VI. NAPLES
(1850-1851)
It would be amusing, if the misfortunes of mankind ever could be so, to hear the pretensions of the government here [Naples] to mildness and clemency, because it does not put men to death, and confines itself to leaving six or seven thousand state prisoners to perish in dungeons. I am ready to believe that the king of Naples is naturally mild and kindly, but he is afraid, and the worst of all tyrannies is the tyranny of cowards.--TOCQUEVILLE [1850].
In the autumn of 1850, with the object of benefiting the eyesight of one of their daughters, the Gladstones made a journey to southern Italy, and an eventful journey it proved. For Italy it was, that now first drew Mr. Gladstone by the native ardour of his humanity, unconsciously and involuntarily, into that great European stream of liberalism which was destined to carry him so far. Two deep principles, sentiments, aspirations, forces, call them what we will, awoke the huge uprisings that shook Europe in 1848--the principle of Liberty, the sentiment of Nationality. Mr. Gladstone, slowly and almost blindly heaving off his shoulders the weight of old conservative tradition, did not at first go beyond liberty, with all that ordered liberty conveys. Nationality penetrated later, and then indeed it penetrated to the heart's core. He went to Naples with no purposes of political propagandism, and his prepossessions were at that time pretty strongly in favour of established governments, either at Naples or anywhere else. The case had doubtless been opened to him by Panizzi--a man as Mr. Gladstone described him, 'of warm, large, and free nature, an accomplished man of letters, and a victim of political persecution, who came to this country a nearly starving refugee.' But Panizzi had certainly made no great revolutionist of him. His opinions, as he told Lord Aberdeen, were the involuntary and unexpected result of his sojourn.
He had nothing to do with the subterranean forces at work in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in the States of the Church, and in truth all over the Peninsula. The protracted struggle that had begun after the establishment of Austrian domination in the Peninsula in 1815, and was at last to end in the construction of an Italian kingdom--the most wonderful political transformation of the century--seemed after the fatal crisis of Novara (1849) further than ever from a close. Now was the morrow of the vast failures and disenchantments of 1848. Jesuits and absolutists were once more masters, and reaction again alternated with conspiracy, risings, desperate carbonari plots. Mazzini, four years older than Mr. Gladstone, and Cavour, a year his junior, were directing in widely different ways, the one the revolutionary movement of Young Italy, the other the constitutional movement of the Italian Resurrection. The scene presented brutal repression on the one hand; on the other a chaos of republicans and monarchists, unitarians and federalists, frenzied idealists and sedate economists, wild ultras and men of the sober middle course. In the midst was the pope, the august shadow, not long before the centre, now once again the foe, of his countrymen's aspirations after freedom and a purer glimpse of the lights of the sun. The evolution of this extraordinary historic drama, to which passion, genius, hope, contrivance, stratagem, and force contributed alike the highest and the lowest elements in human nature and the growth of states, was to be one of the most sincere of Mr. Gladstone's interests for the rest of his life.
SPECTACLE OF MISRULE
As we shall see, he was at first and he long remained untouched by the idea of Italian unity and Italy a nation. He met some thirty or more Italian gentlemen in society at Naples, of whom seven or eight only were in any sense liberals, and not one of them a republican. It was now that he made the acquaintance of Lacaita, afterwards so valued a friend of his, and so well known in many circles in England for his geniality, cultivation, and enlightenment. He was the legal adviser to the British embassy; he met Mr. Gladstone constantly; they talked politics and literature day and night, 'under the acacias and palms, between the fountains and statues of the Villa Reale, looking now to the sea, now to the world of fashion in the Corso.' Here Lacaita first opened the traveller's eyes to the condition of things, though he was able to say with literal truth that not a single statement of fact was made upon Lacaita's credit. Mr. Gladstone saw Bourbon absolutism no longer in the decorous hues of conventional diplomacy, but as the black and execrable thing it really was,--'the negation of God erected into a system of government.' Sitting in court for long hours during the trial of Poerio, he listened with as much patience as he could command to the principal crown witness, giving such evidence that the tenth part of what he heard should not only have ended the case, but secured condign punishment for perjury--evidence that a prostitute court found good enough to justify the infliction on Poerio, not long before a minister of the crown, of the dreadful penalty of four-and-twenty years in irons. Mr. Gladstone accurately informed himself of the condition of those who for unproved political offences were in thousands undergoing degrading and murderous penalties. He contrived to visit some of the Neapolitan prisons, another name for the extreme of filth and horror; he saw political prisoners (and political prisoners included a large percentage of the liberal opposition) chained two and two in double irons to common felons; he conversed with Poerio himself in the bagno of Nisida chained in this way; he watched sick prisoners, men almost with death in their faces, toiling upstairs to see the doctors, because the lower regions were too foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that professional men would enter. Even these inhuman and revolting scenes stirred him less, as it was right they should, than the corruptions of the tribunals, the vindictive treatment for long periods of time of uncondemned and untried men, and all the other proceedings of the government, 'desolating entire classes upon which the life and growth of the nation depend, undermining the foundation of all civil rule.' It was this violation of all law, and of the constitution to which King Ferdinand had solemnly sworn fidelity only a year or two before, that outraged him more than even rigorous sentences and barbarous prison practice. 'Even on the severity of these sentences,' he wrote, 'I would not endeavour to fix attention so much as to draw it off from the great fact of illegality, which seems to me to be the foundation of the Neapolitan system; illegality, the fountain-head of cruelty and baseness and every other vice; illegality which gives a bad conscience, creates fears; those fears lead to tyranny, that tyranny begets resentment, that resentment creates true causes of fear where they were not before; and thus fear is quickened and enhanced, the original vice multiplies itself with fearful speed, and the old crime engenders a necessity for new.'[241]
Poerio apprehended that his own case had been made worse by the intervention of Mr. Temple, the British minister and brother of Lord Palmerston; not in the least as blaming him or considering it officious. He adopted the motto, 'to suffer is to do,' 'il patire è anche operare.' For himself he was not only willing--he rejoiced--to play the martyr's part.
I was particularly desirous, wrote Mr. Gladstone in a private memorandum, to have Poerio's opinion on the expediency of making some effort in England to draw general attention to these horrors, and dissociate the conservative party from all suppositions of winking at them; because I had had from a sensible man one strong opinion against such a course. I said to him that in my view only two models could be thought of,--the first, amicable remonstrance through the cabinets, the second public notoriety and shame. That had Lord Aberdeen been in power the first might have been practicable, but that with Lord Palmerston it would not, because of his position relatively to the other cabinets (Yes, he said, Lord Palmerston was isolato), not because he would be wanting in the will. Matters standing thus, I saw no way open but that of exposure; and might that possibly exasperate the Neapolitan government, and increase their severity? His reply was, 'As to us, never mind; we can hardly be worse than we are. But think of our country, for which we are most willing to be sacrificed. Exposure will do it good. The present government of Naples rely on the English conservative party. Consequently we were all in horror when Lord Stanley last year carried his motion in the House of Lords. Let there be a voice from that party showing that whatever government be in power in England, no support will be given to such proceedings as these. It will do much to break them down. It will also strengthen the hands of a better and less obdurate class about the court. Even there all are not alike. I know it from observation. These ministers are the extremest of extremes. There are others who would willingly see more moderate means adopted.' On such grounds as these (I do not quote words) he strongly recommended me to act.
II
RETURN TO LONDON
Mr. Gladstone reached London on February 26. Phillimore met him at the station with Lord Stanley's letter, of which we shall hear in the next chapter, pressing him to enter the government. 'I was never more struck,' says Phillimore, 'by the earnestness and simplicity of his character. He could speak of nothing so readily as the horrors of the Neapolitan government, of which I verily believe he thought nearly as much as the prospect of his own accession to one of the highest offices of state.' He probably thought not only nearly as much, but infinitely more of those 'scenes fitter for hell than earth,' now many hundred miles away, but still vividly burning in the haunted chambers of his wrath and pity. After rapidly despatching the proposal to join the new cabinet, after making the best he could of the poignant anxieties that were stirred in him by the unmistakeable signs of the approaching secession of Hope and Manning, he sought Lord Aberdeen (March 4), and 'found him as always, satisfactory; kind, just, moderate, humane' (to Mrs. Gladstone, March 4). He had come to London with the intention of obtaining, if possible, Aberdeen's intervention, in preference to any other mode of proceeding,[242] and they agreed that private representation and remonstrance should be tried in the first instance, as less likely than public action by Mr. Gladstone in parliament, to rouse international jealousy abroad, or to turn the odious tragedy into the narrow channels of party at home. Mr. Gladstone, at Lord Aberdeen's desire, was to submit a statement of the case for his consideration and judgment.
POSITION OF LORD ABERDEEN
This statement, the first memorable Letter to Lord Aberdeen, was ready at the beginning of April. The old minister gave it 'mature consideration' for the best part of a month. His antecedents made him cautious. Mr. Gladstone, ten years later, admitted that Lord Aberdeen's views of Italy did not harmonise with what was his general mode of estimating human action and the world's affairs, and there was a reason for this in his past career. In very early youth he had been called upon to deal with the gigantic questions that laid their mighty weight upon European statesmen at the fall of Napoleon; the natural effect of this close contact with the vast and formidable problems of 1814-5 was to make him regard the state-system then founded as a structure on which only reckless or criminal unwisdom would dare to lay a finger. The fierce storms of 1848 were not calculated to loosen this fixed idea, or to dispose him to any new views of either the relations of Austria to Italy, or of the uncounted mischiefs to the Peninsula of which those relations were the nourishing and maintaining cause. In a debate in the Lords two years before (July 20, 1849), Lord Aberdeen had sharply criticised the British government of the day for doing the very thing officially, which Mr. Gladstone was now bringing moral compulsion on him to attempt unofficially. Lord Palmerston had called attention at Vienna to the crying evils of the government of Naples, and had boldly said that it was little wonder if men groaning for long years under such grievances and seeing no hope of redress, should take up any scheme, however wild, that held out any chance of relief. This and other proceedings indicating unfriendliness to the King of Naples and a veiled sympathy with rebellion shocked Aberdeen as much as Lamartine's trenchant saying that the treaties of Vienna were effete. In attacking Palmerston's foreign policy again in 1850, he protested that we had deeply injured Austria and had represented her operations in Italy in a completely false light. In his speech in the Pacifico debate, he had referred to the Neapolitan government without approval but in guarded phrases, and had urged as against Lord Palmerston that the less they admired Neapolitan institutions and usages, the more careful ought they to be not to impair the application of the sacred principles that govern and harmonise the intercourse between states, from which you never can depart without producing mischiefs a thousand fold greater than any promised advantage. Aberdeen was too upright and deeply humane a man to resist the dreadful evidence that was now forced upon him. Still that evidence plainly shook down his own case of a few months earlier, and this cannot have been pleasing. He felt the truth and the enormity of the indictment laid before him; he saw the prejudice that would inevitably be done to conservatism both at home and on the European continent, by the publication of such an indictment from the lips of such a pleader; and he perceived from Mr. Gladstone's demeanour that the decorous plausibilities of diplomacy would no more hold him back from resolute exposure, than they would put out the fires of Vesuvius or Etna.
On May 2 Lord Aberdeen wrote to Schwarzenberg at Vienna, saying that for forty years he had been connected with the Austrian government, and taken a warm interest in the fortunes of the empire; that Mr. Gladstone, one of the most distinguished members of the cabinet of Peel, had been so shocked by what he saw at Naples, that he was resolved to make some public appeal; that to avoid the pain and scandal of a conservative statesman taking such a course, would not his highness use his powerful influence to get done at Naples all that could reasonably be desired? The Austrian minister replied several weeks after (June 30). If he had been invited, he said, officially to interfere he would have declined; as it was, he would bring Mr. Gladstone's statements to the notice of his Sicilian majesty. Meanwhile, at great length, he reminded Lord Aberdeen that a political offender may be the worst of all offenders, and argued that the rigour exercised by England herself in the Ionian Islands, in Ceylon, in respect of Irishmen, and in the recent case of Ernest Jones, showed how careful she should be in taking up abroad the cause of bad men posing as martyrs in the holy cause of liberty.
During all these weeks, while Aberdeen was maturely considering, and while Prince Schwarzenberg was making his secretaries hunt up recriminatory cases against England, Mr. Gladstone was growing impatient. Lord Aberdeen begged him to give the Austrian minister a little more time. It was nearly four months since Mr. Gladstone landed at Dover, and every day he thought of Poerio, Settembrini, and the rest, wearing their double chains, subsisting on their foul soup, degraded by forced companionship with criminals, cut off from the light of heaven, and festering in their dungeons. The facts that escaped from him in private conversation seemed to him--so he tells Lacaita--to spread like wildfire from man to man, exciting the liveliest interest, and extending to the highest persons in the land. He waited a fortnight more, then at the beginning of July he launched his thunderbolt, publishing his Letter to Lord Aberdeen, followed by a second explanation and enlargement a fortnight later.[243] He did not obtain formal leave from Lord Aberdeen for the publication, but from their conversation took it for granted.
NEAPOLITAN LETTERS PUBLISHED
The sensation was profound, and not in England only. The Letters were translated into various tongues and had a large circulation. The Society of the Friends of Italy in London, the disciples of Mazzini (and a high-hearted band they were), besought him to become a member. Exiles wrote him letters of gratitude and hope, with all the moving accent of revolutionary illusion. Italian women composed fervid odes in fire and tears to the 'generoso britanno,' the 'magnanimo cor,' the 'difensore d'un popolo gemente.' The press in this country took the matter up with the warmth that might have been expected. The character and the politics of the accuser added invincible force to his accusations, and for the first time in his life Mr. Gladstone found himself vehemently applauded in liberal prints. Even the contemporary excitement of English public feeling against the Roman catholic church fed the flame. It was pointed out that the King of Naples was the bosom friend of the pope, and that the infernal system described by Mr. Gladstone was that which the Roman clergy regarded as normal and complete.[244] Mr. Gladstone had denounced as one of the most detestable books he ever read a certain catechism used in the Neapolitan schools. Why then, cried the Times, does he omit all comment on the church which is the main and direct agent in this atrocious instruction? The clergy had either basely accepted from the government doctrines that they were bound to abhor, or else these doctrines were their own. And so things glided easily round to Dr. Cullen and the Irish education question. This line was none the less natural from the fact that the editor of the Univers, the chief catholic organ in France, made himself the foremost champion of the Neapolitan policy. The Letters delighted the Paris Reds. They regarded their own epithets as insipid by comparison with the ferocious adjectives of the English conservative. On the other hand, an English gentleman was blackballed at one of the fashionable clubs in Paris for no better reason than that he bore the name of Gladstone. For European conservatives read the letters with disgust and apprehension. People like Madame de Lieven pronounced Mr. Gladstone the dupe of men less honest than himself, and declared that he had injured the good cause and discredited his own fame, besides doing Lord Aberdeen the wrong of setting his name at the head of a detestable libel. The illustrious Guizot wrote Mr. Gladstone a long letter expressing, with much courtesy and kindness, his regret at the publication. Nothing is left in Italy, said Guizot, between the terrors of governments attacked in their very existence and the fury of the beaten revolutionists with hopes more alert than ever for destruction and chaos. The King of Naples on one side, Mazzini on the other; such, said Guizot, is Italy. Between the King of Naples and Mazzini, he for one did not hesitate. This was Mr. Gladstone's first contact with the European party of order in the middle of the century. Guizot was a great man, but '48 had perverted his generalising intellect, and everywhere his jaundiced vision perceived in progress a struggle for life and death with 'the revolutionary spirit, blind, chimerical, insatiate, impracticable.' He avowed his own failure when he was at the head of the French government, to induce the rulers of Italy to make reforms; and now the answer of Schwarzenberg to Lord Aberdeen, as well as the official communications from Naples, showed that like Guizot's French policy the Austrian remedy was moonshine.
Perhaps discomposed by the reproaches of reactionary friends abroad, Lord Aberdeen thought he had some reason to complain of the publication. It is not easy to see why. Mr. Gladstone from the first insisted that if private remonstrance did not work 'without elusion or delay,' he would make a public appeal. In transmitting the first letter, he described in very specific terms his idea that a short time would suffice to show whether the private method could be relied upon.[245] The attitude of the minister at Vienna, of Fortunato at Naples, and of Castelcicala in London, discovered even to Aberdeen himself how little reasonable hope there was of anything being done; elusion and delay was all that he could expect. He was forced to give entire credit to Mr. Gladstone's horrible story, and was as far as possible from thinking it a detestable libel. He never denied the foundation of the case, or the actual state of the abominable facts. Schwarzenberg never consented to comply with his wishes even when writing before the publication. How then could Aberdeen expect that Mr. Gladstone should abandon the set and avowed purpose with which he had come flaming and resolved to England?
SENSATION IN EUROPE
It was exactly because the party with which Mr. Gladstone was allied had made itself the supporter of established governments throughout Europe, that in his eyes that party became specially responsible for not passing by in silence any course of conduct, even in a foreign country, flagrantly at variance with right.[246] And what was there, when at last they arrived, in Prince Schwarzenberg's idle dissertations and recriminations, winding up with a still more idle sentence about bringing the charges under the notice of the Neapolitan government, that should induce Mr. Gladstone to abandon his purpose? He had something else to think of than the scandal to the reactionaries of Europe. 'I wish it were in your power,' he writes to Lacaita in May, 'to assure any of those directly interested, in my name, that I am not unfaithful to them, and will use every means in my power; feeble they are, and I lament it; but God is strong and is just and good; and the issue is in His hands.' That is what he was thinking of. When he talked of 'the sacred purposes of humanity' it was not artificial claptrap in a protocol.[247]
'When I consider,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen, 'that Prince Schwarzenberg really knew the state of things at Naples well enough independently of me, and then ask myself why did he wait seven weeks before acknowledging a letter relating to the intense sufferings of human beings which were going on day by day and hour by hour, while his people were concocting all that trash about Frost and Ernest Jones and O'Brien, I cannot say that I think the spirit of the letter was creditable to him, or very promising as regards these people.' The Neapolitan government entered the field with a formal reply point by point, and Mr. Gladstone met them with a point by point rejoinder. The matter did not rest there. Soon after his arrival at home, he had had some conversation with John Russell, Palmerston, and other members of the government. They were much interested and not at all incredulous. Lord Palmerston's brother kept him too well informed about the state of things there for him to be sceptical. 'Gladstone and Molesworth,' wrote Palmerston, 'say that they were wrong last year in their attacks on my foreign policy, but they did not know the truth.'[248] Lord Palmerston directed copies of Mr. Gladstone's Letters to be sent to the British representatives in all the courts of Europe, with instructions to give a copy to each government. The Neapolitan envoy in London in his turn requested him also to send fifteen copies of the pamphlet that had been got up on the other side. Palmerston promptly, and in his most characteristic style, vindicated Mr. Gladstone against the charges of overstatement and hostile intention; warned the Neapolitan government of the violent revolution that long-continued and widespread injustice would assuredly bring upon them; hoped that they might have set to work to correct the manifold and grave abuses to which their attention had been drawn; and flatly refused to have anything to do with an official pamphlet 'consisting of a flimsy tissue of bare assertions and reckless denials, mixed up with coarse ribaldry and commonplace abuse.' This was the kind of thing that gave to Lord Palmerston the best of his power over the people of England.
ENERGETIC SYMPATHY OF PALMERSTON
In the House of Commons he spoke with no less warmth. Though he had not felt it his duty, he said, to make representations at Naples on a matter relating to internal affairs, he thought Mr. Gladstone had done himself great honour. Instead of seeking amusements, diving into volcanoes and exploring excavated cities, he had visited prisons, descended into dungeons, examined cases of the victims of illegality and injustice, and had then sought to rouse the public opinion of Europe. It was because he concurred in this opinion that he had circulated the pamphlet, in the hope that the European courts might use their influence.[249] As Lord Aberdeen told Madame de Lieven, Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet by the extraordinary sensation it had created among men of all parties had given a great practical triumph to Palmerston and the foreign office.
The immediate effect of Mr. Gladstone's appeal was an aggravation of prison rigour. Panizzi was convinced that the king did not know of all the iniquities exposed by Mr. Gladstone. At the close of 1851 he obtained an interview with Ferdinand, and for twenty minutes spoke of Poerio, Settembrini and the condition of the prisons. The king suddenly cut short the interview, saying, Addio, terribile Panizzi.[250] Faint streaks of light from the outside world pierced the gloom of the dungeons. As time went on, a lady contrived to smuggle in a few pages of Mr. Gladstone's first Letter; and in 1854 the martyrs heard vaguely of the action of Cavour. But it was not until 1859 that the tyrant, fearing the cry of horror that would go up in Europe if Poerio should die in chains, or worse than death, should go mad, commuted prison to perpetual exile,[251] and sixty-six of them were embarked for America. At Lisbon they were transferred to an American ship; the captain, either intimidated or bribed, put in at Queenstown. 'In setting foot on this free soil,' Poerio wrote to Mr. Gladstone from the Irish haven (March 12, 1859), 'the first need of my heart was to seek news of you.' Communications were speedily opened. The Italians made their way to Bristol, where they were received with sympathy and applause by the population. The deliverance of their country was close at hand.
Not now, nor for many years to come, did Mr. Gladstone grasp the idea of Italian unity. It was impossible for him to ignore, but he did undoubtedly set aside, the fact that every shade and section of Italian liberalism from Farini on the right, to Mazzini on the furthest left, insisted on treating Italy as a political integer, and placed the independence of Italy and the expulsion of Austria from Italian soil as the first and fundamental article in the creed of reform. Like most of the English friends of the Italian cause at this time, except the small but earnest group who rallied round the powerful moral genius of Mazzini, he thought only of local freedom and local reforms. 'The purely abstract idea of Italian nationality,' said Mr. Gladstone at this time, 'makes little impression and finds limited sympathy among ourselves.' 'I am certain,' he wrote to Panizzi (June 21, 1851), 'that the Italian habit of preaching unity and nationality in preference to showing grievances produces a revulsion here; for if there are two things on earth that John Bull hates, they are an abstract proposition and the pope.' 'You need not be afraid, I think,' he told Lord Aberdeen (December 1, 1851), 'of Mazzinism from me, still less of Kossuth-ism, which means the other plus imposture, Lord Palmerston, and his nationalities.' But then in 1854 Manin came to England, and failed to persuade even Lord Palmerston that the unity of Italy was the only clue to her freedom.[252] The Russian war made it inconvenient to quarrel with Austria about Italy. With Mr. Gladstone he made more way. 'Seven to breakfast to meet Manin,' says the diary; 'he too is wild.' Not too wild, however, to work conversion on his host. 'It was my privilege,' Mr. Gladstone afterwards wrote, 'to welcome Manin in London in 1854, when I had long been anxious for reform in Italy, and it was from him that, in common with some other Englishmen, I had my first lessons upon Italian unity as the indispensable basis of all effectual reform under the peculiar circumstances of that country.'[253] Yet the page of Dante holds the lesson.
III
THE TEMPORAL POWER
On one important element in the complex Italian case at this time, Mr. Gladstone gained a clear view.
Some things I have learned in Italy, he wrote to Manning (January 26, 1851), that I did not know before, one in particular. The temporal power of the pope, that great, wonderful, and ancient erection, is gone. The problem has been worked out--the ground is mined--the train is laid--a foreign force, in its nature transitory, alone stays the hand of those who would complete the process by applying the match. This seems, rather than is, a digression. When that event comes, it will bring about a great shifting of parts--much super-and much subter-position. God grant it may be for good. I desire it, because I see plainly that justice requires it. Not out of malice to the popedom; for I cannot at this moment dare to answer with a confident affirmative, the question, a very solemn one--Ten, twenty, fifty years hence, will there be any other body in western Christendom witnessing for fixed dogmatic truth? With all my heart I wish it well (though perhaps not wholly what the consistory might think agreed with the meaning of the term)--it would be to me a joyous day in which I should see it really doing well.
Various ideas of this kind set him to work on the large and curious enterprise, long since forgotten, of translating Farini's volumes on the Roman State from 1815 down to 1850. According to the entries in his diary he began and finished the translation of a large portion of the book at Naples in 1850--dictating and writing almost daily. Three of the four volumes of this English translation were done with extraordinary speed by Mr. Gladstone's own hand, and the fourth was done under his direction.[254] His object was, without any reference to Italian unity, to give an illustration of the actual working of the temporal power in its latest history. It is easy to understand how the theme fitted in with the widest topics of his life; the nature of theocratic government; the possibility (to borrow Cavour's famous phrase) of a free church in a free state; and above all,--as he says to Manning now, and said to all the world twenty years later in the day of the Vatican decrees,--the mischiefs done to the cause of what he took for saving truth by evil-doing in the heart and centre of the most powerful of all the churches. His translation of Farini, followed by his article on the same subject in the Edinburgh in 1852, was his first blast against 'the covetous, domineering, implacable policy represented in the term Ultramontanism; the winding up higher and higher, tighter and tighter, of the hierarchical spirit, in total disregard of those elements by which it ought to be checked and balanced; and an unceasing, covert, smouldering war against human freedom, even in its most modest and retiring forms of private life and of the individual conscience.' With an energy not unworthy of Burke at his fiercest, he denounces the fallen and impotent regality of the popes as temporal sovereigns. 'A monarchy sustained by foreign armies, smitten with the curse of social barrenness, unable to strike root downward or bear fruit upward, the sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten boughs--such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul blot upon the face of creation, an offence to Christendom and to mankind.'[255] As we shall soon see, he was just as wrathful, just as impassioned and as eloquent, when, in a memorable case in his own country, the temporal power bethought itself of a bill for meddling with the rights of a Roman voluntary church.
FOOTNOTES:
[241] For the two Letters to Lord Aberdeen, see Gleanings, iv.
[242] There was a slight discrepancy between the two on this point, Mr. Gladstone describing the position as above, Aberdeen believing that it was by his persuasion that Mr. Gladstone dropped his intention of instant publicity. Probably the latter used such urgent language about an appeal to the public opinion of England and Europe, that Lord Aberdeen supposed it to be an immediate and not an ulterior resort. Aberdeen to Castelcicala, September 15, 1851, and Mr. Gladstone to Aberdeen, October 3.
[243] The mere announcement caused such a demand that a second edition was required almost before the first was published.
[244] Wesleyan Methodist Magazine, October 1851. Protestant Magazine, September 1851.
[245] Gladstone to Lord Aberdeen, September 16, 1851.
[246] Mr. Gladstone in an undated draft letter to Castelcicala.
[247] The one point on which Lord Aberdeen had a right to complain was that Mr. Gladstone did not take his advice. As the point revives in Lord Stanmore's excellent life of his father, it may be worth while to reproduce two further passages from Mr. Gladstone's letter to Lord Aberdeen of July 7, 1851. Before publishing the second of the two Letters, he wrote to Lord Aberdeen: 'I ought perhaps to have asked your formal permission for the act of publication; but I thought that I distinctly inferred it from a recent conversation with you as to the mode of proceeding'--(Mr. Gladstone to Lord Aberdeen, July 7, 1851). Then he proceeds as to the new supplementary publication: 'If it be disagreeable to you in any manner to be the recipient of such sad communications, or if you think it better for any other reason, I would put the further matter into another form.' In answer to this, Lord Aberdeen seems not to have done any more to refuse leave to associate his name with the second Letter, than he had done to withdraw the assumed leave for the association of his name with the first.
[248] Ashley, Palmerston, ii. p. 179.
[249] August 7, 1851. Hansard, cxv. p. 1949.
[250] Fagan's Life of Panizzi, ii. pp. 102-3.
[251] On the share of Mr. Gladstone's Letters in leading indirectly to this decision, see the address of Baldacchini, Della Vita e de' Tempi di Carlo Poerio (1867), p. 58.
[252] Gleanings, iv. pp. 188, 195. Trans. of Farini, pref. p. ix.
[253] To Dr. Errera, author of A Life of Manin, Sept. 28, 1872. For Manin's account, see his Life, by Henri Martin, p. 377.
[254] The first two volumes were published by Mr. Murray in 1852, and the last two in 1854. 'June 17, 1851.--Got my first copies of Farini. Sent No. 1 to the Prince; and wrote with sad feelings in those for Hope and Manning.'--Diary.
[255] Gleanings, iv. pp. 160, 176.
VII. RELIGIOUS TORNADO--PEELITE DIFFICULTIES
(1851-1852)
I am always disposed to view with regret the rupture of party ties--my disposition is rather to maintain them. I confess I look, if not with suspicion, at least with disapprobation on any one who is disposed to treat party connections as matters of small importance. My opinion is that party ties closely appertain to those principles of confidence which we entertain for the House of Commons.--GLADSTONE (1852).
As we have seen, on the morning of his arrival from his Italian journey (February 26, 1851) Mr. Gladstone found that he was urgently required to meet Lord Stanley. Mortified by more than one repulse at the opening of the session, the whigs had resigned. The Queen sent for the protectionist leader. Stanley said that he was not then prepared to form a government, but that if other combinations failed, he would make the attempt. Lord John Russell was once more summoned to the palace, this time along with Aberdeen and Graham--the first move in a critical march towards the fated coalition between whigs and Peelites. The negotiation broke off on the No Popery bill; Lord John was committed to it, the other two strongly disapproved. The Queen next wished Aberdeen to undertake the task. Apparently not without some lingering doubts, he declined on the good ground that the House of Commons would not stand his attitude on papal aggression.[256] Then according to promise Lord Stanley tried his hand. Proceedings were suspended for some days until Mr. Gladstone should be on the ground. He no sooner reached Carlton Gardens, than Lord Lincoln arrived, eager to dissuade him from accepting office. Before the discussion had gone far, the tory whip hurried in from Stanley, begging for an immediate visit.
I promised, says Mr. Gladstone, to go directly after seeing Lord Aberdeen. But he came back with a fresh message to go at once, and hear what Stanley had to say. I did not like to stickle, and went. He told me his object was that I should take office with him--any office, subject to the reservation that the foreign department was offered to Canning, but if he declined it was open to me, along with others of which he named the colonial office and the board of trade. Nothing was said of the leadership of the House of Commons, but his anxiety was evident to have any occupant but one for the foreign office. I told him, I should ask no questions and make no remark on these points, as none of them would constitute a difficulty with me, provided no preliminary obstacle were found to intervene. Stanley then said that he proposed to maintain the system of free trade generally, but to put a duty of five or six shillings on corn. I heard him pretty much in silence, but with an intense sense of relief; feeling that if he had put protection in abeyance, I might have had a most difficult question to decide, whereas now I had no question at all. I thought, however, it might be well that I should still see Lord Aberdeen before giving him an answer; and told him I would do so. I asked him also what was his intention with respect to papal aggression. He said that this measure was hasty and intemperate as well as ineffective; and that he thought something much better might result from a comprehensive and deliberate inquiry. I told him I was utterly against all penal legislation and against the ministerial bill, but that I did not on principle object to inquiry; that, on general as well as on personal grounds, I wished well to his undertakings; and that I would see Lord Aberdeen, but that what he had told me about corn constituted, I must not conceal from him, 'an enormous difficulty.' I used this expression for the purpose of preparing him to receive the answer it was plain I must give; he told me his persevering would probably depend on me.
DECLINES OFFICE
Mr. Gladstone next hastened to Lord Aberdeen, and learned what had been going on during his absence abroad. He learned also the clear opinions held by Aberdeen and Graham against No Popery legislation, and noticed it as remarkable that so many minds should arrive independently at the same conclusion on a new question, and in opposition to the overwhelming majority. 'I then,' he continues, 'went on to the levee, saw Lord Normanby and others, and began to bruit abroad the fame of the Neapolitan government. Immediately after leaving the levee (where I also saw Canning, told him what I meant to do, and gathered that he would do the like), I changed my clothes and went to give Lord Stanley my answer, at which he did not show the least surprise. He said he would still persevere, though with little hope. I think I told him it seemed to me he ought to do so. I was not five minutes with him this second time.'[257]
The protectionists having failed, and the Peelites standing aside, the whigs came back, most of them well aware that they could not go on for long. The events of the late crisis had given Mr. Gladstone the hope that Graham would effectively place himself at the head of the Peelites, and that they would now at length begin to take an independent course of their own. 'But it soon appeared that, unconsciously I think more than consciously, he is set upon the object of avoiding the responsibility either of taking the government with the Peel squadron, or of letting in Stanley and his friends.' Here was the weak point in a strong and capable character. When Graham died ten years after this (1861), Mr. Gladstone wrote to a friend, 'On administrative questions, for the last twenty years and more, I had more spontaneous recourse to him for advice, than to all other colleagues together.' In some of the foundations of character no two men could be more unlike. One of his closest allies talks to Graham of 'your sombre temperament.' 'My forebodings are always gloomy,' says Graham himself; 'I shudder on the brink of the torrent.' All accounts agree that he was a good counsellor in cabinet, a first-rate manager of business, a good if rather pompous speaker, admirably loyal and single-minded, but half-ruined by intense timidity. I have heard nobody use warmer language of commendation about him than Mr. Bright. But nature had not made him for a post of chief command.
It by and by appeared that the Duke of Newcastle, known to us hitherto as Lord Lincoln, coveted the post of leader, but Mr. Gladstone thought that on every ground Lord Aberdeen was the person entitled to hold it. 'I made,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'my views distinctly known to the duke. He took no offence. I do not know what communications he may have held with others. But the upshot was that Lord Aberdeen became our leader. And this result was obtained without any shock or conflict.'[258]
II
BILL AGAINST ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES
In the autumn of 1850 the people of this country were frightened out of their senses by a document from the Vatican, dividing England into dioceses bearing territorial titles and appointing Cardinal Wiseman to be Archbishop of Westminster. The uproar was tremendous. Lord John Russell cast fuel upon the flame in a perverse letter to the Bishop of Durham (Nov. 4, 1850). In this unhappy document he accepted the description of the aggression of the pope upon our protestantism as insolent and insidious, declared his indignation to be greater even than his alarm, and even his alarm at the aggressions of a foreign sovereign to be less than at the conduct of unworthy sons of the church of England within her own gates. He wound up by declaring that the great mass of the nation looked with contempt upon the mummeries of superstition. Justified indeed was Bright's stern rebuke to a prime minister of the Queen who thus allowed himself to offend and to indict eight millions of his countrymen, recklessly to create fresh discords between the Irish and English nations, and to perpetuate animosities that the last five-and-twenty years had done so much to assuage. Having thus precipitately committed himself, the minister was forced to legislate. 'I suspect,' wrote Mr. Gladstone to his great friend, Sir Walter James, 'John Russell has more rocks and breakers ahead than he reckoned upon when he dipped his pen in gall to smite first the pope, but most those who not being papists are such traitors and fools as really to mean something when they say, "I believe in one Holy Catholic Church."' There was some division of opinion in the cabinet,[259] but a bill was settled, and the temper of the times may be gauged by the fact that leave to introduce it was given by the overwhelming majority of 395 votes to 63.
In his own language, Mr. Gladstone lamented and disapproved of the pope's proceeding extremely, and had taken care to say so in parliament two and a half years before, when 'Lord John Russell, if he had chosen, could have stopped it; but the government and the press were alike silent at that period.'[260] His attitude is succinctly described in a letter to Greswell, his Oxford chairman, in 1852: 'Do not let it be asserted without contradiction that I ever felt or counselled indifference in regard to the division of England into Romish dioceses. So far is this from being the truth that shortly after I was elected, when the government were encouraging the pope to proceed, and when there was yet time to stop the measure (which I deplore sincerely) by amicable means, I took the opportunity in the House (as did Sir R. Inglis, I think a little later), of trying to draw attention to it. But it was nobody's game then, and the subject fell to the ground. Amicable prevention I desired; spiritual and ecclesiastical resistance I heartily approved; but while I say this, I cannot recede from one inch of the ground I took in opposing the bill, and I would far rather quit parliament for ever than not have voted against so pernicious a measure.'
Other matters, as we have seen, brought on a ministerial crisis, the bill was stopped, and after the crisis was over the measure came to life again with changes making it still more futile for its ends. The Peelites while, like Mr. Bright, 'despising and loathing' the language of the Vatican and the Flaminian Gate, had all of them without concert taken this outburst of prejudice and passion at its right value, and all resolved to resist legislation. How, they asked, could you tolerate the Roman catholic religion, if you would not tolerate its tenet of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope; and what sort of toleration of such a tenet would that be, which forbade the pope to name ecclesiastics to exercise the spiritual authority exercised in any other voluntary episcopal church, Scottish, colonial, or another? Why was it more of a usurpation for the pope to make a new Archbishop of Westminster, than to administer London by the old form of vicars apostolic? Was not the action of the pope, after all, a secondary consideration, and the frenzy really and in essence an explosion of popular wrath against the Puseyites? What was to be thought of a prime minister who, at such risk to the public peace, tried to turn the ferment to account for the sake of strengthening his tottering government? To all this there was no rational reply; and even the editor of a powerful newspaper that every morning blew up the coals, admitted to Greville that 'he thought the whole thing humbug and a pack of nonsense!'[261]
GREAT SPEECH AGAINST THE BILL
The debate on the second reading was marked by a little brutality and much sanctimony. Mr. Gladstone (March 25, 1851) spoke to a House practically almost solid against him. Yet his superb resources as an orator, his transparent depth of conviction, the unmistakeable proofs that his whole heart was in the matter, mastered his audience and made the best of them in their hearts ashamed. He talked of Boniface VIII. and Honorius IX.; he pursued a long and close historical demonstration of the earnest desire of the lay catholics of this country for diocesan bishops as against vicars apostolic; he moved among bulls and rescripts, briefs and pastorals and canon law, with as much ease as if he had been arguing about taxes and tariffs. Through it all the House watched and listened in enchantment, as to a magnificent tragedian playing a noble part in a foreign tongue. They did not apprehend every point, nor were they converted, but they felt a man with the orator's quality of taking fire and kindling fire at a moral idea. They felt his command of the whole stock of fact and of principle belonging to his topics, as with the air and the power of a heroic master he cleared the way before him towards his purpose. Along with complete grasp of details, went grasp of some of the most important truths in the policy of a modern state. He clearly perceived the very relevant fact, so often overlooked by advocates of the free church in a free state, that 'there is no religious body in the world where religious offices do not in a certain degree conjoin with temporal incidents.' But this did not affect the power of his stroke, as he insisted on respect for the frontier--no scientific frontier--between temporal and spiritual. 'You speak of the progress of the Roman catholic religion, and you pretend to meet that progress by a measure false in principle as it is ludicrous in extent. You must meet the progress of that spiritual system by the progress of another; you can never do it by penal enactments. Here, once for all, I enter my most solemn, earnest, and deliberate protest against all attempts to meet the spiritual dangers of our church by temporal legislation of a penal character.' The whole speech is in all its elements and aspects one of the great orator's three or four most conspicuous masterpieces, and the reader would not forgive me if I failed to transcribe its resplendent close. He went back to a passage of Lord John Russell's on the Maynooth bill of 1845. 'I never heard,' said Mr. Gladstone, 'a more impressive passage delivered by any statesman at any time in this House.'
The noble lord referred to some beautiful and touching lines of Virgil, which the house will not regret to hear:--
'Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro, Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pila; Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.'[262]
And he said, upon those scenes where battles have been fought, the hand of nature effaces the traces of the wrath of man, and the cultivator of the soil in following times finds the rusted arms, and looks upon them with calm and joy, as the memorials of forgotten strife, and as quickening his sense of the blessings of his peaceful occupation. The noble lord went on to say, in reference to the powerful opposition then offered to the bill for the endowment of Maynooth, that it seems as if upon the questions of religious freedom, our strife is never to cease, and our arms are never to rust. Would any man, who heard the noble lord deliver these impressive sentiments, have believed not only that the strife with respect to religious liberty was to be revived with a greater degree of acerbity, in the year 1851, but that the noble lord himself was to be a main agent in its revival--that his was to be the head that was to wear the helmet, and his the hand that was to grasp the spear? My conviction is, that this great subject of religious freedom is not to be dealt with, as one of the ordinary matters in which you may, with safety or with honour, do to-day and undo to-morrow. This great people, whom we have the honour to represent, moves slowly in politics and legislation; but, although it moves slowly, it moves steadily. The principle of religious freedom, its adaptation to our modern state, and its compatibility with ancient institutions, was a principle which you did not adopt in haste. It was a principle well tried in struggle and conflict. It was a principle which gained the assent of one public man after another. It was a principle which ultimately triumphed, after you had spent upon it half a century of agonising struggle. And now what are you going to do? You have arrived at the division of the century. Are you going to repeat Penelope's process, but without the purpose of Penelope? Are you going to spend the decay and the dusk of the nineteenth century in undoing the great work which with so much pain and difficulty your greatest men have been achieving during its daybreak and its youth? Surely not. Oh, recollect the functions you have to perform in the face of the world. Recollect that Europe and the whole of the civilised world look to England at this moment not less, no, but even more than ever they looked to her before, as the mistress and guide of nations, in regard to the great work of civil legislation. And what is it they chiefly admire in England? It is not the rapidity with which you form constitutions and broach abstract theories. On the contrary; they know that nothing is so distasteful to you as abstract theories, and that you are proverbial for resisting what is new until you are well assured by gradual effort, by progressive trials, and beneficial tendency. But they know that when you make a step forward you keep it. They know that there is reality and honesty, strength and substance, about your proceedings. They know that you are not a monarchy to-day, a republic to-morrow, and a military despotism the day after. They know that you have been happily preserved from irrational vicissitudes that have marked the career of the greatest and noblest among the neighbouring nations. Your fathers and yourselves have earned this brilliant character for England. Do not forfeit it. Do not allow it to be tarnished or impaired. Show, I beseech you--have the courage to show the pope of Rome, and his cardinals, and his church, that England too, as well as Rome, has her semper eadem; and that when she has once adopted some great principle of legislation, which is destined to influence the national character, to draw the dividing lines of her policy for ages to come, and to affect the whole nature of her influence and her standing among the nations of the world--show that when she has done this slowly, and done it deliberately, she has done it once for all; and that she will then no more retrace her steps than the river that bathes this giant city can flow back upon its source. The character of England is in our hands. Let us feel the responsibility that belongs to us, and let us rely on it; if to-day we make this step backwards, it is one which hereafter we shall have to retrace with pain. We cannot change the profound and resistless tendencies of the age towards religious liberty. It is our business to guide and to control their application; do this you may, but to endeavour to turn them backwards is the sport of children, done by the hands of men, and every effort you may make in that direction will recoil upon you in disaster and disgrace. The noble lord appealed to gentlemen who sit behind me, in the names of Hampden and Pym. I have great reverence for these in one portion at least of their political career, because they were men energetically engaged in resisting oppression. But I would rather have heard Hampden and Pym quoted on any other subject than one which relates to the mode of legislation or the policy to be adopted with our Roman catholic fellow-citizens, because, if there was one blot on their escutcheon, if there was one painful--I would almost say odious--feature in the character of the party among whom they were the most distinguished chiefs, it was the bitter and ferocious intolerance which in them became the more powerful because it was directed against the Roman catholics alone. I would appeal in other names to gentlemen who sit on this side of the House. If Hampden and Pym were friends of freedom, so were Clarendon and Newcastle, so were the gentlemen who sustained the principles of loyalty.... They were not always seeking to tighten the chains and deepen the brand. Their disposition was to relax the severity of the law, and attract the affections of their Roman catholic fellow-subjects to the constitution by treating them as brethren.... We are a minority insignificant in point of numbers. We are more insignificant still, because we are but knots and groups of two or three, we have no power of cohesion, no ordinary bond of union. What is it that binds us together against you, but the conviction that we have on our side the principle of justice--the conviction that we shall soon have on our side the strength of public opinion (oh, oh!). I am sure I have not wished to say a syllable that would wound the feelings of any man, and if in the warmth of argument such expressions should have escaped me, I wish them unsaid. But above all we are sustained by the sense of justice which we feel belongs to the cause we are defending; and we are, I trust, well determined to follow that bright star of justice, beaming from the heavens, whithersoever it may lead.
All this was of no avail, just as the same arguments and temper on two other occasions of the same eternal theme in his life,[263] were to be of no avail. Disraeli spoke strongly against the line taken by the Peelites. The second reading was carried by 438 against 95, one-third even of this minority being Irish catholics, and the rest mainly Peelites, 'a limited but accomplished school,' as Disraeli styled them. Hume asked Mr. Gladstone for his speech for publication to circulate among the dissenters who, he said, know nothing about religious liberty. It was something, however, to find Mr. Gladstone, the greatest living churchman, and Bright, the greatest living nonconformist, voting in the same lobby. The fight was stiff, and was kept up until the end of the summer. The weapon that had been forged in this blazing furnace by these clumsy armourers proved blunt and worthless; the law was from the first a dead letter, and it was struck out of the statute book in 1871 in Mr. Gladstone's own administration.[264]
III
FALL OF THE RUSSELL GOVERNMENT
In the autumn (1851) a committee of the whig cabinet, now reinforced by the admission for the first time of Lord Granville, was named to prepare a reform bill. Palmerston, no friend to reform, fell into restive courses that finally upset the coach. The cabinet, early in November, settled that he should not receive Kossuth, and he complied; but he received a public deputation and an address complimenting him for his exertions on Kossuth's behalf. The court at this proceeding took lively offence, and the Queen requested the prime minister to ascertain the opinion of the cabinet upon it. Such an appeal by the sovereign from the minister to the cabinet was felt by them to be unconstitutional, and though they did not conceal from Palmerston their general dissatisfaction, they declined to adopt any resolution. Before the year ended Palmerston persisted in taking an unauthorised line of his own upon Napoleon's coup d'état (this time for once not on the side of freedom against despotism), and Lord John closed a correspondence between them by telling him that he could not advise the Queen to leave the seals of the foreign department any longer in his hands. This dismissal of Palmerston introduced a new element of disruption and confusion, for the fallen minister had plenty of friends. Lord Lansdowne was very uneasy about reform, and talked ominously about preferring to be a supporter rather than a member of the government; and whig dissensions, though less acute in type, threatened a perplexity as sharp in the way of a stable administration, as the discords among conservatives.
Lord John (Jan. 14, 1852) next asked his cabinet whether an offer should be made to Graham. A long discussion followed; whether Graham alone would do them any good; whether the Peelites, considering themselves as a party, might join, but would not consent to be absorbed; whether an offer to them was to be a persistent attempt in good faith or only a device to mend the parliamentary case, if the offer were made and refused. Two or three of the whig ministers, true to the church traditions of the caste, made great difficulties about the Puseyite notions of Newcastle and Mr. Gladstone. 'Gladstone,' writes one of them, 'is a Jesuit, and more Peelite than I believe was Peel himself.' In the end Lord John Russell and his men met parliament without any new support. Their tottering life was short, and it was an amendment moved by Palmerston (Feb. 20) on a clause in a militia bill, that slit the thread. The hostile majority was only eleven, but other perils lay pretty thick in front. The ministers resigned, and Lord Stanley, who had now become Earl of Derby, had no choice but to give his followers their chance. The experiment that seemed so impossible when Bentinck first tried it, of forming a new third party in the state, seemed up to this point to have prospered, and the protectionists had a definite existence. The ministers were nearly all new to public office, and seventeen of them were for the first time sworn of the privy council in a single day. One jest was that the cabinet consisted of three men and a half--Derby, Disraeli, St. Leonards, and a worthy fractional personage at the admiralty.
Sending to his wife at Hawarden a provisional list (Feb. 23), Mr. Gladstone doubts the way in which the offices were distributed:--'It is not good, as compared I mean with what it should have been. Disraeli could not have been worse placed than at the exchequer. Henley could not have been worse than at the board of trade. T. Baring, who would have been their best chancellor of the exchequer, seems to have declined. Herries would have been much better than Disraeli for that particular place. I suppose Lord Malmesbury is temporary foreign secretary, to hold the place for S. Canning. What does not appear on the face of the case is, who is to lead the House of Commons, and about that everybody seems to be in the dark....'
IV
FIRST DERBY ADMINISTRATION
The first Derby administration, thus formed and covering the year 1852, marks a highly interesting stage in Mr. Gladstone's career. 'The key to my position,' as he afterwards said, 'was that my opinions went one way, my lingering sympathies the other.' His opinions looked towards liberalism, his sympathies drew him to his first party. It was the Peelites who had now been thrown into the case of a dubious third party. At the end of February Mr. Gladstone sought Lord Aberdeen, looking 'to his weight, his prudence, and his kindliness of disposition as the main anchor of their section. His tone has usually been, during the last few years, that of anxiety to reunite the fragments and reconstruct the conservative party, but yesterday, particularly at the commencement of our conversation, he seemed to lean the other way; spoke kindly of Lord Derby and wished that he could be extricated from the company with which he is associated; said that though called a despot all his life, he himself had always been, and was now, friendly to a liberal policy. He did not, however, like the reform question in Lord John's hands; but he considered, I thought (and if so he differed from me), that on church questions we all might co-operate with him securely.' Mr. Gladstone, on the contrary, insisted that their duty plainly was to hold themselves clear and free from whig and Derbyite alike, so as to be prepared to take whatever of three courses might, after the defeat of protectionist proposals, seem most honourable--whether conservative reconstruction, or liberal conjunction, or Peelism single-handed. The last he described as their least natural position; for, he urged, they might be 'liberal in the sense of Peel, working out a liberal policy through the medium of the conservative party.' To that procrastinating view Mr. Gladstone stood tenaciously, and his course now is one of the multitudinous illustrations of his constant abhorrence of premature committal, and the taking of a second step before the first.
After Aberdeen he approached Graham, who proceeded to use language that seemed to point to his virtual return to his old friends of the liberal party, for the reader will not forget the striking circumstance that the new head of a conservative government, and the most trusted of the cabinet colleagues of Peel, had both of them begun official life in the reform ministry of Lord Grey. Graham said he had a very high opinion of Lord Derby's talents and character, and that Lord J. Russell had committed many errors, but that looking at the two as they stood, he thought that the opinions of Lord Derby as a whole were more dangerous to the country than those of Lord John. Mr. Gladstone said it did not appear to him that the question lay between these two; but Graham's reception of this remark implied a contrary opinion.
Lincoln, now Duke of Newcastle, he found obdurate in another direction, speaking with great asperity against Lord Derby and his party; he would make no vows as to junction, not even that he would not join Disraeli; but he thought this government must be opposed and overthrown; then those who led the charge against it would reap the reward; if the Peelites did not place themselves in a prominent position, others would. They had a further conversation. The duke told him that Beresford, the whip, had sent out orders to tory newspapers to run them down; that the same worthy had said 'The Peelites, let them go to hell.' Mr. Gladstone replied that Beresford's language was not a good test of the feelings of his party, and that his violence and that of other people was stimulated by what they imagined or heard of the Peelites. Newcastle persisted in his disbelief in the government. 'During this conversation, held on a sofa at the Carlton, we were rather warm; and I said to him, "It appears to me that you do not believe this party to be composed even of men of honour or of gentlemen."... He clung to the idea that we were hereafter to form a party of our own, containing all the good elements of both parties. To which I replied, the country cannot be governed by a third or middle party unless it be for a time only, and on the whole I thought a liberal policy would be worked out with greater security to the country through the medium of the conservative party, and I thought a position like Peel's on the liberal side of that party preferable, comparing all advantages and disadvantages, to the conservative side of the liberal party. And when he spoke of the tories as the obstructive body I said not all of them--for instance Mr. Pitt, Mr. Canning, Mr. Huskisson, and in some degree Lord Londonderry and Lord Liverpool.'
FOUR SHADES OF PEELITES
The upshot of all these discussions was the discovery that there were at least four distinct shades among the Peelites. 'Newcastle stands nearly alone, if not quite, in the rather high-flown idea that we are to create and lead a great, virtuous, powerful intelligent party, neither the actual conservative nor the actual liberal party but a new one. Apart from these witcheries, Graham was ready to take his place in the liberal ranks; Cardwell, Fitzroy and Oswald would I think have gone with him, as F. Peel and Sir C. Douglas went before him. But this section has been arrested, not thoroughly amalgamated, owing to Graham. Thirdly, there are the great bulk of the Peelites from Goulburn downwards, more or less undisguisedly anticipating junction with Lord Derby, and avowing that free trade is their only point of difference. Lastly myself, and I think I am with Lord Aberdeen and S. Herbert, who have nearly the same desire, but feel that the matter is too crude, too difficult and important for anticipating any conclusion, and that our clear line of duty is independence, until the question of protection shall be settled.' (March 28, 1852.)
The personal composition of this section deserves a sentence. In 1835, during Peel's short government, the whig phalanx opposed to it in the House of Commons consisted of John Russell and seven others.[265] Of these eight all were alive in 1851, seven of them in the then existing cabinet; six of the eight still in the Commons. On the other hand, Peel's cabinet began its career thus manned in the Commons--Peel, Stanley, Graham, Hardinge, Knatchbull, Goulburn. Of these only the last remained in his old position. Peel and Knatchbull were dead; Stanley in the Lords and separated; Graham isolated; Hardinge in the Lords and by way of having retired. Nor was the band very large even as recruited. Of ex-cabinet ministers there were but three commoners; Goulburn, Herbert, Gladstone. And of others who had held important offices there were only available, Clerk, Cardwell, Sir J. Young, H. Corry. The Lords contributed Aberdeen, Newcastle, Canning,[266] St. Germains and the Duke of Argyll. Such, as counted off by Mr. Gladstone, was the Peelite staff.
Graham in April made his own position definitely liberal, or 'whig and something more,' in so pronounced a way as to cut him off from the Gladstonian subdivision or main body of the Peelites. Mr. Gladstone read the speech in which this departure was taken, 'with discomfort and surprise.' He instantly went to read to Lord Aberdeen some of the more pungent passages; one or two consultations were held with Newcastle and Goulburn; and all agreed that Graham's words were decisive. 'I mentioned that some of them were coming to 5 Carlton Gardens in the course of the afternoon (April 20); and my first wish was that now Lord Aberdeen himself would go and tell them how we stood upon Graham's speech. To this they were all opposed; and they seemed to feel that as we had had no meeting yet, it would seem ungracious and unkind to an old friend to hold one by way of ovation over his departure. It was therefore agreed that I should acquaint Young it was their wish that he should tell any one who might come, that we, who were there present, looked upon our political connection with Graham as dissolved by the Carlisle speech.'[267]
ATTITUDE OF GRAHAM
The temporary parting from Graham was conducted with a degree of good feeling that is a pattern for such occasions in politics. In writing to Mr. Gladstone (Mar. 29, 1852), and speaking of his colleagues in Peel's government, Graham says, 'I have always felt that my age and position were different from theirs: that the habits and connections of my early political life, though broken, gave to me a bias, which to them was not congenial; and since the death of our great master and friend, I have always feared that the time might arrive when we must separate. You intimate the decision that party connection must no longer subsist between us. I submit to your decision with regret; but at parting I hope that you will retain towards me some feelings of esteem and regard, such as I can never cease to entertain towards you; and though political friendships are often short-lived, having known each other well, we shall continue, I trust, to maintain kindly relations. It is a pleasure to me to remember that we have no cause of complaint against each other.' 'I have to thank you,' Mr. Gladstone replies, 'for the unvarying kindness of many years, to acknowledge all the advantages I have derived from communication with you, to accept and re-echo cordially your expressions of good will, and to convey the fervent hope that no act or word of mine may ever tend to impair these sentiments in my own mind or yours.'
When the others had withdrawn, Aberdeen told Mr. Gladstone that Lord John had been to call upon him the day before for the first time, and he believed that the visit had special reference to Mr. Gladstone himself. 'The tenor of his conversation,' Mr. Gladstone reports, 'was that my opinions were quite as liberal as his; that in regard to the colonies I went beyond him; that my Naples pamphlets could have been called revolutionary if he had written them; and in regard to church matters he saw no reason why there should not be joint action, for he was cordially disposed to maintain the church of England, and so, he believed, was I.' Lord John, however, we may be sure was the last man not to know how many another element, besides agreement in opinion, decides relations of party. Personal sympathies and antipathies, hosts of indirect affinities having apparently little to do with the main trunk of the school or the faction, hosts of motives only half disclosed, or not disclosed at all even to him in whom they are at work--all these intrude in the composition and management of parties whether religious or political.
Grave discussions turned on new nicknames. The tories had greatly gained by calling themselves conservatives after 1832. The name of whig had some associations that were only less unpopular in the country than the name of tory. It was pointed out that many people would on no account join the whigs, who yet would join a government of which Russells, Greys, Howards, Cavendishes, Villierses, were members. On the other hand Graham declared that Paley's maxim about religion was just as true in politics--that men often change their creed, but not so often the name of their sect. And as to the suggestion, constantly made at all times in our politics for the benefit of waverers, of the name of liberal-conservative, Lord John caustically observed that whig has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what liberal-conservative expresses in seven, and whiggism in two syllables what conservative progress expresses in six.
MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS GROUP
Connected with all this arose a geographical question--in what quarter of the House were the Peelites to sit? Hitherto the two wings of the broken tory party, protectionist and Peelite, had sat together on the opposition benches. The change of administration in 1852 sent the protectionists over to the Speaker's right, and brought the whigs to the natural place of opposition on his left. The Peelite leaders therefore had no other choice than to take their seats below the gangway, but on which side? Such a question is always graver than to the heedless outsider it may seem, and the Peelite discussions upon it were both copious and vehement.[268] Graham at once resolved on sharing the front opposition bench with the whigs: he repeated that his own case was different from the others, because he had once been a whig himself. Herbert, who acted pretty strictly with Mr. Gladstone all this year, argued that they only held aloof from the new ministers on one question, and therefore that they ought not to sit opposite to them as adversaries, but should sit below the gangway on the ministerial side. Newcastle intimated dissent from both, looking to the formation of his virtuous and enlightened third party, but where they should sit in the meantime he did not seem to know. Mr. Gladstone expressed from the first a decided opinion in favour of going below the gangway on the opposition side. What they ought to desire was the promotion of a government conservative in its personal composition and traditions, as soon as the crisis of protection should be over. Taking a seat, he said, is an external sign and pledge that ought to follow upon full conviction of the thing it was understood to betoken; and to sit on the front opposition bench would indicate division from the conservative government as a party, while in fact they were not divided from them as a party, but only on a single question. In the end, Graham sat above the opposition gangway next to Lord John Russell and Cardwell. The Peelite body as a whole determined on giving the new government what is called a fair trial. 'Mr. Sidney Herbert and I,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'took pains to bring them together, in the recognised modes. They sat on the opposition side, but below the gangway, full, or about forty strong; and Sir James Graham, I recollect, once complimented me on the excellent appearance they had presented to him as he passed them in walking up the House.' Considerable uneasiness was felt among some of them at finding themselves neighbours on the benches to Cobden and Bright and Hume and their friends on the one hand, and 'the Irish Brass Band' on the other.
It depended entirely on the Peelites whether the new government should be permitted to conduct the business of the session (subject to conditions or otherwise), or whether they should be open to an instant attack as the enemies of free trade. The effect of such attack must have been defeat, followed by dissolution forthwith, and by the ejection of the Derby government in June (as happened in 1859) instead of in December. The tactics of giving the ministers a fair trial prevailed and were faithfully adhered to, Graham and Cardwell taking their own course. As the result of this and other conditions, for ten months ministers, greatly outnumbered, were maintained in power by the deliberate and united action of about forty Peelites.
Lord Derby had opened his administration with a pledge, as the Peelites understood, to confine himself during the session to business already open and advanced, or of an urgent character. When Mr. Disraeli gave notice of a bill to dispose of four seats which were vacant, this was regarded by them as a manner of opening new and important issues, and not within the definition that had been the condition of their provisional support.[269] 'Lord John Russell came and said to me,' says Mr. Gladstone, '"What will you do?" I admitted we were bound to act; and, joining the liberals, we threw over the proposal by a large majority. This was the only occasion of conflict that arose; and it was provoked, as we thought, by the government itself.'
FOOTNOTES:
[256] 'He had told the Queen that he thought all the offices might be filled in a respectable manner from among the members of the Peel administration. On a subsequent day both Herbert and Cardwell made out from his conversation what I did not clearly catch, namely that Lord Aberdeen himself would have acted on the Queen's wish, and that Graham had either suggested the difficulty altogether, or at any rate got it put forward into its position.' Gladstone Memo., April 22, 1851.
[257] Memorandum, dated Fasque, April 22, 1851.
[258] Memorandum, Sept. 9, 1897.
[259] Grey Papers.
[260] To Phillimore, Nov. 26, 1850.
[261] Greville, Part II, vol. iii. p. 369.
[262] Georgics, i. 493-7. 'Aye, and time will come when the husbandman with bent ploughshare upturning the clods, shall find all corroded by rusty scurf the Roman pikeheads; shall strike with heavy rake on empty helms, and gaze in wonder on giant bones cast from their broken graves.'
[263] Affirmation bill (1883) and Religious Disabilities Removal bill (1891).
[264] One of the most illustrious of the European liberals of the century wrote to Senior:--
Ce que vous me dites que le bill contre les titres ecclésiastiques ne mènera à rien, me paraît vraisemblable, grâce aux moeurs du pays. Mais pourquoi faire des lois pires que les moeurs? C'est le contraire qui devait être. Je vous avoue que j'ai été de coeur et d'esprit avec ceux qui comme Lord Aberdeen et M. Gladstone, se sont opposés au nom de la liberté et du principe même de la réforme, à ces atteintes à la fois vaines et dangereuses que le bill a portées au moins en théorie à l'indépendance de conscience. Où se réfugiera la liberté religieuse, si on la chasse de l'Angleterre?--Tocqueville, Corr. iii. p. 274.
[265] Namely Palmerston, Spring-Rice, F. Baring, Charles Wood, Hobhouse, Labouchere, Lord Howick.
[266] This, of course, was Charles John Earl Canning, third son of Canning the prime minister, Mr. Gladstone's contemporary at Eton and Christ Church, and known to history as governor-general of India in the Mutiny. Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, was cousin of George Canning.
[267] Graham spoke of himself as a tried reformer and as a member of the liberal party, and as glad to find himself the ally of so faithful a liberal and reformer as his fellow-candidate. He would not exactly pledge himself to support the ballot, but he admitted it was a hard question, and said he was not so blind that practical experience might not convince him that he was wrong. (Mar. 26, 1852.)
[268] The same question greatly exercised Mr. Gladstone's mind in 1886, for the same reason, that he again hoped for the reunion of a divided party.
[269] This was a bill to assign the four disfranchised seats for Sudbury and St. Albans to the West Riding of Yorkshire and the southern division of Lancashire. Mr. Gladstone carried the order of the day by a majority of 86 against the government.
VIII. END OF PROTECTION
(1852)
It is not too much to ask that now at least, after so much waste of public time, after ministries overturned and parties disorganised, the question of free trade should be placed high and dry on the shore whither the tide of political party strife could no longer reach it.--GLADSTONE.
The parliament was now dissolved (July 1) to decide a great question. The repeal of the corn law, the ultimate equalisation of the sugar duties, the repeal of the navigation laws, had been the three great free trade measures of the last half-dozen years, and the issue before the electors in 1852 was whether this policy was sound or unsound. Lord Derby might have faced it boldly by announcing a moderate protection for corn and for colonial sugar. Or he might have openly told the country that he had changed his mind, as Peel had changed his mind about the catholic question and about free trade, and as Mr. Disraeli was to change his mind upon franchise in 1867, and Mr. Gladstone upon the Irish church in 1868. Instead of this, all was equivocation. The Derbyite, as was well said, was protectionist in a county, neutral in a small town, free trader in a large one. He was for Maynooth in Ireland, and against it in Scotland. Mr. Disraeli did his best to mystify the agricultural elector by phrases about set-offs and compensations and relief of burdens, 'seeming to loom in the future.' He rang the changes on mysterious new principles of taxation, but what they were to be, he did not disclose. The great change since 1846 was that the working-class had become strenuous free traders. They had in earlier times never been really convinced when Cobden and Bright assured them that no fall in wages would follow the promised fall in the price of food. It was the experience of six years that convinced them. England alone had gone unhurt and unsinged through the fiery furnace of 1848, and nobody doubted that the stability of her institutions and the unity of her people were due to the repeal of bad laws, believed to raise the price of bread to the toilers in order to raise rents for territorial idlers.
AGAIN ELECTED FOR OXFORD
Long before the dissolution, it was certain that Mr. Gladstone would have to fight for his seat. His letter to the Scotch bishop (see above, p. 384), his vote for the Jews, his tenacity and vehemence in resisting the bill against the pope,--the two last exhibitions in open defiance of solemn resolutions of the university convocation itself,--had alienated some friends and inflamed all his enemies. Half a score of the Heads induced Dr. Marsham, the warden of Merton, to come out. In private qualities the warden was one of the most excellent of men, and the accident of his opposition to Mr. Gladstone is no reason why we should recall transient electioneering railleries against a forgotten worthy. The political addresses of his friends depict him. They applaud his sound and manly consistency of principle and his sober attachment to the reformed church of England, and they dwell with zest on the goodness of his heart. The issue, as they put it, was simple: 'At a time when the stability of the protestant succession, the authority of a protestant Queen, and even the Christianity of the national character, have been rudely assailed by Rome on one side, and on the other by democratic associations directed against the union of the Christian church with the British constitution--at such a time, it becomes a protestant university, from which emanates a continuous stream of instruction on all ecclesiastical and Christian questions over the whole empire, to manifest the importance which it attaches to protestant truth, by the selection of a Protestant Representative.' The teaching residents were, as always, decisively for Gladstone, and nearly all the fellows of Merton voted against their own warden. In one respect this was remarkable, for Mr. Gladstone had in 1850 (July 18) resisted the proposal for that commission of inquiry into the universities which the Oxford liberals had much at heart, and it would not have been surprising if they had held aloof from a candidate who had told the House of Commons that 'after all, science was but a small part of the business of education,'--a proposition that in one sense may be true, but applied to unreformed Oxford was the reverse of true. The non-residents were diligently and rather unscrupulously worked upon, and they made a formidable set of discordant elements. The evangelicals disliked Mr. Gladstone. The plain high-and-dry men distrusted him as what they called a sophist. Even some of the anglo-catholic men began to regard as a bad friend 'to the holy apostolic church of these realms, the author of the new theory of religious liberty' in the Scotch letter. They reproachfully insisted that had he headed a party in the House of Commons defending the church, not upon latitudinarian theories of religious liberty, not upon vague hints of a disaffected movement of the non-juring sort, still less upon romanising principles, but on the principles of the constitution, royal supremacy included, then the church would have escaped the worst that had befallen her since 1846. The minister would never have dared to force Hampden into the seat of a bishop. The privy council would never have reversed the court of arches in the Gorham case. The claim of the clergy to meet in convocation would never have been refused. The committee of council would have treated education very differently.[270] All came right in the end, however, and Mr. Gladstone was re-elected (July 14), receiving 260 votes fewer than Sir Robert Inglis, but 350 more than the warden of Merton.[271] We have to remember that he was not returned as a liberal.
II
The leaders of the sections out of office, when the general election was over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings. 'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20), 'are, I apprehend, the crisis of our fate, and will show whether we are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, honour, and resolution the drama or trilogy that has been on the stage since 1841.' He still regarded the situation as something like a reproduction of the position of the previous March. The precise number of the ministerialists could not be ascertained until tested by a motion in the House. They had gained rather more than was expected, and some put them as high as 320, others as low as 290. What was undoubted was that Lord Derby was left in a minority, and that the support of the Peelites might any hour turn it into a majority. Notwithstanding a loss or two in the recent elections, that party still numbered not far short of 40, and Mr. Gladstone was naturally desirous of retaining it in connection with himself. Most of the group were disposed rather to support a conservative government than not, unless such a government were to do, or propose, something open to strong and definite objection. At the same time what he described as the difficulty of keeping Peelism for ever so short a space upon its legs, was as obvious to him as to everybody else. 'It will be an impossible parliament,' Graham said to Mr. Gladstone (July 15), 'parties will be found too nicely balanced to render a new line of policy practicable without a fresh appeal to the electors.' Before a fresh appeal to the electors took place, the impossible parliament had tumbled into a great war.
THE NEW PARLIAMENT
When the newly chosen members met in November, Mr. Disraeli told the House of Commons that 'there was no question in the minds of ministers with respect to the result of that election: there was no doubt that there was not only not a preponderating majority in favour of a change in the laws [free trade] passed in the last few years, or even of modifying them in any degree; but that on the contrary there was a decisive opinion on the part of the country that that settlement should not be disturbed.' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (July 30) that he thought the government absolutely chained to Mr. Disraeli's next budget, and 'I, for one, am not prepared to accept him as a financial organ, or to be responsible for what he may propose in his present capacity.' Each successive speech made by Mr. Disraeli at Aylesbury he found 'more quackish in its flavour than its predecessor.' Yet action on his own part was unavoidably hampered by Oxford. 'Were I either of opinion,' he told Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 5), 'that Lord John Russell ought to succeed Lord Derby, or prepared without any further development of the plans of the government to take my stand as one of the party opposed to them, the first step which, as a man of honour, I ought to adopt, should be to resign my seat.' 'I do not mean hereby,' he adds in words that were soon to derive forcible significance from the march of events, 'that I am unconditionally committed against any alliance or fusion, but that any such alliance or fusion, to be lawful for me, must grow out of some failure of the government in carrying on public affairs, or a disapproval of its measures when they shall have been proposed.' He still, in spite of all the misdeeds of ministers during the elections, could not think so ill of them as did Lord Aberdeen.
'Protection and religious liberty,' he wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 5),'are the subjects on which my main complaints would turn; shuffling as to the former, trading on bigotry as to the latter. The shifting and shuffling that I complain of have been due partly to a miserably false position and the giddy prominence of inferior men; partly to the (surely not unexpected) unscrupulousness and second motives of Mr. Disraeli, at once the necessity of Lord Derby and his curse. I do not mean that this justifies what has been said and done; I only think it brings the case within the common limits of political misconduct. As for religious bigotry,' he continues, 'I condemn the proceedings of the present government; yet much less strongly than the unheard-of course pursued by Lord John Russell in 1850-1, the person to whom I am now invited to transfer my confidence.' Even on the superficial conversion of the Derbyites to free trade, Mr. Gladstone found a tu quoque against the whigs. 'It is, when strictly judged, an act of public immorality to form and lead an opposition on a certain plea, to succeed, and then in office to abandon it.... But in this view, the conduct of the present administration is the counterpart and copy of that of the whigs themselves in 1835, who ran Sir Robert Peel to ground upon the appropriation clause, worked it just while it suited them, and then cast it to the winds; to say nothing of their conduct on the Irish Assassination bill of 1846.'
This letter was forwarded by Aberdeen to Lord John Russell. Lord John had the peculiar temperament that is hard to agitate, but easy to nettle. So polemical a reading of former whig pranks nettled him considerably. Why, he asked, should he not say just as reasonably that Mr. Gladstone held up the whigs to odium in 1841 for stripping the farmer of adequate protection; worked the corn law of 1842 as long as it suited him; and then turned round and cast the corn law to the winds? If he gave credit to Mr. Gladstone for being sincere in 1841, 1842, and 1846, why should not Mr. Gladstone give the same credit to him? As to the principle of appropriation, he and Althorp had opposed four of their colleagues in the Grey cabinet; how could he concede to Peel what he had refused to them? As for the Irish bill on which he had turned Peel out, it was one of the worst of all coercion bills; Peel with 117 followers evidently could not carry on the government; and what sense could there have been in voting for a bad bill, in order to retain in office an impossible ministry? This smart apologia of Lord John's was hardly even plausible, much less did it cover the ground. The charge against the whigs is not that they took up appropriation, but that having taken it up they dropped it for the sake of office. Nor was it a charge that they resisted an Irish coercion bill, but that having supported it on the first reading ('worst of all coercion bills' as it was, even in the eyes of men who had passed the reckless act of 1833), they voted against it when they found that both Bentinck and the Manchester men were going to do the same, thus enabling them to turn Peel out.
CONFUSIONS OF PARTY
Sharp sallies into the past, however, did not ease the present. It was an extraordinary situation only to be described in negatives. A majority could not be found to beat the government upon a vote of want of confidence. Nobody knew who could take their places. Lord John Russell as head of a government was impossible, for his maladroit handling of papal aggression had alienated the Irish; his dealings with Palmerston had offended one powerful section of the English whigs; the Scottish whigs hated him as too much managed by the lights of the free church; and the radicals proscribed him as the chief of a patrician clique. Yet though he was impossible, he sometimes used language to the effect that for him to take any place save the first would be a personal degradation that would lower him to the level of Sidmouth or Goderich. Lord Palmerston represented the moderate centre of the liberal party. Even now he enjoyed a growing personal favour out of doors, not at all impaired by the bad terms on which he was known to be with the court, for the court was not at that date so popular an institution as it became by and by. Among other schemes of ingenious persons at this confused and broken time was a combination under Palmerston or Lansdowne of aristocratic whigs, a great contingent of Derbyites, and the Peelites; and before the elections it was true that Lord Derby had made overtures to these two eminent men. A Lansdowne combination lingered long in the mind of Lord Palmerston himself, who wished for the restoration of a whig government, but resented the idea of serving under its late head. Some dreamed that Palmerston and Disraeli might form a government on the basis of resistance to parliamentary reform. Strange rumours were even afloat that Mr. Gladstone's communications with Palmerston before he left London at the election had been intimate and frequent. 'I cannot make Gladstone out,' said Lord Malmesbury, 'he seems to me a dark horse.'
In the closing days of the autumn (September 12) Graham interpreted some obscure language of Mr. Gladstone's as meaning that if protection were renounced, as it might be, if Palmerston joined Derby and the government were reconstructed, and if Disraeli ceased to be leader, then his own relations with the government would be changed. Gladstone was so uneasy in his present position, so nice in the equipoise of his opinions that he wished to be, as he said, 'on the liberal side of the conservative party, rather than on the conservative side of the liberal party.' A little earlier than this, Lord Aberdeen and Graham agreed in thinking (August) that 'Disraeli's leadership was the great cause of Gladstone's reluctance to have anything to do with the government; ... that even if this should be removed, it would not be very easy for him to enter into partnership with them.' Mr. Gladstone himself now and always denied that the lead in the Commons or other personal question had anything to do with the balance of his opinions at the present and later moments. Those who know most of public life are best aware how great is the need in the case of public men for charitable construction of their motives and intent. Yet it would surely have been straining charity to the point of dishonour if, within two years of Peel's death, any of those who had been attached to him as master and as friend, either Mr. Gladstone or anybody else, could have looked without reprobation and aversion on the idea of cabinet intimacy with the bitterest and least sincere of all Peel's assailants.
III
OPENING SKIRMISHES
Mr. Gladstone repaired to London some weeks before the new session, and though he was not in a position to open direct relations with the government, he expressed to Lord Hardinge, with a view to its communication to Lord Derby, his strong opinion that the House of Commons would, and should, require from ministers a frank and explicit adoption of free trade through the address, and secondly, the immediate production of their financial measures. Lord Derby told Hardinge at Windsor that he thought that neither expectation was far wrong. When the Peelites met at Lord Aberdeen's to discuss tactics, they were secretly dissatisfied with the paragraphs about free trade.
Mr. Disraeli had laid down at the election the sonorous maxim, that no statesman can disregard with impunity the genius of the epoch in which he lives. And he now after the election averred that the genius of the age was in favour of free exchange. Still it was pleasanter to swallow the dose with as little public observation as possible. 'What would have been said,' cried Lord Derby in fervid remonstrance, 'if shortly after catholic emancipation and the reform bill had been admitted as settlements, their friends had come down and insisted not only that the Houses of parliament should consent to act on the new policy they had adopted, but should expressly recant their opinion in favour of the policy that had formerly prevailed? What would the friends of Sir R. Peel have said in 1835 if, when he assumed the government and when the new parliament assembled, he had been called upon to declare that the reform bill was wise, just, and necessary?' The original free traders were not disposed to connive at Derbyite operations any more than were the whigs. Notice was at once given by Mr. Villiers of a motion virtually assailing the ministers, by asserting the doctrine of free trade in terms they could not adopt. 'Now,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'we came to a case in which the liberals did that which had been done by the government in the case of the Four Seats bill; that is to say, they raised an issue which placed us against them. Lord Palmerston moved the amendment which defeated the attack, but he did this at the express request of S. Herbert and mine, and we carried the amendment to him at his house. He did not recommend any particular plan of action, and he willingly acquiesced in and adopted ours.' He said he would convey it to Disraeli, 'with whom,' he said, 'I have had communications from time to time.'
In the debate (Nov. 26) upon the two rival amendments--that of Mr. Villiers, which the ministers could not accept, and that of Palmerston, which they could--Sidney Herbert paid off some old scores in a speech full of fire and jubilation; Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, was elaborately pacific. He earnestly deprecated the language of severity and exasperation, or anything that would tend to embitter party warfare. His illustrious leader Peel, he said, did indeed look for his revenge; but for what revenge did he look? Assuredly not for stinging speeches, assuredly not for motions made in favour of his policy, if they carried pain and degradation to the minds of honourable men. Were they not celebrating the obsequies of an obnoxious policy? Let them cherish no desire to trample on those who had fought manfully and been defeated fairly. Rather let them rejoice in the great public good that had been achieved; let them take courage from the attainment of that good, for the performance of their public duty in future. All this was inspired by the strong hope of conservative reunion. 'Nervous excitement kept me very wakeful after speaking,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'the first time for many years.' (Diary.)
Villiers's motion was rejected by 336 to 256, the Peelites and Graham voting with ministers in the majority. The Peelite amendment in moderated terms, for which Palmerston stood sponsor, was then carried against the radicals by 468 to 53. For the moment the government was saved.
This evening, Mr. Gladstone writes on the next day, Nov. 27, I went to Lady Derby's evening party, where Lord Derby took me a little aside and said he must take the opportunity of thanking me for the tone of my speech last night, which he thought tended to place the discussion on its right footing. It was evident from his manner, and Lady Derby's too, that they were highly pleased with the issue of it. I simply made my acknowledgments in terms of the common kind, upon which he went on to ask me what in my view was to happen next? The great object, he said, was to get rid of all personal questions, and to consider how all those men who were united in their general views of government might combine together to carry on with effect. For himself he felt both uncertain and indifferent; he might be able to carry on the government or he might not; but the question lay beyond that, by what combination or arrangement of a satisfactory nature, in the event of his displacement, the administration of public affairs could be conducted.
To this I replied, that it seemed to me that our situation (meaning that of Herbert, Goulburn, and others, with myself) in relation to his government remained much as it was in March and April last.... We have to expect your budget, and the production of that is the next step. He replied that he much desired to see whether there was a possibility of any rapprochement, and seemed to glance at personal considerations as likely perhaps to stand in the way [Disraeli, presumably]. I said in reply, that no doubt there were many difficulties of a personal nature to be faced in conceiving of any ministerial combination when we looked at the present House of Commons: many men of power and eminence, but great difficulties arising from various causes, present and past relations, incompatibilities, peculiar defects of character, or failure in bringing them into harmony. I said that, as to relations of parties, circumstances were often stronger than the human will; that we must wait for their guiding, and follow it.... He said, rather decidedly, that he assented to the truth of this doctrine. He added, 'I think Sidney said more last night than he intended, did he not?' I answered, 'You mean as to one particular expression or sentence?' He rejoined, 'Yes.'[272] I said, 'I have had no conversation with him on it, but I think it very probable that he grew warm and went beyond his intention at that point; at the same time, I think I ought to observe to you that I am confident that expression was occasioned by one particular preceding speech in the debate.' He gave a significant assent, and seemed to express no surprise.
IV
MR. DISRAELI'S PROPOSALS
The respite for ministers was short. The long day of shadowy promises and delusive dreams was over; and the oracular expounder of mysteries was at last gripped by the hard realities of the taxes. Whigs and Peelites, men who had been at the exchequer and men who hoped to be, were all ready at last to stalk down their crafty quarry. Without delay Disraeli presented his budget (Dec. 3). As a private member in opposition he had brought forward many financial proposals, but it now turned out that none of them was fit for real use. With a serene audacity that accounts for some of Mr. Gladstone's repulsion, he told the House that he had greater subjects to consider 'than the triumph of obsolete opinions.' His proposals dazzled for a day, and then were seen to be a scheme of illusory compensations and dislocated expedients. He took off half of the malt-tax and half of the hop duty, and in stages reduced the tea duty from two shillings and twopence to one shilling. More important, he broke up the old frame of the income-tax by a variation of its rates, and as for the house-tax, he doubled its rate and extended its area. In one of his fragmentary notes, Mr. Gladstone says:--
Having run away from protection, as it was plain from the first they would do, they had little to offer the land, but that little their minority was ready to accept. It was a measure essentially bad to repeal half the malt duty. But the flagrantly vicious element in Disraeli's budget was his proposal to reduce the income-tax on schedule D. to fivepence in the pound, leaving the other schedules at sevenpence. This was no compensation to the land; but, inasmuch as to exempt one is to tax another, it was a distinct addition to the burdens borne by the holders of visible property. It was on Disraeli's part a most daring bid for the support of the liberal majority, for we all knew quite well that the current opinion of the whigs and liberals was in favour of this scheme; which, on the other hand, was disapproved by sound financiers. The authority of Pitt and Peel, and then my own study of the subject, made me believe that it was impracticable, and probably meant the disruption of the tax, with confusion in finance, as an immediate sequitur. What angered me was that Disraeli had never examined the question. And I afterwards found that he had not even made known his intentions to the board of inland revenue. The gravity of the question thus raised made me feel that the day was come to eject the government.
ATTACK ON THE BUDGET
It was upon the increase of the house-tax that the great battle was finally staked. Mr. Gladstone's letters to his wife at Hawarden bring the rapid and excited scenes vividly before us.
6 Carlton Gardens, Dec. 3, 1852.--I write from H. of C. at 4½ just expecting the budget. All seem to look for startling and dangerous proposals. You will read them in the papers of to-morrow, be they what they may. If there is anything outrageous, we may protest at once; but I do not expect any extended debate to-night.... The rush for places in the H. of C. is immense.
Monday, Dec. 6.--On Saturday, in the early part of the day, I had a return, perhaps caused by the damp relaxing weather, of the neuralgic pain in my face, and in the afternoon a long sitting at Lord Aberdeen's about the budget, during which strange to say my pain disappeared, but which kept me past the ordinary post hour. These were the causes of your having no letter. The said budget will give rise to serious difficulties. It is plain enough that when its author announced something looming in the distance, he did not mean this plan but something more extensive. Even his reduced scheme, however, includes fundamental faults of principle which it is impossible to overlook or compound with. The first day of serious debate on it will be Friday next, and a vote will be taken either then or on Monday.
Dec. 8.--Be sure to read Lord Derby's speech on Monday. His reference to the cause of his quarrel with Lord George Bentinck was most striking, and is interpreted as a rap at Disraeli.[273] I have had a long sit with Lord Aberdeen to-day talking over possibilities. The government, I believe, talk confidently about the decision on the house-tax, but I should doubt whether they are right. Meantime I am convinced that Disraeli's is the least conservative budget I have ever known.
Dec. 14.--I need hardly say the vision of going down to-morrow has been dissolved. It has been arranged that I am not to speak until the close of the debate; and it is considered almost certain to go on till Monday. Ministers have become much less confident, but I understand that some, I know not how many, of Lord John's men are not to be relied on. Whether they win or not (I expect the latter, but my opinion is naught) they cannot carry this house-tax nor their budget. But the mischief of the proposals they have launched will not die with them.
Dec. 15.--I write in great haste. Though it is Wednesday, I have been down at the House almost all day to unravel a device of Disraeli's about the manner in which the question is to be put, by which he means to catch votes; and I think after full consultation with Mahon and Wilson Patten, that this will be accomplished. The debate may close to-morrow night. I am sorry to say I have a long speech fermenting in me, and I feel as a loaf might in the oven. The government, it is thought, are likely to be beaten.
Dec. 16.--I have been engaged in the House till close on post time. Disraeli trying to wriggle out of the question, and get it put upon words without meaning, to enable more to vote as they please, i.e. his men or those favourably inclined to him. But he is beaten in this point, and we have now the right question before us. It is not now quite certain whether we shall divide to-night; I hope we may, for it is weary work sitting with a speech fermenting inside one.[274]
Dec. 18.--I have never gone through so exciting a passage of parliamentary life. The intense efforts which we made to obtain, and the government to escape, a definite issue, were like a fox chase, and prepared us all for excitement. I came home at seven, dined, read for a quarter of an hour, and actually contrived (only think) to sleep in the fur cloak for another quarter of an hour; got back to the House at nine. Disraeli rose at 10.20 [Dec. 16], and from that moment, of course, I was on tenterhooks, except when his superlative acting and brilliant oratory from time to time absorbed me and made me quite forget that I had to follow him. He spoke until one. His speech as a whole was grand; I think the most powerful I ever heard from him. At the same time it was disgraced by shameless personalities and otherwise; I had therefore to begin by attacking him for these. There was a question whether it would not be too late, but when I heard his personalities I felt there was no choice but to go on. My great object was to show the conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering them, and this I have the happiness of believing that in some degree I effected; for while among some there was great heat and a disposition to interrupt me when they could, I could see in the faces and demeanour of others quite other feelings expressed. But it was a most difficult operation, and altogether it might have been better effected. The House has not I think been so much excited for years. The power of his speech, and the importance of the issue, combined with the lateness of the hour, which always operates, were the causes. My brain was strung very high, and has not yet quite got back to calm, but I slept well last night. On Thursday night [i.e. Friday morning] after two hours of sleep, I awoke, and remembered a gross omission I had made, which worked upon me so that I could not rest any more. And still, of course, the time is an anxious one, and I wake with the consciousness of it, but I am very well and really not unquiet. When I came home from the House, I thought it would be good for me to be mortified. Next morning I opened the Times, which I thought you would buy, and was mortified when I saw it did not contain my speech but a mangled abbreviation. Such is human nature, at least mine. But in the Times of to-day you will see a very curious article descriptive of the last scene of the debate. It has evidently been written by a man who must have seen what occurred, or been informed by those who did see. He by no means says too much in praise of Disraeli's speech. I am told he is much stung by what I said. I am very sorry it fell to me to say it; God knows I have no wish to give him pain; and really with my deep sense of his gifts I would only pray they might be well used.
THE TWO ANTAGONISTS
The writer in the Times to whom the victorious orator here refers describes how, 'like two of Sir Walter Scott's champions, these redoubtable antagonists gathered up all their force for the final struggle, and encountered each other in mid-career; how, rather equal than like, each side viewed the struggle of their chosen athletes, as if to prognosticate from the war of words the fortunes of two parties so nicely balanced and marshalled in apparently equal array. Mr. Disraeli's speech,' he says, 'was in every respect worthy of his oratorical reputation. The retorts were pointed and bitter, the hits telling, the sarcasm keen, the argument in many places cogent, in all ingenious, and in some convincing. The merits were counterbalanced by no less glaring defects of tone, temper, and feeling. In some passages invective was pushed to the limit of virulence, and in others, meant no doubt to relieve them by contrast, the coarser stimulants to laughter were very freely applied. Occasionally whole sentences were delivered with an artificial voice and a tone of studied and sardonic bitterness, peculiarly painful to the audience, and tending greatly to diminish the effect of this great intellectual and physical effort. The speech of Mr. Gladstone was in marked contrast. It was characterised throughout by the most earnest sincerity. It was pitched in a high tone of moral feeling--now rising to indignation, now sinking to remonstrance--which was sustained throughout without flagging and without effort. The language was less ambitious, less studied, but more natural and flowing than that of Mr. Disraeli; and though commencing in a tone of stern rebuke, it ended in words of almost pathetic expostulation.... That power of persuasion which seems entirely denied to his antagonist, Mr. Gladstone possesses to great perfection, and to judge by the countenances of his hearers, those powers were very successfully exerted. He had, besides, the immense advantage resulting from the tone of moral superiority which he assumed and successfully maintained, and which conciliated to him the goodwill of his audience in a degree never attained by the most brilliant sallies of his adversary, and when he concluded the House might well feel proud of him and of themselves.'
A violent thunderstorm raged during the debate, but the excited senators neither noticed the flashes of lightning nor heard a tremendous shock of thunder. A little before four o'clock in the morning (Dec. 17), the division was taken, and ministers were beaten by nineteen (305 to 286). 'There was an immense crowd,' says Macaulay, 'a deafening cheer when Hayter took the right hand of the row of tellers, and a still louder cheer when the numbers were read.'[275]
DEFEAT OF GOVERNMENT
A small incident occurred a few nights later to show that it was indeed high time to abate the passions of these six years and more. A politician of secondary rank had been accused of bribery at Derby, and a band of tory friends thought the moment opportune to give him a banquet at the Carlton. Mr. Gladstone in another room was harmlessly reading the paper. Presently in came the revellers, began to use insulting language, and finally vowed that he ought to be pitched headlong out of the window into the Reform. Mr. Gladstone made some courteous reply, but as the reporter truly says, courtesy to gentry in this humour was the casting of pearls before swine. Eventually they ordered candles in another room, and left him to himself.[276] 'You will perhaps,' he wrote to his wife, 'see an account of a row at the Carlton in which I have taken no harm.' The affair indeed was trivial, but it illustrates a well-known and striking reflection of Cornewall Lewis upon the assault perpetrated on Sumner in the Senate at Washington by Brooks. 'That outrage,' he said, 'is no proof of brutal manners or low morality in Americans; it is the first blow in a civil war.... If Peel had proposed a law not only reducing rents, but annihilating them, instead of being attacked by a man of words like Disraeli, he would have been attacked with physical arguments by some man of blows.'[277]
In point of numbers the stroke given to protection was not tremendous, but as the history of half a century has shown, it was adequate and sufficient, and Lord Derby at once resigned. He did not take his defeat well. 'Strange to say,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his wife, 'Lord Derby has been making a most petulant and intemperate speech in the House of Lords on his resignation; such that Newcastle was obliged to rise after him and contradict the charge of combination; while nothing could be better in temper, feeling, and judgment than Disraeli's farewell.' Derby angrily divided the combination that had overthrown him into, first, various gradations of liberalism from 'high aristocratic and exclusive whigs down to the extremest radical theorists'; second, Irish ultramontanes; and lastly, a party of some thirty or thirty-five gentlemen 'of great personal worth, of great eminence and respectability, possessing considerable official experience and a large amount of talent--who once professed, and I believe do still profess, conservative opinions.'
Mr. Disraeli, on the contrary, with infinite polish and grace asked pardon for the flying words of debate, and drew easy forgiveness from the member whom a few hours before he had mocked as 'a weird sibyl'; the other member whom he would not say he greatly respected, but whom he greatly regarded; and the third member whom he bade learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and insolence is not invective. Lord John Russell congratulated him on the ability and the gallantry with which he had conducted the struggle, and so the curtain fell. The result, as the great newspaper put it with journalistic freedom, was 'not merely the victory of a battle, but of a war; not a reverse, but a conquest. The vanquished have no principles which they dare to assert, no leaders whom they can venture to trust.'
FOOTNOTES:
[270] Charles Wordsworth, Letter to Mr. Gladstone, 1852, p. 50.
[271] Inglis, 1368; Gladstone, 1108; Marsham, 758.
[272] I suppose this refers to a passage about Mr. Disraeli:--'For my part I acquit the chancellor of the exchequer, so far as his own convictions are concerned, of the charge of having ever been a protectionist. I never for one moment thought he believed in the least degree in protection. I do not accuse him of having forgotten what he said or what he believed in those years. I only accuse him of having forgotten now what he then wished it to appear that he believed.' The same speech contains a whimsical reason why the Jews make no converts, which the taste of our more democratic House would certainly not tolerate.
[273] 'The only serious misunderstanding I ever had with my noble and lamented friend Lord George Bentinck, which I am happy to say was thoroughly removed before his untimely death--was upon a full and frank expression of my opinion that nothing could be more unfitting nor more impolitic than to load with terms of vituperation those from whom we are compelled conscientiously to differ' (Dec. 6).
[274] 'We had a preliminary debate to have the whole resolution put, instead of the preamble only, which was ultimately agreed to, and placed the question more fairly before the public, Disraeli making the extraordinary declaration that though the proposal was for doubling the house-tax, nobody was bound by that vote to do so. It was an attempt at a shuffle in order to catch votes from his own people, and to a certain extent it succeeded.'--Halifax Papers, 1852.
[275] Trevelyan, ii. p. 331.
[276] Times, Dec. 23, 1852.
[277] Letters, p. 315.
Book IV
1853-1859
I. THE COALITION
(1853)
The materials necessary for a sound judgment of facts are not found in the success or failure of undertakings; exact knowledge of the situation that has provoked them forms no inconsiderable element of history.--METTERNICH.
England was unconsciously on the eve of a violent break in the peace that had been her fortunate lot for nearly forty years. To the situation that preceded this signal event, a judicious reader may well give his attention. Some of the particulars may seem trivial. In countries governed by party, what those out of the actualities of the fray reckon trivial often count for much, and in the life of a man destined to be a conspicuous party leader, to pass them by would be to leave out real influences.
The first experiment in providing the country with a tory government had failed. That alliance between whig and Peelite which Lord John the year before had been unable to effect, had become imperative, and at least a second experiment was to be tried. The initial question was who should be head of the new government. In August, Lord Aberdeen had written to Mr. Gladstone in anticipation of the Derbyite defeat: 'If high character and ability only were required, you would be the person; but I am aware that for the present at least this would not be practicable. Whether it would be possible for Newcastle or me to undertake the concern is more than I can say.' Other good reasons apart, it is easy to see that Mr. Gladstone's attitude in things ecclesiastical put him out of court, and though he had made a conspicuous mark not only, as Lord Aberdeen said, by character and ability but by liberality of view especially in the region of colonial reform, still he had as yet had no good opportunity for showing an independent capacity for handling great affairs.
Not any less impossible was Lord John. Shortly before the occasion arose, a whig intimate told him plainly that reconstruction on the basis of his old government was out of the question. 'Lord John's answer was a frank acceptance of that opinion; and he was understood to say that the composition of the next government must be mainly from the ranks of the Peelites; he evidently looked forward to being a member of it, but not the head. When various persons were named as possible heads, Lord Aberdeen was distinctly approved, Graham was distinctly rejected, Newcastle was mentioned without any distinct opinion expressed. We [Aberdeen and Gladstone] were both alike at a loss to know whether Lord John had changed his mind, or had all along since his resignation been acting with this view. All his proceedings certainly seem to require an opposite construction, and to contemplate his own leadership.'[278]
Lord Palmerston was determined not to serve again under a minister who had with his own hand turned him out of office, and of whose unfitness for the first post he was at the moment profoundly convinced. He told a Peelite friend that Lord John's love of popularity would always lead him into scrapes, and that his way of suddenly announcing new policies (Durham letter and Edinburgh letter) without consulting colleagues, could not be acquiesced in. Besides the hostility of Palmerston and his friends, any government with the writer of the Durham letter at its head must have the hostility of the Irishmen to encounter. The liberal attitude of the Peelites on the still smouldering question of papal aggression gave Aberdeen a hold on the Irish such as nobody else could have.
A HARASSED WEEK
Another man of great eminence in the whig party might have taken the helm, but Lord Lansdowne was seventy-two, and was supposed to have formally retired from office for ever. The leader of the Peelites visited the patrician whig at Lansdowne House, and each begged the other to undertake the uncoveted post. Lord Aberdeen gave a slow assent. Previously understanding from Lord John that he would join, Aberdeen accepted the Queen's commission to form a government. He had a harassed week. At first the sun shone. 'Lord John consents,' wrote Mr. Gladstone to his wife at Hawarden, 'and has behaved very well. Palmerston refuses, which is a serious blow. To-morrow I think we shall get to detailed arrangements, about which I do not expect extraordinary difficulty. But I suppose Palmerston is looking to become the leader of a Derby opposition; and without him, or rather with him between us and the conservatives, I cannot but say the game will be a very difficult one to play. It is uncertain whether I shall be chancellor of the exchequer or secretary for the colonies; one of the two I think certainly; and the exchequer will certainly come to Graham or me.'
Within a few hours angry squalls all but capsized the boat. Lord John at first had sought consolation in an orthodox historical parallel--the case of Mr. Fox, though at the head of the largest party, leading the Commons under Lord Grenville as head of the government. Why should he, then, refuse a position that Fox had accepted? But friends, often in his case the most mischievous of advisers, reminded him what sort of place he would hold in a cabinet in which the chief posts were filled by men not of his own party. Lord John himself thought, from memories of Bishop Hampden and other ecclesiastical proceedings, that Mr. Gladstone would be his sharpest opponent. Then as the days passed, he found deposition from first place to second more bitter than he had expected. Historic and literary consolation can seldom be a sure sedative against the stings of political ambition. He changed his mind every twelve hours, and made infinite difficulties. When these were with much travail appeased, difficulties were made on behalf of others. The sacred caste and their adherents were up in arms, and a bitter cry arose that all the good things were going to the Peelites, only the leavings to the whigs. Lord John doubtless remembered what Fox had said when the ministry of All the Talents was made,--'We are three in a bed.' Disraeli now remarked sardonically, 'The cake is too small.' To realise the scramble, the reader may think of the venerable carp that date from Henry iv. and Sully, struggling for bread in the fish-ponds of the palace of Fontainebleau. The whigs of this time were men of intellectual refinement; they had a genuine regard for good government, and a decent faith in reform; but when we chide the selfishness of machine politicians hunting office in modern democracy, let us console ourselves by recalling the rapacity of our oligarchies. 'It is melancholy,' muses Sir James Graham this Christmas in his journal, 'to see how little fitness for office is regarded on all sides, and how much the public employments are treated as booty to be divided among successful combatants.'
From that point of view, the whig case was strong. 'Of 330 members of the House of Commons,' wrote Lord John to Aberdeen, '270 are whig and radical, thirty are Irish brigade, thirty are Peelites. To this party of thirty you propose to give seven seats in cabinet, to the whigs and radicals five, to Lord Palmerston one.' In the end there were six whigs, as many Peelites, and one radical. The case of four important offices out of the cabinet was just as heartrending: three were to go to the thirty Peelites, and one to the two hundred and seventy just persons. 'I am afraid,' cried Lord John, 'that the liberal party will never stand this, and that the storm will overwhelm me.' Whig pride was deeply revolted at subjection to a prime minister whom in their drawing-rooms they mocked as an old tory. In the Aberdeen cabinet, says Mr. Gladstone, 'it may be thought that the whigs, whose party was to supply five-sixths or seven-eighths of our supporters, had less than their due share of power. It should, however, be borne in mind that they had at this juncture in some degree the character of an used up, and so far a discredited, party. Without doubt they were sufferers from their ill-conceived and mischievous Ecclesiastical Titles Act. Whereas we, the Peelites had been for six and a half years out of office, and had upon us the gloss of freshness.'
CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER
Lord Palmerston refused to join the coalition, on the honourable ground that for many years he and Aberdeen had stood at the antipodes to one another in the momentous department of foreign affairs. In fact he looked in another direction. If the Aberdeen-Russell coalition broke down, either before they began the journey or very soon after, Lord Derby might come back with a reconstructed team, with Palmerston leading in the Commons a centre party that should include the Peelites. He was believed to have something of this kind in view when he consented to move the amendment brought to him by Gladstone and Herbert in November, and he was bitterly disappointed at the new alliance of that eminent pair with Lord John. With the tories he was on excellent terms. Pall Mall was alive with tales of the anger and disgust of the Derbyites against Mr. Disraeli, who had caused them first to throw over their principles and then to lose their places. The county constituencies and many conservative boroughs were truly reported to be sick of the man who had promised marvels as 'looming in the future,' and then like a bad jockey had brought the horse upon its knees. Speculative minds cannot but be tempted to muse upon the difference that the supersession by Lord Palmerston of this extraordinary genius at that moment might have made, both to the career of Disraeli himself, and to the nation of which he one day became for a space the supreme ruler. Cobden and Bright let it be understood that they were not candidates for office. 'Our day has not come yet,' Bright said to Graham, and the representative of the radicals in the cabinet was Sir William Molesworth. In their newspaper the radicals wrote rather stiffly and jealously. In the end Lord Palmerston changed his mind and joined.
It was three days before the post of the exchequer was filled. Mr. Gladstone in his daily letter to Hawarden writes: 'At headquarters I understand they say, "Mr. G. destroyed the budget, so he ought to make a new one." However we are trying to press Graham into that service.' The next day it was settled. From Osborne a letter had come to Lord Aberdeen: 'The Queen hopes it may be possible to give the chancellorship of the exchequer to Mr. Gladstone, and to secure the continuance of Lord St. Leonards as chancellor.'[279] Notwithstanding the royal wish, 'we pressed it,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'on Graham, but he refused point blank.' Graham, as we know, was the best economist in the administration of Peel, and Mr. Gladstone's frequent references to him in later times on points of pure finance show the value set upon his capacity in this department. His constitutional dislike of high responsibility perhaps intervened. Mr. Gladstone himself would cheerfully have returned to the colonial office, but the whigs suspected the excesses of his colonial liberalism, and felt sure that he would sow the tares of anglicanism in these virgin fields. So before Christmas day came, Mr. Gladstone accepted what was soon in influence the second post in the government,[280] and became chancellor of the exchequer.
Say what they would, the parliamentary majority was unstable as water. His own analysis of the House of Commons gave 270 British liberals, not very compact, and the radical wing of them certain to make occasions of combination against the government, especially in finance. The only other party avowing themselves general supporters of the government were the forty Peelites--for at that figure he estimated them. The ministry, therefore, were in a minority, and a portion even of that minority not always to be depended on. The remainder of the House he divided into forty Irish brigaders, bent on mischief; from fifty to eighty conservatives, not likely to join in any factious vote, and not ill-disposed to the government, but not to be counted on either for attendance or confidence; finally, the Derby opposition, from 200 to 250, ready to follow Mr. Disraeli into any combination for turning out the government. 'It thus appears, if we strike out the fifty conservatives faintly favourable, that we have a government with 310 supporters, liable on occasions, which frequently arise, to heavy deductions; with an opposition of 290 (Derbyites and brigaders), most of them ready to go all lengths. Such a government cannot be said to possess the confidence of the House of Commons in the full constitutional sense.'
EARLY POSITION OF THE MINISTRY
The general course seemed smooth. Palmerston had gone to the harmless department of home affairs. The international airs were still. But a cabinet finally composed of six Peelites, six whigs, and a radical, was evidently open to countless internal hazards. 'We shall all look strangely at each other,' one of them said, 'when we first meet in cabinet.' Graham describes them as a powerful team that would need good driving. 'There are some odd tempers and queer ways among them; but on the whole they are gentlemen, and they have a perfect gentleman at their head, who is honest and direct, and who will not brook insincerity in others.' The head of the new government described it to a friend as 'a great experiment, hitherto unattempted, and of which the success must be considered doubtful, but in the meantime the public had regarded it with singular favour.' To the King of the Belgians, Aberdeen wrote: 'England will occupy her true position in Europe as the constant advocate of moderation and peace'; and to Guizot, that 'the position which we desired so see England occupy among the nations of Europe, was to act the part of a moderator, and by reconciling differences and removing misunderstandings to preserve harmony and peace.'
I have seen no more concise analysis of the early position of the coalition government than that by one of the ablest and most experienced members of the whig party, not himself a candidate for office:--
'It is strong,' Sir Francis Baring wrote to his son, 'in personal talent; none that I can remember stronger, though the head of the government is untried. It is strong in one point of view: as to public feeling. The country, I believe, wanted a moderate liberal government, and a fusion of liberal conservatives and moderate liberals. It is weak in the feelings of the component parts: Palmerston is degraded, Gladstone will struggle for power, Lord John cannot be comfortable. It is weak in the discordant antecedents of the cabinet; they must all make some sacrifices and work uncomfortably. It is weak in the support. I do not mean the numbers, but the class of supporters. The Peelites are forty; they will have the liberals on the one side and the conservatives on the other. The whigs of the cabinet will be anxious to satisfy the former; the Peelites (Gladstone especially) the other. They are weak in their church views. The protestants look on those who voted against the Aggression bill with distrust; the evangelicals on Gladstone and S. Herbert with dislike. I don't pretend to be a prophet, but it is always well to put down what you expect and to compare these expectations with results. My conjecture is that Gladstone will, before long, leave the government or that he will break it up.'[281]
Long afterwards Mr. Gladstone himself said this of the coalition:--
I must say of this cabinet of Lord Aberdeen's that in its deliberations it never exhibited the marks of its dual origin. Sir W. Molesworth, its radical member, seemed to be practically rather nearer in colour to the Peelites than to the whigs. There were some few idiosyncrasies without doubt. Lord Palmerston, who was home secretary, had in him some tendencies which might have been troublesome, but for a long time were not so. It is, for instance, a complete error to suppose that he asked the cabinet to treat the occupation of the Principalities as a casus belli. Lord Russell shook the position of Lord Aberdeen by action most capricious and unhappy. But with the general course of affairs this had no connection; and even in the complex and tortuous movements of the Eastern negotiations, the cabinet never fell into two camps. That question and the war were fatal to it. In itself I hardly ever saw a cabinet with greater promise of endurance.
II
OPPOSITION AT OXFORD
Acceptance of office vacated the Oxford seat, and the day after Christmas a thunderbolt fell upon the new chancellor of the exchequer from his friend, the militant archdeacon of Taunton. 'I wish to use few words,' Denison wrote, 'where every word I write is so bitterly distressing to me, and must be little less so, I cannot doubt, to yourself and to many others whom I respect and love. I have to state to you, as one of your constituents, that from this time I can place no confidence in you as representative of the university of Oxford, or as a public man.' Mr. Gladstone's protestations that church patronage would be as safe in Lord Aberdeen's hands as in Lord Derby's; that his own past history dispensed with the necessity of producing other assurances of his own fidelity; that his assumption of office could not shake it--all these were vain in face of the staring and flagrant fact that he would henceforth be the intimate and partner in council of Lord John Russell, the latitudinarian, the erastian, the appropriationist, the despoiler; and worse still, of Molesworth, sometimes denounced as a Socinian, sometimes as editor of the atheist Hobbes, but in either case no fit person to dispense the church patronage of the duchy of Lancaster. Only a degree less shocking was the thought of the power of filling bishoprics and deaneries by a prime minister himself a presbyterian. No guarantee that the member for Oxford might have taken against aggression upon the church, or for the concession of her just claims, was worth a feather when weighed against the mere act of a coalition so deadly as this.
It was an awkward fact for Mr. Gladstone's canvassers that Lord Derby had stated that his defeat was the result of a concert or combination between the Peelites and other political parties. Mr. Gladstone himself saw no reason why this should cause much soreness among his Oxford supporters. 'No doubt,' he said, 'they will remember that I avowed before and during the last election a wish to find the policy and measures of the government such as would justify me in giving them my support. That wish I sincerely entertained. But the main question was whether the concert or combination alleged to have taken place for the purpose of ejecting Lord Derby's government from office was fact or fiction. I have not the slightest hesitation in stating to you that it is a fiction. Evidence for the only presumption in its favour was this--that we voted against the budget of Mr. Disraeli in strict conformity with every principle of finance we had professed through our political lives and with the policy of former finance ministers from the time of Mr. Pitt, against the "new principles" and "new policies" which Mr. Disraeli declared at Aylesbury his intention to submit to the House of Commons--a pledge which I admit that he completely redeemed.'[282]
All this was true enough, but what people saw was that the first fruits of the victory were a coalition with the whigs, who by voting with Villiers had from the first shown their predetermination against ministers. As Northcote humorously said, Mary Stuart could never get over the presumption which her marriage with Bothwell immediately raised as to the nature of her previous connection with him. It is hard to deny that, as the world goes, the Oxford tories clerical and lay might think they had a case. Lord Derby was the tory minister, and Mr. Gladstone had been a chief instrument in turning him out. That was the one salient fact, and the political flock is often apt to see a thing with a more single eye than their shepherds.
A candidate was found in Mr. Perceval, son of the tory prime minister who had met a tragic death forty years before. The country clergy were plied with instigations and solicitations, public and private. No absurdity was too monstrous to set afloat. Mr. Gladstone had seceded to the episcopal church of Scotland. He had long ceased to be a communicant. He was on close and intimate terms with Cardinal Wiseman. He had incited the pope to persecute protestants at Florence. In this vein a flight of angry articles and circulars descended on every parsonage where there was an Oxford master of arts with his name still on the university books. At the beginning the enemy by a rush were in a majority, but they were speedily beaten out of it. At the end of six days, in spite of frenzied efforts, no more than 1330 votes out of a constituency of 3600 had been recorded. Still the indomitable men insisted on the legal right of keeping the poll open for fifteen days, and learned persons even gloomily hinted that the time might be extended to forty days. In the end (Jan. 20) Mr. Gladstone had 1022 votes against Perceval's 898, or a narrow majority of 124. The tory press justly consoled themselves by calculating that such a majority was only six per cent. of the votes polled, but they were very angry with the failure of the protestant electors in doing their patriotic duty against 'the pro-romanist candidate.' The organ of the Peelites, on the other hand, was delighted at the first verdict thus gained from the most influential constituency in Great Britain, in favour of the new experiment of conservative-liberalism and wise and rational progress. Graham said, and truly, that 'though Gladstone's defeat at that precise juncture would have been a misfortune, yet for his own sake hereafter, emancipation from the thraldom of that constituency would be a blessing. It is a millstone under which even Peel would have sunk.'
Was Mr. Gladstone right in his early notion of himself as a slow moving mind? Would it be true to say that, compared with Pitt, for instance, he ripened slowly? Or can we accurately describe him as having in any department of life, thought, knowledge, feeling, been precocious? Perhaps not. To speak of slowness in a man of such magical rapidity of intellectual apprehension would be indeed a paradox, but we have seen already how when he is walking in the middle path of his years, there is a sense in which he was slow in character and motion. Slowness explains some qualities in his literary and oratorical form, which was often, and especially up to our present period, vague, ambiguous, and obscure. The careless and the uncharitable set all down to sophistry. Better observers perceived that his seeming mystifications were in fact the result of a really embarrassed judgment. They pointed out that where the way was clear, as in free trade, colonial government, dissenters' chapels, Jewish disabilities, catholic bishoprics, nobody could run more straight, at higher speed, or with more powerful stride. They began to say that in spite of Russells, Palmerstons, Grahams, Mr. Gladstone, after all, was the least unlikely of them 'to turn out a thoroughgoing man of the people.' These anticipations of democracy there is no sign that Mr. Gladstone himself, in the smallest degree, shared. The newspapers, meanwhile, were all but unanimous in declaring that 'if experience, talent, industry, and virtue, are the attributes required for the government of this empire,' then the coalition government would be one of the best that England had ever seen.
III
Mr. Gladstone's dislike and distrust of the intrusion not only of the rude secular arm, but of anything temporal into the sphere of spiritual things, had been marked enough in the old days of battle at Oxford between the tractarians and the heads, though it was less manifest in the Gorham case. In 1853 he found occasion for an honourable exhibition of the same strong feeling. Maurice had got into trouble with the authorities at King's College by essays in which he was taken to hold that the eternity of the future torment of the wicked is a superstition not warranted by the Thirty-nine Articles. A movement followed in the council of the college to oust Maurice from his professorial chair. Mr. Gladstone took great pains to avert the stroke, and here is the story as he told it to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton:--
To Lord Lyttelton.
Oct. 29, 1853.--I remained in town last Thursday in order to attend the council of K.C., and as far as I could, to see fair play. I was afraid of a very precipitous proceeding, and I regret to say my fears have been verified. The motion carried was the Bishop of London's, but I am bound to say he was quite willing to have waived it for another course, and the proceeding is due to a body of laymen chiefly lords. The motion carried is to the effect that the statements on certain points contained in Maurice's last essay are of a dangerous character, and that his connection with the theology of the school ought not to continue. I moved as an amendment that the bishop be requested to appoint competent theologians who should personally examine how far the statements of Mr. Maurice were conformable to or at variance with the three creeds and the formularies of the church of England, and should make a report upon them, and that the bishop should be requested to communicate with the council. For myself I find in different parts of what Maurice has written things that I cannot, and I am quite certain the council had not been able to, reconcile. This consideration alone seemed to me to show that they were not in a condition to proceed with a definite judgment. I do not feel sufficiently certain what his view as a whole may be, even if I were otherwise competent to judge whether it is within or beyond the latitude allowed by the church in this matter. And independently of all this I thought that even decency demanded of the council, acting perforce in a judicial capacity, that they should let the accused person know in the most distinct terms for what he was dismissed, and should show that they had dismissed him, if at all, only after using greater pains to ascertain that his opinions were in real contrariety to some article of the faith. I also cherished the hope, founded on certain parts of what he has said, that his friends might be able in the meantime to arrange some formula concordiæ which might avert the scandal and mischief of the dismissal. Sir J. Patteson, Sir B. Brodie, and Mr. Green supported the amendment, but the majority went the other way, and much was I grieved at it. I am not inclined to abate the dogmatic profession of the church--on the contrary, nothing would induce me to surrender the smallest fraction of it; but while jealous of its infraction in any particular, I am not less jealous of the obtrusion of any private or local opinion into the region of dogma; and above all I hold that there should be as much rigour in a trial of this kind, irrespective of the high character and distinguished powers of the person charged in this particular case, as if he were indicted for murder.[283]
DEFENCE OF MAURICE
Long afterwards, when the alleged heretic was dead, Mr. Gladstone wrote of him to Mr. Macmillan (April 11, 1884): 'Maurice is indeed a spiritual splendour, to borrow the phrase of Dante about St. Dominic. His intellectual constitution had long been, and still is, to me a good deal of an enigma. When I remember what is said and thought of him, and by whom, I feel that this must be greatly my own fault.' Some years after the affair at King's College, Maurice was appointed to Vere Street, and the attack upon him was renewed. Mr. Gladstone was one of those who signed an address of recognition and congratulation.
FOOTNOTES:
[278] Memo, by Mr. Gladstone of a conversation with Aberdeen.
[279] The practical impossibility of retaining this learned man, the Derbyite chancellor, upon the coalition woolsack, is an illustration of the tenacity of the modern party system.
[280] It was not until the rise of Mr. Gladstone that a chancellor of the exchequer, not being prime minister, stood at this high level.
[281] From the Baring papers, for which I am indebted to the kindness of Lord Northbrook.
[282] Times, December 23, 1852.
[283] See Life of Maurice, ii. p. 195; Life of Wilberforce, ii. pp. 208-218. See also Mr. Gladstone's letter to Bishop Hampden, 1856, above p. 168.
Chapter II
THE TRIUMPH OF 1853
(1853)
We have not sought to evade the difficulties of our position.... We have not attempted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy expedients.... We have proposed plans which will go some way towards closing up many vexed financial questions.... While we have sought to do justice to intelligence and skill as compared with property--while we have sought to do justice to the great labouring community by further extending their relief from indirect taxation, we have not been guided by any desire to set one class against another.--GLADSTONE (1853).
Mr. Gladstone began this year, so important both to himself and to the country, with what he described as a short but active and pleasant visit to Oxford. He stayed at Christ Church with Dr. Jacobson, of whom it was observed that he always looked as if on the point of saying something extremely piercing and shrewd, only it never came. He paid many calls, dined at Oriel, had a luncheon and made a speech in the hall at Balliol; passed busy days and brisk evenings, and filled up whatever spare moments he could find or manufacture, with treasury papers, books on taxation, consolidated annuities, and public accounts, alternating with dips into Lamennais--the bold and passionate French mystic, fallen angel of his church, most moving of all the spiritual tragedies of that day of heroic idealists.
On February 3 he moved into the house of the chancellor of the exchequer in that best known of all streets which is not a street, where he was destined to pass some two and twenty of the forty-one years of the public life that lay before him. He had a correspondence with Mr. Disraeli, his predecessor, on the valuation of the furniture in the official house. There was question, also, of the robe that passes down under some law of exchange from one chancellor to another on an apparently unsettled footing. The tone on this high concern was not wholly amicable. Mr. Gladstone notes especially in his diary that he wrote a draft of one of his letters on a Sunday, as being, I suppose, the day most favourable to self-control; while Mr. Disraeli at last suggests that Mr. Gladstone should really consult Sir Charles Wood, 'who is at least a man of the world.' Such are the angers of celestial minds.
At an early cabinet (Feb. 5) he began the battle that lasted in various shapes all the rest of his life. It was on a question of reducing the force in the Pacific. 'Lord Aberdeen, Granville, Molesworth, and I were for it. We failed.' What was the case for this particular retrenchment I do not know, nor does it matter. Fiercer engagements, and many of them, were to follow. Meanwhile he bent all the energies of his mind to the other front of financial questions--to raising money rather than expending it, and with unwearied industry applied himself to solve the problem of redistributing the burdens and improving the machinery of taxation.
For many years circumstances had given to finance a lively and commanding place in popular interest. The protracted discussion on the corn law, conducted not only in senate and cabinet, but in country market-places and thronged exchanges, in the farmer's ordinary and at huge gatherings in all the large towns in the kingdom, had agitated every class in the community. The battle between free trade and protection, ending in a revolution of our commercial system, had awakened men to the enormous truth, as to which they are always so soon ready to relapse into slumber, that budgets are not merely affairs of arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of the prosperity of individuals, the relations of classes, and the strength of kingdoms. The finance of the whigs in the years after the Reform bill had not only bewildered parliament, but had filled merchants, bankers, shipowners, manufacturers, shopkeepers, and the whole array of general taxpayers with perplexity and dismay. Peel recovered a financial equilibrium and restored public confidence, but Peel was gone. The whigs who followed him after 1846 had once more laboured under an unlucky star in this vital sphere of national affairs. They performed the unexampled feat of bringing forward four budgets in a single year, the first of them introduced by Lord John Russell himself as prime minister. By 1851 floundering had reached a climax. Finance had thus discredited one historical party; it had broken up the other. It was finance that overthrew weak governments and hindered the possibility of a strong one.
FISCAL CONFUSION
Mr. Disraeli, the most unsparing of all the assailants of Peel, tried his own hand in 1852. To have the genius and the patience of a great partisan chief is one gift, and this he had; to grasp the complex material interests of a vast diversified society like the United Kingdom demands powers of a different order. The defeat of Mr. Disraeli's budget at the end of 1852 seemed to complete the circle of fiscal confusion. Every source of public income was the object of assault. Every indirect tax was to be reduced or swept away, and yet no two men appeared to agree upon the principles of the direct taxes that were to take their place. The window duty, the paper duty, the tax on advertisements, the malt-tax, the stamp on marine insurances, were all to vanish, but even the most zealous reformers were powerless to fill the void. The order-book of the House of Commons was loaded with motions about the income-tax, and an important committee sat in 1851 to consider all the questions connected with the possibility of its readjustment and amendment. They could not even frame a report. The belief that it was essentially unjust to impose the tax at one and the same rate upon permanent and temporary incomes, prevailed in the great mass, especially of the liberal party. Discussions arose all through this period, descending not only to the elementary principles of taxation, but, as Mr. Gladstone said, almost to the first principles of civilised society itself. Party distraction, ministerial embarrassment, adjournment after adjournment of a decision upon fundamental maxims of national taxation--such was the bewildered scene. At last a statesman appeared, a financier almost by accident (for, as we have seen, it was by no special choice of his own that Mr. Gladstone went to the exchequer), but a financier endowed with a practical imagination of the highest class, with a combination of the spirit of vigorous analysis and the spirit of vigorous system, with the habit of unflagging toil, and above all, with the gift of indomitable courage. If anybody suggested the reappointment of Hume's committee, the idea was wisely dismissed. It was evidently, as Graham said, the duty of the executive government to lead the way and to guide public opinion in a matter of this crucial importance. It seemed impossible and unworthy to avoid a frank declaration about the income-tax. He was strongly of opinion (March 15) that a larger measure would be carried with greater certainty and ease than simple renewal; and that a combination of income-tax, gradually diminishing to a fixed term of extinction, with reduction of the interest of debt, and a review of the probate and legacy duties, afforded the best ground for a financial arrangement both successful and creditable. It was strong ideas of this kind that encouraged Mr. Gladstone to build on a broad foundation.
The nature of his proceedings he set out in one of the most interesting of his political memoranda:--
The liberals were, to all appearance, pledged to the reconstruction of the tax by their opinions, and the tories by their party following. The small fraction of Peelites could probably be relied upon the other way, and some few individuals with financial knowledge and experience. The mission of the new government was described by Lord Aberdeen in the House of Lords as a financial mission, and the stress of it thus lay upon a person, very ill-prepared. My opinions were with Peel; but under such circumstances it was my duty to make a close and searching investigation into the whole nature of the tax, and make up my mind whether there was any means of accepting or compounding with the existing state of opinion. I went to work, and laboured very hard. When I had entered gravely upon my financial studies, I one day had occasion--I know not what--to go into the city and to call upon Mr. Samuel Gurney, to whom experience and character had given a high position there. He asked me with interest about my preparations for my budget; and he said, 'One thing I will venture to urge, whatever your plan is,--let it be simple.' I was a man much disposed to defer to authority, and I attached weight to this advice. But as I went further and further into my subject, I became more and more convinced that, as an honest steward, I had no option but to propose the renewal of the tax in its uniform shape. I constructed much elaborate argument in support of my proposition, which I knew it would be difficult to answer. But I also knew that no amount of unassisted argument would suffice to overcome the obstacles in my way, and that this could only be done by large compensations in my accompanying propositions. So I was led legitimately on, and on, until I had framed the most complicated scheme ever submitted to parliament.
THE FABRIC PLANNED
Truly has it been said that there is something repulsive to human nature in the simple reproduction of defunct budgets. Certainly if anything can be more odious than a living tax, it is a dead one. It is as much as is consonant to biography to give an outline of the plan that was gradually wrought out in Mr. Gladstone's mind during the first three laborious months of 1853, and to mark the extraordinarily far-reaching and comprehensive character of the earliest of his thirteen budgets. Its initial boldness lay in the adoption of the unusual course of estimating the national income roughly for a long period of seven years, and assuming that expenditure would remain tolerably steady for the whole of that period. Just as no provident man in private life settles his establishment on the basis of one year or two years only, so Mr. Gladstone abandoned hand-to-mouth, and took long views. 'I ought, no doubt,' he said afterwards, 'to have pointed out explicitly that a great disturbance and increase of our expenditure would baffle my reckonings.' Meanwhile, the fabric was planned on strong foundations and admirable lines. The simplification of the tariff of duties of customs, begun by Peel eleven years before, was carried forward almost to completion. Nearly one hundred and forty duties were extinguished, and nearly one hundred and fifty were lowered. The tea duty was to be reduced in stages extending over three years from over two shillings to one shilling. In the department of excise, the high and injurious duty on soap, which brought into the exchequer over eleven hundred thousand pounds annually, was swept entirely away. In the same department, by raising the duties on spirits manufactured in Ireland nearer to the level of England and Scotland, a step was taken towards identity of taxation in the three kingdoms--by no means an unequivocal good. Miscellaneous provisions and minor aspects of the scheme need not detain us; but a great reform of rate and scale in the system of the assessed taxes, the reduction of the duty on the beneficent practice of life insurance from half-a-crown to sixpence on the hundred pounds, and the substitution of a uniform receipt stamp, were no contemptible contributions to the comfort and well-being of the community. Advertisements in newspapers became free of duty.[284]
KEYSTONE OF THE BUDGET
The keystone of the budget in Mr. Gladstone's conception was the position to be assigned in it to the income-tax. This he determined to renew for a period of seven years,--for two years at sevenpence in the pound, for two years more at sixpence, and for the last three at fivepence. By that time he hoped that parliament would be able to dispense with it. Meanwhile it was to be extended to Ireland, in compensation for the remission of a debt owed by Ireland to the British treasury of between four and five millions. It was to be extended, also, at a reduced rate of fivepence, to incomes between a hundred and fifty and a hundred pounds--the former having hitherto been the line of total exemption. From the retention of the income-tax as a portion of the permanent and ordinary finance of the country the chancellor of the exchequer was wholly and strongly averse, and so he remained for more than twenty years to come. In order, however, to meet a common and a just objection, that under this impost intelligence, enterprise, and skill paid too much and property paid too little, he resolved upon a bold step. He proposed that the legacy duty, hitherto confined to personal property passing on death, either by will or by inheritance and not by settlement, should henceforth be extended to real property, and to both descriptions of property passing by settlement, whether real or personal. In a word, the legacy duty was to extend to all successions whatever. This was the proposal that in many senses cut deepest. It was the first rudimentary breach in the ramparts of the territorial system, unless, indeed, we count as first the abolition of the corn law.[285] Mr. Gladstone eagerly disclaimed any intention of accelerating by the pressure of fiscal enactment changes in the tenure of landed property, and the letters which the reader has already seen (pp. 345-9) show the high social value that he invariably set upon the maintenance of the old landed order. The succession duty, as we shall find, for the time disappointed his expectations, for he counted on two millions, and in fact it yielded little more than half of one. But it secured for its author the lasting resentment of a powerful class.
Such was the scheme that Mr. Gladstone now worked out in many weeks of toil that would have been slavish, were it not that toil is never slavish when illuminated by a strenuous purpose. When by and by the result had made him the hero of a glorious hour, he wrote to Lord Aberdeen (April 19): 'I had the deepest anxiety with regard to you, as our chief, lest by faults of my own I should aggravate the cares and difficulties into which I had at least helped to bring you; and the novelty of our political relations with many of our colleagues, together with the fact that I had been myself slow, and even reluctant, to the formation of a new connection, filled me with an almost feverish desire to do no injustice to that connection now that it was formed; and to redeem the pledge you generously gave on my behalf, that there would be no want of cordiality and zeal in the discharge of any duties which it might fall to me to perform on behalf of such a government as was then in your contemplation.'
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours a day he toiled at his desk. Treasury officials and trade experts, soap deputations and post-horse deputations, representatives of tobacco and representatives of the West India interest, flocked to Downing Street day by day all through March. If he went into the city to dine with the Lord Mayor, the lamentable hole thus made in his evening was repaired by working till four in the morning upon customs reform, Australian mints, budget plans of all kinds. It is characteristic that even this mountain load of concentrated and exacting labour did not prevent him from giving a Latin lesson every day to his second boy.
II
'Some days before the day appointed for my statement,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'I recited the leading particulars to my able and intelligent friend Cardwell, not in the cabinet but then holding office as president of the board of trade. He was so bewildered and astounded at the bigness of the scheme, that I began to ask myself, Have I a right to ask my colleagues to follow me amidst all these rocks and shoals? In consequence I performed a drastic operation upon the plan, and next day I carried to Lord Aberdeen a reduced and mutilated scheme which might be deemed by some politicians to be weaker but safer. I put to Lord Aberdeen the question I had put to myself, and stated my readiness, if he should think it called for, to make this sacrifice to the probable inclinations of my colleagues. But he boldly and wisely said, "I take it upon myself to ask you to bring your original and whole plan before the cabinet." I thought this an ample warrant.'
THE BUDGET IN CABINET
At last, after Mr. Gladstone had spent an hour at the palace in explaining his scheme to the Prince Consort, the budget was opened to the cabinet (April 9) in a speech of three hours--an achievement, I should suppose, unparalleled in that line, for a cabinet consists of men each with pretty absorbing pre-occupations of his own. The exposition was 'as ingenious,' Lord Aberdeen told Prince Albert, 'as clear, and for the most part as convincing, as anything I have ever heard.' 'Gladstone,' said Lord Aberdeen later (1856) 'does not weigh well against one another different arguments, each of which has a real foundation. But he is unrivalled in his power of proving that a specious argument has no real foundation. On the Succession bill the whole cabinet was against him. He delivered to us much the same speech as he made in the House of Commons. At its close we were all convinced.'[286]
Differences that might easily become serious speedily arose upon details in the minds of two or three of them, and for some days the prime minister regarded the undertaking as not only difficult but perilous. Sir Charles Wood, in cabinet (April 11), strongly disapproved of the extension of income-tax to Ireland, and to the lowering of the exemption line. On Ireland the plan would lay more than half a million of new taxation, whereas much of the relief, such as soap and assessed taxes, would not touch her.[287] Palmerston thought it a great plan, perfectly just, and admirably put together, only it opened too many points of attack, and it could never be carried: Disraeli was on the watch, the Irish would join him, so would the radicals, while the succession duty, to which Palmerston individually had great objection, would estrange many conservatives. Lord John Russell perceived difficulties, but he did not see an alternative. Graham then fell in, disliked the twofold extension of the income-tax, and thought they should only take away half the soap-tax. Lord Lansdowne (a great Irish landlord) agreed with him. Mr. Gladstone told them that he was willing to propose whatever the cabinet might decide on, except one thing, namely, the breaking up of the basis of the income-tax: that he could not be a party to; he should regard it as a high political offence. With this reservation he should follow their judgment, but he strongly adhered to his whole plan. Lord Aberdeen said, 'You must take care your proposals are not unpopular ones.' Mr. Gladstone replied that it was after applying the test of popularity, that he was convinced the budget would be damaged beforehand by some of the small changes that had been suggested.
At the end of a long and interesting discussion, there stood for the whole budget Lord John, Newcastle, Clarendon, Molesworth, Gladstone, with Argyll and Aberdeen more or less favourable; for dropping the two extensions of income-tax and keeping half the soap duty, Lansdowne, Graham, Wood; more or less leaning towards them, Palmerston and Granville. They agreed to meet again the next day (April 12), when they got into the open sea. Wood stuck to his text. Lansdowne suggested that an increased spirit duty and an income-tax for Ireland together would be something like a breach of faith. Palmerston thought they would be beaten, but he would accept the budget provided they were not to be bound to dissolve or resign upon such a point as to the two extensions of the income-tax. Lord John said that if they were beaten on differentiating the tax, they would have to dissolve. Palmerston expressed his individual opinion in favour of a distinction for precarious incomes, and would act in that sense if he were out of the government; as it was, he assented. Argyll created a diversion by suggesting the abandonment of the Irish spirit duty. Mr. Gladstone admitted that he thought the spirit duty the weakest point of the plan, though warrantable and tenable on the whole. At last, after further patient and searching discussion, the cabinet finding that the suggested amendments cut against one another, were for adopting the entire budget, the dissentients being Lansdowne, Graham, Wood, and Herbert. Graham was full of ill auguries, but said he would assent and assist. Wood looked grave, and murmured that he must take time.
CABINET MISGIVINGS
In the course of these preliminaries Lord John Russell had gone to Graham, very uneasy about the income-tax. Graham, though habitually desponding, bade him be of good cheer. Their opponents, he said, were in numbers strong; but the budget would be excellent to dissolve upon, and Lord John admitted that they would gain forty seats.
They agreed, however, in Graham's language, that it would never do to play their trump card until the state of the game actually required it. Lord John confessed that he was no judge of figures,--somewhat of a weakness in a critic of a budget,--and Graham comforted him by the reply that he was at any rate the best judge living of House of Commons tactics.
The position of the government in the House of Commons was notoriously weak. The majority that had brought them into existence was excessively narrow. It had been well known from the first that if any of the accidents of a session should happen to draw the tories, the Irish, and the radicals into one lobby, ministers would find themselves in a minority. Small defeats occurred. The budget was only four days off. Mr. Gladstone enters in his diary: 'Spoke against Gibson; beaten by 200-169. Our third time this week. Very stiff work this. Ellice said dissolution would be the end of it; we agreed in the House to a cabinet to-morrow. Herbert and Cardwell, to whom I spoke, inclined to dissolve.' Next day (April 15), the cabinet met in a flutter, for the same tactics might well be repeated, whenever Mr. Disraeli should think the chances good.
Lord John adverted to the hostility of the radicals as exhibited in the tone of the debate, and hinted the opinion that they must take in a reef or two. Mr. Gladstone doubted whether the budget could live in that House, whatever form it might assume; but even with such perils he should look upon the whole budget as less unsafe than a partial contraction. Graham took the same view of the disposition of parliament: keen opposition; lukewarm support; the necessity of a greater party sympathy and connection to enable them to surmount the difficulties of a most unusual and hazardous operation. But he did not appear to lean to dissolution, and the older members of the cabinet generally declared themselves against it. 'In the end we went back to the position that we must have a budget on Monday, but Clarendon, Herbert, and Palmerston joined the chorus of those who said the measure was too sharp upon Ireland. The idea was then started whether we should go the length of the entire remission of the consolidated annuities[288] and impose the income-tax at sevenpence, with the augmented spirit duty. This view found favour generally; and I felt that some excess in the mere sacrifice of money was no great matter compared with the advantage of so great an approximation to equal taxation.' Then, 'speaking with great deference,' Gladstone repeated his belief once more that the entire budget was safer than a contracted one, both for the House and the country, and his conviction that if they proposed it, the name and fame of the government at any rate would stand well. 'Wood seemed still to hang back, but the rest of the cabinet now appeared well satisfied, and we parted, each resolved and certainly more likely to stand or fall by the budget as a whole than we seemed to be on Wednesday.'
III
The decisive cabinet was on Saturday, April 16. It was finally settled that the budget should be proposed as it stood, with its essential features unaltered. On Sunday, the chancellor of the exchequer went as usual twice to church, and read the Paradiso; 'but I was obliged,' he says, with an accent of contrition, 'to give several hours to my figures.' Monday brought the critical moment. 'April 18. Wrote minutes. Read Shakespeare at night. This day was devoted to working up my papers and figures for the evening. Then drove and walked with C. [Mrs. Gladstone]. Went at 4½ to the House. Spoke 4¾ hours in detailing the financial measures, and my strength stood out well, thank God. Many kind congratulations afterwards. Herberts and Wortleys came home with us and had soup and negus.'
LAID BEFORE PARLIAMENT
The proceeding that figures here so simply was, in fact, one of the great parliamentary performances of the century. Lord Aberdeen wrote to Prince Albert that 'the display of power was wonderful; it was agreed in all quarters that there had been nothing like the speech for many years, and that under the impression of his commanding eloquence the reception of the budget had been most favourable.' Lord John told the Queen the speech was one of the ablest ever made in the House of Commons. 'Mr. Pitt, in the days of his glory, might have been more imposing, but he could not have been more persuasive.' Lord Aberdeen heard from Windsor the next day: 'The Queen must write a line to Lord Aberdeen to say how delighted she is at the great success of Mr. Gladstone's speech last night.... We have every reason to be sanguine now, which is a great relief to the Queen.' Prince Albert used the same language to Mr. Gladstone: 'I cannot resist writing you a line in order to congratulate you on the success of your speech of yesterday. I have just completed a close and careful perusal of it and should certainly have cheered had I a seat in the House. I hear from all sides that the budget has been well received. Trusting that your Christian humility will not allow you to be dangerously elated, I cannot help sending for your perusal the report which Lord John Russell sent to the Queen, feeling sure that it will give you pleasure, such approbation being the best reward a public man can have.'
On the cardinal question of the fortunes of the ministry its effect was decisive. The prime minister wrote to Mr. Gladstone himself (April 19): 'While everybody is congratulating me on the wonderful impression produced in the House of Commons last night, it seems only reasonable that I should have a word of congratulation for you. You will believe how much more sincerely I rejoice on your account than on my own, although most assuredly, if the existence of my government shall be prolonged, it will be your work.' To Madame de Lieven Aberdeen said that Gladstone had given a strength and lustre to the administration which it could not have derived from anything else. No testimony was more agreeable to Mr. Gladstone than a letter from Lady Peel. 'I know the recollections,' he replied, 'with which you must have written, and therefore I will not scruple to say that as I was inspired by the thought of treading, however unequally, in the steps of my great teacher and master in public affairs, so it was one of my keenest anxieties not to do dishonour to his memory, or injustice to the patriotic policy with which his name is forever associated.'[289]
POWER OF THE PERFORMANCE
Greville makes a true point when he says that the budget speech 'has raised Gladstone to a great political elevation, and what is of far greater consequence than the measure itself, has given the country assurance of a man equal to great political necessities and fit to lead parties and direct governments.'[290] Mr. Gladstone had made many speeches that were in a high degree interesting, ingenious, attractive, forcible. He now showed that besides and apart from all this, he was the possessor of qualities without which no amount of rhetorician's glitter commands the House of Commons for a single hour after the fireworks have ceased to blaze. He showed that he had precise perception, positive and constructive purpose, and a powerful will. In 1851, he had on two occasions exhibited the highest competency as a critic of the budget of Sir Charles Wood. On the memorable night in the previous December, when he had torn Mr. Disraeli's budget to pieces, he had proved how terrifying he could be in exposure and assault. He now triumphantly met the test that he had triumphantly applied to his predecessor, and presented a command of even more imposing resources in the task of responsible construction than he had displayed in irresponsible criticism. The speech was saturated with fact; the horizons were large; and the opening of each in the long series of topics, from Mr. Pitt and the great war, down to the unsuspected connection between the repeal of the soap-tax and the extinction of the slave trade in Africa, was exalted and spacious. The arguments throughout were close, persuasive, exhaustive; the moral appeal was in the only tone worthy of a great minister addressing a governing assembly--a masculine invocation of their intellectual and political courage. This is the intrepid way in which a strong parliament and a strong nation like to see public difficulties handled, and they now welcomed the appearance of a new minister, who rejected what he called narrow and flimsy expedients, of which so much had been seen in the last half dozen years; who was not afraid to make a stand against heedless men with hearts apparently set on drying up one source of revenue after another; who did not shrink from sconcing the powerful landed phalanx like other people; and who at the same time boldly used and manfully defended the most unpopular of all the public imposts. In politics the spectacle of sheer courage is often quite as good in its influence and effect as the best of logic. It was so here. While proposing that the income-tax should come to an end in seven years, he yet produced the most comprehensive analysis and the boldest vindication of the structure of the tax as it stood. His manner was plain, often almost conversational, but his elaborate examination of the principles of an income-tax remains to this day a master example of accurate reasoning thrown into delightful form. He admitted all the objections to it: the inquisition that it entailed, the frauds to which it led, the sense in the public mind of its injustice in laying the same rate upon the holder of idle and secured public funds, upon the industrious trader, upon the precarious earnings of the professional man. It was these disadvantages that made him plan the extinction of the tax at the end of a definite period, when the salutary remissions of other burdens now proposed would have had time to bring forth their fruits. As was said by a later chancellor of the exchequer, this speech not only won 'universal applause from his audience at the time, but changed the convictions of a large part of the nation, and turned, at least for several years, a current of popular opinion which had seemed too powerful for any minister to resist.'[291]
The succession duty brought Mr. Gladstone into the first conflict of his life with the House of Lords. That land should be made to pay like other forms of property Was a proposition denounced as essentially impracticable, oppressive, unjust, cowardly, and absurd. It was called ex post facto legislation. It was one of the most obnoxious, detestable, and odious measures ever proposed. Its author was a vulture soaring over society, waiting for the rich harvest that death would pour into his treasury. Lord Derby invoked him as a phoenix chancellor, in whom Mr. Pitt rose from his ashes with double lustre, for Mr. Gladstone had ventured where Pitt had failed. He admitted that nothing short of the chancellor's extraordinary skill and dexterity could have carried proposals so evil through the House of Commons.[292] Meanwhile the public counted up their gains: a remission on tea, good for twenty shillings a year in an ordinary household; a fall in the washing bill; a boon of a couple of pounds for the man who insured his life for five hundred; an easy saving of ten pounds a year in the assessed taxes, and so forth,--the whole performance ending with 'a dissolving view of the decline and fall' of the hated income-tax.
SUCCESSION DUTY AND REDEMPTION
The financial proceedings of this year included a proposal for the redemption of South Sea stock and an attempted operation on the national debt, by the creation of new stocks bearing a lower rate of interest, two options of conversion being given to the holders of old stock. The idea of the creation of a two-and-half-per-cent. stock, said Mr. Gladstone in later years, though in those days novel, was very favourably received.[293]
I produced my plan. Disraeli offered it a malignant opposition. He made a demand for time; the one demand that ought not to have been made. In proposals of this kind, it is allowed to be altogether improper. In 1844 Mr. Goulburn was permitted, I think, to carry through with great expedition his plan for a large reduction of interest. When Mr. Goschen produced his still larger and much more important measure, we, the opposition, did our best to expedite the decision. There are no complications requiring time on such an occasion. It is a matter of aye or no. But when time is allowed the chapter of accidents allows an opponent to hope that a situation known to be unusually happy will deteriorate. Of this contingency Disraeli took his chance. Time as it happened was in his favour. It was no question of the substance of the plan, but a moderate change in the political barometer, which reduced to two or three millions a subscription which at the right moment would probably have been twenty or thirty.[294]
In a letter to W. R. Farquhar (March 8, 1861) he makes further remarks, which are introspective and autobiographic:--
Looking back now upon those of my proceedings in 1853 which related to interest upon exchequer bills and to the reduction of interest on the public debt, I think that there was nothing in the proposals themselves which might not have taken full and quick effect, if they had been made at a time which I may best describe as the time that precedes high-water with respect to abundance of money and security of the market. As respects exchequer bills, I am decidedly of opinion that the rates of premium current for some years before '53 were wholly incompatible with a sound state of things: and the fluctuations then were even greater than since. Still I think that I committed an error from want of sufficient quickness in discerning the signs of the times, for we were upon the very eve of an altered state of things, and any alteration of a kind at all serious was enough to make the period unfit for those grave operations. It is far from being the first or only time when I have had reason to lament my own deficiency in the faculty of rapid and comprehensive observation. I failed to see that high-water was just past; and that although the tide had not perceptibly fallen, yet it was going to fall. The truth likewise is this (to go a step further in my confessions) that almost all my experience in money affairs had been of a most difficult and trying kind, under circumstances which admitted of no choice but obliged me to sail always very near the wind, and this induced a habit of more daring navigation than I could now altogether approve. Nor will I excuse myself by saying that others were deceived like me, for none of them were in a condition to have precisely my responsibility.
Another note contributes a further point of explanation: 'I have always imagined that this fault was due to my experience in the affairs of the Hawarden and Oak Farm estates, where it was an incessant course of sailing near the wind, and there was really no other hope.'
INCOME-TAX
Seven years later Mr. Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer, again produced a budget. Semi-ironic cheers met his semi-ironic expression of an expectation that he would be asked the question: what had become of the calculations of 1853? The succession duty proved a woeful disappointment, and instead of producing two million pounds, produced only six hundred thousand. A similar but greater disappointment, we must recollect, owing mainly to a singular miscalculation as to the income-tax, had marked Peel's memorable budget of 1842, which landed him in a deficiency of nearly two and a quarter millions, instead of a surplus of half a million.[295] Of the disappointment in his own case, Mr. Gladstone when the time came propounded an explanation, only moderately conclusive. I need not discuss it, for as everybody knows, the effective reason why the income-tax could not be removed was the heavy charge created by the Crimean war. What is more to the point in estimating the finance of 1853, is its effect in enabling us to meet the strain of the war. It was this finance that, continuing the work begun by Peel, made the country in 1859 richer by more than sixteen per cent, than it had been in 1853. It was this finance, that by clinching the open questions that enveloped the income-tax, and setting it upon a defensible foundation while it lasted, bore us through the struggle. Unluckily, in demonstrating the perils of meddling with the structure of the tax, in showing its power and simplicity, the chancellor was at the same time providing the easiest means, if not also the most direct incentive, to that policy of expenditure--it rose from fifty to seventy millions between 1853 and 1859--which was one of the most fatal obstacles to the foremost aims of his political life. It was twenty years from now, as my readers will see, before the effort, now foreshadowed, to exclude the income-tax from the ordinary sources of national revenue, reached its dramatic close.
FOOTNOTES:
[284] A curious parliamentary incident occurred. The original proposal was to reduce the duty from eighteen-pence to sixpence. A motion to repeal it altogether was rejected by ten. Then a motion was made to substitute zero for sixpence in the clause. The Speaker ruled that this reversal of the previous vote was not out of order, and it was carried by nine.
[285] Some may place first the Act of 1833 making real estate liable for simple contract debts.
[286] Mrs. Simpson's Many Memories, p. 237.
[287] For paper on Irish income-tax, see Appendix.
[288] Loans made to Ireland for various purposes.
[289] Cavour, as Costi's letters show, took an eager interest in Mr. Gladstone's budget speech.
[290] Greville, Third Series, i. p. 59.
[291] Northcote, Twenty Years of Financial Policy, p. 185.
[292] Mr. Gladstone received valuable aid from Bethell, the solicitor-general. On leaving, office in 1855 he wrote to Bethell: 'After having had to try your patience more than once in circumstances of real difficulty, I have found your kindness inexhaustible, and your aid invaluable, so that I really can ill tell on which of the two I look back with the greater pleasure. The memory of the Succession Duty bill is to me something like what Inkermann may be to a private of the Guards: you were the sergeant from whom I got my drill and whose hand and voice carried me through.'
[293] The city articles of the time justify this statement.
[294] Gladstone Memo., 1897. See also Appendix.
[295] It may be said, however, that Peel was right about the yield of the income-tax, and only overlooked the fact that it would not all be collected, within the year.
III. THE CRIMEAN WAR
(1853-1854)
He [Burke] maintained that the attempt to bring the Turkish empire into the consideration of the balance of power in Europe was extremely new, and contrary to all former political systems. He pointed out in strong terms the danger and impolity of our espousing the Ottoman cause.--BURKE (1791).
After the session Mr. Gladstone had gone on a visit to Dunrobin, and there he was laid up with illness for many days. It was the end of September before he was able to travel south. At Dingwall they presented him (Sept. 27) with the freedom of that ancient burgh. He spoke of himself as having completed the twenty-first year of his political life, and as being almost the youngest of those veteran statesmen who occupied the chief places in the counsels of the Queen. At Inverness the same evening, he told them that in commercial legislation he had reaped where others had sown; that he had enjoyed the privilege of taking a humble but laborious part in realising those principles of free trade which, in the near future, would bring, in the train of increased intercourse and augmented wealth, that closer social and moral union of the nations of the earth which men all so fervently desire, and which must in the fulness of time lessen the frequency of strife and war. Yet even while the hopeful words were falling from the speaker's lips, he might have heard, not in far distance but close at hand, the trumpets and drums, the heavy rumbling of the cannon, and all the clangour of a world in arms.
II
OTTOMANS AND THE WEST
One of the central and perennial interests of Mr. Gladstone's life was that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths, that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern question. The root of the Eastern question, as everybody almost too well knows, is the presence of the Ottoman Turks in Europe, their possession of Constantinople,--that incomparable centre of imperial power standing in Europe but facing Asia,--and their sovereignty as Mahometan masters over Christian races. In one of the few picturesque passages of his eloquence Mr. Gladstone once described the position of these races. 'They were like a shelving beach that restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, is beaten by the waves; it is laid desolate; it produces nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing save a mass of shingle, of rock, of almost useless sea-weed. But it is a fence behind which the cultivated earth can spread, and escape the incoming tide, and such was the resistance of Bulgarians, of Servians, and of Greeks. It was that resistance which left Europe to claim the enjoyment of her own religion and to develop her institutions and her laws.' This secular strife between Ottoman and Christian gradually became a struggle among Christian powers of northern and western Europe, to turn tormenting questions in the east to the advantage of rival ambitions of their own. At a certain epoch in the eighteenth century Russia first seized her place among the Powers. By the end of the century she had pushed her force into the west by the dismemberment of Poland; she had made her way to the southern shores of the Black Sea; and while still the most barbaric of all the states, she had made good a vague claim to exercise the guardianship of civilisation on behalf of the Christian races and the Orthodox church. This claim it was that led at varying intervals of time, and with many diversities of place, plea, and colour, to crisis after crisis springing up within the Turkish empire, but henceforth all of them apt to spread with dangerous contagion to governments beyond Ottoman limits.
England, unlike France, had no systematic tradition upon this complicated struggle. When war began between Russia and the Porte in 1771, we supported Russia and helped her to obtain an establishment in the Black Sea. Towards the end of 1782 when Catherine by a sort of royal syllogism, as Fox called it, took the Crimea into her own hands, the whig cabinet of the hour did not think it necessary to lend Turkey their support, though France and Spain proposed a combination to resist. Then came Pitt. The statesman whose qualities of greatness so profoundly impressed his contemporaries has usually been praised as a minister devoted to peace, and only driven by the French Revolution into the long war. His preparations in 1791 for a war with Russia on behalf of the Turk are a serious deduction from this estimate. Happily the alarms of the Baltic trade, and the vigorous reasoning of Fox, produced such an effect upon opinion, that Pitt was driven, on peril of the overthrow of his government, to find the best expedient he could to bring the business to an end without extremities. In 1853 the country was less fortunate than it had been in 1791.
A Russian diplomatist made a homely comparison of the Eastern question to the gout; now its attack is in the foot, now in the hand; but all is safe if only it does not fly to a vital part. In 1852 the Eastern question showed signs of flying to the heart, and a catastrophe was sure. A dispute between Greek and Latin religious as to the custody of the holy places at Jerusalem, followed by the diplomatic rivalries of their respective patrons, Russia and France, produced a crisis that was at first of no extraordinary pattern. The quarrel between two packs of monks about a key and a silver star was a trivial symbol of the vast rivalry of centuries between powerful churches, between great states, between heterogeneous races. The dispute about the holy places was adjusted, but was immediately followed by a claim from the Czar for recognition by treaty of his rights as protector of the Sultan's Christian subjects. This claim the Sultan, with encouragement from the British ambassador, rejected, and the Czar marched troops into the Danubian provinces, to hold them in pledge until the required concession should be made to his high protective claims. This issue was no good cause for a general conflagration. Unfortunately many combustibles happened to lie about the world at that time, and craft, misunderstanding, dupery, autocratic pride, democratic hurry, combined to spread the blaze.
DIPLOMATIC RIVALRIES
The story is still fresh. With the detailed history of the diplomacy that preceded the outbreak of war between England, France, and Turkey on the one part and Russia on the other, we have here happily only the smallest concern. The large question, as it presented itself to Mr. Gladstone's mind in later years, and as it presents itself now to the historic student, had hardly then emerged to the view of the statesmen of the western Powers. Would the success of Russian designs at that day mean anything better than the transfer of the miserable Christian races to the yoke of a new master?[296] Or was the repulse of these designs necessary to secure to the Christian races--who, by the by, were not particularly good friends to one another--the power of governing themselves without any master, either Russian or Turk? To this question, so decisive as it is in judging the policy of the Crimean war, it is not quite easy even now for the historian--who has many other things to think of than has the contemporary politician--to give a confident answer.
Nicholas was not without advisers who warned him that the break-up of Turkey by force of Russian arms might be to the deliverer a loss and not a gain. Brunnow, then Russian ambassador at St. James's, said to his sovereign: 'The war in its results would cause to spring out of the ruins of Turkey all kinds of new states, as ungrateful to us as Greece has been, as troublesome as the Danubian Principalities have been, and an order of things where our influence will be more sharply combated, resisted, restrained, by the rivalries of France, England, Austria, than it has ever been under the Ottoman. War cannot turn to our direct advantage. We shall shed our blood and spend our treasure in order that King Otho may gain Thessaly; that the English may take more islands at their own convenience; that the French too may get their share; and that the Ottoman empire may be transformed into independent states, which for us will only become either burdensome clients or hostile neighbours.' If this forecast was right, then to resist Russia was at once to prevent her from embarrassing and weakening herself, and to lock up the Christians in their cruel prison-house for a quarter of a century longer. If sagacious calculation in such a vein as this were the mainspring of the world, history would be stripped of many a crimson page. But far-sighted calculation can no longer be ascribed to the actors in this tragedy of errors--to Nicholas or Napoleon, to Aberdeen or Palmerston, or to any other of them excepting Cavour and the Turk.
In England both people and ministers have been wont to change their minds upon the Eastern question. In the war between Russia and Turkey in 1828, during the last stage of the struggle for Greek independence, Russia as Greek champion against the Turk had the English populace on her side; Palmerston was warmly with her, regarding even her advance to Constantinople with indifference; and Aberdeen was reproached as a Turkish sympathiser. Now we shall see the parts inverted,--England and Palmerston ardent Turks, and Aberdeen falling into disgrace (unjustly enough) as Russian. Before we have done with Mr. Gladstone, the popular wheel will be found to make another and yet another revolution.
III
THE BRITISH CABINET
When Kinglake's first two volumes of his history of the Crimean war appeared (1863), Mr. Gladstone wrote to a friend (May 14): 'Kinglake is fit to be a brilliant popular author, but quite unfit to be a historian. His book is too bad to live, and too good to die. As to the matter most directly within my cognisance, he is not only not too true, but so entirely void of resemblance to the truth, that one asks what was really the original of his picture.'[297] A little earlier he had written to Sir John Acton: 'I was not the important person in the negotiation before the war that Mr. Kinglake seems to suppose; and with him every supposition becomes an axiom and a dogma.' All the papers from various sources to which I have had access show that Mr. Gladstone, as he has just said, had no special share in the various resolutions taken in the decisive period that ended with the abandonment of the Vienna note in the early autumn of 1853. He has himself told us that through the whole of this critical stage Lord Clarendon, then in charge of foreign affairs, was the centre of a distinct set of communications, first, with the prime minister, next, with Lord John Russell as leader in the Commons, and third, with Lord Palmerston, whose long and active career at the foreign office had given him special weight in that department. The cabinet as a body was a machine incapable of being worked by anything like daily and sometimes hourly consultations of this kind, 'the upshot of which would only become known on the more important occasions to the ministers at large, especially to those among them charged with the most laborious departments.'[298] This was not at all said by way of exculpating Mr. Gladstone from his full share of responsibility for the war, for of that he never at any time showed the least wish or intention to clear himself, but rather the contrary. As matter of fact, it was the four statesmen just named who were in effective control of proceedings until the breakdown of the Vienna note, and the despatch of the British and French squadrons through the Dardanelles in October, opened the second stage of the diplomatic campaign, and led directly if not rapidly to its fatal climax.
We have little more than a few glimpses of Mr. Gladstone's participation in the counsels of the eventful months that preceded the outbreak of the war. To Mrs. Gladstone he writes (October 4): 'I can hardly at this moment write about anything else than the Turkish declaration of war. This is a most serious event, and at once raises the question, Are we to go into it? The cabinet meets on Friday, and you must not be surprised at anything that may happen. The weather may be smooth; it also may be very rough.' First the smooth weather came. 'October 7. We have had our cabinet, three hours and a half; all there but Graham and Molesworth,[299] who would both have been strongly for peace. We shall have another to-morrow, to look over our results in writing. Some startling things were said and proposed, but I think that as far as government is concerned, all will probably keep straight at this juncture, and as to war I hope we shall not be involved in it, even if it goes on between Russia and Turkey, which is not quite certain.' Aberdeen himself thought the aspect of this cabinet of the 7th on the whole very good, Gladstone arguing strongly against a proposal of Palmerston's that England should enter into an engagement with Turkey to furnish her with naval assistance. Most of the cabinet were for peace. Lord John was warlike, but subdued in tone. Palmerston urged his views 'perseveringly but not disagreeably.' The final instruction was a compromise, bringing the fleet to Constantinople, but limiting its employment to operations of a strictly defensive character. This was one of those peculiar compromises that in their sequel contain surrender. The step soon showed how critical it was. Well indeed might Lord Aberdeen tell the Queen that it would obviously every day become more and more difficult to draw the line between defensive and offensive, between an auxiliary and a principal. So much simpler is a distinction in words than in things. Still, he was able to assure her that, though grounds of difference existed, the discussions of the cabinet of the 8th were carried on amicably and in good humour. With straightforward common sense the Queen pressed the prime minister for his own deliberate counsel on the spirit and ultimate tendency of the policy that he would recommend her to approve. In fact, Lord Aberdeen had no deliberate counsel to proffer. Speedily the weather roughened.
SPEECH AT MANCHESTER
Four days later (October 12) the minister repeated that, while elements of wide difference existed, still the appearance of that day was more favourable and tended to mutual agreement. At this cabinet Mr. Gladstone was not present, having gone on an expedition to Manchester, the first of the many triumphal visits of his life to the great industrial centres of the nation. 'Nothing,' he wrote to Lord Aberdeen, 'could have gone off better. Yesterday (October 11), I had to make a visit to the Exchange, which was crammed and most cordial. This morning we had first the "inauguration" of the Peel statue, in the presence of an enormous audience--misnamed so, inasmuch as but a portion of them could hear; and then a meeting in the Town Hall, where there were addresses and speeches made, to which I had to reply. I found the feeling of the assemblage so friendly that I said more on the war question than I had intended, but I sincerely hope I did not transgress the limits you would think it wise for me to observe. The existence of a peace and a war party was evident, from alternate manifestations, but I think the former feeling was decidedly the stronger, and at any rate I should say without the smallest doubt that the feeling of the whole meeting as a mass was unequivocally favourable to the course that the government have pursued.'
'Your Manchester speech,' Lord Aberdeen wrote to him in reply, 'has produced a great and, I hope, a very beneficial effect upon the public mind, and it has much promoted the cause of peace.' This result was extremely doubtful. The language of the Manchester speech is cloudy, but what it comes to is this. It recognises the duty of maintaining the integrity and independence of the Ottoman empire. Independence, however, in this case, says Mr. Gladstone, designates a sovereignty full of anomaly, of misery, of difficulty, and it has been subject every few years since we were born to European discussion and interference; we cannot forget the political solecism of Mahometans exercising despotic rule over twelve millions of our fellow Christians; into the questions growing out of this political solecism we are not now entering; what we see to-day is something different; it is the necessity for regulating the distribution of power in Europe; the absorption of power by one of the great potentates of Europe, which would follow the fall of the Ottoman rule, would be dangerous to the peace of the world, and it is the duty of England, at whatever cost, to set itself against such a result.
This was Mr. Gladstone's first public entry upon one of the most passionate of all the objects of his concern for forty years to come. He hears the desolate cry, then but faint, for the succour of the oppressed Christians. He looks to European interference to terminate the hateful solecism. He resists the interference single-handed of the northern invader. It was intolerable that Russia should be allowed to work her will upon Turkey as an outlawed state.[300] In other words, the partition of Turkey was not to follow the partition of Poland. What we shortly call the Crimean war was to Mr. Gladstone the vindication of the public law of Europe against a wanton disturber. This was a characteristic example of his insistent search for a broad sentiment and a comprehensive moral principle. The principle in its present application had not really much life in it; the formula was narrow, as other invasions of public law within the next dozen years were to show. But the clear-cut issues of history only disclose themselves in the long result of Time. It was the diplomatic labyrinth of the passing hour through which the statesmen of the coalition had to thread their way. The disastrous end was what Mr. Disraeli christened the coalition war.
'The first year of the coalition government,' Lord Aberdeen wrote to Mr. Gladstone, 'was eminently prosperous, and this was chiefly owing to your own personal exertions, and to the boldness, ability, and success of your financial measures. Our second year, if not specially brilliant, might still have proved greatly advantageous to the country, had we possessed the courage to resist popular clamour and to avoid war; but this calamity aggravated all other causes of disunion and led to our dissolution.'[301]
IV
ENGLAND SLOWLY DRAWN IN
On November 4, Clarendon wrote to Lord Aberdeen that they were now in an anomalous and painful position, and he had arrived at the conviction that it might have been avoided by firm language and a more decided course five months ago. 'Russia would then, as she is now, have been ready to come to terms, and we should have exercised a control over the Turks that is now not to be obtained.' Nobody, I suppose, doubts to-day that if firmer language had been used in June to Sultan and Czar alike, the catastrophe of war would probably have been avoided, as Lord Clarendon here remorsefully reflects. However that may have been, this pregnant and ominous avowal disclosed the truth that the British cabinet were no longer their own masters; that they had in a great degree, even at this early time, lost all that freedom of action which they constantly proclaimed it the rule of their policy to maintain, and which for a few months longer some of them at least strove very hard but all in vain to recover.
The Turks were driving at war whilst we were labouring for peace, and both by diplomatic action and by sending the fleet to protect Turkish territory against Russian attack, we had become auxiliaries and turned the weaker of the two contending powers into the stronger. A few months afterwards Mr. Gladstone found a classic parallel for the Turkish alliance. 'When Aeneas escaped from the flames of Troy he had an ally. That ally was his father Anchises, and the part which Aeneas performed in the alliance was to carry his ally upon his back.' But the discovery came too late, nor was the Turk the only ally. Against the remonstrances of our ambassador the Sultan declared war upon Russia, and proceeded to acts of war, well knowing that England and France in what they believed to be interests of their own would see him through it. If the Sultan and his ulemas and his pashas were one intractable factor, the French Emperor was another. 'We have just as much to apprehend,' Graham wrote (Oct. 27), 'from the active intervention of our ally as from the open hostility of our enemy.' Behind the decorous curtain of European concert Napoleon III. was busily weaving scheme after scheme of his own to fix his unsteady diadem upon his brow, to plant his dynasty among the great thrones of western Europe, and to pay off some old scores of personal indignity put upon him by the Czar.
The Czar fell into all the mistakes that a man could. Emperor by divine right, he had done his best to sting the self-esteem of the revolutionary emperor in Paris. By his language to the British ambassador about dividing the inheritance of the sick man, he had quickened the suspicions of the English cabinet. It is true the sick man will die, said Lord John Russell, but it may not be for twenty, fifty, or a hundred years to come; when William III. and Louis XIV. signed their treaty for the partition of the Spanish monarchy, they first made sure that the death of the king was close at hand. Then the choice as agent at Constantinople of the arrogant and unskilful Menschikoff proved a dire misfortune. Finally, the Czar was fatally misled by his own ambassador in London. Brunnow reported that all the English liberals and economists were convinced that the notion of Turkish reform was absurd; that Aberdeen had told him in accents of contempt and anger, 'I hate the Turks'; and that English views generally as to Russian aggression and Turkish interests had been sensibly modified. All this was not untrue, but it was not true enough to bear the inference that was drawn from it at St. Petersburg. The deception was disastrous, and Brunnow was never forgiven for it.[302]
LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE
Another obstacle to a pacific solution, perhaps most formidable of them all, was Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at Constantinople. Animated by a vehement antipathy to Russia, possessing almost sovereign ascendency at the Porte, believing that the Turk might never meet a happier chance of having the battle out with his adversary once for all, and justly confident that a policy of war would find hearty backers in the London cabinet--in him the government had an agent who while seeming to follow instructions in the narrow letter baffled them in their spirit. In the autumn of 1853 Lord Aberdeen wrote to Graham, 'I fear I must renounce the sanguine view I have hitherto taken of the Eastern question; for nothing can be more alarming than the present prospect. I thought that we should have been able to conquer Stratford, but I begin to fear that the reverse will be the case, and that he will succeed in defeating us. Although at our wit's end, Clarendon and I are still labouring in the cause of peace; but really to contend at once with the pride of the Emperor, the fanaticism of the Turks, and the dishonesty of Stratford is almost a hopeless attempt.'[303] This description, when he saw it nearly forty years later, seems to have struck Mr. Gladstone as harsh. Though he agreed that the passage could hardly be omitted, he confessed his surprise that Lord Aberdeen should have applied the word dishonesty to Lord Stratford. He suggested the addition of a note that should recognise the general character of Lord Stratford, and should point out that prejudice and passion, by their blinding powers, often produce in the mind effects like those proper to dishonesty.[304] Perhaps we may find this a hard saying. Doubtless when he comes to praise and blame, the political historian must make due allowance for his actors; and charity is the grandest of illuminants. Still hard truth stands first, and amiable analysis of the psychology of a diplomatic agent who lets loose a flood of mischief on mankind is by no means what interests us most about him. Why not call things by their right names?[305]
In his private letters (November) Stratford boldly exhibited his desire for war, and declared that 'the war, to be successful, must be a very comprehensive war on the part of England and France.' Well might the Queen say to the prime minister that it had become a serious question whether they were justified in allowing Lord Stratford any longer to remain in a situation that enabled him to frustrate all the efforts of his government for peace. Yet here, as many another time in these devious manoeuvres, that fearful dilemma interposed--inseparable in its many forms from all collective action whether in cabinet or party; so fit to test to the very uttermost all the moral fortitude, all the wisdom of a minister, his sense of proportion, his strength of will, his prudent pliancy of judgment, his power of balance, his sure perception of the ruling fact. The dilemma here is patent. To recall Lord Stratford would be to lose Lord Palmerston and Lord John; to lose them would be to break up the government; to break up the government would be to sunder the slender thread on which the chances of peace were hanging.[306] The thought, in short, of the high-minded Aberdeen striving against hope to play a steadfast and pacific part in a scene so sinister, among actors of such equivocal or crooked purpose, recalls nothing so much as the memorable picture long ago of Maria Theresa beset and baffled by her Kaunitzes and Thuguts, Catherines, Josephs, great Fredericks, Grand Turks, and wringing her hands over the consummation of an iniquitous policy to which the perversity of man and circumstance had driven her.
As the proceedings in the cabinet dragged on through the winter, new projects were mooted. The ground was shifted to what Lord Stratford had called a comprehensive war upon Russia. Some of the cabinet began to aim at a transformation of the policy. It was suggested that the moment should be seized to obtain not merely the observance by Russia of her treaty obligations to Turkey, but a revision and modification of the treaties in Turkish interests. This is the well-known way in which, ever since the world called civilised began, the area of conflict is widened. If one plea is eluded or is satisfied, another is found; and so the peacemakers are at each step checkmated by the warmakers. The Powers of central Europe were immovable, with motives, interests, designs, each of their own. Austria had reasons of irresistible force for keeping peace with Russia. A single victory of Russia in Austrian Poland would enable her to march direct upon Vienna. Austria had no secure alliance with Prussia; on the contrary, her German rival opposed her on this question, and was incessantly canvassing the smaller states against her in respect to it. The French Emperor was said to be revolving a plan for bribing Austria out of Northern Italy by the gift of Moldavia and Wallachia. All was intricate and tortuous. The view in Downing Street soon expanded to this, that it would be a shame to England and to France unless the Czar were made not only to abandon his demands, and to evacuate the Principalities, but also to renounce some of the stipulations in former treaties on which his present arrogant pretensions had been formed. In the future, the guarantees for the Christian races should be sought in a treaty not between Sultan and Czar, but between the Sultan and the five Powers.
BRITISH OPINION
Men in the cabinet and men out of it, some with ardour, others with acquiescence, approved of war for different reasons, interchangeable in controversial value and cumulative in effect. Some believed, and more pretended to believe, that Turkey abounded in the elements and energies of self-reform, and insisted that she should have the chance. Others were moved by vague general sympathy with a weak power assailed by a strong one, and that one, moreover, the same tyrannous strength that held an iron heel on the neck of prostrate Poland; that only a few years before had despatched her legions to help Austria against the rising for freedom and national right in Hungary; that urged intolerable demands upon the Sultan for the surrender of the Hungarian refugees. Others again counted the power of Russia already exorbitant, and saw in its extension peril to Europe, and mischief to the interests of England. Russia on the Danube, they said, means Russia on the Indus. Russia at Constantinople would mean a complete revolution in the balance of power in the Mediterranean, and to an alarmed vision, a Russia that had only crossed the Pruth was as menacing as if her Cossacks were already encamped in permanence upon the shores of the Bosphorus.
Along with the anxieties of the Eastern question, ministers were divided upon the subject of parliamentary reform. Some, including the prime minister, went with Lord John Russell in desiring to push a Reform bill. Others, especially Palmerston, were strongly adverse. Mr. Gladstone mainly followed the head of the government, but he was still a conservative, and still member for a tory constituency, and he followed his leader rather mechanically and without enthusiasm. Lord Palmerston was suspected by some of his colleagues of raising the war-cry in hopes of drowning the demand for reform. In the middle of December (1853) he resigned upon reform,[307] but nine days later he withdrew his resignation and returned. In the interval news of the Russian attack on the Turkish fleet at Sinope (November 30) had arrived--an attack justified by precedent and the rule of war. But public feeling in England had risen to fever; the French Emperor in exacting and peremptory language had declared that if England did not take joint action with him in the Black Sea, he would either act alone or else bring his fleet home. The British cabinet yielded, and came to the cardinal decision (Dec. 22) to enter the Black Sea. 'I was rather stunned,' Gladstone wrote to Sidney Herbert next day, 'by yesterday's cabinet. I have scarcely got my breath again. I told Lord Aberdeen that I had had wishes that Palmerston were back again on account of the Eastern question.'
Here is a glimpse of this time:--
Nov. 23, '53.--Cabinet. Reform discussed largely, amicably, and satisfactorily on the whole. Dec. 16.--Hawarden. Off at 9 A.M. Astounded by a note from A. Gordon. [Palmerston had resigned the day before.] After dinner went to the admiralty, 10½-1½, where Lord Aberdeen, Newcastle, Graham, and I went over the late events and went over the course for to-morrow's cabinet. Dec. 21.--Called on Lord Palmerston, and sat an hour. 22.--Cabinet, 2-7½, on Eastern Question. Palmerston and reform. A day of no small matter for reflection. Jan. 4, 1854.--To Windsor. I was the only guest, and thus was promoted to sit by the Queen at dinner. She was most gracious, and above all so thoroughly natural.
THE DECISION OF DECEMBER 22
On the decision of Dec. 22, Sir Charles Wood says:--
We had then a long discussion on the question of occupying the Black Sea, as proposed by France, and it seemed to me to be such a tissue of confusions that I advocated the simple course of doing so. Gladstone could not be persuaded to agree to this, in spite of a strong argument of Newcastle's. Gladstone's objection being to our being hampered by any engagement. His scheme was that our occupying the Black Sea was to be made dependent, in the first place, on the Turks having acceded to the Vienna proposals, or at any rate to their agreeing to be bound by any basis of peace on which the English and French governments agreed. Newcastle and I said we thought this would bind us much more to the Turks than if we occupied the Black Sea as part of our own measures, adopted for our own purposes, and without any engagement to the Turks, under which we should be if they accepted our conditions. Gladstone said he could be no party to unconditional occupation; so it ended in our telling France that we would occupy the Black Sea, that is, prevent the passage of any ships or munitions of war by the Russians, but that we trusted she would join us in enforcing the above condition on the Turks. If they agreed, then we were to occupy the Black Sea; if they did not, we were to reconsider the question, and then determine what to do. Clarendon saw Walewski, who was quite satisfied.
By the middle of February war was certain. Mr. Gladstone wrote an account of a conversation that he had at this time with Lord Aberdeen:--
Feb. 22.--Lord Aberdeen sent for me to-day and informed me that Lord Palmerston had been with him to say that he had made up his mind to vote for putting off (without entering into the question of its merits) the consideration of the Reform bill for the present year. [Conversation on Reform.][308]
He then asked me whether I did not think that he might himself withdraw from office when we came to the declaration of war. All along he had been acting against his feelings, but still defensively. He did not think that he could regard the offensive in the same light, and was disposed to retire. I said that a defensive war might involve offensive operations, and that a declaration of war placed the case on no new ground of principle. It did not make the quarrel, but merely announced it, notifying to the world (of itself justifiable) a certain state of facts which would have arrived. He said all wars were called or pretended to be defensive. I said that if the war was untruly so called, then our position was false; but that the war did not become less defensive from our declaring it, or from our entering upon offensive operations. To retire therefore upon such a declaration, would be to retire upon no ground warrantable and conceivable by reason. It would not be standing on a principle, whereas any man would require a distinct principle to justify him in giving up at this moment the service of the crown. He asked: How could he bring himself to fight for the Turks? I said we were not fighting for the Turks, but we were warning Russia off the forbidden ground. That if, indeed, we undertook to put down the Christians under Turkish rule by force, then we should be fighting for the Turks; but to this I for one could be no party. He said if I saw a way for him to get out, he hoped I would mention it to him. I replied that my own views of war so much agreed with his, and I felt such a horror of bloodshed, that I had thought the matter over incessantly for myself. We stand, I said, upon the ground that the Emperor has invaded countries not his own, inflicted wrong on Turkey, and what I feel much more, most cruel wrong on the wretched inhabitants of the Principalities; that war had ensued and was raging with all its horrors; that we had procured for the Emperor an offer of honourable terms of peace which he had refused; that we were not going to extend the conflagration (but I had to correct myself as to the Baltic), but to apply more power for its extinction, and this I hoped in conjunction with all the great Powers of Europe. That I, for one, could not shoulder the musket against the Christian subjects of the Sultan, and must there take my stand. (Not even, I had already told him, if he agreed to such a course, could I bind myself to follow him in it.) He said Granville and Wood had spoken to him in the same sense. I added that S. Herbert and Graham probably would adhere; perhaps Argyll and Molesworth, and even others might be added.
LORD ABERDEEN'S MISGIVINGS
Ellice had been with him and told him that J. Russell and Palmerston were preparing to contend for his place. Ellice himself, deprecating Lord Aberdeen's retirement, anticipated that if it took place Lord Palmerston would get the best of it, and drive Lord John out of the field by means of his war popularity, though Lord John had made the speech of Friday to put himself up in this point of view with the country.
In consequence of what I had said to him about Newcastle, he [Aberdeen] had watched him, and had told the Queen to look to him as her minister at some period or other; which, though afraid of him (as well as of me) about Church matters, she was prepared to do. I said I had not changed my opinion of Newcastle as he had done of Lord John Russell, but I had been disappointed and pained at the recent course of his opinions about the matter of the war. At my house last Wednesday he [Newcastle] declared openly for putting down by force the Christians of European Turkey. Yes, Lord Aberdeen replied; but he thought him the description of man who would discharge well the duties of that office. In this I agree.[309]
A few days later (March 3) Lord John Russell, by way of appeasing Aberdeen's incessant self-reproach, told him that the only course that could have prevented war would have been to counsel the Turks to acquiesce, and not to allow the British fleet to quit Malta. 'But that was a course,' Lord John continued, 'to which Lansdowne, Palmerston, Clarendon, Newcastle, and I would not have consented; so that you would only have broken up your government if you had insisted upon it.' Then the speaker added his belief that the Czar, even after the Turk's acquiescence and submission, if we could have secured so much, would have given the Sultan six months' respite, and no more. None of these arguments ever eased the mind of Lord Aberdeen. Even in his last interview with the departing ambassador of the Czar, he told him how bitterly he regretted, first, the original despatch of the fleet from Malta to Besika Bay (July 1853); and second that he had not sent Lord Granville to St. Petersburg immediately on the failure of Menschikoff at Constantinople (May 1853), in order to carry on personal negotiations with the Emperor.[310]
An ultimatum demanding the evacuation of the Principalities was despatched to St. Petersburg by England and France, the Czar kept a haughty silence, and at the end of March war was declared. In the event the Principalities were evacuated a couple of months later, but the state of war continued. On September 14, English, French, and Turkish troops disembarked on the shores of the Crimea, and on the 20th of the month was fought the battle of the Alma. 'I cannot help repeating to you,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Palmerston (Oct. 4, 1854), 'which I hope you will forgive, the thanks I offered at an earlier period, for the manner in which you urged--when we were amidst many temptations to far more embarrassing and less effective proceedings--the duty of concentrating our strokes upon the heart and centre of the war at Sebastopol.'[311] In the same month Bright wrote the solid, wise, and noble letter that brought him so much obloquy then, and stands as one of the memorials of his fame now.[312] Mr. Gladstone wrote to his brother Robertson upon it:--
Nov. 7, 1854.--I thought Bright's letter both an able and a manly one, and though I cannot go his lengths, I respect and sympathise with the spirit in which it originated. I think he should draw a distinction between petty meddlings of our own, or interferences for selfish purposes, and an operation like this which really is in support of the public law of Europe. I agree with him in some of the retrospective part of his letter.
Then came the dark days of the Crimean winter.
DID THE CABINET DRIFT?
In his very deliberate vindication of the policy of the Crimean war composed in 1887, Mr. Gladstone warmly denies either that the ship of state drifted instead of being steered, or that the cabinet was in continual conflict with itself at successive stages of the negotiation.[313] He had witnessed, he declares, much more of sharp or warm argument in every other of the seven cabinets to which he belonged.[314] In 1881 he said to the present writer: 'As a member of the Aberdeen cabinet I never can admit that divided opinions in that cabinet led to hesitating action, or brought on the war. I do not mean that all were always and on all points of the same mind. But I have known much sharper divisions in a cabinet that has worked a great question honourably and energetically, and I should confidently say, whether the negotiations were well or ill conducted, that considering their great difficulty they were worked with little and not much conflict. It must be borne in mind that Lord Aberdeen subsequently developed opinions that were widely severed from those that had guided us, but these never appeared in the cabinet or at the time.' Still he admits that this practical harmony could much less truly be affirmed of the four ministers especially concerned with foreign affairs;[315] that is to say, of the only ministers whose discussions mattered. It is certainly impossible to contend that Aberdeen was not in pretty continual conflict, strong and marked though not heated, with these three main coadjutors. Whether it be true to say that the cabinet drifted, depends on the precise meaning of a word. It is undoubtedly true that it steered a course bringing the ship into waters that the captain most eagerly wished to avoid, and each tack carried it farther away from the expected haven. Winds and waves were too many for them. We may perhaps agree with Mr. Gladstone that as it was feeling rather than argument that raised the Crimean war into popularity, so it is feeling and not argument that has plunged it into the 'abyss of odium.' When we come to a period twenty years after this war was over, we shall see that Mr. Gladstone found out how little had time changed the public temper, how little had events taught their lesson.
FOOTNOTES:
[296] In 1772 Burke had said that he did not wish well to Turkey, for any people but the Turks, situated as they are, would have been cultivated in three hundred years; yet they grow more gross in the very native soil of civility and refinement. But he did not expect to live to see the Turkish barbarian civilised by the Russian.--Corr. i. p. 402.
[297] To Mrs. Gladstone, Jan. 3, 1863: 'In the evenings I have leisure. Much of it I have been spending in reading Kinglake's book, which touches very nearly, and not agreeably or justly, the character of Lord Aberdeen and his government. I am afraid Newcastle blabbed on what took place, and that his blabbing was much coloured with egotism. Clarendon, I hear, is very angry with the book, and Lewis too, but Lewis is not a party concerned.'
[298] Eng. Hist. Rev. No. vi. p. 289.
[299] 'Molesworth in the cabinet,' said Lord Aberdeen later, 'was a failure. Until the war he was a mere cipher. When the war had broken out and was popular he became outrageously warlike.'--Mrs. Simpson's Many Memories, p. 264; see also Cobden's Speeches, ii. p. 28.
[300] Eng. Hist. Rev. No. vi. p. 290.
[301] March 17, 1856.
[302] See Martens' Recueil des Traités, etc., published by the Russian foreign office, 1898, vol. xii., containing many graphic particulars of these events.
[303] Stanmore, Earl of Aberdeen, pp. 270-1.
[304] To Sir A. Gordon, Aug. 31, 1892.
[305] See Stanmore, p. 253.
[306] This is clearly worked out by Lord Stanmore, p. 254, etc.
[307] Ashley's Life of Palmerston, ii. p. 270.
[308] See Appendix.
[309] Lord Blachford in his Letters says of Newcastle (p. 225): 'An honest and honourable man, a thorough gentleman in all his feelings and ways, and considerate of all about him. He respected other people's position, but was sensible of his own; and his familiarity, friendly enough, was not such as invited response. It was said of him that he did not remember his rank unless you forgot it. In political administration he was painstaking, clear-headed, and just. But his abilities were moderate, and he did not see how far they were from being sufficient for the management of great affairs, which, however, he was always ambitious of handling.' See also Selborne's Memorials, ii. pp. 257-8.
[310] Martens.
[311] The equivocal honour of originality seems to belong to the French, but they had allowed the plan to slumber.--De La Gorce, Hist. du second Empire, i. pp. 231-3.
[312] It is given in Speeches, i. p. 529. Oct. 29, 1854.
[313] Eng. Hist. Rev. April 1887. This article was submitted to the Duke of Argyll and Lord Granville for correction before publication.
[314] The cabinet of 1892 was his eighth.
[315] Aberdeen, Russell, Palmerston, Clarendon.