III. Education—The Career And The Talents. (1870)…

III. Education—The Career And The Talents. (1870)

He that taketh away-weights from the motions, doth the same as he that addeth wings.—PYM.

I

Amid dire controversies that in all countries surround all questions of the school, some believe the first government of Mr. Gladstone in its dealing with education to have achieved its greatest constructive work. Others think that, on the contrary, it threw away a noble chance. In the new scheme of national education established in 1870, the head of the government rather acquiesced than led. In his own words, his responsibility was that of concurrence rather than of authorship. His close absorption in the unfamiliar riddles of Irish land, besides the mass of business incident to the office of prime minister, might well account for his small share in the frame of the education bill. More than this, however, his private interest in public education did not amount to zeal, and it was at bottom the interest of a churchman. Mr. Gladstone afterwards wrote to Lord Granville (June 14, ’74), “I have never made greater personal concessions of opinion than I did on the Education bill to the united representations of Ripon and Forster.” His share in the adjustments of the Act was, as he said afterwards, a very simple one, and he found no occasion either to differ from departmental colleagues, or to press upon them any proposals of his own. If they had been dealing with an untouched case, he would have preferred the Scotch plan, which allowed the local school board to prescribe whatever religious education pleased it best. Nor did he object to a strict limitation of all teaching paid for in schools aided or provided out of public money, whether rate or tax, to purely secular instruction. In that case, however, he held strongly that, subject to local consent, the master who gave the secular teaching should be allowed to give religious teaching also at other times, even within the school-house.(189)

(M92) What Mr. Gladstone cared for was the integrity of religious instruction. What he disliked or dreaded was, in his own language, the invasion of that integrity “under cover of protecting exceptional consciences.” The advance of his ideas is rather interesting. So far back as 1843,(190) in considering the education clauses of the Factory bill of that year, he explained to Lord Lyttelton that he was not prepared to limit church teaching in the schools in the exposition of scripture. Ten years later, he wrote to his close friend, Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury:—

I am not friendly to the idea of constraining by law either the total or the partial suppression of conscientious differences in religion, with a view to fusion of different sects whether in church or school. I believe that the free development of conviction is upon the whole the system most in favour both of truth and of charity. Consequently you may well believe that I contemplate with satisfaction the state of feeling that prevails in England, and that has led all governments to adopt the system of separate and independent subsidies to the various religious denominations.

As for the government bill of that year (1853), he entirely repudiated the construction put upon some of its clauses, namely, “that people having the charge of schools would be obliged to admit children of all religious creeds, as well as that having admitted them, they would be put under control as to the instruction to be given.” Ten years later still, we find him saying, “I deeply regret the aversion to ‘conscience clauses,’ which I am convinced it would be most wise for the church to adopt. As far back as 1838 I laboured hard to get the National Society to act upon this principle permissively; and if I remember right, it was with the approval of the then Bishop of London.” In 1865 he harps on the same string in a letter to Lord Granville:—

... Suppose the schoolmaster is reading with his boys the third chapter of St. John, and he explains the passage relating to baptism in the sense of the prayer book and articles—the dissenters would say this is instruction in the doctrine of the church of England. Now it is utterly impossible for you to tell the church schoolmaster or the clergyman that he must not in the school explain any passage of scripture in a sense to which any of the parents of the children, or at least any sect objects; for then you would in principle entirely alter the character of the religious teaching for the rest of the scholars, and in fact upset the whole system. The dissenter, on the other hand, ought (in my opinion) to be entitled to withdraw his child from the risk (if he considers it such) of receiving instruction of the kind I describe.

Mr. Gladstone had therefore held a consistent course, and in cherishing along with full freedom of conscience the integrity of religious instruction, he had followed a definite and intelligible line. Unluckily for him and his government this was not the line now adopted.

II

When the cabinet met in the autumn of 1869, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord de Grey (afterwards Ripon) (Nov. 4):—

I have read Mr. Forster’s able paper, and I follow it very generally. On one point I cannot very well follow it.... Why not adopt frankly the principle that the State or the local community should provide the secular teaching, and either leave the option to the ratepayers to go beyond this sine quâ non, if they think fit, within the limits of the conscience clause, or else simply leave the parties themselves to find Bible and other religious education from voluntary sources?

Early in the session before the introduction of the bill, Mr. Gladstone noted in his diary, “Good hope that the principal matters at issue may be accommodated during the session, but great differences of opinion have come to the surface, and much trouble may arise.” In fact trouble enough arose to shake his ministry to its foundations. What would be curious if he had not had the Land bill on his hands, is that he did not fight hard for his own view in the cabinet. He seems to have been content with stating it, without insisting. Whether he could have carried it in the midst of a whirlwind of indeterminate but vehement opinions, may well be doubted.

(M93) The Education bill was worked through the cabinet by Lord de Grey as president of the council, but its lines were laid and its provisions in their varying forms defended in parliament, by the vice-president, who did not reach the cabinet until July 1870. Mr. Forster was a man of sterling force of character, with resolute and effective power of work, a fervid love of country, and a warm and true humanity. No orator, he was yet an excellent speaker of a sound order, for his speaking, though plain and even rough in style, abounded in substance; he always went as near to the root of the matter as his vision allowed, and always with marked effect for his own purposes. A quaker origin is not incompatible with a militant spirit, and Forster was sturdy in combat. He had rather a full share of self-esteem, and he sometimes exhibited a want a tact that unluckily irritated or estranged many whom more suavity might have retained. Then, without meaning it, he blundered into that most injurious of all positions for the parliamentary leader, of appearing to care more for his enemies than for his friends. As Mr. Gladstone said of him, “destiny threw him on the main occasions of his parliamentary career into open or qualified conflict with friends as well as foes, perhaps rather more with friends than foes.” A more serious defect of mind was that he was apt to approach great questions—Education, Ireland, Turkey—without truly realising how great they were, and this is the worst of all the shortcomings of statesmanship. There was one case of notable exception. In all the stages and aspects of the American civil war, Forster played an admirable part.

The problem of education might have seemed the very simplest. After the extension of the franchise to the workmen, everybody felt, in a happy phrase of that time, that “we must educate our masters.” Outside events were supposed to hold a lesson. The triumphant North in America was the land of the common school. The victory of Prussians over Austrians at Sadowa in 1866 was called the victory of the elementary school teacher. Even the nonconformists had come round. Up to the middle of the sixties opinion among them was hostile to the intervention of the state in education. They had resisted Graham’s proposals in 1843, and Lord John Russell’s in 1847; but a younger generation, eager for progress, saw the new necessity that change of social and political circumstance imposed. The business in 1870 was to provide schools, and to get the children into them.(191)

It is surprising how little serious attention had been paid even by speculative writers in this country to the vast problem of the relative duties of the State and the Family in respect of education. Mill devoted a few keen pages to it in his book upon political economy. Fawcett, without much of Mill’s intellectual power or any of his sensitive temperament, was supposed to represent his principles in parliament; yet in education he was against free schools, while Mill was for them. All was unsettled; important things were even unperceived. Yet the questions of national education, answer them as we will, touch the moral life and death of nations. The honourable zeal of the churches had done something, but most of the ground remained to be covered. The question was whether the system about to be created should merely supplement those sectarian, private, voluntary schools, or should erect a fabric worthy of the high name of national. The churchman hoped, but did not expect, the first. The nonconformist (broadly speaking), the academic liberal, and the hard-grit radical, were keen for the second, and they were all three well represented in the House of Commons.

(M94) What the government proposed was that local boards should be called into existence to provide schools where provision was inadequate and inefficient, these schools to be supported by the pence of the children, the earned grant from parliament, and a new rate to be levied upon the locality. The rate was the critical element. If the boards chose, they could make bye-laws compelling parents to send their children to school; and they could (with a conscience clause) settle what form of religious instruction they pleased. The voluntary men were to have a year of grace in which to make good any deficiency in supply of schools, and so keep out the boards. The second reading was secured without a division, but only on assurances from Mr. Gladstone that amendments would be made in committee. On June 16, the prime minister, as he says, “explained the plans of the government to an eager and agitated house.”

Two days before, the cabinet had embarked upon a course that made the agitation still more eager. Mr. Gladstone wrote the pregnant entry: “June 14. Cabinet; decided on making more general use of machinery supplied by voluntary schools, avoidance of religious controversy in local boards.” This meant that the new system was in no way to supersede the old non-system, but to supplement it. The decision was fatal to a national settlement. As Mr. Forster put it, their object was “to complete the voluntary system and to fill up gaps.” Lord Ripon used the same language in the Lords. Instead of the school boards being universal, they should only come into existence where the ecclesiastical party was not strong enough in wealth, influence, and liberality to keep them out. Instead of compulsory attendance being universal, that principle could only be applied where a school board was found, and where the school board liked to apply it. The old parliamentary grant to the denominational schools was to be doubled. This last provision was Mr. Gladstone’s own. Forster had told him that it was impossible to carry a proposal allowing school boards to contribute to denominational schools, and the only compensation open was a larger slice of the grant from parliament.

III

The storm at once began to rage around the helmsman’s ears. Some days earlier the situation had been defined by Mr. Brand, the whip, for his leader’s guidance. The attempt, he said, made by Fawcett, Dilke, and others, to create a diversion in favour of exclusively secular education has signally failed; the opinion of the country is clearly adverse. On the other hand, while insisting on the religious element, the country is just as strongly opposed to dogmatic teaching in schools aided by local rates. “You ask me,” said Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Brand (May 24), “to solve the problem in the words ‘to include religion, and to exclude dogma,’ which, as far as I know, though it admits of a sufficient practical handling by individuals acting for themselves, has not yet been solved by any state or parliament.” Well might he report at Windsor (June 21) that, though the auspices were favourable, there was a great deal of crude and indeterminate opinion on the subject in the House as well as elsewhere, and “the bill, if carried, would be carried by the authority and persistence of the government, aided by the acquiescence of the opposition.” It was this carrying of the bill by the aid of the tory opposition that gave fuel to the liberal flame, and the increase of the grant to the sectarian schools made the heat more intense. The most critical point of the bill, according to Mr. Gladstone, was a proposal that now seems singularly worded, to the effect that the teaching of scriptures in rate schools should not be in favour of, or opposed to, tenets of any denomination. This was beaten by 251 to 130. “The minority was liberal, but more than half of the liberal party present voted in the majority.”

(M95) “We respect Mr. Forster,” cried Dale of Birmingham, “we honour Mr. Gladstone, but we are determined that England shall not again be cursed with the bitterness and strife from which we had hoped that we had for ever escaped, by the abolition of the church rate.”(192) Writing to a brother nonconformist, he expresses his almost unbounded admiration for Mr. Gladstone, “but it is a bitter disappointment that his government should be erecting new difficulties in the way of religious equality.” Under the flashing eye of the prime minister himself the nonconformist revolt reared its crest. Miall, the veteran bearer of the flag of disestablishment, told Mr. Gladstone (July 22) that he was leading one section of the liberal party through the valley of humiliation. “Once bit, twice shy. We can’t stand this sort of thing much longer,” he said. In a flame of natural wrath Mr. Gladstone replied that he had laboured not to gain Mr. Miall’s support, but to promote the welfare of the country. “I hope my hon. friend will not continue his support to the government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of right and duty. For God’s sake, sir, let him withdraw it the moment he thinks it better for the cause he has at heart that he should do so.” The government, he said, had striven to smooth difficulties, to allay passions, to avoid everything that would excite or stimulate, to endeavour to bring men to work together, to rise above mere sectional views, to eschew all extremes, and not to make their own narrow choice the model of the measure they were presenting to parliament, but to admit freely and liberally into its composition those great influences which were found swaying the community. Forster wrote to a friend, “it does not rest with me now whether or no the state should decree against religion—decree that it is a thing of no account. Well, with my assent the state shall not do this, and I believe I can prevent it.”(193) Insist, forsooth, that religion was not a thing of no account against men like Dale, one of the most ardent and instructed believers that ever fought the fight and kept the faith; against Bright, than whom no devouter spirit breathed, and who thought the Education Act “the worst Act passed by any liberal parliament since 1832.”

The opposition did not show deep gratitude, having secured as many favours as they could hope, and more than they had anticipated. A proposal from the government (July 14) to introduce secret voting in the election of local boards was stubbornly contested, in spite, says Mr. Gladstone, “of the unvarying good temper, signal ability and conciliatory spirit of Mr. Forster,” and it was not until after fourteen divisions that a few assuaging words from Mr. Gladstone brought the handful of conservative opposition to reason. It was five o’clock before the unflagging prime minister found his way homewards in the broad daylight.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it was more essential to carry public opinion with the law. To force parents to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if opinion would not help to work it. Yet probably on no other question in Mr. Gladstone’s career as law-maker was common opinion so hard to weigh, to test, to focus and adjust. Of the final settlement of the question of religious instruction, Mr. Gladstone said to Lord Lyttelton when the battle was over (Oct. 25, ’70):—

... I will only say that it was in no sense my choice or that of the government. Our first proposition was by far the best. But it received no active support even from the church, the National Society, or the opposition, while divers bishops, large bodies of clergy, the Education Union, and earliest of all, I think, Roundell Palmer in the House of Commons, threw overboard the catechism. We might then have fallen back upon the plan of confining the application of the rate to secular subjects; but this was opposed by the church, the opposition, most of the dissenters, and most of our own friends. As it was, I assure you, the very utmost that could be done was to arrange the matter as it now stands, where the exclusion is limited to the formulary, and to get rid of the popular imposture of undenominational instruction.

(M96) At bottom the battle of the schools was not educational, it was social. It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the very contrary of religious. In the conflicts of the old centuries whence Christian creeds emerged, disputes on dogma constantly sprang from rivalries of race and accidents of geography. So now quarrels about education and catechism and conscience masked the standing jealousy between church and chapel—the unwholesome fruit of the historic mishaps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that separated the nation into two camps, and invested one of them with all the pomp and privilege of social ascendency. The parent and the child, in whose name the struggle raged, stood indifferent. From the point of party strategy, the policy of this great statute was fatal. The church of England was quickened into active antagonism by Irish disestablishment, by the extinction of sectarian tests at Oxford and Cambridge, and by the treatment of endowed schools. This might have been balanced by the zeal of nonconformists. Instead of zeal, the Education Act produced refrigeration and estrangement.

We may be sure that on such a subject Mr. Gladstone looked further than strategies of party. “I own to you,” said he to a correspondent before the battle was quite over, “that the history of these last few months leaves upon my mind some melancholy impressions, which I hope at some fancied period of future leisure and retirement to study and interpret.” He soon saw how deep the questions went, and on what difficult ground the state and the nation would be inevitably drawn. His notions of a distinctive formula were curious. Forster seems to have put some question to him on the point whether the three creeds were formularies within the Act. It appears to me, Mr. Gladstone answered (October 17, 1870):—

It is quite open to you at once to dispose of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and to decline inquiring whether they are distinctive, upon the ground that they are not documents employed in the instruction of young children.... Obviously no one has a right to call on you to define the distinctive character of a formulary such as the Thirty-nine Articles, or of any but such as are employed in schools. With respect to the Apostles’ Creed, it appears to me not to be a distinctive formulary in the sense of the Act. Besides the fact that it is acknowledged by the great bulk of all Christendom, it is denied or rejected by no portion of the Christian community; and, further, it is not controversial in its form, but sets forth, in the simplest shape a series of the leading facts on which Christianity, the least abstract of all religions, is based.

Manning plied him hard (September, October, November, 1871). The state of Paris (Commune blazing that year, Tuileries and Hôtel de Ville in ashes, and the Prussian spiked helmets at the gates) was traceable to a godless education—so the archbishop argued. In England the Christian tradition was unbroken. It was only a clique of doctrinaires, Huxley at the head of them, who believing nothing trumpeted secular education. “Delighted to see Mr. Forster attacked as playing into the hands of the clergy.” Mr. Gladstone should stimulate by every agency in his power the voluntary religious energies of the three kingdoms. “The real crisis is in the formation of men. They are as we make them, and they make society. The formation of men is the work you have given to the school boards. God gave it to the parents. Neither you nor Mr. Forster meant this; you least of all men on your side of the House. Glad to see you lay down the broad and intelligible line that state grants go to secular education, and voluntary efforts must do the rest. Let us all start fair in this race. Let every sect, even the Huxleyites, have their grant if they fulfil the conditions. As for the school-rate conscience, it is a mongrel institution of quakerism.” How Mr. Gladstone replied on all these searching issues, I do not find.

IV

The passing of the Act did not heal the wound. The nonconformist revolt was supported in a great conference at Manchester in 1872, representing eight hundred churches and other organizations. Baptist unions and congregational unions were unrelenting. We may as well finish the story. It was in connection with this struggle that Mr. Chamberlain first came prominently into the arena of public life—bold, intrepid, imbued with the keen spirit of political nonconformity, and a born tactician. The issue selected for the attack was the twenty-fifth section of the Education Act, enabling school boards to pay in denominational schools the fees of parents who, though not paupers, were unable to pay them. This provision suddenly swelled into dimensions of enormity hitherto unsuspected. A caustic onlooker observed that it was the smallest ditch in which two great political armies ever engaged in civil war. Yet the possibility under cover of this section, of a sectarian board subsidising church schools was plain, and some cases, though not many, actually occurred in which appreciable sums were so handed over. The twenty-fifth section was a real error, and it made no bad flag for an assault upon a scheme of error.

(M97) Great things were hoped from Mr. Bright’s return to the government in the autumn of 1873. The correspondence between Mr. Gladstone and him sheds some interesting light upon the state into which the Education Act, and Mr. Forster’s intractable bearing in defence of it, had brought important sections of the party:—

Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone.

Aug. 12, 1873.—So far as I can hear, there is no intention to get up an opposition at Birmingham, which is a comfort, as I am not in force to fight a contested election. I am anxious not to go to the election, fearing that I shall not have nerve to speak to the 5000 men who will or may crowd the town hall. Before I go, if I go, I shall want to consult you on the difficult matter—how to deal frankly and wisely with the education question. I cannot break with my “noncon.” friends, the political friends of all my life; and unless my joining you can do something to lessen the mischief now existing and still growing, I had better remain as I have been since my illness, a spectator rather than an actor on the political field.... I hope you are better, and that your troubles, for a time, are diminished. I wish much you could have announced a change in the education department; it would have improved the tone of feeling in many constituencies.

Mr. Gladstone himself had touched “the watchful jealousy” of Bright’s nonconformist friends by a speech made at the time at Hawarden. This speech he explained in writing to Bright from Balmoral (Aug. 21):—

The upshot, I think, is this. My speech could not properly have been made by a man who thinks that boards and public rates ought to be used for the purpose of putting down as quickly as may be the voluntary schools. But the recommendation which I made might have been consistently and properly supported by any one whose opinions fell short of this, and did not in the least turn upon any preference for voluntary over compulsory means.(194)

As he said afterwards to Lord Granville, “I personally have no fear of the secular system; but I cannot join in measures of repression against voluntary schools.”

“There is not a word said by you at Hawarden,” Bright replied (Aug. 25), “that would fetter you in the least in considering the education question; but at present the general feeling is against the idea of any concession on your part.... What is wanted is some definite willingness or resolution to recover the goodwill and confidence of the nonconformist leaders in the boroughs; for without this, reconstruction is of no value.... Finance is of great moment, and people are well pleased to see you in your old office again; but no budget will heal the soreness that has been created—it is not of the pocket but of the feelings.... I want you just to know where I am and what I feel; but if I could talk to you, I could say what I have to say with more precision, and with a greater delicacy of expression. I ask you only to put the best construction on what I write.”

If Forster could only have composed himself to the same considerate spirit, there might have been a different tale to tell. Bright made his election speech at Birmingham, and Forster was in trouble about it. “I think,” said the orator to Mr. Gladstone, “he ought rather to be thankful for it; it will enable him to get out of difficulties if he will improve the occasion. There is no question of changing the policy of the government, but of making minor concessions.... I would willingly change the policy of irritation into one of soothing and conciliation.” Nothing of great importance in the way even of temporary reconciliation was effected by Mr. Bright’s return. The ditch of the twenty-fifth clause still yawned. The prime minister fell back into the position of August. The whole situation of the ministry had become critical in every direction. “Education must be regarded as still to a limited extent an open question in the government.”

When the general election came, the party was still disunited. Out of 425 liberal candidates in England, Scotland, and Wales, 300 were pledged to the repeal of the 25th clause. Mr. Gladstone’s last word was in a letter to Bright (Jan. 27, 1874):—

The fact is, it seems to me, that the noncons. have not yet as a body made up their minds whether they want unsectarian religion, or whether they want simple secular teaching, so far as the application of the rate is concerned. I have never been strong against the latter of these two which seems to me impartial, and not, if fairly worked, of necessity in any degree unfriendly to religion. The former is in my opinion glaringly partial, and I shall never be a party to it. But there is a good deal of leaning to it in the liberal party. Any attempt to obtain definite pledges now will give power to the enemies of both plans of proceeding. We have no rational course as a party but one, which is to adjourn for a while the solution of the grave parts of the education problem; and this I know to be in substance your opinion.

V

(M98) The same vigorous currents of national vitality that led to new endeavours for the education of the poor, had drawn men to consider the horrid chaos, the waste, and the abuses in the provision of education for the directing classes beyond the poor. Grave problems of more kinds than one came into view. The question, What is education? was nearly as hard to answer as the question of which we have seen so much, What is a church? The rival claims of old classical training and the acquisition of modern knowledge were matters of vivacious contest. What is the true place of classical learning in the human culture of our own age? Misused charitable trusts, and endowments perverted by the fluctuations of time, by lethargy, by selfishness, from the objects of pious founders, touched wakeful jealousies in the privileged sect, and called into action that adoration of the principle of property which insists upon applying all the rules of individual ownership to what rightfully belongs to the community. Local interests were very sensitive, and they were multitudinous. The battle was severely fought, and it extended over several years, while commission upon commission explored the issues.

In a highly interesting letter (1861) to Lord Lyttelton Mr. Gladstone set out at length his views upon the issue between ancient and modern, between literary training and scientific, between utilitarian education and liberal. The reader will find this letter in an appendix, as well as one to Sir Stafford Northcote.(195) While rationally conservative upon the true basis of attainments in “that small proportion of the youth of any country who are to become in the fullest sense educated men,” he is rationally liberal upon what the politics of the time made the burning question of the sacrosanctity of endowments. “It is our habit in this country,” he said, “to treat private interests with an extravagant tenderness. The truth is that all laxity and extravagance in dealing with what in a large sense is certainly public property, approximates more or less to dishonesty, or at the least lowers the moral tone of the persons concerned.”

The result of all this movement, of which it may perhaps be said that it was mainly inspired and guided by a few men of superior energy and social weight like Goldwin Smith, Temple, Jowett, Liddell, the active interest of the classes immediately concerned being hardly more than middling—was one of the best measures in the history of this government of good measures (1869). It dealt with many hundreds of schools, and with an annual income of nearly six hundred thousand pounds. As the Endowed Schools bill was one of the best measures of the government, so it was Mr. Forster’s best piece of legislative work. That it strengthened the government can hardly be said; the path of the reformer is not rose-strewn.(196)

VI

(M99) In one region Mr. Gladstone long lagged behind. He had done a fine stroke of national policy in releasing Oxford from some of her antique bonds in 1854;(197) but the principle of a free university was not yet admitted to his mind. In 1863 he wrote to the vice-chancellor how entirely the government concurred in the principle of restricting the governing body of the university and the colleges to the church. The following year he was willing to throw open the degree; but the right to sit in convocation he guarded by exacting a declaration of membership of the church of England.(198) In 1865 Mr. Goschen—then beginning to make a mark as one of the ablest of the new generation in parliament, combining the large views of liberal Oxford with the practical energy of the city of London, added to a strong fibre given him by nature—brought in a bill throwing open all lay degrees. Mr. Gladstone still stood out, conducting a brisk correspondence with dissenters. “The whole controversy,” he wrote to one of them, “is carried on aggressively, as if to disturb and not to settle. Abstract principles urged without stint or mercy provoke the counter-assertion of abstract principles in return. There is not power to carry Mr. Goschen’s speech either in the cabinet, the parliament, or the country. Yet the change in the balance of parties effected by the elections will cast upon the liberal majority a serious responsibility. I would rather see Oxford level with the ground, than its religion regulated in the manner which would please Bishop Colenso.”

Year by year the struggle was renewed. Even after the Gladstone government was formed, Coleridge, the solicitor-general, was only allowed in a private capacity to introduce a bill removing the tests. When he had been two years at the head of administration, Mr. Gladstone warned Coleridge: “For me individually it would be beyond anything odious, I am almost tempted to say it would be impossible, after my long connection with Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis of what will be taken and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges; as well as a reversal of what was deliberately considered and sanctioned in the parliamentary legislation of 1854 and 1856. I incline to think that this work is work for others, not for me.”

It was not until 1871 that Mr. Gladstone consented to make the bill a government measure. It rapidly passed the Commons and was accepted by the Lords, but with amendments. Mr. Gladstone when he had once adopted a project never loitered; he now resolutely refused the changes proposed by the Lords, and when the time came and Lord Salisbury was for insisting on them, the peers declined by a handsome majority to carry the fight further. It is needless to add that the admission of dissenters to degrees and endowments did not injuriously affect a single object for which a national university exists. On the other hand, the mischiefs of ecclesiastical monopoly were long in disappearing.

VII

(M100) We have already seen how warmly the project of introducing competition into the civil service had kindled Mr. Gladstone’s enthusiasm in the days of the Crimean war.(199) Reform had made slow progress. The civil service commission had been appointed in 1855, but their examinations only tested the quality of candidates sent before them on nomination. In 1860 a system was set up of limited competition among three nominated candidates, who had first satisfied a preliminary test examination. This lasted until 1870. Lowe had reform much at heart. At the end of 1869, he appealed to the prime minister: “As I have so often tried in vain, will you bring the question of the civil service before the cabinet to-day? Something must be decided. We cannot keep matters in this discreditable state of abeyance. If the cabinet will not entertain the idea of open competition, might we not at any rate require a larger number of competitors for each vacancy? five or seven or ten?”

Resistance came from Lord Clarendon and, strange to say, from Mr. Bright. An ingenious suggestion of Mr. Gladstone’s solved the difficulty. All branches of the civil service were to be thrown open where the minister at the head of the department approved. Lowe was ready to answer for all the departments over which he had any control,—the treasury, the board of works, audit office, national debt office, paymaster-general’s office, inland revenue, customs and post-office. Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Childers, Mr. Goschen, and Lord de Grey were willing to do the same, and finally only Clarendon and the foreign office were left obdurate. It was true to say of this change that it placed the whole educated intellect of the country at the service and disposal of the state, that it stimulated the acquisition of knowledge, and that it rescued some of the most important duties in the life of the nation from the narrow class to whom they had hitherto been confided.

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IV. The Franco-German War. (1870)

Of all the princes of Europe, the king of England alone seemed to be seated upon the pleasant promontory that might safely view the tragic sufferings of all his neighbours about him, without any other concernment than what arose from his own princely heart and Christian compassion, to see such desolation wrought by the pride and passion and ambition of private persons, supported by princes who knew not what themselves would have.—CLARENDON.

I

During the years in which England had been widening the base of her institutions, extending her resources of wealth and credit, and strengthening her repute in the councils of Christendom, a long train of events at which we have glanced from time to time, had slowly effected a new distribution of the force of nations, and in Mr. Gladstone’s phrase had unset every joint of the compacted fabric of continental Europe. The spirit in which he thought of his country’s place in these transactions is to be gathered from a letter addressed by him to General Grey, the secretary of the Queen, rather more than a year before the outbreak of the Franco-German war. What was the immediate occasion I cannot be sure, nor does it matter. The letter itself is full of interest, for it is in truth a sort of charter of the leading principles of Mr. Gladstone’s foreign policy at the moment when he first incurred supreme responsibility for our foreign affairs:—

Mr. Gladstone to General Grey.

April 17, 1869.—... Apart from this question of the moment, there is one more important as to the tone in which it is to be desired that, where matter of controversy has arisen on the continent of Europe, the diplomatic correspondence of this country should be carried on. This more important question may be the subject of differences in the country, but I observe with joy that her Majesty approves the general principle which Lord Clarendon sets forth in his letter of the 16th. I do not believe that England ever will or can be unfaithful to her great tradition, or can forswear her interest in the common transactions and the general interests of Europe. But her credit and her power form a fund, which in order that they may be made the most of, should be thriftily used.

The effect of the great revolutionary war was to place England in a position to rely upon the aid of her own resources. This was no matter of blame to either party; it was the result of a desperate struggle of over twenty years, in which every one else was down in his turn, but England was ever on her feet; in which it was found that there was no ascertained limit either to her means, or to her disposition to dispense them; in which, to use the language of Mr. Canning, her flag was always flying “a signal of rallying to the combatant, and of shelter to the fallen.” The habit of appeal and of reliance thus engendered by peculiar circumstances, requires to be altered by a quiet and substantial though not a violent process. For though Europe never saw England faint away, we know at what a cost of internal danger to all the institutions of the country, she fought her way to the perilous eminence on which she undoubtedly stood in 1815.

If there be a fear abroad that England has forever abjured a resort to force other than moral force, is that fear justified by facts? In 1853, joining with France, we made ourselves the vindicators of the peace of Europe; and ten years later, be it remembered, in the case of Denmark we offered to perform the same office, but we could get no one to join us. Is it desirable that we should go further? Is England so uplifted in strength above every other nation, that she can with prudence advertise herself as ready to undertake the general redress of wrongs? Would not the consequence of such professions and promises be either the premature exhaustion of her means, or a collapse in the day of performance? Is any Power at this time of day warranted in assuming this comprehensive obligation? Of course, the answer is, No. But do not, on the other hand, allow it to be believed that England will never interfere. For the eccentricities of other men’s belief no one can answer; but for any reasonable belief in such an abnegation on the part of England, there is no ground whatever. As I understand Lord Clarendon’s ideas, they are fairly represented by his very important diplomatic communications since he has taken office. They proceed upon such grounds as these: That England should keep entire in her own hands the means of estimating her own obligations upon the various states of facts as they arise; that she should not foreclose and narrow her own liberty of choice by declarations made to other Powers, in their real or supposed interests, of which they would claim to be at least joint interpreters; that it is dangerous for her to assume alone an advanced, and therefore an isolated position, in regard to European controversies; that, come what may, it is better for her to promise too little than too much; that she should not encourage the weak by giving expectations of aid to resist the strong, but should rather seek to deter the strong by firm but moderate language, from aggressions on the weak; that she should seek to develop and mature the action of a common, or public, or European opinion, as the best standing bulwark against wrong, but should beware of seeming to lay down the law of that opinion by her own authority, and thus running the risk of setting against her, and against right and justice, that general sentiment which ought to be, and generally would be, arrayed in their favour. I am persuaded that at this juncture opinions of this colour being true and sound, are also the only opinions which the country is disposed to approve. But I do not believe that on that account it is one whit less disposed than it has been at any time, to cast in its lot upon any fitting occasion with the cause it believes to be right.... I therefore hope and feel assured her Majesty will believe that Lord Clarendon really requires no intimation from me to ensure his steadily maintaining the tone which becomes the foreign minister of the Queen.

(M101) Heavy banks of cloud hung with occasional breaks of brighter sky over Europe; and all the plot, intrigue, conspiracy, and subterranean scheming, that had been incessant ever since the Crimean war disturbed the old European system, and Cavour first began the recasting of the map, was but the repulsive and dangerous symptom of a dire conflict in the depths of international politics. The Mexican adventure, and the tragedy of Maximilian’s death at Queretaro, had thrown a black shadow over the iridescent and rotten fabric of Napoleon’s power. Prussian victory over Austria at Sadowa had startled Europe like a thunderclap. The reactionary movement within the catholic fold, as disclosed in the Vatican council, kindled many hopes among the French clericals, and these hopes inspired a lively antagonism to protestant Prussia in the breast of the Spanish-born Empress of the French. Prussia in 1866 had humiliated one great catholic power when she defeated the Austrian monarchy on the battlefields of Bohemia. Was she to overthrow also the power that kept the pope upon his temporal throne in Rome? All this, however, was no more than the fringe, though one of the hardest things in history is to be sure where substance begins and fringe ends. The cardinal fact for France and for Europe was German unity. Ever since the Danish conflict, as Bismarck afterwards told the British government,(200) the French Emperor strove to bring Prussia to join him in plans for their common aggrandisement. The unity of Germany meant, besides all else, a vast extension of the area from which the material of military strength was to be drawn; and this meant the relative depression of the power of French arms. Here was the substantial fact, feeding the flame of national pride with solid fuel. The German confederation of the Congress of Vienna was a skilful invention of Metternich’s, so devised as to be inert for offence, but extremely efficient against French aggression. A German confederation under the powerful and energetic leadership of Prussia gave France a very different neighbour.

In August 1867, the French ambassador at Berlin said to the ambassador of Great Britain, “We can never passively permit the formation of a German empire; the position of the Emperor of the French would become untenable.” The British ambassador in Paris was told by the foreign minister there, that “there was no wish for aggrandisement in the Emperor’s mind, but a solicitude for the safety of France.” This solicitude evaporated in what Bismarck disdainfully called the policy of pourboires, the policy of tips and pickings—scraps and slips of territory to be given to France under the diplomatic name of compensation. For three years it had been no secret that peace was at the mercy of any incident that might arise.

The small Powers were in trepidation, and with good reason. Why should not France take Belgium, and Prussia take Holland? The Belgian press did not conceal bad feeling, and Bismarck let fall the ominous observation that if Belgium persisted in that course, “she might pay dear for it.” The Dutch minister told the British ambassador in Vienna that in 1865 he had a long conversation with Bismarck, and Bismarck had given him to understand that without colonies Prussia could never become a great maritime nation; he coveted Holland less for its own sake, than for her wealthy colonies. When reminded that Belgium was guaranteed by the European Powers, Bismarck replied that “a guarantee was in these days of little value.” This remark makes an excellent register of the diplomatic temperature of the hour.

Then for England. The French Emperor observed (1867), not without an accent of complaint, that she seemed “little disposed to take part in the affairs of the day.” This was the time of the Derby government. When war seemed inevitable on the affair of Luxemburg, Lord Stanley, then at the foreign office, phlegmatically remarked (1867) that England had never thought it her business to guarantee the integrity of Germany. When pressed from Prussia to say whether in the event of Prussia being forced into war by France, England would take a part, Lord Stanley replied that with the causes of that quarrel we had nothing to do, and he felt sure that neither parliament nor the public would sanction an armed interference on either side. Belgium, he added, was a different question. General non-intervention, therefore, was the common doctrine of both our parties.

(M102) After Mr. Gladstone had been a year in power, the chance of a useful part for England to perform seemed to rise on the horizon, but to those who knew the racing currents, the interplay of stern forces, the chance seemed but dim and faint. Rumour and gossip of a pacific tenor could not hide the vital fact of incessant military preparation on both sides—steadfast and scientific in Prussia, loose and ill-concerted in France. Along with the perfecting of arms, went on a busy search by France for alliances. In the autumn of 1869 Lord Clarendon had gone abroad and talked with important personages. Moltke told him that in Prussia they thought war was near. To Napoleon the secretary of state spoke of the monster armaments, the intolerable burden imposed upon the people, and the constant danger of war that they created. The Emperor agreed—so Lord Clarendon wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Sept. 18, ’69)—but went on to say that during the King of Prussia’s life, and as long as the present Prussian system lasted, he thought no change of importance could be effected. Still the seed by and by appeared to have fallen on good ground. For in January 1870, in a conversation with the British ambassador, the French foreign minister (Daru) suggested that England might use her good offices with Prussia, to induce a partial disarmament in order that France might disarm also. The minister, at the same time, wrote a long despatch in the same sense to the French ambassador at St. James’s. Lord Clarendon perceived the delicacy of opening the matter at Berlin, in view of the Prussian monarch’s idolatry of his army. He agreed, however, to bring it before the king, not officially, but in a confidential form. This would compromise nobody. The French ambassador in London agreed, and Lord Clarendon wrote the draft of a letter to Loftus in Berlin. He sent the draft to Mr. Gladstone (Jan. 31, 1870) for “approval and criticism.” Mr. Gladstone entered eagerly into Lord Clarendon’s benevolent correspondence:—

Mr. Gladstone to Lord Clarendon.

31 Jan. 1870.—The object of your letter on disarmament is noble, and I do not see how the terms of the draft can be improved. I presume you will let the Queen know what you are about, and possibly circumstances might arrive in which she could help?

7 Feb.—The answer to your pacific letter as reported by Loftus throws, I think, a great responsibility on the King of Prussia.

12 Feb.—I hope, with Daru, that you will not desist from your efforts, whatever be the best mode of prosecuting the good design. I thought Bismarck’s case, on Loftus’s letter, a very bad one. I do not think Lyons’s objections, towards the close of his letter, apply in a case where you have acted simply as a friend, and not in the name and on behalf of France.

18 Feb.—I return Bismarck’s confidential letter on disarmament. As the matter appears to me, the best that can be said for this letter is that it contains matter which might be used with more or less force in a conference on disarmament, by way of abating the amount of relative call on Prussia. As an argument against entertaining the subject, it is futile, and he ought at any rate to be made to feel his responsibility,—which, I daresay, you will contrive while acknowledging his civility.

9 April.—I presume you have now only in the matter of disarmament to express your inability to recede from your opinions, and your regret at the result of the correspondence. If inclined to touch the point, you might with perfect justice say that while our naval responsibilities for our sea defence have no parallel or analogue in the world, we have taken not far short of two millions off our estimates, and have not announced that the work of reduction is at an end: which, whether satisfactory or not, is enough, to show that you do not preach wholly without practising.

It is a striking circumstance, in view of what was to follow, that at this moment when Mr. Gladstone first came into contact with Bismarck,—the genius of popular right, and free government, and settled law of nations, into contact with the genius of force and reason of state and blood and iron—the realist minister of Prussia seemed to be almost as hopeful for European peace as the minister of England. “The political horizon,” Bismarck wrote (Feb. 22), “seen from Berlin appears at present so unclouded that there is nothing of interest to report, and I only hope that no unexpected event will render the lately risen hope of universal peace questionable.”(201) The unexpected event did not tarry, and Bismarck’s own share in laying the train is still one of the historic enigmas of our time.

II

(M103) Ever since 1868 the statesmen of revolutionary Spain had looked for a prince to fill their vacant throne. Among others they bethought themselves of a member of a catholic branch of the house of Hohenzollern, and in the autumn of 1869 an actual proposal was secretly made to Prince Leopold. The thing lingered. Towards the end of February, 1870, Spanish importunities were renewed, though still under the seal of strict secrecy, even the Spanish ambassador in Paris being kept in the dark.(202) Leopold after a long struggle declined the glittering bait. The rival pretenders were too many, and order was not sure. Still his refusal was not considered final. The chances of order improved, he changed his mind, and on June 28 the Spanish emissary returned to Madrid with the news that the Hohenzollern prince was ready to accept the crown. The King of Prussia, not as king, but as head of the house, had given his assent. That Bismarck invented the Hohenzollern candidature the evidence is not conclusive. What is undoubted is that in the late spring of 1870 he took it up, and was much discontented at its failure in that stage.(203) He had become aware that France was striving to arrange alliances with Austria, and even with Italy, in spite of the obnoxious presence of the French garrison at Rome. It was possible that on certain issues Bavaria and the South might join France against Prussia. All the hindrances to German unity, the jealousies of the minor states, the hatred of the Prussian military system, were likely to be aggravated by time, if France, while keeping her powder dry, were to persevere in a prudent abstention. Bismarck believed that Moltke’s preparations were more advanced than Napoleon’s. It was his interest to strike before any French treaties of alliance were signed. The Spanish crown was an occasion. It might easily become a pretext for collision if either France or Germany thought the hour had come. If the Hohenzollern candidate withdrew, it was a diplomatic success for France and a humiliation to Germany; if not, a king from Prussia planted across the Pyrenees, after the aggrandizements of north German power in 1864 and 1866, was enough to make Richelieu, Mazarin, Louis XIV., Bonaparte, even Louis Philippe, turn in their graves.

On June 27, 1870, Lord Clarendon died, and on July 6 Lord Granville received the seals of the foreign department from the Queen at Windsor. The new chief had visited his office the day before, and the permanent under-secretary coming into his room to report, gave him the most remarkable assurance ever received by any secretary of state on first seating himself at his desk. Lord Granville told the story in the House of Lords on July 11, when the crash of the fiercest storm since Waterloo was close upon them:—

The able and experienced under-secretary, Mr. Hammond, at the foreign office told me, it being then three or four o’clock, that with the exception of the sad and painful subject about to be discussed this evening [the murders by brigands in Greece] he had never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any important question that I should have to deal with. At six o’clock that evening I received a telegram informing me of the choice that had been made by the provisional government of Spain of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, and of his acceptance of the offer. I went to Windsor the following day, and had the honour of receiving the seals of the foreign office from her Majesty. On my return I saw the Marquis de Lavalette, who informed me of the fact which I already knew, and in energetic terms remarked on the great indignity thus offered to France, and expressed the determination of the government of the Emperor not to permit the project to be carried out. M. Lavalette added that he trusted that her Majesty’s government, considering its friendly relations with France and its general desire to maintain peace, would use its influence with the other parties concerned. I told M. de Lavalette that the announcement had taken the prime minister and myself entirely by surprise.(204)

Yet two days before Mr. Hammond told Lord Granville that he was not aware of anything important to be dealt with at the foreign department, a deputation had started from Madrid with an invitation to Prince Leopold. At the moment when this singular language was falling from our under-secretary’s lips, the Duc de Gramont, the French foreign minister, was telling Lord Lyons at Paris that France would not endure the insult, and expressing his hope that the government of the Queen would try to prevent it. After all, as we have seen, Bismarck in February had used words not very unlike Mr. Hammond’s in July.

On July 5, the Emperor, who was at St. Cloud, sent for Baron Rothschild (of Paris), and told him that as there was at that moment no foreign minister in England, he wished to send through him a message to Mr. Gladstone. He wanted Mr. Gladstone to be informed, that the council of ministers at Madrid had decided to propose Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern for the Spanish throne, that his candidature would be intolerable to France, and that he hoped Mr. Gladstone would endeavour to secure its withdrawal. The message was telegraphed to London, and early on the morning of July 6, the present Lord Rothschild deciphered it for his father, and took it to Carlton House Terrace. He found Mr. Gladstone on the point of leaving for Windsor, and drove with him to the railway station. For a time Mr. Gladstone was silent. Then he said he did not approve of the candidature, but he was not disposed to interfere with the liberty of the Spanish people to choose their own sovereign.

Lord Granville put pressure on the provisional government at Madrid to withdraw their candidate, and on the government at Berlin “effectually to discourage a project fraught with risks to the best interests of Spain.” The draft of this despatch was submitted by Lord Granville to Mr. Gladstone, who suggested a long addition afterwards incorporated in the text. The points of his addition were an appeal to the magnanimity of the King of Prussia; an injunction to say nothing to give ground for the supposition that England had any business to discuss the abstract right of Spain to choose her own sovereign; that the British government had not admitted Prince Leopold’s acceptance of the throne to justify the immediate resort to arms threatened by France; but that the secrecy with which the affair had been conducted was a ground for just offence, and the withdrawal of the prince could alone repair it.(205) Austria made energetic representations at Berlin to the same effect. In sending this addition to Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone says (July 8), “I am doubtful whether this despatch should go till it has been seen by the cabinet, indeed I think it should not, and probably you mean this. The Queen recollects being told something about this affair by Clarendon—without result—last year. I think Gramont exacts too much. It would never do for us to get up a combination of Powers in this difficult and slippery matter.”

Events for a week—one of the great critical weeks of the century—moved at a dizzy speed towards the abyss. Peace unfortunately hung upon the prudence of a band of statesmen in Paris, who have ever since, both in their own country and everywhere else, been a byword in history for blindness and folly. The game was delicate. Even in the low and broken estate into which the moral areopagus of Europe had fallen in these days, it was a disadvantage to figure as the aggressor. This disadvantage the French Empire heedlessly imposed upon itself. Of the diplomacy on the side of the government of France anterior to the war, Mr. Gladstone said that it made up “a chapter which for fault and folly taken together is almost without a parallel in the history of nations.”(206)

On July 6 the French Ministers made a precipitate declaration to their Chambers, which was in fact an ultimatum to Prussia. The action of Spain was turned into Prussian action. Prussia was called to account in a form that became a public and international threat, as Bismarck put it, “with the hand on the sword-hilt.” These rash words of challenge were the first of the French disasters. On July 8 the Duc de Gramont begged her Majesty’s government to use all their influence to bring about the voluntary renunciation by Prince Leopold of his pretensions. This he told Lord Lyons would be “a most fortunate solution” of the question. Two days later he assured Lord Lyons that “if the Prince of Hohenzollern should, on the advice of the King of Prussia, withdraw his acceptance of the crown the whole affair would be at an end.”

On July 10 Lord Granville suggests to Mr. Gladstone: “What do you think of asking the Queen whether there is any one to whom she could write confidentially with a view to persuade Hohenzollern to refuse?” Mr. Gladstone replies:—

1. I should think you could not do wrong in asking the Queen, as you propose, to procure if she can a refusal from Hohenzollern, through some private channel. 2. I suppose there could be no objection to sounding the Italian government as to the Duke of Aosta. 3. If in the meantime you have authentic accounts of military movements in France, would it not be right formally to ask their suspension, if it be still the desire of the French government that you should continue to act in the sense of procuring withdrawal?

The ambassador at Paris was instructed to work vigorously in this sense, and to urge self-possession and measure upon the Emperor’s council. On July 12, however, the prospects of peace grew more and more shadowy. On that day it became known that Prince Leopold had spontaneously renounced the candidature, or that his father had renounced it on his behalf. The French ministers made up their minds that the defeat of Prussia must be more direct. Gramont told Lyons (July 12) that the French government was in a very embarrassing position. Public opinion was so much excited that it was doubtful whether the ministry would not be overthrown, if it went down to the Chamber and announced that it regarded the affair as finished, without having obtained some more complete satisfaction from Prussia. So the Emperor and his advisers flung themselves gratuitously under Bismarck’s grinding wheels by a further demand that not only should the candidature be withdrawn, but the King should pledge himself against its ever being at any time revived. Mr. Gladstone was not slow to see the fatal mischief of this new development.

Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville.

July 12, 11.30 P.M.—I have seen, since Rothschild’s telegram,(207) that of Lyons, dated 7.55 P.M. It seems to me that Lyons should be supplied with an urgent instruction by telegram before the council of ministers to-morrow. France appealed to our support at the outset. She received it so far as the immediate object was concerned. It was immediately and energetically given. It appears to have been named by the French minister in public inclusively with that of other Powers. Under these circumstances it is our duty to represent the immense responsibility which will rest upon France, if she does not at once accept as satisfactory and conclusive, the withdrawal of the candidature of Prince Leopold.

The substance of this note was despatched to Paris at 2.30 A.M. on the morning of July 13. It did not reach Lord Lyons till half-past nine, when the council of ministers had already been sitting for half an hour at St. Cloud. The telegram was hastily embodied in the form of a tolerably emphatic letter and sent by special messenger to St. Cloud, where it was placed in M. de Gramont’s hand, at the table at which he and the other ministers were still sitting in council in the presence of the Emperor and the Empress.(208) At the same time Lord Granville strongly urged M. de Lavalette in London, to impress upon his government that they ought not to take upon themselves the responsibility of pursuing the quarrel on a matter of form, when they had obtained what Gramont had assured Lord Lyons would put an end to the dispute. Though Mr. Disraeli afterwards imputed want of energy to the British remonstrances, there is no reason to suppose that Lord Lyons was wanting either in directness or emphasis. What warnings were likely to reach the minds of men trembling for their personal popularity and for the dynasty, afraid of clamour in the streets, afraid of the army, ignorant of vital facts both military and diplomatic, incapable of measuring such facts even if they had known them, committed by the rash declaration of defiance a week before to a position that made retreat the only alternative to the sword? At the head of them all sat in misery, a sovereign reduced by disease to a wavering shadow of the will and vision of a man. They marched headlong to the pit that Bismarck was digging for them.

(M104) On July 14 Mr. Gladstone again writes to Lord Granville, suggesting answers to questions that might be asked that night in parliament. Should they say that the candidature was withdrawn, and that with this withdrawal we had a right to hope the whole affair would end, but that communications were still continued with Prussia? In duty to all parties we were bound to hope that the subject of complaint having disappeared, the complaint itself and the danger to the peace of Europe would disappear also. Then he proceeds: “What if you were to telegraph to Lyons to signify that we think it probable questions may be asked in parliament to-day; that having been called in by France itself, we cannot affect to be wholly outside the matter; and that it will be impossible for us to conceal the opinion that the cause of quarrel having been removed, France ought to be satisfied. While this might fairly pass as a friendly notice, it might also be useful as admonition. Please to consider. The claim in the telegrams for more acknowledgment of the conduct of Prussia in parliament, seems to me to deserve consideration.”

On July 13 Gramont asked Lord Lyons whether he could count upon the good offices of England in obtaining the prohibition of any future candidature, at the same time giving him a written assurance that this would terminate the incident. Lord Lyons declined to commit himself, and referred home for instructions. The cabinet was hastily summoned for noon on the 14th. It decided that the demand could not be justified by France, and at the same time took a step of which Gramont chose to say, that it was the one act done by the English government in favour of peace. They suggested to Bismarck that as the King of Prussia had consented to the acceptance by Prince Leopold of the Spanish crown, and had thereby, in a certain sense, become a party to the arrangement, so he might with perfect dignity communicate to the French government his consent to the withdrawal of the acceptance, if France waived her demand for an engagement covering the future. This suggestion Bismarck declined (July 15) to bring before the King, as he did not feel that he could recommend its acceptance. As he had decided to hold France tight in the position in which her rulers had now planted her, we can understand why he could not recommend the English proposal to his master. Meanwhile the die was cast.

III

(M105) The King of Prussia was taking the waters of Ems. Thither Benedetti, the French ambassador to his court, under instructions followed him. The King with moderation and temper told him (July 11) he had just received a telegram that the answer of Prince Leopold would certainly reach him the next day, and he would then at once communicate it. Something (some say Bismarck) prevented the arrival of the courier for some hours beyond the time anticipated. On the morning of the 13th the King met Benedetti on the promenade, and asked him if he had anything new to say. The ambassador obeyed his orders, and told the King of the demand for assurances against a future candidature. The King at once refused this new and unexpected concession, but in parting from Benedetti said they would resume their conversation in the afternoon. Meanwhile the courier arrived, but before the courier a despatch came from Paris conveying the suggestion that the King might write an apologetic letter to the French Emperor. This naturally gave the King some offence, but he contented himself with sending Benedetti a polite message by an aide-de-camp that he had received in writing from Prince Leopold the intelligence of his renunciation. “By this his Majesty considered the question as settled.” Benedetti persevered in seeking to learn what answer he should make to his government on the question of further assurances. The King replied by the same officer that he was obliged to decline absolutely to enter into new negotiations; that what he had said in the morning was his last word in the matter. On July 14, the King received Benedetti in the railway carriage on his departure for Berlin, told him that any future negotiations would be conducted by his government, and parted from him with courteous salutations. Neither king nor ambassador was conscious that the country of either had suffered a shadow of indignity from the representative of the other.

Bismarck called upon the British ambassador in those days, and made what, in the light of later revelations, seems a singular complaint. He observed that Great Britain “should have forbidden France to enter on the war. She was in a position to do so, and her interests and those of Europe demanded it of her.”(209) Later in the year he spoke in the same sense at Versailles: “If, at the beginning of the war, the English had said to Napoleon, ‘There must be no war,’ there would have been none.”(210) What is certain is that nobody would have been more discomfited by the success of England’s prohibition than Count Bismarck. The sincerity and substance of his reproach are tested by a revelation made by himself long after. Though familiar, the story is worth telling over again in the biography of a statesman who stood for a type alien to policies of fraud.

(M106) Bismarck had hurried from Varzin to Berlin on July 12, in profound concern lest his royal master should subject his country and his minister to what, after the menace of Gramont and Ollivier on July 6, would be grave diplomatic defeat. He had resolved to retire if the incident should end in this shape, and the chief actor has himself described the strange sinister scene that averted his design. He invited Moltke and Roon to dine with him alone on July 13. In the midst of their conversation, “I was informed,” he says, “that a telegram from Ems in cipher, if I recollect rightly, of about 200 ‘groups’ was being deciphered. When the copy was handed me it showed that Abeken had drawn up and signed the telegram at his Majesty’s command, and I read it out to my guests, whose dejection was so great that they turned away from food and drink. On a repeated examination of the document I lingered upon the authorisation of his Majesty, which included a command, immediately to communicate Benedetti’s fresh demand and its rejection to our ambassadors and to the press. I put a few questions to Moltke as to the extent of his confidence in the state of our preparations, especially as to the time they would still require in order to meet this sudden risk of war. He answered that if there was to be war he expected no advantage to us by deferring its outbreak.... Under the conviction that war could be avoided only at the cost of the honour of Prussia, I made use of the royal authorisation to publish the contents of the telegram; and in the presence of my two guests I reduced the telegram by striking out words, but without adding or altering, to the following form: ‘After the news of the renunciation of the hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern had been officially communicated to the imperial government of France by the royal government of Spain, the French ambassador at Ems further demanded of his Majesty the King that he would authorise him to telegraph to Paris that his Majesty the King bound himself for all future time never again to give his consent if the Hohenzollerns should renew their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon decided not to receive the French ambassador again, and sent to tell him through the aide-de-camp on duty that his Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador.’ The difference in the effect of the abbreviated text of the Ems telegram, as compared with that produced by the original, was not the result of stronger words but of the form, which made this announcement appear decisive, while Abeken’s version would only have been regarded as a fragment of a negotiation still pending and to be continued at Berlin. After I had read out the concentrated edition to my two guests, Moltke remarked: ‘Now it has a different ring; it sounded before like a parley; now it is like a flourish in answer to a challenge.’ I went on to explain: ‘If in execution of his Majesty’s order I at once communicate this text, which contains no alteration in or addition to the telegram, not only to the newspapers, but also by telegraph to all our embassies, it will be known in Paris before midnight, and not only an account of its contents, but also an account of the manner of its distribution, will have the effect of a red rag upon the Gallic bull. Fight we must, if we do not want to act the part of the vanquished without a battle. Success, however, essentially depends upon the impression which the origination of the war makes upon us and others; it is important that we should be the party attacked, and that we fearlessly meet the public threats of France.’ This explanation brought about in the two generals a revulsion to a more joyous mood, the liveliness of which surprised me. They had suddenly recovered their pleasure in eating and drinking, and spoke in a more cheerful vein. Roon said: ‘Our God of old lives still, and will not let us perish in disgrace.’ ”(211)

The telegram devised at the Berlin dinner-party soon reached Paris. For a second time the 14th day of July was to be a date of doom in French history. The Emperor and his council deliberated on the grave question of calling out the reserves. The decisive step had been pressed by Marshal Lebœuf the night before without success. He now returned to the charge, and this time his proposal was resolved upon. It was about four o’clock. The marshal had hardly left the room before new scruples seized his colleagues. The discussion began over again, and misgivings revived. The Emperor showed himself downcast and worn out. Towards five o’clock somebody came to tell them it was absolutely necessary that ministers should present themselves before the Chambers. Gramont rose and told them that if they wished an accommodation, there was still one way, an appeal to Europe. The word congress was no sooner pronounced than the Emperor, seized by extraordinary emotion at the thought of salvation by his own favourite chimera, was stirred even to tears. An address to the Powers was instantly drawn up, and the council broke off. At six o’clock Lebœuf received a note from the Emperor, seeming to regret the decision to call out the reserves. On Lebœuf’s demand the council was convoked for ten o’clock that night. In the interval news came that the Ems telegram had been communicated to foreign governments. As Bismarck had calculated, the affront of the telegram was aggravated by publicity. At ten o’clock the council met, and mobilisation was again considered. By eleven it was almost decided that mobilisation should be put off. At eleven o’clock a foreign office despatch arrived, and was read at the council. What was this despatch, is not yet known—perhaps from the French military agent at Berlin, with further news of Prussian preparations. It was of such a kind that it brought about an instant reaction. The orders for mobilisation were maintained.(212)

(M107) An inflammatory appeal was made to the Chambers. When a parliamentary committee was appointed, a vital document was suppressed, and its purport misrepresented. Thus in point of scruple, the two parties to the transaction were not ill-matched, but Bismarck had been watchful, provident, and well informed, while his opponents were men, as one of them said, “of a light heart,” heedless, uncalculating, and ignorant and wrong as to their facts.(213)

On July 15 Mr. Gladstone reported to the Queen:—

Mr. Disraeli made inquiries from the government respecting the differences between France and Prussia, and in so doing expressed opinions strongly adverse to France as the apparent aggressor. Mr. Gladstone, in replying, admitted it to be the opinion of the government that there was no matter known to be in controversy of a nature to warrant a disturbance of the general peace. He said the course of events was not favourable, and the decisive moment must in all likelihood be close at hand.

“At a quarter past four,” says a colleague, “a cabinet box was handed down the treasury bench to Gladstone. He opened it and looking along to us, said—with an accent I shall never forget—‘War declared against Prussia.’ ”(214) “Shall I ever forget,” says Archbishop Tait, “Gladstone’s face of earnest care when I saw him in the lobby?”(215)

The British cabinet made a final effort for peace. Lord Granville instructed our ambassadors to urge France and Prussia to be so far controlled by the treaty of Paris that before proceeding to extremities they should have recourse to the good offices of some friendly Power, adding that his government was ready to take any part that might be desired in the matter. On the 18th Bismarck replied by throwing the onus of acceptance on France. On the 19th France declined the proposal.

Just as Bismarck said that England ought to have prevented the war, Frenchmen also said that we ought to have held the Emperor back. With what sanction could Mr. Gladstone have enforced peremptory counsel? Was France to be made to understand that England would go to war on the Prussian side? Short of war, what more could she have done? Lord Granville had told Gramont that he had never in despatch or conversation admitted that after the French had received satisfaction in substance, there was a case for a quarrel on pure form. The British cabinet and their ambassador in Paris had redoubled warning and remonstrance. If the Emperor and his advisers did not listen to the penetrating expostulations of Thiers, and to his vigorous and instructed analysis of the conditions of their case, why should they listen to Lord Granville? Nor was there time, for their precipitancy had kindled a conflagration before either England or any other Power had any chance of extinguishing the blaze.(216)

To Michel Chevalier Mr. Gladstone wrote a few days later:—

I cannot describe to you the sensation of pain, almost of horror, which, has thrilled through this country from end to end at the outbreak of hostilities, the commencement of the work of blood. I suppose there was a time when England would have said, “Let our neighbours, being, as they are, our rivals, waste their energies, their wealth, their precious irrevocable lives, in destroying one another: they will be the weaker, we shall be relatively the stronger.” But we have now unlearned that bad philosophy; and the war between France and Prussia saddens the whole face of society, and burdens every man with a personal grief. We do not pretend to be sufficient judges of the merits: I now mean by “we” those who are in authority, and perhaps in a condition to judge least ill. We cannot divide praise and blame as between parties. I hope you do not think it unkind that I should write thus. Forgive the rashness of a friend. One of the purposes in life dear to my heart has been to knit together in true amity the people of my own country with those of your great nation. That web of concord is too tender yet, not to suffer under the rude strain of conflicts and concussions even such as we have no material share in. I think that even if I err, I cannot be without a portion of your sympathy: now when the knell of the brave begins to toll. As for us, we have endeavoured to cherish with both the relations of peace and mutual respect. May nothing happen to impair them!

Though good feeling prevented Mr. Gladstone from dividing praise and blame between the two governments, his own judgment was clear. The initial declaration of July 6, followed by the invention of a second demand by France upon Prussia after the first had been conceded, looked to him, as it did to England generally, like a fixed resolution to force a quarrel. In September he wrote of the proceedings of the French government:—

Wonder rises to its climax when we remember that this feverish determination to force a quarrel was associated with a firm belief in the high preparation and military superiority of the French forces, the comparative inferiority of the Germans, the indisposition of the smaller states to give aid to Prussia, and even the readiness of Austria, with which from his long residence at Vienna the Duc de Gramont supposed himself to be thoroughly acquainted, to appear in arms as the ally of France. It too soon appeared that, as the advisers of the Emperor knew nothing of public rights and nothing of the sense of Europe, so they knew nothing about Austria and the mind of the German states, and less than nothing about not only the Prussian army, but even their own.(217)

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V. Neutrality And Annexation. (1870)

The immediate purpose with which Italians and Germans effected the great change in the European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed not securities but forces. Machiavelli’s time had come.—ACTON.

I

(M108) “The war is a grievous affair,” Mr. Gladstone said to Brand, “and adds much to our cares, for to maintain our neutrality in such a case as this, will be a most arduous task. On the face of the facts France is wrong, but as to personal trustworthiness the two moving spirits on the respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par.” His individual activity was unsparing. He held almost daily conferences with Lord Granville at the foreign office; criticised and minuted despatches; contributed freely to the drafts. “There has not, I think,” he wrote to Bright (Sept. 12), “been a single day on which Granville and I have not been in anxious communication on the subject of the war.” When Lord Granville went to Walmer he wrote to Mr. Gladstone, “I miss our discussions here over the despatches as they come in very much.” “I hope I need not say that while you are laid up with gout at Walmer,” Mr. Gladstone wrote in October, “I am most ready to start at a few hours’ notice at any time of day or night, to join you upon any matter which you may find to require it. Indeed I could not properly or with comfort remain here upon any other terms.” Details of this agitating time, with all its convulsions and readjustments, belong to the history of Europe. The part taken by Mr. Gladstone and his cabinet was for several months in pretty close harmony with the humour of the country. It will be enough for us to mark their action at decisive moments.

On July 16 he wrote to Cardwell at the war office:—

If, unhappily, which God forbid, we have to act in this war, it will not be with six months’, nor three months’, nor even one month’s notice. The real question is, supposing an urgent call of honour and of duty in an emergency for 15,000 or 20,000 men, what would you do? What answer would the military authorities make to this question, those of them especially who have brains rather than mere position? Have you no fuller battalions than those of 500? At home or in the Mediterranean? If in the latter, should they not be brought home? Childers seemed to offer a handsome subscription of marines, and that the artillery would count for much in such a case is most probable. What I should like is to study the means of sending 20,000 men to Antwerp with as much promptitude as at the Trent affair we sent 10,000 to Canada.

The figures of the army and navy were promptly supplied to the prime minister, Cardwell adding with, a certain shrillness that, though he had no wish to go either to Antwerp or anywhere else, he could not be responsible for sending an expedition abroad, unless the army were fitted for that object by measures taken now to increase its force.

I entirely agree with you, Mr. Gladstone replied, that when it is seriously intended to send troops to Antwerp or elsewhere abroad, “immediate measures must be taken to increase our force.” I feel, however, rather uneasy at what seems to me the extreme susceptibility on one side of the case of some members of the cabinet. I hope it will be balanced by considering the effect of any forward step by appeal to parliament, in compromising the true and entire neutrality of our position, and in disturbing and misdirecting the mind of the public and of parliament. I am afraid I have conveyed to your mind a wrong impression as to the state of my own. It is only a far outlook which, in my opinion, brings into view as a possibility the sending a force to Antwerp. Should the day arrive, we shall then be on the very edge of war, with scarcely a hope of not passing onward into the abyss.

Cardwell sent him a paper by a high military authority, on which Mr. Gladstone made two terse ironic comments. “I think the paper,” he said, “if it proves anything proves (1) That generals and not ministers are the proper judges of those weights in the political scales which express the likelihood of war and peace; (2) That there is very little difference between absolute neutrality and actual war. I advise that Granville should see it.”

On July 25 the Times divulged the text of a projected agreement in 1869 (it was in truth 1867) between the French and Prussian governments in five articles, including one that the incorporation of Belgium by France would not be objected to by Prussia. The public was shocked and startled, and many were inclined to put down the document for a forgery and a hoax. As a matter of fact, in substance it was neither. The Prussian ambassador a few days before had informed Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville personally and in strict secrecy, that the draft of such a project existed in the handwriting of M. Benedetti. This private communication was taken by Mr. Gladstone to have been made with the object of prompting him to be the agent in producing the evil news to the world, and thus to prejudice France in the judgment of Europe. He thought that no part of his duty, and took time to consider it, in the expectation that it was pretty sure to find its way into print by some other means, as indeed soon happened. “For the sake of peace,” Bismarck explained to Lord Granville (July 28, 1870), “I kept the secret, and treated the propositions in a dilatory manner.” When the British ambassador on one occasion had tried to sound him on the suspected designs of France, Bismarck answered, “It is no business of mine to tell French secrets.”

(M109) There were members of the cabinet who doubted the expediency of England taking any action. The real position of affairs, they argued, was not altered: the draft treaty only disclosed what everybody believed before, namely that France sought compensation for Prussian aggrandisement, as she had secured it for Italian aggrandisement by taking Savoy and Nice. That Prussia would not object, provided the compensations were not at the expense of people who spoke German, had all come out at the time of the Luxemburg affair. If France and Prussia agreed, how could we help Belgium, unless indeed Europe joined? But then what chance was there of Russia and Austria joining against France and Prussia for the sake of Belgium, in which neither of them had any direct interest? At the same time ministers knew that the public in England expected them to do something, though a vote for men and money would probably suffice. The cabinet, however, advanced a step beyond a parliamentary vote. On July 30 they met and took a decision to which Mr. Gladstone then and always after attached high importance. England proposed a treaty to Prussia and France, providing that if the armies of either violated the neutrality of Belgium, Great Britain would co-operate with the other for its defence, but without engaging to take part in the general operations of the war. The treaty was to hold good for twelve months after the conclusion of the war. Bismarck at once came into the engagement. France loitered a little, but after the battle of Wörth made no more difficulty, and the instrument was signed on August 9.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

The mind of the government was described by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to Bright (August 1):—

Although some members of the cabinet were inclined on the outbreak of this most miserable war to make military preparations, others, Lord Granville and I among them, by no means shared that disposition, nor I think was the feeling of parliament that way inclined. But the publication of the treaty has altered all this, and has thrown upon us the necessity either of doing something fresh to secure Belgium, or else of saying that under no circumstances would we take any step to secure her from absorption. This publication has wholly altered the feeling of the House of Commons, and no government could at this moment venture to give utterance to such an intention about Belgium. But neither do we think it would be right, even if it were safe, to announce that we would in any case stand by with folded arms, and see actions done which would amount to a total extinction of public right in Europe.

The idea of engagements that might some day involve resort to force made Bright uneasy, and Mr. Gladstone wrote to him again (August 4):—

It will be a great addition to the domestic portion of the griefs of this most unhappy war, if it is to be the cause of a political severance between you and the present administration. To this I know you would justly reply that the claims of conviction are paramount. I hope, however, that the moment has not quite arrived.... You will, I am sure, give me credit for good faith when I say, especially on Lord Granville’s part as on my own, who are most of all responsible, that we take this step in the interest of peace.... The recommendation set up in opposition to it generally is, that we should simply declare we will defend the neutrality of Belgium by arms in case it should be attacked. Now the sole or single-handed defence of Belgium would be an enterprise which we incline to think Quixotic; if these two great military powers combined against it—that combination is the only serious danger; and this it is which by our proposed engagements we should I hope render improbable to the very last degree. I add for myself this confession of faith. If the Belgian people desire, on their own account, to join France or any other country, I for one will be no party to taking up arms to prevent it. But that the Belgians, whether they would or not, should go ’plump’ down the maw of another country to satisfy dynastic greed, is another matter. The accomplishment of such a crime as this implies, would come near to an extinction of public right in Europe, and I do not think we could look on while the sacrifice of freedom and independence was in course of consummation.

II

(M110) By the end of the first week of August the storm of war had burst upon the world. “On the 2nd of August, in the insignificant affair of Saarbrück, the Emperor of the French assumed a feeble offensive. On the 4th, the Prussians replied energetically at Wissemburg. And then what a torrent, what a deluge of events! In twenty-eight days ten battles were fought. Three hundred thousand men were sent to the hospitals, to captivity, or to the grave. The German enemy had penetrated into the interior of France, over a distance of a hundred and fifty miles of territory, and had stretched forth everywhere as he went the strong hand of possession. The Emperor was a prisoner, and had been deposed with general consent; his family wanderers, none knew where; the embryo at least of a republic, born of the hour, had risen on the ruins of the empire, while proud and gorgeous Paris was awaiting with divided mind the approach of the conquering monarch, and his countless host.”(218) This was Mr. Gladstone’s description of a marvellous and shattering hour.

Talleyrand was fond in the days of 1815 at Vienna, of applying to any diplomatist who happened to agree with him the expression, “a good European.” He meant a statesman who was capable of conceiving the state-system of the western world as a whole. The events of August made the chief minister of Austria now exclaim, “I see no longer any Europe.” All the notions of alliance that had so much to do with the precipitation of the war were dissipated. Italy, so far from joining France, marched into Rome. Austria ostentatiously informed England that she was free from engagements. The Czar of Russia was nephew of the Prussian king and German in his leanings, but Gortchakoff, his minister, was jealous of Bismarck, and his sympathies inclined to France, and Czar and minister alike nursed designs in the Black Sea. With such materials as these Mr. Pitt himself with all his subsidies could not have constructed a fighting coalition. Even the sons of stricken France after the destruction of the empire were a divided people. For side by side with national defence against the invader, republican and monarchic propagandism was at work, internecine in its temper and scattering baleful seeds of civil war.

“Many,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to Chevalier in September, “seem so over-sanguine as to suppose that it is in our power at any moment, by friendly influence of reasoning, to solve the problem which has brought together in the shock of battle the two greatest military powers of Europe.... I do not see that it is an offence on our part not to interfere when the belligerents differ so widely, when we have not the hope of bringing them together, and when we cannot adopt without reserve the language and claims of either.” Material responsibility and moral responsibility both pointed to a rigid equity between the combatants, and to strict neutrality. The utmost to be done was to localise the war; and with this aim, the British cabinet induced Italy, Austria, Russia, and smaller powers to come to a common agreement that none of them would depart from neutrality without a previous understanding with the rest. This league of the neutrals, though negative, was at least a shadow of collective action, from which good might come if the belligerents should some day accept or invite mediation. To this diplomatic neutrality the only alternative was an armed neutrality, and armed neutrality has not always served pacific ends.

To the German contention at one stage after the overthrow of the empire, that the Empress was still the only authority existing legally for France, Mr. Gladstone was energetically opposed. “It embodied,” he said, “the doctrine that no country can have a new government without the consent of the old one.” “Ought we,” he asked Lord Granville (Sept. 20), “to witness in silence the promulgation of such a doctrine, which is utterly opposed to the modern notions of public right, though it was in vogue fifty years back, and though it was acted on with most fatal consequences by the Prussians of eighty years back?” Then as for mediation, whether isolated or in common, he saw no hope in it. He said to the Duke of Argyll (Sept. 6), “I would not say a word ever so gently. I believe it would do great mischief. As at present advised, I see but two really safe grounds for mediation, (1) a drawn battle; (2) the request of both parties.” Ever since 1862, and his error in the American war—so he now wrote to Lord Granville—“in forming and expressing an opinion that the Southerners had virtually established their independence, I have been very fearful of giving opinions with regard to the proper course of foreign nations to pursue in junctures, of which, after all, I think they have better means of forming a judgment than foreigners can possess.”

In the middle of September Thiers, in the course of his valiant mission to European courts, reached London. “Yesterday,” Mr. Gladstone writes (Sept. 14), “I saw Thiers and had a long conversation with him; he was very clear and touching in parts. But the purpose of his mission is vague. He seems come to do just what he can.” The vagueness of Thiers did but mirror the distractions of France. Not even from his ingenious, confident, and fertile mind could men hope for a clue through the labyrinth of European confusions. Great Britain along with four other powers recognised the new government of the Republic in France at the beginning of February 1871.

(M111) It was about this time that Mr. Gladstone took what was for a prime minister the rather curious step of volunteering an anonymous article in a review, upon these great affairs in which his personal responsibility was both heavy and direct.(219) The precedent can hardly be called a good one, for as anybody might have known, the veil was torn aside in a few hours after the Edinburgh Review containing his article appeared. Its object, he said afterwards, was “to give what I thought needful information on a matter of great national importance, which involved at the time no interest of party whatever. If such interests had been involved, a rule from which I have never as a minister diverted would have debarred me from writing.” Lord Granville told him that, “It seemed to be an admirable argument, the more so as it is the sort of thing Thiers ought to have said and did not.” The article made a great noise, as well it might, for it was written with much eloquence, truth, and power, and was calculated to console his countrymen for seeing a colossal European conflict going on, without the privilege of a share in it. One passage about happy England—happy especially that the wise dispensation of Providence had cut her off by the streak of silver sea from continental dangers—rather irritated than convinced. The production of such an article under such circumstances was a striking illustration of Mr. Gladstone’s fervid desire—the desire of a true orator’s temperament—to throw his eager mind upon a multitude of men, to spread the light of his own urgent conviction, to play the part of missionary with a high evangel, which had been his earliest ideal forty years before. Everybody will agree that it was better to have a minister writing his own articles in a respectable quarterly, than doctoring other people’s articles with concomitants from a reptile fund.

III

On the vital question of the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, Mr. Gladstone’s view was easy to anticipate. He could not understand how the French protests turned more upon the inviolability of French soil, than on the attachment of the people of Alsace and North Lorraine to their country. The abstract principle he thought peculiarly awkward in a nation that had made recent annexations of her own. Upon all his correspondents at home and abroad, he urged that the question ought to be worked on the basis of the sentiments of the people concerned, and not upon the principle of inviolability. He composed an elaborate memorandum for the cabinet, but without effect. On the last day of September, he records: “Sept. 30: Cabinet 2-1/4-6. I failed in my two objects. 1. An effort to speak with the other neutral Powers against the transfer of Alsace and Lorraine without reference to the populations. 2. Immediate release of Fenian prisoners.”

To Mr. Bright, who was still prevented by illness from attending cabinets, and who had the second of the two objects much at heart, he wrote the next day:—

I send for your private perusal the enclosed mem. which I proposed to the cabinet yesterday, but could not induce them to adopt. It presupposes the concurrence of the neutral Powers. They agreed in the opinions, but did not think the expression of them timely. My opinion certainly is that the transfer of territory and inhabitants by mere force calls for the reprobation of Europe, and that Europe is entitled to utter it, and can utter it with good effect.

The ground taken by him in the cabinet was as follows:—

A matter of this kind cannot be regarded as in principle a question between the two belligerents only, but involves considerations of legitimate interest to all the Powers of Europe. It appears to bear on the Belgian question in particular. It is also a principle likely to be of great consequence in the eventual settlement of the Eastern question. Quite apart from the subject of mediation, it cannot be right that the neutral Powers should remain silent, while this principle of consulting the wishes of the population is trampled down, should the actual sentiment of Alsace and Lorraine be such as to render that language applicable. The mode of expressing any view of this matter is doubtless a question requiring much consideration. The decision of the cabinet was that the time for it had not yet come. Any declaration in the sense described would, Mr. Gladstone thought, entail, in fairness, an obligation to repudiate the present claim of France to obtain peace without surrendering “either an inch of her territory or a stone of her fortresses.”

Mr. Bright did not agree with him, but rather favoured the principle of inviolability. In November Mr. Gladstone prepared a still more elaborate memorandum in support of a protest from the neutral Powers. The Duke of Argyll put what was perhaps the general view when he wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 25, 1870), “that he had himself never argued in favour of the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, but only against our having any right to oppose it otherwise than by the most friendly dissuasion.” The Duke held that the consent of populations to live under a particular government is a right subject to a great many qualifications, and it would not be easy to turn such a doctrine into the base of an official remonstrance. After all, he said, the instincts of nations stand for something in this world. The German did not exceed the ancient acknowledged right of nations in successful wars, when he said to Alsace and Lorraine, “Conquest in a war forced upon me by the people of which you form a part, gives me the right to annex, if on other grounds I deem it expedient, and for strategic reasons I do so deem it.”

Mr. Gladstone, notwithstanding his cabinet, held to his view energetically expressed as follows:—

If the contingency happen, not very probable, of a sudden accommodation which shall include the throttling of Alsace and part of Lorraine, without any voice previously raised against it, it will in my opinion be a standing reproach to England. There is indeed the Russian plan of not recognising that in which we have had no part; but it is difficult to say what this comes to.

On December 20 he says to Lord Granville what we may take for a last word on this part of the case: “While I more and more feel the deep culpability of France, I have an apprehension that this violent laceration and transfer is to lead us from bad to worse, and to be the beginning of a new series of European complications.”

While working in the spirit of cordial and even eager loyalty to the prime minister, Lord Granville disagreed with him upon the question of diplomatic action against annexation. Palmerston, he said to Mr. Gladstone in October, “wasted the strength derived by England by the great war by his brag. I am afraid of our wasting that which we at present derive from moral causes, by laying down general principles when nobody will attend to them, and when in all probability they will be disregarded. My objection to doing at present what you propose is, that it is impossible according to my views to do so without being considered to throw our weight into the French scale against Germany, with consequent encouragement on one side and irritation on the other.”

Like Thiers, Mr. Gladstone had been leaning upon the concurrence of the neutral Powers, and active co-operation at St. Petersburg. Russian objects were inconsistent with the alienation of Germany, and they made a fatal bar to all schemes for lowering the German terms. This truth of the situation was suddenly brought home to England in no palatable way.

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VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)

“You are always talking to me of principles. As if your public law were anything to me; I do not know what it means. What do you suppose that all your parchments and your treaties signify to me?”

—ALEXANDER I. To TALLEYRAND.

I

At the close of the Crimean war in 1856 by the provisions of the treaty of Paris, Russia and Turkey were restrained from constructing arsenals on the coast of the Euxine, and from maintaining ships of war on its waters. No serious statesman believed that the restriction would last, any more than Napoleon’s restraint on Prussia in 1808 against keeping up an army of more than forty thousand men could last. Palmerston had this neutralisation more at heart than anybody else, and Lord Granville told the House of Lords what durability Palmerston expected for it:—

General Ignatieff told me that he remarked to Lord Palmerston, “These are stipulations which you cannot expect will last long,” and Lord Palmerston replied, “They will last ten years.” A learned civilian, a great friend of mine, told me he heard Lord Palmerston talk on the subject, and say, “Well, at all events they will last my life.” A noble peer, a colleague of mine, an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston, says Lord Palmerston told him they would last seven years.(220)

In 1856 Mr. Gladstone declared his opinion, afterwards often repeated, that the neutralisation of the Black Sea, popular as it might be in England at the moment, was far from being a satisfactory arrangement.(221) Were the time to come, he said, when Russia might resume aggressive schemes on Turkey, he believed that neutralisation would mean nothing but a series of pitfalls much deeper than people expected.(222) These pitfalls now came into full view. On the last day of October Prince Gortchakoff addressed a circular to the Powers, announcing that his imperial master could “no longer consider himself bound to the terms of the treaty of March 1856, in so far as these limit his rights of sovereignty in the Black Sea.” On the merits there was very little real dispute in Europe. As Lord Granville once wrote to Mr. Gladstone: “There was no doubt about Germany having at Paris, and subsequently, always taken the Russian view. France made an intimation to the same effect very soon after the conclusion of the treaty. And Austria later. Italy did the same, but not in so decided a manner.... I have frequently said in public that with the exception of ourselves and the Turks, all the co-signatories of the treaty of Paris had expressed views in favour of modifying the article, previous to Prince Gortchakoff’s declaration.”(223)

(M112) To have a good case on the merits was one thing, and to force it at the sword’s point was something extremely different. As Mr. Gladstone put it in a memorandum that became Lord Granville’s despatch, “the question was not whether any desire expressed by Russia ought to be carefully examined in a friendly spirit by the co-signatory powers, but whether they are to accept from her an announcement that by her own act, without any consent from them, she has released herself from a solemn covenant.”(224) Mr. Gladstone, not dissenting on the substance of the Russian claim, was outraged by the form. The only parallel he ever found to Gortchakoff’s proceedings in 1870 was a certain claim, of which we shall soon see something, made by America in 1872. “I have had half an idea,” he wrote to Lord Granville, “that it might be well I should see Brunnow [the Russian ambassador] either with you or alone. All know the mischief done by the Russian idea of Lord Aberdeen, and the opposition are in the habit of studiously representing me as his double, or his heir in pacific traditions. This I do not conceive to be true, and possibly I might undeceive Brunnow a little.”

In this country, as soon as the news of the circular was made known, the public excitement was intense. Consols instantly dropped heavily. Apart from the form of the Russian claim, the public still alert upon the eastern question, felt that the question was once more alive. As Mr. Gladstone had said to Lord Granville (Oct. 4, 1870), “Everybody at a time like this looks out for booty; it will be hard to convince central Europe that Turkey is not a fair prize.” From France Lord Lyons wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 14) that the Russian declaration was looked upon with complacency, because it might lead to a congress, and at all events it might, by causing a stir among the neutrals, give a check to Prussia as well as to Russia.

Lord Granville wrote to Mr. Gladstone, who was at Hawarden (Nov. 21):—

I am very sorry to hear that you are not well. Of course, you must run no risk, but as soon as you can you will, I hope, come up and have a cabinet. Childers has been here. He tells me there is a perfect howl about ministers not meeting. He is more quiet in his talk than I hear some of our colleagues are. But he says if there is to be war, every day lost is most injurious. I have told him that it is impossible to say that we may not be driven into it by Russia, or by other foreign powers, or by our own people; that we must take care of our dignity; but if there ever was a cabinet which is bound not to drift into an unnecessary war, it is ours.

Mr. Gladstone replied next day:—

I will frankly own that I am much disgusted with a good deal of the language that I have read in the newspapers within the last few days about immediate war with Russia. I try to put a check on myself to prevent the reaction it engenders. Your observation on drifting into war is most just: though I always thought Clarendon’s epithet in this one case inapplicable as well as unadvisable. I know, however, nothing more like drifting into war than would be a resort to any military measures whatever, except with reference either to some actual fact or some well defined contingency....

II

The courses open to the British Government in the face of the circular were these. They might silently or with a protest acquiesce. Or they might declare an offensive war (much deprecated by Turkey herself) against a nation that had peculiar advantages for defence, and for an object that every other signatory power thought in itself a bad object. Third, they might, in accordance with a wonderfully grand scheme suggested to ministers, demand from Germany, all flushed as she was with military pride, to tell us plainly whether she was on our side or Russia’s; and if the German answer did not please us, then we should make an offensive alliance with France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey checking Russia in the east and Germany in the west. A fourth plan was mutely to wait, on the plea that whatever Russia might have said, nothing had been done. The fifth plan was a conference. This was hardly heroic enough to please everybody in the cabinet. At least it saved us from the insanity of a war that would have intensified European confusion, merely to maintain restraints considered valuable by nobody. The expedient of a conference was effectively set in motion by Bismarck, then pre-occupied in his critical Bavarian treaty and the siege of Paris. On November 12, Mr. Odo Russell left London for Versailles on a special mission to the Prussian king. The intrepidity of our emissary soon secured a remarkable success, and the episode of Bismarck’s intervention in the business was important.

(M113) Mr. Odo Russell had three hours’ conversation with Count Bismarck on November 21. Bismarck told him that the Russian circular had taken him by surprise; that though he had always thought the treaty of 1856 too hard upon Russia, he entirely disapproved both of the manner and time chosen for forcing on a revision of it; that he could not interfere nor even answer the circular, but to prevent the outbreak of another war he would recommend conferences at Constantinople.(225) The conversation broke off at four o’clock in the afternoon, with this unpromising cast. At ten in the evening it was resumed; it was prolonged until half an hour beyond midnight. “I felt I knew him better,” Mr. Russell in an unofficial letter tells Lord Granville (Nov. 30), “and could express more easily all that I had determined to say to convince him that unless he could get Russia to withdraw the circular, we should be compelled with or without allies to go to war.” Bismarck remained long obstinate in his professed doubts of England going to war; but he gradually admitted the truth of the consequences to which a pacific acceptance of “the Russian kick must inevitably lead. And so he came round to the British point of view, and felt that in our place he could not recede.”

It was not hard to see Bismarck’s interests. The mischief to Germany of another European war before Paris had fallen; the moral support to be derived by the Tours government from a revival of the old Anglo-French alliance; the chances of Beust and other persons fishing in the troubled waters of an extended European conflict; the vital importance of peace to the reconstruction of Germany—these were the disadvantages to his own country and policy, of a war between England and Russia; these worked the change in his mind between afternoon and midnight, and led him to support the cause of England and peace against Gortchakoff and his circular. Characteristically, at the same time he strove hard to drive a bargain with the English agent, and to procure some political advantages in exchange for his moral support. “In politics,” he said, “one hand should wash the other” (eine Hand die andere waschen muss). In Mr. Odo Russell, however, he found a man who talked the language, kept the tone and was alive to all the arts of diplomatic business, and no handwashing followed. When Mr. Russell went to his apartment in the Place Hoche at Versailles that night, he must have felt that he had done a good day’s work.

In the following year, papers were laid before parliament, and attention was drawn to the language used by Mr. Russell to Bismarck, in the pregnant sentence about the question being of a nature in its present state to compel us with or without allies, to go to war with Russia.(226) Mr. Gladstone, when directly challenged, replied (Feb. 16) that the agent had used this argument without specific authority or instruction from the government, but that the duty of diplomatic agents required them to express themselves in the mode in which they think they can best support the proposition of which they wish to procure acceptance. Mr. Odo Russell explained to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 27) that he was led to use the argument about England being compelled to go to war with or without allies by these reasons: that we were bound by a definite treaty to regard any retractation of the stipulations of March 30, 1856, as a cause of war;(227) that Gortchakoff’s assumption of a right to renounce provisions directly touching Russian interests seemed to carry with it the assumption of a right to renounce all the rest of the treaty; that Mr. Gladstone’s government had declared (Nov. 10) that it was impossible to sanction the course announced by Gortchakoff; that, therefore, France being otherwise engaged, and Austria being unprepared, we might be compelled by our joint and several obligations under the tripartite treaty, to go to war with Russia for proceedings that we pronounced ourselves unable to sanction; finally, that he had never been instructed to state to Prussia, that the question was not one compelling us ever to go to war, notwithstanding our treaty engagements. What was Mr. Gladstone’s reply to this I do not find, but Lord Granville had very sensibly written to him some weeks before (Dec. 8, 1870):—

I am afraid our whole success has been owing to the belief that we would go to war, and to tell the truth, I think that war in some shape or other, sooner or later, was a possible risk after our note. In any case, I would reassure nobody now. Promising peace is as unwise as to threaten war. A sort of instinct that the bumps of combativeness and destructiveness are to be found somewhere in your head, has helped us much during the last five months.

III

(M114) Having undertaken to propose a conference, Bismarck did the best he could for it. The British cabinet accepted on condition that the conference was not to open with any previous assumption of Gortchakoff’s declaration, and they objected to Petersburg as the scene of operations. Mr. Gladstone in some notes prepared for the meeting of his colleagues (Nov. 26), was very firm on the first and main point, that “Her Majesty’s government could enter into no conference which should assume any portion of the treaty to have been already abrogated by the discretion of a single Power, and it would be wholly out of place for them, under the present circumstances, to ask for a conference, as they were not the parties who desire to bring about any change in the treaty.” Russia made difficulties, but Bismarck’s influence prevailed. The conference assembled not at Petersburg but in London, and subject to no previous assumption as to its results.(228)

The close of a negotiation is wont to drop the curtain over embarrassments that everybody is glad to forget;(229) but the obstacles to an exact agreement were not easily overcome. Lord Granville told Mr. Gladstone that no fewer than thirteen or fourteen versions of the most important protocol were tried before terms were reached. In the end Lord Granville’s conclusion was that, as no just rights had been sacrificed, it was a positive advantage that Russia should be gratified by the removal of restraints naturally galling to her pride.

The conference opened at the foreign office on Dec. 17, and held its final meeting on March 13. Delay was caused by the difficulty of procuring the attendance of a representative of France. Jules Favre was appointed by the government at Bordeaux, but he was locked up in Paris, and he and Bismarck could not agree as to the proper form of safe-conduct. What was even more important, the governing men in France could not agree upon his instructions; for we must remember that all this time along with the patriotic struggle against the Prussians, there went on an internal struggle only a degree less ardent between republicans and monarchists. It was not until the final meeting of the conference, that the Duc de Broglie was accredited as representative of his country.(230) At the first formal meeting a special protocol was signed recording it as “an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can liberate itself from the engagements of a treaty, nor modify the stipulations thereof, unless with the consent of the contracting Powers by means of an amicable arrangement.”

To give a single signatory Power the right of forbidding a change desired by all the others, imposes a kind of perpetuity on treaty stipulations, that in practice neither could nor ought to be insisted upon. For instance it would have tied fast the hands of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel in the Italian transactions which Mr. Gladstone had followed and assisted with so much enthusiasm, for Austria would never have assented. It is, moreover, true that in the ever recurring eras when force, truculent and unabashed, sweeps aside the moral judgments of the world, the mere inscription of a pious opinion in a protocol may seem worth little trouble. Yet it is the influence of good opinion, tardy, halting, stumbling, and broken, as it must ever be, that upholds and quickens the growth of right. The good rules laid down in conferences and state-papers may look tame in the glare of the real world of history as it is. Still, if we may change the figure, they help to dilute the poisons in the air.

IV

(M115) In England opinion veered round after Sedan. The disappearance of the French empire had effectively dispelled the vivid suspicions of aggression. The creation of the empire of a united Germany showed a new Europe. The keen word of an English diplomatist expressed what was dawning in men’s minds as a new misgiving. “Europe,” he said, “has lost a mistress and got a master.” Annexation wore an ugly look. Meetings to express sympathy with France in her struggle were held in London and the provinces. Still on the whole the general verdict seemed to be decisively in favour of a resolute neutrality, for in fact, nobody who knew anything of the state of Europe could suggest a policy of British intervention that would stand an hour of debate.

One proposal favoured by Mr. Gladstone, and also, I remember, commended by Mill, was the military neutralisation of Alsace and Lorraine, and the dismantling of the great border fortresses, without withdrawing the inhabitants from their French allegiance. The idea was worked out in a pamphlet by Count Gasparin. On this pamphlet Mr. Max Müller put what Mr. Gladstone called the fair question, whether its author was likely to persuade the European powers to guarantee border neutrality. “I will try to give you a fair answer,” Mr. Gladstone said (Jan. 30, 1871). “You will not think it less fair because it is individual and unofficial; for a man must be a wretch indeed, who could speak at this most solemn juncture, otherwise than from the bottom of his heart. First, then, I agree with you in disapproving the declaration, or reputed declaration, of Lord Derby (then Stanley) in 1867, about the Luxemburg guarantee. I have in parliament and in my present office, declined or expressly forborne to recognise that declaration.(231) Secondly, as to the main question. It is great. It is difficult. But I should not despair. I may add I should desire to find it practicable; for I think it would be a condition fair to both parties, and one on which Germany would have an absolute title to insist. Some of the most excusable errors ever committed,” he said, in closing the letter, “have also been the most ruinous in their consequences. The smallest in the forum of conscience, they are the greatest in the vast theatre of action. May your country, justly indignant and justly exultant, be preserved from committing one of these errors.” Three months later, when all was at an end, he repeated the same thought:—

The most fatal and in their sequel most gigantic errors of men are also frequently the most excusable and the least gratuitous. They are committed when a strong impetus of right carries them up to a certain point, and a residue of that impetus, drawn from the contact with human passion and infirmity, pushes them beyond it. They vault into the saddle; they fall on the other side. The instance most commonly present to my mind is the error of England in entering the Revolutionary war in 1793. Slow sometimes to go in, she is slower yet to come out, and if she had then held her hand, the course of the revolution and the fate of Europe would in all likelihood have been widely different. There might have been no Napoleon. There might have been no Sedan.

The changes in the political map effected by these dire months of diplomacy and war were almost comparable in one sense to those of the treaty of Münster, or the treaty of the Pyrenees, or the treaties of Vienna, save that those great instruments all left a consolidated Europe. Italy had crowned her work by the acquisition of Rome. Russia had wiped out the humiliation of 1856. Prussia, after three wars in six years, had conquered the primacy of a united Germany. Austria had fallen as Prussia rose. France had fallen, but she had shaken off a government that had no root in the noblest qualities of her people.

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VII. “Day’s Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)

We have not been an idle government. We have had an active life, and that is substantially one of the conditions of a happy life.... I am thankful to have been the leader of the liberal party at a period of the history of this country, when it has been my privilege and my duty to give the word of advance to able coadjutors and trusty and gallant adherents.—GLADSTONE.

I

The most marked administrative performance of Mr. Gladstone’s great government was the reform and reorganisation of the army. In Mr. Cardwell he was fortunate enough to have a public servant of the first order; not a political leader nor a popular orator, but one of the best disciples of Peel’s school; sound, careful, active, firm, and with an enlightened and independent mind admirably fitted for the effective despatch of business. Before he had been a month at the war office, the new secretary of state submitted to Mr. Gladstone his ideas of a plan that would give us an effective force for defence at a greatly reduced cost. The reorganisation of the army was one of the results of that great central event, from which in every direction such momentous consequences flowed—the victory of Prussian arms at Sadowa. The victory was a surprise, for even Lord Clyde, after a close inspection of the Prussian army, had found no more to report than that it was a first-rate militia. Sadowa disclosed that a soldier, serving only between two and three years with the colours, could yet show himself the most formidable combatant in Europe. The principle of Cardwell’s plan was that short enlistment is essential to a healthy organisation of the army, and this reform it was that produced an efficient reserve, the necessity for which had been one of the lessons of the Crimean war. A second, but still a highly important element, was the reduction of the whole force serving in the colonies from fifty thousand men to less than half that number.(232) “To this change,” said Mr. Cardwell, “opposition will be weak, for the principle of colonial self-reliance is very generally assented to.” The idea, as Lord Wolseley says, that a standing army during peace should be a manufactory for making soldiers rather than either a costly receptacle for veterans, or a collection of perfectly trained fighters, “had not yet taken, hold of the military mind in England.”(233) The details do not concern us here, and everybody knows the revolution effected by the changes during Mr. Gladstone’s great administration in the composition, the working, and the professional spirit of the army.

(M116) Army reform first brought Mr. Gladstone into direct collision with reigning sentiment at court. In spite of Pym and Cromwell and the untoward end of Charles I. and other salutary lessons of the great rebellion, ideas still lingered in high places that the sovereign’s hand bore the sword, and that the wearer of the crown through a commander-in-chief had rights of control over the army, not quite dependent on parliament and secretary of state. The Queen had doubted the policy of disestablishing the church in Ireland, but to disestablish the commander-in-chief came closer home, and was disliked as an invasion of the personal rights of the occupant of the throne. This view was rather firmly pressed, and it was the first of a series of difficulties—always to him extremely painful, perhaps more painful than any other—that Mr. Gladstone was called upon in his long career to overcome. The subject was one on which the temper of a reforming parliament allowed no compromise, even if the prime minister himself had been inclined to yield. As it was, by firmness, patience, and that tact which springs not from courtiership but from right feeling, he succeeded, and in the June of 1870 the Queen approved an order in council that put an end to the dual control of the army, defined the position of the commander-in-chief, and removed him corporeally from the horse guards to the war office in Pall Mall.(234) This, however, by no means brought all the military difficulties to an end.

One particular incident has a conspicuous place on the political side of Mr. Gladstone’s life. Among the elements in the scheme was the abolition of the practice of acquiring military rank by money purchase. Public opinion had been mainly roused by Mr. Trevelyan, who now first made his mark in that assembly where he was destined to do admirable work and achieve high eminence and popularity. An Act of George III. abolished selling of offices in other departments, but gave to the crown the discretion of retaining the practice in the army, if so it should seem fit. This discretion had been exercised by the issue of a warrant sanctioning and regulating that practice; commissions in the army were bought and sold for large sums of money, far in excess of the sums fixed by the royal warrant; and vested interests on a large scale grew up in consequence. The substitution, instead of this abusive system, of promotion by selection, was one of the first steps in army reform. No effective reorganisation was possible without it. As Mr. Gladstone put it, the nation must buy back its own army from its own officers. No other proceeding in the career of the ministry aroused a more determined and violent opposition. It offended a powerful profession with a host of parliamentary friends; the officers disliked liberal politics, they rather disdained a civilian master, and they fought with the vigour peculiar to irritated caste.

The first question before parliament depended upon the Commons voting the money to compensate officers who had acquired vested interests. If that were secure, there was nothing to hinder the crown, in the discretion committed to it by the statute, from cancelling the old warrant. Instead of this, ministers determined to abolish purchase by bill. Obstruction was long and sustained. The principle of the bill was debated and re-debated on every amendment in committee, and Mr. Gladstone reported that “during his whole parliamentary life, he had been accustomed to see class interests of all kinds put themselves on their defence under the supposition of being assailed, yet he had never seen a case where the modes of operation adopted by the professing champions were calculated to leave such a painful impression on the mind.” Credible whispers were heard of the open hostility of high military personages. In one of the debates of this time upon the army (Mar. 23, 1871), speakers freely implied that the influence of what was called the horse guards was actively adverse to reform. Mr. Gladstone, taking this point, laid it down that “military authorities without impairing in the slightest degree the general independence of their political opinions, should be in full harmony with the executive as to the military plans and measures which it might propose; and that only on this principle could the satisfactory working of our institutions be secured.”

The correspondence with the Queen was copious. In one letter, after mentioning that parliament had been persuaded to extend the tenure of the commander-in-chief’s office beyond five years, and to allow the patronage and discipline of the army to be vested in him, though the secretary of state was responsible, Mr. Gladstone proceeds:—

It would have been impossible to procure the acquiescence of parliament in these arrangements, unless they had been accompanied with the declaration of Mr. Cardwell, made in the name of the cabinet, and seen and approved by your Majesty, that “it is of course necessary for the commander-in-chief to be in harmony with the government of the day” (Feb. 21, 1871), and with a similar declaration of Mr. Gladstone on March 23, 1871, also reported to, and approved by your Majesty, that while all political action properly so called was entirely free, yet the military plans and measures of the government must always have the energetic co-operation of the military chiefs of the army.

(M117) The end was of course inevitable.(235) The bill at last passed the Commons, and then an exciting stage began. In the Lords it was immediately confronted by a dilatory resolution. In view of some such proceeding, Mr. Gladstone (July 15) wrote to the Queen as to the best course to pursue, and here he first mentioned the step that was to raise such clamour:—

As the government judge that the illegality of over-regulation prices cannot continue, and as they can only be extinguished by putting an end to purchase, what has been chiefly considered is how to proceed with the greatest certainty and the smallest shock, and how to secure as far as may be for the officers all that has hitherto been asked on their behalf. With this view, the government think the first step would be to abolish the warrant under which prices of commissions are fixed. As the resolution of the House of Lords states the unwillingness of the House to take part in abolishing purchase until certain things shall have been done, it would not be applicable to a case in which, without its interposition, purchase would have been already abolished.

Two days later (July 17) the Lords passed what Sir Roundell Palmer called “their ill-advised resolution.” On July 18 the cabinet met and resolved to recommend the cancelling of the old warrant regulating purchase, by a new warrant abolishing purchase. It has been said or implied that this proceeding was forced imperiously upon the Queen. I find no evidence of this. In the language of Lord Halifax, the minister in attendance, writing to Mr. Gladstone from Osborne (July 19, 1871), the Queen “made no sort of difficulty in signing the warrant” after the case had been explained. In the course of the day she sent to tell Lord Halifax, that as it was a strong exercise of her power in apparent opposition to the House of Lords, she should like to have some more formal expression of the advice of the cabinet than was contained in an ordinary letter from the prime minister, dealing with this among other matters. Ministers agreed that the Queen had a fair right to have their advice on such a point of executive action on her part, recorded in a formal and deliberate submission of their opinion. The advice was at once clothed in the definite form of a minute.

On July 20 Mr. Gladstone announced to a crowded and anxious House the abolition of purchase by royal warrant. The government, he said, had no other object but simplicity and despatch, and the observance of constitutional usage. Amid some disorderly interruptions, Mr. Disraeli taunted the government with resorting to the prerogative of the crown to get out of a difficulty of their own devising. Some radicals used the same ill-omened word. After a spell of obstruction on the ballot bill, the bitter discussion on purchase revived, and Mr. Disraeli said that what had occurred early in the evening was “disgraceful to the House of Commons,” and denounced “the shameful and avowed conspiracy of the cabinet” against the House of Lords. The latter expression was noticed by the chairman of committee and withdrawn, though Mr. Gladstone himself thought it the more allowable of the two.

In a letter to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Gladstone vindicated this transaction as follows:—

July 26, ’71.—I should like to assure myself that you really have the points of the case before you. 1. Was it not for us an indispensable duty to extinguish a gross, wide-spread, and most mischievous illegality, of which the existence had become certain and notorious? 2. Was it not also our duty to extinguish it in the best manner? 3. Was not the best manner that which, (a) made the extinction final; (b) gave the best, i.e. a statutory, title for regulation prices; (c) granted an indemnity to the officers; (d) secured for them compensation in respect of over-regulation prices? 4. Did not the vote of the House of Lords stop us in this best manner of proceeding? 5. Did it absolve us from the duty of putting an end to the illegality? 6. What method of putting an end to it remained to us, except that which we have adopted?

(M118) Sir Roundell Palmer wrote, “I have always thought and said that the issuing of such a warrant was within the undoubted power of the crown.... It did and does appear to me that the course which the government took was the least objectionable course that could be taken under the whole circumstances of the case.”(236) I can find nothing more clearly and more forcibly said upon this case than the judgment of Freeman, the historian—a man who combined in so extraordinary a degree immense learning with precision in political thought and language, and added to both the true spirit of manly citizenship:—

I must certainly protest against the word “prerogative” being used, as it has so often been of late, to describe Mr. Gladstone’s conduct with regard to the abolition of purchase in the army. By prerogative I understand a power not necessarily contrary to law, but in some sort beyond law—a power whose source must be sought for somewhere else than in the terms of an act of parliament. But in abolishing purchase by a royal warrant Mr. Gladstone acted strictly within the terms of an act of parliament, an act so modern as the reign of George III. He in truth followed a course which that act not only allowed but rather suggested.... I am not one of those who condemn Mr. Gladstone’s conduct in this matter; still I grant that the thing had an ill look. The difference I take to be this. Mr. Gladstone had two courses before him: he might abolish purchase by a royal warrant—that is, by using the discretion which parliament had given to the crown; or he might bring a bill into parliament to abolish purchase.... What gave the thing an ill look was that, having chosen the second way and not being able to carry his point that way, he then fell back on the first way. I believe that it was better to get rid of a foul abuse in the way in which it was got rid of, than not to get rid of it at all, especially as the House of Commons had already decided against it. Still, the thing did not look well. It might seem that by electing to bring a bill into parliament Mr. Gladstone had waived his right to employ the royal power in the matter.... I believe that this is one of those cases in which a strictly conscientious man like Mr. Gladstone does things from which a less conscientious man would shrink. Such a man, fully convinced of his own integrity, often thinks less than it would be wise to think of mere appearances, and so lays himself open to the imputation of motives poles asunder from the real ones.(237)

These last words undoubtedly explain some acts and tendencies that gave a handle to foes and perplexed friends.

II

Next let us turn to reform in a different field. All the highest abstract arguments were against secret voting. To have a vote is to have power; as Burke said, “liberty is power, when men act in bodies”; but the secret vote is power without responsibility. The vote is a trust for the commonwealth; to permit secrecy makes it look like a right conferred for a man’s own benefit. You enjoin upon him to give his vote on public grounds; in the same voice you tell him not to let the public know how he gives it. Secrecy saps the citizen’s courage, promotes evasion, tempts to downright lying. Remove publicity and its checks, then all the mean motives of mankind—their malice, petty rivalries, pique, the prejudices that men would be ashamed to put into words even to themselves—skulk to the polling booth under a disguising cloak. Secrecy, again, prevents the statesman from weighing or testing the forces in character, stability, persistency, of the men by whom a majority has been built up, and on whose fidelity his power of action must depend. This strain of argument was worked out by J. S. Mill(238) and others, and drew from Mr. Bright, who belonged to a different school of liberals, the gruff saying, that the worst of great thinkers is that they so often think wrong.

Though the abstract reasoning might be unanswerable, the concrete case the other way was irresistible. Experience showed that without secrecy in its exercise the suffrage was not free. The farmer was afraid of his landlord, and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the priest wielded thunderbolts over the faithful. Not only was the open vote not free; it exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution, that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance.

(M119) For forty years this question had been fought. The ballot actually figured in a clause of an early draft of the Reform bill of 1832. Grote, inspired by James Mill whose vigorous pleas for the ballot in his well-known article in 1830 were the high landmark in the controversy, brought it before parliament in an annual motion. When that admirable man quitted parliament to finish his great history of Greece, the torch was still borne onwards by other hands. Ballot was one of the five points of the charter. At nearly every meeting for parliamentary reform between the Crimean war and Disraeli’s bill of 1867, the ballot was made a cardinal point. General opinion fluctuated from time to time, and in the sixties journals of repute formally dismissed it as a dead political idea. The extension of the franchise in 1867 brought it to life again, and Mr. Bright led the van in the election of 1868 by declaring in his address that he regarded the ballot as of the first importance. “Whether I look,” he said, “to the excessive cost of elections, or to the tumult which so often attends them, or to the unjust and cruel pressure which is so frequently brought to bear upon the less independent class of voters, I am persuaded that the true interest of the public and of freedom will be served by the system of secret and free voting.” J. S. Mill had argued that the voter should name his candidate in the polling booth, just as the judge does his duty in a court open to the public eye. No, replied Bright, the jury-room is as important as the judge’s bench, and yet the jury-room is treated as secret, and in some countries the verdict is formally given by ballot. Some scandals in the way of electoral intimidation did much to ripen public opinion. One parliamentary committee in 1868 brought evidence of this sort to light, and another committee recommended secret voting as the cure.

Among those most ardent for the change from open to secret voting, the prime minister was hardly to be included. “I am not aware,” he wrote to Lord Shaftesbury (Dec. 11, 1871), “of having been at any time a vehement opponent of the ballot. I have not been accustomed to attach to it a vital importance, but at any time, I think, within the last twenty or twenty-five years I should have regarded it as the legitimate complement of the present suffrage.”(239) In the first speech he made as prime minister at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) be said that there were two subjects that could not be overlooked in connection with the representation of the people. “One of them is the security afforded by the present system for perfect freedom in the giving of the vote, which vote has been not only not conferred as a favour, but imposed as a duty by the legislature on the members of the community. I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important reservation, namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means, free voting must be secured.”

A bill providing for vote by ballot, abolishing public nominations and dealing with corrupt practices in parliamentary elections was introduced by Lord Hartington in 1870. Little progress was made with it, and it was eventually withdrawn. But the government were committed to the principle, and at the end of July Mr. Gladstone took the opportunity of explaining his change of opinion on this question, in the debate on the second reading of a Ballot bill brought in by a private member. Now that great numbers who depended for their bread upon their daily labour had acquired the vote, he said, their freedom was threatened from many quarters. The secret vote appeared to be required by the social conditions under which they lived, and therefore it had become a necessity and a duty to give effect to the principle.

(M120) Yet after the cabinet had decided to make the ballot a ministerial measure, the head of the cabinet makes a rather pensive entry in his diary: “July 27, 1870.—H. of C. Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324-230 with mind satisfied, and as to feeling, a lingering reluctance.” How far this reluctance was due to misgivings on the merits of the ballot, how far to the doubts that haunt every ministerial leader as to the possibilities of parliamentary time, we do not know. The bill, enlarged and reintroduced next year, was entrusted to the hands of Mr. Forster—himself, like Mr. Gladstone, a latish convert to the principle of secret voting—and by Forster’s persistent force and capacity for hard and heavy labour, after some eighteen days in committee, it passed through the House of Commons.

After obstruction had been at last broken down, other well-known resources of civilisation remained, and the Lords threw out the bill.(240) It was novel, they said; it was dangerous, it had not been considered by the country or parliament (after eighteen days of committee and forty years of public discussion), it was incoherent and contradictory, and to enact vote by ballot was inevitably to overthrow the monarchy. Even the mightiest of American orators had said as much. “Above all things,” Daniel Webster had adjured Lord Shaftesbury, “resist to the very last the introduction of the ballot; for as a republican, I tell you that the ballot can never co-exist with monarchical institutions.”

The rejection by the Lords stimulated popular insistence. At Whitby in the autumn (Sept. 2), Mr. Gladstone said the people’s bill had been passed by the people’s House, and when it was next presented at the door of the House of Lords, it would be with an authoritative knock. He told Lord Houghton that he was sorry to see the agitation apparently rising against the House of Lords, though he had a strong opinion about the imprudence of its conduct on the Army bill, and especially on the Ballot bill. “There is no Duke of Wellington in these days. His reputation as a domestic statesman seems to me to rest almost entirely on his leadership of the peers between 1832 and 1841.”

The bill was again passed through the Commons in 1872. Mr. Gladstone was prepared for strong measures. The cabinet decided that if the House of Lords should hold to what the prime minister styled “the strange provision for optional secrecy,” the government would withdraw the bill and try an autumn session, and if the Lords still hardened their hearts, “there would remain nothing but the last alternative to consider,”—these words, I assume, meaning a dissolution. Perhaps the opposition thought that a dissolution on the ballot might give to the ministerial Antæus fresh energy. This time the Lords gave way, satisfied that the Measure had now at last been more adequately discussed,—the said discussion really consisting in no more than an adequate amount of violent language out of doors against the principle of a hereditary legislature.(241)

The results of the general election two years later as they affected party, are an instructive comment on all this trepidation and alarm. In one only of the three kingdoms the ballot helped to make a truly vital difference; it dislodged the political power of the Irish landlord. In England its influence made for purity, freedom, and decency, but it developed no new sources of liberal strength. On this aspect of things the first parliamentary precursor of the ballot made remarks that are worth a few lines of digression. “You will feel great satisfaction,” his wife said to Grote one morning at their breakfast, “at seeing your once favourite measure triumph over all obstacles.” “Since the wide expansion of the voting element,” the historian replied, “I confess that the value of the ballot has sunk in my estimation. I don’t, in fact, think the elections will be affected by it one way or another, as far as party interests are concerned.” “Still,” his interlocutor persisted, “you will at all events get at the genuine preference of the constituency.” “No doubt; but then, again, I have come to perceive that the choice between one man and another among the English people, signifies less than I used formerly to think it did. The English mind is much of one pattern, take whatsoever class you will. The same favourite prejudices, amiable and otherwise; the same antipathies, coupled with ill-regulated though benevolent efforts to eradicate human evils, are well-nigh universal. A House of Commons cannot afford to be above its own constituencies in intelligence, knowledge, or patriotism.”(242) In all this the element of truth is profound enough. In every change of political machinery the reformer promises and expects a new heaven and a new earth; then standing forces of national tradition, character, and institution assert their strength, our millennium lags, and the chilled enthusiast sighs. He is unreasonable, as are all those who expect more from life and the world than life and the world have to give. Yet here at least the reformer has not failed. The efficacy of secret voting is negative if we will, but it averts obvious mischiefs alike from old privileged orders in states and churches and from new.

III

(M121) In finance the country looked for wonders. Ministers were called the cabinet of financiers. The cabinet did, in fact, contain as many as five men who were at one time or another chancellors of the exchequer, and its chief was recognised through Europe as the most successful financier of the age. No trailing cloud of glory, as in 1853 or 1860, attended the great ministry, but sound and substantial results were achieved, testifying to a thrifty and skilful management, such as might have satisfied the ambition of a generation of chancellors. The head of the new government promised retrenchment as soon as the government was formed. He told his constituents at Greenwich (Dec. 21, 1868) that he was himself responsible for having taken the earliest opportunity of directing the public mind to the subject of expenditure at an opening stage of the late election; for “although there may be times when the public mind may become comparatively relaxed in regard to the general principles of economy and thrift, it is the special duty of public men to watch the very beginnings of evil in that department. It is a very easy thing to notice these mischiefs when they have grown to a gigantic size; but it commonly happens that when financial error has arisen to those dimensions, the case has become too aggravated for a remedy.” He reminded them of the addition that had been made to the standing charges of the country in the ordinary and steadily recurring annual estimates presented to parliament. He said that he knew no reason why three millions should have been added during the two years of tory government to the cost of our establishments:—

It is one thing, I am very well aware, to put on three millions; it is another thing to take them off. When you put three millions on to the public expenditure, you create a number of new relations, a number of new offices, a number of new claims, a number of new expectations. And you can’t, and what is more, you ought not to, destroy all these in a moment. And, therefore, the work of retrenchment must be a well-considered and a gradual work. But I ask you to look at the names of the men who have been, placed in charge of the great spending departments of the country. The study, the idea that has governed the formation of the present administration has been to place able and upright men in charge of the public purse—men of administrative experience, men of proved ability, men, lastly, holding their seats in the House of Commons, and, therefore, immediately responsible to the representatives of the people. It would not become me to promise what we can do; but this I can tell you, that my friends connected with the various departments most concerned in the public expenditure have, even before the early moment at which I speak, directed their very first attention to this subject, and that I, for one, shall be as deeply disappointed as you can be, if in the estimates which it will be our duty to present in February you do not already perceive some results of their opening labours.

One of Mr. Gladstone’s first letters to a colleague was addressed to Mr. Lowe, containing such hints and instructions upon treasury administration as a veteran pilot might give about lights, buoys, channels, currents, to a new captain. “No man wants so much sympathy,” he said, “as the chancellor of the exchequer, no man gets so little. Nor is there any position so lamentable for him as to be defeated in proposing some new charge on the public conceived or adopted by himself. He is like an ancient soldier wounded in the back. Whereas even defeat in resisting the raids of the House of Commons on the public purse is honourable, and always turns out well in the end.” He sent Mr. Lowe a list of the subjects that he had tried in parliament without success, and of those that he had in his head but was not able to take in hand. They make a fine example of an active and reforming mind.(243) “What commonly happened, in cases of this kind, in my time, was as follows: The opposition waited for a development of discontent and resistance among some small fraction of liberal members. When this was compact in itself, or was at all stimulated by constituencies, they sent out habitually strong party whips, and either beat me, or forced me to withdraw in order to avoid beating, or exposing our men to local disadvantage. This game, I hope, will not be quite so easy now.”

(M122) The first two of Mr. Lowe’s budgets were on the lines thus traced beforehand. The shilling duty on a quarter of corn was abolished—“an exceeding strong case,” as Mr. Gladstone called it—taxes on conveyances were adjusted, and the duty on fire insurance was removed. The only notable contribution to the standing problem of widening the base of taxation was the proposal to put a tax on matches.(244) This was a notion borrowed from the United States, and much approved by Mr. Wells, the eminent free-trade financier of that country. In England it was greeted with violent disfavour. It was denounced as reactionary, as violating the first principles of fiscal administration, and as the very worst tax that had been proposed within recent memory, for is not a match a necessary of life, and to tax a necessary of life is to go against Adam Smith and the books. The money, it was said, ought to have been got either by raising the taxes on tea and sugar, or else by putting the shilling duty back on corn again, though for that matter, tea, sugar, and corn are quite as much necessaries of life as, say, two-thirds of the matches used.(245) No care, however, was given to serious argument; in fact, the tax was hardly argued at all. Some hundreds of poor women employed at a large match factory in the east end of London trooped to protest at Westminster, and the tax was quickly dropped. It was perhaps unlucky that the proposal happened to be associated with Mr. Lowe, for his uncomplimentary criticisms on the working class four or five years before were neither forgotten nor forgiven. A Latin pun that he meant to print on the proposed halfpenny match stamp, ex luce lucellum, “a little gain out of a little light,” was good enough to divert a college common room, but it seemed flippant to people who expected to see the bread taken out of their mouths.

On the other side of the national account Mr. Gladstone was more successful. He fought with all his strength for a reduction of the public burdens, and in at least one of these persistent battles with colleagues of a less economising mind than himself, he came near to a breach within the walls of his cabinet. In this thankless region he was not always zealously seconded. On Dec. 14, 1871, he enters in his diary: “Cabinet, 3-7. For two and a half hours we discussed army estimates, mainly on reduction, and the chancellor of exchequer did not speak one word.” The result is worth recording. When Mr. Gladstone was at the exchequer the charge on naval, military, and civil expenditure had been reduced between 1860 and 1865 from thirty-eight millions to thirty-one. Under the Derby-Disraeli government the figure rose in two or three years to thirty-four millions and three-quarters. By 1873 it had been brought down again to little more than thirty-two millions and a quarter.(246) That these great reductions were effected without any sacrifice of the necessary strength and efficiency of the forces, may be inferred from the fact that for ten years under successive administrations the charge on navy and army underwent no substantial augmentation. The process had been made easier, or made possible, by the necessity under which the German war laid France, then our only rival in naval force, to reduce her expenditure upon new ships. The number of seamen was maintained, but a reduction was effected in the inefficient vessels in the foreign squadrons; two costly and almost useless dockyards were suppressed (much to the disadvantage of Mr. Gladstone’s own constituents), and great abuses were remedied in the dockyards that were left. In the army reduction was made possible without lessening the requisite strength, by the withdrawal of troops from Canada, New Zealand, and the Cape. This was due to the wise policy of Lord Granville and Mr. Gladstone. In spite of the increased cost of education, of army purchase, of the rise of prices, and all the other causes that swell estimates, the country was still spending no more in 1873 than when Mr. Gladstone took office in 1868.(247) To this story we have to add that nearly thirty millions of debt were paid off in the five years. Well might men point to such a record, as the best proof that the promises of economy made at the hustings had been seriously kept.(248)

(M123) When the time came for him to take stock of his own performances, Mr. Lowe, who was apt to be cleverer than he was wise, made a speech at Sheffield, in September 1873, that almost recalls the self-laudation of Cicero over the immortal glories of his consulate. He disclaimed any share of the admirable genius for finance that had been seen in Pitt, Peel, or Gladstone, but he had read in the Latin grammar that economy was a great revenue, and he thought that he could at least discharge the humble task of hindering extravagance. “The first thing I did as chancellor of the exchequer,” he said, “was to issue an order that no new expenditure whatever would be allowed without my opinion first being taken upon it.... In an evil hour for my own peace and quietness I took upon myself—I believe it was never taken upon himself by any chancellor of the exchequer before—the duty of protecting the revenue, instead of leaving it to be done by an inferior official.” After reciting his figures, he wound up with a resounding pæan: “So far as I am aware, up to the present time there is no one who can challenge comparison with what has been done during these years. Sir R. Peel and Mr. Gladstone routed out protection in your trade, a measure that conferred immortal honour on them, but so far as relieving you from taxation is concerned, I believe you would seek in vain in British history for anything like what has been done during these last four years.” This strange vein was more than a little distasteful to the prime minister, as a letter to Lord Granville upon it shows (Sept. 9, 1873):—

Lowe’s speech at Sheffield is really too bad, and free as it is from all evil intention, it illustrates the invariable solecisms of his extraordinary mind.... He says no chancellor of the exchequer before did treasury business, but left it to a subordinate official.... Some have done more, some less. No one, probably, as much as Lowe, but some almost as much. I did less, perhaps much less. But I hold that the first duties of the chancellor of the exchequer are outside the treasury. One of them is to look after and control the great expenditures and estimates. In this duty I am sorry to say he was wretchedly deficient; yet he coolly takes to himself the credit of army and navy reductions, which is due to Cardwell and Childers (who, in his admirable speech, did not say a word, I think, for himself), and with which every member of the cabinet had almost as much to do as he had. I can speak from experience, for I know what it has been to have had cast upon my shoulders the most important and most offensive duty of the financial minister.... He has ample merit to stand on, in a great amount of labour done, and generally well done, and with good results for the public. Much of the unpopularity is unjust; a little patience would set all right.

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VIII. Autumn Of 1871. Decline Of Popularity. (1871-1872)

For the present at least the reformation will operate against the reformers. Nothing is more common than for men to wish, and call loudly too, for a reformation, who when it arrives do by no means like the severity of its aspect. Reformation is one of those pieces which must be put at some distance in order to please. Its greatest favourers love it better in the abstract than in the substance.

—BURKE.

I

In July, 1871, Mr. Gladstone paid a Sunday visit to Tennyson among the Surrey hills. They had two interesting days, “with talk ranging everywhere.” The poet read the Holy Grail, which Mr. Gladstone admired. They discussed the Goschen parish council plan, and other social reforms; Lacordaire and liberal collectivism; politics and the stormy times ahead. Mr. Gladstone assured them that he was a conservative, and feared extreme measures from the opposition. “A very noble fellow,” Tennyson called him, “and perfectly unaffected.”(249) Mr. Gladstone, for his part, records in his diary that he found “a characteristic and delightful abode. In Tennyson are singularly united true greatness, genuine simplicity, and some eccentricity. But the latter is from habit and circumstance, the former is his nature. His wife is excellent, and in her adaptation to him wonderful. His son Hallam is most attractive.”

After a laborious and irksome session, “in which, we have sat, I believe, 150 hours after midnight,” the House rose (Aug. 21). Mr. Gladstone spent some time at Whitby with his family, and made a speech to his eldest son’s constituents (Sept. 2) on the ballot, and protesting against the spirit of “alarmism.” Towards the end of the month he went on to Balmoral. On September 26 he was presented with the freedom of Aberdeen, and made a speech on Irish home rule, of which, as we shall see, he heard a great deal fifteen years later:—

To Mrs. Gladstone.

Balmoral, Sept. 28.—The time is rolling on easily at this quiet place.... We breakfast six or eight. The Prince and Princess Louis of Hesse dine most days. To-day I walked with her and her party. She is quick, kind, and well informed. I got her to-day on the subject of the religious movement in the Roman catholic church in Germany. She is imbued with her father’s ideas, and, I think, goes beyond them. She quoted Strauss to me, as giving his opinion that the movement would come to nothing. She said the infallibility was the legitimate development of the Roman system. I replied that the Roman system had grown up by a multitude of scarcely perceptible degrees out of the earliest form of Christianity, and if we adopted this notion of legitimate development, we ran a risk of making Saint Paul responsible for the Vatican council. She talked much about the hospitals, in which she worked so hard while nursing her baby, a very fine one, whom she introduced to me, with two flourishing elder children. She hates war; and is not easy as to the future.

Sept. 29.—I have had a twelve-mile stretch to-day, almost all on wild ground, and so solitary! not a living creature except three brace of grouse all the way. I am glad to report that I came in very fresh. ... What a mess the Bishop of Winchester has made of this Glengarry kirk business.

Sept. 30.—Last night we dined ten at Abergeldie. The Prince of Wales had his usual pleasant manners. He is far lighter in hand than the Duke of Edinburgh. After dinner he invited me to play whist. I said, “For love, sir?” He said, “Well, shillings and half-a-crown on the rubber,” to which I submitted. Ponsonby and I against the Prince and Brasseur, a charming old Frenchman, his tutor in the language. The Prince has apparently an immense whist memory, and plays well accordingly. To-day the Queen was to have seen me at six, but sent to postpone it till to-morrow on account of expecting the Princess of Wales, who was to come over and pay her a visit from Abergeldie. I think she is nervous, and shrinks from talk; but I do not mean to say a word that would give her trouble, as there would be no good in it at this moment.

Oct. 3.—I have seen the Queen again this morning. She conversed longer, near an hour, and was visibly better and stronger, and in good spirits. She told me much about her illness. ... She wished me a pleasant journey.

Ballater, Oct. 4.—Here am I ensconced in the station-master’s box at Ballater, after a 15 or 16 mile walk round through the hills, the regular train being postponed for an hour or more to let the couple from Mar Lodge go off special. They had two carriages laden with luggage, besides their own carriage! I hope to be at Colwyn soon after six. These solitary walks among the hills, I think, refresh and invigorate me more than anything else. To-day the early part of the day was glorious, and the wind most bracing as it came over the mass of mountains. I bade farewell reluctantly to Balmoral, for it is as homelike as any place away from home can be, and wonderfully safe from invasions. I had all the grand mountains in view at once, with their snow caps; the lowest, about the same as Snowdon. I came by the falls of the Muich, which, after the rain, were very fine. I had an interesting conversation with Princess Louise about the Queen this morning.

Oct. 4.—Nothing sets me up in mind and body like a mountain solitude, not even, perhaps, the sea. Walked from Balmoral to Ballater, 15 miles, in 4 hrs. 5 m. 6.—Walked 20 miles in 5 hrs. and 45 minutes. 7.—Walked 15 miles.—(Diary.)

To Mrs. Gladstone.

Ainslie Place, Edinburgh, Oct. 8, 1871.—I got here last night before seven, and had the most affectionate welcome from the dean that you can conceive; a dinner-party followed, and now I have for the first time since the government was formed had a holiday of two whole days. Last night the lord advocate tried to talk to me about the Scotch endowed schools and I refused to have anything to say to him. I have no time to write about my walk, beyond this, that it was quite successful. The dean [Ramsay] preached at St. John’s this morning about Ruth. The sermon was beautiful, and the voice and manner with his venerable age made it very striking. He put an astonishing energy into it, and his clear melodious tones rang through and through as they did when I first heard him 43½ years ago. It was altogether most touching, and he told me afterwards that he had wished to preach to me once more before he died. But I rejoice to say his life seems a very good one. I would not have missed the occasion for much.

London, Oct. 27.—Went to Sir R. Murchison’s funeral, the last of those who had known me or of me from infancy. And so a step towards the end is made visible. It was a great funeral. 28.—My expedition to Greenwich, or rather, Blackheath. I spoke 1 h. 50 m.; too long, yet really not long enough for a full development of my points. Physically rather an excess of effort. All went well, thank God!—(Diary.)

(M124) This speech at Blackheath was a fine illustration both of Mr. Gladstone’s extraordinary power, and of the sure respect of a British audience for manful handling and firm dealing in a minister, if only the appeal be high enough. It was one of the marked scenes of his life. In the cold mist of the October afternoon he stood bareheaded, pale, resolute, before a surging audience of many thousands, few of them enthusiastically his friends, a considerable mass of them dockyard workmen, furious at discharge or neglect by an economising government. He was received with loud and angry murmurs ominous of storm, but curiosity, interest, and a sense that even a prime minister should have fair play prevailed. His rich tones and clear articulation—and Mr. Gladstone had studied all the arts for husbanding vocal resources—carried his words beyond the five or six thousand persons that are commonly understood to be the limit of possible hearers in the open air. After half an hour of struggle he conquered a hold upon them that became more intense as he went on—touching topic after topic, defending all that had been done for the reform and efficiency of the army, denouncing extreme opinions on the Education Act, vindicating the ballot bill, laughing at various prescriptions of social quackery—until at the close of a speech nearly two hours long, he retired amid sustained hurricanes of earnest applause. Well might he speak of rather an excess of physical effort, to say nothing of effort of mind.

On his return to Hawarden he had a visit from Mr. Bright, whom he earnestly hoped to bring back into the cabinet.(250)

Nov. 13.—Hawarden. Two long conversations with Mr. Bright, who arrived at one. 14.—Some five hours in conversation with Mr. Bright; also I opened my proposal to him, which he took kindly though cautiously. My conversation with him yesterday evening kept me awake till four. A most rare event; but my brain assumes in the evening a feminine susceptibility, and resents any unusual strain, though, strange to say, it will stand a debate in the H. of C. 15.—Forenoon with Bright, who departed, having charmed everybody by his gentleness. Began the cutting of a large beech. #/

To Lord Granville.

Nov. 15, 1871.—Bright has been here for forty-eight hours, of which we passed I think more than a fourth in conversation on public affairs. Everything in and everything out of the cabinet I told him as far as my memory would serve, and I think we pretty well boxed the political compass. On the whole I remained convinced of two things: first, that his heart is still altogether with us; secondly, that his health, though requiring great care, is really equal to the moderate demands we should make upon him. The truth is I was quite as much knocked up with our conversation as he was, but then I had the more active share. In the whole range of subjects that we travelled over, we came to no point of sharp difference, and I feel confident that he could work with the cabinet as harmoniously and effectually as before. In saying this I should add that I told him, with respect to economy, that I thought we should now set our faces in that direction. I told him that we should not expect of him ordinary night attendance in the House of Commons, and that his attendance in the cabinet was the main object of our desire. He was pleased and touched with our desire, and he has not rejected the proposal. He has intimated doubts and apprehensions, but he reserves it for consideration, and seemed decidedly pleased to learn that the question might be held open until the meeting of parliament in case of need.... I did not think it fair to put to him the request by which I endeavoured to hold him in December 1868, viz.: that he would not determine in the matter without seeing me again; but I begged and pressed that he should in no case refuse without taking the opinion of a first-rate London physician, as these are the people whose wide experience best enables them to judge in such cases. Altogether my experience of him was extremely pleasant, and he was popular beyond measure in the house, where the guests were one or two ladies and four gentlemen, Sir G. Prevost, a high church (but most excellent) archdeacon, John Murray, the tory publisher, and Hayward—whom to describe it needs not. One and all were charmed with Bright. In his character the mellowing process has continued to advance, and whatever he may have been thirty years ago, he is now a gentle and tender being. Yesterday he had five hours of conversation with me and much with others, also an hour and a half walk in the rain, which seemed to do him no harm whatever. I will add but one word. He was deeply impressed with the royalty question.... Details I will report to the cabinet.

Mr. Bright did not yet feel able to return, and an important year, the third of the administration, drew to its close.

II

Two stubborn and noisy scuffles arose in the autumn of 1871, in consequence of a couple of appointments to which Mr. Gladstone as prime minister was a party. One was judicial, the other was ecclesiastical.

(M125) Parliament, authorising the appointment of four paid members of the judicial committee of the privy council, had restricted the post to persons who held at the date of their appointment, or had previously held, judicial office in this country or in India.(251) Difficulty arose in finding a fourth member of the new court from the English bench. The appointment being a new one, fell to the prime minister, but he was naturally guided by the chancellor. The office was first offered by Mr. Gladstone to Lord Penzance, who declined to move. Application was then made to Willes and to Bramwell. They also declined, on the ground that no provision was made for their clerks. Willes could not abandon one who had been “his officer, he might say friend, for thirty years.” Bramwell spoke of the pecuniary sacrifice that the post would involve, “for I cannot let my clerks, who between them have been with me near half a century, suffer by the change.” The chancellor mentioned to Mr. Gladstone a rumour that there was ’an actual strike among the judges’ in the matter. Nobody who knew Bramwell would impute unreasonable or low-minded motives to him, and from their own point of view the judges had a sort of case. It was ascertained by the chancellor that Blackburn and Martin had said expressly that they should decline. Mr. Gladstone felt, as he told Lord Hatherley, that “it was not right to hawk the appointment about,” and he offered it to Sir Robert Collier, then attorney-general. Collier’s claim to the bench, and even to the headship of a court, was undisputed; his judicial capacity was never at any time impugned; he acquired no additional emolument. In accepting Mr. Gladstone’s offer (Oct. 1871) he reminded him: “You are aware that in order to qualify me it will be necessary first to make me a common law judge.” Three days later, the chancellor told Mr. Gladstone, “It would hardly do to place the attorney-general on the common law bench and then promote him.” Still under the circumstances he thought it would be best to follow the offer up, and Collier was accordingly made a judge in the common pleas, sat for a few days, and then went on to the judicial committee. The proceeding was not taken without cabinet authority, for Lord Granville writes to Mr. Gladstone: “Nov. 12, ’71: The cabinet completely assented to the arrangement. Sufficient attention was perhaps not given to the technical point. For technical it only is.... I think you said at the cabinet that Collier wished to have three months’ tenure of the judgeship, and that we agreed with you that this would have been only a sham.”

Cockburn, the chief justice of the Queen’s bench, opened fire on Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 10) in a long letter of rather over-heroic eloquence, protesting that a colourable appointment to a judgeship for the purpose of getting round the law seriously compromised the dignity of the judicial office, and denouncing the grievous impropriety of the proceeding as a mere subterfuge and evasion of the statute. Mr. Gladstone could be extremely summary when he chose, and he replied in three or four lines, informing the chief justice that as the transaction was a joint one, and as “the completed part of it to which you have taken objection, was the official act of the lord chancellor,” he had transmitted the letter for his consideration. That was all he said. The chancellor for his part contented himself with half a dozen sentences, that his appointment of Collier to the puisne judgeship had been made with a full knowledge of Mr. Gladstone’s intention to recommend him for the judicial committee; that he thus “acted advisedly and with the conviction that the arrangement was justified as regards both its fitness and its legality”; and that he took upon himself the responsibility of thus concurring with Mr. Gladstone, and was prepared to vindicate the course pursued. This curt treatment of his Junius-like composition mortified Cockburn’s literary vanity, and no vanity is so easily stung as that of the amateur.

(M126) Collier, when the storm was brewing, at once wrote to Mr. Gladstone (Nov. 13) proposing to retain his judgeship to the end of the term, then to resign it, and act gratuitously in the privy council. He begged that it might not be supposed he offered to do this merely as matter of form. “Though I consider the objection to my appointment wholly baseless, still it is not pleasant to me to hold a salaried office, my right to which is questioned.” “I have received your letter,” Mr. Gladstone replied (Nov.. 14), “which contains the offer that would only be made by a high-spirited man, impatient of suspicion or reproval, and determined to place himself beyond it.... I have not a grain of inclination to recede from the course marked out, and if you had proposed to abandon the appointment, I should have remonstrated.”

What Mr. Gladstone called “a parliamentary peppering” followed in due course. It was contended that the statute in spirit as in letter exacted judicial experience, and that formal passing through a court was a breach of faith with parliament. As usual, lawyers of equal eminence were found to contend with equal confidence that a fraud had been put upon the law, and that no fraud had been put upon it; that the law required judicial status not experience, and on the other hand that what it required was experience not status. Lord Hatherley and Roundell Palmer were all the virtues, whether public or private, personified; they were at the top of the legal ladder; and they agreed in Palmer’s deliberate judgment that—after other judges with special fitness had declined the terms offered by parliament—in nominating the best man at the bar who was willing to take a vacant puisne judgeship upon the understanding that he should be at once transferred to the judicial committee, the government were innocent of any offence against either the spirit or substance of the law.(252)

Yet the escape was narrow. The government only missed censure in the Lords by a majority of one. In the Commons the evening was anxious. “You will see,” says Mr. Bruce (Feb. 20, 1872), “that we got but a small majority last night. The fact is that our victory in the Lords made men slack about coming to town, and Glyn got very nervous in the course of the evening. However, Palmer’s and Gladstone’s speeches, both of which were excellent, improved the feeling, and many who had announced their intention to go away without voting, remained to support us.” At one moment it even looked as if the Speaker might have to give a casting vote, and he had framed it on these lines: “I have concluded that the House while it looks upon the course taken by government as impolitic and injudicious, is not prepared at the present juncture to visit their conduct with direct parliamentary censure.”(253) In the end, ministers had a majority of twenty-seven, and reached their homes at three in the morning with reasonably light hearts.

III

(M127) The ecclesiastical case of complaint against Mr. Gladstone was of a similar sort. By an act of parliament passed in 1871 the Queen was entitled to present to the rectory of Ewelme, but only a person who was a member of convocation of the university of Oxford. This limitation was inserted by way of compensation to the university for the severance of the advowson of the rectory from a certain chair of divinity. The living fell vacant, and the prime minister offered it (June 15) to Jelf of Christ Church, a tory and an evangelical. By Jelf it was declined. Among other names on the list for preferment was that of Mr. Harvey, a learned man who had published an edition of Irenæus, a work on the history and theology of the three creeds, articles on judaism, jansenism, and jesuitism, and other productions of merit. As might perhaps have been surmised from the nature of his favourite pursuits, he was not a liberal in politics, and he had what was for the purposes of this preferment the further misfortune of being a Cambridge man. To him Mr. Gladstone now offered Ewelme, having been advised that by the process of formal incorporation in the Oxford convocation the requirement of the statute would be satisfied. Mr. Harvey accepted. He was told that it was necessary that he should become a member of convocation before he could be appointed. A little later (Aug. 1) he confessed to the prime minister his misgivings lest he should be considered as an “interloper in succeeding to the piece of preferment that parliament had appropriated to bona-fide members of the university of Oxford.” These scruples were set aside, he was incorporated as a member of Oriel in due form, and after forty-two days of residence was admitted to membership of convocation, but whether to such plenary membership as the Ewelme statute was taken to require, became matter of dispute. All went forward, and the excellent man was presented and instituted to his rectory in regular course. There was no secret about operations at Oxford; the Oriel men were aware of his motive in seeking incorporation, and the vice-chancellor and everybody else concerned knew all about it. Mr. Gladstone, when squalls began to blow, wrote to Mr. Harvey (Feb. 26, ’72) that he was advised that the presentation was perfectly valid.

The attack in parliament was, as such attacks almost always are, much overdone. Mr. Gladstone, it appeared, was far worse than Oliver Cromwell and the parliament of the great rebellion; for though those bad men forced three professors upon Oxford between 1648 and 1660, still they took care that the intruders should all be men trained at Oxford and graduates of Oxford. Who could be sure that the prime minister would not next appoint an ultramontane divine from Bologna, or a Greek from Corfu? Such extravagances did as little harm as the false stories about Mr. Harvey being jobbed into the living because he had been at Eton with Mr. Gladstone and was his political supporter. As it happened he was a conservative, and Mr. Gladstone knew nothing of him except that a number of most competent persons had praised his learning. In spite of all this, however, and of the technical validity of the appointment, we may wish that the rector’s doubts had not been overruled. A worthy member regaled the House by a story of a gentleman staying in the mansion of a friend; one morning he heard great noise and confusion in the yard; looking out he saw a kitchen-maid being put on a horse, and so carried round and round the yard. When he went downstairs he asked what was the matter, and the groom said, “Oh, sir, ’tis only that we’re going to take the animal to the fair to sell, and we want to say he has carried a lady.” The apologue was not delicate, but it conveyed a common impression. “Gladstone spoke,” says Mr. Bruce (March 9, 1872), “with great vigour and eloquence on the Ewelme case; but I think that, with the best possible intentions, he had placed himself in a wrong position.”

IV

In 1872 the wide popularity of the government underwent a marked decline. The award at Geneva caused lively irritation. The most active nonconformists were in active revolt. The Licensing bills infuriated the most powerful of all trade interests. The Collier case and the Ewelme case seemed superfluous and provoking blunders. A strong military section thirsted for revenge on the royal warrant. Mr. Goschen’s threatened bill on local rating spread vague terrors. Individual ministers began to excite particular odium.

As time went on, the essentially composite character of a majority that was only held together by Mr. Gladstone’s personality, his authority in the House, and his enormous strength outside, revealed itself in awkward fissures. The majority was described by good critics of the time, as made up of three sections, almost well defined enough to deserve the name of three separate parties. First were the whigs, who never forgot that the prime minister had been for half his life a tory; who always suspected him, and felt no personal attachment to him, though they valued his respect for property and tradition, and knew in any case that he was the only possible man. Then came the middle-class liberals, who had held predominance since 1832, who were captivated by Mr. Gladstone’s genius for finance and business, and who revered his high moral ideals. Third, there was the left wing, not strong in parliament but with a certain backing among the workmen, who thought their leader too fond of the church, too deferential to the aristocracy, and not plain enough and thorough enough for a reforming age. The murmurs and suspicions of these hard and logical utilitarians of the left galled Mr. Gladstone as ungrateful. Phillimore records of him at this moment:—

Feb. 21, 1872.—Gladstone in high spirits and in rather a conservative mood. 29.—Gladstone sees that the time is fast coming when he must sever himself from his extreme supporters. He means to take the opportunity of retiring on the fair plea that he does not like to oppose those who have shown such great confidence in him, or to join their and his opponents. The plea seems good for retirement, but not for refraining in his individual capacity from supporting a government which is liberal and conservative.

Here is a sketch from the Aberdare papers of the temper and proceedings of the session:—

April 19.—We have had a disastrous week—three defeats, of which much the least damaging was that on local taxation, where we defended the public purse against a dangerous raid. There is no immediate danger to be apprehended from them. But these defeats lower prestige, encourage the discontented and envious, and animate the opposition. I think that Gladstone, who behaved yesterday with consummate judgment and temper, is personally very indifferent at the result. He is vexed at the ingratitude of men for whom he has done such great things which would have been simply impossible without him, and would not be unwilling to leave them for a while to their own guidance, and his feeling is shared by many of the ministry. Our measures must for the most part be taken up by our successors, and we should of course be too happy to help them. But I don’t see the end near, although, of course, everybody is speculating.

Yet business was done. Progress of a certain kind was made in the thorny field of the better regulation of public houses, but Mr. Gladstone seems never to have spoken upon it in parliament. The subject was in the hands of Mr. Bruce, the home secretary, an accomplished and amiable man of the purest public spirit, and he passed his bill; but nothing did more to bring himself and his colleagues into stern disfavour among the especially pagan strata of the population. An entry or two from Mr. Bruce’s papers will suffice to show Mr. Gladstone’s attitude:—

Home Office, Dec. 9, 1869.—I am just returned from the cabinet, where my Licensing bill went through with flying colours. I was questioned a great deal as to details, but was ready, and I think that Gladstone was very well pleased.

Jan. 16, 1871.—I called upon Gladstone yesterday evening. He was in high spirits and full of kindness. He said that he had told Cardwell that I must be at the bottom of the abuse the press was pouring upon him, as I had contrived to relieve myself of it. “Some one minister,” he added, “is sure to be assailed. You caught it in the autumn, and now poor Cardwell is having a hard time of it.” I went with him afterwards to the Chapel Royal, which he never fails to attend.

Dec. 14.—We have a cabinet to-day, when I hope to have my Licensing bill in its main principles definitely settled. Unfortunately Gladstone cares for nothing but “free trade” [in the sale of liquor], which the House won’t have, and I cannot get him really to interest himself in the subject.

This is Speaker Brand’s account of the general position:—

Throughout the session the opposition, ably led by Disraeli, were in an attitude of watchfulness. He kept his eye on the proceedings of the government day by day on the Alabama treaty. Had that treaty failed, no doubt Disraeli would have taken the sense of the House on the conduct of the government. For the larger part of the session the Alabama question hung like a cloud over the proceedings, but as soon as that was settled, the sky cleared. It has been a good working session.... Of the two leading men, Gladstone and Disraeli, neither has a strong hold on his followers. The radicals below the right gangway are turbulent and disaffected, and the same may be said of the independent obstruction below the left gangway.... B., E., H., L. avowedly obstruct all legislation, and thus bring the House into discredit.

(M128) It was now that Mr. Disraeli discerned the first great opportunity approaching, and he took the field. At Manchester (April 3) he drew the famous picture of the government, one of the few classic pieces of the oratory of the century:—

Extravagance is being substituted for energy by the government. The unnatural stimulus is subsiding. Their paroxysms end in prostration. Some take refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternates between a menace and a sigh. As I sit opposite the treasury bench, the ministers remind me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers upon a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumblings of the sea.

On midsummer day he essayed at the Crystal Palace a higher flight, and first struck the imperialist note. He agreed that distant colonies could only have their affairs administered by self-government. “Self-government, when it was conceded, ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accomplished by an imperial tariff, by securities for the people of England, for the enjoyment of the unappropriated lands which belonged to the sovereign as their trustee, and by a military code which should have precisely defined the means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should have been defended, and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies themselves. It ought further to have been accompanied by the institution of some representative council in the metropolis which would have brought the colonies into constant and continuous relations with the home government.” He confessed that he had himself at one time been so far caught by the subtle views of the disintegrationists, that he thought the tie was broken. Opinion in the country was at last rising against disintegration. The people had decided that the empire should not be destroyed. “In my judgment,” he said, “no minister in this country will do his duty who neglects any opportunity of reconstructing as much as possible our colonial empire, and of responding to those distant sympathies which may become the source of incalculable strength and happiness to this land.” Toryism now sought three great objects: “the maintenance of our institutions, the preservation of our empire, and the improvement of the condition of the people.” The time was at hand when England would have to decide between national and cosmopolitan principles, and the issue was no mean one. “You must remember,” he concluded, “that in fighting against liberalism or the continental system, you are fighting against those who have the advantage of power—against those who have been high in place for nearly half a century. You have nothing to trust to but your own energy and the sublime instinct of an ancient people.”

Disraeli’s genius, at once brooding over conceptions and penetrating in discernment of fact, had shown him the vast tory reserves that his household suffrage of 1867 would rally to his flag. The same genius again scanning the skies read aright the signs and characteristics of the time. Nobody would seriously have counselled intervention in arms between France and Germany, yet many felt a vague humiliation at a resettlement of Europe without England. Nobody seriously objected to the opening of the Black Sea, yet many were affected by a restive consciousness of diplomatic defeat. Everybody was glad that—as I am about to describe in the following chapter—we had settled the outstanding quarrel with America, yet most people were sore at the audacity of the indirect claims, followed by the award of swingeing damages. National pride in short was silently but deeply stirred; the steady splendour of the economic era for a season paled in uncalculating minds. This coming mood the tory leader, with his rare faculty of wide and sweeping forecast, confidently divined, and he found for it the oracle of a party cry in phrases about Empire and Social Reform. When power fell into his hands, he made no single move of solid effect for either social reform or imperial unity. When Mr. Gladstone committed himself to a policy, he brought in bills to carry it out. Forecast without a bill is interesting, but not to be trusted.

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IX. Washington And Geneva. (1870-1872)

Although I may think the sentence was harsh in its extent, and unjust in its basis, I regard the fine imposed on this country as dust in the balance compared with the moral value of the example set when these two great nations of England and America—which are among the most fiery and the most jealous in the world with regard to anything that touches national honour—went in peace and concord before a judicial tribunal rather than resort to the arbitrament of the sword.—GLADSTONE.(254)

I

One morning in the summer of 1862 a small wooden sloop, screw and steam, of a little over a thousand tons register dropped slowly down the waters of the Mersey. The decks were rough and unfinished, but guests on board with bright costumes made a gay picture, flags were flying, and all wore the look of a holiday trial trip. After luncheon in the cabin, the scene suddenly changed. At a signal from the vessel a tug came alongside, the cheerful visitors to their surprise were quickly transferred, and the sloop made off upon her real business. She dropped anchor in a bay on the coast of Anglesey, where she took twenty or thirty men mostly English on board from a tug sent after her from Liverpool, with or without the knowledge of the officials. Thence she sailed to the Azores, where a steamer from London and a steamer from Liverpool brought officers, armaments, and coal. As soon as these were trans-shipped, the British ensign was hauled down, the Confederate flag run up, and the captain opened sealed orders directing him to sink, burn, or destroy, everything that flew the ensign of the so-called United States of America. These orders the captain of the rover faithfully executed, and in a few months the Alabama—for that was henceforth her memorable name—had done much to sweep the commercial marine of America from the ocean.

(M129) On the day on which she sailed (July 29), the government made up its mind that she should be detained, on the strength of affidavits that had been almost a week in their hands. The bird of prey had flown. The best definition of due diligence in these matters would seem to be, that it is the same diligence and exactness as are exercised in proceedings relating to imposts of excise or customs. We may guess how different would have been the vigilance of the authorities if a great smuggling operation had been suspected. This lamentable proceeding, for which the want of alacrity and common sense at the foreign office and the bias or blundering of the customs agents at Liverpool, may divide the grave discredit, opened a diplomatic campaign between England and the United States that lasted as long as the siege of Troy, and became an active element in the state of moral war that prevailed during that time between the two kindred communities. Mr. Gladstone, like other members of the Palmerston administration, held for several years that the escape of the Alabama was no wrong done by us. Lord Russell admitted (1863) that the cases of the Alabama and the Oreto were “a scandal and in some degree a reproach to our laws,” though he stated in the same sentence that the cabinet thought the law sufficient where legal evidence also was sufficient. It was true that Britain is the greatest shipbuilding country in the world; that to interfere with ships or any other article of commerce is in so far to impose on a neutral some of the calamities of a belligerent; and that restriction of trade was no element in the policy and spirit of foreign enlistment acts either here or in America, which was the first country that by positive legislation sought to restrain its citizens within definite limits of neutrality. By a law of this kind parliament intended to forbid all subjects within its jurisdiction to make war on people at peace with the British sovereign. It is only, in the words of Canning, when the elements of armament are combined, that they come within the purview of such law. This is not by way of controversy, but to define an issue. Chief Justice Cockburn, an ardent champion of his country if ever there was one, pronounced in his judgment at Geneva, when the day for a verdict at length arrived, that the cruiser ought to have been detained a week before; that the officials of customs were misled by legal advice “perhaps erroneous”; and that the right course to take was “plain and unmistakable.” Even Lord Russell after many years of obdurate self-defence, at last confessed in manly words: “I assent entirely to the opinion of the lord chief justice that the Alabama ought to have been detained during the four days I was waiting for the opinion of the law officers. But I think that the fault was not that of the commissioners of customs; it was my fault as secretary of state for foreign affairs.”(255)

Before the Alabama some ten vessels intended for Confederate service had been detained, inquired into, and if released, released by order of a court for want of evidence. After the Alabama, no vessel on which the American minister had made representation to the foreign office succeeded in quitting a British port. But critical cases occurred. Emboldened by the successful escape of the Alabama, the Confederate agents placed two ironclad rams upon the stocks at the Birkenhead shipyard; Mr. Adams, the American minister in London, renewed his bombardment of the foreign office with proof of their object and design; the foreign office repeated its perplexed pleas against interference, made still more difficult by a colourable transfer of the rams to a French owner; and the whole dreary tragi-comedy of the Alabama seemed likely to be acted over again. By the autumn of 1863 the rams were ready to take the water, and the builders were again talking of a trial trip. This time Lord Russell gave orders that the rams were to be stopped (Sept. 3). He felt the mortification of an honourable man at the trick, of which he had allowed himself to be made the dupe in the case of the Alabama. Perhaps also he had been impressed by language used by Mr. Adams to a member of the cabinet, and more formally to himself, to the effect that the departure of the rams would mean the practical opening to the Southern Confederates of full liberty to use this country as a base for hostile expeditions against the North. “This,” said Mr. Adams, “is war.”(256)

The affair of the rams was followed by Mr. Gladstone with absorbed attention. He confessed to the Duke of Argyll (Sept. 30, 1863) that he could not get the ironclads out of his head, and his letter shows with what exhaustive closeness he argued the case. The predicament was exactly fitted to draw out some of his most characteristic qualities—minute precision, infinite acuteness, infinite caution, the faculty of multiplied distinction upon distinction, an eye for the shadows of a shade. The points are no longer of living interest, but they exhibit a side of him that is less visible in his broader performances of parliament or platform.

As might have been expected, Mr. Adams was instructed to solicit redress for the doings of the Alabama. Lord Russell (Dec. 19, 1862), declaring that government had used every effort to stop her, refused to admit that we were under any obligation whatever to make compensation. Two years later (Aug. 30, 1865) he still declined both compensation and a proposal for arbitration. This opened a long struggle of extreme interest in the ministerial life of Mr. Gladstone, and, what was more, in the history of civilised nations. It was arbitration upon these issues that now began to divide politicians both inside the cabinet and outside, just as mediation and recognition had divided them in the earlier stages of the American conflict.

(M130) In 1863 Mr. Adams was the first to point to what after a long struggle became the solution of these difficulties, by assuring Lord Russell that there was “no fair and equitable form of conventional arbitrament or reference” to which America would not be willing to submit. In 1865 (Sept. 2) Mr. Gladstone wrote a letter to Lord Russell, the reply to which has already been published.(257) Always jealous for cabinet authority, he began by submitting to Lord Russell that he had no idea that a despatch refusing arbitration was to be written, without a cabinet being held upon a subject so important. As it was, they had not disposed of the question or even discussed it. On the merits, he inclined to believe that the demand for arbitration was highly unreasonable; still though not disposed to say “Yes” to the demand, he doubted “No.” The proper course would be to lead the Americans to bring out the whole of their case, so that the cabinet might have all the pleas before them previously to coming to “a decision of great delicacy and moment.”

Lord Russell stood to his guns. “The question,” he said, “has been the principal object of my thoughts for the last two years, and I confess I think that paying twenty millions down would be far preferable to submitting the case to arbitration.” England would be disgraced for ever if a foreign government were left to arbitrate whether an English secretary of state had been diligent or negligent in his duties, and whether an English law officer was partial and prejudiced in giving his opinion of English law. There the matter stood, and the moral war smouldered on.

II

In 1870, the time arrived when Mr. Gladstone himself, no longer a minister third in standing in a Palmerston government, was called upon to deal with this great issue as a principal in his own administration. In 1868 the conservative government had agreed to a convention, by which a mixed commission, British and American, sitting in London should decide upon the settlement of all claims by the subjects of either country upon the other; and in respect of what were known generically as the Alabama Claims, proposing to refer these to the arbitration of the head of some friendly state, in case the mixed commission should not agree. The idea of a composite court or tribunal, as distinguished from a single sovereign arbitrator, had not yet risen above the horizon. Before this project ripened, Mr. Disraeli was out of government, Lord Clarendon had taken Lord Stanley’s place at the foreign office, and the convention, with some modifications, was signed by him (Jan. 14, 1869), and in due course despatched to Washington. There the Senate, not on the merits but for party and personal reasons, refused to ratify. Though this attempt failed, neither of the two English political parties was in a position any longer to refuse arbitration in principle.

Agreement in principle is of little avail, without driving force enough for practice. The driving force was found mainly from a gradual change in English sentiment, though the difficulties with Russia also counted for something. Even so early as 1863 the tide of popular opinion in England had begun slowly to swell in favour of the Northern cause. In 1866 victory across the Atlantic was decided, the union was saved, and slavery was gone. A desire to remove causes of difference between ourselves and the United States grew at a remarkable speed, for the spectacle of success is wont to have magical effects even in minds that would indignantly reject the standards of Machiavelli. While benevolent feeling gained volume in this country, statesmen in America took ground that made the satisfaction of it harder. They began to base their claim for reparation on the original proclamation of British neutrality when the American conflict began. First made in 1866, this new pretension was repeated in despatches of 1867, and in 1869 the American secretary formally recorded the complaint that the Southern insurrection obtained its enduring vitality by resources drawn from England, and as a consequence of England’s imperfect discharge of her duties as neutral. England became, they said, the arsenal, the navy-yard, and the treasury of the insurgent Confederacy.

In the discussion of the Clarendon convention of 1869 Mr. Sumner—a man of some great qualities, but too often the slave of words where he thought himself their master—made an extravagant speech against the British government in the senate, assessing the claim of the United States upon this country on principles that would have raised it to the modest figure of some four hundred million pounds sterling due from us to them, or, as Mr. Gladstone himself estimated it, to sixteen hundred millions. It does not matter which. This was only a violent and fantastic exaggeration of an idea of constructive claims for indirect damages that lay slumbering, but by no means extinct, in American minds, until, as we shall see, in 1872 it very nearly led to a disastrous explosion. This idea first found distinct and official utterance in the despatch of 1869. Besides compensating individuals for depredations, we were to pay for the cost to America of chasing the cruisers; for the transfer of most of the American commercial marine to the British flag; for enhanced insurance; and generally for the increased difficulty of putting down the rebellion.

All through 1870 a rather troublesome exchange of letters went on between Washington and the foreign office, and Mr. Gladstone took an active concern in it. “I grieve to trouble you with so much manuscript,” Lord Clarendon writes him on one occasion (Mar. 17, 1870), “but I don’t venture single-handed to conduct a correspondence with the United States.... All this correspondence can do nothing but harm, and I have made my answer as short as is consistent with courtesy. I should like to send it on Saturday, but if you have not time to look at it, or think it ought to be seen by the cabinet, I could, make an excuse for the delay to Motley.” All this was in entire conformity to Mr. Gladstone’s enduring conception of the right relations between a prime minister and the foreign secretary. We need not follow details, but one must not be omitted. In 1868 a royal commission recommended various material changes in the Foreign Enlistment Act, and in 1870 accordingly a new law was passed, greatly strengthening the hands of the executive, and furnishing due means of self-protection against such nefarious manœuvres as those of the Alabama.(258) By this Act, among other things, it was made an offence to build a ship with reasonable cause to believe that it would be employed in the service of a foreign state at war with a friendly state.

As the year 1870 went on, the expediency of an accommodation with America strengthened in Mr. Gladstone’s mind. One member of the cabinet pointed out to the foreign secretary that if there was any chance of a war with Russia about the Black Sea, it would be as well to get causes of differences with America out of the way; otherwise, however unprepared the United States might be at the moment, we should undoubtedly have them on our hands sooner or later.(259) With Mr. Gladstone the desire was not a consequence of the possible troubles with Russia. His view was wider and less specific. He was alive to the extent to which England’s power in Europe was reduced by the smothered quarrel with America, but he took even higher ground than this in his sense of the blessing to the world of an absolute reconciliation in good faith between the old England and the new. At first the government proposed (Nov. 28, 1870) to send over Sir John Rose to America. He was one of the many Scots who have carried the British flag in its best colours over the face of the globe; his qualities had raised him to great prominence in Canada; he had enjoyed good opportunities of measuring the American ground; he was shrewd, wise, well read in the ways of men and the book of the world, and he had besides the virtue of being pleasant. Rose himself did not formally undertake the mission, but he applied himself with diligence and success to bring the American government to the project of a joint high commission to examine and consider a situation that there was a common desire to terminate.

(M131) On Feb. 1, 1871, Mr. Gladstone was able to report to the Queen the arrival of news that the government of the United States were willing to concur in a commission for the discussion of international questions at present depending, without a previous understanding that liability in respect of the Alabama was to be acknowledged by this country. The cabinet naturally thought that on this they might close, and they at once considered the composition of the commission and the proper instructions. Lord de Grey consented to be its president. Lord Derby, on being invited to join the commission, was very grateful for the compliment but declined, being of opinion that firmness and not concession to the Americans was what was wanted. Sir George Grey declined; so did Lord Halifax. “I asked Northcote,” Lord Granville reports to Mr. Gladstone, “his eyes twinkled through his spectacles. But he said he must ask Lady Northcote, and requested permission to consult Dizzy. The former consented, ditto Dizzy, which looks well.” So the commission was made up of Lord de Grey as the head of it, Northcote, Thornton (the British minister at Washington), Sir John Macdonald, as the representative of Canada, and Mr. Mountague Bernard, a theoretic jurist, who had written a book about our neutrality the year before.(260)

III

The personal relations of Lord de Grey and his brethren with their American colleagues were excellent. They worked hard all day, and enjoyed Washington hospitality in its full strength every night. In business, Mr. Fish occasionally advanced or supported contentions thought by the Englishmen to be almost amusing. For instance, Mr. Sumner in a memorandum (Jan. 17, 1871) to Mr. Fish, had submitted a singular species of political syllogism. He desired nothing so much, he said, as that entire goodwill should prevail between Great Britain and the United States, and that the settlement should be complete. Now the greatest trouble and peril in the way of a complete settlement was Fenianism; Fenianism was excited by the proximity of the British flag over the Canadian border; therefore, the British flag should be withdrawn from the whole hemisphere, including the islands, and the American flag should fly in its stead. In conformity with this tight and simple chain of reasoning, Mr. Fish threw out a hint to Lord de Grey that the cession of Canada might end the quarrel. The English envoy contented himself with the dry remark that he did not find such a suggestion in his instructions.(261)

Though sometimes amused, the commissioners soon understood that at heart the American negotiators desired to settle. Difficulties with their own people were great. A presidential campaign with all its necessities approached. A settlement of outstanding accounts with England might be a good card to play in the election; on the other hand, if the peace card were not available, it was just possible that a war card might do nearly as well. Mr. Fish was mortally afraid of Sumner, who had been chairman of the foreign relations committee in the senate, and whose anti-English temper, as we have seen, was red-hot. The constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority in the senate for the ratification of a treaty was awkward and menacing, and it was necessary to secure dubious senators by the exhibition of high national temper on the public stage. It is interesting to note, in passing, that the English visitors were persuaded how much better it would have been if, according to our own parliamentary system at Westminster, the American system had allowed Mr. Fish to meet Mr. Sumner on the floor of congress, and instead of seeking victory by unseen manipulation, fight the battle out before the country.

(M132) The British commissioners were almost as much embarrassed by their friends at home as by their friends or foes at Washington. Both ministers and lawyers, from the safe distance of Downing Street, were sometimes excessive in pressing small and trivial alterations, which the Americans after the diplomatist’s manner insisted on treating as if they were not small but great. The sharp corner in the London cabinet was the more serious proposal, that certain rules as to the duty of neutrals should be laid down, and should be made guiding principles for the arbitrators, although the rules themselves had not been formally established when England’s alleged breaches of neutral obligation had been committed. This retro-active or ex-post-facto quality, when the cabinet considered it (March 18), gave trouble, and it was used by passionate and impolitic persons to tarnish the whole policy in this country. Much heat was evoked, for a cabinet of many talents is not always the same thing as a cabinet of plain minds. One clever man objected at large to the commission, to concession, to obtaining any principle of settlement for future contingencies. A second was violent against all such arbitration as this, and thought they had much better pay up at once and have done with it. A third clever man even let fall some high words about “national dishonour.” Granville, Argyll, Forster (the last described by a colleague as “a tower of strength”), were steadfast and unfaltering for conciliation. Mr. Gladstone agreed, but eager though he was for a settlement, he “agreed with reluctance.” Sir Roundell Palmer had now great influence with him, and Palmer had come round to the conclusion that the risk from translating retrospectively into the form of a hypothetical international convention, not existing when the events happened, a duty that we had recognised as incumbent on us under our own law, might be safely run.(262) In plain English, the adverse way of describing this peculiar substitute for a free and open arbitration, was that Great Britain owed the Americans nothing, and if she had not consented to accept a set of new-fangled rules, and to be judged retro-actively by them, she could not possibly have been made to pay anything. To this the short answer was that though the rules might or might not be new-fangled as principles of international law, yet they were not new as principles of English municipal law, which, as construed by the British government itself, was coincident in substance with those rules. Was it in fact reasonable to contend that ironclads might be built in the Mersey, sent out a few miles beyond the river mouth, there armed from lighters, and sent off to bombard New York? If not, was it reasonable that England should invite the arbitrators to judge the Alabama case according to one rule in the past, and then to lay down another rule for the future?

A minor objection raised by Mr. Gladstone gave much alarm to his commissioners, and it is too characteristic to be omitted. Speaking of the ardently desired treaty, he writes to Lord Granville (April 12, 1871):—

With regard to the preamble, it designates the late war in America as “the rebellion.” I do not think it is right for us now to adopt a mode of speech different from that which we maintained throughout the struggle. Further, it tends to discredit our recognition of belligerency. And if we declare it a rebellion, we have given an example available to be quoted hereafter for the dealings of a foreign power with rebels as belligerents. If, on the other hand, the Americans object to speaking of the “civil war,” it is quite easy (so I think) to leave out the words “during the recent rebellion in the U.S.” altogether, and to say in the years 186—or even to begin “Whereas H.B.M.” perhaps inserting in after “U.S.” “in respect of such depredations.”

This is an instance of the tenacity with which he sometimes held his ground after its relations and bearings had entirely changed. Something too may doubtless be set down to the lingering remains of his old feeling, of the strength of the constitutional argument of the South that sovereign states had a right to withdraw from the union if they pleased. If the proposal to drop the word “rebellion” had been brought without warning or preparation before the full commission, assent would have been hopeless, but by the discretion of informal interviews, the matter was canvassed beforehand, the obnoxious word was silently left out, Mr. Gladstone’s point was gained, and things went prosperously forward. “I am quite sure,” wrote Sir Stafford Northcote to Mr. Gladstone (March 17), “that there was no other way in which you could have hoped to settle these questions than by such a commission as ours.... What may be our fate I do not presume to guess, but if we succeed, it will be mainly due to de Grey’s excellent sense, tact, and temper.” In the end, notwithstanding the power of the senate over treaties, the want of control by the American government over its party, and the exigencies of Canada, all at last fell into decent shape, and the substantial objects in view were effectively maintained. Canadian fishery questions were adjusted, and the boundary of San Juan remitted to the arbitration of the newly made German Emperor.

(M133) After thirty-seven sittings, spread over a period of two months, the treaty was signed on May 8, in a room decorated with flowers, with the good omen of brilliant sunshine, and everybody in such good humour that the American secretary of the commission tossed up with Lord Tenterden which should sign first,—the Englishman happily winning. The treaty began by the declaration that her Britannic Majesty authorised the commissioners to express in a friendly spirit the regret felt by her Majesty’s government for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed by these vessels. It embraced a definition of the rules of maritime neutrality, which some legal text-writers have applauded, and other legal text-writers have therefore condemned. Finally, and most important of all, whether we look at the immediate purpose or at its contribution to a great though slow-moving cause, the treaty of Washington secured a judgment by the arbitration of a tribunal, of all claims growing out of acts committed by the cruisers, “and generically known as the Alabama Claims.” The tribunal was to consist of five members named by Great Britain, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil.

The effect of the rules of Washington as applied at Geneva remains, as I have said, a topic of controversy. Maine, for example, while admitting that the result for the occasion was good, holds that by making the rule of neutral duty more severe, it marked reaction rather than progress in the general drift of international law.(263) Others maintain that the amended foreign enlistment Act of 1870, which is in fact a partial incorporation of the Washington rules, went far beyond what international law requires, and made a new crime out of an act, namely the building of a ship, which is not forbidden either by the law of nations or by other municipal laws.(264)

IV

(M134) Once, after some crowning mercy in the war, President Lincoln said to his cabinet, “Now, gentlemen, we have got our harpoon into the monster, but we must still take uncommon care, or else by a single flop of his tail he will send us into all eternity.” This wholesome caution, too often overlooked by headlong politicians, was suddenly found to be much needed at the eleventh hour of the treaty of Washington. At the end of 1871, Mr. Gladstone experienced a severe shock, for he found that the case put in by America for the arbitrators insisted upon an adjudication by them not only upon the losses suffered by individual American citizens, but upon the indirect, constructive, consequential, and national claims first propounded in their full dimensions by Mr. Sumner. A storm at once arose in England, and nobody was more incensed than the prime minister. In reporting to the Queen, he used language of extreme vehemence, and in the House of Commons (Feb. 9, 1872) when Mr. Disraeli spoke of the indirect claims as preposterous and wild, as nothing less than the exacting of tribute from a conquered people, Mr. Gladstone declared that such words were in truth rather under the mark than an exaggeration, and went on to say that “we must be insane to accede to demands which no nation with a spark of honour or spirit left could submit to even at the point of death.” Speaking of the construction put upon the treaty by the government, he declared such a construction to be “the true and unambiguous meaning of the words, and therefore the only meaning admissible, whether tried by grammar, by reason, by policy, or by any other standard.” Some persons argued that this was to accuse the Americans of dishonesty. “I learn really for the first time,” exclaimed Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville (Feb. 8), “that a man who affirms that in his opinion a document is unambiguous in his favour, thereby affirms that one who reads it otherwise is dishonest.” His critics retorted that surely a construction that could not stand the test of grammar, of reason, of policy, or any other test, must be due either to insanity or to dishonesty; and as we could hardly assume General Grant, Mr. Fish, and the others to be out of their wits, there was nothing for it but dishonesty.

For five anxious months the contest lasted. The difficulties were those of time and form, often worse than those of matter and substance. Nor would this have been the first case in which small points hinder the settlement of great questions. The manner of proceeding, as Mr. Gladstone reports to the Queen, was of such complication that hours were given almost every day for many weeks, to the consideration of matter which on the day following was found to have moved out of view. Suggestions came from Washington, mostly inadmissible, whether their faults were due to accident and haste or to design. Sometimes refusals of this suggestion or that from our side were couched in “terms of scant courtesy and bordering upon harshness.” Still the cabinet persisted in husbanding every chance of saving the treaty. They charitably judged the attitude of the Washington government, in Mr. Gladstone’s ample language, “to be directed by considerations belonging to the sphere of its own domestic policy, and to the contentions of party in that sphere. But they will attempt by patient consideration, avoidance of self-laudation and of irritating topics, and a steady endeavour to be right, to attain the great end in view of an honourable settlement which it would be a sad disgrace as well as misfortune to both countries now to miss.” And here occurs a consideration as we pass, upon the American constitution. “The fact remains indisputable (June 1), that there is no conclusive evidence of any serious subject the substance of which is at present in dispute between the two governments, but the difficulties arising on the American side from what may be termed electioneering considerations are greatly aggravated by the position of the American senate and the reference to that body for previous counsel, for which it seems to be miserably unsuited, as it takes days and almost weeks for debate, where a cabinet would require only hours.”

The opposition in parliament was patriotic, and as a rule made no difficulties. “Mr. Disraeli,” reports Mr. Gladstone (June 3), “behaved with the caution and moderation which have generally marked his conduct with, regard to the Washington treaty.... On the whole the House of Commons showed the same dignified self-command for which it has been remarkable during the whole period since the opening of the session with reference to this question; although the more inflammatory expressions, which fell from a few members, were warmly cheered by a portion, and a portion only, of the opposition.”

The cabinet was unanimous against the submission of the indirect claims, but there were marked differences of leaning, as in fact there had been throughout. All accepted Lord Ripon’s(265) view that if he had insisted on getting into the treaty nothing less than a formal and express repudiation of the indirect claims, no treaty at all would have been possible. Both sides in the Washington conferences had been more anxious to submit to the arbitrators the principle of allowing indirect claims, than to embark on any discussion of them. The American commissioners knew this principle to be unsound, but knowing also that their own people expected the claims to be referred, they could only abstain from insisting on their inclusion. The British commissioners were willing silently to waive an express renunciation of them, being confident that the terms of the protocols and the language of the treaty would be so construed by the arbitrators as to exclude the indirect claims.(266) All this was a rational and truly diplomatic temper on both sides; but then the immortal events of a hundred years before had shown too plainly that Englishmen at home cannot always be trusted to keep a rational and diplomatic temper; and many events in the interval had shown that English colonists, even when transfigured into American citizens, were still chips of the old block. The cabinet agreed that a virtual waiver of the claims was to be found both in the protocols of the conference, and in the language of the treaty. Lord Ripon and Mr. Forster, however, thought it would be safe to go on at Geneva, in the assurance that the arbitrators would be certain to rule the indirect claims out. At the other extreme of the cabinet scale, the view was urged that England should not go on, unless she put upon record a formal declaration that did she not, and never would, assent to any adjudication upon the indirect claims. To a certain minister who pressed for some declaration in this sense,—also formulated in a motion by Lord Russell in parliament, himself responsible for so much of the original mischief(267)—Mr. Gladstone wrote as follows:—

June 17.—... I doubt whether the cabinet can legitimately be asked, as a cabinet, to make these affirmations, inasmuch as, according to my view, they are not within the purview of its present undertaking—that undertaking has reference exclusively to the scope of the arbitration. We have contended all along that the claims would not legitimately come before the arbitrators.... But we had never demanded the assent of the Americans to our reasoning, only to our conclusion that the claims were not within the scope of the arbitration. It is my view (but this is quite another matter) that they lie cast aside, a dishonoured carcass, which no amount of force, fraud, or folly can again galvanise into life. You will see then, in sum, that (if I rightly understand you) I accept for myself broadly and freely what may be called the extreme doctrine about the indirect claims; but I think the cabinet cannot fairly be challenged for an official judgment on a matter really not before it.

The little entries in the diary give us a good idea of the pressure on the prime minister:—

Feb. 6, 1872.—Spoke an hour after Disraeli on the address.... The Alabama and Washington question lay heavy on me till the evening. Even during the speech I was disquieted, and had to converse with my colleagues. March 16.—Cabinet 2¾-7; laborious chiefly on the Washington treaty. 17th.—Worked on part of the despatch for America. 18th.—In conclave. Much heavy work on Alabama. 22nd.—Severe bronchial attack. Transacted business through West, W. H. G. [his son] Mr. Glyn, Lord Granville, and Cardwell, who went to and fro between the cabinet below-stairs and me. To all of them I whispered with some difficulty. April 5.—Conclave on countercase. First with Cardwell and Lowe, then with Tenterden and Sanderson. Much confusion. May 12.—Saw Lord Granville, who brought good news from America. 27th.—U.S. question bristles with difficulties. 30th.—H. of C. During the evening two long conferences on Washington treaty with Lord G. and the lawyers, and a cabinet 10-1. Worked Uniformity bill through committee at intervals. June 3.—Cabinet 3-4-1/4. H. of C. Made a statement on the treaty of Washington. The house behaved well. Also got the Act of Uniformity bill read a third time. Its preamble is really a notable fact in 1872. 6th.—H. of C. Spoke on Washington treaty and Scots Education—the House too well pleased as to the former. 11th.—The cabinet met at 2. and sat intermittently with the House to 5¾, again 9-1/4-1.

(M135) The arbitrators were to meet on June 15. Yet no break in the clouds seemed likely. Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues had a meeting at the foreign office, and did not separate until after midnight on June 11. The British agent was to be directed to apply for an immediate adjournment, and without lodging the summary of our case as provided by the treaty. If the arbitrators declined to adjourn, either because the Americans objected, or from a belief that they had no title to adjourn without a formal opening of business by lodging summaries, then was or was not our agent to change tack and lodge his summary? Or was the arbitration, and with the arbitration the whole treaty, to fall to the ground for want of it? On this question Mr. Gladstone thought it his duty to mention to the Queen that it had not yet (June 13) been found possible to bring the cabinet to a decision. For a day or two it looked as if the ministry might fall to pieces, but the head of it was indomitable:—

June 13 (Thursday).—Since Tuesday morning I have constantly resolved or discussed this proposition: that we should not be justified in breaking off the proceedings at Geneva (if an adjournment can be had after presentation of the summary), upon a refusal to present it. My determination upon it is now firmly rooted and tested by all the mental effort I can apply, and the time I thought had come to-day for looking forward as well as backward. I therefore wrote to the Queen in terms which might a little prepare her for difficulties in the cabinet. I saw Granville first, who had not reached my point, but seemed to come up to it; then arranged for him to see Halifax, Ripon to see Kimberley, and the chancellor [Lowe] to see Cardwell; as the knot of the probable difficulty is in these three. On the whole, I hope we shall, in one way or another, work through. At any rate, if anything like a government can be held together, I will not shrink.

June 15.—Cabinet 12-2-1/4, and with brief intervals to 7-½. Dined with Princess Louise. After dinner Granville and I went to see Mr. Hammond, then on to the F. 0., where we got (before midnight) the protocol of to-day from Geneva. Thank God that up to a certain point the indications on this great controversy are decidedly favourable.

June 16.—Sunday (Bunker Hill anniversary? [No—June 17]). Cabinet here 1-½-3-1/4. We sent off a telegram, which I hope may finish the good work at Geneva.

What happened at Geneva was this. When the day came, the British agent did not lodge his summary, but asked for an adjournment for eight months, as the two governments did not agree upon the scope of the arbitration. This looked dark enough, and the treaty seemed doomed. It was saved by Mr. Adams, the American nominee on the tribunal. When he reached Geneva and learned how things stood, he decided that the knot which they could not untie must be cut.(268) His golden idea was this: the arbitrators should make a spontaneous declaration that on the principles of international law the indirect claims ought to be excluded from their consideration. Adams saw his colleagues one by one, and brought them round to his view. The English chief justice had made up his mind that the whole thing was dead, as he had for many months been loudly telling all London that it ought to be. But when asked by Mr. Adams whether the spontaneous extra-judicial declaration would remove all obstacles to progress, Cockburn answered that he thought it would. “I said,” Mr. Adams continued, “that in that event I was prepared to make a proposition. I should be assuming a heavy responsibility; but I should do so, not as an arbitrator representing my country, but as representing all nations.” So the indirect claims were summarily ruled out, and the arbitration proceeded. In some notes prepared for the cabinet on all these proceedings (Feb. 4, 1873), Lord Tenterden, the clever and experienced British agent at Geneva, writes, “I cannot conclude this part of the memorandum without saying that the dignity, tact, self-command, and moderation with which Mr. Adams discharged his functions as arbitrator, did honour to his country.”

(M136) In September (1872) the five arbitrators at Geneva gave their award. They were unanimous in finding Great Britain liable for the acts of the Alabama; all save the British representative found her liable for the Florida; the Italian, the Swiss, and the American against the Englishman and the Brazilian found her liable for the Shenandoah after leaving Melbourne. They awarded in satisfaction and final settlement of all claims, including interest, a gross sum of about three and a quarter million pounds sterling. The award, though hardly a surprise, still inflicted a lively twinge of mortification on the masterful and confident people of this island. Opinion was divided, but the decision was not one of those that cut deep or raise the public temperature to fever. The prints of the opposition insisted that the result was profoundly vexatious, it was a bungled settlement, and the arguments used in favour of it were “wild sentimental rubbish.” On the other hand, the Times regarded it with profound satisfaction, and ministerial writers with a lyric turn hailed it as a magnificent victory, though we had to pay a heavy bill. A little balm was extracted from the fact that the Americans had preferred before the tribunal a demand of nine millions and a half, and thus got little more than one-third of what they had asked. So ended what has been called the greatest of all arbitrations, extinguishing the embers that could not have been left to smoulder without constant peril of a vast and fratricidal conflagration. The treaty of Washington and the Geneva arbitration stand out as the most notable victory in the nineteenth century of the noble art of preventive diplomacy, and the most signal exhibition in their history of self-command in two of the three chief democratic powers of the western world. For the moment the result did something to impair the popularity of Mr. Gladstone’s government, but his association with this high act of national policy is one of the things that give its brightest lustre to his fame.

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