the Foreign Minister, from whom he receives his instruc- tions ; but in such cases as these the stronger will has a 136 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY faculty of dictating the orders which it is to obey.' The anti-Russian party in this country were naturally indignant, both at the cool assumption that her Majesty's representative would thus play his colleagues false, and at the anticipatory approval of his assumed perfidy ; but there is reason to think that a certain number of people among us rather admired the supposed arrangement as an illustration of the 'national genius for compromise.' The suspicions of the one party and the self-congratula- tions of the other were confirmed by the conduct of the British delegate. Before going to Constantinople, Lord Salisbury paid visits to Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome. Why ? Was not the Eastern question more our own con- cern than that of any other European State? Was not England ' the greatest Mahommedan Power,' and could it be doubted that Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby (under hypnotic influence) had instructed the Secretary of State for India to inform the Conference that England intended to 'behave as such?' Why, then, it was indignantly asked by the more ardent advocates of the theory that British interests were bound up with the ' integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire ' why, then, should an English Minister go, ' cap in hand,' to Prince Bismarck or Count Andrassy, or any other Continental minister, to learn his views, instead of walking straight into the Conference Chamber and flinging down a British ultimatum on the council table? What could it mean, asked politicians of this school (and their Radical adversaries chuckled as they echoed, ' What, indeed?'), except that Lord Salisbury was arranging with the enemies of the Turk for compelling him to surrender ? On the arrival of the British Plenipotentiary at Constan- tinople, matters became worse and worse. For not only THE TWO DELEGATES 137 did he make the acquaintance of the Russian representative, General Ignatieff, but his relations with that ' sweet enemy ' became so unpatriotically friendly that the two delegates were actually seen walking arm-in-arm with each other in the streets of Pera ! It was impossible to conceal so compromising an incident from the watchful eye of ' our own correspondent' at Constantinople. He reported it to his employers at home ; it was duly and gravely chroni- cled in the daily press ; and hands of holy horror were held up at it by solemn instructors of the public, whose por- tentous consciousness of ' statesmanlike ' responsibility had deadened their native sense of the ridiculous. They might at least have remembered their Dickens, and, recalling the familiarities exchanged between the two eminent advo- cates portrayed by the great humourist, have refrained from such a display of the somewhat fatuous simplicity of Mr. Pickwick. In justice, however, to these able and at that time influential writers, it is only fair to admit that the series of events which followed supplied them with some excuse for misconception. The text of Lord Salisbury's instructions was of course unpublished, and therefore unknown to the English public until after the dissolution of the Conference ; but its general tenor was no secret, and it soon became apparent to jealous observers of the course of the nego- tiations at Constantinople that the ' English proposals,' as they were called, were undergoing modification, and as- suming a more exacting shape as against Turkey before being submitted to the Porte at all. Thus, although it had been understood that the English Government had been especially urgent in insisting against, as was believed, the wish of Russia that representatives of the Porte should 138 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY assist at the Conference, a series of preliminary sittings were held from which Turkey was excluded. Not only so, complained a hostile newspaper critic, but it was these meetings which constituted the Con- ference in the only true sense of the word ; and ' the re- presentatives of the Porte were subsequently admitted not so much to confer with the European delegates as to be informed of their decision.' ' Moreover,' proceeds the same indignant writer, the 'proceedings at the "Preliminary Conference " amounted to a breach of faith, an infringement of the conditions upon which Turkey had consented to a Conference. Not only did the delegates of the Powers take upon themselves to discuss the " English proposals " in the absence of Turkish representatives, but they stepped beyond the limits there prescribed, and in effect discussed, formulated, and settled a different programme of their own. A comparison of the proposal of the European delegates with the programme so carefully drawn up by Lord Derby will show how wide was the departure from the terms upon which the Conference was supposed to have met. The English programme proposed peace with Servia on the basis " in general terms " of the status quo : yet at the first sitting of the plenary Conference the Porte was called upon to grant an accession of territory to the conquered country. The programme expressly affirmed the "independence" of the Ottoman Empire ; but the Conference began by submitting proposals which would have handed over the fiscal and judicial system of Turkey to the control of foreigners. The programme, while suggesting a system of local self-government, made no mention of any foreign guarantees for these administrative reforms, or indeed of any guarantees whatever, other than those inherent in the PRELIMINARY MEETINGS 139 scheme of administration itself, but the Turkish plenipoten- tiaries found themselves confronted on their admission with the proposal to admit a corps of Belgian gendarmerie to Ottoman territory.' This account of matters is exact enough, albeit from a hostile hand ; and though the question ' How did these extraordinary changes come about ? ' is answered perversely enough by the writer with the suggestion that it was ' the result of a conversation between Lord Salisbury and General Ignatieff,' there is no denying that the change may well have seemed ' extraordinary ' enough at the time to English onlookers, especially to those who started with the preconceived notion that Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby (mysteriously subjugated by him) were interposing the shield of English diplomacy with the sword of English power in the background between Turkey and the aggres- sive designs of her hereditary enemy. It required the evidence of Blue Books if, indeed, even that was sufficient to convince these suspicious bystanders that the British delegate at the Conference of Constantinople was in com- plete accord throughout with his colleagues at home ; and that if in the preliminary sittings of the delegates he con- sented to enlarge the scope and increase the stringency of the original English demands upon the Porte, he did so in pursuance of a policy upon which the Cabinet were for the time being entirely at one. For at this juncture of events they were no doubt one and all, from Lord Beaconsfield downwards, convinced of two things : first, that the English people were not prepared, at any rate in the first instance, to take up arms in defence of ' the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire ' ; and secondly, that at the stage which matters had then 140 THE MARQUIS" OF SALISBURY reached a Russian attack upon Turkey was only to be averted, if at all, by coming to an agreement with Russia as to the terms of settlement to be proposed at Constantinople, and then bringing all possible pressure to bear upon the Porte to procure its compliance with them. And to the attainment of this end there is every reason to believe that Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Salisbury, Lord Derby, and, in fact, the entire Cabinet energetically and loyally co-operated. On this view of the policy and purposes of the British Government the course pursued by our representative at Constantinople, however unsatisfactory it may have appeared to a certain school of politicians in this country, becomes of course intelligible. It was plain that a thorough under- standing with Russia must precede any attempt to exert influence upon Turkey. The demands of the former Power required to be brought into conformity with the will of Europe, and to be sustained by the approval of the Euro- pean concert, before there could be any use in presenting them to the latter Power. Nor was the contemplated result arrived at by a mere process of concession to Russian pretensions. On the con- trary, there were waivers on both sides. The adverse critics above quoted were unaware at the time that the ' English proposals ' of settlement had not, and never had had, the field to themselves. There were Russian proposals, and those of a somewhat formidable kind, before the Powers also. At the end of the previous September, Count Schouvaloff had proposed to Lord Derby that if the Porte refused the conditions of peace with Servia which England was then putting forward, a simultaneous coercive move- ment on the part of all the Powers should be made at once. This movement, it was suggested, should consist, THE IRREDUCIBLE MINIMUM 141 firstly, of the occupation of Bosnia by an Austrian force ; secondly, of the occupation of Bulgaria by a Russian Army ; and thirdly, of the entrance into the Bosphorus of the united fleets of Europe. The Czar, however, was ready, it was added, to drop the first two suggestions, and to regard the entrance of the fleet into the Bosphorus as sufficient. One of Lord Salisbury's first steps on arriving at Con- stantinople was to inform General Ignatieff that he was instructed to oppose any scheme of military occupation ; to which the Russian representative at once replied that his Government had no intention of insisting on their proposal. By this concession he no doubt did something to predispose his British colleague in favour of the project which he submitted in substitution for that which had been thus abandoned. Anyhow, the Preliminary Conference was not long in arriving at the conclusion that some sort of occupation of Turkish territory by the troops of some European Power or other would become necessary, and Lord Salisbury communicated in this sense with the Government at home. They assented to the proposal ; and it was finally agreed among the plenipotentiaries in private council that the 'irreducible minimum' of demands to be made by the Powers upon Turkey should include the exaction of her consent to the establishment of an International Commission to reorganise Bulgaria, with the support, as aforesaid, of six thousand troops to be supplied by Belgium or some other minor State. Thus it will be seen that the partisan gossip of the day was entirely misleading and misled, and that, at any rate at this stage of the Eastern difficulty, the Beaconsfield Ad- ministration were in complete accord in holding that war was only to be averted by liberal, even perilously liberal, 142 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY concessions on the part of Turkey to her hereditary enemy and secular despoiler ; that it was better for Europe that these perils should be risked by the Porte than that a great European war should be allowed to break out ; and that England therefore should co-operate ex animo with the other great Powers in endeavouring to press this view of the matter on the Sultan and his advisers. The weak point in the policy, as the British plenipotentiary no doubt perceived as clearly as anyone, was that there was nothing in it to recommend it to the Porte in preference to facing that alternative of war which we and other European Powers happened to regard from our own points of view as so manifestly ineligible. Nor was it long before this weak point betrayed itself. With the trifling exception of the assent of Turkey thereto, the arrangement was complete ; but upon the Preliminary Conference converting itself into a Plenary Conference by the addition of the representatives of the Porte, it was discovered that this assent was not to be had on any terms. It was in vain that, with a bluntness which alarmed and scandalised English critics of like mind with those above quoted, Lord Salisbury urged upon the Sultan's chief minister, Midhat Pasha, the dire necessities of his master's situation. It was in vain that he pointed out to him how serious for the Sultan was the danger of rejecting the demands of Europe, and, on the other hand, how much exaggerated was the injury or risk of injury which he would incur by compliance. ' There is no ground in history,' he wrote in a despatch explaining and defending the proposals of the Powers and it must be ad- mitted in the light of subsequent events that his words contained a larger measure of truth than some of us at that day were prepared to recognise ' there is no ground in A FINAL WARNING 143 history for the belief that the grant of practical self- government to the Bulgarian province would develop any such desire as that of incorporation in the Russian Empire in the population.' On the other hand, the risks of a non possumus were, in a speech afterwards quoted verbatim and with undissembled horror in the leading editorial columns of an anti-Russian journal, thus frankly exposed before the Conference by the representative of her Britannic Majesty. Admitting that no ' right ' of interference between the Sultan and his subjects could be founded on the treaty of 1856, Lord Salisbury proceeded as follows : But if this Conference separates because the Sultan and those about his Imperial Majesty do not choose to listen to the counsels of the six guaranteeing Powers, the position of Turkey in the face of Europe will have suffered a complete change, and will be very perilous. It will be henceforth understood in all countries that the Porte, after having for twenty years enjoyed the security which was secured to it by the agreement of the Christian Powers, refuses to lend its ear to their demands against the sufferings which the Christian subjects of his Im- perial Majesty are undergoing. The conscience of Europe will be moved by the conviction that she exercises no further in- fluence in the councils of the Sublime Porte, and that she can no longer acquit herself of the responsibility imposed upon her by the efforts that she has made to protect Turkey. It is necessary for the Porte now to reflect on the grave consequences which may result from such a revulsion of feeling in the public opinion of Europe. They are hastening to a period but little distant dangers which will threaten the existence of Turkey if she leaves herself entirely isolated. I am charged to declare formally that Great Britain is resolved to give her sanction neither to bad administration nor to oppression, and if the Porte, through obstinacy or inertness, resists the efforts which are being made at present with the object of placing the Ottoman Empire upon a more secure basis, the responsibility for the consequences which will follow will rest solely on the Sultan and his advisers. 144 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY This solemn appeal was, however, fruitless. The Pashas, according to their wont, were prodigal of promises, but chary of guarantees. They steadily refused to assent to the military and other measures demanded of them to insure the effective reorganisation of the disturbed provinces, and nothing remained for the representatives of the Powers but to break up the Conference. It met for the last time on January 20, 1877, and two days later Lord Salisbury left Constantinople for England. It was assuredly no fault of his that his mission had failed. Its failure was in no degree owing, as some of his English censors asserted, to his display of any undue partiality for the Greek Christians, or to any excessive complaisance exhibited by him towards the demands of General Ignatieff. Neither was it due, as was alleged by other English censors, or by the same censors at other times, to any division of counsels among his colleagues at home. On the contrary, they were united in a policy of which he was a loyal and convinced exponent. They were at one in their belief that war could only be averted by large Turkish concessions, and in the desire to bring the utmost moral pressure to bear upon the Porte to procure its assent to them. They may well have differed among them- selves as to the probability of procuring that assent, but if so, it is only reasonable to presume that Lord Salisbury was not an adherent to the more sanguine view. True as i may have been, that prudence dictated the compliance of Turkey with the demands made upon her, it is no less true that pride as strongly dissuaded from them, if only that they involved serious and conspicuous derogations of Ottoman sovereignty. They were such concessions, in short, as a military Power does not usually make to the inhabitants of TURKISH CALCULATIONS 145 territories which it has won and rules by the sword, except after defeat in the field ; and even while the British delegate was endeavouring to convince the Pashas of the advantages of granting ' practical self-government to the Bulgarian pro- vinces,' the Secretary of State for India must now and then have asked himself what amount of rhetorical per- suasion, and what force of appeal to policy and prudence, would be necessary on the part of Russia and the European Powers to obtain the assent of England to the establishment of administrative autonomy in the Punjab. ' Surrender a part of your Empire, or you will lose it all,' is the only argument, other than defeat in the field, which could possibly prevail in such a case, either at Constantinople or Calcutta ; and then only if the facts and probabilities of the situation irresistibly drove it home. Some of us thought that facts and probabilities would drive the argument home to the minds of the Turks in the winter of 1876, but they failed, and, as the event proved, they rightly failed to do so. Doubtless there were Englishmen who had persuaded themselves that if Turkey refused to ' listen to reason,' she could and would be left by England abso- lutely at the mercy of her enemy ; and that that enemy could and would be allowed to have his will of her, even to the application of Mr. Gladstone's ' bag and baggage policy ' over the whole of her European dominions, and to the seizure of Constantinople by Russia. But the Sultan's shrewd advisers knew England better, as it turned out, than these natives of her soil. They knew that, so far as territorial gain and loss were concerned and lives and money go for very little with Mahommedans who see Paradise ahead of them, and have left bankruptcy behind they had everything to gain by fighting Russia for their Balkan provinces, L 146 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY and nothing to lose. ' The non-intervention resolves of the English Cabinet were perfectly well known to us,' wrote Midhat Pasha a year afterwards in an English review, ' but we knew still better that the general interests of Europe and the particular interests of England were bound up in our dispute with Russia ; that in spite of all the declarations of the English Cabinet, it appeared to us to be absolutely impossible for her to avoid interfering sooner or later in this Eastern dispute.' On February 13, 1878, just a year and three weeks after the Turkish states- man, relying upon this ultimate necessity of British inter- ference, politely bowed the baffled European delegates out of the council chamber, a British fleet under Admiral Hornby steamed through the Dardanelles, in verification of his forecast. Parliament met on February 8, and Ministers took an early opportunity of dispelling the popular delusion as to their divided counsels. Lord Salisbury spoke at some length in explanation of the course taken at the Conference. He described his policy and that of his colleagues as simply that of ' trying by all peaceable means in our power to in- duce Turkey to open her eyes to the danger which surrounds her, to awake from her infatuation and give to the poor popu- lations which have suffered so much some measure of liberty and safety for life and honour.' And Lord Beaconsfield bore testimony to the complete accord which subsisted in the Cabinet with respect to this policy and the efforts made to give effect to it. Lord Salisbury, he said, had been 'supposed not to have the confidence of his colleagues because he seems to have been attacked in some newspapers generally supporting the Administration, and because his colleagues have not written leading articles in his defence. Every public man DEFENDED BY LORD EEACONSFIELD 147 is liable to such attacks. No one has been more attacked in the public newspapers than myself. I dare say I have had as many leading articles, mainly of a vituperative nature, written against me as any one ever had ; and yet I declare upon my honour that I do not know a single colleague who ever wrote a single line in my defence.' The characteristic irony of this reply to political gossip in no degree detracted from its effect, or obscured the soundness of its underlying argument ; and talk about ' the split in the Cabinet ' died down for some time to come. Adverting later on in this speech to the abortive issue of Lord Salisbury's mission, the Prime Minister used still more significant language : * Allow me,' he said, ' to say, when we are told that the Conference was a failure, that certainly there was no failure of my noble friend in the principal object of his mission to Constantinople. When he went there, what was the situation ? Then the first sine quct non was that Bulgaria should be occupied by a Russian army. We had a great many other demands of a similar kind. Who suc- ceeded in obtaining the withdrawal of those unreasonable proposals ? Why, my noble friend. My noble friend fell only into the error which I should have fallen into myself, and I believe every member of this House would have done the same. He gave too much credit to the Turks for common sense, and he could not believe that when he made so admirable an arrangement in their favour, they would have lost so happy an opportunity.' A last effort was made by the Powers, at the ostensible instance of Russia, to maintain peace. General Ignatieff was despatched on a special mission to the various Euro- pean Courts, concluding with that of St. James's ; and in the month of March a Protocol, setting forth the terms on L 2 148 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY which the reciprocal disarmament of Russia and Turkey might take place, was signed by the representatives of the six great Powers in London. Early in April it was pre- sented to the Porte and rejected. The outbreak of hostilities was now seen to be only a matter of days. 149 CHAPTER X Declaration of war The 'Charter of English Policy 'Anxiety in England The ' large maps 'Progress of the war and fall of Plevna Differences in the Cabinet Lord Carnarvon on the Cri- mean war His resignation Fleet despatched to the Bosphorus The Reserves called out Resignation of Lord Derby Explana- tions in the House of Lords. ON April 24, 1877, Russia declared war against the Ottoman Empire, and her forces crossed the Turkish frontiers, European and Asiatic, on the same day. About a fortnight later, Lord Derby addressed a despatch, afterwards described by the Prime Minister as the ' Charter of our policy,' to Prince Gortschakoff, pledging the British Government to neutrality in the war ' so long as Turkish interests alone were involved.' Other interests, however, ' which they are equally bound and determined to defend, might be imperilled if the war were prolonged,' and these Lord Derby proceeded, on the part of the Government, to indicate. Foremost among these interests was the security of our route to India by way of the Suez Canal. ' An attempt,' wrote the Foreign Secretary, ' to blockade or otherwise to interfere with the Canal or its approaches, would be regarded by her Majesty's Government as a menace to India, and as a grave injury to the commerce of the world. On both these grounds any such step which they hope and fully 150 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY believe there is no intention on the part of either belligerent to take would be inconsistent with the maintenance by them of passive neutrality.' Russia was next warned that ' an attack on Egypt, or the occupation of that country, even temporarily for purposes of war, could scarcely be regarded with unconcern by the neutral Powers, certainly not by England.' Of Constantinople it was said : ' Her Majesty's Government are not prepared to witness with in- difference the passing into other hands than those of its present possessors of a capital possessing so peculiar and so commanding a position.' The existing arrangements regu- lating the navigation of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles were described as ' wise and salutary,' and it was intimated that there would be ' serious objections to their alteration in any material sense.' Reference was made to the possibility of protection being needed for our interests in the Persian Gulf, and after reminding the Russian Chancellor of the dis- claimer of interested motives which the Emperor had uttered in a recent speech at Livadia, the despatch concluded as follows : ' Her Majesty's Government cannot better show their confidence in these declarations of his Imperial Majesty than by requesting Your Excellency to be so good as to convey to the Emperor and the Russian Government the frank explanation of British policy which I have had the honour of thus offering to you.' The tenor and tone of this despatch, to the stipulations of which Prince Gortschakoff formally signified the assent of Russia, were generally approved in England. Both on its positive and its negative side, alike in its announcement and in its limitations of British neutrality, it faithfully reflected the then temper of the great majority of the British public. The ferment created by the Bulgarian agitation had FEELING IN ENGLAND 151 now almost entirely subsided, and it was only a very small and fanatical section of Englishmen who still continued urging their country to take part with Russia in ' coercing the Turk.' On the other hand the minority which was prepared to counsel the immediate armed intervention of England as an ally of Turkey in the struggle was certainly not much larger. Nevertheless, as the year advanced and the events of the war unfolded themselves, the position of the Government became more and more difficult. The heroic defence of Plevna by the Turkish forces under Osman Pasha appealed powerfully to English sympathies, while, on the other hand, the successes of Russia in Asiatic Turkey excited a certain amount of English alarm. It soon became clear that neither the forces nor the fortresses of the Otto- man Porte in that region were strong enough to offer any very prolonged resistance to the Russian arms ; and Russia once established at Erzeroum, would command that very valley of the Euphrates along which we had but a few years before been seriously considering the advisability of con- structing a railway to the Persian Gulf as a second route to our Indian possessions. Thus throughout the summer and autumn of 1878 the feeling in favour of Turkey continued to grow. The war, in- deed, had not lasted two months before Ministers found their ears importunately assailed with the cry of ' British interests in danger.' A considerable share in the task of resistance to this popular movement devolved, not unnaturally, upon the official guardian of that particular British interest which was alleged to be principally imperilled. As Secretary for India, Lord Salisbury no doubt felt himself bound to allay the apprehensions of danger to our Eastern dependency, and his, as we all know, is one of those natures to which it would 152 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY be instinctive to dispel a groundless alarm by employing ridicule as the instrument of reassurance. Though often an effective, it is not always a judicious one ; nor was it so in this instance. In reply to a speech from Lord De Mauley as to Russia's advance in Central Asia, Lord Salisbury remarked that, in discussions of this kind, a great deal of apprehension arises from ' the popular use of maps on too small a scale. As with such maps you are able to put a thumb on India and a finger on Russia, some persons at once think that the political situation is alarming, and that India must be looked to. If the noble lord would only use a larger map say one on the scale of the Ordnance map of England he would find that the distance between Russia and British India is not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule. There are between them deserts and mountainous chains measured by thousands of miles, and these are serious obstacles to any advance of Russia, however well-planned such an advance might be.' This ironical reference to the scale of the Ordnance survey was taken seriously the next morning by the most serious of all English newspapers, past, present, and to come, and Lord De Mauley was solemnly advised by the ' Times ' to study Central Asian geography by the aid of an imaginary Brobdingnagian map, on which the distance between Askabad and Peshawur would be something like seventy feet. At a dinner of the Merchant Taylors' Company the same evening, Lord Salisbury delivered a still keener sati- rical stroke at the alarmist. ' I have,' he said, ' a colonial friend who is very much exercised in his mind, and in a very anxious state in connection with the Cape of Good Hope. He pointed out to me that Russia was in Armenia, that Armenia is the key to Syria, that Syria is the key to THE 'LARGE MAPS' 153 Egypt, and that any one advancing into Egypt has the key to Africa. By this list of keys long drawn out, he shows that the present victories of Russia seriously menace South Africa. I have done my best to console him, but I feel that his anxious feelings are only characteristic of the appre- hensions which I hear around me.' This pleasantry, which did but slightly exaggerate the forebodings of an article recently published in a London newspaper the 'list of keys' closing in this case with Egypt and the overland route to India was no doubt a fairer hit than the other. But its discretion was no less doubtful. Both sallies only served to irritate many Englishmen, Anglo- Indian, and other, who were as familiar with all the geo- graphical distances in question as the Indian Secretary him- self, and who naturally resented being held up to the public as ignorant simpletons merely because they differed in opinion from him as to the amount of military and other difficulty interposed by these distances to a Russian advance. Such inconsiderate jests, moreover, have the habit of coming, like the curses of the proverb, ' home to roost.' The day was not far distant when Lord Salisbury and his col- leagues were to engage in a war the policy of which was plausibly assailable, and was, in fact, assailed, by the very arguments which he here supplied. In less than a year and a half from the utterance of these long-remembered words, an opponent of the Afghan War might have asked Lord Salisbury whether the distance between Askabad and Peshawur had diminished because half a dozen Russian officers had been entertained by Shere Ali at Cabul, and whether in any case even the distance from the Afghan capital itself to the Indian frontier would not look somewhat formidable on a map of the Ordnance scale, 154 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Meanwhile the summer of 1877 wore into autumn, and autumn was rapidly passing into winter, while the war still raged, as indecisive as bloody, in Eastern Europe. English sympathies, as has been said, were setting more and more strongly all the time in favour of the Turks, and, Cabinet Ministers being men, the Government may be pre- sumed to have been not insensible to those subtle influences with which the air was charged. But they held steadily by the policy which they had marked out for themselves ; and there are no grounds for supposing that at any time throughout the summer and autumn their views as to the specific steps which this policy dictated, or the language in which it should be represented to their countrymen in Parlia- mentary and outdoor oratory, or to foreign Powers in diplo- matic despatches, differed in any material degree. As late as the month of October, Lord Salisbury spoke at Bradford, and, reiterating the declaration that her Majesty's Government would pursue British interests and British interests alone, proceeded to justify, in words, which the whole body of his colleagues would doubtless have re- echoed, the attitude of strict neutrality which had up to that moment been maintained. Nor, indeed, up to that date, and even for nearly two months longer, was the military situation in the Balkan provinces such as could possibly have developed any latent potentialities of dissen- sion in the minds of Ministers. So long as Turkey con- tinued to hold Russia at bay in Bulgaria, as she was then doing, it was of course evident to all at any rate save that small minority of Englishmen absolutely unrepresented in the Cabinet, who were alarmed at the progress of the Russian arms in Armenia that British interests were not and could not be endangered, and that the invader would have to FALL OF PLEVNA 155 break down the resistance of the invaded in Europe before any danger of this sort could possibly arise. But on December 10 the scene changed. On that day Plevna fell. Osman Pasha and his thirty thousand stout soldiers became prisoners of war ; and the road to the Balkans lay open before Russia. Three weeks later, on New Year's Day, 1878, General Gourko, with the Russian Imperial Guard, crossed the Etropol Balkans a north-west- ward running spur of the mountain chain and pushed on to Sofia, which was captured virtually without a struggle. Early in the next week Skobeleff and his force made their way across the main range, by the Troyan Pass, marched eastward and occupied Kezanlik, thus commanding the southern outlet of the Schipka, of which General Radetzky held the northern entrance, and shutting up as in a trap the Turkish troops then in occupation of the pass. This force, after a severe engagement, was captured by General Ra- detzky, and with this the resisting power of Turkey collapsed. The Russians marched to Adrianople and occupied it without a fight. Suleiman Pasha, with the remnant of the Ottoman army, fell back to Kavala on the coast of the yEgean, whence he embarked to Constantinople. The whole Balkan Peninsula lay at the feet of Russia. There was nothing to stop her advance to the peninsula of Gallipoli, where she could close the Dardanelles against the fleets of all Europe, while the remainder of her army pursued their eastward march to Constantinople. The internal history of the Beaconsfield Administration during the three eventful and exciting months which elapsed between the fall of Plevna and the definitive resignation of Lord Derby, awaits the Greville of the future. Or it may exist in the pages of some Ministerial diarist, not to be 156 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY given to the world till the last of the actors in that domestic drama of cross purposes and conflicting counsels shall have passed away. Meanwhile we may at least congratulate ourselves that the ' Bous Megas ' of the Privy Councillor's obligation to secrecy did not 'tread so heavily' on the tongues of some of ' them that know ' as to leave us quite without material for the construction of an unofficial narra- tive of the events. On the contrary, thanks to Parliament- ary statements of an unusual frankness, and to one or two animated debates in the House of Lords in which polemics got the better of discretion, one is able to piece together the public incidents of those days into a connected story of considerable verisimilitude. The fall of Plevna was undoubtedly, as well it might be, a shock to Ministers. It was a warning to all of them that there was probably, and perhaps even rapidly, approach- ing, that critical time for every man who has both to counsel and to act, when abstract doctrines of policy have to be applied to concrete facts, and when each has to decide for himself what or whether any action is demanded of him as the result cf such application. For months past the members of the Cabinet had been repeating to each other and to the public all no doubt with complete and equal good faith that it was their duty to maintain a passive attitude until British interests were menaced. 'British interests' they had perhaps sufficiently defined for their own as well as for Russia's purposes, in the so-called ' Charter of our policy.' But the moment was approaching when each member of the Cabinet had to put to himself the two momentous questions : What acts or words on the part of Russia now that Turkey is virtually at her mercy will constitute a menace to British interests ? And assuming DIVISIONS IN THE CABINET 157 such menace to arise, what military or naval measures must we adopt to meet it ? That the Cabinet split upon the latter of these questions is matter of history. To some people it seemed to be also a matter of reproach to Ministers that they were thus unable to agree. Nevertheless to those who look at the question a little more closely, this division of counsels will, I think, be seen to discredit our political system rather than our politicians. Surely, if it has become proverbial that a council of war never fights or in other words, that among, say, half a dozen generals, there is sure to be a majority unduly opposed to risks it is hardly surprising that sixteen civilians should not have possessed, without exception, the requisite amount of nerve. The wonder would have been if they had been all of one mind ; and perhaps the wonder will be, if any resolutions which may possibly involve the country in war are taken unanimously by any unwieldy Cabinet of the future. It seems tolerably clear that differences began to mani- fest themselves in the Cabinet between the fall of Plevna if no earlier and the end of the year. On December 13, two days after the news of Osman Pasha's surrender reached England, a despatch was addressed by Lord Derby to the Government of St. Petersburg, expressing the hope that if the Russians advanced south of the Balkans, no attempt would be made to occupy Constantinople or the Dardanelles, and adding that if any such attempt were made, 'the Queen's Government must hold themselves free to take whatever course might appear to them necessary for the protection of British interests.' A Cabinet council was held on the following day, Friday, December 14, when the new situation, it may be presumed, was anxiously I $8 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY discussed. The Cabinet met again on Monday the 1 7th, and yet again on the following day. After this council it was announced that Parliament would meet on the day in January to which it then stood formally prorogued. This resolution, as Lord Derby some months after- wards told the House of Lords, in one of those informing bursts of ex-Ministerial candour to which reference has been already made, was a compromise on a proposition ' that Parliament should meet even earlier still.' It may fairly be inferred from all this that differences of opinion had already begun to manifest themselves in the Cabinet, and that these were of a sufficiently acute kind to require the holding of three Cabinet meetings before they could even be tem- porarily composed. To contend in the middle of December that Parliament ought to 'meet much earlier than' the middle of January practically amounts to the contention that it should be summoned before Christmas ; and we may take it, therefore, that the political situation and prospect disclosed by the fall of Plevna so differently affected different members of the Cabinet that whereas one party held that Parliament should be summoned at once or in other words, that warlike preparations requiring Parliamen- tary assent should be commenced immediately another party saw no present reason for antedating the meeting of Parliament at all. Practically, however, the compromise amounted to a victory for the party of inaction. Events, however, were to prove too strong for them, although Prince Gortschakoff, to his credit as a diplomatist be it said, did all that fair words could do to strengthen their hands. On December 16 he replied to Lord Derby's communication, recalling the assurance given in his despatch of seven months before, and repeated in a conversation held OFFER OF MEDIATION 159 by the Czar with Colonel Wellesley in July, that Constanti- nople should only be occupied if it became an absolute military necessity to do so. ' If the obstinacy or illusions of the Porte,' said Prince Gortschakoff, 'shall oblige his Majesty to pursue his military operations in order to dictate a peace responding to the openly proclaimed object of the war, his Imperial Majesty has always reserved to himself, and still continues to claim in regard to this point, the full right of action which is the claim of every belligerent.' The despatch concluded by asking that the British interests which this proceeding might touch should be still further defined, so that some means might be found to reconcile these interests with those of Russia. This despatch, the substance of which was known by telegraph a fortnight before its full text arrived, no doubt strengthened the peace party in the Cabinet ; though it was obvious, of course, for their opponents to reply that ' military necessity ' is an extremely elastic term, and that Russia had only to propose impossible conditions of armis- tice to Turkey in order to provide herself with the required pretext for pushing on to Constantinople. Meanwhile an offer of English good offices in mediation between the belligerents had been met by Russia with the reply that the submission of Turkey must be signified by her applica- tion for an armistice to the Russian commander in the field. This answer created, not quite justly perhaps, a certain amount of irritation in England, and undoubtedly added, with more show of reason, to the apprehension that Russian diplomacy was preparing to have its hand pre- tendedly forced by Russian militarism. On January 2, the desire to combat this apprehension became too strong for the official discretion of one of the 160 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY Ministers. Replying on that day to a deputation of South African merchants, Lord Carnarvon expressed his complete dissent from the idea that there was ' any affront or insult conveyed to England ' by the Russian rejection of her peace overtures. This was harmless and even useful enough ; but the Colonial Secretary went on to express the hope that we should not in this country ' lash ourselves up into a nervous apprehension for so-called British honour and British interests.' And in a later, and yet more signi- ficant passage of the speech he spoke as follows : ' Most of us in this room are old enough to remember the outbreak of the Crimean war. We can remember how Russia on the one hand through self-deception, and this country on the other hand in a great measure through an extreme excite- ment, drifted to use an expression which became historical into a war. I apprehend that there are few people now who look back upon that war with satisfaction, and I am confident that there is nobody in this, country insane enough to desire a repetition of it.' On the day after the delivery of this speech the Cabinet met, and Lord Beaconsfield, to quote his colleague's sub- sequent account of the matter in the House of Lords, ' thought himself at liberty to condemn very severely the language that I had used. My Lords, I need not re -state the terms of that controversy on either side ; I took time to consider the course which it was my duty to take, and then, in a memorandum which I had drawn up, but with which I think it unnecessary to trouble the House, I recapitulated what had passed, and having vindicated the position I had taken, I reaffirmed, in the hearing of my colleagues, and without any contradiction, the propositions I had then laid down. The noble Earl the Prime Minister LORD CARNARVON AND HIS CHIEF l6l was good enough to ask me for a copy of it, and so the matter ended ; but no public or private disavowal was uttered or hinted at with regard to what I then said. I have therefore felt myself justified, and I still feel myself justified, in believing that where no such disapproval was uttered, I had not misrepresented the opinion of her Majesty's Government at that time.' No incident could better illustrate the engaging sim- plicity of Lord Carnarvon's character, and his well-known tendency to suppose that conscious rectitude of motive is a substitute for discretion. One can quite believe that the literary style of his memorandum was admirable, and its matter theoretically convincing. The ' propositions ' which he had ' laid down ' in his reply to the South African deputation were no doubt in perfect accord with the 'charter' of English policy, as framed at the outbreak of the war. No doubt, too, Lord Carnarvon thoroughly felt that so soon as any ' British interest ' therein declared inviolable should appear to him to be in any way menaced, he would be as ready as any of his colleagues to take active measures for its protection. And in the consciousness of this, he did not hesitate to describe a war waged five-and- twenty years before also for the protection of British interests, albeit in his opinion erroneously conceived as a war of which nobody would be ' insane enough ' to desire the repetition. There spoke the statesman who, because he was conscious of his own determination to uphold the integrity of the Empire, saw no objection to discussing Home Rule a few years afterwards as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland with an Irish Nationalist leader who was known to be aiming at the destruction of the unity of the realm. Lord Carnarvon's complacent inference from the silence M 1 62 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY of the Premier after being furnished with a copy of the memorandum was equally characteristic of the man. It is, of course, evident that Lord Beaconsfield on this, as on many another occasion in his life, observed the excellent maxim that the 'least said the soonest mended.' If a ' split in the Cabinet ' was destined to come, there could be no use in replying to Lord Carnarvon's protest ; if it was to be averted, a judicious Premier's best way of averting it would be to let his rebuke produce whatever effect it might be capable of producing, and to refrain from intensifying the natural irritation which it had created by engaging in any personal controversy with his colleague. Time, indeed, was soon to show that Lord Beaconsfield was prepared to make greater sacrifices than this to keep his Cabinet together at such a crisis as was approaching. On January 1 2, a telegram was sent by the Government to the British ambassador at St. Petersburg, requesting him to obtain a specific assurance, rendered urgently necessary in view of the positions which the invading army then held, that no Russian force should be sent to the peninsula of Gallipoli. This message was conveyed to Prince Gortscha- koff by Lord Augustus Loftus on the following day, and two days later, on the i5th, the Russian Chancellor replied that his Government had no intention of ordering an occupation of Gallipoli unless the Turkish regular troops should concen- trate there, and that he hoped that the Queen's Govern- ment did not contemplate any such step on their own part, as it would be a departure from neutrality, and would en- courage the Turks to resist. But the four days which elapsed between the despatch of this reply and the meeting of Parliament were anxious days for the Cabinet. On the i4th, while the despatch MINISTERIAL RESIGNATIONS 163 was still on its way, a Council was held in the absence of Lord Derby, who was confined to his house by indis- position. Here, having before them a telegram from Mr. Layard transmitting a report that the Russians were march- ing on Gallipoli, Ministers took the momentous resolution to despatch the fleet to the Dardanelles, and on the following day Lord Carnarvon tendered his resignation to his chief. The same day, however, Prince Gortschakoff's reply arrived, and Lord Beaconsfield, anxious to avoid or defer as long as possible a rupture with his colleague, informed Lord Carnarvon that the resolution of the i4th was rescinded, and that the proposed sailing orders to the fleet would not be given. Parliament met on the 1 7th with the Colonial Secretary's resignation still in the hands of the Prime Minister, who returned it to him with the statement that ' there was no important difference ' between them. Their agreement, however, was but of brief duration. On January 23, the Cabinet again met, .and reports having now reached Ministers that the Russians were marching to Adrianople, that crowds of refugees were pouring into the Turkish capital, and that the Sultan was about to fly to Broussa, while in the meantime the all-important information as to the terms of peace proposed by Russia to Turkey was being strictly, and as was suspected, studiously, withheld, it was resolved both to despatch the fleet definitively to Constanti- nople and to ask Parliament for a vote of credit of six millions. The order to sail was sent off the same evening. On the following day both Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby tendered their resignations, but on the evening of that day, informal and private information having been received of the conclusion of an armistice, together M2 164 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY apparently with a general though imperfect account of its terms, a telegram was despatched to Admiral Hornby directing him not to pass the Dardanelles, but to retire and anchor in Besika Bay. This countermanding order reached the fleet just in time to arrest it when on the point of entering the Straits. Lord Derby thereupon recalled his resignation, while Lord Carnarvon adhered to his, and definitely retired from the Cabinet. The Foreign Minister, however, was destined soon to follow the Colonial Secretary into retirement. It is true that he managed to overcome his objection to the despatch of the British fleet to the Bosphorus, the order for which was given ' positively for the last time ' on February 8, and executed on the i3th under protest from the Porte. But it is just possible that Lord Derby's ultimate assent to the step may have been facilitated by observation of the movements of Russia, in the reports of which, however occasionally exag- gerated or premature as was the case with the rumour which brought the historic but far from creditable debate on the Vote of Credit to an abrupt close there was enough to convince all but the blindest and most reckless partisanship that this naval demonstration was imperatively called for. To-day, at any rate, no one can doubt, upon an impartial review of the whole crisis, that whether with or without the connivance of St. Petersburg, the Russian commanders were, to use a familiar expression, persistently ' trying it on,' Central-Asian fashion, with the British Government throughout the month of January and the early days of February, and that any further irresolute fidgeting with the fleet would inevitably have brought the Russians to Constantinople. But this military danger provided against, the political prospect grew steadily darker. The longer the original THE RESERVES CALLED OUT 16$ terms of armistice were looked at, the less they were liked in England, and the protracted delay in the Russo-Turkish peace negotiations, and the profound secrecy in which their result was for some time shrouded, served to increase both popular and Ministerial uneasiness. The Treaty of San Stefano was signed on March 3, but it was not till the 22nd that its full text was made public. A despatch received from St. Petersburg four days later practically brought the international negotiations for a Congress, which had been going on ever since the armistice, to a summary close. In this despatch, the Russian Chancellor, who had been hitherto temporising with the other European Cabinets, threw off the mask, and boldly announced that though the Czar's Government was considerate enough to 'leave to other Powers the liberty of raising such questions at the Congress as they may think fit, it reserved to itself the liberty of accepting or not accepting the discussion of these questions.' In the view of every member of the Cabinet but Lord Derby, there was but one possible answer to this arrogant defiance. At the council held on the 27th, the Government resolved to close the negotiations for a Congress and to call out the Reserves. On the following morning Lord Derby also ' positively for the last time ' on this occa- sion resigned, and on the following evening in the House of Lords explained the step in a brief statement in which he informed his hearers that measures had been resolved upon by the Cabinet which he could not consider 'as being prudent in the interests of European peace, or as being necessary for the safety of the country, or as being warranted by the state of matters abroad.' What these measures were remains a Cabinet secret which has never been regularly, or by her Majesty's per- 166 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY mission, divulged. Irregularly, and without that permission, the measures in question were alleged by Lord Derby in the House of Lords in the July following to have included, together with the calling out of the Reserves, a decision to ' seize upon and occupy the island of Cyprus, together with a point on the Syrian coast, a project which was to be carried out by a secret naval expedition sent out from England, with or without the consent of the Sultan.' Lord Salisbury, who followed him, denied that any such resolution had ever been taken by the Cabinet, though he admitted that ' all kinds of contingencies are spoken of and all possible poli- cies discussed at Cabinet meetings, and that it was quite possible that his noble friend may have heard some project discussed by this member of the Cabinet or that.' The two accounts are fairly reconcilable, and the alleged conflict of statements between the two Ministers has been much exaggerated. It is easy to understand that even a ' discus- sion' of some such foreign adventure,//^ an actual resolu- tion to call out the Reserves, would be quite enough to drive Lord Derby from office. 1 6 7 CHAPTER XI Lord Salisbury becomes Foreign Secretary The Salisbury Circular Its effect Agreement for a congress The ' unauthentic ' memo- randum Ministerial answers and their defence The Treaty of Berlin The Afghan war Mr. Gladstone's 'passionate pilgrimage' The elections of 1880. IT was a turning-point in the career of both statesmen, and for the younger of them it proved that decisive tidal hour in his affairs from which the flood was henceforth to bear him without check or hindrance to the highest political fortune. On April i, Lord Salisbury's appointment to the post of Foreign Secretary was announced in Parliament, and on the following morning, to the boundless gratification of the public and to the infinite chagrin of those who had chosen to assume that Lord Derby's views of policy were in the main identical with those of his successor, the memorable Salisbury Circular, a note addressed to the representatives of the various Powers in justification of the refusal of England to attend the Congress, appeared in the public prints. It was a document conspicuous alike for its dignified spirit, its high argumentative power, and the firm though courteous resolution of its language ; and its imme- diate effect was not only to rally all the patriotic elements in the country to the side of the Government, but to con- vince Russia as her subsequent diplomacy showed that 1 68 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY her arrogant attitude must be abandoned, and that some accommodation with England, which would render the meet- ing of a Congress possible, must at all costs be sought. The circular began by setting forth the impossibility, from the point of view either of policy or of international law, of admitting the pretensions of Russia to reserve to herself a right of refusing at discretion to accept a discussion, in a Congress of the Powers, of any provisions of the treaty of San Stefano which she chose to declare final. Even if the terms of the treaty were such as were likely to be, without excep- tion, approved, an inspection of the instrument would show, the Foreign Secretary said, that her Majesty's Government ' could not in an European Congress accept any partial or fragmentary examination of its provisions.' Every material stipulation which it contained involved a departure from the treaty of 1856, and it was impossible therefore for her Majesty's Government, without violating the spirit of the Protocol of the Conference of 1871 (which had affirmed it to be ' an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can liberate itself from the engagements of a treaty, nor modify the stipulations thereof, unless with the consent of the contracting Powers by means of an amicable arrangement ' ), to acquiesce in ' the withdrawal from the cognizance of the Powers of articles in the Treaty of San Stefano which are modifications of existing treaty engage- ments and inconsistent with them.' Passing thence to an examination of the provisions of the document in detail, the Circular proceeded as follows : The most important consequences to which the treaty practically leads are those which result from its action as a whole upon the nations of South-eastern Europe. By the THE SALISBURY CIRCULAR 169 articles erecting the new Bulgaria, a strong Slav state will be created under the auspices and control of Russia, possessing important harbours upon the shores of the Black Sea and the Archipelago, and conferring upon that Power a preponderating influence over both political and commercial- relations in those seas. It will be so constituted as to merge in the dominant Slav majority a considerable mass of population which is Greek in race and sympathy, and which views with alarm the prospect of absorption in a community alien to it not only in nationality but in political tendency and in religious allegiance. The provisions by which this new state is to be subjected to a ruler whom Russia will practically choose, its administration framed by a Russian commissary, and the first working of its institutions commenced under the control of a Russian army, sufficiently indicate the political system of which it is to form a part. Then, after pointing out that the stipulation, in itself highly commendable, for the concession of improved institu- tions for the populations of Thessaly and Epirus under the supervision of the Russian Government was one which could not be viewed with satisfaction either by the Govern- ment of Greece, or by the Powers ; that the territorial severance from Constantinople of the Greek, Albanian, and Slavonic provinces which were still to be left under the government of the Porte, would be ' a source of administra- tive embarrassment and political weakness to the Porte itself, and would expose the inhabitants to a serious risk of anarchy,' Lord Salisbury went on to show that by the other portions of the treaty analogous results are arrived at upon other frontiers of the Ottoman empire. Thus The compulsory alienation of Bessarabia from Roumania, the extension of Bulgaria to the shores of the Black Sea, which are principally inhabited by Mussulmans and Greeks, and the acquisition of the important harbour of Batoum, will make the rule of the Russian Government dominant over all the vicinity I794> I9S. 200 OSMAN PASHA, defence of Plevna, 151, 155-157 ' Oxford Essays' of 1858, 21-27 Oxford Union Society, 3-5 University, Lord Salisbury and, 108 Bill, 9-12 PAKINGTON, Sir John, 7, n, 15, 75-79 Palmer, Sir Roundell (Lord Selborne), 89 Palmerston, Lord, 14, 16, 31, 33, 34, 36; and the Law of Conspiracy, 19 ; and the Paper Duties, 37 ; death of, 47 Paper Duties Repeal Bill, 37-44, 101 Parliamentary Elections Bill, 17-19 Procedure Bill, 105-107 Reform, paper on, 21-27 Parnell, Mr., 187, 202 Peace Preservation Bill, 109 ; Act, 186, 187 Peel, General, 13, 15, 75-77. 79 Sir Robert, policy in 1846, 64, 65 Pelly, Sir Lewis, 182 Peshawur, 179 Phoenix Park tragedy, 195 Plevna, defence of, 151 : tall of, 155-13? Portugal and Southern Africa, 211 Protection, 6 ; Peel and, 64 Bill, 100 Public Health Act, 127 Worship Regulation Bill, 98, 120- Pu'lling's, Mr. F. S., ' Life and S ( eeches of the Mariiuis of Salisbury,' 4 SAL 1 QUARTERLY REVIEW,' the, 215 RADETZKY, General, 155 Rates, abolition of Church, 20, 37 Redistribution Bill, 56, 197, 198 Reform, essay, ' The Theories of Parlia- mentary,' 21-27 Mr. Disraeli's Bill of 1859, 27-3' ; LordJ. Russell's Bill, 32-35; Bill of 1866, 49-60; Mr. Disraeli's cf 1867, 63-92, 197 Reformatory system, improvement of, 16 Reserves called out, the, 165, 166 Richmond and Gordon, Duke of, 120, 173-174, 193 Ritual, Royal Commission on, 98 Roebuck, Mr., 12-15 Rosebery, Lord, 207 Roumania, 20, 21 Royal Titles Bill, 128 Russell, Lord John, and University Legislation, 9-12 ; 13 ; 14 ; Reform Bill, 31, 32-35, 71 ; the Brazilian dim- culty, 46-47 ; Prime Minister, 48, 49, 61 ; Life Peerages Bill, 107 Russia, war with, 9, 12-15 '< and Black Sea Treaty, 115 ; Eastern Question, 129-148 ; and war with Turkey, 149- 166 ; Treaty of Berlin, 168-176 ; and Afghanistan, 178-182 ; 208, 209 ; in Central Asia, 200, 201 SALISBURY, Marquis of, birth and an- cestry, 2-3 ; at Oxford, 3-5 ; enters Parliament, 5, 9 ; maiden speech, 10- I2 ; and Crimean War, 12-15 ! Chinese War, 16 ; and Parliamentary elections, 17-19 ; marriage of, 19 ; paper on ' The Theories of Parliamentary Re- form,' 21-27 : Reform Bill of 1859, 28- 31 ; Paper Duties Repeal Bill, 37-44 ; becomes Lord Cranborne, 47 ; and Reform Bill of 1866, 49-60 ; Secretary of State for India, 62, 116, 117; and Disraeli's Reform Bill 1867, 74-92 ; relations with Mr. Disraeli, 93 ; Irish Church, 94-97 ; succeeds to Mar- quisate, 97 ; oratory of, 97-98 ; and Suspensory Bill, 98-104;" and Irish Chuich Disestablishment Bill, 104- 106; and Life Peerages Bill, 105-108 : and Oxford University, 108 ; Irish Land Act,io9-i 12; and Ballot Bill, 112; and'amine in Bengal, 118; and Public Worship Regulation Bill, 120-126 ; ses- sions of 1874-76, 126-128 ; Eastern Question, 129-148 ; Russo-Turkish War, 149-166 ; appointed Foreign Secretary, 167 : the Salisbury Circu- lar, 168-173; 'h e Treaty of Berlin, 174-178 ; and Afghanistan, 178-183 ; and Disturbance bill, 186-189 ; Prime 224 THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY SAL Minister, 192-194 ; and fall of Khar- toum, 199 ; return to power, 200 ; and 1885 election, 201-202 ; resignation of, 203 ; Second Administration, 205- 206 ; Foreign Office Policy, 206-210 ; diplomatic record, 211-214; oratory and wit, 215-217 ; personal character- istics, 217-219. See also ' Speeches ' Schouvaloff, Count, 140, 173 Seats Bill, 54, 58 Servia, the principality of, 130, 138, 140 Shaftesbury, Lord, 98 ; and Suspensory Bill, 103 ; 120 Shere Ali, 178-182 Shirley, Professor, 3, 4 Skobeleff, General, 155 Small Tenements Act, 81 Soudan, affairs in the, 196- South Africa, 201 ; Transvaal, 190 Speeches: at Oxford Union, 3, 4 ; maiden on the Universities Bill, 10- 12 ; on the Crimea, 12-15 ; on the Budget proposals for 1860-61, 38 ; on the privileges of the House of Lords, 42-45, 216 ; on the Brazilian difficulty, 46-47 ; on the Franchise Bill, 52-54 ; at Stamford, 62-63 ' on Household Suffrage, 82-86 ; on the Irish Church, 97 ; on the Suspensory Bill, 98-1 Worship Regulation Bill, 121, 124- 126 ; ' man proposes," 127 ; at Guild- hall Banquet, on the Eastern Ques- tion, 133-134 ; at the Constantinople Conference, 143, 144 ; on 'maps,' 152, 153 ; at Bradford, 154 ; on Afghan matters, 182 ; on the Disturbance Bill, 186, 187 ; at Taunton, 188 ; at Birmingham on crime and outrage, 188, 189 ; at Mansion House, 1890, 208, 209 ; at Newport, 217 Stamford, Lord R. Cecil elected for, 5, 9, 16, 62 Stanley, Lord, 51, 58 Suez Canal, 149 Suleiman Pasha, 155 Suspensory Bill of Irish Church, 98-104 TAUNTON, Lord Salisbury at, 188 Ten Minutes Bill, the, 78 The Times and Reform, 48-49 ' Theories of Parliamentary Reform,' the, paper by Lord Salisbury, 21-27 Transvaal, 190 Treaty of Berlin, 129, 171-178 San Stefano, 165, 171, 172, 174 Trevelyan, Sir George, 204 Turkey, 20 and Eastern Question, 129-148 and war with Russia, 149-166 and the Treaty of Berlin, 168-178 UNITED STATES, and Behring's Sea, 211, 212 WALPOLE, Mr. Spencer, 7, 29, 58 Wellesley, Colonel, 159 Wolseley, Lord, 196 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON