- 
 i m 
 
 Hii 
 
 -; ' 
 

HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 OTJE OWN TIMES 
 
 FROM THE ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA TO 
 THE BERLIN CONGRESS 
 
 BY JUSTIN McCAKTHY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THK WATERDALE NEIGHBORS" "MT ENEMY'S DAUGHTER" ETC. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 VOL. I. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE 
 
 1880 
 
I/J 
 
CONTENTS OF VOL I. 
 
 CHAPTER I. PAGE 
 
 THE KING is DEAD ! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! 5 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 STATESMEN AND PARTIES 21 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 CANADA AND LOUD DURHAM 36 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 SCIENCE AND SPEED 58 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 CHARTISM 70 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 QUESTION DE JUPONS 88 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE 98 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE OPIUM WAR 112 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY 124 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES 139 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 THE DISASTERS OF CABUL 151 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 THE REPEAL YEAR 182 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION . . 203 
 
4 CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. PACE 
 
 FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE 216 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND 240 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 MR. DISRAELI 25G 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, AND FOREIGN INTRIGUE .... 275 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND 291 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 DON PACIFICO 317 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL ". . 339 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK . 358 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 PALMERSTON . 371 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE" 399 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 MR. GLADSTONE 423 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 THE EASTERN QUESTION , 433 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 462 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 THK INVASION OF THE CRIMEA 485 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 505 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY 524 
 
A HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 OUR OWIST TIMES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE KING IS DEAD ! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! 
 
 BEFORE half-past two o'clock on the morning of June 20th, 
 1837, William IV. was lying dead in Windsor Castle, while 
 the messengers were already hurrying off to Kensington 
 Palace to bear to his successor her summons to the throne. 
 The illness of the King had been but shart, and at one time, 
 even after it had been pronounced alarming, it seemed to 
 take so hopeful a turn that the physicians began to think it 
 would pass harmlessly away. But the King was an old man 
 was an old man even when he came to the throne: and 
 when the dangerous symptoms again exhibited themselves, 
 their warning was very soon followed by fulfilment. The 
 death of King William may be fairly regarded as having 
 closed an era of our history. With him, we may believe, 
 ended, the reign of personal government in England. Wil- 
 liam was, indeed, a constitutional king in more than mere 
 name. He was to the best of his lights a faithful represent- 
 ative of the constitutional principle. He was as far in ad- 
 vance of his two predecessors in understanding and accept- 
 ance of the principle as his successor has proved herself be- 
 yond him. Constitutional government has developed itself 
 gradually, as everything else has done in English politics. 
 The written principle and code of its system it would be as 
 vain to look for as for the British Constitution itself. King 
 William still held to and exercised the right to dismiss his 
 ministers when he pleased, and because he pleased. His fa- 
 
6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ther had held to the right of maintaining favorite ministers 
 in defiance of repeated votes of the House of Commons. It 
 would not be easy to find any written rule or declaration of 
 constitutional law pronouncing decisively that either was in 
 the wrong. But in our day we should believe that the con- 
 stitutional freedom of England was outraged, or at least put 
 in the extremest danger, if a sovereign were to dismiss a 
 
 O 7 O 
 
 ministry at mere pleasure, or to retain it in spite of the ex- 
 pressed wish of the House of Commons. Virtually, there- 
 fore, there was still personal government in the reign of 
 William IV. With his death the long chapter of its history 
 came to an end. We find it difficult now to believe that it 
 was a living principle, openly at work among us, if not open- 
 ly acknowledged, so lately as in the reign of King William. 
 The closing scenes of King William's life were undoubted- 
 ly characterized by some personal dignity. As a rule, sover- 
 eigns show that they know how to die. Perhaps the neces- 
 sary consequence of their training, by virtue of which they 
 come to regard themselves always as the central figures in 
 great State pageantry, is to make them assume a manner of 
 dignity on all occasions when the eyes of their subjects may 
 be supposed to be on them, even if the dignity of bearing is 
 not the free gift of nature. The manners of William IV. 
 had been, like those of most of his brothers, somewhat rough 
 and overbearing. He had been an unmanageable naval 
 officer. He had again and again disregarded or disobeyed 
 orders, and at' last it had been found convenient to with- 
 draw him from active service altogether, and allow him to 
 rise through the successive ranks of his profession by a 
 merely formal and technical process of ascent. In his moi'e 
 private capacity he had, when younger, indulged more than 
 once in unseemly and insufferable freaks of temper. He 
 had made himself unpopular, while Duke of Clarence, by his 
 strenuous opposition to some of the measures which were 
 especially desired by all the enlightenment of the country. 
 He was, for example, a determined opponent of the meas- 
 ures for the abolition of the slave-trade. He had wrangled 
 publicly, in open debate, with some of his brothers in the 
 House of Lords ; and words had been interchanged among 
 the royal princes which could not be heard in our day even 
 in the hottest debates of the more turbulent House of Com- 
 
THE KING is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 7 
 
 mons. But William seems to have been one of the men 
 whom increased responsibility improves. He was far bet- 
 ter as a king than as a prince. He proved that he was able 
 at least to understand that first duty of a constitutional sov- 
 ereign which, to the last day of his active life, his father, 
 George III., never could be brought to comprehend that 
 the personal predilections and prejudices of the King must 
 sometimes give way to the public interest. 
 
 Nothing perhaps in life became him like to the leaving of 
 it. His closing days were marked by gentleness and kindly 
 consideration for the feelings of those around him. When 
 he awoke on June 18th he remembered that it was the anni- 
 versary of the battle of Waterloo. He expressed a strong 
 pathetic wish to live over that day, even if he were never to 
 see another sunset. He called for the flag which the Duke 
 of Wellington always sent him on that anniversary, and he 
 laid his hand upon the eagle which adorned it, and said he 
 felt revived by the touch. He had himself attended, since 
 his accession, the Waterloo banquet ; but this time the Duke 
 of Wellington thought it would perhaps be more seemly to 
 have the dinner put off, and sent accordingly to take the 
 wishes of his Majesty. The King declared that the dinner 
 must go on as usual, and sent to the Duke a friendly, simple 
 message expressing his hope that the guests might have a 
 pleasant day. He talked in his homely way to those about 
 him, his direct language seeming to acquire a sort of tragic 
 dignity from the approach of the death that was so near. 
 He had prayers read to him again and again, and called 
 those near him to witness that he had always been a faith- 
 ful believer in the truths of religion. He had his despatch- 
 boxes brought to him, and tried to get through some busi- 
 ness with his private secretary. It was remarked with some 
 interest that the last official act he ever performed was to 
 sign with his trembling hand the pardon of a condemned 
 criminal. Even a far nobler reign than his would have re- 
 ceived new dignity if it closed with a deed of mercy. 
 When some of those around him endeavored to encourage 
 him with the idea that he might recover and live many 
 years yet, he declared, with a simplicity which had some- 
 thing oddly pathetic in it, that he would be willing to live 
 ten years yet for the sake of the country. The poor King 
 
8 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 was evidently under the sincere conviction that England 
 could hardly get on without him. His consideration for his 
 country, whatever whimsical thoughts it may suggest, is en- 
 titled to some, at least, of the respect which we give to the 
 dying groan of a Pitt or a Mirabeau, who fears with too 
 much reason that he leaves a blank not easily to be filled. 
 "Young royal tarry -b reeks" William had been jocularly 
 called by Robert Burns fifty years before, when there was 
 yet a popular belief that he would come all right and do 
 brilliant and gallant things, and become a stout sailor in 
 whom a seafaring nation might feel pride. He disappoint- 
 ed all such expectations ; but it must be owned that when 
 responsibility came upon him he disappointed expectation 
 anew in a different way, and was a better sovereign, more 
 deserving of the complimentary title of patriot -king, than 
 even his friends would have ventured to anticipate. 
 
 There were eulogies pronounced upon him after his death 
 in both Houses of Parliament, as a matter of course. It is 
 not necessary, however, to set down to mere court homage 
 or parliamentary form some of the praises that were be- 
 stowed on the dead King by Lord Melbourne and Lord 
 Brougham and Lord Grey. A certain tone of sincerity, not 
 quite free, perhaps, from surprise, appears to run through 
 some of these expressions of admiration. They seem to say 
 that the speakers were at one time or another considerably 
 surprised to find that, after all, William really was able and 
 willing on grave occasions to subordinate his personal lik- 
 ings and dislikings to considerations of State policy, and to 
 what was shown to him to be for the good of the nation. 
 In this sense at least he may be called a patriot-king. We 
 have advanced a good deal since that time, and we require 
 somewhat higher and more positive qualities in a sovereign 
 now to excite our political wonder. But we must judge 
 William by the reigns that went before, and not the reign 
 that came after him ; and, with that consideration borne in 
 mind, we may accept the panegyric of Lord Melbourne and 
 of Lord Grey, and admit that on the whole he was better 
 than his education, his early opportunities, and his early 
 promise. 
 
 William IV. (third son of George III.) had left no children 
 who could have succeeded to the throne, and the crown 
 
THE KING- is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 9 
 
 passed, therefore, to the daughter of his brother (fourth son 
 of George), the Duke of Kent. This was the Princess Al- 
 exandrina Victoria, who was born at Kensington Palace on 
 May 24th, 1819. The Princess was, therefore, at this time lit- 
 tle more than eighteen years of age. The Duke of Kent died 
 a few months after the birth of his daughter, and the child 
 was brought up under the care of his widow. She was well 
 brought up : both as regards her intellect and her character 
 her training was excellent. She was taught to be self-reli- 
 ant, brave, and systematical. Prudence and economy were 
 inculcated on her as though she had been born to be poor. 
 One is not generally inclined to attach much importance 
 to what historians tell us of the education of contempora- 
 ry princes or pi'incesses; but it cannot be doubted that the 
 Princess Victoi'ia was trained for intelligence and goodness. 
 "The death of the King of England has everywhere 
 caused the greatest sensation. . . . Cousin Victoria is said 
 to have shown astonishing self-possession. She undertakes 
 a heav)'' responsibility, especially at the present moment, 
 when parties are so excited, and all rest their hopes on her." 
 These words are an extract from a letter written on July 
 4th, 1837, by the late Prince Albert, the Prince Consort of so 
 many happy years. The letter was written to the Prince's 
 father, from Bonn. The young Queen had, indeed, behaved 
 with remarkable self-possession. There is a pretty descrip- 
 tion, which has been often quoted, but will bear citing once 
 more, given by Miss Wynn, of the manner in which the 
 young sovereign received the news of her accession to a 
 throne. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Plowley, and 
 the Lord Chamberlain, the Marquis of Conyngham, left Wind- 
 sor for Kensington Palace, where the Princess Victoria had 
 been residing, to inform her of the King's death. It was 
 two hours after midnight when they started, and they did 
 not reach Kensington until five o'clock in the morning. 
 
 w3 O 
 
 "They knocked, they rang, they thumped for a considerable 
 time before they could rouse the porter at the gate ; they 
 were again kept waiting in the court-yard, then turned into 
 one of the lower rooms, where they seemed forgotten by ev- 
 erybody. They rang the bell, and desired that the attend- 
 ant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform her 
 Royal Highness that they requested an audience on business 
 
 1* 
 
10 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of importance. After another delay, and another ringing to 
 inquire the cause, the attendant was summoned, who stated 
 that the Princess was in such a sweet sleep that she could 
 not venture to disturb her. Then they said, " We are come 
 on business of state to the Queen, and even her sleep must 
 give way to that." It did ; and to prove that she did not 
 keep them waiting, in a few minutes she came into the room 
 in a loose white night-gown and shawl, her nightcap thrown 
 off, and her hair falling upon her shoulders, her feet in slip- 
 pers, tears in her eyes, but perfectly collected and dignified." 
 The Prime-minister, Lord Melbourne, was presently sent for, 
 and a meeting of the privy council summoned for eleven 
 o'clock, when the Lord Chancellor administei'ed the usual 
 oaths to the Queen, and her Majesty received in return the 
 oaths of allegiance of the cabinet ministers and other privy 
 councillors present. Mr. Greville, who was usually as little 
 disposed to record any enthusiastic admiration of royalty 
 and royal personages as Humboldt or Varnhagen von Ense 
 could have been, has described the scene in words well 
 worthy of quotation: 
 
 "The King died at twenty minutes after two yesterday 
 morning, and the young Queen met the council at Kensing- 
 ton Palace at eleven. Never was anything like the first 
 impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and ad- 
 miration which is raised about her manner and behavior, 
 and certainly not without justice. It was very extraordi- 
 nary, and something far beyond what was looked for. Her 
 extreme youth and inexperience, and the ignorance of the 
 world concerning her, naturally excited intense curiosity to 
 see how she would act on this trying occasion, and there 
 was a considerable assemblage at the palace, notwithstand- 
 ing the short notice which was given. The first thing to 
 be done was to teach her her lesson, which, for this purpose, 
 Melbourne had himself to learn. . . . She bowed to the 
 lords, took her seat, and then read her speech in a clear, dis- 
 tinct, and audible voice, and without any appearance of 
 fear or embarrassment. She was quite plainly dressed, and 
 in mourning. After she had read her speech, and taken and 
 signed the oath for the security of the Church of Scotland, 
 the privy councillors were sworn, the two royal dukes first 
 by themselves; and as these two old men, her uncles, knelt 
 
THE KING IS DEAD ! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN ! 11 
 
 before her, swearing allegiance and kissing her hand, I saw 
 her blush up to the eyes, as if she felt the contrast between 
 their civil and their natural relations, and this was the only 
 sign of emotion which she evinced. Her manner to them 
 was very graceful and engaging ; she kissed them both, and 
 rose from her chair and moved toward the Duke of Sussex, 
 who was farthest from her, and too infirm to reach her. She 
 seemed rather bewildered at the multitude of men who were 
 sworn, and who came, one after another, to kiss her hand, 
 but she did not speak to anybody, nor did she make the 
 slightest difference in her manner, or show any in her coun- 
 tenance, to any individual of any rank, station, or party. I 
 particularly watched her when Melbourne and the ministers, 
 and the Duke of Wellington and Peel approached her. She 
 went through the whole ceremony, occasionally looking at 
 Melbourne for instruction when she had any doubt what to 
 do, which hardly ever occurred, and with perfect calmness 
 and self-possession, but at the same time with a graceful 
 modesty and propriety particularly interesting and ingra- 
 tiating." 
 
 Sir Robert Peel told Mr. Greville that he was amazed at 
 " her manner and behavior, at her apparent deep sense of 
 her situation, and at the same time her firmness." The 
 Duke of Wellington said in his blunt way that if she had 
 been his own daughter he could not have desired to see her 
 perform her part better. "At twelve," says Mr. Greville, 
 " she held a council, at which she presided with as much 
 ease as if she had been doing nothing else all her life ; and 
 though Lord Lansdowne and my colleague had contrived, 
 between them, to make some confusion with the council pa- 
 pers, she was not put out by it. She looked very well ; and 
 though so small in stature, and without much pretension to 
 beauty, the gracefulness of her manner and the good ex- 
 pression of her countenance give her, on the whole, a very 
 agreeable appearance, and, with her youth, inspire an exces- 
 sive interest in all who approach her, and which I can't help 
 feeling myself. ... In short, she appears to act with every 
 sort of good taste and good feeling, as well as good sense ; 
 and, as far as it has gone, nothing can be more favorable 
 than the impression she has made, and nothing can promise 
 better than her manner and conduct do; though," Mr. Gre- 
 
12 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 ville somewhat superfluously adds, "it would be rash to 
 count too confidently upon her judgment and discretion in 
 more weighty matters." 
 
 The interest or curiosity with which the demeanor of the 
 young Queen was watched was all the keener because the 
 world in general knew so little about her. Not merely was 
 the world in general thus ignorant, but even the statesmen 
 and officials in closest communication with court circles were 
 in almost absolute ignorance. According to Mr. Greville, 
 whose authority, however, is not to be taken too implicitly 
 except as to matters which he actually saw, the young Queen 
 had been previously kept in such seclusion by her mother 
 "never," he says, "having slept out of her bedroom, nor 
 been alone with anybody but herself and the Baroness Leh- 
 zen" that "not one of her acquaintance, none of the at- 
 tendants at Kensington, not even the Duchess of Northum- 
 berland, her governess, have any idea what she is or what 
 she promises to be." There was enough in the court of the 
 two sovereigns who went before Queen Victoria to justify 
 any strictness of seclusion which the Duchess of Kent might 
 desire for her daughter. George IV. was a Charles II. with- 
 out the education or the talents; William IV. was a Fred- 
 erick William of Prussia without the genius. The ordinary 
 manners of the society at the court of either had a full fla- 
 vor, to put it in the softest w r ay, such as a decent tap-room 
 would hardly exhibit in a time like the present. No one 
 can read even the most favorable descriptions given by con- 
 temporaries of the manners of those two courts without feel- 
 ing grateful to the Duchess of Kent for resolving that her 
 daughter should see as little as possible of their ways and 
 their company. 
 
 It was remarked with some interest that the Queen sub- 
 scribed herself simply "Victoria," and not, as had been ex- 
 pected, "Alexandrina Victoria." Mr. Greville mentions in 
 liis diary of December 24th, 1819, that "the Duke of Kent 
 gave the name of Alexandrina to his daughter in compli- 
 ment to the Emperor of Russia. She was to have had the 
 name of Georgiana, but the Duke insisted upon Alexandrina 
 being her first name. The Regent sent for Lieven " (the 
 Russian ambassador, husband of the famous Princess de Lie- 
 ven), "and made him a great many compliments, en leper- 
 
THE KING is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 13 
 
 siflant, on the Emperor's being godfather, but informed him 
 that the name of Georgiana could be second to no other in 
 this country, and therefore she could not bear it at all." It 
 was a very wise choice to employ simply the name of Vic- 
 toria, around which no ungenial associations of any kind 
 hung at that time, and Avhich can have only grateful asso- 
 ciations in the history of this country for the future. 
 
 It is not necessary to go into any formal description of 
 the various ceremonials and pageantries which celebrated 
 the accession of the new sovereign. The proclamation of 
 the Queen, her appearance for the first time on the throne 
 in the House of Lords when she prorogued Parliament in 
 person, and even the gorgeous festival of her coronation, 
 which took place on June 28th, in the following year, 1838, 
 may be passed over with a mere word of record. It is 
 worth mentioning, however, that at the coronation proces- 
 sion one of the most conspicuous figures was that of Marshal 
 Soult, Duke of Dalmatia, the opponent of Moore and Wel- 
 lington in the Peninsula, the commander of the Old Guard 
 at Liitzen, and one of the strong arms of Napoleon at Wa- 
 terloo. Soult had been sent as ambassador-extraordinary 
 to represent the French Government and people at the cor- 
 onation of Queen Victoria, and nothing could exceed the en- 
 thusiasm with which he was received by the crowds in the 
 streets of London on that day. The white-haired soldier 
 was cheered wherever a glimpse of his face or figure could 
 be caught. He appeared in the procession in a carriage, the 
 frame of which had been used on occasions of state by some 
 of the Princes of the House of Conde, and which Soult had 
 had splendidly decorated for the ceremony of the corona- 
 tion. Even the Austrian ambassador, says an eye-witness, 
 attracted less attention than Soult, although the dress of 
 the Austrian, Prince Esterhazy, "down to his very boot- 
 heels, sparkled with diamonds." The comparison savors now 
 of the ridiculous, but is remarkably expressive and effective. 
 Prince Esterhazy's name in those days suggested nothing 
 but diamonds. His diamonds may be said to glitter through 
 all the light literature of the time. When Lady Mary Wort- 
 ley Montagu wanted a comparison with which to illustrate 
 excessive splendor and brightness, she found it in "Mr. 
 Pitt's diamonds." Prince Esterhazy's served the same pur- 
 
14: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 pose for the writers of the early years of the present reign. 
 It was, therefore, perhaps, no very poor tribute to the stout 
 old moustache of the Republic and the Empire to say that 
 at a London pageant his war-worn face drew attention away 
 from Prince Esterhazy's diamonds. Soult himself felt very 
 warmly the genuine kindness of the reception given to him. 
 Years after, in a debate in the French Chamber, when M. 
 Guizot was accused of too much partiality for the English 
 alliance, Marshal Soult declared himself a warm champion 
 of that alliance. "I fought the English down to Toulouse," 
 he said, " when I fired the last cannon in defence of the na- 
 tional independence ; in the mean time I have been in Lon- 
 don, and France knows the reception which I had there. 
 The English themselves cried 'Vive Soult!' they cried 
 ' Soult forever !' I had learned to estimate the English on 
 the field of battle ; I have learned to estimate them in peace ; 
 and I repeat that I am a warm partisan of the English alli- 
 ance." History is not exclusively made by cabinets and 
 professional diplomatists. It is highly probable that the 
 cheers of a London crowd on the day of the Queen's corona- 
 tion did something genuine and substantial to restore the 
 good feeling between this country and France, and efface 
 the bitter memories of Waterloo. 
 
 It is a fact well worthy of note, amidst whatever records 
 of court ceremonial and of political change, that a few days 
 after the accession of the Queen, Mr. Montefiore was elected 
 Sheriff of London, the first Jew who had ever been chosen 
 for that office ; and that he received knighthood at the 
 hands of her Majesty when she visited the City on the fol- 
 lowing Lord Mayor's day. He was the first Jew whom roy- 
 alty had honored in this country since the good old times 
 when royalty was pleased to borrow the Jew's money, or 
 order instead the extraction of his teeth. The expansion of 
 the principle of religious liberty and equality, which has 
 been one of the most remarkable characteristics of the reign 
 of Queen Victoria, could hardly have been more becomingly 
 inaugurated than by the compliment which sovereign and 
 city paid to Sir Moses Montefiore. 
 
 The first signature attached to the Act of Allegiance pre- 
 sented to the Queen at Kensington Palace was that of her 
 eldest surviving uncle, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The 
 
THE KING is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 15 
 
 fact may be taken as an excuse for introducing a few words 
 here to record the severance that then took place between 
 the interests of this country, or at least the reigning family 
 of these realms, and another State, which had for a long time 
 been bound up together in a manner seldom satisfactory to 
 the English people. In the whole history of England it will 
 be observed that few things have provoked greater popular 
 dissatisfaction than the connection of a reigning family with 
 the crown or rulership of some foreign State. There is an 
 instinctive jealousy on such a point, which, even when it is 
 unreasonable, is not unnatural. A sovereign of England had 
 better be sovereign of England, and of no foreign State. 
 Many favorable auspices attended the accession of Queen 
 Victoria to the throne ; some at least of these were associ- 
 ated with her sex. The country was in general disposed to 
 think that the accession of a woman to the throne would 
 somewhat clarify and purify the atmosphere of the court. 
 It had another good effect as well, and one of a strictly po- 
 litical nature. It severed the connection which had existed 
 for some generations between this country and Hanover. 
 The connection was only personal, the successive kings of 
 England being also by succession sovereigns of Hanover. 
 
 C5 / O 
 
 The crown of Hanover was limited in its descent to the 
 male line, and it passed on the death of William IV. to his 
 eldest surviving brother, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. The 
 change was in almost every way satisfactory to the English 
 people. The indirect connection between England and 
 Hanover had at no time been a matter of gratification to 
 the public of this country. Many cooler and more enlight- 
 ened persons than honest Squire Western had viewed with 
 disfavor, and at one time with distrust, the division of in- 
 tei-ests which the ownership of the two crowns seemed al- 
 most of necessity to create in our English sovereigns. Be- 
 sides, it must be owned that the people of this country were 
 not by any means sorry to be rid of the Duke of Cumber- 
 land. Not many of George III.'s sons were popular; the 
 Duke of Cumberland was probably the least popular of all. 
 He was believed by many persons to have had something 
 moi'e than an indirect, or passive, or innocent share in the 
 Orange plot, discovered and exposed by Joseph Hume in 
 1835, for setting aside the claims of the young Princess Vic- 
 
16 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tovia, and putting himself, the Duke of Cumberland, on the 
 throne; a scheme which its authors pretended to justify by 
 the preposterous assertion that they feared the Duke of 
 Wellington would otherwise seize the crown for himself. 
 His manners were rude, overbearing, and sometimes even 
 brutal. He had personal habits which seemed rather fitted 
 for the days of Tiberius, or for the court of Peter the Great, 
 than for the time and sphere to which he belonged. Rumor 
 not unnaturally exaggerated his defects, and in the mouths 
 of many his name was the symbol of the darkest and fiercest 
 passions, and even crimes. Some of the popular reports 
 with regard to him had their foundation only in the com- 
 mon detestation of his character and dread of his influence; 
 but it is certain that he was profligate, selfish, overbearing, 
 and quarrelsome. A man with these qualities would usual- 
 ly be described in fiction as at all events bluntly honest and 
 outspoken ; but the Duke of Cumberland was deceitful and 
 treacherous. He was outspoken in his abuse of those with 
 whom he quarrelled, and in his style of anecdote and jocular 
 conversation ; but in no other sense. The Duke of Welling- 
 ton, whom he hated, told Mr. Greville that he once asked 
 George IV. why the Duke of Cumberland was so unpopular, 
 and the King replied, " Because there never was a father 
 well with bis son, or husband with his wife, or lover with 
 his mistress, or friend with his friend, that he did not try to 
 make mischief between them." The first thing he did on 
 his accession to the throne of Hanover was to abrogate the 
 constitution which had been agreed to by the Estates of the 
 kingdom, and sanctioned by the late King, William IV. 
 "Radicalism," said the King, writing to an English noble- 
 man, " has been here all the order of the day, and all the 
 lower class appointed to office were more or less imbued 
 with these laudable principles. . . . But I have cut the wings 
 of this democracy." He went, indeed, pretty vigorously to 
 work, for he dismissed from their offices seven of the most 
 distinguished professors of the University of Gottingen, be- 
 cause they signed a protest against his arbitrary abrogation 
 of the constitution. Among the men thus pushed from their 
 stools were Gervinus, the celebrated historian and Shak- 
 spearian critic, at that time professor of history and litera- 
 ture; Evvald, the Orientalist and theologian; Jacob Grimm; 
 
THE KING- is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 17 
 
 and Frederick Dahlmann, professor of political science. 
 Gervinus, Grimm, and Dahlmann were not merely deprived 
 of their offices, but were actually sent into exile. The ex- 
 iles were accompanied across the frontier by an immense 
 concourse of students, who gave them a triumphant Geleit 
 in true student fashion, and converted what was meant for 
 degradation and punishment into a procession of honor. 
 The offence against all rational principles of civil govern- 
 ment in these arbitrary proceedings on the part of the new 
 King was the more flagrant because it could not even be 
 pretended that the professors were interfering with politi- 
 cal matters outside their province, or that they were issuing 
 manifestoes calculated to disturb the public peace. The 
 University of Gottingen at that time sent a representative 
 to the Estates of the kingdom, and the protest to which the 
 seven professors attached their names was addressed to the 
 academical senate, and simply declared that they would take 
 no part in the ensuing election, because of the suspension of 
 the constitution. All this led to somewhat serious disturb- 
 ances in Hanover, which it needed the employment of mil- 
 itary force to suppress. 
 
 It was felt in England that the mere departure of the 
 Duke of Cumberland from this country would have made 
 the severance of the connection with Hanover desirable, even 
 if it had not been in other ways an advantage to us. Later 
 times have shown how much we have gained by the separa- 
 tion. It would have been exceedingly inconvenient, to say 
 the least, if the crown worn by a sovereign of England had 
 been hazarded in the war between Austria and Prussia in 
 1866. Our reigning family must have seemed to suffer in 
 dignity if that crown had been roughly knocked off the head 
 of its wearer, who happened to be an English sovereign; and 
 it would have been absurd to expect that the English people 
 could engage in a quarrel with which their interests and hon- 
 or had absolutely nothing to do, for the sake of a mere fam- 
 ily possession of their ruling house. Looking back from 
 this distance of time, and across a change of political and 
 social manners far greater than the distance of time might 
 seem to explain, it appears difficult to understand the pas- 
 sionate emotions which the accession of the young Queen 
 seems to have excited on all sides. Some influential and 
 
18 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 prominent politicians talked and wrote as if there were real- 
 ly a possibility of the Tories attempting a revolution in fa- 
 vor of the Hanoverian branch of the royal family ; and if 
 some such crisis had again come round as that which tried 
 the nation when Queen Anne died. On the other hand, there 
 were heard loud and shrill cries that the Queen was destined 
 to be conducted by her constitutional advisers into a precip- 
 itate pathway leading sheer down into popery and anarchy. 
 The Times insisted that " the anticipations of certain Irish 
 Roman Catholics respecting the success of their warfare 
 against Church and State under the auspices of these not 
 untried ministers into whose hands the all but infant Queen 
 has been compelled by her unhappy condition to deliver her- 
 self and her indignant people, are to be taken for nothing, 
 and as nothing, but the chimeras of a band of visionary trai- 
 tors." The Times even thought it necessary to point out 
 that for her Majesty to turn papist, to marry a papist, "or in 
 any manner follow the footsteps of the Coburg family, whom 
 these incendiaries describe as papists," would involve an 
 "immediate forfeiture of the British crown." On the other 
 hand, some of the Radical and more especially Irish papers 
 talked in the plainest terms of Tory plots to depose, or even 
 to assassinate, the Queen, and put the Duke of Cumberland 
 in her place. O'Connell, the great Irish agitator, declared 
 in a public speech that if it were necessary he could get 
 "five hundred thousand brave Irishmen to defend the life, 
 the honor, and the person of the beloved young lady by 
 whom England's throne is now filled." Mr. Henry Grattan, 
 the son of the famous orator, and like his father a Protes- 
 tant, declared, at a meeting in Dublin, that " if her Majesty 
 were once fairly placed in the hands of the Tories, I would 
 not give an orange-peel for her life." He even went on to 
 put his rhetorical declaration into a more distinct form : " If 
 some of the low miscreants of the party got round her Maj- 
 esty, and had the mixing of the royal bowl at night, I fear 
 she would have a long sleep." This language seems almost 
 too absurd for sober record, and yet was hardly more absurd 
 than many things said on what may be called the other side. 
 A Mr. Bradshaw, Tory member for Canterbury, declared at 
 a public meeting in that ancient city that the sheet-anchor 
 of the Liberal Ministry was the body of "Irish papists and 
 
THE KING is DEAD! LONG LIVE THE QUEEN! 19 
 
 rapparees whom the priests return to the House of Com- 
 mons." "These are the men who represent the bigoted sav- 
 ages, hardly more civilized than the natives of New Zealand, 
 but animated with a fierce, undying hatred of England. Yet 
 on these men are bestowed the countenance and support of 
 the Queen of Protestant England. For, alas ! her Majesty 
 is Queen only of a faction, and is as much of a partisan as 
 the Lord Chancellor himself." At a Conservative dinner in 
 Lancashire, a speaker denounced the Queen and her minis- 
 ters on the same ground so vehemently, that the Command- 
 er-in-chief addressed a remonstrance to some military offi- 
 cers who were among the guests at this excited banquet, 
 pointing out to them the serious responsibility they incurred 
 by remaining in any assembly when such language was ut- 
 tered and such sentiments were expressed. 
 
 No one, of course, would take impassioned and inflated 
 harangues of this kind on either side as a representation of 
 the general feeling. Sober persons all over the country 
 must have known perfectly well that there was not the slight- 
 est fear that the young Queen would turn a Roman Catholic, 
 or that her ministry intended to deliver the country up as a 
 prey to Rome. Sober persons everywhere, too, must have 
 known equally well that there was no longer the slightest 
 cause to feel any alarm about a Tory plot to hand over the 
 throne of England to the detested Duke of Cumberland. 
 "We only desire, in quoting such outrageous declarations, to 
 make more clear the condition of the public mind, and to 
 show what the state of the political world must have been 
 when such extravagance and such delusions were possible. 
 We have done this partly to show what were the trials and 
 difficulties under which her Majesty came to the throne, and 
 partly for the mere purpose of illustrating the condition of 
 the country and of political education. There can be no 
 doubt that all over the country passion and ignorance were 
 at work to make the task of constitutional government pecul- 
 iarly difficult. A vast number of the followers of the Tories 
 in country places really believed that the Liberals were de- 
 termined to hurry the sovereign into some policy tending to 
 the degradation of the monarchy. If any cool and enlight- 
 ened reasoner were to argue with them on this point, and 
 endeavor to convince them of the folly of ascribing such pur- 
 
20 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 poses to a number of English statesmen whose interests, 
 position, and honor were absolutely bound up with the suc- 
 cess and the glory of the State, the indignant and unreason- 
 ing Tories would be able to cite the very words of so great 
 and so sober-minded a statesman as Sir Robert Peel, who, in 
 his famous speech to the electors of Tamworth, promised to 
 rescue the constitution from being made the " victim of false 
 friends," and the country from being " trampled under the 
 hoof of a ruthless democracy." If, on the other hand, a sen- 
 sible person were to try to persuade hot-headed people on 
 the opposite side that it was absurd to suppose the Tories 
 really meant any hai*m to the freedom and the peace of the 
 country and the security of the succession, he might be in- 
 vited, with significant expression, to read the manifesto is- 
 sued by Lord Durham to the electors of Sunderland, in which 
 that eminent statesman declared that "in all circumstances, 
 at all hazards, be the personal consequences what they may," 
 he would ever be found ready when called upon to defend 
 the principles on which the constitution of the country was 
 then settled. We know now very well that Sir Robert Peel 
 and Lord Durham were using the language of innocent meta- 
 phor. Sir Robert Peel did not really fear much the hoof of 
 the ruthless democracy ; Lord Durham did not actually ex- 
 pect to be called upon at any terrible risk to himself to fight 
 the battle of freedom oh English soil. But when those 
 whose minds had been bewildered and whose passions had 
 been inflamed by the language of the Times on the one 
 side, and that of O'Connell on the other, came to read the 
 calmer and yet sufficiently impassioned words of responsible 
 statesmen like Sir Robert Peel and Lord Durham, they might 
 be excused if they found rather a confirmation than a ref- 
 utation of their arguments and their fears. 
 
 The truth is that the country was in a very excited condi- 
 tion, and that it is easy to imagine a succession of events 
 which might in a moment have thrown it into utter confu- 
 sion. At home and abroad things were looking ominous 
 for the new reign. To begin with, the last two reigns had, 
 on the whole, done much to loosen, not only the personal 
 feeling of allegiance, but even the general confidence in the 
 virtue of monarchical rule. The old plan of personal gov- 
 ernment had become an anomaly, and the system of a gen- 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 21 
 
 nine constitutional government, such as we know, bad not 
 yet been tried. The very manner in which the Reform Bill 
 had been carried, the political stratagem which had been re- 
 sorted to when further resistance seemed dangerous, was not 
 likely to exalt in popular estimate the value of what was 
 then gracefully called constitutional government. Only a 
 short time before, the country had seen Catholic emancipa- 
 tion conceded, not from a sense of justice on the part of min- 
 isters, but avowedly because further resistance must lead to 
 civil disturbance. There was not much in all this to impress 
 an intelligent and independent people with a sense of the 
 great wisdom of the rulers of the country, or of the indis- 
 pensable advantages of the system which they represented. 
 Social discontent prevailed almost everywhere. Economic 
 laws were hardly understood by the country in general. 
 Class interests were fiercely arrayed against each other. 
 The cause of each man's class filled him with a positive 
 fanaticism. He was not a mere selfish and grasping partisan, 
 but he sincerely believed that each other class was arrayed 
 against his, and that the natural duty of self-defence and 
 self-preservation compelled him to stand firmly by his own. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 
 
 LORD MELBOURNE was the First Minister of the Crown 
 when the Queen succeeded to the throne. He was a man 
 who then and always after made himself particularly dear 
 to the Queen, and for whom she had the strongest regard. 
 He was of kindly, somewhat indolent nature; fair and even 
 generous toward his political opponents ; of the most genial 
 disposition toward his friends. He was emphatically not a 
 strong man. He was not a man to make good grow where 
 it was not already growing, to adopt the expression of a 
 great author. Long before that time his eccentric wife, Lady 
 Caroline Lamb, had excused herself for some of her follies 
 and frailties by pleading that her husband was not a man to 
 watch over any one's morals. He was a kindly counsellor 
 to a young Queen ; and, happily for herself, the young Queen 
 
22 A HISTORY OP OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 in this case had strong, clear sense enough of her own not to 
 be absolutely dependent on any counsel. Lord Melbourne 
 was not a statesman. His best qualities, personal kindness 
 and good-nature apart, were purely negative. He was un- 
 fortunately not content even with the reputation for a sort 
 of indolent good-nature which he might have well deserved : 
 he strove to make himself appear hopelessly idle, trivial, 
 and careless. When he really was serious and earnest, he 
 seemed to make it his business to look like one in whom no 
 human affairs could call up a gleam of interest. He became 
 the fanfaron of levities which he never had. We have 
 amusing pictures of him as he occupied himself in blowing a 
 feather or nursing a sofa-cushion Avhile receiving an impor- 
 tant and perhaps highly sensitive deputation from this or 
 that commercial "interest." Those who knew him insisted 
 that he really was listening with all his might and main ; 
 that he had sat up the whole night before, studying the 
 question which he seemed to think so unworthy of any at- 
 tention ; and that, so far from being, like Horace, wholly ab- 
 sorbed in his trifles, he was at very great pains to keep up 
 the appearance of a trifler. A brilliant critic has made a 
 lively and amusing attack on this alleged peculiarity. "If 
 the truth must be told," says Sydney Smith, " our viscount 
 is somewhat of an impostor. Everything about him seems 
 to betoken careless desolation ; any one would suppose from 
 his manner that he was playing at chuck-farthing with hu- 
 man happiness ; that he was always on the heel of pastime ; 
 that he would giggle away the Great Charter, and decide 
 by the method of teetotum whether my lords the bishops 
 should or should not retain their seats in the House of Lords. 
 All this is but the mere vanity of surprising, and making us 
 believe that he can play with kingdoms as other men can 
 with ninepins. ... I am sorry to hurt any man's feelings, 
 and to brush away the magnificent fabric of levity and gay- 
 cty he has reared ; but I accuse our minister of honesty and 
 diligence ; I deny that he is careless or rash : he is nothing 
 more than a man of good understanding and good principle 
 disguised in the eternal and somewhat wearisome affectation 
 of a political roue." 
 
 Such a masquerading might perhaps have been excusable, 
 or even attractive, in the case of a man of really brilliant 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 23 
 
 and commanding talents. Lookers-on are always rather 
 apt to be fascinated by the spectacle of a man of well rec- 
 ognized strength and force of character playing for the mo- 
 ment the part of an indolent trifler. The contrast is charm- 
 ing in a brilliant Prince Hal or such a Sardanapalus as By- 
 ron drew. In our own time a considerable amount of the 
 popularity of Lord Palmerston was inspired by the amusing 
 antagonism between his assumed levity and his well-known 
 force of intellect and strength of will. But in Lord Mel- 
 bourne's case the affectation had no such excuse or happy 
 effect. He was not by any means a Palmerston. He was 
 only fitted to rule in the quietest times. He was a poor 
 speaker, utterly unable to encounter the keen, penetrating 
 criticisms of Lyndhurst or the vehement and remorseless 
 invectives of Brougham. Debates were then conducted 
 with a bitterness of personality unknown, or at all events 
 very rarely known, in our days. Even in the House of 
 Lords language was often interchanged of the most virulent 
 hostility. The rushing impetuosity and fury of Brougham's 
 style had done much then to inflame the atmosphere which 
 in our days is usually so cool and moderate. 
 
 It probably added to the warmth of the attacks on the 
 ministry of Lord Melbourne that the Prime -minister was 
 supposed to be an especial favorite with the young Queen. 
 When Victoria came to the throne the Duke of Wellington 
 gave frank expression to his feelings as to the future of his 
 party. He was of opinion that the Tories would never 
 have any chance with a young woman for sovereign. "I 
 have no small-talk," he said, " and Peel has no manners." It 
 had probably not occurred to the Duke of Wellington to 
 think that a woman could be capable of as sound a consti- 
 tutional policy, and could show as little regard for personal 
 predilections in the busines of government, as any man. All 
 this, however, only tended to embitter the feeling against 
 the Whig government. Lord Melbourne's constant attend- 
 ance on the young Queen was regarded with keen jealousy 
 and dissatisfaction. According to some critics, the Prime- 
 minister was endeavoring to inspire her with all his own 
 gay heedlessness of character and temperament. Accord- 
 ing to others, Lord Melbourne's purpose was to make him- 
 self agreeable and indispensable to the Queen ; to surround 
 
24 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 her with his friends, relations, and creatures, and thus get 
 a lifelong hold of power in England, in defiance of political 
 changes and parties. It is curious now to look back on 
 much that was said in the political and personal heats and 
 bitternesses of the time. If Lord Melbourne had been a 
 French mayor of the palace, whose real object was to make 
 himself virtual ruler of the State, and to hold the sovereign 
 as a puppet in his hands, there could not have been greater 
 anger, fear, and jealousy. Since that time we have all learn- 
 ed on the very best authority that Lord Melbourne actually 
 was himself the person to advise the Queen to show some 
 confidence in the Tories to "hold out the olive-branch a 
 little to them," as he expressed it. He does not appear to 
 have been greedy of power, or to have used any unfair 
 means of getting or keeping it. The character of the young 
 sovereign seems to have impressed him deeply. His real or 
 affected levity gave way to a genuine and lasting desire 
 to make her life as happy, and her reign as successful, as he 
 could. The Queen always felt the warmest affection and 
 gratitude for him, and showed it long after the public had 
 given up the suspicion that she could be a puppet in the 
 hands of a minister. 
 
 Still, it is certain that the Queen's Prime-minister was by 
 no means a popular man at the time of her accession. Even 
 observers who had no political or personal interest what- 
 ever in the conditions of cabinets were displeased to see the 
 opening of the new reign so much, to all appearance, under 
 the influence of one who either was or tried to be a mere 
 lounger. The deputations went away offended and dis- 
 gusted when Lord Melbourne played with feathers or dan- 
 dled sofa-cushions in their presence. The almost fierce en- 
 ergy and strenuousness of a man like Brougham showed 
 in overwhelming contrast to the happy-go-lucky airs and 
 graces of the Premier. It is likely that there was quite as 
 much of affectation in the one case as in the other ; but the 
 affectation of a devouring zeal for the public service told at 
 least far better than the other in the heat and stress of de- 
 bate. When the new reign began, the ministry had two 
 enemies or critics in the House of Lords of the most formi- 
 dable character. Either alone would have been a trouble 
 to a minister of far stronger mould than Lord Melbourne; 
 
STATESMEN AND. PAETIES. 25 
 
 but circumstances threw them both, for the moment, into a 
 chance alliance against him. 
 
 One of these was Lord Brougham. No stronger and 
 stranger a figure than his is described in the modern history 
 of England. He was gifted with the most varied and strik- 
 ing talents, and with a capacity for labor which sometimes 
 seemed almost superhuman. Not merely had he the capac- 
 ity for labor, but he appeared to have a positive passion for 
 work. His restless energy seemed as if it must stretch itself 
 out on every side seeking new fields of conquest. The study 
 that was enough to occupy the whole time and wear out 
 the frame of other men was only recreation to him. He 
 might have been described as one possessed by a very de- 
 mon of work. His physical strength never gave way. His 
 high spirits never deserted him. His self -confidence was 
 boundless. He thought he knew everything, and could do 
 everything better than any other man. He delighted in 
 giving evidence that he understood the business of the spe- 
 cialist better than the specialist himself. His vanity was 
 overweening, and made him ridiculous almost as often and 
 as much as his genius made him admired. The comic liter- 
 ature of more than a generation had no subject more fruitful 
 than the vanity and restlessness of Lord Brougham. He 
 was beyond doubt a great Parliamentary orator. His style 
 was too diffuse and sometimes too uncouth to suit a day 
 like our own, when form counts for more than substance, 
 when passion seems out of place in debate, and not to ex- 
 aggerate is far more the object than to try to be great. 
 Brougham's action was wild, and sometimes even furious ; 
 his gestures were singularly ungraceful; his manners were 
 grotesque ; but of his power over his hearers there could be 
 no doubt. That power remained with him until a far later 
 date ; and long after the years when men usually continue 
 to take part in political debate, Lord Brougham could be 
 impassioned, impressive, and even overwhelming. He was 
 not an orator of the highest class: his speeches have not 
 stood the test of time. Apart from the circumstances of 
 the hour and the personal power of the speaker, they could 
 hardly arouse any great delight, or even interest ; for they 
 are by no means models of English style, and they have lit- 
 tle of that profound philosophical interest, that pregnancy 
 
 I. 2 
 
26 A HISTORY OF OUR, OWN TIMES. 
 
 of thought and meaning, aud that splendor of eloquence, 
 which make the speeches of Burke always classic, and even 
 in a certain sense always popular among us. In truth, no 
 man could have done with abiding success all the things 
 which Brougham did successfully for the hour. On law, on 
 politics, on literature, on languages, on science, on art, on 
 industrial and commercial enterprise, he professed to pro- 
 nounce with the authority of a teacher. " If Brougham 
 knew a little of law," said O'Connell, when the former be- 
 came Lord Chancellor, " he would know a little of every- 
 thing." The anecdo'te is told in another way too, which 
 perhaps makes it even more piquant. "The new Lord 
 Chancellor knows a little of everything in the world even 
 of law." 
 
 Brougham's was an excitable and self- asserting nature. 
 He had during many years shown himself an embodied in- 
 fluence, a living, speaking force in the promotion of great 
 political aud social reforms. If his talents were great, if his 
 personal vanity was immense, let it be said that his services 
 to the cause of human freedom and education were simply 
 inestimable. As an opponent of slavery in the colonies, as 
 an advocate of political reform at home, of law reform, of 
 popular education, of religious equality, he had worked with 
 indomitable zeal, with resistless passion, and with splendid 
 success. But his career passed through two remarkable 
 changes which, to a great extent, interfered with the full effi- 
 cacy of his extraordinary powers. The first was when from 
 popular tribune and reformer he became Lord Chancellor in 
 1830 ; the second was when he was left out of office on the 
 reconstruction of the Whig Ministry in April, 1835, and he 
 passed for the remainder of his life into the position of an 
 independent or unattached critic of the measures and policy 
 of other men. It has never been clearly known why the 
 Whigs so suddenly threw over Brougham. The common 
 belief is that his eccentricities and his almost savage temper 
 made him intolerable in a cabinet. It has been darkly hint- 
 ed that for awhile his intellect was actually under a cloud, 
 as people said that of Chatham was during a momentous 
 season. 
 
 Lord Brougham was not a man likely to forget or forgive 
 the wrong which he must have believed that lie had sus- 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 27 
 
 tained at the hands of the Whigs. He became the fiercest 
 and most formidable of Lord Melbourne's hostile critics. 
 
 The other opponent who has been spoken of was Lord 
 Lyndhurst. Lord Lyndhurst resembled Lord Brougham in 
 the length of his career and in capacity for work, if in noth- 
 ing else. Lyndhurst, who was born in Boston the year before 
 the tea-ships were boarded in that harbor and their cargoes 
 flung into the water, has been heard addressing the House 
 of Lords in all vigor and fluency by men who are yet far 
 from middle age. He was one of the most effective Parlia- 
 mentary debaters of a time which has known such men as 
 Peel and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bright and 
 Cobden. His style was singularly and even severely clear, 
 direct, and pure; his manner was easy and graceful; his 
 voice remarkably sweet and strong. Nothing could have 
 been in greater contrast than his clear, correct, nervous ar- 
 gument, and the impassioned invectives and overwhelming 
 strength of Brougham. Lyndhurst had, as has been said, an 
 immense capacity for work, when the work had to be done ; 
 but his natural tendency was as distinctly toward indolence 
 as Brougham's was toward unresting activity. Nor were 
 Lyndhurst's political convictions ever very clear. By the 
 habitude of associating with the Tories, and receiving office 
 from them, and speaking for them, and attacking their ene- 
 mies with argument and sarcasm, Lyndhurst finally settled 
 down into all the ways of Toryism. But nothing in his varied 
 history showed that he had any particular preference that 
 way; and there were many passages in his career when it 
 would seem as if a turn of chance decided what path of po- 
 litical life he was to follow. As a keen debater he was, per- 
 haps, hardly ever excelled in Parliament; but he had neither 
 the passion nor the genius of the orator; and his capacity 
 was narrow indeed in its range when compared with the 
 astonishing versatility and omnivorous mental activity of 
 Brougham. As a speaker he was always equal. He seem- 
 ed to know no varying moods or fits of mental lassitude. 
 Whenever he spoke he reached at once the same high level 
 as a debater. The very fact may in itself, perhaps, be taken 
 as conclusive evidence that he was not an orator. The 
 higher qualities of the orator are no more to be summoned 
 at will than those of the poet. 
 
28 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 These two men were without any comparison the two 
 leading debaters in the House of Lords. Lord Melbourne 
 had not at that time in the Upper House a single man of 
 first- class or even of second-class debating power on the 
 bench of the ministry. An able writer has well remarked 
 that the position of the ministry in the House of Lords 
 might be compared to that of a water -logged wreck into 
 which enemies from all quarters are pouring their broad- 
 sides. 
 
 The accession of the Queen made it necessary that a new 
 Parliament should be summoned. The struggle between 
 parties among the constituencies was very animated, and 
 was carried on in some instances with a recourse to manoeu- 
 vre and stratagem such as in our time would hardly be pos- 
 sible. The result was not a very marked alteration in the 
 condition of parties ; but, on the whole, the advantage re- 
 mained with the Tories. Somewhere about this time, it 
 may be remarked, the use of the word " Conservative," to 
 describe the latter political party, first came into fashion. 
 Mr. "Wilson Croker is credited with the honor of having first 
 employed the word in that sense. In an article in the Quar- 
 terly Review some years before, he spoke of being decidedly 
 and conscientiously attached " to what is called the Tory, 
 but which might with more propriety be called the Con- 
 servative, party." During the elections for the new Parlia- 
 ment, Lord John Russell, speaking at a public dinner at 
 Stroud, made allusion to the new name which his opponents 
 were beginning to affect for their party. "If that," he said, 
 " is the name that pleases them, if they say that the old dis- 
 tinction of Whig and Tory should no longer be kept up, I 
 am ready, in opposition to their name of Conservative, to 
 take the name of Reformer, and to stand by that opposition." 
 
 The Tories, or Conservatives, then, had a slight gain as the 
 result of the appeal to the country. The new Parliament, 
 on its assembling, seems to have gathered in the Commons 
 an unusually large number of gifted and promising men. 
 There was something, too, of a literary stamp about it, a fact 
 not much to be observed in Parliaments of a date nearer to 
 the present time. 'Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece, sat for 
 the city of London. The late Lord Lytton, then Mr. Edward 
 Lytton Bulwer, had a seat an advanced Radical at that day. 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 29 
 
 Mr. Disraeli came then into Parliament for the first time. 
 Charles Duller, full of high spirits, brilliant humor, and the 
 very inspiration of keen good-sense, seemed on the sure way 
 to that career of renown which a premature death cut short. 
 Sir William Molesworth was an excellent type of the school 
 which in later days was called the Philosophical Radical. 
 Another distinguished member of the same school, Mr. Roe- 
 buck, had lost his seat, and was for the moment an outsider. 
 Mr. Gladstone had been already five years in Parliament. 
 The late Lord Carlisle, then Lord Morpeth, was looked upon 
 as a graceful specimen of the literary and artistic young no- 
 bleman, who also cultivates a little politics for his intellectu- 
 al amusement. Lord John Russell had but lately begun his 
 career as leader of the House of Commons; Lord Palmerston 
 was Foreign Secretary, but had not even then got the credit 
 of the great ability which he possessed. Not many years 
 before Mr. Greville spoke of him as a man who " had been 
 twenty years in office, and had never distinguished himself 
 before." Mr. Greville expresses a mild surprise at the high 
 opinion which persons who knew Lord Palmerston intimate- 
 ly were pleased to entertain as to his ability and his capac- 
 ity for work. Only those who knew him very intimately 
 indeed had any idea of the capacity for governing Parlia- 
 ment and the country which he was soon afterward to dis- 
 play. Sir Robert Peel was leader of the Conservative party. 
 Lord Stanley, the late Lord Derby, was still in the House of 
 Commons. He had not long before broken definitively with 
 the Whigs on the question of the Irish ecclesiastical estab- 
 lishment, and had passed over to that Conservative party of 
 which he afterward became the most influential leader, and 
 the most powerful Parliamentary orator. O'Connell and 
 Sheil represented the eloquence of the Irish national party. 
 Decidedly the Plouse of Commons first elected during Queen 
 Victoria's reign was strong in eloquence and talent. Only 
 two really great speakers have arisen, in the forty years that 
 followed, who were not members of Parliament at that time 
 Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright. Mr. Cobden had come forward 
 as a candidate for the borough of Stockport, but was not 
 successful, and did not obtain a seat in Parliament until four 
 years after. It was only by what may be called an accident 
 that Macaulay and Mr. Roebuck were not in the Parliament 
 
30 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of 1837. It is fair to say, therefore, that, except for Cobden 
 and Bright, the subsequent forty years had added no first- 
 class name to the records of Parliamentary eloquence. 
 
 The ministry was not very strong in the House of Com- 
 mons. Its conditions, indeed, hardly allowed it to feel itself 
 strong even if it had had more powerful representatives in 
 either House. Its adherents were but loosely held together. 
 The more ardent reformers were disappointed with minis- 
 ters; the Free -trade movement was rising into distinct 
 bulk and proportions, and threatened to be formidably in- 
 dependent of mere party ties. The Government had to rely 
 a good deal on the precarious support of Mr. O'Connell and 
 his followers. They were not rich in debating talent in the 
 Commons any more than in the Lords. Sir Robert Peel, 
 the leader of the Opposition, was by far the most powerful 
 man in the House of Commons. Added to his great quali- 
 ties as an administrator and a Parliamentary debater, he had 
 the virtue, then very rare among Conservative statesmen, of 
 being a sound and clear financier, with a good grasp of the 
 fundamental principles of political economy. His high au- 
 stere character made him respected by opponents as well 
 as by friends. He had not, perhaps, many intimate friends. 
 His temperament was cold, or at least its heat was self-con- 
 tained ; he threw out no genial glow to those around him. 
 He was by nature a reserved and shy man, in whose man- 
 ners shyness took the form of pompousness and coldness. 
 Something might be said of him like that which Richter 
 said of Schiller : he was to strangers stony, and like a preci- 
 pice from which it was their instinct to spring back. It is 
 certain that he had warm and generous feelings, but his 
 very sensitiveness only led him to disguise them. The con- 
 trast between his emotions and his lack of demonstrative- 
 ness created in him a constant artificiality which often seem- 
 ed mere awkwardness. It was in the House of Commons 
 that his real genius and character displayed themselves. 
 The atmosphere of debate was to him what Macaulay says 
 wine was to Addison, the influence which broke the spell 
 under which his fine intellect seemed otherwise to lie im- 
 prisoned. Peel was a perfect master of the House of Com- 
 mons. He was as great an orator as any man could be who 
 addresses himself to the House of Commons, its ways and 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES, 31 
 
 its purposes alone. He went as near, perhaps, to the rank of 
 a great orator as any one can go who is but little gifted with 
 imagination. Oratory has been well described as the fusion 
 of reason and passion. Passion always carries something 
 of the imaginative along with it. Sir Robert Peel had little 
 imagination, and almost none of that passion which in elo- 
 quence sometimes supplies its place. His style was clear, 
 strong, and stately ; full of various argument and apt il- 
 lustration drawn from books and from the world of politics 
 and commerce. He followed a difficult argument home to 
 its utter conclusions; and if it had in it any lurking fallacy 
 he brought out the weakness into the clearest light, often 
 with a happy touch of humor and quiet sarcasm. His 
 speeches might be described as the very perfection of good- 
 sense and high principle clothed in the most impressive lan- 
 guage. But they were something more peculiar than this, 
 for they were so constructed, in their argument and their 
 style alike, as to touch the very core of the intelligence of the 
 House of Commons. They told of the feelings and the in- 
 spiration of Parliament as the ballad-music of a country tells 
 of its scenery and its national sentiments. 
 
 Lord Stanley was a far more energetic and impassioned 
 speaker than Sir Robert Peel, and perhaps occasionally, in 
 his later career, came now and then nearer to the height of 
 genuine oratory. But Lord Stanley was little more than a 
 splendid Parliamentary partisan, even when, long after, he 
 was Prime-minister of England. He had very little, indeed, 
 of that class of information which the modern world requires 
 of its statesmen and leaders. Of political economy, of 
 finance, of the development and the discoveries of modern 
 science, he knew almost as little as it is possible for an able 
 and energetic man to know who lives in the throng of active 
 life and hears what people are talking of around him. He 
 once said good-humoredly of himself, that he was brought 
 up in the pre-scientific period. His scholarship was mere- 
 ly such training in the classic languages as allowed him to 
 have a full literary appreciation of the beauty of Greek and 
 Roman literature. He had no real and deep knowledge of 
 the history of the Greek and the Roman people, nor proba- 
 bly did he at all appreciate the great difference between the 
 spirit of Roman and of Greek civilization. He had, in fact, 
 
32 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 what would have been called at an earlier day an elegant 
 scholarship; he had a considerable knowledge of the politics 
 of his time in most European countries, an energetic, intrepid 
 spirit, and with him, as Macaulay well said, the science of 
 Parliamentary debate seemed to be an instinct. There was 
 no speaker on the ministerial benches at that time who could 
 for a moment be compared with him. 
 
 Lord John Russell, who had the leadership of the party 
 in the House of Commons, was really a much stronger man 
 than he seemed to be. He had a character for dauntless 
 courage and confidence among his friends; for boundless 
 self-conceit among his enemies. Every one remembers Syd- 
 ney Smith's famous illustrations of Lord John Russell's un- 
 limited faith in his own power of achievement. Thomas 
 Moore addressed a poem to him at one time, when Lord 
 John Russell thought or talked of giving up political life, in 
 which he appeals to " thy genius, thy youth, and thy name," 
 declares that the instinct of the young statesman is the 
 same as " the eaglet's to soar with his eyes on the sun," and 
 implores him not to "think for an instant thy country can 
 spare such a light from her darkening horizon as thou." 
 Later observers, to whom Lord John Russell appeared prob- 
 ably remarkable for a cold and formal style as a debater, 
 and for lack of originating power as a statesman, may find 
 it diificult to reconcile the poet's picture with their own im- 
 pressions of the reality. But it is certain that at one time 
 the reputation of Lord John Russell was that of a rather 
 reckless man of genius, a sort of Whig Shelley. He had, in 
 truth, much less genius than his friends and admirers be- 
 lieved, and a great deal more of practical strength than 
 either friends or foes gave him credit for. He became, not 
 indeed an orator, but a very keen debater, who was espe- 
 cially effective in a cold, irritating sarcasm which penetrated 
 the weakness of an opponent's argument like some dissolv- 
 ing acid. In the poem from which we have quoted, Moore 
 speaks of the eloquence of his noble friend as "not like those 
 rills from a height, which sparkle and foam and in vapor 
 are o'er; but a current that works out its way into light 
 through the filtering recesses of thought and of lore." Al- 
 lowing for the exaggeration of friendship and poetry, this 
 is not a bad description of what Lord John Russell's style 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 33 
 
 became at its best. The thin bright stream of argument 
 worked its way slowly out, and contrived to wear a path 
 for itself through obstacles which at first the looker-on 
 might have felt assured it never could penetrate. Lord 
 John Kussell's swordsmanship was the swordsmanship of 
 Saladin, and not that of stout King Richard. But it was 
 very effective sword-play in its own way. Our English sys- 
 tem of government by party makes the history of Parlia- 
 ment seem like that of a succession of great political duels. 
 Two men stand constantly confronted during a series of 
 years, one of whom is at the head of the Government, while 
 the other is at the head of the Opposition. They change 
 places with each victory. The conqueror goes into office; 
 the conquered into opposition. This is not the place to dis- 
 cuss either the merits or the probable duration of the prin- 
 ciple of government by party; it is enough to say here 
 that it undoubtedly gives a very animated and varied com- 
 plexion to our political struggles, and invests them, indeed, 
 with much of the glow and passion of actual warfare. It 
 has often happened that the two leading opponents are men 
 of intellectual and oratorical powers so fairly balanced that 
 their followers may well dispute among themselves as to 
 the superiority of their respective chiefs, and that the public 
 in general may become divided into two schools, not merely 
 political, but even critical, according to their partiality for 
 one or the other; We still dispute as to whether Fox or 
 Pitt was the greater leader, the greater orator ; it is prob- 
 able that for a long time to come the same question will 
 be asked by political students about Gladstone and Disra- 
 eli. For many years Lord John Russell and Sir Robert 
 Peel stood thus opposed. They will often come into con- 
 trast and comparison in these pages. For the present it is 
 enough to say that Peel had by far the more original mind, 
 and that Lord John Russell never obtained so great an in- 
 fluence over the House of Commons as that which his rival 
 long enjoyed. The heat of political passion afterward in- 
 duced a bitter critic to accuse Peel of lack of originality be- 
 cause he assimilated readily and turned to account the ideas 
 of other men. Not merely the criticism, but the principle 
 on which it was founded, was altogether wrong. It ought 
 to be left to children to suppose that nothing is original but 
 
 2* 
 
34 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 that which we make up, as the childish phrase is, " out of 
 our own heads." Originality in politics, as in every field 
 of art, consists in the use and application of the ideas which 
 we get or are given to us. The greatest proof Sir Robert 
 Peel ever gave of high and genuine statesmanship was in 
 his recognition that the time had come to put into practi- 
 cal legislation the principles which Cobden and Villiers and 
 Bright had been advocating in the House of Commons. 
 Lord John Russell was a born reformer. He had sat at the 
 feet of Fox. He was cradled in the principles of Liberalism. 
 He held faithfully to his creed ; he was one of its boldest 
 and keenest champions. He had great advantages over 
 Peel, in the mere fact that he had begun his education in a 
 more enlightened school. But he wanted passion quite as 
 much as Peel did, and remained still farther than Peel be- 
 low the level of the genuine orator. Russell, as we have 
 said, had not long held the post of leader of the House of 
 Commons when the first Parliament of Queen Victoria as- 
 sembled. He was still, in a manner, on trial ; and even 
 among his friends, perhaps especially among his friends, 
 there were whispers that his confidence in himself was 
 greater than his capacity for leadership. 
 
 After the chiefs of Ministry and of Opposition, the most 
 conspicuous figure in the House of Commons was the colos- 
 sal form of O'Connell, the great Irish agitator, of whom we 
 shall hear a good deal more. Among the foremost orators 
 of the House at that time was O'Connell's impassioned lieu- 
 tenant, Richard Lalor Sheil. It is curious how little is now 
 remembered of Sheil, whom so many well-qualified authori- 
 ties declaimed to be a genuine orator. Lord Beaconsfield, in 
 one of his novels, speaks of SheiPs eloquence in terms of the 
 highest praise, and disparages Canning. It is but a short 
 time since Mr. Gladstone selected Sheil as one of three re- 
 markable illustrations of great success as a speaker, achieved 
 in spite of serious defects of voice and delivery ; the other 
 two examples being Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Newman. Mr. 
 Gladstone described Shell's voice as like nothing but the 
 sound produced by "a tin kettle battered about from place 
 to place," knocking first against one side and then against 
 another. "In anybody else," Mr. Gladstone went on to say, 
 "I would not, if it had been in my choice, like to have lis- 
 
STATESMEN AND PARTIES. 35 
 
 tened to that voice; but in him I would not have changed 
 it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody 
 ever felt it painful while listening to it. He was a great or- 
 ator, and an orator of much preparation, I believe, carried 
 even to words, with a very vivid imagination and an enor- 
 mous power of language, and of strong feeling. There was 
 a peculiar character, a sort of half-wildness in his aspect and 
 delivery; his whole figure, and his delivery, and his voice 
 and his matter, were all in such perfect keeping with one 
 another that they formed a great Parliamentary picture; 
 and although it is now thirty-five years since I heard Mr. 
 Sheil, my recollection of him is just as vivid as if I had been 
 listening to him to-day." This surely is a picture of a great 
 orator, as Mr. Gladstone says Sheil was. Nor is it easy to 
 understand how a man, without being a great orator, could 
 have persuaded two experts of such very different schools 
 as Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli that he deserved such a 
 name. Yet the after-years have in a curious but unmistak- 
 able way denied the claims of Sheil. Perhaps it is because, 
 if he really was an orator, he was that and nothing more, 
 that our practical age, finding no mark left by him on Par- 
 liament or politics, has declined to take much account even 
 of his eloquence. His career faded away into second-class 
 ministerial office, and closed at last, somewhat prematurely, 
 in the little court of Florence, where he was sent as the rep- 
 resentative of England. He is worth mentioning here, be- 
 cause he had the promise of a splendid reputation ; because 
 the charm of his eloquence evidently lingered long in the 
 memories of those to whom it was once familiar, and be- 
 cause his is one of the most brilliant illustrations of that 
 career of Irish agitator, which begins in stormy opposition 
 to English government, and subsides after awhile into meek 
 recognition of its title and adoption of its ministerial uni- 
 form. O'Connell we have passed over for the present, be- 
 cause we shall hear of him again ; but of Sheil it is not nec- 
 essary that we should hear any more. 
 
 This was evidently a remarkable Parliament, with Russell 
 for the leader of one party, and Peel for the leader of anoth- 
 er; with O'Connell and Sheil as independent supporters of 
 the ministry; with Mr. Gladstone still comparatively new 
 to public life, and Mr. Disraeli to address the Commons for 
 
3b A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the first time ; with Palmerston still unrecognized, and Stan- 
 ley lately gone over to Conservatism, itself the newest in- 
 vented thing in politics ; with Grote and Bulwer, and Joseph 
 Hume and Charles Buller ; and Ward and Villiers, Sir Fran- 
 cis Burdett and Smith O'Brien, and the Radical Alcibiades 
 of Finsbury, "Tom" Duncombe. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 
 
 THE first disturbance to the quiet and good promise of 
 the new reign came from Canada. The Parliament which 
 we have described met for the first time on November 20th, 
 1837, and was to have been adjourned to February 1st, 1838 ; 
 but the news which began to arrive from Canada was so 
 alarming, that the ministry were compelled to change their 
 purpose and fix the reassembling of the Houses for January 
 16th. The disturbances in Canada had already broken out 
 into open rebellion. 
 
 The condition of Canada was very peculiar. Lower or 
 Eastern Canada was inhabited for the most part by men of 
 French descent, who still kept up in the midst of an active 
 and moving civilization most of the principles and usages 
 which belonged to France before the Revolution. Even to 
 this day, after all the changes, political and social, that have 
 taken place, the traveller from Europe sees in many of the 
 towns of Lower Canada an old-fashioned France, such as he 
 had known otherwise only in books that tell of France be- 
 fore '89. Nor is this only in small sequestered towns and 
 villages which the impulses of modern ways have yet failed 
 to reach. In busy and trading Montreal, with its residents 
 made up of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, as well 
 as the men of French descent, the visitor is more immediate- 
 ly conscious of the presence of what may be called an old- 
 fashioned Catholicism than he is in Paris, or even indeed 
 in Rome. In Quebec, a city which for picturesqueness and 
 beauty of situation is not equalled by Edinburgh or Flor- 
 ence, the curious interest of the place is further increased, 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 37 
 
 the novelty of the sensations it produces in the visitor is 
 made more piquant, by the evidences he meets with every- 
 where, through its quaint and steepy streets and under its 
 antiquated archways, of the existence of a society which has 
 hardly in France survived the Great Revolution. At the 
 opening of Queen Victoria's reign, the undiluted character 
 of this French medievalism was, of course, much more re- 
 markable. It would doubtless have exhibited itself quiet- 
 ly enough if it were absolutely undiluted. Lower Canada 
 would have dozed away in its sleepy picturesqueness, held 
 fast to its ancient ways, and allowed a bustling, giddy world, 
 all alive with commerce and ambition, and desire for novel- 
 ty and the terribly disturbing thing which unresting people 
 called progress, to rush on its wild path unheeded. But its 
 neighbors and its newer citizens were not disposed to allow 
 Lower Canada thus to rot itself in ease on the decaying 
 wharves of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. In the 
 large towns there were active traders from England and 
 
 o o 
 
 other countries, who were by no means content to put up 
 with Old- World ways, and to let the magnificent resources 
 of the place run to waste. Upper Canada, on the other hand, 
 was all new as to its population, and was full of the modern 
 desire for commercial activity. Upper Canada was peopled 
 almost exclusively by inhabitants from Great Britain. 
 Scotch settlers, with all the energy and push of their coun- 
 try ; men from the northern province of Ireland, who might 
 be described as virtually Scotch also, came there. The emi- 
 grant from the south of Ireland went to the United States 
 because he found there a country more or less hostile to Eng- 
 land, and because there the Catholic Church was understood 
 to be flourishing. The Ulsterman went to Canada as the 
 Scotchman did, because he saw the flag of England flyinor, 
 
 o o j o ? 
 
 and the principle of religious establishment which he admired 
 at home still recognized. It is almost needless to say that 
 Englishmen in great numbers were settled there, whose chief 
 desire was to make the colony as far as possible a copy of 
 the institutions of England. When Canada was ceded to 
 England by France, as a consequence of the victories of 
 Wolfe, the population was nearly all in the lower province, 
 and therefore was nearly all of French origin. Since the 
 cession the growth of the population of the other province 
 
38 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 had been surprisingly rapid, and had been almost exclusive- 
 ly the growth, as we have seen, of immigration from Great 
 Britain, one or two of the colonizing states of the European 
 continent, and the American Republic itself. 
 
 It is easy to see on the very face of things some of the dif- 
 ficulties which must arise in the development of such a sys- 
 tem. The French of Lower Canada would regard with al- 
 most morbid jealousy any legislation which appeared likely 
 to interfere with their ancient ways and to give any advan- 
 tage or favor to the populations of British descent. The 
 latter would see injustice or feebleness in every measure 
 which did not assist them in developing their more energetic 
 ideas. The home Government, in such a condition of things, 
 often has especial trouble with those whom we may call its 
 own people. Their very loyalty to the institutions of the 
 Old Country impels them to be unreasonable and exacting. 
 It is not easy to make them understand why they should 
 not be at the least encouraged, if not indeed actually ena- 
 bled, to carry boldly out the Anglicizing policy which they 
 clearly see is to be for the good of the colony in the end. 
 The Government has all the difficulty that the mother of a 
 household has when, with the best intentions and the most 
 conscientious resolve to act impartially, she is called upon to 
 manage her own children and the children of her husband's 
 former marriage. Every word she says, every resolve she is 
 induced to acknowledge, is liable to be regarded with jeal- 
 ousy and dissatisfaction on the one side as well as on the 
 other. " You are doing everything to favor your own chil- 
 dren," the one set cry out. "You ought to do something 
 more for your own children," is the equally querulous re- 
 monstrance of the other. 
 
 It would have been difficult, therefore, for the home Gov- 
 ernment, however wise and far-seeing their policy, to make 
 the wheels of any system run smoothly at once in such a 
 colony as Canada. But their policy certainly does not seem 
 to have been either wise or far-seeing. The plan of govern- 
 ment adopted looks as if it were especially devised to bring 
 out into sharp relief all the antagonisms that were natural 
 to the existing state of things. By an Act called the Con- 
 stitution of 1791, Canada was divided into two provinces, 
 the Upper and the Lower. Each province had a separate 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 39 
 
 system of government consisting of a governor; an execu- 
 tive council appointed by the Crown, and supposed in some 
 way to resemble the Privy Council of this country ; a legis- 
 lative council, the members of which were appointed by the 
 Crown for life ; and a representative assembly, the members 
 of which were elected for four years. At the same time the 
 clergy reserves were established by Parliament. One-sev- 
 enth of the waste lands of the colony was set aside for the 
 maintenance of the Protestant clergy a fruitful source of 
 disturbance and ill-feeling. 
 
 When the two provinces were divided in 1791, the inten- 
 tion was that they should remain distinct in fact as well as 
 in name. It was hoped that Lower Canada would remain 
 altogether French, and that Upper Canada would be exclu- 
 sively English. Then it was thought that they might be 
 governed on their separate systems as securely and with as 
 little trouble as we now govern the Mauritius on one system 
 and Malta on another. 
 
 Those who formed such an idea do not seem to have taken 
 any counsel with geography. The one fact, that Upper Can- 
 ada can hardly be said to have any means of communication 
 with Europe and the whole Eastern world except through 
 Lower Canada, or else through the United States, ought to 
 have settled the question at once. It was in Lower Canada 
 that the greatest difficulties arose. A constant antagonism 
 grew up between the majority of the legislative council, who 
 were nominees of the Crown, and the majority of the repre- 
 sentative assembly, who were elected by the population of 
 the province. The home Government encouraged, and in- 
 deed kept up, that most odious and dangerous of all instru- 
 ments for the supposed management of a colony a "British 
 party" devoted to the so-called interests of the mother-coun- 
 try, and obedient to the word of command from their mas- 
 ters and patrons at home. The majority in the legislative 
 council constantly thwarted the resolutions of the vast ma- 
 jority of the popular assembly. Disputes arose as to the 
 voting of supplies. The Government retained in their ser- 
 vice officials whom the representative assembly had con- 
 demned, and insisted on the right to pay them their salaries 
 out of certain funds of the colony. The representative as- 
 sembly took to stopping the supplies, and the Government 
 
40 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 claimed the right to counteract this measure by appropriat- 
 ing to the purpose such public moneys as happened to be 
 within their reach at the time. The colony for indeed on 
 these subjects the population of Lower Canada, right or 
 wrong, was so near to being of one mind that we may take 
 the declarations of public meetings as representing the colo- 
 ny demanded that the legislative council should be made 
 elective, and that the colonial government should not be al- 
 lowed to dispose of the moneys of the colony at their pleas- 
 ure. The House of Commons and the Government here re- 
 plied by refusing to listen to the proposal to make the legis- 
 lative council an elective body, and authorizing the provin- 
 cial government, without the consent of the colonial repre- 
 sentation to appropriate the money in the treasury for the 
 administration of justice and the maintenance of the execu- 
 tive system. This was, in plain words, to announce to the 
 French population, who made up the vast majority, and 
 whom we had taught to believe in the representative form 
 of government, that their wishes would never count for any- 
 thing, and that the colony was to be ruled solely at the 
 pleasure of the little British party of officials and Crown nom- 
 inees. It is not necessary to suppose that in all these dis- 
 putes the popular majority were in the right and the officials 
 in the wrong. No one can doubt that there was much bit- 
 terness of feeling arising out of the mere differences of race. 
 The French and the English could not be got to blend. In 
 some places, as it was afterward said in the famous report of 
 Lord Durham, the two sets of colonists never publicly met 
 together except in the jury-box, and then only for the ob- 
 struction of justice. The British residents complained bit- 
 terly of being subject to French law and procedure in so 
 many of their affairs. The tenure of land and many other 
 conditions of the system were antique French, and the French 
 law worked, or rather did not work, in civil affairs side by 
 side with the equally impeded British law in criminal mat- 
 ters. At last the representative assembly refused to vote 
 any further supplies or to carry on any further business. 
 They formulated their grievances against the home Govern- 
 ment. Their complaints Avere of arbitrary conduct on the 
 part of. the governors; intolerable composition of the legis- 
 lative council, which they insisted ought to be elective; ille- 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 41 
 
 gal appropriation of the public money; and violent proroga- 
 tion of the provincial Parliament. 
 
 One of the leading men in the movement which afterward 
 became rebellion in Lower Canada was Mr. Louis Joseph 
 Papineau. This man had risen to high position by his tal- 
 ents, his energy, and his undoubtedly honorable character. 
 He had represented Montreal in the Representative Assem- 
 bly of Lower Canada, and he afterward became Speaker of 
 the House. He made himself leader of the movement to 
 protest against the policy of the governors, and that of the 
 Government at home, by whom they were sustained. He 
 held a series of meetings, at some of which undoubtedly 
 rather strong language was used, arid too frequent and sig- 
 nificant appeals were made to the example held out to the 
 population of Lower Canada by the successful revolt of the 
 United States. Mr. Papineau also planned the calling to- 
 gether of a great convention to discuss and proclaim the 
 grievances of the colonies. Lord Gosford, the governor, be- 
 gan by dismissing several militia officers who had taken 
 part in some of these demonstrations ; Mr. Papineau him- 
 self was an officer of this force. Then the governor issued 
 warrants for the apprehension of many members of the pop- 
 ular Assembly on the charge of high -treason. Some of 
 these at once left the country ; others against whom war- 
 rants were issued were arrested, and a sudden resistance 
 was made by their friends and supporters. Then, in the 
 manner familiar to all who have read anything of the his- 
 tory of revolutionary movements, the resistance to a capture 
 of prisoners suddenly transformed itself into open rebellion. 
 
 The rebellion was not, in a military sense, a very great 
 thing. At its first outbreak the military authorities were 
 for a moment surprised, and the rebels obtained one or two 
 trifling advantages. But the commander- in-chief at once 
 showed energy adequate to the occasion, and used, as it was 
 his duty to do, a strong hand in putting the movement 
 down. The rebels fought with something like desperation 
 in one or two instances, and there was, it must be said, a 
 good deal of blood shed. The disturbance, however, after 
 awhile extended to the upper province. Upper Canada too 
 had its complaints against its governors and the home Gov- 
 ernment, and its protests against having its offices all dis- 
 
42 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 posed of by a "family compact;" but the rebellious move- 
 ment does not seem to have taken a genuine hold of the 
 province at any time. There was some discontent ; there 
 was a constant stimulus to excitement kept up from across 
 the American frontier by sympathizers with any republican 
 movement ; and there were some excitable persons inclined 
 for revolutionary change in the province itself whose zeal 
 caught fire when the flame broke out in Lower Canada. 
 But it seems to have been an exotic movement altogether, 
 and, so far as its military history is concerned, deserves no- 
 tice chiefly for the chivalrous eccentricity of the plan by 
 which the governor of the province undertook to put it 
 down. The governor was the gallant and fanciful soldier 
 and traveller, Sir Francis, then Major, Head. He who had 
 fought at Waterloo, and seen much service besides, was 
 quietly performing the duties of Assistant Poor Law Com- 
 missioner for the county of Kent, when he was summoned, 
 in 1835, at a moment's notice, to assume the governorship 
 of Upper Canada. When the rebellion broke out in that 
 province, Major Head proved himself not merely equal to 
 the occasion, but boldly superior to it. He promptly re- 
 solved to win a grand moral victory over all rebellion then 
 and for the future. He was seized with a desire to show to 
 the whole world how vain it was for any disturber to think 
 of shaking the loyalty of the province under his control. 
 He issued to rebellion in general a challenge not unlike that 
 which Shakspeare's Prince Harry offers to the chiefs of the 
 insurrection against Henry IV. He invited it to come on 
 and settle the controversy by a sort of duel. He sent all 
 the regular soldiers out of the province to the help of the 
 authorities of Lower Canada ; he allowed the rebels to ma- 
 ture their plans in any way they liked ; he permitted them 
 to choose their own day and hour, and when they were 
 ready to begin their assaults on constituted authority, he 
 summoned to his side the militia and all the loyal inhabi- 
 tants, and with their help he completely extinguished the 
 rebellion. It was but a very trifling affair ; it went out or 
 collapsed in a moment. Major Head had his desire. He 
 showed that rebellion in that province was not a thing se- 
 rious enough to call for the intervention of regular troops. 
 The loyal colonists were for the most part delighted with 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 43 
 
 the spirited conduct of their leader and his new-fashioned 
 way of dealing with rebellion. No doubt the moral effect 
 was highly imposing. The plan was almost as original as 
 that described in Herodotus and introduced into one of 
 Massinger's plays, when the moral authority of the masters 
 is made to assert itself over the rebellious slaves by the 
 mere exhibition of the symbolic whip. But the authorities 
 at home took a somewhat more prosaic view of the policy 
 of Sir Francis Head. It was suggested that if the fears of 
 many had been realized, and the rebellion had been aided 
 by a large force of sympathizers from the United States, the 
 moral authority of Canadian loyalty might have stood 
 greatly in need of the material presence of regular troops. 
 In the end Sir Francis Head resigned his office. His loyal- 
 ty, courage, and success were acknowledged by the gift of a 
 baronetcy ; and he obtained the admiration not merely of 
 those who approved his policy, but even of many among 
 those who felt bound to condemn it. Perhaps it may be 
 mentioned that there were some who persisted to the last 
 in the belief that Sir Francis Head was not by any means 
 so rashly chivalrous as he had allowed himself to be thought, 
 and that he had full preparation made, if his moral demon- 
 stration should fail, to supply its place in good time with 
 more commonplace and effective measures. 
 
 The news of the outbreaks in Canada created a natural 
 excitement in this countiy. There was a very strong feel- 
 ing of sympathy among many classes here not, indeed, 
 with the rebellion, but with the colony which complained 
 of what seemed to be genuine and serious grievances. Pub- 
 lic meetings were held at which resolutions were passed 
 ascribing the disturbances, in the first place, to the refusal 
 by the Government of any redress sought for by the colo- 
 nists. Mr. Hume, the pioneer of financial reform, took the 
 side of the colonists very warmly, both in and out of Parlia- 
 ment. During one of the Parliamentary debates on the sub- 
 ject, Sir Robert Peel referred to the principal leader of the 
 rebellion in Upper Canada as " a Mr. Mackenzie." Mr. 
 Hume resented this way of speaking of a prominent colo- 
 nist, and remarked that " there was a Mr. Mackenzie as 
 there might be a Sir Robert Peel," and created some amuse- 
 ment by referring to the declarations of Lord Chatham on 
 
44 - A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the American Stamp Act, which he cited as the opinions of 
 " a Mr. Pitt." Lord John Russell, on the part of the Govern- 
 ment, introduced a bill to deal with the rebellious province. 
 The bill proposed, in brief, to suspend for a time the con- 
 stitution of Lower Canada, and to send out from this coun- 
 try a governor -general and high -commissioner, with full 
 powers to deal with the rebellion, and to remodel the con- 
 stitution of both provinces. The proposal met with a good 
 deal of opposition at first on very different grounds. Mr. 
 Roebuck, who was then, as it happened, out of Parliament, 
 appeai'ed as the agent and representative of the province of 
 Lower Canada, and demanded to be heard at the bar of both 
 the Houses in opposition to the bill. After some little de- 
 mur his demand was granted, and he stood at the bar, first 
 of the Commons, and then of the Lords, and opposed the 
 bill on the ground that it unjustly suspended the constitu- 
 tion of Lower Canada in consequence of disturbances pro- 
 voked by the intolerable oppression of the home Govern- 
 ment. A critic of that day remarked that most orators 
 seemed to make it their business to conciliate and propitiate 
 the audience they desired to win over, but that Mr. Roebuck 
 seemed from the very first to be determined to set all his 
 hearers against him and his cause. Mr. Roebuck's speeches 
 were, however, exceedingly argumentative and powerful ap- 
 peals. Their effect was enhanced by the singularly youth- 
 ful appearance of the speaker, who is described as looking 
 like a boy hardly out of his teens. 
 
 It was evident, however, that the proposal of the Govern- 
 ment must in the main be adopted. The general opinion of 
 Parliament decided, not unreasonably, that that was not the 
 moment for entering into a consideration of the past policy 
 of the Government, and that the country could do nothing 
 better just then than send out some man of commanding 
 ability and character to deal with the existing condition of 
 things. There was an almost universal admission that the 
 Government had found the right man when Lord John Rus- 
 sell mentioned the name of Lord Durham. 
 
 Lord Durham was a man of remarkable character. It is 
 a matter of surprise how little his name is thought of by the 
 present generation, seeing what a strenuous figure he seemed 
 in the eyes of his contemporaries, and how striking a part he 
 
CANADA AND LOED DUKHAM. * 45 
 
 played in the politics of a time which has even still some living 
 representatives. He belonged to one of the oldest families 
 in England. The Lambtons had lived on their estate in the 
 North, in uninterrupted succession, since the Conquest. The 
 male succession, it is stated, never was interrupted since the 
 twelfth century. They were not, however, a family of aris- 
 tocrats. Their wealth was derived chiefly from coal mines, 
 and grew up in later days ; the property at first, and for a 
 long time, was of inconsiderable value. For more than a 
 century, however, the Lambtons had come to take rank 
 among the gentry of the county, and some member of the 
 family had represented the city of Durham in the House of 
 Commons from 1727 until the early death of Lord Durham's 
 father in December, 1797. William Henry Lambton, Lord 
 Durham's father, was a stanch Whig, and had been a friend 
 and associate of Fox. John George Lambton, the son, was 
 born at Lambton Castle in April, 1792. Before he was quite 
 twenty years of age, he made a romantic marriage at Gretna 
 Green with a lady who died three years after. He served 
 for a short time in a regiment of Hussars. About a year 
 after the death of his first wife he married the eldest dauo-h- 
 
 o 
 
 ter of Lord Grey. He was then only twenty-four years of 
 age. He had before this been returned to Parliament for 
 the county of Durham, and he soon distinguished himself 
 as a very advanced and energetic reformer. W^hile in the 
 Commons he seldom addressed the House, but when he did 
 speak, it was in support of some measure of reform, or 
 against what he conceived to be antiquated and illiberal 
 legislation. He brought out a plan of his own for Parlia- 
 mentary reform in 1821. In 1828 he was raised to the peer- 
 age, with the title of Baron Durham. When the ministry 
 of Lord Grey was formed, in November, 1830, Lord Durham 
 became Lord Privy Seal. He is said to have hacl an almost 
 complete control over Lord Grey. He had an impassioned 
 and energetic nature, which sometimes drove him into out- 
 breaks of feeling which most of his colleagues dreaded. Va- 
 
 ZJ O 
 
 rious highly-colored descriptions of stormy scenes between 
 him and his companions in office are given by writers of the 
 time. Lord Durham, his enemies and some of his friends 
 said, bullied and browbeat his opponents in the cabinet, 
 and would sometimes hardly allow his father-in-law and of- 
 
46 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ficial chief a chance of putting in a word on the other side, 
 or in mitigation of his tempestuous mood. He was thor- 
 ough in his reforming purposes, and would have rushed at 
 radical changes with scanty consideration for the time or 
 for the temper of his opponents. He had very little rever- 
 ence indeed for what Carlyle calls the majesty of custom. 
 Whatever he wished he strongly wished. He had no idea 
 of reticence, and cared not much for the decorum of office. 
 It is not necessary to believe all the stories told by those 
 who hated and dreaded Lord Durham, in order to accept 
 the belief that he really was somewhat of an enfant terrible 
 to the stately Lord Grey, and to the easy-going colleagues 
 who were by no means absolutely eaten up by their zeal for 
 reform. In the powerful speech which he delivered in the 
 House of Lords on the Reform Bill there is a specimen of 
 his eloquence of denunciation which might well have star- 
 tled listeners, even in those days when the license of speech 
 was often sadly out of proportion with its legalized liberty. 
 Lord Durham was especially roused to anger by some ob- 
 servations made in the debate of a previous night by the 
 Bishop of Exeter. He described the prelate's speech as an 
 exhibition of " coarse and virulent invective, malignant and 
 false insinuation, the grossest perversions of historical facts 
 decked out with all the choicest flowers of pamphleteering 
 slang." He was called to order for these words, and a peer 
 moved that they be taken down. Lord Durham was by 
 no means dismayed. He coolly declared that he did not 
 mean to defend his language as the most elegant or grace- 
 ful, but that it exactly conveyed the ideas regarding the 
 bishop which he meant to express; that he believed the 
 bishop's speech to contain insinuations which were as false 
 as scandalous ; that he had said so ; that he now begged 
 leave to repeat the words, and that he paused to give any 
 noble lord who thought fit an opportunity of taking them 
 down. Not one, however, seemed disposed to encounter 
 any further this impassioned adversary, and when he had 
 had his say, Lord Durham became somewhat mollified, and 
 endeavored to soften the pain of the impression he had 
 made. He begged the House of Lords to make some al- 
 lowance for him if he had spoken too warmly ; for, as he 
 said with much pathetic force, his mind had lately been 
 
CANADA AND LOUD DURHAM. 47 
 
 tortured by domestic loss. He thus alluded to the recent 
 death of his eldest son " a beautiful boy," says a writer 
 of some years ago, " whose features will live forever in the 
 well-known picture by Lawrence." 
 
 The whole of this incident the fierce attack and the sud- 
 den pathetic expression of regret will serve well enough to 
 illustrate the emotional, uncontrolled character of Lord Dur- 
 ham. He was one of the men who, even when they are 
 thoroughly in the right, have often the unhappy art of seem- 
 i;ig to put themselves completely in the wrong. He was the 
 most advanced of all the reformers in the reforming ministry 
 of Lord Grey. His plan of Reform in 1821 proposed to give 
 four hundred members to certain districts of town and coun- 
 try, in which every householder should have a vote. When 
 Lord Grey had formed his reform ministry, Lord Durham 
 sent for Lord John 1 Russell and requested him to draw up a 
 scheme of reform. A committee was formed on Lord Dur- 
 ham's suggestion, consisting of Sir James Graham, Lord 
 Dimcannon, Lord John Russell, and Lord Durham himself. 
 Lord John Russell drew up a plan, which he published long 
 after, with the alterations which Lord Durham had BUO-- 
 
 ' O 
 
 gested and written in his own hand on the margin. If 
 Lord Durham had had his way the ballot would at that 
 time have been included in the programme of the Govern- 
 ment ; and it was, indeed, understood that at one period of 
 the discussions he had won over his colleagues to his opin- 
 ion on that subject. He was, in a word, the Radical mem- 
 ber of the cabinet, with all the energy which became such 
 a character; with that "magnificent indiscretion" which 
 had been attributed to a greater man Edmund Burke; 
 with all that courage of his opinions which, in the Frenchi- 
 fied phraseology of modern politics, is so much talked of, so 
 rarely found, and so little trusted or successful when it is 
 found. 
 
 Not, long after Lord Durham was raised in the peerage 
 and became an earl. His influence over Lord Grey contin- 
 ued great, but his differences of opinion with his former col- 
 leagues he had resigned his office became greater and 
 greater every day. More than once he had taken the pub- 
 lic into his confidence in his characteristic and heedless way. 
 He was sent on a mission to Russia, perhaps to get him out 
 
48 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 of the way, and afterward he was made ambassador at the 
 Russian court. In the interval between his mission and his 
 formal appointment he had come back to England and per- 
 formed a series of enterprises which in the homely and un- 
 dignified language of American politics would probably be 
 called "stumping the country." He was looked to with 
 much hope by the more extreme Liberals in the country, and 
 with corresponding dislike and dread by all who thought 
 the country had gone far enough, or much too far in the 
 recent political changes. 
 
 None of his opponents, however, denied his great ability. 
 He was never deterred by conventional beliefs and habits 
 from looking boldly into the very heart of a great political 
 difficulty. He was never afraid to propose what, in times 
 later than his, have been called heroic remedies. There was 
 a general impression, perhaps, even among those who liked 
 him least, that he was a sort of " unemployed Caesar," a man 
 who only required a field large enough to develop great 
 qualities in the ruling of men. The difficulties in Canada 
 seemed to have come as if expressly to give him an opportu- 
 nity of proving himself all that his friends declared him to 
 be, or of justifying forever the distrust of his enemies. He 
 went out to Canada with the assurance of every one that 
 his expedition would either make or mar a career, if not a 
 country. 
 
 Lord Durham went out to Canada with the brightest 
 hopes and prospects. He took with him two of the men 
 best qualified in England at that time to make his mission 
 a success Mr. Chai'les Buller and Mr. Edward Gibbon 
 "Wakefield. He understood that he was going out as a dic- 
 tator, and there can be no doubt that his expedition was re- 
 garded in this light by England and by the colonies. We 
 have remarked that people looked on his mission as likely to 
 make or mar a career, if not a country. What it did, how- 
 ever, was somewhat different from that which any one ex- 
 pected. Lord Durham found out a new alternative. He 
 made a country, and he marred a career. He is distinctly 
 the founder of the system which has since worked with such 
 gratifying success in Canada ; he is the founder, even, of the 
 principle which allowed the quiet development of the prov- 
 inces into a confederation with neighboring colonies under 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 49 
 
 the name of the Dominion of Canada. But the singular 
 quality which in home politics had helped to mar so much 
 of Lord Durham's personal career was in full work during 
 his visit to Canada. It would not be easy to find in modern 
 political history so curious an example of splendid and last- 
 ing success combined with all the appearance of utter and 
 disastrous failure. The mission of Lord Durham saved Can- 
 ada. It ruined Lord Durham. At the moment it seemed to 
 superficial observers to have been as injurious to the colony 
 as to the man. 
 
 Lord Durham arrived in Quebec at the end of May, 1838. 
 He at once issued a proclamation, in style like that of a dicta- 
 tor. It was not in any way unworthy of the occasion, which 
 especially called for the intervention of a brave and enlight- 
 ened dictatorship. He declared that he would unsparingly 
 punish any who violated the laws, but he frankly invited the 
 co-operation of the colonies to form a new system of govern- 
 ment really suited to their wants and to the altering condi- 
 tions of civilization. Unfortunately, he had hardly entered 
 on his work of dictatorship when he found that he was no 
 longer a dictator. In the passing of the Canada Bill through 
 Parliament the powers which he understood were to be con- 
 ferred upon him had been considerably reduced. Lord Dur- 
 ham went to woi'k, however, as if he were still invested with 
 absolute authority over all the laws and conditions of the 
 colony. A very Caesar laying down the lines for the future 
 government of a province could hardly have been more 
 boldly arbitrary. Let it be said, also, that Lord Durham's 
 arbitrariness was for the most part healthy in effect and just 
 in spirit. But it gave an immense opportunity of attack on 
 himself and on the Government to the enemies of both at 
 home. Lord Durham had hardly begun his work of recon- 
 struction when his recall was clamored for by vehement 
 voices in Parliament. 
 
 Lord Durham besran by issuing a series of ordinances in- 
 
 O / O 
 
 tended to provide for the security of Lower Canada. He 
 proclaimed a very liberal amnesty, to which, however, there 
 were certain exceptions. The leaders of the rebellious 
 movement, Papineau and others, who had escaped from the 
 colony, were excluded from the amnesty. So likewise were 
 certain prisoners who either had voluntarily confessed them- 
 I. 3 
 
50 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 selves guilty of high-treason, or had been induced to make 
 such an acknowledgment in the hope ofobtaining a mitigated 
 punishment. These Lord Durham ordered to be transported 
 to Bermuda ; and for any of these, or of the leaders who had 
 escaped, who should return to the colony without permis- 
 sion, he proclaimed that they should be deemed guilty of 
 high-treason, and condemned to suffer death. It needs no 
 learned legal argument to prove that this was a proceed- 
 ing not to be justified by any of the ordinary forms of law. 
 Lord Durham had not power to transport any one to Ber- 
 muda. He had no authority over Bermuda; he had no au- 
 thority which he could delegate to the officials of Bermuda 
 enabling them to detain political prisoners. Nor had he 
 any power to declare that persons who returned to the col- 
 ony were to be liable to the punishment of death. It is not 
 a capital offence by any of the laws of England for even a 
 transported convict to break bounds and return to his home. 
 All this was quite illegal ; that is to say, was outside the 
 limits of Lord Durham's legal authority. Lord Durham was 
 well aware of the fact. He had not for a moment supposed 
 that he was acting in accordance with ordinary English law. 
 He was acting in the spirit of a dictator, at once bold and 
 merciful, who is under the impression that he has been in- 
 vested with extraordinary powers for the very reason that 
 the crisis does not admit of the ordinary operations of law. 
 For the decree of death to banished men returning without 
 permission, he had, indeed, the precedent and authority of 
 acts passed already by the colonial Parliament itself; but 
 Lord Durham did not care for any such authority. He 
 found that he had on his hands a considerable number of 
 prisoners whom it would be absurd to put on trial in Lower 
 Canada with the usual forms of law. It would have been 
 absolutely impossible to get any unpacked jury to convict 
 them. They would have been triumphantly acquitted. The 
 authority of the Crown would have been brought into great- 
 er contempt than ever. So little faith had the colonists in 
 the impartial working of the ordinary law in the governor's 
 hands, that the universal impression in Lower Canada was 
 that Lord Durham would have the prisoners tried by a 
 packed jury of his own officials, convicted as a matter of 
 course, and executed out of hand. It was with amazement 
 
CANADA AND LORD DUEHAM. 51 
 
 people found that the new governor would not stoop to the 
 infamy of packing a jury. Lord Durham saw no better way 
 out of the difficulty than to impose a sort of exile on those 
 who admitted their connection with the rebellion, and to 
 prevent by the threat of a severe penalty the return of those 
 who had already fled from the colony. His amnesty meas- 
 ure was large and liberal ; but he did not see that he could 
 allow prominent offenders to remain unrebuked in the col- 
 ony ; and to attempt to bring them to trial would have been 
 to secure for them, not punishment, but public honor. 
 
 Another measure of Lord Durham's was likewise open 
 to the charge of excessive use of power. The act which 
 appointed him prescribed that he should be advised by a 
 council, and that every ordinance of his should be signed 
 by at least five of its members. There was already a coun- 
 cil in existence nominated by Lord Durham's predecessor, 
 Sir J. Colborne a sort of provisional government put to- 
 gether to supply for the moment the place of the suspended 
 political constitution. This council Lord Durham set aside 
 altogether, and substituted for it one of his own making, 
 and composed chiefly of his secretaries and the members of 
 his staff. In truth, this was but a part of the policy which 
 he had marked out for himself. He was resolved to play 
 the game which he honestly believed he could play better 
 than any one else. He had in his mind, partly from the 
 inspiration of the gifted and well -instructed men who ac- 
 companied and advised him, a plan which he was firmly 
 convinced would be the salvation of the colony. Events 
 have proved that he was right. His disposal of the prison- 
 ers was only a clearing of the decks for the great action of 
 remodelling the colony. He did not allow a form of law 
 to stand between him and his purpose. Indeed, as we have 
 already said, he regarded himself as a dictator sent out to 
 reconstruct a whole system in the best way he could. When 
 he was accused of having gone beyond the law, he asked 
 with a scorn not wholly unreasonable : " What are the con- 
 stitutional principles remaining in force where the whole 
 constitution is suspended ? What principle of the British 
 constitution holds good in a country where the people's 
 money is taken from them without the people's consent ; 
 where representative government is annihilated; where mar- 
 
52 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tial law has been the law of the land, and where trial by 
 jury exists only to defeat the ends of justice, and to provoke 
 the righteous scorn and indignation of the community? 1 ' 
 
 Still there can be no doubt that a less impetuous and im- 
 patient spirit than that of Lord Durham might have found 
 a way of beginning his great reforms without provoking 
 such a storm of hostile criticism. He was, it must ahvays 
 be remembered, a dictator who only strove to use his pow- 
 ers for the restoration of liberty and constitutional govern- 
 ment. His mode of disposing of his prisoners was arbitrary 
 only in the interests of mercy. He declared openly that he 
 did not think it right to send to an ordinary penal settle- 
 ment, and thus brand with infamy, men whom the public 
 feeling of the colony entirely approved, and whose cause, 
 until they broke into rebellion, had far more of right on its 
 side than that of the authority they complained of could 
 claim to possess. He sent them to Bermuda simply as into 
 exile; to remove them from the colony, but nothing more. 
 He lent the weight of this authority to the colonial Act, 
 which prescribed the penalty of death for returning to the 
 colony, because he believed that the men thus proscribed 
 never would return. 
 
 But his policy met with the severest and most unmeas- 
 ured criticism at home. If Lord Durham had been guilty 
 of the worst excesses of power which Burke charged against 
 Warren Hastings, he could not have been more fiercely de- 
 nounced in the House of Lords. He was accused of having 
 promulgated an ordinance which would enable him to hang 
 men without any trial or form of trial. None of his oppo- 
 nents seemed to remember that whether his disposal of the 
 prisoners was right or wrong, it was only a small and inci- 
 dental part of a great policy covering the readjustment of 
 the whole political and social system of a splendid colony. 
 The criticism went on as if the promulgation of the Quebec 
 ordinances was the be-all and the end-all of Lord Durham's 
 mission. His opponents made great complaint about the 
 cost of his progress in Canada. Lord Durham had undoubt- 
 edly a lavish taste and a love for something like Oriental 
 display. He made his goings about in Canada like a gor- 
 geous royal progress; yet it was well known that he took 
 no remuneration whatever for himself, and did not even ac- 
 
CANADA AND LOED DURHAM. 53 
 
 cept his own personal travelling expenses. He afterward 
 stated in the House of Lords that the visit cost him person- 
 ally ten thousand pounds at least. Mr. Hume, the advocate 
 of economy, made sarcastic comment on the sudden fit of 
 parsimony which seemed to have seized, in Lord Durham's 
 case, men whom he had never before known to raise their 
 voices against any prodigality of expenditure. 
 
 The ministry was very weak in debating power in the 
 House of Lords. Lord Durham had made enemies there. 
 The opportunity was tempting for assailing him and the 
 ministry together. Many of the criticisms were undoubted- 
 ly the conscientious protests of men who saw danger in any 
 departure from the recognized principles of constitutional 
 law. Eminent judges and lawyers in the House of Lords 
 naturally looked, above all things, to the proper administra- 
 tion of the law as it existed. But it is hard to doubt that 
 political or personal enmity influenced some of the attacks 
 on Lord Durham's conduct. Almost all the leading men in 
 the House of Lords were against him. Lord Brougham 
 and Lord Lyndhurst were for the time leagued in opposition 
 to the Government and in attack on the Canadian policy. 
 Lord Brougham claimed to be consistent. He had opposed 
 the Canada coercion from the beginning, he said, and he op- 
 posed illegal attempts to deal with Canada now. It seems 
 a little hard to understand how Lord Brougham could really 
 have so far misunderstood the purpose of Lord Durham's 
 proclamation as to believe that he proposed to hang men 
 without the form of law. However Lord Durham may have 
 broken the technical rules of law, nothing could be more 
 obvious than the fact that he did so in the interest of mer- 
 cy and generosity, and not that of tyrannical severity. Lord 
 Brougham inveighed against him with thundering eloquence, 
 Jis if he were denouncing another Sejanus. It must be own- 
 ed that his attacks lost some of their moral effect because 
 of his known hatred to Lord Melbourne and the ministry, 
 and even to Lord Durham himself. People said that 
 Brougham had a special reason for feeling hostile to any- 
 thing done by Lord Durham. A dinner was given to Lord 
 Grey by the Reformers of Edinburgh, in 1834, at which Lord 
 Brougham and Lord Durham were both present. Brough- 
 am was called upon to speak, and in the course of his speech 
 
54 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 he took occasion to condemn certain too-zealous Reformers 
 who could not be content with the changes that had been 
 made, but must demand that the ministry should rush for- 
 ward into wild and extravagant enterprises. He enlarged 
 upon this subject with great vivacity and with amusing 
 variety of humorous and rhetorical illustration. Lord Dur- 
 ham assumed that the attack was intended for him. His 
 assumption was not unnatural. When he came in his turn 
 to speak, he was indiscreet enough to reply directly to Lor<i 
 Brougham, to accept the speech of the former as a personal 
 challenge, and in bitter words to retort invective and sar- 
 casm. The scene was not edifying. The guests were scan- 
 dalized. The effect of Brougham's speech was wholly spoil- 
 ed. Brougham was made to seem a disturber of order by 
 the indiscretion which provoked into retort a man notorious- 
 ly indiscreet and incapable of self-restraint. It is not unfair 
 to the memory of so fierce and unsparing a political gladia- 
 tor as Lord Brougham, to assume that when he felt called 
 upon to attack the Canadian policy of Lord Durham, the 
 recollection of the scene at the Edinburgh dinner inspired 
 with additional force his criticism of the Quebec ordinances. 
 The ministry were weak, and yielded. They had in the 
 first instance approved of the ordinances, but they quickly 
 gave way and abandoned them. They avoided a direct at- 
 tempt on the part of Lord Brougham to reverse the policy 
 of Lord Durham by announcing that they had determined 
 to disallow the Quebec ordinances. Lord Durham learned 
 for the first time from an American paper that the Govern- 
 ment had abandoned him. He at once announced his deter- 
 mination to give up his position and to return to England. 
 His letter announcing this resolve crossed on the ocean the 
 despatch from home disallowing his ordinances. With char- 
 acteristic imprudence, he issued a proclamation from the 
 Castle of St. Lewis, in the city of Quebec, which was virtual- 
 ly an appeal to the public feeling of the colony against the 
 conduct of her Majesty's Government. When the news of 
 this extraordinary proclamation reached home, Lord Durham 
 was called by the Times newspaper "the Lord High Sedi- 
 tioner." The representative of the sovereign, it was said, 
 had appealed to the judgment of a still rebellious colony 
 against the policy of the sovereign's own advisers. Of 
 
CANADA AND LORD DURHAM. 55 
 
 course Lord Durham's recall was unavoidable. The Govern- 
 ment at once sent out a despatch removing him from his 
 place as Governor of British North America. 
 
 Lord Durham had not waited for the formal recall. He 
 returned to England a disgraced man. Yet even then there 
 
 o o 
 
 was public spirit enough among the English people to refuse 
 to ratify any sentence of disgrace upon him. When he 
 landed at Plymouth he was received with acclamations by 
 the population, although the Government had prevented 
 any of the official honor usually shown to returning govern- 
 ors from being offered to him. Mr. John Stuart Mill has 
 claimed with modest firmness and with perfect justice a lead- 
 ing share in influencing public opinion in favor of Lord Dur- 
 ham. "Lord Durham," he says in Ins autobiography, " was 
 bitterly attacked from all sides, inveighed against by ene- 
 mies, given up by timid friends; while those who would 
 willingly have defended him did not know what to say. He 
 appeared to be returning a defeated and discredited man. 
 I had followed the Canadian events from the beginning; I 
 had been one of the prompters of his prompters; his policy 
 was almost exactly what mine would have been, and I was 
 in a position to defend it. I wrote and published a mani- 
 festo in the [Westminster] ^Review, in which I took the very 
 highest ground in his behalf, claiming for him not mere ac- 
 quittal, but praise and honor. Instantly a number of other 
 writers took up the tone. I believe there was a portion of 
 truth in what Lord Durham soon after, with polite exaggera- 
 tion, said to me, that to this article might be ascribed the 
 almost triumphal reception which he met with on his arrival 
 in England. I believe it to have been the word in season, 
 which at a critical moment does much to decide the result ; 
 the touch which determines whether a stone set in motion 
 at the top of an eminence shall roll down on one side or on 
 the other. All hopes connected with Lord Durham as a po- 
 litician soon vanished; but with regard to Canadian and 
 generally to colonial policy the cause was gained. Lord 
 Durham's report, written by Charles Buller, partly under the 
 inspiration of Wakefield, began a new era; its recommenda- 
 tions, extending to complete internal self-government, were 
 in full operation in Canada Avithin two or three years, and 
 have been since extended to nearly all the other colonies of 
 
56 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 European race which have any claim to the character of 
 important communities." In this instance the victu causa 
 pleased not only Cato, but, in the end, the gods as well. 
 
 Lord Durham's report was acknowledged by enemies as 
 well as by the most impartial critics to be a masterly docu- 
 ment. As Mr. Mill has said, it laid the foundation of the 
 political success and social prosperity not only of Canada 
 but of all the other important colonies. After having ex- 
 plained in the most exhaustive manner the causes of discon- 
 tent and backwardness in Canada, it went on to recommend 
 that the government of the colony should be put as much as 
 possible into the hands of the colonists themselves, that they 
 themselves should execute as well as make the laws, the limit 
 of the Imperial Government's interference being in such 
 matters as atfect the relations of the colony with the moth- 
 er-country, such as the constitution and form of government, 
 the regulation of foreign relations and trade, and the dis- 
 posal of the public lands. Lord Durham proposed to estab- 
 lish a thoroughly good system of municipal institutions ; to 
 secure the independence of the judges; to make all provin- 
 cial officers, except the governor and his secretary, responsi- 
 ble to the colonial legislature ; and to repeal all former leg- 
 islation with respect to the reserves of land for the clergy. 
 Finally, he proposed that the provinces of Canada should be 
 reunited politically and should become one legislature, con- 
 taining the representatives of both races and of all districts. 
 It is significant that the report also recommended that in 
 any act to be introduced for this purpose, a provision should 
 be made by which all or any of the other North American 
 colonies should, on the application of their legislatures and 
 with the consent of Canada, be admitted into the Canadian 
 Union. Thus the separation which Fox thought unwise 
 was to be abolished, and the Canadas were to be fused into 
 one system, which Lord Durham would have had a federa- 
 tion. In brief, Lord Durham proposed to make the Canadas 
 self-governing as regards their internal affairs, and the germ 
 of a federal union. It is not necessary to describe in detail 
 the steps by which the Government gradually introduced 
 the recommendations of Lord Durham to Parliament and 
 carried them to success. Lord Glenelg, one of the feeblest 
 and most apathetic of colonial secretaries, had retired from 
 
CANADA AND LOED DUEHAM. 57 
 
 office, partly, no doubt, because of the attacks in Parliament 
 on his administration of Canadian affairs. He was succeed- 
 ed at the Colonial Office by Lord Normanby, and Lord Nor- 
 rnanby gave way in a few months to Lord John Russell, who 
 was full of energy and earnestness. Lord Durham's succes- 
 sor and disciple in the work of Canadian government, Lord 
 Sydenham best known as Mr. Charles Poulett Thomson, 
 one of the pioneers of free-trade received Lord John Rus- 
 sell's cordial co-operation and support. Lord John Russell 
 introduced into the House of Commons a bill which he de- 
 scribed as intended to lay the foundation of a permanent 
 settlement of the affairs of Canada. The measure was post- 
 poned for a session because some statesmen thought that 
 it would not be acceptable to the Canadians themselves. 
 Some little sputterings of the rebellion had also lingered af- 
 ter Lord Durham's return to this country, and these for a 
 short time had directed attention away from the policy of 
 reorganization. In 1840, however, the Act was passed which 
 reunited Upper and Lower Canada on the basis proposed 
 by Lord Durham. Further legislation disposed of the cler- 
 gy reserve lands for the general benefit of all churches and 
 denominations. The way was made clear for that scheme 
 which in times nearer to our own has formed the Dominion 
 of Canada. 
 
 Lord Durham did not live to see the success of the policy 
 he had recommended. We may anticipate the close of his 
 career. Within a few days after the passing of the Canada 
 Government Bill he died at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on 
 July 28th, 1840. He was then little more than forty-eight 
 years of age. He had for some time been in failing health, 
 and it cannot be doubted that the mortification attending 
 his Canadian mission had worn away his strength. His 
 proud and sensitive spirit could ill bear the contradictions 
 and humiliations that had been forced upon him. His was 
 an eager and a passionate nature, full of that sceva indigna- 
 tio which, by his own acknowledgment, tortured the heart 
 of Swift. He wanted to the success of his political career 
 that proud patience which the gods are said to love, and by 
 virtue of which great men live down misappreciation, and 
 hold out until they see themselves justified and hear the re- 
 proaches turn into cheers. But if Lord Durham's personal 
 
 3* 
 
58 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 career was in any way a failure, bis policy for the Canadas 
 was a splendid success. It established the principles of co- 
 lonial government. There were undoubtedly defects in the 
 construction of the actual scheme which Lord Durham ini- 
 tiated, and which Lord Sydenham, who died not long after 
 him, instituted. The legislative union of the two Canadas 
 was in itself a makeshift, and was only adopted as such. 
 Lord Durham would have had it otherwise if he might; but 
 he did not see his way then to anything like the complete 
 federation scheme afterward adopted. But the success of 
 the policy lay in the broad principles it established, and to 
 which other colonial systems as well as that of the Domin- 
 ion of Canada owe their strength and security to-day. One 
 may say, with little help from the merely fanciful, that the 
 rejoicings of emancipated colonies might have been in his 
 dying ears as he sank into his early grave. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SCIENCE AND SPEED. 
 
 THE opening of the reign of Queen Victoria coincided 
 with the introduction of many of the great discoveries and 
 applications in science, industry, and commerce which we 
 consider specially representative of modern civilization. A 
 reign which saw in its earlier years the application of the 
 electric current to the task of transmitting messages, the 
 first successful attempts to make use of steam for the busi- 
 ness of transatlantic navigation, the general development of 
 the railway system all over these countries, and in the in- 
 troduction of the penny -post, must be considered to have 
 obtained for itself, had it secured no other memorials, an abid- 
 ing place in history. A distinguished author has lately in- 
 veighed against the spirit which would rank such improve- 
 ments as those just mentioned with the genuine triumphs 
 of the human race, and has gone so far as to insist that there 
 is nothing in any such which might not be expected from 
 the self-interested contrivings of a very inferior animal nat- 
 ure. Amidst the tendency to glorify beyond measure the 
 mere mechanical improvements of modern civilization, it is 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 59 
 
 natural that there should arise some angry questioning, some 
 fierce disparagement of all that it has done. There will al- 
 ways be natures to which the philosophy of contemplation 
 must seem far nobler than the philosophy which expresses 
 itself in mechanical action. It may, however, be taken as 
 certain that no people who were ever great in thought and 
 in art wilfully neglected to avail themselves of all possible 
 contrivances for making life less laborious by the means of 
 mechanical and artificial contrivance. The Greeks were, to 
 the best of their opportunity, and when at the highest point 
 of their glory as an artistic rdfce, as eager for the application 
 of all scientific and mechanical contrivances to the business 
 of life as the most practical and boastful Manchester man or 
 Chicago man of our own day. We shall afterward see that 
 the reign of Queen Victoria came to have a literature, an 
 art, and a philosophy distinctly its own. For the moment 
 we have to do with its industrial science; or, at least, with 
 the first remarkable movements in that direction which ac- 
 companied the opening of the reign. This at least must be 
 said for them, that they have changed the conditions of hu- 
 man life for us in such a manner as to make the history of 
 the past forty or fifty years almost absolutely distinct from 
 that of any preceding period. In all that part of our social 
 life which is affected by industrial and mechanical appli- 
 ances, the man of the latter part of the eighteenth century 
 was less widely removed from the Englishman of the days 
 of the Fasten Letters than we are removed from the ways 
 of the eighteenth century. The man of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury travelled on land and sea in much the same way that 
 his forefathers had done hundreds of years before. His 
 communications by letter with his fellows were carried on 
 in very much the same method. He got his news from 
 abroad and at home after the same slow, uncertain fashion. 
 His streets and houses were lighted very much as they 
 might have been when Mr. Pepys was in London. His 
 ideas of drainage and ventilation were equally elementary 
 and simple. We see a complete revolution in 'all these 
 things. A man of the present day suddenly thrust back 
 fifty years in life Avould find himself almost as awkwardly 
 unsuited to the ways of that time as if he were sent back 
 to the age when the Romans occupied Britain. He would 
 
60 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 find himself harassed at every step he took. He could do 
 hardly anything as he does it to-day. Whatever the moral 
 and philosophical value of the change in the eyes of think- 
 ers too lofty to concern themselves with the common ways 
 and doings of human life, this is certain at least, that the 
 change is of immense historical importance ; and that even 
 if we look upon life as a mere pageant and show, interesting 
 to wise men only by its curious changes, a wise man of this 
 school could hardly have done better, if the choice lay with 
 him, than to desire that the lines of his life might be so cast 
 as to fall into the earlier part^>f this present reign. 
 
 It is a somewhat curious coincidence that in the year 
 when Professor Wheatstone and Mr. Cooke took out their 
 first patent "for improvements in giving signals aiid sound- 
 ing alarms in distant places by means of electric currents 
 transmitted through metallic circuit," Professor Morse, the 
 American electrician, applied to Congress for aid in the con- 
 struction and carrying on of a small electric telegraph to 
 convey messages a short distance, and made the application 
 without success. In the following year he came to this 
 country to obtain a patent for his invention ; but he was 
 refused. He had come too late. Our own countrymen were 
 beforehand with him. Very soon after we find experiments 
 made with the electric telegraph between Euston Square 
 and Camden Town. These experiments were made under 
 the authority of the London and North-western Railway 
 Company, immediately on the taking out of the patent by 
 Messrs. Wheatstone and Cooke. Mr. Robert Stephenson 
 was one of those who came to watch the operation of this 
 new and wonderful attempt to make the currents of the air 
 man's faithful Ariel. The London and Birmingham Rail- 
 way was opened through its whole length in 1838. The 
 Liverpool and Preston line was opened in the same year. 
 The Liverpool and Birmingham had been opened in the year 
 before ; the London and Croydon was opened the year after. 
 The Act for the transmission of the mails by railways was 
 passed in 1838. In the same year it was noted as an unpar- 
 alleled, and to many an almost incredible, triumph of hu- 
 man energy and science over time and space, that a loco- 
 motive had been able to travel at a speed of thirty-seven 
 miles an hour. 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 61 
 
 " The prospect of travelling from the metropolis to Liver- 
 pool, a distance of two hundred and ten miles, in ten hours, 
 calls forcibly to mind the tales of fairies and genii by which 
 we were amused in our youth, and contrasts forcibly with 
 the fact, attested on the personal experience of the writer 
 of this notice, that about the commencement of the pres- 
 ent century this same journey occupied a space of sixty 
 hours." These are the words of a writer who gives an in- 
 teresting account of the railways of England during the 
 first year of the reign of Queen Victoria. In the same vol- 
 ume from which this extract is taken an allusion is made to 
 the possibility of steam communication being successfully 
 established between England and the United States. "Prep- 
 arations on a gigantic scale," a writer is able to announce, 
 "are now in a state of great forwardness for trying an ex- 
 periment in steam navigation which has been the subject 
 of much controversy among scientific men. Ships of an 
 enormous size, furnished with steam-power equal to the 
 force of four hundred horses and upward, will, before our 
 next volume shall be prepared, have probably decided the 
 question whether this description of vessels can, in the pres- 
 ent state of our knowledge, profitably engage in transat- 
 lantic voyages. It is possible that these attempts may fail 
 a result which is, indeed, predicted by high authorities on 
 this subject. We are more sanguine in our hopes; but 
 should these be disappointed, we cannot, if we are to judge 
 from our past progress, doubt that longer experience and 
 a further application of inventive genius will, at no very 
 distant day, render practicable and profitable by this means 
 the longest voyages in which the adventurous spirit of man 
 will lead him to embark." The experiment thus alluded to 
 was made with perfect success. The Sirius, the Great West- 
 ern, and the .Royal William accomplished voyages between 
 New York and this country in the early part of 1838; and 
 it was remarked that "Transatlantic voyages by means of 
 steam may now be said to be as easy of accomplishment, 
 with ships of adequate size and power, as the passage be- 
 tween London and Margate." The Great Western crossed 
 the ocean from Bristol to New York in fifteen days. She 
 was followed by the Sirius^ which left Cork for New York, 
 and made the passage in seventeen days. The controversy 
 
62 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 as to the possibility of such voyages, which was settled by 
 the Great Western and the Sinus, had no reference to the 
 actual safety of such an experiment. During seven years 
 the mails for the Mediterranean had been despatched by 
 means of steamers. The doubt was as to the possibility 
 of stowing in a vessel so large a quantity of coal or other 
 fuel as would enable her to accomplish her voyage across 
 the Atlantic, where there could be no stopping-place and no 
 possibility of taking in new stores. It was found, to the 
 delight of all those who believed in the practicability of the 
 enterprise, that the quantity of fuel which each vessel hud 
 on board when she left her port of departure proved amply 
 sufficient for the completion of the voyage. Neither the 
 Sirius nor the Great Western was the first vessel to cross 
 the Atlantic by means of steam propulsion. Nearly twenty 
 years before, a vessel called the Savannah, built at New 
 York, crossed the ocean to Liverpool ; and some years later 
 an English -built steamer made several voyages between 
 Holland and the Dutch West Indian colonies as a packet 
 vessel in the service of that Government. Indeed, a voyage 
 had been made round the Cape of Good Hope more lately 
 still by a steamship. These expeditions, however, had real- 
 ly little or nothing to do with the problem which was solved 
 by the voyages of the Sirius and the Great Western. In the 
 former instances the steam-power was employed merely as 
 an auxiliary. The vessel made as much use of her steam 
 propulsion as she could, but she had to rely a good deal on 
 her capacity as a sailer. This was quite a different thing 
 from the enterprise of the Sirius and the Great Western, 
 which was to cross the ocean by steam propulsion, and 
 steam propulsion only. It is evident that, so long as the 
 steam-power was to be used only as an auxiliary, it would 
 be impossible to reckon on speed and certainty of arrival. 
 The doubt was whether a steamer could carry, with her 
 cargo and passengers, fuel enough to serve for the whole 
 of her voyage across the Atlantic. The expeditions of the 
 Sirius and the Great Western settled the whole question. 
 It was never again a matter of controversy. It is enough 
 to say that two years after the Great Western went out 
 from Bristol to New York the Cunard line of steamers was 
 established. The steam communication between Liverpool 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 63 
 
 and New York became thenceforth as regular and as unva- 
 rying a part of the business of commerce as the journeys of 
 the trains on the Great Western Railway between London 
 and Bristol. It was not Bristol which benefited most by 
 the transatlantic voyages. They made the greatness of 
 Liverpool. Year by year the sceptre of the commercial 
 marine passed away from Bristol to Liverpool. No port in 
 the world can show a line of docks like those of Liverpool. 
 There the stately Mersey flows for miles between the superb 
 and massive granite walls of the enclosures within whose 
 shelter the ships of the world are arrayed, as if on parade, 
 for the admiration of the traveller who has hitherto been 
 accustomed to the irregular and straggling arrangements of 
 the docks of London or of New York. 
 
 On July 5th, 1839, an unusually late period of the year, 
 the Chancellor of the Exchequer brought forward his annual 
 budget. The most important part of the financial statement, 
 so far as later times are concerned, is set out in a resolution 
 proposed by the finance minister, which, perhaps, represents 
 the greatest social improvement brought about by legisla- 
 tion in modern times. The Chancellor proposed a resolution 
 declaring that "it is expedient to reduce the postage on let- 
 ters to one uniform rate of one penny charged upon every 
 letter of a weight to be hereafter fixed by law ; Parliamenta- 
 ry privileges of franking being abolished and official frank- 
 ing strictly regulated ; this House pledging itself at the 
 same time to make good any deficiency of revenue which may 
 be occasioned by such an alteration in the rates of the ex- 
 isting duties." Up to this time the rates of postage had 
 been both high and various. They were varying both as to 
 distance and as to the weight and even the size or the shape 
 of a letter. The district or London post was a separate 
 branch of the postal department ; and the charge for the 
 transmission of letters was made on a different scale in Lon- 
 don from that which prevailed between town and town. 
 The average postage on every chargeable letter through- 
 out the United Kingdom was sixpence farthing. A letter 
 from London to Brighton cost eightpence; to Aberdeen one 
 shilling and threepence half-penny; to Belfast one shilling 
 and fourpence. Nor was this all ; for if the letter were writ- 
 ten on more than one sheet of paper, it came under the oper- 
 
64: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 atiou of a higher scale of charge. Members of Parliament 
 had the privilege of franking letters to a certain limited ex- 
 tent ; members of the Government had the privilege of 
 franking to an unlimited extent. It is, perhaps, as well to 
 mention, for the sake of being intelligible to all readers in an 
 
 7 O ~ 
 
 age which has not, in this country at least, known practical- 
 ly the beauty and liberality of the franking privilege, that it 
 consisted in the right of the privileged person to send his 
 own or any other person's letters through the post free of 
 charge by merely writing his name on the outside. This 
 meant, in plain words, that the letters of the class who could 
 best afford to pay for them went free of charge, and that 
 those who could least afford to pay had to pay double 
 the expense, that is to say, of carrying their own letters and 
 the letters of the privileged and exempt. 
 
 The greatest grievances were felt everywhere because of 
 this absurd system. It had along with its other disadvan- 
 tages that of encouraging what may be called the smug- 
 gling of letters. Everywhere sprang up organizations for 
 the illicit conveyance of correspondence at lower rates than 
 those imposed by the Government. The proprietors of al- 
 most every kind of public conveyance are said to have been 
 engaged in this unlawful but certainly not very unnatural 
 or unjustifiable traffic. Five-sixths of all the letters sent 
 between Manchester and London were said to have been 
 conveyed for years by this process. One great mercantile 
 house was proved to have been in the habit of sending sixty- 
 seven letters by what we may call this undergound post- 
 office for every one on which they paid the Government 
 charges. It was not merely to escape heavy cost that these 
 stratagems were employed. As there was an additional 
 charge when a letter was written on more sheets than one, 
 there was a frequent and almost a constant tampering by 
 officials with the sanctity of sealed letters for the purpose 
 of ascertaining whether or not they ought to be taxed on 
 the higher scale. It was proved that in the years between 
 1815 and 1835, while the population had increased thirty per 
 cent., and the stage-coach duty had increased one hundred 
 and twenty-eight per cent., the Post-office revenues had 
 shown no increase at all. In other countries the postal rev- 
 enue had been on the increase steadily during that time; 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 65 
 
 in the United States the revenue had actually trebled, al- 
 though then and later the postal system of America was full 
 of faults which at that day only seemed intelligible or ex- 
 cusable when placed in comparison with those of our own 
 system. 
 
 Mr. (afterward Sir Rowland) Hill is the man to whom this 
 country, and, indeed, all civilization, owes the adoption of the 
 cheap and uniform system. His plan has been adopted by 
 every State which professes to have a postal system at all. 
 Mr. Hill belonged to a remarkable family. His father, 
 Thomas Wright Hill, was a teacher, a man of advanced and 
 practical views in popular education, a devoted lover of sci- 
 ence, an advocate of civil and religious liberty, and a sort 
 of celebrity in the Birmingham of his day, where he took 
 a bold and active part in trying to defend the house of Dr. 
 Priestley against the mob who attacked it. He had five 
 sons, every one of whom made himself more or less conspic- 
 uous as a practical reformer in one path or another. The 
 eldest of the sons was Matthew Davenport Hill, the philan- 
 thropic recorder of Birmingham, who did so much for prison 
 reform and for the reclamation of juvenile offenders. The 
 third son was Rowland Hill, the author of the cheap postal 
 system. Rowland Hill when a little weakly child began to 
 show some such precocious love for arithmetical calculations 
 as Pascal showed for mathematics. His favorite amusement, 
 as a child, was to lie on the hearth-rug and count up figures 
 by the hour together. As he grew up he became teacher 
 of mathematics in his father's school. Afterward he was 
 appointed Secretary to the South Australian Commission, 
 and rendered much valuable service in the organization of 
 the colony of South Australia. His early love of masses of 
 figures it may have been which in the first instance turned 
 his attention to the number of letters passing through the 
 Post-office, the proportion they bore to the number of the 
 population, the cost of carrying them, and the amount which 
 the Post-office authorities charged for the conveyance of a 
 single letter. A picturesque and touching little illustration 
 of the veritable hardships of the existing system seems to 
 have quickened his interest in a reform of it. Miss Marti- 
 neau thus tells the story : 
 
 " Coleridge, when a young man, was walking through the 
 
66 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Lake district, when he one day saw the postman deliver a 
 letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it 
 over and examined it, and then returned it, saying she could 
 not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that 
 the letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, 
 in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As 
 soon as the postman was out of sight she showed Coleridge 
 how his money had been wasted as far as she was concerned. 
 The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her 
 brother and herself that as long as all went well with him 
 he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter; 
 and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. 
 Most persons would have remembered this incident as a 
 curious story to tell ; but there was one mind which waken- 
 ed up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. It 
 struck Mr. Rowland Hill that there must be something 
 wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to 
 cheating, in order to gratify their desire to hear of one an- 
 other's welfare." 
 
 Mr. Hill gradually worked out for himself a comprehensive 
 scheme of reform. He put it before the world early in 1837. 
 The public were taken by surprise when the plan came be- 
 fore them in the shape of a pamphlet, which its author mod- 
 estly entitled "Post-office Reform; its importance and prac- 
 ticability." The root of Mr. Hill's system lay in the fact, 
 made evident by him beyond dispute, that the actual cost 
 of the conveyance of letters through the post was very tri- 
 fling, and was but little increased by the distance over which 
 they had to be carried. 
 
 His proposal was, therefore, that the rates of postage should 
 be diminished to the minimum ; that at the same time the 
 speed of conveyance should be increased, and that there 
 should be much greater frequency of despatch. His princi- 
 ple was, in fact, the very opposite of that which had prevail- 
 ed in the calculations of the authorities. Their idea was 
 that the higher the charge for letters the greater the return 
 to the revenue. He started on the assumption that the 
 smaller the charge the greater the profit. He, therefore, 
 recommended the substitution of one uniform charge of one 
 penny the half-ounce, without reference to the distance with- 
 in the limits of the United Kingdom which the letter had to 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 67 
 
 be carried. The Post-office authorities were at first uncom- 
 promising in their opposition to the scheme. The Post- 
 master-general, Lord Lichfield, said in the House of Lords, 
 that of all the wild and extravagant schemes he had ever 
 heai'd of, it was the wildest and most extravagant. "The 
 mails," he said, "will have to carry twelve times as much 
 weight, and therefore the charge for transmission, instead of 
 100,000, as now, must be twelve times that amount. The 
 walls of the Post-office would burst; the whole area in 
 which the building stands would not be large enough to re- 
 
 ~ O C5 
 
 ceive the clerks and the letters." It is impossible not to be 
 struck by the paradoxical peculiarity of this argument. Be- 
 cause the change would be so much welcomed by the public, 
 Lord Lichfield argued that it ought not to be made. He 
 did not fall back upon the then familiar assertion that the 
 public would not send anything like the number of letters 
 the advocates of the scheme expected. He argued that they 
 would send so many as to make it troublesome for the Post- 
 office authorities to deal with them. In plain words, it 
 would be such an immense accommodation to the population 
 in general that the officials could not undertake the trouble 
 of carrying it into effect. Another Post-office official, Colonel 
 Maberley, was, at all events, more liberal. "My constant 
 language," he said afterward, " to the heads of the depart- 
 ments was This plan we know will fail. It is our duty to 
 take care that no obstruction is placed in the way of it by 
 the heads of the departments, and by the Post-office. The 
 allegation, I have not the least doubt, will be made at a sub- 
 sequent period, that this plan has failed in consequence of 
 the unwillingness of the Government to carry it into fail- 
 execution. It is our duty, as servants of the Government, 
 to take care that no blame eventually shall fall on the Gov- 
 ernment through any unwillingness of ours to carry it into 
 proper effect." It is, perhaps, less surprising that the routine 
 mind of officials should have seen no future but failure for 
 the scheme, when so vigorous and untrammelled a thinker 
 as Sydney Smith spoke with anger and contempt of the fact 
 that " a million of revenue is given up in the nonsensical 
 Penny-post scheme, to please my old, excellent, and univer- 
 sally dissentient friend, Noah Warburton." Mr. Warburton 
 was then member for Bridport, and, with Mr. Wallace, anoth- 
 
68 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 er member of Parliament, was very active in supporting and 
 promoting the views of Mr. Hill. " I admire the Whig Min- 
 istry," Sydney Smith went on to say, " and think they have 
 done more good things than all the ministries since the Rev- 
 olution ; but these concessions are sad and unworthy marks 
 of weakness, and fill reasonable men with alarm." 
 
 It will be seen from this remark alone that the ministry 
 had yielded somewhat more readily than might have been 
 expected to the arguments of Mr. Hill. At the time his 
 pamphlet appeared a commission was actually engaged in 
 inquiring into the condition of the Post-office department. 
 Their attention was drawn to Mr. Hill's plan, and they gave 
 it a careful consideration, and reported in its favor, although 
 the Post-office authorities were convinced that it must in- 
 volve an unbearable loss of revenue. In Parliament Mr. 
 Wallace, whose name has been already mentioned, moved 
 for a committee to inquire into the whole subject, and es- 
 pecially to examine the mode recommended for charging 
 and collecting postage in the pamphlet of Mr. Hill. The 
 committee gave the subject a very patient consideration, 
 and at length made a report recommending uniform charges 
 and prepayment by stamps. That part of Mr. Hill's plan 
 which suggested the use of postage-stamps was adopted by 
 him on the advice of Mr. Charles Knight. The Government 
 took up the scheme with some spirit and liberality. The 
 revenue that year showed a deficiency, but they determined 
 to run the further risk which the proposal involved. The 
 commercial community had naturally been stirred greatly 
 by the project which promised so much relief and advan- 
 tage. Sydney Smith was very much mistaken, indeed, when 
 he fancied that it was only to please his old and excellent 
 friend, Mr. Warburton, that the ministry gave way to the 
 innovation. Petitions from all the commercial communities 
 were pouring in to support the plan, and to ask that at least 
 it should have a fair trial. The Government at length de- 
 termined to bring in a bill which should provide for the al- 
 most immediate introduction of Mr. Hill's scheme, and for 
 the abolition of the franking system except in the case of 
 official letters actually sent on business directly belonging 
 to her Majesty's service. The bill declared, as an introduc- 
 tory step, that the charge for postage should be at the rate 
 
SCIENCE AND SPEED. 69 
 
 of fourpence for each letter under half an ounce in weight, 
 irrespective of distance, within the limits of the United King- 
 dom. This, however, was to be only a beginning; for on 
 January 10th, 1840, the postage was fixed at the uniform 
 rate of one penny per letter of not more than half an ounce 
 in weight. The introductory measure was not, of course, 
 carried without opposition in both Houses of Parliament. 
 The Duke of Wellington, in his characteristic w r ay, declared 
 that he strongly objected to the scheme ; but, as the Govern- 
 ment had evidently set their hearts upon it, he recommended 
 the House of Lords not to offer any opposition to it. In the 
 House of Commons it was opposed by Sir Robert Peel and 
 Mr. Goulburn,both of whom strongly condemned the whole 
 scheme as likely to involve the country in vast loss of rev- 
 enue. The measure, however, passed into law. Some idea 
 of the effect it has produced upon the postal correspondence 
 of the country may be gathered from the fact that in 1839, 
 the last year of the heavy postage, the number of letters 
 delivered in Great Britain and Ireland was a little more 
 than eighty-two millions, which included some five millions 
 and a half of franked letters returning nothing to the reve- 
 nues of the country; whereas, in 1875, more than a thousand 
 millions of letters were delivered in the United Kingdom. 
 The population during the same time has not nearly dou- 
 bled itself. It has already been remarked that the principle 
 of Sir Rowland Hill's reform has since been put into oper- 
 ation in every civilized country in the world. It may be 
 added that before long we shall, in all human probability, see 
 an interoceanic postage established at a rate as low as peo- 
 ple sometimes thought Sir Rowland Hill a madman for rec- 
 ommending as applicable to our inland post. The time is 
 not far distant when a letter will be carried from London to 
 San Francisco, or to Tokio in Japan, at a rate of charge as 
 small as that which made financiers stare and laugh when it 
 was suggested as profitable remuneration for carrying a let- 
 ter from London to the towns of Sussex or Hertfordshire. 
 The "Penny-post," let it be said, is an older institution than 
 that which Sir Rowland Hill introduced. A penny-post for 
 the conveyance of letters had been set up in London so long 
 ago as 1683 ; and it was adopted or annexed by the Govern- 
 ment some years after. An effort was even made to set up 
 
70 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 a half-penny post in London, in opposition to the official pen- 
 ny-post, in 1708 ; but the Government soon crushed this vex- 
 atious and intrusive rival. In 1738 Dr. Johnson writes to 
 Mr. Cave " to entreat that you will be pleased to inform me, 
 by the penny-post, whether you resolve to print the poem." 
 After awhile the Government changed their penny-post to 
 a twopenny-post, and gradually made a distinction between 
 district and other postal systems, and contrived to swell the 
 price for deliveries of all kinds. Long before even this time 
 of the penny-post, the old records of the city of Bristol con- 
 tain an account of the payment of one penny for the car- 
 riage of letters to London. It need hardly be explained, 
 however, that a penny in that time, or even in 1683, was a 
 payment of very different value indeed from the modest sum 
 which Sir Rowland Hill was successful in establishing. The 
 ancient penny-post resembled the modern penny-post only 
 in name. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHARTISM. 
 
 IT cannot, however, be said that all the omens under which 
 the new Queen's reign opened at home were as auspicious 
 as the coincidences which made it contemporary with the 
 first chapters of these new and noble developments in the 
 history of science and invention. On the contrary, it began 
 amidst many grim and unpromising conditions in our social 
 affairs. The winter of 1837-'38 was one of unusual severity 
 and distress. There would have been much discontent and 
 grumbling in any case among the class described by French 
 writers as the proletaire ; but the complaints were aggra- 
 vated by a common belief that the young Queen was wholly 
 under the influence of a frivolous and selfish minister, who 
 occupied her with amusements while the poor were starving. 
 It does not appear that there was at any time the slightest 
 justification for such a belief; but it prevailed among the 
 working-classes and the poor very generally, and added to 
 the sufferings of genuine want the bitterness of imaginary 
 wrong. Popular education was little looked after; so far 
 
CHARTISM. 71 
 
 as the State was concerned, might be said not to be looked 
 after at all. The laws of political economy were as yet only 
 within the appreciation of a few, who were regarded not un- 
 commonly, because of their theories, somewhat as phrenolo- 
 gists or mesmerists might be looked on in a more enlighten- 
 ed time. Some writers have made a great deal of the case 
 of Thorn and his disciples as evidence of the extraordinary 
 ignorance that prevailed. Thorn was a broken-down brew- 
 er, and in fact a madman, who had for some time been going 
 about in Canterbury and other parts of Kent bedizened in 
 fantastic costume, and styling himself at first Sir William 
 Courtenay, of Powderham Castle, Knight of Malta, King of 
 Jerusalem, king of the gypsy races, and we know not what 
 else. He announced himself as a great political reformer, 
 and for awhile he succeeded in getting many to believe in 
 and support him. He was afterward confined for some time 
 in a lunatic asylum, and when he came out he presented him- 
 self to the ignorant peasantry in the character of a second 
 Messiah. He found many followers and believers again, 
 among a humbler class, indeed, than those whom he had 
 formerly won over. Much of his influence over the poor 
 Kentish laborers was due to his denunciations of the new 
 Poor Law, which was then popularly hated and feared with 
 an almost insane intensity of feeling. Thorn told them he 
 had come to regenerate the whole world, and also to save 
 his followers from the new Poor Law; and the lattet an- 
 nouncement commended the former. He assembled a crowd 
 of his supporters, and undertook to lead them to an attack 
 on Canterbury. With his own hand he shot dead a police- 
 man who endeavored to oppose his movements, exactly as 
 a savior of society of bolder pretensions and greater suc- 
 cess did at Boulogne not long after. Two companies of 
 soldiers came out from Canterbury to disperse the rioters. 
 The officer in command was shot dead by Thorn. Thorn's 
 followers then charged the unexpecting soldiers so fiercely 
 that for a moment there was some confusion ; but the sec- 
 ond company fired a volley which stretched Thorn and sev- 
 eral of his adherents lifeless on the field. That was an end 
 of the rising. Several of Thorn's followers were afterward 
 tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced ; but some pity 
 was felt for their ignorance and their delusion, and they were 
 
72 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 not consigned to death. Long after the fall of their pre- 
 posterous hero and saint, many of Thorn's disciples believed 
 that he would return from the grave to carry out the prom- 
 ised work of his mission. All this was lamentable, but could 
 hardly be regarded as specially characteristic of the early 
 years of the present reign. The Thorn delusion was not 
 much more absurd than the Tichborne mania of a later day. 
 Down to our own time there are men and women among the 
 Social Democrats of cultured Germany who still cherish the 
 hope that their idol Ferdinand Lassalle will come back from 
 the dead to lead and guide them. 
 
 But there were political and social dangers in the open- 
 ing of the present reign more serious than any that could 
 have been conjured up by a crazy man in a fantastic dress. 
 There were delusions having deeper roots and showing a 
 more inviting shelter than any that a religious fanatic of the 
 vulgar type could cause to spring up in our society. 
 
 Only a lew weeks after the coronation of the Queen a 
 great Radical meeting was held in Birmingham. A mani- 
 festo was adopted there which afterward came to be known 
 as the Chartist petition. With that movement Chartism be- 
 gan to be one of the most disturbing influences of the polit- 
 ical life of the country. It is a movement which, although 
 its influence may now be said to have wholly passed away, 
 Avell deserves to have its history fully written. For ten 
 years it agitated England. It sometimes seemed to threat- 
 en an actual uprising of all the proletaire against what were 
 then the political and social institutions of the country. It 
 might have been a very serious danger if the State had been 
 involved in any external difficulties. It was backed by 
 much genuine enthusiasm, passion, and intelligence. It ap- 
 pealed strongly and naturally to whatever there was of dis- 
 content among the working-classes. It afforded a most ac- 
 ceptable and convenient means by which ambitious politi- 
 cians of the self-seeking order could raise themselves into 
 temporary importance. Its fierce and fitful flame went out 
 at last under the influence of the clear, strong, and steady 
 light of political reform and education. The one great les- 
 son it teaches is, that political agitation lives and is formi- 
 dable only by virtue of what is reasonable in its demands. 
 Thousands of ignorant and miserable men all over the coun- 
 
CHAETISM. 73 
 
 try joined the Chartist agitation who cared nothing about 
 the substantial value of its political claims. They were 
 poor, they were overworked, they were badly paid, their 
 lives were altogether wretched. They got into their heads 
 some wild idea that the People's Charter would give them 
 better food and wages, and lighter work if it were obtained, 
 and that for that very reason the aristocrats and the officials 
 would not grant it. No political concessions could really 
 have satisfied these men. If the Charter had been granted 
 in 1838, they would no doubt have been as dissatisfied as 
 ever in 1839. But the discontent of these poor creatures 
 would have brought with it little danger to the State if it 
 had not become part of the support of an organization which 
 could show some sound and good reason for the demands it 
 made. The moment that the clear and practical political 
 grievances were dealt with, the organization melted way. 
 Vague discontent, however natural and excusable it may 
 be, is only formidable in politics when it helps to swell the 
 strength and the numbers of a crowd which calls for some 
 reform that can be made and is withheld. One of the vnl- 
 garest fallacies of state-craft is to declare that it is of no 
 use granting the reforms which would satisfy reasonable de- 
 mands, because there are still unreasonable agitators whom 
 these will not satisfy. Get the reasonable men on your side, 
 and you need not' fear the unreasonable. This is the lesson 
 taught to statesmen by the Chartist agitation. 
 
 A funeral oration over Chartism was pronounced by 
 Sir John Campbell, then Attorney-general, afterward Lord 
 Chief-justice Campbell, at a public dinner at. Edinburgh on 
 October 24th, 1839. He spoke at some length and with 
 much complacency of Chartism as an agitation which had 
 passed away. Some ten days afterward occurred the most 
 formidable outburst of Chartism that had been known up to 
 that time, and Chartism continued to be an active and a dis- 
 turbing influence in England for nearly ten years after. If 
 Sir John Campbell had told his friends and constituents 
 at the Edinburgh dinner that the influence of Chartism was 
 just about to make itself really felt, he would have shown 
 himself a somewhat more acute politician than we now un- 
 derstand him to be. Seldom has a public man setting up 
 to be a political authority made a worse hit than he did in 
 
 I. 4 
 
74: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 that memorable declaration. Campbell was, indeed, only a 
 clever, shrewd lawyer of the hard and narrow class. He 
 never made any pretension to statesmanship, or even to 
 great political knowledge ; and his unfortunate blunder 
 might be passed over without notice were it not that it il- 
 lustrates fairly enough the manner in which men of better 
 information and judgment than he were at that time in the 
 habit of disposing of all inconvenient political problems. 
 The Attorney-general was aware that there had been a few 
 riots and a few arrests, and that the law had been what he 
 would call vindicated ; and as he had no manner of sympa- 
 thy with the motives which could lead men to distress them- 
 selves and their friends about imaginary charters, he as- 
 sumed that there was an end of the matter. It did not oc- 
 cur to him to ask himself whether there might not be some 
 underlying causes to explain, if riot to excuse, the agitation 
 that just then began to disturb the country, and that con- 
 tinued to disturb it for so many years. Even if he had in- 
 quired into the subject, it is not likely that he would have 
 come to any wiser conclusion about it. The dramatic in- 
 stinct, if we may be allowed to call it so, which enables a 
 man to put himself for the moment into the condition and 
 mood of men entirely unlike himself in feelings and condi- 
 tions, is an indispensable element of real statesmanship ; but 
 it is the rarest of all gifts among politicians of the second 
 order. If Sir John Campbell had turned his attention to 
 the Chartist question, he would only have found that a num- 
 ber of men, for the most part poor and ignorant, were com- 
 plaining of grievances where he could not for himself see 
 any substantial grievances at all. That would have been 
 enough for him. If a solid, wealthy, and rising lawyer could 
 not see any cause for grumbling, he would have made up 
 his mind that no reasonable persons worthy the considera- 
 tion of sensible legislators would continue to grumble after 
 they had been told by those in authority that it was their 
 business to keep quiet. But if he had, on the other hand, 
 looked with the light of sympathetic intelligence, of that 
 dramatic instinct which has just been mentioned, at the con- 
 dition of the classes among whom Chartism was then rife, 
 he would have seen that it was not likely the agitation could 
 be put down by a few prosecutions and a few arrests, and 
 
CHARTISM. 75 
 
 the censure of a prosperous Attorney -general. He would 
 have seen that Chartism was not a cause but a consequence. 
 The intelligence of a very ordinary man who approached 
 the question in an impartial mood might have seen that 
 Chartism was the expression of a vague discontent with 
 very positive grievances and evils. 
 
 We have, in our time, outlived the days of political ab- 
 stractions. The catchwords which thrilled our forefathers 
 with emotion on one side or the other fall with hardly any 
 meaning on our ears. We smile at such phrases as " the 
 rights of man." We hardly know what is meant by talk- 
 ing of "the people" as the words were used long ago, when 
 "the people" was understood to mean a vast mass of wrong- 
 ed persons who had no representation, and were oppressed 
 by privilege and the aristocracy. We seldom talk of " lib- 
 erty ;" any one venturing to found a theory or even a decla- 
 mation on some supposed deprival of liberty would soon find 
 himself in the awkward position of being called on to give 
 a scientific definition of what he understood liberty to be. 
 He would be as much puzzled as were certain English work- 
 ing-men, who, desiring to express to Mr. John Stuart Mill 
 their sympathy with what they called in the slang of Conti- 
 nental democracy " the Revolution," were calmly bidden by 
 the great Liberal thinker to ask themselves what they meant 
 by "the Revolution," which revolution, what revolution, and 
 why they sympathized with it. But perhaps we are all a 
 little too apt to think that because these abstractions have 
 no living meaning now they never had any living meaning 
 at all. They convey no manner of clear idea in England 
 now, but it does not by any means follow that they never 
 conveyed any such idea. The phrase which Mr. Mill so 
 properly condemned when he found it in the mouths of Eng- 
 lish working-men had a very intelligible and distinct mean- 
 ing when it first came to be used in France and throughout 
 the Continent. " The Revolution " expressed a clear reality, 
 as recognizable by the intelligence of all w r ho heard it as 
 the name of Free-trade or of Ultramontanism to men of our 
 time. " The Revolution " was the principle which was as- 
 serting all over Europe the overthrow of the old absolute 
 power of kings, and it described it just as well as any word 
 could do. It is meaningless in our day, for the very reason 
 
76 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 that it was full of meaning then. So it was with " the peo- 
 ple," and "the rights of the people," and the "rights of 
 labor," and all the other grandiloquent phrases which seem 
 to us so empty and so meaningless now. They are empty 
 and meaningless at the present hour ; but they have no ap- 
 plication now chiefly because they had application then. 
 
 The Reform Bill of 1832 had been necessarily, and perhaps 
 naturally, a class measure. It had done great things for the 
 constitutional system of England. It had averted a revo- 
 lution which without some such concession would probably 
 have been inevitable. It had settled forever the question 
 which was so fiercely and so gravely debated during the 
 discussions of the reform years, whether the English Con- 
 stitution is or is not based upon a system of popular repre- 
 sentation. To many at present it may seem hardly credible 
 that sane men could have denied the existence of the repre- 
 sentative principle. But during the debates on the great 
 Reform Bill such a denial was the strong point of many of 
 the leading opponents of the measure, including the Duke 
 of Wellington himself. The principle of the Constitution, it 
 was soberly argued, is that the sovereign invites whatever 
 communities or interests he thinks fit to send in persons to 
 Parliament to take council with him on the affairs of the na- 
 tion. This idea was got rid of by the Reform Bill. That 
 bill abolished fifty-six nomination or rotten boroughs, and 
 took away half the representation from thirty others ; it 
 disposed of the seats thus obtained by giving sixty-five ad- 
 ditional representatives to the counties, and conferring the 
 right of returning members on Manchester, Leeds, Birming- 
 ham, and some thirty-nine large and prosperous towns which 
 had previously had no representation ; while, as Lord John 
 Russell said in his speech when he introduced the bill in 
 March, 1831, " a ruined mound" sent two representatives to 
 Parliament ; " three niches in a stone wall " sent two repre- 
 sentatives to Parliament ; "a park where no houses were to 
 be seen " sent two representatives to Parliament. The bill 
 introduced a 10 household qualification for boroughs, and 
 extended the county franchise to lease -holders and copy- 
 holders. But it left the working-classes almost altogether 
 out of the franchise. Not merely did it confer no political 
 emancipation on them, but it took away in many places 
 
CHARTISM. 77 
 
 the peculiar franchises which made the working-men voters. 
 There were communities such, for example, as that of Pres- 
 ton, in Lancashire where the system of franchise existing 
 created something like universal suffrage. All this was 
 smoothed away, if such an expression may be used, by the 
 Reform Bill. In truth, the Reform Bill broke down the mo- 
 nopoly which the aristocracy and landed classes had enjoy- 
 ed, and admitted the middle classes to a share of the law- 
 making power. The representation was divided between the 
 aristocracy and the middle class, instead of being, as before, 
 the exclusive possession of the former. 
 
 The working-class, iu the opinion of many of their ablest 
 and most influential representatives, were not merely left 
 out but shouldered out. This was all the more exasperat- 
 ing because the excitement and agitation by the strength 
 of which the Reform Bill was carried in the teeth of so much 
 resistance were kept up by the working-men. There was, 
 besides, at the time of the Reform Bill, a very high degree 
 of what may be called the temperature of the French Revo- 
 lution still heating the senses and influencing the judgment 
 even of the aristocratic leaders of the movement. What 
 Richter calls the "seed -grains" of the revolutionary doc- 
 trines had been blown abroad so widely that they rested 
 in some of the highest as well as in most of the lowliest 
 places. Some of the Reform leaders Lord Durham, for in- 
 stance were prepared to go much farther in the way of 
 Radicalism than at a later period Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright 
 would have gone. There was more than once a sort of ap- 
 peal to the working-men of the country which, however dif- 
 ferently it may have been meant, certainly sounded in their 
 ears as if it were an intimation that in the event of the bill 
 being resisted too long it might be necessary to try what 
 the strength of a popular uprising could do. Many years 
 after, in the defence of the Irish state-prisoners at Clonmel, 
 the counsel who pleaded their cause insisted that they had 
 warrant for their conduct in certain proceedings which were 
 in preparation during the Reform agitation. He talked with 
 undisguised significance of the teacher being in the ministry 
 and the pupils in the dock; and quoted Captain Macheath 
 to the effect that if laws were made equally for every de- 
 gree, there might even then be rare company on Tyburn 
 
78 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 tree. It is not necessary to attach too much importance to 
 assertions of this kind, or to accept them as sober contribu- 
 tions to history; but they are very instructive as a means 
 of enabling us to understand the feeling of soreness which 
 
 o o 
 
 remained in the minds of large masses of the population 
 when, after the passing of the Reform Bill, they found them- 
 selves left out in the cold. Rightly or wrongly, they be- 
 lieved that their strength had been kept in reserve or in ter- 
 rorem to secure the carrying of the Reform Bill, and that 
 when it was carried they were immediately thrown over by 
 those whom they had thus helped to pass it. Therefore, at 
 the time when the young sovereign ascended the throne, 
 the working-classes in all the large towns were in a state 
 of profound disappointment and discontent, almost, indeed, 
 of disaffection. Chartism was beginning to succeed to the 
 Reform agitation. The leaders who had come from the 
 ranks of the aristocracy had been discarded or had with- 
 drawn. In some cases they had withdrawn in perfect good 
 faith, believing sincerely that they had done the work which 
 they undertook to do, and that that was all the country re- 
 quired. Men drawn more immediately from the working- 
 class itself, or who had in some way boon dropped down 
 by a class higher in the social scale, took up the popular 
 leadership now. 
 
 Chartism may be said to have sprung definitively into ex- 
 istence in consequence of the formal declarations of the lead- 
 ers of the Liberal party in Parliament that they did not in- 
 tend to push Reform any farther. At the opening of the 
 first Parliament of Queen Victoria's reign the question was 
 brought to a test. A Radical member of the House of Com- 
 mons moved as an amendment to the address a resolution 
 declaring in favor of the ballot and of shorter duration of 
 Parliaments. Only twenty members voted for it; and Lord 
 John Russell declared distinctly against all such attempts 
 to reopen the Reform question. It was impossible that this 
 declaration should not be received with disappointment 
 and anger by great masses of the people. They had been 
 in the full assurance that the Reform Bill itself was only 
 the means by which greater changes were to be brought 
 about. Lord John Russell said in the House of Commons 
 that to push Reform any farther then would be a breach of 
 
CHARTISM. 79 
 
 faith toward those who helped him to carry it. A great 
 many outside Parliament not unnaturally regarded the re- 
 fusal to go any farther as a breach of faith toward them on 
 the part of the Liberal leaders. Lord John Russell was 
 right from his point of view. It would have been impossi- 
 ble to carry the Reform movement any farther just then. 
 In a country like ours, where interests are so nicely bal- 
 anced, it must always happen that a forward movement in 
 politics is followed by a certain reaction. The parliamen- 
 tary leaders in Parliament were already beginning to feel the 
 influence of this law of our political growth. It would have 
 been hopeless to attempt to get the upper and middle classes 
 at such a time to consent to any further changes of consid- 
 erable importance^ But the feeling of those who had helped 
 so materially to bring about the Reform movement was at 
 least intelligible when they found that its effects were to 
 stop just short of the measures which alone could have any 
 direct influence on their political position. 
 
 A conference was held almost immediately between a few 
 of the Liberal members of Parliament who professed radical 
 opinions and some of the leaders of the working-men. At 
 this conference the programme, or what was always after- 
 ward known as " the Charter," was agreed upon and drawn 
 up. The name of" Charter" appears to have been given to 
 it for the first time by O'Connell. "There's your Charter," 
 he said to the secretary of the Working-men's Association ; 
 "agitate for it, and never be content with anything less." 
 It is a great thing accomplished in political agitation to have 
 found a telling name. A name is almost as important for a 
 new agitation as for a new novel. The title of "The Peo- 
 ple's Charter" would of itself have launched the movement. 
 
 Quietly studied now, the People's Charter does not seem 
 a very formidable document. There is little smell of gun- 
 powder about it. Its "points," as they were called, were 
 six. Manhood Suffrage came first. It was then called uni- 
 versal suffrage, but it only meant manhood suffrage, for the 
 promoters of the movement had not the slightest idea of in- 
 sisting on the franchise for women. The second was Annual 
 Parliaments. Vote by Ballot was the third. Abolition of 
 the Property Qualification (then and for many years after 
 required for the election of a member to Parliament) was 
 
80 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the fourth. The Payment of Members was the fifth ; and 
 the Division of the Country into Equal Electoral Districts, 
 the sixth of the famous points. Of these proposals some, it 
 will be seen, were perfectly reasonable. Not one was so ab- 
 solutely unreasonable as to be outside the range of fair and 
 quiet discussion among practical politicians. Three of the 
 points half, that is to say, of the whole number have 
 already been made part of our constitutional system. The 
 existing franchise may be virtually regarded as manhood 
 suffrage. We have for years been voting by means of a 
 written paper dropped in a ballot-box. The property quali- 
 fication for members of Parliament could hardly be said to 
 have been abolished. Such a word seems far too grand and 
 dignified to describe the fate that befell it. We should 
 rather say that it was extinguished by its own absurdity 
 and viciousness. It never kept out of Parliament any per- 
 son legally disqualified, and it was the occasion of incessant 
 tricks and devices which would surely have been counted 
 disreputable and disgraceful to those who engaged in them, 
 but that the injustice and folly of the system generated a 
 sort of false public conscience where it was concerned, and 
 made people think it as lawful to cheat it, as at one time the 
 most respectable persons in private life thought it allowable 
 to cheat the revenue and wear smuggled lace or drink smug- 
 gled brandy. The proposal to divide the country into equal 
 electoral districts is one which can hardly yet be regarded 
 as having come to any test. But it is almost certain that 
 sooner or later some alteration of our present system in that 
 direction will be adopted. Of the two other points of the 
 Charter, the payment of members may be regarded as de- 
 cidedly objectionable; and that for yearly parliaments as 
 embodying a proposition which would make public life an 
 almost insufferable nuisance to those actively concerned in 
 it. But neither of these two proposals would be looked 
 upon in our time as outside tire range of legitimate political 
 discussion. Indeed, the difficulty any one engaged in their 
 advocacy would find just now would be in getting any con- 
 siderable body of listeners to take the slightest interest in 
 the argument either for or against them. 
 
 O ~ 
 
 The Chartists might be roughly divided into three classes 
 the political Chartists, the social Chartists, and the Char- 
 
CHARTISM. 81 
 
 tists of vague discontent, who joined the movement because 
 they were wretched and felt angry. The first were the reg- 
 ular political agitators, who wanted a wider popular repre- 
 sentation ; the second were chiefly led to the movement by 
 their hatred of the "bread -tax." These two classes were 
 perfectly clear as to what they wanted : some of their de- 
 mands were just and reasonable ; none of them were without 
 the sphere of rational and peaceful controversy. The dis- 
 ciples of mere discontent naturally swerved alternately to 
 the side of those leaders or sections who talked loudest and 
 fiercest against the law-makers and the constituted authori- 
 ties. Chartism soon split itself into two general divisions 
 the moral force, and the physical force Chartism. Nothing 
 can be more unjust than to represent the leaders and pro- 
 moters of the movement as mere factious and self-seeking 
 demagogues. Some of them were men of great ability and 
 eloquence ; some were impassioned young poets drawn from 
 the class whom Kingsley has described in his "Alton Locke;" 
 some were men of education; many were earnest and de- 
 voted fanatics; and, so far as we can judge, all, or nearly all, 
 were sincere. Even the man who did the movement most 
 harm, and who made himself most odious to all reasonable 
 outsiders, the once famous, now forgotten, Feargus O'Con- 
 nor, appears to have been sincere, and to "have personally 
 lost more than he gained by his Chartism. Four or five 
 years after the collapse of what may be called the active 
 Chartist agitation, a huge white-headed, vacuous-eyed man 
 was to be seen of mornings wandering through the arcades 
 of Covent Garden Market, looking at the fruits and flowers, 
 occasionally taking up a flower, smelling at it, and putting 
 it down, with a smile of infantile satisfaction ; a man who 
 might have reminded observers of Mr. Dick in Dickens's 
 "David Copperfield ;" and this was the once renowned, once 
 dreaded and detested Feargus O'Connor. For some time 
 before his death his reason had wholly deserted him. Men 
 did not know at first in the House of Commons the meaning 
 of the odd pranks which Feargus was beginning to play 
 there to the bewilderment of the great assembly. At last 
 it was seen that the fallen leader of Chartism was a hopeless 
 madman. It is hardly to be doubted that insanity had long 
 been growing on him, and that some at least of his political 
 
 4* 
 
82 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 follies and extravagances were the result of an increasing 
 disorder of the brain. In his day he had been the very 
 model for a certain class of demagogue. He was of com- 
 manding presence, great stature,and almost gigantic strength. 
 He had education ; he had mixed in good society ; he be- 
 longed to an old family, and, indeed, boasted his descent from 
 a line of Irish kings, not without some ground for the claim. 
 He had been a man of some fashion at one time, and had led 
 a life of wild dissipation in his early years. He had a kind 
 of eloquence which told with immense power on a mass of 
 half-ignorant hearers ; and, indeed, men who had no manner 
 of liking for him or sympathy with his doctrines have de- 
 clared that he was the most effective mob orator they had 
 ever heard. He was ready, if needs were, to fight his way 
 single-handed through a whole mass of Tory opponents at a 
 contested election. Thomas Cooper, the venerable poet of 
 Chartism, has given an amusing description, in his autobiog- 
 raphy, of Feargus O'Connor, who was then his hero, leaping 
 from a wagon at a Nottingham election into the midst of a 
 crowd of Tory butchers, and with only two stout Chartist 
 followei's fighting his way through all opposition, "flooring 
 the butchers like ninepins." " Once," says Mr. Cooper, " the 
 Tory lambs fought off all who surrounded him and got him 
 down, and my heart quaked for I thought they would kill 
 him. But in a very few moments his red head emerged 
 again from the rough human billows, and he was fighting 
 his way as before." 
 
 There were many men in the movement of a nobler moral 
 nature than poor huge, wild Feargus O'Connor. There were 
 men like Thomas Cooper himself, devoted, impassioned, full 
 of poetic aspiration, and no scant measure of poetic inspira- 
 tion as well. Henry Vincent was a man of unimpeachable 
 character and of some ability, an effective popular speaker, 
 who has since maintained in a very unpretending way a con- 
 siderable reputation. Ernest Jones was as sincere and self- 
 sacrificing a man as ever joined a sinking cause. He had 
 proved his sincerity more in deed than word. His talents 
 only fell short of that height Avhich might claim to be re- 
 garded as genius. His education was that of a scholar and 
 a gentleman. Many men of education and ability were 
 drawn into sympathy, if not into actual co-operation, with the 
 
CHARTISM. 83 
 
 Chartists by a conviction that some of their claims were 
 well-founded, and that the grievances of the working-classes, 
 which were terrible to contemplate, were such as a Parlia- 
 ment better representing all classes would be able to rem- 
 edy. Some of these men have since made for themselves an 
 honorable name in Parliament and out of it; some of them 
 have risen to high political position. It is necessary to read 
 such a book as Thomas Cooper's autobiography, to under- 
 stand how genuine was the poetic and political enthusiasm 
 which was at the heart of the Chartist movement, and how 
 bitter was the suffering which drove into its ranks so many 
 thousands of stout working-men who, in a country like Eng- 
 land, might well have expected to be able to live by the 
 hard work they were only too willing to do. One must 
 read the Anti-Corn-law rhymes of Ebenezer Elliott to un- 
 derstand how the " bread - tax " became identified in the 
 minds of the very best of the working-class, and identified 
 justly, with the system of political and economical legisla- 
 tion which was undoubtedly kept up, although not of con- 
 scious purpose, for the benefit of a class. In the minds of 
 too many, the British Constitution meant hard work and 
 half-starvation. 
 
 A whole literature of Chartist newspapers sprang up to 
 advocate the cause. The Northern /Star, owned and con- 
 ducted by Feargus O'Connor, was the most popular and in- 
 fluential of them ; but every great town had its Chartist 
 press. Meetings were held at which sometimes very violent 
 language was employed. It began to be the practice to hold 
 torch-light meetings at night, and many men went armed to 
 these, and open clamor was made by the wilder of the Char- 
 tists for an appeal to arms. A formidable riot took place in 
 Birmingham, where the authorities endeavored to put down 
 a Chartist meeting. Ebenezer Elliott and other sensible 
 sympathizers endeavored to open the eyes of the more ex- 
 treme Chartists to the folly of all schemes for measures of 
 violence; but, for the time, the more violent a speaker was, 
 the better chance he had of becoming popular. Efforts were 
 made at times to bring about a compromise with the mid- 
 dle-class Liberals and the Anti-Corn-law leaders; but all 
 such attempts proved failures. The Chartists would not 
 give up their Charter ; many of them would not renounce 
 
84 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the hope of seeing it carried by force. The Government 
 began to prosecute some of the orators and leaders of the 
 Charter movement; and some of these were convicted, im- 
 prisoned, and treated with great severity. Henry Vincent's 
 imprisonment at Newport, in Wales, was the occasion of an 
 attempt at rescue which bore a very close resemblance in- 
 deed to a scheme of organized and armed rebellion. 
 
 Newport had around it a large mining population, and the 
 miners were nearly all physical-force Chartists. It was ar- 
 ranged among them to march in three divisions to a certain 
 rendezvous, and when they had formed a junction there, 
 which was to be two hours after midnight, to march into 
 Newport, attack the jail, and effect the release of Vincent 
 and other prisoners. The attempt was to be under the chief 
 command of Mr. Frost, a trader of Newport, who had been 
 a magistrate, but was deprived of the commission of the 
 peace for violent political speeches a man of respectable 
 character and conduct up to that time. This was on No- 
 vember 4th, 1839. There was some misunderstanding and 
 delay, as almost invariably happens in such enterprises, and 
 the divisions of the little army did not effect their junction 
 in time. When they entered Newport, they found the au- 
 thorities fully prepared to meet them. Frost entered the 
 town at the head of one division only, another following him 
 at some interval. The third was nowhere, as far as the ob- 
 ject of the enterprise was concerned. A conflict took place 
 between the rioters and the soldiery and police, and the riot- 
 ers were dispersed with a loss of some ten killed and fifty 
 wounded. In their flight they encountered some of the oth- 
 er divisions coming up to the enterprise all too late. Noth- 
 ing was more remarkable than the courage shown by the 
 mayor of Newport, the magistrates, and the little body of 
 soldiers. The mayor, Mr. Phillips, received two gunshot 
 wounds. Frost was arrested next day along with some of 
 his colleagues. They were tried on June 6th, 1840. The 
 charge against them was one of high-treason. There did 
 really appear ground enough to suppose that the expedition 
 led by Frost was not merely to rescue Vincent, but to set 
 going the great rebellious movement of which the physical- 
 force Chartists had long been talking. The Chartists ap- 
 pear at first to have numbered some ten thousand twenty 
 
CHARTISM. 85 
 
 thousand, indeed, according to other accounts and they 
 were armed with guns, pikes, swords, pickaxes, and bludgeons. 
 If the delay and misunderstanding had not taken place, and 
 they had arrived at their rendezvous at the appointed time, 
 the attempt might have led to very calamitous results. The 
 jury found Frost and two of his companions, Williams and 
 Jones, guilty of high-treason, and they were sentenced to 
 death ; the sentence, however, was commuted to one of trans- 
 portation for life. Even this was afterward relaxed, and 
 when some years had passed away, and Chartism had ceased 
 to be a disturbing influence, Frost was allowed to return to 
 England, where he found that a new generation had grown 
 up, and that he was all but forgotten. In the mean time the 
 Corn-law agitation had been successful; the year of revolu- 
 tions had passed harmlessly over; Feargus O'Connor's day 
 was done. 
 
 But the trial and conviction of Frost, Williams, and Jones 
 did not put a stop to the Chartist agitation. On the con- 
 trary, that agitation seemed rather to wax and strengthen 
 and grow broader because of the attempt at Newport and 
 its consequences. Thomas Cooper, for example, had never 
 attended a Chartist meeting, nor known anything of Char- 
 tisru beyond what he read in the newspapers, until after the 
 conviction of Frost and his companions. There was no lack 
 of what were called energetic measures on the part of the 
 Government. The leading Chartists all over the country 
 were prosecuted and tried, literally by hundreds. In most 
 cases they were convicted and sentenced to terms of im- 
 prisonment. The imprisonment served rather to make the 
 Chartist leaders popular, and to advertise the movement, 
 than to accomplish any purpose the Government had at 
 heart. They helped to make the Government very un- 
 popular. The working-classes grew more and more bitter 
 against the Whigs, Avho, they said, had professed Liberalism 
 only to gain their own ends, and were really at heart less 
 Liberal than the Tories. Now and then an imprisoned rep- 
 resentative of the Chartist movement got to the end of his 
 period of sentence, and came out of durance. He was a hero 
 all. over again, and his return to public life was the signal 
 for fresh demonstrations of Charlism. At the general elec- 
 tion of 1841, the vast majority of the Chartists, acting on 
 
86 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the advice of some of their more extreme leaders, threw all 
 their support into the cause of the Tories, and so helped the 
 downfall of the Melbourne Administration. 
 
 Wide and almost universal discontent among the work- 
 ing-classes in town and country still helped to swell the 
 Chartist ranks. The weavers and stockingers in some of 
 the manufacturing towns were miserably poor. Wages 
 were low everywhere. In the agricultural districts the 
 complaints against the operation of the new Poor Law were 
 vehement and passionate; and although they were unjust 
 in principle and sustained by monstrous exaggerations of 
 statement, they were not the less potent as recruiting 
 agents for Chartism. There was a profound distrust of the 
 middle class and their leaders. The Anti-Corn-law agita- 
 tion which was then springing up, and which, one might 
 have thought, must find its most strenuous support among 
 the poor artisans of the towns, was regarded with deep dis- 
 gust by some of the Chartists, and with downright hostility 
 by others. A very temperate orator of the Chartists put 
 the feeling of himself and his fellows in clear terms. " We 
 do not object to the repeal of the Corn Laws," he said ; " on 
 the contrary, when we get the Charter we will repeal the 
 Corn Laws and all the bad laws. But if you give up your 
 agitation for the Charter to help the Free-traders, they will 
 never help you to get the Charter. Don't be deceived by 
 the middle classes again ! You helped them to get the Re- 
 form Bill, and where are the fine promises they made you? 
 Don't listen to their humbug any more. Stick to your 
 Charter. Without your votes you are veritable slaves." 
 The Chartists believed themselves abandoned by their nat- 
 ural leaders. All manner of socialist doctrines began to 
 creep in among them. Wild and infidel opinions were pro- 
 claimed by many. Thomas Cooper tells one little anecdote 
 which he says fairly illustrates the feelings of many of the 
 fiercer spirits among the artisan Chartists in some of the 
 towns. He and his friends were holding a meeting one day 
 in Leicester. A poor religious stockinger said : " Let us be 
 patient a little longer; surely God Almighty will help us 
 soon." "Talk to us no more about thy Goddle Mighty," 
 was the fierce cry that came, in reply, from one of the au- 
 dience ; " there isn't one ! If there was one, he wouldn't let 
 
CHAKTISM. 87 
 
 us suffer as we do !" About the same time a poor stocking- 
 er rushed into Cooper's house, and throwing himself wildly 
 on a chair, exclaimed, " I wish they would hang me ! I have 
 lived on cold potatoes that were given me these two days, 
 and this morning I've eaten a raw potato for sheer hunger. 
 Give me a bit of bread and a cup of coffee, or I shall drop !" 
 Thomas Cooper's remark about this time is very intelligi- 
 ble and simple. It tells a long, clear story about Chartism. 
 " How fierce," he says, " my discourses became now in the 
 Market-place on Sunday evenings ! My heart often burned 
 with indignation I knew not how to express. I began, from 
 sheer sympathy, to feel a tendency to glide into the depraved 
 thinking of some of the stronger but coarser spirits among 
 the men." 
 
 So the agitation went on. We need not follow it through 
 all its incidents. It took in some places the form of indus- 
 trial strikes; in others, of socialistic assemblages. Its fanat- 
 icism had in many instances a strong flavor of nobleness and 
 virtue. Some men under the influence of thoughtful lead- 
 ers pledged themselves to total abstinence from intoxicating 
 drinks, in the full belief that the agitation would never suc- 
 ceed until the working-classes had proved themselves, by 
 their self-control, to be worthy of the gift of freedom. In 
 other instances, as has been already remarked, the disap- 
 pointment and despair of the people took the form of infi- 
 delity. There were many riots and disturbances ; none, in- 
 deed, of so seemingly rebellious a nature as that of Frost 
 and his companions, but many serious enough to spread 
 great alarm, and to furnish fresh occasion for Government 
 prosecutions and imprisonments. Some of the prisoners 
 seem to have been really treated with a positively wanton 
 harshness and even cruelty. Thomas Cooper's account of 
 his own sufferings in prison is painful to read. It is not 
 easy to understand what good purpose any Government 
 could have supposed the prison authorities were serving 
 by the unnecessary degradation and privation of men who, 
 whatever their errors, were conspicuously and transparently 
 sincere and honest. 
 
 It is clear that at that time the Chartists, who represented 
 the bulk of the artisan class in most of the large towns, did 
 in their very-hearts believe that England was ruled for the 
 

 88 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 benefit of aristocrats and millionnaires who were absolutely 
 indifferent to the sufferings of the poor. It is equally clear 
 that most of what are called the ruling class did really be- 
 lieve the English working-men who joined the Chartist move- 
 ment to be a race of fierce, unmanageable, and selfish com- 
 munists who, if they were allowed their own way for a 
 moment, would prove themselves determined to overthrow 
 throne, altar, and all established securities of society. An 
 ignorant panic prevailed on both sides. England was in- 
 deed divided then, as Mr. Disraeli's novel described it, into 
 two nations, the rich and the poor, in towns at least ; and 
 each hated and feared the other with all that unthinking 
 hate and fear which hostile nations are capable of showing 
 even amidst all the influences of civilization. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 QUESTION DE JUPONS. 
 
 MEANWHILE things were looking ill with the Melbourne 
 Ministry. Sir Robert Peel was addressing great meetings 
 of his followers, and declaring with much show of justice 
 that he had created anew the Conservative party. The po- 
 sition of the Whigs would in any case have been difficult. 
 Their mandate, to use the French phrase, seemed to be ex- 
 hausted. They had no new thing to propose. They came 
 into power as reformers, and now they had nothing to offer 
 in the way of reform. It may be taken as a certainty that 
 in English politics reaction must always follow advance. 
 The Whigs must just then have come in for the effects of 
 reaction. But they had more than that to contend with. 
 In our own time, Mr. Gladstone had no sooner passed his 
 great measures of reform than he began to experience the 
 effects of reaction. But there was a great difference be- 
 tween his situation and that of the Whigs under Melbourne. 
 He had not failed to satisfy the demands of his followers. 
 He had no extreme wing of his party clamoring against him 
 on the ground that he had made use of their strength to 
 help him in carrying out as much of his programme as suit- 
 ed his own coterie, and that he had then deserted them. This 
 
, QUESTION DE JUPONS. 89 
 
 was the condition of the Whigs. The more advanced Lib- 
 erals and the whole body of the Chartists, and the working- 
 classes generally, detested and denounced them. Many of 
 the Liberals had had some hope while Lord Durham still 
 seemed likely to be a political power, but with the fading 
 of his influence they lost all interest in the Whig Ministry. 
 On the other hand, the support of O'Connell was a serious 
 disadvantage to Melbourne and his party in England. 
 
 But the Whig ministers were always adding by some 
 mistake or other to the difficulties of their position. The 
 Jamaica Bill put them in great perplexity. This was a 
 measure brought in on April 9th, 1839, to make temporary 
 provision for the government of the island of Jamaica, by 
 setting aside the House of Assembly for five years, and dur- 
 ing that time empowering the governor and council with 
 three salaried commissioners to manage the affairs of the 
 colony. In other words, the Melbourne Ministry proposed 
 to suspend for five years the constitution of Jamaica. No 
 body of persons can be more awkwardly placed than a Whig 
 Ministry proposing to set aside a constitutional government 
 anywhere. Such a proposal may be a necessary measure ; 
 it may be unavoidable; but it always comes with a bad 
 grace from Whigs or Liberals, and gives their enemies a 
 handle against them which they cannot fail to use to some 
 purpose. What, indeed, it may be plausibly asked, is the 
 raison d'etre of a Liberal Government, if they have to re- 
 turn to the old Tory policy of suspended constitutions and 
 absolute law? When Rabagas, become minister, tells his 
 master that the only way to silence discontent is by the lit- 
 eral use of the cannon, the Prince of Monaco remarks very 
 naturally that if that was to be the policy, he might as well 
 have kept to his old ministers and his absolutism. So it is 
 with an English Liberal Ministry advising the suspension 
 of constitutions. 
 
 In the case of the Jamaica Bill there was some excuse for 
 the harsh policy. After the abolition of slavery, the former 
 masters in the island found it veiy hard to reconcile them- 
 selves to the new condition of things. They could not all 
 at once understand that their former slaves were to be their 
 equals before the law. As we have seen much more lately 
 in the Southern States of America, after the civil war and 
 
90 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the emancipation of the negroes, there was still a pertina- 
 cious attempt made by the planter class to regain in sub- 
 stance the power they had had to renounce in name. This 
 was not to be justified or excused; but, as human nature is 
 made, it was not unnatural. On the other hand, some of the 
 Jamaica negroes were too ignorant to understand that they 
 had acquired any rights; others were a little too clamor- 
 ous in their assertion. Many a planter worked his men and 
 whipped his women just as before the emancipation, and 
 the victims did not understand that they had any right 
 to complain. Many negroes, again, were ignorantly and 
 thoughtlessly " bumptious," to use a vulgar expression, in 
 the assertion of their newly-found equality. The imperial 
 governors and officials were generally and justly eager to 
 protect the negroes ; and the result was a constant quarrel 
 between the Jamaica House of Assembly and the represent- 
 atives of the home Government. The Assembly became 
 more insolent and offensive every day. A bill, very neces- 
 sary in itself, was passed by the imperial Parliament for the 
 better regulation of prisons in Jamaica, and the House of 
 Assembly refused to submit to any such legislation. Under 
 these circumstances, the Melbourne Ministry proposed the 
 suspension of the constitution of the island. The measure 
 was opposed not only by Peel and the Conservatives, but 
 by many Radicals. It was argued that there were many 
 courses open to the ministry short of the high-handed pro- 
 ceeding they proposed; and, in truth, there was not that 
 confidence in the Melbourne Ministry at all which would 
 have enabled them to obtain from Parliament a majority 
 sufficient to carry through such, a policy. The ministry was 
 weak and discredited ; anybody might now throw a stone 
 at it. They only had a majority of five in favor of their 
 measure. This, of course, was a virtual defeat. The minis- 
 try acknowledged it, and resigned. Their defeat was a hu- 
 miliation ; their resignation an inevitable submission ; but 
 they came back to office almost immediately under condi- 
 tions that made the humiliation more humbling, and ren- 
 dered their subsequent career more difficult by far than 
 their past struggle for existence had been. 
 
 The return of the Whigs to office for they cannot be 
 said to have returned to power came about in a very odd 
 
QUESTION DE JUPONS. 91 
 
 way. Gulliver ought to have had an opportunity of telling 
 such a story to the king of the Brobdingnagians, in order 
 the better to impress him with a clear idea of the logical 
 beauty of constitutional government. It was an entirely 
 new illustration of the old cherchez la femme principle, the 
 femme in this case, however, being altogether a passive and 
 innocent cause of trouble. The famous controversy known 
 as the " Bedchamber Question " made a way back for the 
 Whigs into place. When Lord Melbourne resigned, the 
 Queen sent for the Duke of Wellington, who advised her to 
 apply to Sir Robert Peel, for the reason that the chief dif- 
 ficulties of a Conservative Government would be in the 
 House of Commons. The Queen sent for Peel, and when he 
 came, told him, with a simple and girlish frankness, that she 
 was sorry to have to part with her late ministers, of whose 
 conduct she entirely approved, but that she bowed to con- 
 stitutional usage. This must have been rather an astonish- 
 ing beginning to the grave and formal Peel ; but he was not 
 a man to think any worse of the candid young sovereign 
 for her outspoken ways. The negotiations went on very 
 smoothly as to the colleagues Peel meant to recommend to 
 her Majesty, until he happened to notice the composition of 
 the royal household as regarded the ladies most closely in 
 attendance on the Queen. For example, he found that the 
 wife of Lord Normanby and the sister of Lord Morpeth 
 were the two ladies in closest attendance on her Majesty. 
 Now it has to be borne in mind it was proclaimed again 
 and again during the negotiations that the chief difficulty 
 of the Conservatives would necessarily be in Ireland, where 
 their policy would be altogether opposed to that of the 
 Whigs. Lord Normanby had been Lord-lieutenant of Ire- 
 land under the Whigs, and Lord Morpeth, whom we can all 
 remember as the amiable and accomplished Lord Carlisle of 
 later time, Irish Secretary. It certainly could not be satis- 
 factory for Peel to try to work a new Irish policy while the 
 closest household companions of the Queen were the wife 
 and sister of the displaced statesmen who directly represent- 
 ed the policy he had to supersede. Had this point of view 
 been made clear to the sovereign at first, it is hardly possi- 
 ble that any serious difficulty could have arisen. The Queen 
 must have seen the obvious reasonableness of Peel's request; 
 
92 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 nor is it to be supposed that the two ladies in question could 
 have desired to hold their places under such circumstances. 
 But unluckily some misunderstanding took place at the very 
 beginning of the conversations on this point. Peel only de- 
 sired to press for the retirement of the ladies holding the 
 higher offices; he did not intend to ask for any change af- 
 fecting a place lower in official rank than that of lady of the 
 bedchamber. But somehow or other he conveyed to the 
 mind of the Queen a different idea. She thought he meant 
 to insist, as a matter of principle, upon the removal of all 
 her familiar attendants and household associates. Under 
 this impression she consulted Lord John Russell, who ad- 
 vised her on what he understood to be the state of the facts. 
 On his advice, the Queen stated in reply that she could not 
 " consent to a course which she conceives to be contrary to 
 usage and is repugnant to her feelings." Sir Robert Peel 
 held firm to his stipulation ; and the chance of his then form- 
 ing a ministry was at an end. Lord Melbourne and his col- 
 leagues had to be recalled ; and at a cabinet meeting they 
 adopted a minute declaring it reasonable " that the great 
 offices of the Court and situations in the household held by 
 members of Parliament should be included in the political 
 arrangements made on a change in the Administration ; but 
 they are not of opinion that a similar principle should be 
 applied or extended to the offices held by ladies in her Maj- 
 esty's household." 
 
 The matter was naturally made the subject of explana- 
 tion in both Houses of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel was 
 undoubtedly right in his view of the question, and if he had 
 been clearly understood the right could hardly have been 
 disputed; but he defended his position in language of what 
 now seems rather ludicrous exaggeration. He treated this 
 question de jupons as if it were of the last importance not 
 alone to the honor of the ministry, but even to the safety 
 of the realm. " I ask you," he said, " to go back to other 
 times : take Pitt or Fox, or any other minister of this proud 
 country, and answer for yourselves the question, is it fitting 
 that one man shall be the minister, responsible for the most 
 arduous charge that can fall to the lot of man, and that the 
 wife of the other that other his most formidable political 
 enemy shall, with his express consent, hold office in imme- 
 
QUESTION DE JUPONS. 93 
 
 diate attendance on the sovereign ?" " Oh, no !" he ex- 
 claimed, in an outburst of indignant eloquence. "I felt 
 that it was impossible ; I could not consent to this. Feel- 
 ings more powerful than reasoning told me that it was not 
 for my own honor or for the public interests that I should 
 consent to be minister of England." This high-flown Ian- 
 
 o o 
 
 guage seems oddly out of place on the lips of a statesman 
 who, of all his contemporaries, was the least apt to indulge 
 in bursts of overwrought sentiment. Lord Melbourne, on 
 the other hand, defended his action in the House of Lords 
 in language of equal exaggeration. " I resume oifice," he 
 said, "unequivocally and solely for this reason, that I will 
 not desert my sovereign in a situation of difficulty and dis- 
 tress, especially when a demand is made upon her Majesty 
 with which I think she ought not to comply a demand in- 
 consistent with her personal honor, and which, if acquiesced 
 in, would render her reign liable to all the changes and va- 
 riations of political parties, and make her domestic life one 
 constant scene of unhappiness and discomfort." 
 
 In the country the incident created great excitement. 
 Some Liberals bluntly insisted that it was not right in such 
 a matter to consult the feelings of the sovereign at all, and 
 that the advice of the minister, and his idea of what was for 
 the good of the country, ought alone to be considered. On 
 the other hand, O'Connell burst into impassioned language 
 of praise and delight, as he dwelt upon the decision of the 
 Queen, and called upon the Powers above to bless "the 
 young creature that creature of only nineteen, as pure as 
 she is exalted," who consulted not her head, but " the ovei ! - 
 flowing feelings of her young heart." "Those excellent 
 women who had been so long attached to her, who had 
 nursed and tended to her wants in her childhood, who had 
 watched over her in her sickness, whose eyes beamed with 
 delight as they saw her increasing daily in beauty and in 
 loveliness when they were threatened to be forced away 
 from her her heart told her that she could as well part 
 with that heart itself as with those whom it held so dear." 
 Feargns O'Connor went a good deal farther, however, when 
 he boldly declared that he had excellent authority for the 
 statement that if the Tories had got the young Queen into 
 their hands by the agency of the new ladies of the bed- 
 
94 A HISTORY OF OUB OWN TIMES. 
 
 chamber, they had a plan for putting her out of the way 
 and placing "the bloody Cumberland" on the throne in her 
 stead. In O'ConnelPs case, no mystery was made of the 
 fact that he believed the ladies actually surrounding the 
 young Queen to be friendly to what he considered the cause 
 of Ireland ; and that he was satisfied Peel and the Tories 
 were against it. For the wild talk represented by the 
 words of Feargus O'Connor, it is only necessary to say that, 
 frenzied and foolish as it must seem now to us, and as it 
 must even then have seemed to all rational beings, it had 
 the firm acceptance of large masses of people throughout 
 the country, who persisted in seeing in Peel's pleadings for 
 the change of the bedchamber women the positive evidence 
 of an unscrupulous Tory plot to get possession of the Queen's 
 person, not indeed for the purpose of violently altering the 
 succession, but in the hope of poisoning her mind against all 
 Liberal opinions. 
 
 Lord Brougham was not likely to lose so good an oppor- 
 tunity of attacking Lord Melbourne and his colleagues. He 
 insisted that Lord Melbourne had sacrificed Liberal princi- 
 ples and the interests of the country to the private feelings 
 of the sovereign. " I thought," he declared, in a burst of 
 eloquent passion, " that we belonged to a country in which 
 the government by the Crown and the wisdom of Parlia- 
 ment was everything, and the personal feelings of the sov- 
 ereign were absolutely not to be named at the same time. 
 ' I little thought to have lived to hear it said by the 
 Whigs of 1839, 'Let us rally round the Queen; never 
 mind the House of Commons; never mind measures; throw 
 principles to the dogs ; leave pledges unredeemed ; but for 
 God's sake rally round the throne.' Little did I think the 
 day would come when I should hear such language, not 
 from the unconstitutional, place-hunting, king-loving Tories, 
 who thought the public was made for the king, not the king 
 for the public, but from the Whigs themselves ! The Ja- 
 maica Bill, said to be a most important measure, had been 
 brought forward. The Government staked their existence 
 upon it. They were not able to carry it; they therefore 
 conceived they had lost the confidence of the House of Com- 
 mons. They thought it a measure of paramount necessity 
 then. Is it less necessary now? Oh, but that is altered ! The 
 
QUESTION DE JUPONS. 95 
 
 Jamaica question is to be new-fashioned; principles are to be 
 given up, and all because of two ladies of the bedchamber." 
 Nothing could be more undesirable than the position in 
 which Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had allowed the 
 sovereign to place herself. The more people in general 
 came to think over the matter, the more clearly it was seen 
 that Peel was in the right, although he had not made him- 
 self understood at first, and had, perhaps, not shown all 
 through enough of consideration for the novelty of the 
 young sovereign's position, or for the difficulty of finding 
 a conclusive precedent on such a question, seeing that since 
 the principle of ministerial responsibility had come to be 
 recognized among us in its genuine sense, there never before 
 had been a woman on the throne. But no one could de- 
 liberately maintain the position at first taken up by the 
 Whigs ; and, in point of fact, they were soon glad to drop 
 it as quickly and quietly as possible. The whole question, 
 it may be said at once, was afterward settled by a sensi- 
 ble compromise which the Prince Consort suggested. It 
 was agreed that on a change of ministry the Queen would 
 listen to any representation from the incoming Prime-min- 
 ister as to the composition of her household, and would ar- 
 range. for the retirement, "of their own accord," of any la- 
 dies who were so closely related to the leaders "of Opposi- 
 tion as to render their presence inconvenient. The Whigs 
 came back to office utterly discredited. They had to tinker 
 up somehow a new Jamaica Bill. They had declared that 
 they could not remain in office unless they were allowed 
 to deal in a certain way with Jamaica; and now that they 
 were back again in office, they could not avoid trying to do 
 something with the Jamaica business. They, therefore, in- 
 troduced a new bill, which was a mere compromise put to- 
 gether in the hope of its being allowed to pass. It was al- 
 lowed to pass, after a fashion ; that is, when the Opposition 
 in the House of Lords had tinkered it and amended it at 
 their pleasure. The bedchamber question, in fact, had thrown 
 Jamaica out of perspective. The unfortunate island must 
 do the best it could now; in this country statesmen had 
 graver matter to think of. Sir Robert Peel could not gov- 
 ern with Lady Normanby ; the Whigs would not govern 
 Avithout her. 
 
96 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 It does not seem by any means clear, however, that Lord 
 Melbourne and his colleagues deserved the savage censure 
 
 o o 
 
 of Lord Brougham merely for having returned to office and 
 given up their original position with regard to the Jamaica 
 Bill. What else remained to be done? If they had refused 
 to come back, the only result would have been that Peel 
 must have become Prime-minister, with a distinct minority 
 in the House of Commons. Peel could not have held his 
 ground there, except by the favor and mercy of his oppo- 
 nents; and those were not merciful days in politics. He 
 would only have taken office to be called upon at once to 
 resign it by some adverse vote of the House of Commons. 
 The state of things seems, in this respect, to be not unlike 
 that which existed when Mr. Gladstone was defeated on the 
 Irish University Bill in 1873. Mr. Gladstone resigned, or 
 rather tendered his resignation; and by his advice her Maj- 
 esty invited Mr. Disraeli to form a cabinet. Mr. Disraeli did 
 not see his way to undertake the government of the country 
 with the existing House of Commons ; and as the conditions 
 under which he was willing to undertake the duty were not 
 conveniently attainable, the negotiation came to an end. 
 The Queen sent again for Mr. Gladstone, who consented to 
 resume his place as Prime-minister. If Lord Melbourne re- 
 turned to office with the knowledge that he could not carry 
 the Jamaica Bill, which he had declared to be necessary, Mr. 
 Gladstone resumed his place at the head of his ministry with- 
 out the remotest hope of being able to carry his Irish Uni- 
 versity measure. No one ever found fault with Mr. Glad- 
 stone for having, under the circumstances, done the best he 
 could, and consented to meet the request of the sovereign 
 and the convenience of the public service by again taking on 
 himself the responsibility of government, although the meas- 
 ure on which he had declared he would stake the existence 
 of his ministry had been rejected by the House of Commons. 
 Still, it cannot be denied that the Melbourne Government 
 were prejudiced in the public mind by these events, and by 
 the attacks for which they gave so large an opportunity. 
 The feeling in some parts of the country was still sentimen- 
 tally with the Queen. At many a dinner-table it became the 
 fashion to drink the health of her Majesty with a punning 
 addition, not belonging to an order of wit any higher than 
 
QUESTION DE JUPONS. 97 
 
 that which in other days toasted the King " over the water;" 
 or prayed of heaven to " send this crumb well down." The 
 Queen was toasted as the sovereign of spirit who " would 
 not let her belles be peeled." But the ministry were almost 
 universally believed to have placed themselves in a ridicu- 
 lous light, and to have crept again into office, as an able 
 writer puts it, "behind the petticoats of the ladies in wait- 
 ing." The death of Lady Flora Hastings, which occurred 
 almost immediately, tended further to arouse a feeling of 
 dislike to the Whigs. This melancholy event does not need 
 any lengthened comment. A young lady who belonged to 
 the household of the Duchess of Kent fell under an unfound- 
 ed, but, in the circumstances, not wholly unreasonable, sus- 
 picion. It was the classic story of Calisto, Diana's unhappy 
 nymph, reversed. Lady Flora was proved to be innocent; 
 but her death, imminent probably in any case from the dis- 
 ease which had fastened on her, was doubtless hastened by 
 the humiliation to which she had been subjected. It does 
 not seem that any one was to blame in the matter. The 
 ministry certainly do not appear to have done anything 
 for which they could fairly be reproached. No one can 
 be surprised that those who surrounded the Queen and the 
 Duchess of Kent should have taken some pains to inquire 
 into the truth or falsehood of scandalous rumors, for which 
 there might have appeared to be some obvious justification. 
 But the whole story was so sad and shocking ; the death of 
 the poor young lady followed with such tragic rapidity upon 
 the establishment of her innocence; the natural complaints 
 of her mother were so loud and impassioned, that the minis- 
 ters who had to answer the mother's appfeals were unavoid- 
 ably placed in an invidious and a painful position. The de- 
 mands of the Marchioness of Hastings for redress were un- 
 reasonable. They endeavored to make out the existence of 
 a cruel conspiracy against Lady Flora, and called for the 
 peremptory dismissal and disgrace of the eminent court phy- 
 sician, who had merely performed a most painful duty, and 
 whose report had been the especial means of establishing the 
 injustice of the suspicions which were directed against her. 
 But it was a damaging duty for a minister to have to write 
 to the distracted mother, as Lord Melbourne found it nec- 
 essary to do, telling her that her demand was " so unprece- 
 I. 5 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 dented and objectionable, that even the respect due to your 
 ladyship's sex, rank, family, and character would not justify 
 me in more, if, indeed, it authorizes so much, than acknowl- 
 edging that letter for the sole purpose of acquainting your 
 ladyship that I have received it." The "Palace scandal," 
 as it was called, became known shortly before the dispute 
 about the ladies of the bedchamber. The death of Lady 
 Flora Hastings happened soon after it. It is not strictly in 
 logical propriety that such events, or their rapid succession, 
 should tend to bring into disrepute the ministry, who can 
 only be regarded as their historical contemporaries. But 
 the world must change a great deal before ministers are no 
 longer held accountable in public opinion for anything but 
 the events over which they can be shown to have some 
 control. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 
 
 ON January 16th, 1840, the Queen, opening Parliament in 
 person, announced her intention to marry her cousin, Prince 
 Albert of Saxe-Goburg-Gotha a step which she trusted 
 would be "conducive to the interests of my people as well 
 as to- my own domestic happiness." In the discussion which 
 followed in the House of Commons, Sir Robert Peel ob- 
 served that her Majesty had " the singular good fortune to 
 be able to gratify her private feelings, while she performs 
 her public duty, and to obtain the best guarantee for happi- 
 ness by contracting an alliance founded on affection." Peel 
 spoke the simple truth ; it was, indeed, a marriage founded 
 on affection. No marriage contracted in the humblest class 
 could have been more entirely a union of love, and more 
 free from what might be called selfish and worldly considera- 
 tions. The Queen had for a long time loved her cousin. He 
 was nearly her own age, the Queen being the elder by three 
 months and two or three days. Francis Charles Augustus 
 Albert Emmanuel was the full name of the young Prince. 
 He was the second son of Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg- 
 Saalfeld, and of his wife Louisa, daughter of Augustus, Duke 
 of Saxe-Gotha-Altenbenr. Prince Albert was born at the 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 99 
 
 Rosenau, one of his father's residences, near Coburg, on Au- 
 gust 26th, 1J319. The court historian notices with pardon- 
 able complacency the " remarkable coincidence " easily ex- 
 plained, surely that the same accoucheuse, Madame Siebold, 
 assisted at the birth of Prince Albert, and of the Queen some 
 three months before, and that the Prince was baptized by 
 the clergyman, Professor Genzler, who had the year before 
 officiated at the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. 
 A marriage between the Princess Victoria and Prince Albert 
 had been thought of as desirable among the families on both 
 sides, but it was always wisely resolved that nothing should 
 be said to the young Princess on the subject unless she her- 
 self showed a distinct liking for her cousin. In 1836 Prince 
 Albert was brought by his father to England, and made the 
 personal acquaintance of the Princess, and she seems at once 
 to have been drawn toward him in the manner which her 
 family and friends would most have desired. Three years 
 later the Prince again came to England, and the Queen, in a 
 letter to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote of him 
 in the warmest terms. "Albert's beauty," she said, "is 
 most striking, and he is most amiable and unaffected in 
 short, very fascinating." Not many days after she wrote to 
 another friend and faithful counsellor, the Baron Stockmar, 
 to say, "I do feel so guilty I know not how to begin my let- 
 ter; but I think the news it will contain will be sufficient 
 to insure your forgiveness. Albert has completely won my 
 heart, and all was settled between us this morning." The 
 Queen had just before informed Lord Melbourne of her in- 
 tention, and Lord Melbourne, it is needless to say, expressed 
 his decided approval. There was no one to disapprove of 
 such a marriage. 
 
 Prince Albert was a young man to win the heart of any 
 girl. He was singularly handsome, graceful, and gifted. 
 In princes, as we know, a small measure of beauty and ac- 
 complishment suffices to throw courtiers and court ladies 
 into transports of admiration ; but had Prince Albert been 
 the son of a farmer or a butler, he must have been admired 
 for his singular personal attractions. He had had a sound 
 and a varied education. He had been brought up as if he 
 were to be a professional musician, a professional chemist or 
 botanist, and a professor of history and belles-lettres and the 
 
100 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 fine arts. The scientific and the literary were remarkably 
 blended in his bringing-up ; remarkably, that is to say, for 
 some half-century ago, when even in Germany a system of 
 education seldom aimed at being totus, teres atque rotundus. 
 He had begun to study the constitutional history of States, 
 and was preparing himself to take an interest in politics. 
 There was much of the practical and business-like about him, 
 as he showed in after-life ; he loved farming, and took a deep 
 interest in machinery and in the growth of industrial science. 
 He was a sort of combination of the troubadour, the savant, 
 and the man of business. His tastes were for a quiet, domes- 
 tic, and unostentatious life a life of refined culture, of happy, 
 calm evenings, of art and poetry and genial communion with 
 Nature. He was made happy by the songs of birds, and de- 
 lighted in sitting alone and playing the organ. But there 
 was in him, too, a great deal of the political philosopher. 
 He loved to hear political and other questions well argued 
 out, and once observed that a false argument jarred on his 
 nerves as much as a false note in music. He seems to have 
 had from his youth an all-pervading sense of duty. So far 
 as we can guess, he was almost absolutely free from the 
 ordinary follies, not to say sins, of youth. Young as he was 
 when he married the Queen, he devoted himself at once to 
 what he conscientiously believed to be the duties of his sta- 
 tion with a self-control and self-devotion rare even among 
 the aged, and almost unknown in youth. He gave up every 
 habit, however familiar and dear, every predilection, no mat- 
 ter how sweet, every indulgence of sentiment or amusement 
 that in any way threatened to interfere with the steadfast 
 performance of the part he had assigned to himself. No 
 man ever devoted himself more faithfully to the difficult 
 duties of a high and a new situation, or kept more strictly 
 to his resolve. It was no task to him to be a tender hus- 
 band and a loving father. This was a part of his sweet, 
 pure, and affectionate nature. It may well be doubted 
 whether any other queen ever had a married life so happy 
 as that of Queen Victoria. 
 
 The marriage of the Queen and the Prince took place on 
 February 10th, 1840. The reception given by the people in 
 general to the Prince on his landing in England a few days 
 before the ceremony, and on the day of the marriage, was 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 101 
 
 cordial, and even enthusiastic. But it is not certain whether 
 there was a very cordial feeling to the Prince among all 
 classes of politicians. A rumor of the most absurd kind 
 had got abroad in certain circles that the young Albert was 
 not a Protestant that he was, in fact, a member of the 
 Church of Rome. In a different circle the belief was curi- 
 ously cherished that the Prince was a free-thinker in mat- 
 ters of religion, and a radical in politics. Somewhat unfort- 
 unately, the declaration of the intended marriage to the 
 privy council did not mention the fact that Albert was a 
 Protestant Prince. The cabinet no doubt thought that the 
 leaders of public opinion on all sides of politics would have 
 had historical knowledge among them to teach them that 
 Prince Albert belonged to that branch of the Saxon family 
 which since the Reformation had been conspicuously Prot- 
 estant. "There has not," Prince Albert himself wrote to 
 the Queen on December 7th, 1839, "been a single Catholic 
 princess introduced into the Coburg family since the appear- 
 ance of Luther in 1521. Moreover, the Elector Frederick 
 the Wise of Saxony was the very first Protestant that ever 
 lived." No doubt the ministry thought also that the con- 
 stitutional rule which forbids an English sovereign to mar- 
 ry with a Roman Catholic under penalty of forfeiting the 
 crown, would be regarded as a sufficient guarantee that 
 when they announced the Queen's approaching marriage it 
 must be a marriage with a Protestant. All this assumption, 
 however reasonable and natural, did not find warrant in the 
 events that actually took place. It would have been better, 
 of course, if the Government had assuined that Parliament 
 and the public generally knew nothing about the Prince and 
 his ancestry, or the constitutional penalties for a member of 
 the Royal Family marrying a Catholic, and had formally 
 announced that the choice of Queen Victoria had happily 
 fallen on a Protestant. The wise and foreseeing Leopold, 
 King of the Belgians, had recommended that the fact should 
 be specifically mentioned ; but it was, perhaps, a part of Lord 
 Melbourne's indolent good-nature to take it for granted that 
 people generally would be cairn and reasonable, and that all 
 would go right without interruption or cavil. He therefore 
 acted on the assumption that any formal mention of Prince 
 Albert's Protestantism would be superfluous; and neither 
 
102 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 in the declaration to the privy council nor in the announce- 
 ment to Parliament was a word said upon the subject. The 
 result was that in the debate on the address in the House 
 of Lords a somewhat unseemly altercation took place, an al- 
 tercation the more to be regretted because it might have 
 been so easily spared. The question was bluntly raised by 
 no less a person than the Duke of Wellington whether the 
 future husband of the Queen was or was not a Protestant. 
 The Duke actually charged the ministry with having pur- 
 posely left out the word "Protestant" in the announce- 
 ments, in order that they might not offend their Irish and 
 Catholic supporters, and by the very charge did much to 
 strengthen the popular feeling against the statesmen who 
 were supposed to be kept in office by virtue of the patron- 
 age of O'Connell. The Duke moved that the word "Prot- 
 
 o 
 
 estant" be inserted in the congratulatory address to the 
 Queen, and he carried his point, although Lord Melbourne 
 held to the opinion that the word was unnecessary in de- 
 scribing a Prince who was not only a Protestant, but de- 
 scended from the most Protestant family in Europe. The 
 lack of judgment and tact on the part of the ministry was 
 never more clearly shown than in the original omission of 
 the word. 
 
 Another disagreeable occurrence was the discussion that 
 took place when the bill for the naturalization of the Prince 
 was brought before the House of Lords. The bill in its title 
 merely set out the proposal to provide for the naturalization 
 of the Prince ; but it contained a clause to give him prece- 
 dence for life "next after her Majesty, in Parliament or else- 
 where, as her Majesty might think proper." A great deal 
 of objection was raised by the Duke of Wellington and Lord 
 Brougham to this clause on its own merits ; but, as was nat- 
 ural, the objections were infinitely aggravated by the singu- 
 lar want of judgment, and even of common propriety, which 
 could introduce a clause conferring on the sovereign powers 
 so large and so new into a mere naturalization bill, without 
 any previous notice to Parliament. The matter Avas ulti- 
 mately settled by allowing the bill to remain a simple nat- 
 uralization measure, and leaving the question of precedence 
 to be dealt with by Royal prerogative. Both the great po- 
 litical parties concurred, without further difficulty, in an ar- 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 103 
 
 rangement by which it was provided in letters-patent that 
 the Prince should thenceforth upon all occasions, and in all 
 meetings, except when otherwise provided by Act of Par- 
 liament, have precedence next to the Queen. There never 
 would have been any difficulty in the matter if the ministry 
 had acted with any discretion ; but it would be absurd to 
 expect that a great nation, whose constitutional system is 
 built up of precedents, should agree at once and without de- 
 mur to every new arrangement which it might seem conven- 
 ient to a ministry to make in a hurry. Yet another source 
 of dissatisfaction to the palace and the people was created 
 by the manner in which the ministry took upon themselves 
 to bring forward the proposition for the settlement of an 
 annuity on the Prince. In former cases that, for exam- 
 ple, of Queen Charlotte, Queen Adelaide, and Prince Leopold 
 on his marriage with the Princess Charlotte the annuity 
 granted had been 50,000. It so happened, however, that 
 the settlement to be made on Prince Albert came in times 
 of great industrial and commercial distress. The days had 
 gone by when economy in the House of Commons was looked 
 upon as an ignoble principle, and when loyalty to the sover- 
 eign was believed to bind members of Parliament to grant, 
 Avithout a murmur of discussion, any sums that might be 
 asked by the minister in the sovereign's name. Parliament 
 was beginning to feel more thoroughly its responsibility as 
 the guardian of the nation's resources, and it was no longer 
 thought a fine thing to give away the money of the tax-pay- 
 er with magnanimous indifference. It was, therefore, absurd 
 on the part of the ministry to suppose 'that because great 
 sums of money had been voted without question on former 
 occasions, they would be voted without question now. It is 
 quite possible that the whole matter might have been set- 
 tled without controversy if the ministry had shown any 
 judgment whatever in their conduct of the business. In 
 our day the ministry would at once have consulted the lead- 
 ers of the Opposition. In all matters where the grant of 
 money to any one connected with the sovereign is concern- 
 ed, it is now understood that the gift shall come with the 
 full concurrence of both parties in Parliament. The leader 
 of the House of Commons would probably, by arrangement, 
 propose the grant, and the leader of the Opposition would 
 
104 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 second it. In the case of the annuity to Prince Albert, the 
 ministry had the almost incredible folly to bring forward 
 their proposal without having invited in any way the con- 
 currence of the Opposition. They introduced the proposal 
 without discretion; they conducted the discussion on it 
 without temper. They answered the most reasonable objec- 
 tions with imputations of want of loyalty ; and they gave 
 some excuse for the suspicion that they wished to provoke 
 the Opposition into some expression that might make them 
 odious to the Queen and the Prince. Mr. Hume, the econo- 
 mist, proposed that the annuity be reduced from .50,000 to 
 21,000. This was negatived. Thereupon Colonel Sibthorp, 
 a once famous Tory fanatic of the most eccentric manners 
 and opinions, proposed that the sum be 30,000, and he re- 
 ceived the support of Sir Robert Peel and other eminent 
 members of the Opposition; and the amendment was carried. 
 
 These were not auspicious incidents to prelude the Royal 
 marriage. There can be no doubt that for a time the Queen, 
 still more than the Prince, felt their influence keenly. The 
 Prince showed remarkable good -sense and appreciation of 
 the condition of political arrangements in England, and read- 
 ily comprehended that there was nothing personal to him- 
 self in any objections which the House of Commons might 
 have made to the proposals of the ministry. The question 
 of precedence was very easily settled when it came to be 
 discussed in reasonable fashion ; although it was not until 
 many years after (1857) that the title of Prince Consort was 
 given to the husband of the Queen. 
 
 A few months after the marriage, a bill was passed provid- 
 ing for a regency in the possible event of the death of the 
 Queen, leaving issue. With the entire concurrence of the lead- 
 ers of the Opposition, who were consulted this time, Prince 
 Albert was named Regent, following the precedent which had 
 been adopted in the instance of the Princess Charlotte and 
 Prince Leopold. The Duke of Sussex, uncle of the Queen, 
 alone dissented in the House of Lords, and recorded his pro- 
 test against the proposal. The passing of this bill was nat- 
 urally regarded as of much importance to Prince Albert. It 
 gave him to some extent the status in the country which he 
 had not had before. It also proved that the Prince him- 
 self had risen in the estimation of the Tory party during the 
 
THE QUEEN'S MAKRIAGE. 105 
 
 few months that elapsed since the debates on the annuity 
 and the question of precedence. No one could have started 
 with a more resolute determination to stand clear of party 
 politics than Prince Albert. He accepted at once his posi- 
 tion as the husband of the Queen of a constitutional coun- 
 try. His own idea of his duty was that he should be the 
 private secretary and unofficial counsellor of the Queen. 
 To this purpose he devoted himself unswervingly. Outside 
 that part of his duties, he constituted himself a sort of min- 
 ister without portfolio of art and education. He took an 
 interest, and often a leading part, in all projects and move- 
 ments relating to the spread of education, the culture of art, 
 and the promotion of industrial science. Yet it was long 
 before he was thoroughly understood by the country. It 
 was long before he became in any degree popular; and it 
 may be doubted whether he ever was thoroughly and gen- 
 erally popular. Not, perhaps, until his untimely deatli did 
 the country find out how entirely disinterested and faith- 
 ful his life had been, and how he had made the discharge 
 of duty his business and his task. His character was one 
 which is liable to be regarded by ordinary observers as 
 possessing none but negative virtues. He was thought to 
 be cold, formal, and apathetic. His manners were some- 
 what shy and constrained, except when he was in the com- 
 pany of those he loved, and then he commonly relaxed into 
 a kind of boyish freedom and joyousness. But to the pub- 
 lic in general he seemed format and chilling. It is not 
 only Mr. Pendennis who conceals his gentleness under a shy 
 and pompous demeanor. With all hisf ability, his anxiety 
 to learn, his capacity for patient study, and his willingness 
 to welcome new ideas, he never, perhaps, quite understood 
 the genius of the English political system. His faithful 
 friend and counsellor, Baron Stockmar, was not the man 
 best calculated to set him right on this subject. Both were 
 far too eager to find in the English Constitution a piece 
 of symmetrical mechanism, or to treat it as a written code 
 from which one might take extracts or construct summaries 
 for constant reference and guidance. But this was not, in 
 the beginning, the cause of any coldness toward the Prince 
 on the part of the English public. Prince Albert had not 
 the ways of an Englishman ; nnd the tendency of English- 
 
 5* 
 
106 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 men, then as now, was to assume that to have manners oth- 
 er than those of an Englishman was to be so far unworthy 
 of confidence. He was not made to shine in commonplace 
 society. He could talk admirably about something, but 
 he had not the gift of talking about nothing, and probably 
 would not have cared much to cultivate such a faculty. He 
 was fond of suggesting small innovations and improvements 
 in established systems, to the annoyance of men with set 
 ideas, who liked their own ways best. Thus it happened 
 that he remained for many years, if not exactly unappre- 
 ciated, yet not thoroughly appreciated, and that a consid- 
 erable and very influential section of society was always 
 ready to cavil at what he said, and find motive for suspicion 
 in most things that he did. Perhaps he was best under- 
 stood and most cordially appreciated among the poorer 
 classes of his wife's subjects. He found also more cordial 
 approval generally among the Radicals than among the 
 Tories, or even the Whigs. 
 
 One reform which Prince Albert worked earnestly to 
 bring about was the abolition of duelling in the army, and 
 the substitution of some system of courts of honorable ar- 
 bitration to supersede the barbaric recourse to the decision 
 of weapons. He did not succeed in having his courts of 
 honor established. There was something too fanciful in the 
 scheme to attract the authorities of our two services ; and 
 there were undoubtedly many practical difficulties in the 
 way of making such a system effective. But he succeeded 
 so far, that he induced the Duke of Wellington and the 
 heads of the services to turn their attention very seriously 
 to the subject, and to use all the influence in their po\yer 
 for the purpose of discouraging and discrediting the odious 
 practice of the duel. It is carrying.courtly politeness too 
 far to attribute the total disappearance of the duelling sys- 
 tem, as one biographer seems inclined to do, to the personal 
 efforts of Prince Albert. It is enough to his honor that he 
 did his best, and that the best was a substantial contribu- 
 tion toward so great an object. But nothing can testify 
 more strikingly to the rapid growth of a genuine civiliza- 
 tion in Queen Victoria's reign than the utter discontinuance 
 of the duelling system. When the Queen came to the throne, 
 and for years after, it was still in full force. The duel plays 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 107 
 
 a conspicuous part in the fiction and the drama of the reign's 
 earlier years. It was a common incident of all political con- 
 troversies. It was an episode of most contested elections. 
 It was often resorted to for the purpose of deciding the right 
 or wrong of a half-drunken quarrel over a card-table. It 
 formed as common a theme of gossip as an elopement or a 
 bankruptcy. Most of the eminent statesmen who were prom- 
 inent in the earlier part of the Queen's reign had fought 
 duels. Peel and O'Connell had made arrangements for a 
 " meeting." Mr. Disraeli had challenged O'Connell, or any 
 of the sons of O'Connell. The great agitator himself had 
 killed his man in a duel. Mr. Roebuck had gone out; Mr. 
 Cobden, at a much later period, had been visited with a 
 challenge, and had had the good sense and the moral cour- 
 age to laugh at it. At the present hour a duel in England 
 would seem as absurd and barbarous an anachronism as 
 an ordeal by touch or a witch-burning. Many years have 
 passed since a duel was last talked of in Parliament; and 
 then it was only the subject of a reprobation that had some 
 work to do to keep its countenance while administering the 
 proper rebuke. But it was not the influence of any one 
 man, or even any class of men, that brought about in so 
 short a time this striking change in the tone of public feel- 
 ing and morality. The change was part of the growth of 
 education and of civilization; of the strengthening and 
 broadening influence of the press, the platform, the cheap 
 book, the pulpit, and the less restricted intercourse of classes. 
 This is, perhaps, as suitable a place as any other to intro- 
 duce some notice of the attempts that w*ere made from time 
 to time upon the life of the Queen. It is proper to say some- 
 thing of them, although not one possessed the slightest po- 
 litical importance, or could be said to illustrate anything 
 more than sheer lunacy, or that morbid vanity and thirst 
 for notoriety that is nearly akin to genuine madness. The 
 first attempt Avas made on June 10th, 1840, by Edward 
 Oxford, a pot-boy of seventeen, who fired two shots at the 
 Queen as she was driving up Constitution Hill with Prince 
 Albert. Oxford fired both shots deliberately enough, but 
 happily missed in each case. He proved to have been an 
 absurd creature, half crazy with a longing to consider him- 
 self a political prisoner and to be talked of. When he was 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tried, the jury pronounced him insane, and he was ordered 
 to be kept in a lunatic asylum during her Majesty's pleas- 
 ure. The trial completely dissipated some wild alarms that 
 were felt, founded chiefly on absurd papers in Oxford's pos- 
 session, about a tremendous secret society called " Young 
 England," having among its other objects the assassination 
 of royal personages. It is not an uninteresting illustration 
 of the condition of public feeling, that some of the Irish 
 Catholic papers in seeming good iaith denounced Oxford as 
 an agent of the Duke of Cumberland and the Orangemen, 
 and declared that the object was to assassinate the Queen 
 and put the Duke on the throne. The trial showed that 
 Oxford was the agent of nobody, and was impelled by noth- 
 ing but his own crack-brained love of notoriety. The find- 
 ing of the jury was evidently something of a compromise, 
 for it is very doubtful whether the boy was insane in the 
 medical sense, and whether he was fairly to be held irre- 
 sponsible for his actions. But it was felt, perhaps, that the 
 wisest course was to treat him as a madman ; and the result 
 did not prove unsatisfactory. Mr. Theodore Martin, in his 
 " Life of the Prince Consort," expresses a different opinion. 
 He thinks it would have been well if Oxford had been dealt 
 M'ith as guilty in the ordinary way. "The best commen- 
 tary," he says, " on the lenity thus shown was pronounced 
 by Oxford himself, on being told of the similar attempts of 
 Francis and Bean in 1842, when he declared that if he had 
 been hanged there would have been no more shooting at the 
 
 O 3 
 
 Queen." It may be reasonably doubted whether the au- 
 thority of Oxford, as to the general influence of criminal leg- 
 islation, is very valuable. Against the philosophic opinion 
 of the half-crazy young pot-boy, on which Mr. Martin places 
 so much reliance, may be set the fact that in other countries 
 where attempts on the life of the sovereign have been pun- 
 ished by the stern award of death, it has not been found that 
 the execution of one fanatic was a safe protection against 
 the murderous fanaticism of another. 
 
 On May 30th, 1842, a man named John Francis, son of a 
 machinist in Drury Lane, fired a pistol at the Queen as she 
 was driving down Constitution Hill, on the very spot where 
 Oxford's attempt was made. This was a somewhat serious 
 attempt, for Francis was not more than a few feet from the 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. 109 
 
 carriage, which fortunately, was driving at a very rapid rate. 
 The Queen showed great composure. She was in some 
 measure prepared for the attempt, for it seems certain that 
 the same man had on the previous evening presented a pis- 
 tol at the royal carriage, although he did not then fire it. 
 Francis was arrested and put on trial. He was only twenty- 
 two years of age, and although at first he endeavored to 
 brazen it out and put on a sort of melodramatic regicide 
 aspect, yet when the sentence of death for high-treason was 
 passed on him he fell into a swoon and was carried insensible 
 from the court. The sentence was not carried into effect. 
 It was not certain whether the pistol was loaded at all, and 
 whether the whole performance was not a mere piece of bru- 
 tal play-acting done out of a longing to be notorious. Her 
 Majesty herself was anxious that the death-sentence should 
 not be carried into eifect, and it was finally commuted to 
 one of transportation for life. The very day after this mit- 
 igation of punishment became publicly known, another at- 
 tempt was made by a hunch-backed lad named Bean. As 
 the Queen was passing from Buckingham Palace to the 
 Chapel Royal, Bean presented a pistol at her carriage, but 
 did not succeed in firing it before his hand was seized by a 
 prompt and courageous boy who was standing near. The 
 pistol was found to be loaded with powder, paper closely 
 rammed down, and some scraps of a clay pipe. It may be 
 asked whether the argument of Mr. Martin is not fully borne 
 out by this occurrence, and whether the fact of Bean's at- 
 tempt having been made on the day after the commutation 
 of the capital sentence in the case of Francis is not evidence 
 that the leniency in the former instance was the cause of the 
 attempt made in the latter. But it was made clear, and the 
 fact is recorded on the authority of Prince Albert himself, 
 that Bean had announced his determination to make the at- 
 tempt several days before the sentence of Francis was com- 
 muted, and while Francis was actually lying under sentence 
 of death. With regard to Francis himself, the Prince was 
 clearly of opinion that to carry out the capital sentence 
 would have been nothing less than a judicial murder, as it 
 is essential that the act should be committed with intent to 
 kill or wound, and in Francis's case, to all appearance, this 
 was not the fact, or at least it was open to grave doubt. In 
 
110 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 this calm and wise way did the husband of tbe Queen, who 
 had always shaved with her whatever of danger there might 
 be in the attempts, argue as to the manner in which they 
 ought to be dealt with. The ambition which most or all of 
 the miscreants who thus disturbed the Queen and the coun- 
 try was that of the mountebank rather than of the assassin. 
 The Queen herself showed how thoroughly she understood 
 the significance of all that had happened, when she declared, 
 according to Mr. Martin, that she expected a repetition of 
 the attempts on her life so long as the law remained unal- 
 tered by which they could be dealt with only as acts of high- 
 treason. The seeming dignity of martyrdom had something 
 fascinating in it to morbid vanity or crazy fanaticism, while, 
 on the other hand, it was almost certain that the martyr's 
 penalty would not in the end be inflicted. A very appro- 
 priate change in the law was effected by which a punish- 
 ment at once sharp and degrading was provided even for 
 mere mountebank attempts against the Queen a punish- 
 ment which was certain to be inflicted. A bill was intro- 
 duced by Sir Robert Peel making such attempts punishable 
 by transportation for seven years, or by imprisonment for a 
 term not exceeding three years, "the culprit to be publicly 
 or privately whipped as often and in such manner as the 
 court shall direct, not exceeding thrice." Bean was con- 
 victed under this act, and sentenced to eighteen months' im- 
 prisonment in Millbank Penitentiary. This did not, how- 
 ever, conclude the attacks on the Queen. An Irish brick- 
 layer, named Hamilton, fired a pistol, charged only with 
 powder, at her Majesty, on Constitution Hill, on May 19th, 
 
 1849, and was sentenced to seven years' transportation. A 
 man named Robert Pate, once a lieutenant of hussars, struck 
 her Majesty on the face with a stick as she was leaving the 
 Duke of Cambridge's residence in her carriage on May 27th, 
 
 1850. This man was sentenced to seven years' transporta- 
 tion, but the judge paid so much attention to the plea of in- 
 sanity set up on his behalf, as to omit from his punishment 
 the whipping which might have been ordered. Finally, 
 on February 29th, 1872, a lad of seventeen, named Arthur 
 O'Connor, presented a pistol at the Queen as she was enter- 
 ing Buckingham Palace after a drive. The pistol, however, 
 proved to be unloaded an antique and useless or harmless 
 
THE QUEEN'S MARRIAGE. Ill 
 
 weapon, with a flintlock which was broken, and in the barrel 
 a piece of greasy red rag. The wretched lad held a paper 
 in one hand, which was found to be some sort of petition 
 on behalf of the Fenian prisoners. When he came up for 
 trial a plea of insanity was put in on his behalf, but he did 
 not seem to be insane in the sense of being irresponsible for 
 his actions or incapable of understanding the penalty they 
 involved, and he was sentenced to twelve months' imprison- 
 ment and a whipping. We have hurried over many years 
 for the purpose of completing this painful and ludicrous cat- 
 alogue of the attempts made against the Queen. It will be 
 seen that in not a single instance was there the slightest 
 political significance to be attached to them. Even in our 
 own softened and civilized time it sometimes happens that 
 an attempt is made on the life of a sovereign which, how- 
 ever we may condemn and reprobate it on moral grounds, 
 yet does seem to bear a distinct political meaning, and to 
 show that there are fanatical minds still burning under some 
 sense of national or personal wrong. But in the various 
 attacks which were made on Queen Victoria nothing of the 
 kind was even pretended. There was no opportunity for 
 iny vaporing about Brutus and Charlotte Corday. The im- 
 pulse, where it was not that of sheer insanity, was of kin to 
 the vulgar love of notoriety in certain minds which sets on 
 those whom it pervades to mutilate noble works of art and 
 scrawl their autographs on the marble of immortal monu- 
 ments. There was a great deal of wisdom shown in not 
 dealing too severely with most of these offences, and in not 
 treating them too much au serieux. Pi-face Albert himself 
 said that "the vindictive feeling of the common people 
 would be a thousand times more dangerous than the mad- 
 ness of individuals." There was not, indeed, the slightest 
 danger at any time that the "common people" of England 
 could be wrought up to any sympathy with assassination ; 
 nor was this what Prince Albert meant. But the Queen 
 and her husband were yet new to power, and the people had 
 not quite lost all memory of sovereigns who, well-meaning 
 enough, had yet scarcely understood constitutional govern- 
 ment, and there were wild rumors of reaction this way and 
 revolution that way. It might have fomented a feeling of 
 distrust and dissatisfaction if the people had seen any dispo- 
 
112 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 sition on the part of those in authority to strain the criminal 
 law for the sake of enforcing a death penalty against creat- 
 ures like Oxford and Bean. The most alarming and unnerv 
 ing of all dangers to a ruler is that of assassination. Even 
 the best and most blameless sovereign is not wholly secure 
 against it. The hand of Oxford might have killed the Queen. 
 Perhaps, however, the best protection a sovereign can have 
 is not to exaggerate the danger. There is no safety in mere 
 severity of punishment. Where the attempt is serious and 
 desperate, it is that of a fanaticism which holds its life in its 
 hand, and is not to be deterred by fear of death. The tort- 
 ures of Ravaillac did not deter Damiens. The birch in the 
 case of Bean and O'Connor may effectively discountenance 
 enterprises which are born of the mountebank's and not the 
 fanatic's spirit. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE OPIUM WAR. 
 
 THE Opium dispute with China was going on when the 
 Queen came to the throne. The Opium War broke out soon 
 after. On March 3d, 1843, five huge wagons, each of them 
 drawn by four horses, and the whole under escort of a de- 
 tachment of the 60th Regiment, arrived in front of the Mint. 
 An immense crowd followed the wagons. It was seen that 
 they were filled with boxes ; and one of the boxes having 
 been somewhat broken in its journey, the crowd were able 
 to see that it was crammed full of odd-looking silver coins. 
 The lookers-on were delighted, as well as amused, by the 
 sight of this huge consignment of treasure; and when it be- 
 came known that the silver money was the first instalment 
 of the China ransom, there were lusty cheers given as the 
 wagons passed through the gates of the Mint. This was a 
 payment on account of the war indemnity imposed on China. 
 Nearly four millions and a half sterling was the sum of the 
 indemnity, in addition to one million and a quarter which 
 had already been "paid by the Chinese authorities. Many 
 readers may remember that for some time " China money " 
 was regularly set down as an item in the revenues of each 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 113 
 
 year with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to 
 deal. The China War, of which this money was the spoil, 
 was not, perhaps, an event of which the nation was entitled 
 to be very proud. It was the precursor of other wars ; the 
 policy on which it was conducted has never since ceased 
 altogether to be a question of more or less excited contro- 
 versy; but it may safely be asserted that if the same events 
 were to occur in our day it would be hardly possible to find 
 a ministry to originate a war, for which at the same time it 
 must be owned that the vast majority of the people, of all 
 politics and classes, were only too ready then to find excuse 
 and even justification. The wagon-loads of silver conveyed 
 into the Mint amidst the cheers of the crowd were the spoils 
 of the famous Opium War. 
 
 Reduced to plain words, the principle for which we fought 
 in the China War was the right of Great Britain to force a 
 peculiar trade upon a foreign people in spite of the protesta- 
 tions of the Government and all such public opinion as there 
 was of the nation. Of course this was not the avowed mo- 
 tive of the war. Not often in history is the real and inspir- 
 ing motive of a war proclaimed in so many words by those 
 who carry it on. Not often, indeed, is it seen, naked and 
 avowed, even in the minds of its promoters themselves. As 
 the quarrel between this country and China went on, a great 
 many minor and incidental subjects of dispute arose, which 
 for the moment put the one main and original question out 
 of people's minds ; and in the course of these discussions it 
 happened more than once that the Chinese authorities took 
 some steps which put them decidedly in the wrong. Thus 
 it is true enough that there were particular passages of the 
 controversy when the English Government had all or nearly 
 all of the right on their side, so far as the immediate incident 
 of the dispute was concerned ; and when, if that had been 
 the whole matter of quarrel, or if the quarrel had begun 
 there, a patriotic minister might have been justified in think- 
 ing that the Chinese were determined to offend England 
 and deserved humiliation. But no consideration of this kind 
 can now hide from our eyes the fact that in the beginning 
 and the very origin of the quarrel we were distinctly in the 
 wrong. We asserted or at least acted on the assertion of 
 a claim so unreasonable and even monstrous, that it never 
 
114 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 could have been made upon any nation strong enough to 
 render its assertion a matter of serious responsibility. The 
 most important lessons a nation can learn from its own his- 
 tory are found in the exposure of its own errors. Historians 
 have sometimes done more evil than court flatterers when 
 they have gone about to glorify the errors of their own peo- 
 ple, and to make wrong appear right, because an English 
 Government talked the public opinion of the time into a 
 confusion of principles. 
 
 The whole principle of Chinese civilization, at the time 
 when the Opium War broke out, was based on conditions 
 which to any modern nation must seem erroneous and un- 
 reasonable. The Chinese governments and people desired 
 to have no political relations or dealings whatever with any 
 other State. They were not so obstinately set against private 
 and commercial dealings ; but they would have no political 
 intercourse with foreigners, and they would not even recog- 
 nize the existence of foreign peoples as States. They were 
 perfectly satisfied with themselves and their own systems. 
 They were convinced that their own systems were not only 
 wise but absolutely perfect. It is superfluous to say that 
 this was in itself evidence of ignorance and self-conceit. A 
 belief in the perfection of their own systems could only ex- 
 ist among a people who knew nothing of any other systems. 
 But absurd as the idea must appear to us, yet the Chinese 
 might have found a good deal to say for it. It Avas the re- 
 sult of a civilization so ancient that the oldest events pre- 
 served in European history were but as yesterday in the com- 
 parison. Whatever its errors and defects, it was distinctly 
 a civilization. It was a system with a literature and laws 
 and institutions of its own ; it was a coherent and harmo- 
 nious social and political system which had, on the whole, 
 worked tolerably well. It was not very unlike, in its prin- 
 ciples, the kind of civilization which at one time it was the 
 whim of men of genius, like Rousseau and Diderot, to ideal- 
 ize and admire. The European, of whatever nation, may be 
 said to like change, and to believe in its necessity. His in- 
 stincts and his convictions alike tend this way. The sleep- 
 iest of Europeans the Neapolitan, who lies with his feet in 
 the water on the Chiaja; the Spaniard, who smokes his cigar 
 and sips his coflee as if life had no active business whatever; 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 115 
 
 the flaneur of the Paris boulevards; the beggar who lounged 
 from cabin to cabin in Ireland a generation ago all these, 
 no matter how little inclined for change themselves, would 
 be delighted to hear of travel and enterprise, and of new 
 things and new discoveries. But to the Chinese, of all East- 
 ern races, the very idea of travel and change was something 
 repulsive and odious. As the thought of having to go a 
 day unwashed would be to the educated Englishman of our 
 age, or as the edge of a precipice is to a nervous man, so 
 was the idea of innovation to the Chinese of that time. The 
 ordinary Oriental dreads and detests change ; but the Chi- 
 nese at that time went as far beyond the ordinary Oriental 
 as the latter goes beyond an average Englishman. In the 
 present day a considerable alteration has taken place in this 
 respect. The Chinese have had innovation after innovation 
 forced on them, until at last they have taken up with the new 
 order of things, like people who feel that it is idle to resist 
 their fate any longer. The emigration from China has been 
 as remarkable as that from Ireland or Germany ; and the 
 United States finds itself confronted with a question of the 
 first magnitude when it asks itself what is to be the influ- 
 ence and operation of the descent of the Chinese popula- 
 tions along the Pacific slope. Japan has put on modern 
 and European civilization like a garment. Japan effected 
 in a few years a revolution in the political constitution and 
 the social habits of her people, and in their very way of look- 
 ing at things, the like of which no other State ever accom- 
 plished in a century. But nothing of all this was thought 
 of at the time of the China War. The onef thing which China 
 asked of European civilization and the thing called Modern 
 Progress was to be let alone. China's prayer to Europe was 
 that of Diogenes to Alexander "Stand out of my sunshine." 
 It was, as we have said, to political relationships rather 
 than to private and commercial dealings with foreign peo- 
 ples that the Chinese felt an unconquerable objection. They 
 did not, indeed, like even private and commercial dealings 
 with foreigners. They would much rather have lived with- 
 out ever seeing the face of a foreigner. But they had put 
 up with the private intrusion of foreigners and trade, and 
 had had dealings with American traders, and with the East 
 India Company. The charter and the exclusive rights of 
 
116 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the East India Company expired in April, 1834 ; the charter 
 was renewed under different conditions, and the trade with 
 China was thrown open. One of the great branches of the 
 East India Company's business with China was the opium 
 trade. When the trading privileges ceased this traffic was 
 taken up briskly by private merchants, who bought of the 
 Company the opium which they grew in India and sold it 
 to the Chinese. The Chinese governments, and all teachers, 
 moralists, and persons of education in China, had long de- 
 sired to get rid of or put down this trade in opium. They 
 considered it highly detrimental to the morals, the health, 
 and the prosperity of the people. Of late the destructive 
 effects of opium have often been disputed, particularly in 
 the House of Commons. It has been said that it is not, on 
 the average, nearly so unwholesome as the Chinese govern- 
 ments always thought, and that it does not do as much pro- 
 portionate harm to China as the use of brandy, whiskey, and 
 gin does to England. It seems to this writer hardly possi- 
 ble to doubt that the use of opium is, on the whole, a curse 
 to any nation ; but even if this were not so, the question be- 
 tween England and the Chinese governments would remain 
 just the same. The Chinese governments may have taken 
 exaggerated views of the evils of the opium trade ; their 
 motives in wishing to put it down may have been mixed 
 with considerations of interest as much political as philan- 
 thropic. Lord Palmerston insisted that the Chinese Gov- 
 ernment were not sincere in their professed objection on 
 moral grounds to the traffic. If they were sincere, he asked, 
 why did they not prevent the growth of the poppy in 
 China? It was, he tersely put it, an "exportation of bullion 
 question, an agricultural protection question ;" it was a ques- 
 tion of the poppy interest in China, and of the economists 
 who wished to prevent the exportation of the precious met- 
 als. It is curious that such arguments as this could have 
 weighed with any one for a moment. It was no business 
 of ours to ask ourselves whether the Chinese Government 
 were perfectly sincere in their professions of a lofty morality, 
 or whether they, unlike all other governments that have ever 
 been known, were influenced by one sole motive in the mak- 
 ing of their regulations. All that had nothing to do with 
 the question. States are not at liberty to help the subjects 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 117 
 
 of oilier States to break the laws of their own governments. 
 Especially when these laws even profess to concern ques- 
 tions of morals, is it the duty of foreign States not to inter- 
 fere with the regulations which a government considers it 
 necessary to impose for the protection of its people. All 
 traffic in opium was strictly forbidden by the governments 
 and laws of China; yet our English traders carried on a 
 brisk and profitable trade in the forbidden article. Nor 
 was this merely an ordinary smuggling, or a business akin 
 to that of the blockade-running during the American civil 
 war. The arrangements with the Chinese Government al- 
 lowed the existence of all establishments and machinery for 
 carrying on a general trade at Canton and Macao ; and un- 
 der cover of these arrangements the opium traders set up 
 their regular head-quarters in these towns. 
 
 Let us find an illustration intelligible to readers of the 
 present day to show how unjustifiable was this practice. 
 The State of Maine, as every one knows, prohibits the com- 
 mon sale of spirituous liquors. Let us suppose that several 
 companies of English merchants were formed in Portland 
 and Augusta, and the other towns of Maine, for the purpose 
 of brewing beer and distilling whiskey, and selling both to 
 the public of Maine in defiance of the State laws. Let us 
 further suppose that when the authorities of Maine proceed- 
 ed to put the State laws in force against these intruders, 
 our Government here took up the cause of the whiskey-sell- 
 ers, and sent an iron-clad fleet to Portland to compel the 
 people of Maine to put up with them. It seems impossible 
 to think of any English Government taking such a course as 
 this; or of the English public enduring it for one moment. 
 In the case of such a nation as the United States, nothing 
 
 ' O 
 
 of the kind would be possible. The serious responsibilities 
 of any such undertaking would make even the most thought- 
 less minister pause, and would give the public in general 
 some time to think the matter over; and before any freak 
 of the kind could be attempted the conscience of the nation 
 would be aroused, and the unjust policy would have to be 
 abandoned. But in dealing with China the ministry never 
 seems to have thought the right or wrong of the question a 
 matter Avorthy of any consideration. The controversy was 
 entered upon with as light a heart as a modern war of still 
 
118 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 graver moment. The people in general knew nothing about 
 the matter until it had gone so far that the original point 
 of dispute was almost out of sight, and it seemed as if the 
 safety of English subjects and the honor of England were 
 compromised in some way by the high-handed proceedings 
 of the Chinese Government. 
 
 The English Government appointed superintendents to 
 manage our commercial dealings with China. Unluckily 
 these superintendents were invested with a sort of political 
 or diplomatic character, and thus from the first became ob- 
 jectionable to the Chinese authorities. One of the first of 
 these superintendents acted in disregard of the express in- 
 structions of his own Government. He was told that he 
 must not pass the entrance of the Canton River in a vessel 
 of war, as the Chinese authorities always made a marked 
 distinction between ships of war and merchant vessels in re- 
 gard to the freedom of intercourse. Misunderstandings oc- 
 curred at every new step of negotiation. These misunder- 
 standings were natural. Our people knew hardly anything 
 about the Chinese. The limitation of our means of commu- 
 nication with them made this ignorance inevitable, but cer- 
 tainly did not excuse our acting as if we were in possession 
 of the fullest and most accurate information. The manner 
 in which some of our official instructors went on was well 
 illustrated by a sentence in the speech of Sir James Graham, 
 during the debate on the whole subject in the House of 
 Commons in April, 1840. It was, Sir James Graham said, as 
 if a foreigner who was occasionally permitted to anchor at 
 the Nore, and at times to land at Wapping, being placed in 
 close confinement during his continuance there, were to pro- 
 nounce a deliberate opinion upon the resources, the genius, 
 and the character of the British Empire. 
 
 Our representatives were generally disposed to be un- 
 yielding ; and not only that, but to see deliberate offence 
 in every Chinese usage or ceremony which the authorities 
 endeavored to impose on them. On the other hand, it is 
 clear that the Chinese authorities thoroughly detested them 
 and their mission, and all about them, and often made or 
 countenanced delays that were unnecessary, and interfer- 
 ences which were disagreeable and offensive. The Chinese 
 believed from the first that the superintendents were there 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 119 
 
 merely to protect the opium trade, and to force on China 
 political relations with the West. Practically this was the 
 efl'ect of their presence. The superintendents took no steps 
 to aid the Chinese authorities in stopping the hated trade. 
 The British traders naturally enough thought that the Brit- 
 ish Government were determined to protect them in carry- 
 ing it on. Indeed, the superintendents themselves might 
 well have had the same conviction. The Government at 
 home allowed Captain Elliott, the chief superintendent, to 
 make appeal after appeal for instructions without paying 
 the slightest attention to him. Captain Elliott saw that the 
 opium traders were growing more and more reckless and 
 audacious; that they were thrusting their trade under the 
 very eyes of the Chinese authorities. He also saw, as every 
 one on the spot must have seen, that the authorities, who 
 had been somewhat apathetic for a long time, were now at 
 last determined to go any lengths to put down the traffic. 
 At length the English Government announced to Captain 
 Elliott the decision which they ought to have made known 
 months, not to say years before, that "her Majesty's Gov- 
 ernment could not interfere for the purpose of enabling Brit- 
 ish subjects to violate the laws of the country with which 
 they trade ;" and that " any loss, therefore, which such per- 
 sons may suffer in consequence of the more effectual execu- 
 tion of the Chinese laws on this subject must be borne by 
 the parties who have brought that loss on themselves by 
 their own acts." This very wise and proper resolve came, 
 however, too late. The British traders had been allowed to 
 go on for a long time under the full conviction that the pro- 
 tection of the English Government was^behind them, and 
 wholly at their service. Captain Elliott himself seems to 
 have now believed that the announcement of his superiors 
 was but a graceful diplomatic figure of speech. When the 
 Chinese authorities actually proceeded to insist on the for- 
 feiture of an immense quantity of the opium in the hand of 
 British traders, and took other harsh but certainly not un- 
 natural measures to extinguish the traffic, Captain Elliott 
 sent to the Governor of India a request for as many ships 
 of war as could be spared for the protection of the life and 
 property of Englishmen in China. Before long British ships 
 arrived, and the two countries were at war. 
 
120 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe the successive steps by 
 which the war came on. It was inevitable from the mo- 
 ment that the English superintendent identified himself with 
 the protection of the opium trade. The English believed 
 that the Chinese authorities were determined on war, and 
 only waiting for a convenient moment to make a treacher- 
 ous beginning. The Chinese were convinced that from the 
 first we had meant nothing but war. Such a condition of 
 feeling on both sides would probably have made war una- 
 voidable, even in the case of two nations who had far much 
 better ways of understanding each other than the English 
 and Chinese. It is not surprising if the English people 
 at home knew little of the original causes of the contro- 
 versy. All that presented itself to their mind was the fact 
 that Englishmen were in danger in a foreign country ; that 
 they were harshly treated and recklessly imprisoned ; that 
 their lives were in jeopardy, and that the flag of England 
 was insulted. There was" a general notion, too, that the 
 Chinese were a barbarous and a ridiculous people, who had 
 no alphabet, and thought themselves much better than any 
 other people, even the English, and that on the whole it 
 would be a good thing to take the conceit out of them. 
 Those who remember what the common feeling of ordinary 
 society was at the time, will admit that it did not reach a 
 much loftier level than this. The matter was, however, 
 taken up more seriously in Parliament. 
 
 The policy of the Government was challenged in the 
 House of Commons, but with results of more importance to 
 the existing composition of the English Cabinet than to the 
 relations between this country and China. Sir James Gra- 
 ham moved a resolution condemning the policy of ministers 
 for having, by its uncertainty and other errors, brought about 
 the war, which, however, he did not then think it possible to 
 avoid. A debate which continued for three days took place. 
 It was marked by the same curious mixture of parties which 
 we have seen in debates on China questions in days nearer 
 to the present. The defence of the Government was opened 
 by Mr. Macaulay, who had been elected for Edinburgh and 
 appointed Secretary at War. The defence consisted chiefly 
 in the argument that we could not have put the trade in 
 opium down, no matter how earnest we had been, and that 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 121 
 
 it was not necessary or possible to keep on issuing frequent 
 instructions to agents so far away as our representatives in 
 China. Mr. Macaulay actually drew, from our experience 
 in India, an argument in support of his position. We can- 
 not govern India from London, he insisted ; we must, for the 
 most part, govern India in India. One can imagine how 
 Macaulay would, in one of his essays, have torn into pieces 
 such an argument coming from any advocate of a policy op- 
 posed to his own. The reply, indeed, is almost too obvious 
 to need any exposition. In India the complete materials of 
 administration were in existence. There was a Governor- 
 general; there were councillors; there was an army. The 
 men best qualified to rule the country Avere there, provided 
 with all the appliances and forces of rule. In China we had 
 an agent with a vague and anomalous office dropped down 
 in the middle of a hostile people, possessed neither of recog- 
 nized authority nor of power to enforce its recognition. It 
 was probably true enough that we could not have put down 
 the opium trade; that even with all the assistance of the 
 Chinese Government we could have done no more than to 
 drive it from one port in order to see it make its appearance 
 at another. But what we ought to have done is, therefore, 
 only the more clear. "We ought to have announced from the 
 first, and in the firmest tone, that we would have nothing to 
 do with the trade; that we would not protect it; and we 
 ought to have held to this determination. As it was, we al- 
 lowed our traders to remain under the impression that we 
 were willing to support them, until it was too late to un- 
 deceive them with any profit to their safety or our credit. 
 The Chinese authorities acted after awhile with a high- 
 handed disregard of fairness, and of anything like what we 
 should call the responsibility of law; but it is evident that 
 they believed they were themselves the objects of lawless 
 intrusion and enterprise. There were on the part of the Gov- 
 ernment great efforts made to represent the motion as an 
 attempt to prevent the ministry from exacting satisfaction 
 from the Chinese Government, and from protecting the lives 
 and interests of Englishmen in China. But it is unfortu- 
 nately only too often the duty of statesmen to recognize the 
 necessity of carrying on a war, even while they are of opin- 
 ion that they whose mismanagement brought about the war 
 I. 6 
 
122 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 deserve condemnation. When Englishmen are being impris- 
 oned and murdered, the innocent just as well as the guilty, 
 in a foreign country when, in short, war is actually going 
 on it is not possible for English statesmen in opposition to 
 say, " We will not allow England to strike a blow in defence 
 of our fellow-countrymen and our flag, because we are of 
 opinion that better judgment on the part of our Government 
 would have spared us the beginning of such a war." There 
 was really no inconsistency in recognizing the necessity of 
 carrying on the war, and at the same time censuring the 
 ministry who had allowed the necessity to be forced upon 
 us. Sir Robert Peel quoted with great effect, during the 
 debate, the example of Fox, who declared his readiness to 
 give every help to the prosecution of a war which the very 
 same day he proposed to censure the ministry for having 
 brought upon the country. With all their efforts, the min- 
 isters were only able to command a majority of nine votes 
 as the result of the three days' debate. 
 
 The war, however, went on. It was easy work enough so 
 far as England was concerned. It was on our side nothing 
 but a succession of cheap victories. The Chinese fought 
 very bravely in a great many instances; and they showed 
 still more often a Spartan-like resolve not to survive defeat. 
 When one of the Chinese cities was taken by Sir Hugh 
 Gough, the Tartar general went into his house as soon as lie 
 saw that all was lost, made his servants set fire to the build- 
 ing, and calmly sat in his chair until he was burned to death. 
 One of the English officers writes of the same attack, that it 
 was impossible to compute the loss of the Chinese, "for when 
 they found they could stand no longer against us, they cut 
 the throats of their wives and children, or drove them into 
 wells or ponds, and then destroyed themselves. In many 
 houses there were from eight to twelve dead bodies, and I 
 myself saw a dozen women and children drowning them- 
 selves in a small pond the day afjer the fight." We quick- 
 ly captured the island ofChusan, on the east coast of China ; 
 a part of our squadron went up the Peiho River to threaten 
 the capital ; negotiation were opened, and the preliminaries 
 of a treaty were made out, to which, however, neither the 
 English Government nor the Chinese would agree, and the 
 war was reopened. Chusan was again taken by us ; Ning- 
 
THE OPIUM WAR. 123 
 
 po, a large city a few miles in on the main-land, fell into our 
 hands; Amoy, farther south, was captured; our troops were 
 before Nankin when the Chinese Government at last saw 
 how futile was the idea of resisting our arms. Their women 
 or their children might just as well have attempted to en- 
 counter our soldiers. With all the bravery which the Chi- 
 nese often displayed, there was something pitiful, pathetic, 
 ludicrous, in the simple and childlike attempts which they 
 made to carry on war against us. They made peace at last 
 on any terms we chose to ask. We asked, in the first in- 
 stance, the cession in perpetuity to us of the island of Hong- 
 Kong. Of course we got it. Then we asked that five ports 
 Canton, Amoy, Foo-Chow-Foo, Ningpo, and Shanghai 
 should be thrown open to British traders, and that consuls 
 should be established there. Needless to say that this, too, 
 was conceded. Then it was agreed that the indemnity al- 
 ready mentioned should be paid by the Chinese Govern- 
 ment some four millions and a half sterling, in addition to 
 one million and a quarter as compensation for the destroyed 
 opium. It was also stipulated that correspondence between 
 officials of the two Governments was thenceforth to be car- 
 ried on upon equal terms. The war was over for the pres- 
 ent, and the thanks of both Houses of Parliament were voted 
 to the fleet and army engaged in the operations. The Duke 
 of Wellington moved the vote of thanks in the House of 
 Lords. He could hardly help, one would think, forming in 
 his mind as he spoke an occasional contrast between the ser- 
 vices which he asked the House to honor, and the sort of 
 warfare which it had been his glorious duty to engage in so 
 long. The Duke of Wellington was a simple-minded man, 
 with little sense of humor. He did not, probably, perceive 
 himself the irony that others might have seen in the fact 
 that the conqueror of Napoleon, the victor in years of war- 
 fare against soldiers unsurpassed in history, should have had 
 to move a vote of thanks to the fleet and army which tri- 
 umphed over the unarmed, helpless, childlike Chinese. 
 
 The whole chapter of history ended, not inappropriately 
 perhaps, with a rather pitiful dispute between the English 
 Government and the English traders about the amount of 
 compensation to which the latter laid claim for their de- 
 stroyed opium. The Government were in something of a 
 
124 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 difficulty ; for they had formally announced that they were 
 resolved to let the traders abide by any loss which their 
 violation of the laws of China might bring upon them. But, 
 on the other hand, they had identified themselves by the 
 war with the cause of the traders ; and one of the condi- 
 tions of peace had been the compensation for the opium. 
 The traders insisted that the amount given for this purpose 
 by the Chinese Government did not nearly meet their losses. 
 The English Government, on the other hand, would not ad- 
 mit that they were bound in any way further to make good 
 the losses of the merchants. The traders demanded to be 
 compensated according to the price of opium at the time 
 the seizure was made ; a demand which, if we admit any 
 claim at all, seems only fair and reasonable. The Govern- 
 ment had clearly undertaken their cause in the end, and 
 were hardly in a position, either logical or dignified, when 
 they afterward chose to say, " Yes, we admit that we did 
 undertake to get you redress, but we do not think now that 
 we are bound to give you full redress." At last the matter 
 was compromised; the merchants had to take what they 
 could get, something considerably below their demand, and 
 give in return to the Government an immediate acquittance 
 in full. It is hard to get up any feeling of sympathy with 
 the traders who lost on such a speculation. It is hard to 
 feel any regret even if the Government which had done so 
 much for them in the war treated them so shabbily when 
 the war was over ; but that they were treated shabbily in 
 the final settlement seems to us to allow of no doubt. 
 
 The Chinese war, then, was over for the time. But as the 
 children say that snow brings more snow, so did that war 
 with China bring other wars to follow it. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 
 
 THE Melbourne Ministry kept going from bad to worse. 
 There was a great stirring in the country all around them, 
 which made their feebleness the more conspicuous. We 
 sometimes read in history a defence of some particular sov- 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 125 
 
 ereign whom common opinion cries down, the defence being 
 a reference to the number of excellent measures that were 
 set in motion during his reign. If we were to judge of the 
 Melbourne Ministry on the same principle, it might seem, in- 
 deed, as if their career was one of extreme activity and fruit- 
 fulness. Reforms were astir in almost every direction. In- 
 quiries into the condition of our poor and our laboring 
 classes were, to use a cant phrase of the time, the order of 
 the day. The foundation of the colony of New Zealand 
 was laid with a philosophical deliberation and thoughtful- 
 ness which might have reminded one of Locke and the Con- 
 stitution of the Carolinas. Some of the first comprehensive 
 and practical measures to mitigate the rigor arid to correct 
 the indiscriminateness of the death punishment were taken 
 during this period. One of the first legislative enactments 
 which fairly acknowledged the difference between an Eng- 
 lish wife and a purchased slave, so far as the despotic power 
 of the master was concerned, belongs to the same time. 
 This was the Custody of Infants Bill, the object of which 
 was to obtain for mothers of irreproachable conduct, who 
 through no fault of theirs were living apart from their hus- 
 bands, occasional access to their children, with the permis- 
 sion and under the control of the Equity Judges. It is cu- 
 rious to notice how long and how fiercely this modest meas- 
 ure of recognition for what may almost be called the natu- 
 ral rights of a wife and a mother was disputed in Parlia- 
 ment, or at least in the House of Lords. 
 
 It is curious, too, to notice what a clamor was raised over 
 the small contribution to the cause of national education 
 which was made by the Melbourne Government. In 1834 
 the first grant of public money for the purposes of element- 
 ary education was made by Parliament. The sum granted 
 was twenty thousand pounds, and the same grant was made 
 every year until 1839. Then Lord John Russell asked for 
 an increase of ten thousand pounds, and proposed a change 
 in the manner of appropriating the money, tip to that time 
 the grant had been distributed through the National School 
 Society, a body in direct connection with the Church of 
 England, and the British and Foreign School Association, 
 which admitted children of all Christian denominations 
 without imposing on them sectarian teaching. The money 
 
126 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 was dispensed by the Lords of the Treasury, who gave aid 
 to applicants in proportion to the size and cost of the school 
 buildings, and the number of children who attended them. 
 Naturally the result of such an arrangement was that the 
 districts which needed help the most got it the least. If a 
 place was so poor as not to be able to do anything for itself, 
 the Lords of the Treasury would do nothing for it. Nat- 
 urally, too, the rich and powerful Church of England secured 
 the greater part of the grant for itself. There was no in- 
 spection of the schools; no reports were made to Parliament 
 as to the manner in which the system worked ; no steps 
 were taken to find out if the teachers were qualified or the 
 teaching was good. "The statistics of the schools," says a 
 writer in the Edinburgh liemetc, " were alone considered 
 the size of the school-room, the cost of the building, and the 
 number of scholars." In 1839 Lord John Russell proposed 
 to increase the grant, and an Order in Council transferred 
 its distribution to a committee of the privy council, com- 
 posed of the president and not more than five members. 
 Lord John Russell also proposed the appointment of in- 
 spectors, the founding of a model school for the training of 
 teachers, and the establishment of infant schools. The mod- 
 el school and the infant schools were to be practically un- 
 sectarian. The committee of the privy council were to be 
 allowed to depart from the principle of proportioning their 
 grants to the amount of local contribution, to establish in 
 poor and crowded places schools not necessarily connected 
 with either of the two educational societies, and to extend 
 their aid even to schools where the Roman Catholic version 
 of the Bible was read. The proposals of the Government 
 were fiercely opposed in both Houses of Parliament. The 
 most various and fantastic forms of bigotry combined against 
 them. The application of public money, and especially 
 through the hands of the committee of privy council, to 
 any schools not under the control and authority of the 
 Church of England was denounced as a State recognition 
 of popery and heresy. Scarcely less marvellous to us now 
 are the speeches of those who promoted than of those who 
 opposed the scheme. Lord John Russell himself, who was 
 much in advance of the common opinion of those among 
 whom he moved, pleaded for the principles of his measure 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 127 
 
 in a tone rather of apology than of actual vindication. He 
 did not venture to oppose point-blank the claim of those 
 who insisted that it was part of the sacred right of the Es- 
 tablished Church to have the teaching all done in her own 
 way or to allow no teaching at all. 
 
 The Government did not get all they sought for. They 
 had a fierce fight for their grant, and an amendment moved 
 by Lord Stanley, to the effect that her Majesty be requested 
 to revoke the Order in Council appointing the Committee 
 on Education, was only negatived by a .majority of two votes 
 275 to 273. In the Lords, to which the struggle was trans- 
 ferred, the Archbishop of Canterbury actually moved and 
 carried by a large majority an address to the Queen pray- 
 ing her to revoke the Order in Council. The Queen replied 
 firmly that the funds voted by Parliament would be found 
 to be laid out in strict accordance with constitutional usage, 
 the rights of conscience, and the safety of the Established 
 Chui'ch, and so dismissed the question. The Government, 
 therefore, succeeded in establishing their Committee of Coun- 
 cil on Education, the institution by which our system of pub- 
 lic instruction has been managed ever since. The ministry, 
 on the whole, showed to advantage in this struggle. They 
 took up a principle, and they stood by it. If, as we have 
 said, the speeches made by the promoters of the scheme seem 
 amazing to any intelligent person of our time because of the 
 feeble, apologetic, and almost craven tone in which they as- 
 sert the claims of a system of national education, yet it must 
 be admitted that the principle was accepted by the Govern- 
 ment at some risk, and that it was not shabbily deserted in 
 the face of hostile pressure. It is worth noticing that while 
 the increased grant and the principles on which it was to be 
 distributed were opposed by such men as Sir Robert Peel, 
 Lord Stanley, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli, it had the sup- 
 port of Mr. O'Connell and of Mr. Smith O'Brien. Both these 
 Irish leaders only regretted that the grant was not very 
 much larger, and that it was not appropriated on a more 
 liberal principle. O'Connell was the recognized leader of 
 the Irish Catholics and Nationalists ; Smith O'Brien was an 
 aristocratic Protestant. With all the weakness of the Whig 
 Ministry, their term of office must at least be remarkable for 
 the new departure it took in the matter of national educa- 
 
128 A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tion. The appointment of the Committee of Council marks 
 an epoch. 
 
 Indeed, the history of that time seems full of Reform proj- 
 ects. The Parliamentary annals contain the names of va- 
 rious measures of social and political improvement which 
 might in themselves, it would seem, bear witness to the most 
 unsleeping activity on the part of any ministry. Measures 
 for general registration ; for the reduction of the stamp duty 
 on newspapers, and of the duty on paper; for the improve- 
 ment of the jail system ; for the spread of vaccination ; for 
 the regulation of the labor of children ; for the prohibition 
 of the employment of any child or young person under 
 twenty-one in the cleaning of chimneys by climbing; for 
 the suppression of the punishment of the pillory ; efforts to 
 relieve the Jews from civil disabilities these are but a few 
 of the many projects of social and political reform that oc- 
 cupied the attention of that busy period, which somehow 
 appears, nevertheless, to have been so sleepy and do-nothing. 
 How does it come about that we can regard the ministry in 
 whose time all these things were done or attempted as ex- 
 hausted and worthless ? 
 
 One answer is plain. The reforming energy was in the 
 time and not in the ministry. In every instance public opin- 
 ion went far ahead of the inclinations of her Majesty's min- 
 isters. There was a just and general conviction that if the 
 Government were left to themselves they would do nothing. 
 When they were driven into any course of improvement 
 they usually did all they could to minimize the amount of 
 reform to be effected. Whatever they undertook they seem- 
 ed to undertake reluctantly, and as if only with the object 
 of preventing other people from having anything to do with 
 it. Naturally, therefore, they got little or no thanks for any 
 good they might have done. When they brought in a meas- 
 ure to abolish in various cases the punishment of death, they 
 fell so far behind public opinion and the inclinations of the 
 commission that had for eight years been inquiring into the 
 state of our criminal law, that their bill only passed by very 
 narrow majorities, and impressed many ardent reformers as 
 if it were meant rather to withhold than to advance a gen- 
 uine reform. In truth, it was a period of enthusiasm and 
 of growth, and the ministry did not understand this. Lord 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 129 
 
 Melbourne seems to have found it hard to persuade himself 
 that there was any real anxiety in the mind of any one to 
 do anything in particular. He had, apparently, got into his 
 mind the conviction that the only sensible thing the people 
 of England could do was to keep up the Melbourne Minis- 
 try, and that, being a sensible people, they would naturally 
 do this. He had grown into something like the condition 
 of a pampered old hall-porter, who, dozing in his chair, be- 
 gins to look on it as an act of rudeness if any visitor to his 
 master presumes to knock at the door and so disturb him 
 from his comfortable rest. 
 
 Any one who doubts that it was really a time of enthusi- 
 asm in these countries has only to glance at its history. 
 The Church of England and the Church of Scotland were 
 alike convulsed by movements which were the offspring of 
 a genuine and irresistible enthusiasm enthusiasm of that 
 strong, far-reaching kind which makes epochs in the history 
 of a church or a people. In Ireland Father Mathew, a pi- 
 ous and earnest friar, who had neither eloquence nor learn- 
 ing nor genius, but only enthusiasm and noble purpose, had 
 stirred the hearts of the population in the cause of temper- 
 ance as thoroughly as Peter the Hermit might have stirred 
 the heart of a people to a crusade. Many of the efforts of 
 social reform which are still periodically made among our- 
 selves had their beginning then, and can scarcely be said to 
 have made much advance from that day to this. In July, 
 1840, Mr. Hume moved in the House of Commons for an ad- 
 dress to the Throne, praying that the British Museum and 
 the National Gallery might be opened to the public after 
 Divine service on Sundays, "at such hours as taverns, beer- 
 shops, and gin-shops are legally open." The motion was, of 
 course, rejected ; but it is worthy of mention now as an evi- 
 dence of the point to which the spirit of social reform had 
 advanced at a period when Lord Melbourne had seemingly 
 made up his mind that reform had done enough for his gen- 
 eration, and that ministers might be allowed, at least during 
 his time, to eat their meals in peace without being disturbed 
 by the urgencies of restless Radicals, or threatened with 
 hostile majorities and Tory successes. 
 
 The Stockdale case was a disturbance of ministerial repose 
 which at one time threatened to brincr about a collision be- 
 
180 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tween the privileges of Parliament and the authority of the 
 law courts. The Messrs. Hansard, the well-known Parlia- 
 mentary printers, had published certain Parliamentary re- 
 ports on prisons, in which it happened that a book published 
 by J. J. Stockdale was described as obscene and disgusting 
 in the extreme. Stockdale proceeded against the Hansards 
 for libel. The Hansards pleaded the authority of Parlia- 
 ment ; but Lord Chief -justice Denman decided that the 
 House of Commons was not Parliament, and had no author- 
 ity to sanction the publication of libels on individuals. Out 
 of this contradiction of authorities arose a long and often a 
 very unseemly squabble. The House of Commons would 
 not give up its privileges ; the law courts would not admit 
 its authority. Judgment was given by default against the 
 Hansards in one of the many actions for libel which arose 
 out of the affair, and the sheriffs of London were called on 
 to seize and sell some of the Hansards' property to satisfy 
 the demands of the plaintiff. The unhappy sheriffs were 
 placed, as the homely old saying would describe it, between 
 the devil and the deep sea. If they touched the property 
 of the Hansards they were acting in contempt of the privi- 
 lege of the House of Commons, and were liable to be com- 
 mitted to Newgate. If, on the other hand, they refused to 
 carry out the orders of the Court of Queen's Bench, that 
 court would certainly send them to prison for the refusal. 
 The reality of their dilemma was, in fact, very soon proved. 
 The amount of the damages was paid into the Sheriffs- Court 
 in order to avoid the scandal of a sale, but under protest ; 
 the House of Commons ordered the sheriffs to refund the 
 money to the Hansards ; the Court of Queen's Bench was 
 moved for an order to direct the sheriffs to pay it over to 
 1 Stockdale. The sheriffs were finally committed to the cus- 
 tody of the sergeant-at-arms for contempt of the House of 
 Commons. The Court of Queen's Bench served a writ of 
 habeas corpus on the sergeant-at-arms calling on him to pro- 
 duce the sheriffs in court. The House directed the sergeant- 
 at-arms to inform the court that he held the sheriffs in cus- 
 tody by order of the Commons. The sergeant-at-arms took 
 the sheriffs to the Court of Queen's Bench and made his 
 statement there ; his explanation was declared reasonable 
 and sufficient, and he marched his prisoners back again. A 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 131 
 
 great deal of this ridiculous sort of thing went on which it 
 is not now necessary to describe in any detail. The House 
 of Commons, what -with the arrest of the sheriffs and of 
 agents acting on behalf of the pertinacious Stockdale, had 
 on their hands batches of prisoners with whom they did not 
 know in the least what to do ; the whole affair created im- 
 mense popular excitement mingled with much ironical laugh- 
 ter. At last the House of Commons had recourse to legisla- 
 tion, and Lord John Russell brought in a bill on March 3d, 
 1840, to afford summary protection to all persons employed 
 in the publication of Parliamentary papers. The preamble 
 of the measure declared that " whereas it is essential to the 
 due and effectual discharge of the functions and duties of 
 Parliament that no obstruction should exist to the publi- 
 cation of the reports, papers, votes, or proceedings of either 
 House, as such House should deem fit," it is to be lawful 
 "for any person or persons against whom any civil or crimi- 
 nal proceedings shall be taken on account of such publica- 
 tion to bring before the court a certificate under the hand 
 of the Lord Chancellor or the Speaker, stating that it was 
 published by the authority of the House, and the proceed- 
 ings should at once be stayed." This bill was run quickly 
 through both Houses not without some opposition or at 
 least murmur in the Upper House and it became law on 
 April 14th. It settled the question satisfactorily enough, 
 although it certainly did not define the relative rights of 
 Parliament and the courts of law. No difficulty of the same 
 kind has since arisen. The sheriffs and the other prisoners 
 were discharged from custody after awhile, and the public 
 excitement went out in quiet laughter. 
 
 The question, however, was a very serious one ; and it is 
 significant that public opinion was almost entirely on the 
 side of the law courts and the sheriffs. The ministry must 
 have so fallen in public favor as to bring the House of Com- 
 mons into disrepute along with them, or such a sentiment 
 could not have prevailed so widely out-of-doors. The pub- 
 lic seemed to see nothing in the whole affair but a tyranni- 
 cal House of Commons wielding illimitable powers against 
 a few humble individuals, some of whom, the sheriffs, for in- 
 stance, had no share in the controversy except that imposed 
 on them by official duty. Accordingly, the sheriffs were the 
 
132 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 heroes of the hour, and were toasted and applauded all over 
 the country. Assuredly it was an awkward position for the 
 House of Commons to be placed in when it had to vindicate 
 its privileges by committing to prison men who were merely 
 doing a duty which the law courts imposed on them. It 
 would have been better, probably, if the Government had 
 more firmly asserted the rights of the House of Commons at 
 the beginning, and thus allowed the public to see the real 
 question which the whole controversy involved. Nothing 
 can be more clear now than the paramount importance of 
 securing to each House of Parliament an absolute authority 
 and freedom of publication. No evil that could possibly 
 arise out of the misuse of such a power could be anything 
 like that certain to come of a state of things which restricted 
 by libel laws, or otherwise, the right of either House to pub- 
 lish whatever it thought proper for the public good. Not 
 a single measure for the reform of any great grievance, from 
 the abolition of slavery to the passing of the Factory Acts, 
 but might have been obstructed, and perhaps even prevent- 
 ed, if the free exposure of existing evils were denied to the 
 Houses of Parliament. In this country, Parliament only 
 works through the power of public opinion. A social re- 
 form is not carried out simply by virtue of the decision of 
 a cabinet that something ought to be done. The attention 
 of the Legislature and of the public has to be called to the 
 grievance again and again, by speeches, resolutions, debates, 
 and divisions, before there is any chance of carrying a meas- 
 ure on the subject. When public opinion is ripe, and is 
 strong enough to help the Government through with a re- 
 form in spite of prejudices and vested interests, then, and 
 not till then, the reform is carried. But it would be hardly 
 possible to bring the matter up to this stage of growth if 
 those who were interested in upholding a grievance had the 
 power of worrying the publishers of the Parliamentary reports 
 by legal proceedings in the earlier stages of the discussion. 
 Nor would it be of any use to protect merely the freedom 
 of debate in Parliament itself. It is not through debate, 
 but through publication, that the public opinion of the coun- 
 try is reached. In truth, the poorer a man is, the weaker 
 and the humbler, the greater need is there that he should 
 call out for the full freedom of publication to be vested in 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 133 
 
 the hands of Parliament. The factory child, the climbing 
 boy, the apprentice under colonial systems of modified slav- 
 ery, the seaman sent to sea in the rotten ship; the woman 
 clad in unwomanly rags who sings her "Song of a Shirt;" 
 the other woman, almost literally unsexed in form, function, 
 and soul, who in her filthy trousers of sacking dragged on 
 all-fours the coal trucks in the mines these are the tyrants 
 and the monopolists for whom we assert the privilege of 
 Parliamentary publication. 
 
 The operations which took place about this time in Syria 
 belong, perhaps, rather to the general history of the Ottoman 
 Empire than to that of England. But they had so impor- 
 tant a bearing on the relations between this country and 
 France, and are so directly connected with subsequent events 
 in which England bore a leading part, that it would be im- 
 possible to pass them over without some notice here. Mo- 
 hammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt, the most powerful of all the 
 Sultan's feudatories, a man of iron will and great capacity 
 both for war and administration, had made himself for a 
 time master of Syria. By the aid of the warlike qualities 
 of his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, he had defeated the 
 armies of the Porte wherever he had encountered them. 
 Mohammed's victories had, for the time, compelled the Porte 
 to allow him to remain in power in Syria; but the Sultan 
 had long been preparing to try another effort for the reduc- 
 tion of his ambitious vassal. In 1839 the Sultan again de- 
 clared war against Mohammed Ali. Ibrahim Pasha again 
 obtained an overwhelming victory over the Turkish army. 
 The energetic Sultan Mahmoud, a man not unworthy to 
 cope with such an adversary as Mohammed Ali, died sud- 
 denly ; and immediately after his death the Capitan Pasha, 
 or Lord High Admiral of the Ottoman fleet, went over to 
 the Egyptians with all his vessels; an act of almost unexam- 
 pled treachery even in the history of the Ottoman Empire. 
 It was evident that Turkey was not able to hold her own 
 against the formidable Mohammed and his successful son ; 
 and the policy of the Western Powers of Europe, and of 
 England especially, had long been to maintain the Ottoman 
 Empire as a necessary part of the common State system. 
 The policy of Russia was to keep up that empire as long 
 as it suited her own purposes; to take care that no other 
 
134 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Power got anything out of Turkey ; and to prepare the 
 way for such a partition of the spoils of Turkey as would 
 satisfy Russian interests. Russia, therefore, was to be found 
 now defending Turkey, and now assailing her. The course 
 taken by Russia was seemingly inconsistent; but it was 
 only inconsistent as the course of a sailing ship may be 
 which now tacks to this side and now to that, but has a 
 clear object in view and a port to reach all the while. Eng- 
 land was then, and for a long time after, steadily bent on 
 preserving the Turkish Empire, and in a great measure as 
 a rampart against the schemes and ambitions imputed to 
 Russia herself. France was less firmly set on the mainte- 
 nance of Turkey ; and France, moreover, had got it into her 
 mind that England had designs of her own on Egypt. Aus- 
 tria was disposed to go generally with England ; Prussia 
 was little more than a nominal sharer in the alliance that 
 was now tinkered np. It is evident that such an alliance 
 could not be very harmonious or direct in its action. It 
 was, however, effective enough to prove too strong for the 
 Pasha of Egypt. A fleet made up of English, Austrian, and 
 Turkish vessels bombarded Acre; an allied army drove the 
 Egyptians from several of their strongholds. Ibrahim Pasha, 
 with all his courage and genius, was not equal to the odds 
 against which lie now saw himself forced to contend. He 
 had to succumb. No one could doubt that he and his fa- 
 ther were incomparably better able to give good govern- 
 ment and the chances of development to Syria than the 
 Porte had ever been. But in this instance, as in others, 
 the odious principle was upheld by England and her actual 
 allies that the Turkish Empire must be maintained, at no 
 matter what cost of suffering and degradation to its subject 
 populations. Mohammed AH was deprived of all his Asiatic 
 possessions, but was secured in his government of Egypt. 
 A convention signed at London on July 15th, 1840, arranged 
 for the imposition of those terms on Mohammed Ali. 
 
 The convention was signed by the representatives of Great 
 Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, on the one part, and of 
 the Ottoman Porte on the other. The name of France was 
 not found there. France had drawn back from the alliance, 
 and for some time seemed as if she were likely to take arms 
 against it. M. Thiers was then her Prime-minister : he was 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 135 
 
 a man of quick fancy, restless and ambitious temperament, 
 and what we cannot help culling a vulgar spirit of national 
 self-sufficiency we are speaking now of the Thiers of 1840, 
 not of the wise and capable statesman, tempered and tried 
 by the fire of adversity, who reorganized France out of the 
 ruin and welter of 1870. Thiers persuaded himself and the 
 great majority of his countrymen that England was bent 
 upon driving Mohammed AH out of Egypt as well as out of 
 Syria, and that her object was to obtain possession of Egypt 
 for herself. For some months it seemed as if war were inev- 
 itable between England and France, although there was not 
 in reality the slightest reason why the two States should 
 quarrel. France was just as far away from any thought of 
 a really disinterested foreign policy as England. England, 
 on the other hand, had not the remotest idea of becoming 
 the possessor of Egypt. Fortunately Louis Philippe and M. 
 Guizot were both strongly in favor of peace ; M. Thiers re- 
 signed ; and M. Guizot became Minister for Foreign Affairs, 
 and virtually head of the Government. Thiers defended his 
 policy in the French Chamber in a scream of passionate and 
 almost hysterical declamation. Again and again he declared 
 that his mind had been made up to go to war if England did 
 not at once give way and modify the terms of the conven- 
 tion of July. It cannot be doubted that Thiers carried with 
 him much of the excited public feeling of France. But the 
 King and M. Guizot were happily supported by the major- 
 ity in and out of the Chambers; and on July 13th, 1841, the 
 Treaty of London was signed, which provided for the settle- 
 ment of the affairs of Egypt on the basis of the arrangement 
 already made, and which contained, moreover, the stipula- 
 tion, to be referred to more than once hereafter, by which 
 the Sultan declared himself firmly resolved to maintain the 
 ancient principle of his empire that no foreign ship of war 
 was to be admitted into the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, 
 with the exception of light vessels for which a firman was 
 granted. 
 
 The public of this country had taken but little interest in 
 the controversy about Egypt, at least until it seemed like- 
 ly to involve England in a war with France. Some of the 
 episodes of the war were indeed looked upon with a certain 
 satisfaction by people here at home. The bravery of Charles 
 
136 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Napier, the hot-headed, self- conceited commodore, was en- 
 thusiastically extolled, and his feats of successful audacity 
 were glorified as though they had shown the genius of a 
 Nelson or the clever resource of a Cochrane. Not many of 
 Napier's admirers cared a rush about the merits of the quar- 
 rel between the Porte and the Pasha. Most of them would 
 have been just as well pleased if Napier had been fighting 
 for the Pasha and against the Porte ; not a few were ut- 
 terly ignorant as to whether he was fighting for Porte or 
 for Pasha. Those- who claimed to be more enlightened had 
 a sort of general idea that it was in some way essential to 
 the safety and glory of England that whenever Turkey was 
 in trouble we should at once become her champions, tame 
 her rebels, and conquer her enemies. Unfounded as were 
 the suspicions of Frenchmen about our designs upon Egypt, 
 they can hardly be called very unreasonable. Even a very 
 cool and impartial Frenchman might be led to the conclu- 
 sion that free England would not without some direct pur- 
 pose of her own have pledged herself to the cause of a base 
 and a decaying despotism. 
 
 Steadily, meanwhile, did the ministry go from bad to 
 worse. They had greatly damaged their character by the 
 manner in which they had again and again put up with de- 
 feat, and consented to resume or retain office on any excuse 
 or pretext. They were remarkably bad administrators; 
 their finances were wretchedly managed. In later times 
 we have come to regard the Tories as especially weak in the 
 matter of finance. A well-managed revenue and a comfort- 
 able surplus are generally looked upon as in some way or 
 other the monopoly of a Liberal administration; while lav- 
 ish expenditure, deficit, and increased taxation are counted 
 among the necessary accompaniments of a Tory Govern- 
 ment. So nearly does public opinion on both sides go to 
 accepting these conditions, that there are many Tories who 
 take it rather as a matter of pride that their leaders are not 
 mean economists, and who regard a free-handed expenditure 
 of the national revenue as something peculiarly gentleman- 
 like, and in keeping with the honorable traditions of a great 
 country party. But this was not the idea which prevailed 
 in the days of the Melbourne Ministry. Then the universal 
 conviction was that the Whigs were incapable of managing 
 
DECLINE AND FALL OF THE WHIG MINISTRY. 137 
 
 the finances. The budget of the Chancellor of the Excheq- 
 uer, Mr. Baring, showed a deficiency of nearly two millions. 
 This deficiency he proposed to meet in part by alteration in 
 the sugar duties; but the House of Commons, after a long 
 debate, rejected his proposals by a majority of thirty-six. 
 It was then expected, of course, that ministers would resign; 
 but they were not yet willing to accept the consequences 
 of defeat. They thought they had another stone in their 
 sling. Lord John Russell had previously given notice of 
 his intention to move for a committee of the whole House 
 to consider the state of legislation with regard to the trade 
 in corn ; and he now brought forward an announcement of 
 his plan, which was to propose a fixed duty of eight shil- 
 lings per quarter on wheat, and proportionately diminished 
 rates on rye, barley, and oats. Except for its effect on the 
 fortunes of the Melbourne Ministry there is not the slightest 
 importance to be attached to this proposal. It was an ex- 
 periment in the direction of the Free-traders, who were just 
 beginning to be powerful, although they were not nearly 
 strong enough yet to dictate the policy of a government. 
 We shall have to tell the story of Free-trade hereafter; this 
 present incident is no part of the history of a great move- 
 ment; it is merely a small party dodge. It deceived no 
 one. Lord Melbourne had always spoken with the utter- 
 most contempt of the Free-trade agitation. With charac- 
 teristic oaths, he had declared that of all the mad things 
 he had ever heard suggested, Free-trade was the maddest. 
 Lord John Russell himself, although far more enlightened 
 than the Prime-minister, had often condemned and sneered 
 at the demand for Free-trade. The conversion of the min- 
 isters into the official advocates of a moderate fixed duty 
 was all too sudden for the conscience, for the very stomach 
 of the nation. Public opinion would not endure it. Noth- 
 ing but harm came to the Whigs from the attempt. In- 
 stead of any new adherents or fresh sympathy being won 
 for them by their proposal, people only asked, " Will noth- 
 ing, then, turn them out of office? Will they never have 
 done with trying new tricks to keep in place?" 
 
 Sir Robert Peel took, in homely phrase, the bull by the 
 horns. He proposed a direct vote of want of confidence 
 a resolution declaring that ministers did not possess con- 
 
138 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 fidence of the House sufficiently to enable them to carry 
 through the measures which they deemed of essential im- 
 portance to the public welfare, and that their continuance 
 in office under such circumstances was at variance witli the 
 spirit of the Constitution. On June 4th, 1841, the division 
 was taken ; and the vote of no-confidence was carried by a 
 majority of one. Even the Whigs could not stand this. 
 Lord Melbourne at last began to think that things were 
 
 o o 
 
 looking serious. Parliament was dissolved, and the result 
 of the general election was that the Tories were found to 
 have a majority even greater than they themselves had an- 
 ticipated. The moment the new Parliament was assembled 
 amendments to the address were carried in both Houses in 
 a sense hostile to the Government. Lord Melbourne and 
 his colleagues had to resign, and Sir Robert Peel was in- 
 trusted with the task of forming an administration. 
 
 We have not much more to do with Lord Melbourne in 
 this history. He merely drops out of it. Between his ex- 
 pulsion from office and his death, which took place in 1848, 
 he did little or nothing to call for the notice of any one. It 
 was said at one time that his closing years were lonesome 
 and melancholy; but this has lately been denied, and indeed 
 it is not likely that one who had such a genial temper and 
 so many friends could have been left to the dreariness of a 
 not self-sufficing solitude and to the bitterness of neglect. 
 He was a generous and kindly man ; his personal character, 
 although often assailed, was free of any serious reproach ; 
 he was a failure in office, not so much from want of ability, 
 as because he was a politician without convictions. 
 
 The Peel Ministry came into power with great hopes. It 
 had Lord Lyndhurst for Lord Chancellor ; Sir James Gra- 
 ham for Home Secretary ; Lord Aberdeen at the Foreign 
 Office; Lord Stanley was Colonial Secretary. The most re- 
 markable man not in the cabinet, soon to be one of the fore- 
 most statesmen in the country, was Mr. W. E. Gladstone. 
 It is a fact of some significance in the history of the Peel 
 administration, that the elections which brought the new 
 ministry into power brought Mr. Cobden for the first time 
 into the House of Commons. 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 139 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 
 
 WHILE Lord Melbourne and his Whig colleagues, still in 
 office, were fribbling away their popularity on the pleasant 
 assumption that nobody was particularly in earnest about 
 anything, the Vice-chancellor and heads of houses held a 
 meeting at Oxford, and passed a censure on the celebrated 
 "No. 90," of "Tracts for the Times." The movement, of 
 which some important tendencies were formally censured in 
 the condemnation of this tract, was one of the most momen- 
 tous that had stirred the Church of England since the Ref- 
 ormation. The author of the tract was Dr. John Henry 
 Newman, and the principal ground for its censure, by voices 
 claiming authority, was the principle it seemed to put for- 
 ward that a man might honestly subscribe all the articles 
 and formularies of the English Church, while yet holding 
 many of the doctrines of the Church of Rome, against which 
 those articles were regarded as a necessary protest. The 
 great movement which was thus brought into sudden ques- 
 tion and publicity was in itself an offspring of the immense 
 stirring of thought which the French Revolution called up, 
 and which had its softened echo in the English Reform Bill. 
 The centre of the religious movement was to be found in the 
 University of Oxford. When it is in the right, and when it 
 is in the wrong, Oxford has always had more of the senti- 
 mental and of the poetic in its cast of thought than its rival 
 or colleague of Cambridge. There were two influences then 
 in operation over England, both of which alike aroused the 
 alarm and the hostility of certain gifted and enthusiastic 
 young Oxford men. One was the tendency to Rationalism 
 drawn from the German theologians ; the other was the 
 manner in which the connection of the Church with the 
 State in England was beginning to operate to the disad- 
 vantage of the Church as a sacred institution and teacher. 
 The Reform party everywhere were assailing the rights and 
 
140 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 property of. the Church. In Ireland, especially, experiments 
 were made which every practical man will now regard with 
 approval, whether he be Churchman or not, but which seemed 
 to the devoted ecclesiast of Oxford to be fraught with dan- 
 ger to the freedom and influence of the Church. Out of the 
 contemplation of these dangers sprang the desire to revive 
 the authority of the Church ; to quicken her with a new vi- 
 tality ; to give her once again that place as guide and in- 
 spirer of the national life which her ardent votaries believed 
 to be hers by right, and to have been forfeited only by the 
 carelessness of her authorities, and their failure to fulfil the 
 duties of her Heaven-assigned mission. 
 
 No movement could well have had a purer source. None 
 could have had more disinterested and high-minded pro- 
 moters. It was borne in upon some earnest, unresting souls, 
 like that of the sweet and saintly Keble souls "without 
 haste and without rest," like Goethe's star that the Church 
 of England had higher duties and nobler claims than the 
 business of preaching harmless sermons and the power of 
 enriching bishops. Keble could not bear to think of the 
 Church taking pleasure since all is well. He urged on some 
 of the more vigorous and thoughtful minds around him, or 
 rather he suggested it by his influence and his example, that 
 they should reclaim for the Church the place which ought to 
 be hers, as the true successor of the Apostles. He claimed 
 for her that she, and she alone, was the real Catholic Church, 
 and that Rome had wandered away from the right path, and 
 foregone the glorious mission which she might have main- 
 tained. Among those who shared the spirit and purpose of 
 Keble were Richard Hurrell Froude, the historian's elder 
 brother, who gave rich promise of a splendid career, but who 
 died Avhile still in comparative youth ; Dr. Pusey, afterward 
 leader of the school of ecclesiasticism which bears his name; 
 and, most eminent of all, Dr. Newman. Keble had taken 
 part in the publication of a series of treatises called "Tracts 
 for the Times," the object of which was to vindicate the real 
 mission, as the writers believed, of the Church of England. 
 This was the Tractarian movement, which had such various 
 and memorable results. Newman first started the project 
 of the Tracts, and wrote the most remarkable of them. He 
 had, up to this time, been distinguished as one of the most 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 141 
 
 unsparing enemies of Rome. At the same time he was, as 
 he has himself said, "fierce" against the "instruments" and 
 the " manifestations " of " the Liberal cause." While he 
 was at Algiers once, a French vessel put in there, flying the 
 tricolor; Newman would not even look at her. "On my 
 return, though forced to stop twenty -four hours at Paris, 
 I kept in-doors the whole time, and all that I saw of that 
 beautiful city was what I saw from the diligence." He had 
 never had any manner of association with Roman Catholics; 
 had, in fact, known singularly little of them. As Newman 
 studied and wrote concerning the best way to restore the 
 Church of England to her proper place in the national life, 
 he kept the thought before him "that there was something 
 greater than the Established Church, and that that was the 
 Church Catholic and Apostolic, set up from the beginning, 
 of which she was but the local presence and the organ. 
 She was nothing unless she was this. She must be dealt 
 with strongly, or she would be lost. There was need of a 
 second Reformation." At this time the idea of leaving the 
 Church never, Dr. Newman himself assures us, had crossed 
 his imagination. He felt alarmed for the Church between 
 German Rationalism and man-of-the-world liberalism. His 
 fear was that the Church would sink to be the servile instru- 
 ment of a State, and a Liberal State. 
 
 The abilities of Dr. Newman were hardly surpassed by 
 any contemporary in any department of thought. His po- 
 sition and influence in Oxford were almost unique. There 
 was in his intellectual temperament a curious combination 
 of the mystic and the logical. He was at once a poetic 
 dreamer and a sophist in the true and not the corrupt and 
 ungenerous sense of the latter word. It had often been said 
 of him and of another great Englishman, that a change in 
 their early conditions and training would easily have made 
 of Newman a Stuart Mill, and of Mill a Newman. England, 
 in our time, has hardly had a greater master of argument and 
 of English prose than Newman. He is one of the keenest of 
 dialecticians; and, like Mill, has the rare art that dissolves 
 all the difficulties of the most abstruse or perplexed subject, 
 and shows it bare and clear even to the least subtle of read- 
 ers. His words dispel mists; and whether they who listen 
 agree or not, they cannot fail to understand. A penetrating, 
 
142 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 poignant, satirical humor is found in most of his writings, an 
 irony sometimes piercing suddenly through it like a darting 
 pain. On the other hand, a generous vein of poetry and of 
 pathos informs his style ; and there are many passages of 
 his works in which he rises to the height of a genuine and 
 noble eloquence. 
 
 In all the arts that make a great preacher or orator New- 
 man was strikingly deficient. His manner was constrained, 
 ungraceful, and even awkward ; his voice was thin and weak. 
 His bearing was not at first impressive in any way. A 
 gaunt, emaciated figure, a sharp and eagle face, a cold, medi- 
 tative eye, rather repelled than attracted those who saw him 
 for the first time. Singularly devoid of affectation, New man 
 did not always conceal his intellectual scorn of men who 
 made loud pretence with inferior gifts, and the men must 
 have been few indeed whose gifts were not inferior to his. 
 Newman had no scorn for intellectual inferiority in itself; he 
 despised it only when it gave itself airs. His influence while 
 he was the vicar of St. Mary's at Oxford was profound. As 
 Mr. Gladstone said of him in a recent speech, " without os- 
 tentation or effort, but by simple excellence, he was continu- 
 ally drawing undergraduates more and more around him." 
 Mr. Gladstone in the same speech gave a description of Dr. 
 Newman's pulpit style which is interesting : " Dr. Newman's 
 manner in the pulpit was one which, if you considered it in 
 its separate parts, would lead you to arrive at very unsat- 
 isfactory conclusions. There was not very much change in 
 the inflection of the voice ; action there was none ; his ser- 
 mons were read, and his eyes were always on his book; and 
 all that, you will say, is against efficiency in preaching. Yes ; 
 but you take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and 
 a seal upon him, there was a solemn music and sweetness in 
 his tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken to- 
 gether with the tone and with the manner, which made even 
 his delivery, such as I have described it, and though exclu- 
 sively with written sermons, singularly attractive." The 
 stamp and seal were, indeed, those which are impressed by 
 genius, piety, and earnestness. No opponent ever spoke of 
 Newman but with admiration for his intellect and respect 
 for his character. Dr. Newman had a younger brother, Fran- 
 cis W. Newman, who also possessed remarkable ability and 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 143 
 
 earnestness. He, too, was distinguished at Oxford, and seem- 
 ed to have a great career there before him. But he was 
 drawn one way by the wave of thought before his more fa- 
 mous brother had been drawn the other way. In 1830, the 
 younger Newman found himself prevented by religious scru- 
 ples from subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles for his mas- 
 ter's degree. He left the university, and wandered for years 
 in the East, endeavoring, not very successfully, perhaps, to 
 teach Christianity on its broadest base to Mohammedans; 
 and then he came back to England to take his place among 
 the leaders of a certain school of free thought. Fate had 
 dealt with those brothers as with the two friends in Rich- 
 ter's story : it " seized their bleeding hearts, and flung them 
 different ways." 
 
 When Dr. Newman wrote the famous Tract " No. 90," for 
 which he was censured, he bowed to the authority of his 
 bishop, if not to that of the heads of houses; and he discon- 
 tinued the publication of such treatises. But he did not ad- 
 mit any change of opinion ; and, indeed, soon after he edit- 
 ed a publication called The British Critic, in which many of 
 the principles held to be exclusively those of the Church of 
 Rome were enthusiastically claimed for the English Church. 
 Yet a little and the gradual working of Newman's mind be- 
 came evident to all the world. The brightest and most pen- 
 etrating intellect in the Church of England was withdrawn 
 from her service, and Newman went over to the Church of 
 Rome. His secession Avas described by Mr. Disraeli, a quar- 
 ter of a century afterward, as having "dealt a blow to the 
 Church of England under which she still reels." To this re- 
 sult had the inquiry conducted him which had led his friend 
 Dr. Pusey merely to endeavor to incorporate some of the 
 mysticism and the symbols of Rome with the ritual of the 
 English Protestant Church; which had brought Keble only 
 to seek a more liberal and truly Christian temper for the 
 faith of the Protestant; and which had sent Francis New- 
 man into Radicalism and Rationalism. 
 
 In truth, it is not difficult now to understand how the 
 elder Newman's mind became drawn toward the ancient 
 Church which won him at last. We can see from his own 
 candid account of his earlier sentiments how profoundly 
 mystical was his intellectual nature, and how, long before 
 
144 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 he was conscious of any such tendency, he was drawn toward 
 the very symbolisms of the Catholic Church. Pascal's early 
 and unexplained mastery of mathematical problems which 
 no one had taught him is not more suggestive in its way 
 than those early drawings of Catholic symbols and devices 
 which, done in his childhood, Newman says surprised and 
 were inexplicable to him when he came on them in years 
 long after. No place could be better fitted to encourage 
 and develop this tendency to mysticism in a thoughtful mind 
 than Oxford, with all its noble memories of scholars and of 
 priests, with its picturesque and poetic surroundings, and 
 its never-fading media3valism. Newman lived in the past. 
 His spirit was with mediaeval England. His thoughts were 
 of a time when one Church took charge of the souls of a 
 whole united, devout people, and stood as the guide and au- 
 thority appointed for them by Heaven. He thought of such 
 a time until first he believed in it as a thing of the past, 
 and next came to have faith in the possibility of its restora- 
 tion as a thing of the present and the future. When once 
 he had come to this point the rest followed, "as by lot God 
 wot." No creature could for a moment suppose that that 
 ideal Church was to be found in the English Establishment, 
 submitted as it was to State-made doctrine, and to the de- 
 cision of the Lord Chancellor, who might be an infidel or a 
 free-liver. The question which Cardinal Manning tells us 
 he asked himself years after, at the time of the Gorham case, 
 must often have presented itself to the mind of Newman 
 Suppose all the Bishops of the Church of England should 
 decide unanimously on any question of doctrine, would any 
 one receive the decision as infallible? Of course not. Such 
 is not the genius or the principle of the English Church. 
 The Church of England has no pretension to be considered 
 the infallible guide of the people in matters even of doc- 
 trine. Were she seriously to put forward any such preten- 
 sion, it would be rejected with contempt by the common 
 mind of the nation. We are not discussing questions of 
 dogma or the rival claims of Churches here ; we are merely 
 pointing out that to a man with Newman's idea of a church, 
 the Church of England could not long afford a home. That 
 very logical tendency, which in the mind of Newman, as 
 of that of Pascal, contended for supremacy with the ten- 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHUKCHES. 145 
 
 dency to. devotion and mysticism, only impelled him more 
 rigorously on his way. He could not put up with com- 
 promises, and convince himself that he ought to be con- 
 vinced. He dragged every compromise and every doctrine 
 into the light, and insisted on knowing exactly what it 
 amounted to and what it meant to say. The doctrines and 
 compromises of his own Church did not satisfy him. There 
 are minds which, in this condition of bewilderment, might 
 have been content to find " no footing so solid as doubt." 
 Newman had not a mind of that class. He could not be- 
 lieve in a world without a church, or a church without what 
 he held to be inspiration ; and accordingly he threw his 
 whole soul, energy, genius, and fame into the cause of the 
 Church of Rome. 
 
 This, however, did not come all at once. We are antici- 
 pating by a few years the passing over of Dr. Newman, Car- 
 dinal Manning, and others to the ancient Church. It is 
 clear that Newman was not himself conscious for a long 
 time of the manner in which he \vas being drawn, surely al- 
 though not quickly, in the direction of Rome. He used to 
 be accused at one time of having remained a conscious Ro- 
 man Catholic in the English Church, laboring to make new 
 converts. Apart from his own calm assurances, and from 
 the singularly pure and candid nature of the man, there are 
 reasons enough to render such a charge absurd. Indeed, 
 
 O O 7 
 
 that simple and childish conception of human nature which 
 assumes that a man must always see the logical consequences 
 of certain admissions or inquiries beforehand, because all men 
 can see them afterward, is rather confusing and out of place 
 when we are considering such a crisis of thought and feeling 
 as that which took place in Oxford, and such men as those 
 who were principally concerned in it. For the present it is 
 enough to say that the object of that movement was to raise 
 the Church of England from apathy, from dull, easy-going 
 acquiescence, from the perfunctory discharge of formal du- 
 ties, and to quicken her again with the spirit of a priesthood, 
 to arouse her to the living work, spiritual and physical, of 
 an ecclesiastical sovereignty. The impulse overshot itself 
 in some cases, and was misdirected in others. It proved a 
 failure, on the whole, as to its definite aims ; and it some- 
 times left behind it only the ashes of a barren symbolism. 
 I. 7 
 
14:6 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 But in its source it was generous, beneficent, and qoble, and 
 it is hard to believe that there has not been throughout the 
 Church of England, on the whole, a higher spirit at work 
 since the famous Oxford movement began. 
 
 Still greater was the practical importance, at least in de- 
 fined results, of the movement which went on in Scotland 
 about the same time. A fortnight before the decision of the 
 heads of houses at Oxford on Dr. Newman's tract, Lord 
 Aberdeen announced in the House of Lords that he did not 
 see his way to do anything in particular with regard to the 
 dissensions in the Church of Scotland. He had tried a meas- 
 ure, he said, the year before, and half the Church of Scotland 
 liked it, and the other half denounced it, and the Govern- 
 ment opposed it ; and he, therefore, had nothing further to 
 suggest in the matter. The perplexity of Lord Aberdeen 
 only faintly typified the perplexity of the ministry. Lord 
 Melbourne was about the last man in the world likely to 
 have any sympathy with the spirit which animated the Scot- 
 tish Reformers, or any notion of how to get out of the diffi- 
 culty which the whole question presented. Differing as they 
 did in so many other points, there was one central resem- 
 blance between the movement in the Kirk of Scotland and 
 that which was going on in the Church of England. In 
 both cases alike the effort of the reforming party was to 
 emancipate the Church from the control of the State in mat- 
 ters involving religious doctrine and duty. In Scotland was 
 soon to be presented the spectacle of a great secession from 
 an Established Church, not because the seceders objected to 
 the principle of a Church, but because they held that the 
 Establishment was not faithful enough to its mission as a 
 Church. One of the seceders pithily explained the posi- 
 tion of the controversy when he said that he and his fellows 
 were leaving the Kirk of Scotland, not because she was too 
 "churchy," but because she was not "churchy" enough. 
 
 The case was briefly this: During the reign of Queen 
 Anne an Act was passed which took from the Church courts 
 in Scotland the free choice as to the appointment of pastors, 
 by subjecting the power of the presbytery to the control 
 and interference of the law courts. Harley, Bolingbroke, 
 and Swift, not one of whom cared a rush about the supposed 
 sanctity of an ecclesiastical appointment, were the authors 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 147 
 
 of tliis compromise, which was exactly of the kind that sen- 
 sible men of the world everywhere might be supposed likely 
 to accept and approve. In an immense number of Scotch 
 parishes the minister was nominated by a lay patron ; and 
 if the presbytery found nothing to condemn in him as to 
 " life, literature, and doctrine," they were compelled to ap- 
 point him, however unwelcome he might be to the parish- 
 ioners. Now it is obvious that a man might have a blame- 
 less character, sound religious views, and an excellent edu- 
 cation, and nevertheless be totally unfitted to undertake the 
 charge of a Scottish parish. The Southwark congregation, 
 who appreciate and delight in the ministrations of Mr. Spur- 
 geon, might very well be excused if they objected to having 
 a perfectly moral Chai'les Honeyman, even though his relig- 
 ious opinions were identical with those of their favorite, 
 forced upon them at the will of some aristocratic lay patron. 
 The effect of the power conferred on the law courts and the 
 patron was simply in a great number of cases to send fami- 
 lies away from the Church of Scotland and into voluntaryism. 
 The Scotch people are above all others impatient of any at- 
 tempt to force on them the services of unacceptable minis- 
 ters. Men clung to the National Church as long as it was 
 national that is, as long as it represented and protected the 
 sacred claims of a deeply religious people. Dissent, or rath- 
 er voluntaryism, began to make a progress in Scotland that 
 alarmed thoughtful Churchmen. To get over the difficulty, 
 the General Assembly, the highest ecclesiastical court in 
 Scotland, and likewise a sort of Church Parliament, declared 
 that a veto on the nomination of the pastor should be exer- 
 cised by the congregation, in accordance with a fundamental 
 law of the Church that no pastor should be intruded on any 
 congregation contrary to the will of the people. The Veto 
 Act, as this declaration was called, worked well enough for 
 a short time, and the highest legal authorities declared it 
 not incompatible with the Act of Queen Anne. But it di- 
 minished far too seriously the power of the lay patron to be 
 accepted without a struggle. In the celebrated Auchterar- 
 der case the patron Avon a victory over the Church in the 
 courts of law, for having presented a minister whose appoint- 
 ment was vetoed by the congregation ; he obtained an order 
 from the civil courts deciding that the presbytery must take 
 
148 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 him on trial, in obedience with the Act of Queen Anne, as he 
 was qualified by life, literature, and doctrine. This question, 
 however, was easily settled by the General Assembly of the 
 Church. They left to the patron's nominee his stipend and 
 his house, and took no further notice of him. They did not 
 recognize him as one of their pastors, but he might have, if 
 he would, the manse and the money which the civil courts 
 had declared to be his. They merely appealed to the Legis- 
 lature to do something which might make the civil law in 
 harmony with the principles of the Church. A more serious 
 question, however, presently arose. This was the famous 
 Strathbogie case, which brought the authority of the Church 
 and that of the State into irreconcilable conflict. A minis- 
 ter had been nominated in the parish of Marnoch who was so 
 unacceptable to the congregation that 261 out of 300 heads 
 of families objected to his appointment. The General As- 
 sembly directed the presbytery of Strathbogie, in which the 
 parish lay, to reject the minister, Mr. Edwards. The pres- 
 bytery had long been noted for its leaning toward the claims 
 of the civil power, and it very reluctantly obeyed the com- 
 mand of the highest authority and ruling body of the Church. 
 Another minister Was appointed to the parish. Mr. Edwards 
 fought the question out in the civil court and obtained an 
 interdict against the new appointment, and a decision that 
 the presbytery were bound to take himself on trial. Sev- 
 en members, constituting the majority of the presbytery, 
 determined, without consulting the General Assembly, to 
 obey the civil power, and they admitted Mr. Edwards on 
 trial. The seven were brought before the bar of the Gen- 
 eral Assembly, and by an overwhelming majority were con- 
 demned to be deposed from their places in the ministry. 
 Their parishes were declared vacant. A more complete an- 
 tagonism between Church and State is not possible to imag- 
 ine. The Church expelled from its ministry seven men for 
 having obeyed the command of the civil laws. 
 
 It was on the motion of Dr. Chalmers that the seven min- 
 isters were deposed. Dr. Chalmers became the leader of 
 the movement which was destined within two years from 
 the time we are now surveying to cause the disruption of 
 the ancient Kirk of Scotland. No man could be better fitted 
 for the task of leadership in such a movement. He was be- 
 
MOVEMENTS IN THE CHURCHES. 149 
 
 yond comparison the foremost man in the Scottish Church. 
 He was the greatest pulpit orator in Scotland, or, indeed, in 
 Great Britain. As a scientific writer, both on astronomy 
 and on political economy, he had made a great mark. From 
 having been in his earlier days the minister of an obscure 
 Scottish village congregation, he had suddenly sprung into 
 fame. He was the lion of any city which he happened to 
 visit. If he preached in London, the church was crowded 
 with the leaders of politics, science, and fashion, eager to 
 hear him. The effect he produced in England is all the 
 more surprising seeing that he spoke in the broadest Scot- 
 tish accent conceivable, and, as one admirer admits, mispro- 
 nounced almost every word. We have already quoted what 
 Mr. Gladstone said about the style of Dr. Newman ; let us 
 cite also what he says about Dr. Chalmers. " I have heard," 
 said Mr. Gladstone, "Dr. Chalmers preach and lecture. Be- 
 ing a man of Scotch blood, I am very much attached to 
 Scotland, and like even the Scotch accent, but not the 
 Scotch accent of Dr. Chalmers. Undoubtedly the accent of 
 Dr. Chalmers in preaching and delivery was a considerable 
 impediment to his success; but notwithstanding all that, it 
 was overborne by the power of the man in preaching over- 
 borne by his power, which melted into harmony with all the 
 adjuncts and incidents of the man as a whole, so much so, 
 that although I would have said that the accent of Dr. Chal- 
 mers was distasteful, yet in Dr. Chalmers himself I would not 
 have had it altered in the smallest degree." Chalmers spoke 
 with a massive eloquence in keeping with his powerful frame 
 and his broad brow and his commanding presence. His 
 speeches were a strenuous blending of argument and emo- 
 tion. They appealed at once to the strong common-sense and 
 to the deep religious convictions of his Scottish audiences. 
 His whole soul was in his work as a leader of religious move- 
 ments. He cared little or nothing for any popularity or fame 
 that he might have won. Some strong and characteristic 
 words of his own have told us what he thought of passing 
 renown. He called it "a popularity which rifles home of 
 its sweets ; and by elevating a man above his fellows places 
 him in a region of desolation, where he stands a conspicuous 
 mark for the shafts of malice, envy, and detraction ; a pop- 
 ularity which, with its head among storms and its feet on 
 
150 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the treacherous quicksands, has nothing to lull the agonies 
 of its tottering existence but the hosannas of a drivelling 
 generation." There is no reason to doubt that these were 
 Chalmers's genuine sentiments ; and scarcely any man of his 
 time had come into so sudden and great an endowment of 
 popularity. The reader of to-day must not look for ade- 
 quate illustration of the genius and the influence of Chal- 
 mers in his published works. These do, indeed, show him 
 to have been a strong reasoner and a man of original mind ; 
 but they do not show the Chalmers of Scottish controversy 
 that Chalmers must be studied through the traces, lying 
 all around, of his influence upon the mind and the history 
 of the Scottish people. The Free Church of Scotland is his 
 monument. He did not make that Church. It was not the 
 work of one man, or, strictly speaking, of one generation. 
 It grew naturally out of the inevitable struggle between 
 Church and State. But Chalmers did more than any other 
 man to decide the moment and the manner of its coming 
 into existence, and its success is his best monument. 
 
 For we may anticipate a little in this instance as in that 
 of the Oxford movement, and mention at once the fact that 
 on May 18th, 1843, some five hundred ministers of the 
 Church of Scotland, under the leadership of Dr. Chalmers, 
 seceded from the old Kirk and set about to form the Free 
 Church. The Government of Sir Robert Peel had made a 
 weak effort at compromise by legislative enactment, but had 
 declined to introduce any legislation which should free the 
 Kirk of Scotland from the control of the civil courts, and 
 there was no course for those who held the views of Dr. 
 Chalmers but to withdraw from the Church which admitted 
 that claim of State control. Opinions may differ as to the 
 necessity, the propriety of the secession as to its effects 
 upon the history and the character of the Scottish people 
 since that time; but there can be no difference of opinion as 
 to the spirit of self-sacrifice in which the step was taken. 
 Five hundred ministers on that memorable day went delib- 
 erately forth from their positions of comfort and honor, from 
 home and competence, to meet an uncertain and a perilous 
 future, with perhaps poverty and failure to be the final re- 
 sult of their enterprise, and with misconstruction and mis- 
 representation to make the bitter bread of poverty more bit- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 151 
 
 ter still. In these pages we have nothing to do with the 
 merits of religious controversies ; and it is no part of our 
 concern to consider even the social and political effects pro- 
 duced upon Scotland by this great secession. But we need 
 not withhold our admiration from the men who risked and 
 suffered so much in the cause of what they believed to be 
 their Church's true rights ; and we are bound to give this 
 admiration as cordially to the poor and nameless ministers, 
 the men of the rank and file, about whose doings history so 
 little concerns herself, as to the leaders like Chalmers, who, 
 whether they sought it or not, found fame shining on their 
 path of self-sacrifice. The history of Scotland is illustrated 
 by many great national deeds. No deed it tells of surpasses 
 in dignity and in moral grandeur that secession to cite the 
 words of the protest "from an Establishment which we 
 loved and prized, through interference with conscience, the 
 dishonor done to Christ's crown, and the rejection of his 
 sole and supreme authority as King in his Church." 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 
 
 THE earliest days of the Peel Ministry fell upon trouble, 
 not indeed at home, but abroad. At home the prospect still 
 seemed bright. The birth of the Queen's eldest son was 
 an event welcomed by national congratulation. There was 
 still great distress in the agricultural districts ; but there 
 was a general confidence that the financial genius of Peel 
 would quickly find some way to make burdens light, and 
 that the condition of things all over the country would be- 
 gin to mend. It was a region far removed from the knowl- 
 edge and the thoughts of most Englishmen that supplied 
 the news now beginning to come into England day after 
 day, and to thrill the country with the tale of one of the 
 greatest disasters to English policy and English arms to 
 be found in all the record of our dealings with the East. 
 There are many still living who can recall with an impres- 
 sion as keen as though it belonged to yesterday the first ac- 
 counts that reached this country of the surrender at Cabul, 
 
152 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and the gradual extinction of the army that tried to make 
 its retreat through the terrible Pass. 
 
 This grim chapter of history had been for some time in 
 preparation. It may be said to open with the reign itself. 
 News travelled slowly then ; and it was quite in the ordi- 
 nary course of things that some part of the empire might be 
 torn with convulsion for months before London knew that 
 the even and ordinary condition of things had been disturbed. 
 In this instance the rejoicings at the accession of the young 
 Queen were still going on, when a series of events had begun 
 in Central Asia destined to excite the profoundest emotion 
 in England, and to exercise the most powerful influence upon 
 our foreign policy down to the present hour. On September 
 20th, 1837, Captain Alexander Barnes arrived at Cabul, the 
 capital of the State of Cabul, in the north of Afghanistan, 
 and the ancient capital of the Emperor Baber, whose tomb 
 is on a hill outside the city. Burnes was a famous Oriental- 
 ist and traveller, the Burton or Burnaby of his day ; he had 
 conducted an expedition into Central Asia; had published 
 his travels in Bokhara, and had been sent on a mission by 
 the Indian Government, in whose service he was, to study 
 the navigation of the Indus. He was, it may be remarked, 
 a member of the family of Robert Burns, the poet himself 
 having changed the original spelling of the name which all 
 the other members of the family retained. The object of 
 the journey of Captain Burnes to Cabul in 1837 was, in the 
 first instance, to enter into commercial relations with Dost 
 Mahomed, then ruler of Cabul, and with other chiefs of the 
 western regions. But events soon changed his business 
 from a commercial into a political and diplomatic mission ; 
 and his tragic fate would make his journey memorable to 
 Englishmen forever, even if other events had not grown out 
 of it which give it a place of more than personal importance 
 in history. 
 
 The great region of Afghanistan, with its historical boun- 
 daries as varying and difficult to fix at certain times as those 
 of the old Dukedom of Burgundy, has been called the land 
 of transition between Eastern and Western Asia. All the 
 great ways that lead from Persia to India pass through that 
 region. There is a proverb which declares that no one can 
 be king of Hindostan without first becoming lord of Cabul. 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 153 
 
 The Afghans are the ruling nation, but among them had 
 long been settled Hindoos, Arabs, Armenians, Abyssinians, 
 and men of other races and religions. The Afghans are 
 
 o o 
 
 Mohammedans of the Shunite sect, but they allowed Hindoos, 
 Christians, and even the Persians, who are of the hated dis- 
 senting sect of the Shiites, to live among them, and even to 
 rise to high position and influence. The founder of the Af- 
 ghan Empire, Ahmed Shah, died in 1773. He had made an 
 empire which stretched from Herat on the west to Sirhind 
 on the east, and from the Oxus and Cashmere on the north 
 to the Arabian Sea and the mouths of the Indus on the 
 south. The death of his son, Timur Shah, delivered the 
 kingdom up to the hostile factions, intrigues, and quarrels 
 of his sons : the leaders of a powerful tribe, the Barukzyes, 
 took advantage of the events that arose out of this condi- 
 tion of things to dethrone the descendants of Ahmed Shah. 
 When Captain Burnes visited Afghanistan in 1832, the only 
 part of all their great inheritance which yet remained with 
 the descendants of Ahmed Shah was the principality of He- 
 rat. The remainder of Afghanistan was parcelled out be- 
 tween Dost Mahomed and his brothers. Dost Mahomed 
 was a man of extraordinary ability and energy. He would 
 probably have made a name as a soldier and a statesman 
 anywhere. He had led a stormy youth, but had put away 
 with maturity and responsibility the vices and follies of his 
 earlier years. There seems no reason to doubt that, although 
 he was a usurper, he was a sincere lover of his country, and 
 on the whole a wise and just ruler. When Captain Burnes 
 visited Dost Mahomed, he was received with every mark of 
 friendship and favor. Dost Mahomed professed to be, and 
 no doubt at one time was, a sincere friend of the English 
 Government and people. There was, however, at that time 
 a quarrel going on between the Shah of Persia and the Prince 
 of Herat, the last enthroned representative, as has been al- 
 ready said, of the great family on whose fall Dost Mahomed 
 and his brothers had mounted into power. So far as can 
 now be judged, there does seem to have been serious and 
 genuine ground of complaint on the part of Persia against 
 the ruler of Herat. But it is probable, too, that the Persian 
 Shah had been seeking for, and in any case would have 
 found, a pretext for making war; and the strong impression 
 
 7* 
 
154 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 at the time in England, and among the authorities in India, 
 was that Persia herself was but a puppet in the hands of 
 Russia. A glance at the map will show the meaning of this 
 suspicion and the reasons which at once gave it plausibility, 
 and would have rendered it of grave importance. If Persia 
 were merely the instrument of Russia, and if the troops of 
 the Shah were only the advance guard of the Czar, then, un- 
 doubtedly, the attack on Herat might have been regarded 
 as the first step of a great movement of Russia toward our 
 Indian dominion. 
 
 There were other reasons, too, to give this suspicion some 
 plausibility. Mysterious agents of Russia, officers in her ser- 
 vice and others, began to show themselves in Central Asia 
 at the time of Captain Burnes's visit to Dost Mahomed. 
 Undoubtedly Russia did set herself for some reason to win 
 the friendship and alliance of Dost Mahomed ; and Captain 
 Burnes was for his part engaged in the same endeavor. All 
 considerations of a merely commercial nature had long since 
 been put away, and Burnes was freely and earnestly negoti- 
 ating with Dost Mahomed for his alliance. Burnes always 
 insisted that Dost Mahomed himself was sincerely anxious 
 to become an ally of England, and that lie offered more than 
 once, on his own free part, to dismiss the Russian agents even 
 without seeing them, if Burnes desired him to do so. But 
 for some reason Burnes's superiors did not share his confi- 
 dence. In Downing Street and in Simla the profouudest dis- 
 trust of Dost Mahomed prevailed. It was again and again 
 impressed on Burnes that he must regard Dost Mahomed as 
 a treacherous enemy, and as a man playing the part of Per- 
 sia and of Russia. It is impossible now to estimate fairly 
 all the reasons which may have justified the English and 
 the Indian Governments in this conviction. But we know 
 that nothing in the policy afterward followed out by the 
 Indian authorities exhibited any of the judgment and wis- 
 dom that would warrant us in taking anything for granted 
 on the mere faith of their dictum. The story of four years 
 almost to a day the extent of this sad chapter of English 
 history will be a tale of such misfortune, blunder, and hu- 
 miliation as the annals of England do not anywhere else pre- 
 sent. Blunders which were, indeed, worse than crimes, and a 
 principle of action which it is a crime in any rulers to sane- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 155 
 
 lion, brought things to such a pass with us that in a few 
 years from the accession of the Queen we had in Afghanis- 
 tan soldiers who were positively afraid to fight the enemy, 
 and some English officials who were not ashamed to treat 
 for the removal of our most formidable foes by purchased 
 assassination. It is a good thing for us all to read in cold 
 
 o o 
 
 blood this chapter of our history. It will teach us how vain 
 is a policy founded on evil and ignoble principles ; how vain 
 is the strength and courage of men when they have not lead- 
 ers fit to command. It may teach us, also, not to be too 
 severe in our criticism of other nations. The failure of the 
 French invasion of Mexico under the Second Empire seems 
 like glory when compared with the failure of our attempt 
 to impose a hated sovereign on the Afghan people. 
 
 Captain Burnes then was placed in the painful difficulty 
 of having to carry out a policy of which he entirely disap- 
 proved. He believed in Dost Mahomed as a friend, and he 
 was ordered to regard him as an enemy. It would have 
 been better for the career and for the reputation of Burnes 
 if he had simply declined to have anything to do with a 
 course of action which seemed to him at once unjust and un- 
 wise. But Burnes was a young man, full of youth's energy 
 and ambition. He thought he saw a career of distinction 
 opening before him, and he was unwilling to close it abrupt- 
 ly by setting himself in obstinate opposition to his superi- 
 ors. He was, besides, of a quick mercurial temperament, over 
 which mood followed mood in rapid succession of change. 
 A slight contradiction sometimes threw him into momenta- 
 ry despondency ; a gleam of hope elated him into the assur- 
 ance that all was won. It is probable that after awhile he 
 may have persuaded himself to acquiesce in the judgment 
 of his chiefs. On the other hand, Dost Mahomed was placed 
 in a position of great difficulty and dangei'. He had to 
 choose. He could not remain absolutely independent of all 
 the disputants. If England would not support him, he must 
 for his own safety find alliances elsewhere in Russian state- 
 craft, for example. He told Burnes of this again and again, 
 and Burnes endeavored, without the slightest success, to im- 
 press his superiors with his own views as to the reasonable- 
 ness of Dost Mahomed's arguments. Runjeet Singh, the dar- 
 ing and successful adventurer who had annexed the whole 
 
156 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 province of Cashmere to his dominions, was the enemy of 
 Dost Mahomed and the faithful ally of England. Dost Ma- 
 homed thought the British Government could assist him in 
 coming to terms with Runjeet Singh, and Burnes had as- 
 sured him that the British Government would do all it could 
 to establish satisfactory terms of peace between Afghanistan 
 and the Punjaub, over which Runjeet Singh ruled. Burnes 
 wrote from Cabul to say that Russia had made substantial 
 offers to Dost Mahomed ; Persia had been lavish in her bid- 
 dings for his alliance ; Bokhara and other states had not been 
 backward ; " yet in all that has passed, or is daily transpir- 
 ing, the chief of Cabul declares that he prefers the sympathy 
 and friendly offices of the British to all these cffers, however 
 alluring they may seem, from Persia or from the Emperor; 
 which places his good-sense in a light more than prominent, 
 and in my humble judgment proves that by an earlier atten- 
 tion to these countries we might have escaped the whole of 
 these intrigues and held long since a stable influence in Ca- 
 bul." Burnes, however, was unable to impress his superiors 
 with any belief either in Dost Mahomed or in the policy 
 which he himself advocated, and the result was that Lord 
 Auckland, the Governor-general of India, at length resolved 
 to treat Dost Mahomed as an enemy, and to drive him from 
 Cabul. Lord Auckland, therefore, entered into a treaty with 
 Runjeet Singh and Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, the exiled repre- 
 sentative of what we may call the legitimist rulers of Af- 
 ghanistan, for the restoration of the latter to the throne of 
 his ancestors, and for the destruction of the power of Dost 
 Mahomed. 
 
 It ought to be a waste of time to enter into any argument 
 in condemnation of such a policy in our days. Even if its 
 results had not proved in this particular instance its most 
 striking and exemplary condemnation, it is so grossly and 
 flagrantly opposed to all the principles of our more modern 
 statesmanship that no one among us ought now to need a 
 warning against it. Dost Mahomed was the accepted, pop- 
 ular, and successful ruler of Cabul. No matter what our 
 quarrel with him, we had not the slightest right to make it 
 an excuse for forcing on his people a ruler whom they had 
 proved before, as they were soon to prove again, that they 
 thoi'oughly detested. Perhaps the nearest parallel to our 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 157 
 
 policy in this instance is to be found in the French invasion 
 of Mexico, and the disastrous attempt to impose a foreign 
 ruler on the Mexican people. Each experiment ended in ut- 
 ter failure, and in the miserable death of the unfortunate 
 puppet prince who was put forward as the figure-head of the 
 enterprise. But the French Emperor could at least have 
 pleaded in his defence that Maximilian of Austria had not 
 already been tried and rejected by the Mexican people. Our 
 protege had been tried and rejected. The French Emper- 
 or might have pleaded that he had actual and substantial 
 wrongs to avenge. We had only problematical and possi- 
 ble dangers to guard against. In any case, as has been al- 
 ready said, the'calamities entailed on French arms and coun- 
 sels by the Mexican intervention read like a page of .brilliant 
 success when compared with the immediate result of our en- 
 terprise in Cabul. Before passing away from this part of 
 the subject, it is necessary to mention the fact that among 
 its many unfortunate incidents the campaign led to some 
 peculiarly humiliating debates and some lamentable accusa- 
 tions in the House of Commons. Years after Burnes had 
 been flung into his bloody grave, it was found that the Eng- 
 lish Government had presented to the House of Commons 
 his despatches in so mutilated and altered a form, that Burnes 
 was made to seem as if he actually approved and recom- 
 mended the policy which he especially warned us to avoid. 
 It is painful to have to record such a fact, but it is indispen- 
 sable that it should be recorded. It would be vain to at- 
 tempt to explain how the principles and the honor of Eng- 
 lish statesmanship fell, for the hour, under the demoralizing 
 influence which allowed such things to be thought legiti- 
 mate. An Oriental atmosphere seemed to have gathered 
 around our official leaders. In Afghanistan they were en- 
 tering into secret and treacherous treaties ; in England they 
 were garbling despatches. When, years after, Lord Palmer- 
 ston was called upon to defend the policy which had thus 
 dealt with the despatches of Alexander Burnes, he did not 
 say that the documents were not garbled. He only con- 
 tended that, as the Government had determined not to act 
 on the advice of Burnes, they were in nowise bound to pub- 
 lish those passages of his despatches in which he set forth 
 assumptions which they believed to be unfounded, and ad- 
 
158 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 vised a policy which they looked upon as mistaken. Such 
 a defence is only to be read with wonder and pain. The 
 Government were not accused of suppressing passages which 
 they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be worthless. The ac- 
 cusation was that, by suppressing passages and sentences 
 here and there, Barnes was made to appear as if he were 
 actually recommending the policy against which he was at 
 the time most earnestly protesting. Burnes was himself the 
 first victim of the policy which he strove against, and which 
 all England has since condemned. No severer word is need- 
 ed to condemn the mutilation of his despatches than to say 
 that he was actually made to stand before the country as 
 responsible for having recommended that very policy. "It 
 should never be forgotten," says Sir J. W. Kaye, the histori- 
 an of the Afghan War, " by those who would form a correct 
 estimate of the character and career of Alexander Burnes, 
 that both had been misrepresented in those collections of 
 State papers which are supposed to furnish the best materi- 
 als of history, but which are often in reality only one-sided 
 compilations of garbled documents counterfeits, which the 
 ministerial stamp forces into currency, defrauding a present 
 generation, and handing down to posterity a chain of dan- 
 gerous lies." 
 
 Meanwhile the Persian attack on Herat had practically 
 failed, owing mainly to the skill and spirit of a young Eng- 
 lish officer, Eldred Pottinger, who was assisting the prince 
 in his resistance to the troops of the Persian Shah. Lord 
 Auckland, however, ordered the assemblage of a British 
 force for service across the Indus, and issued a famous man- 
 ifesto, dated from Simla, October 1st, 1838, in which lie set 
 forth the motives of his policy. The Governor- general 
 stated that Dost Mahomed had made a sudden and unpro- 
 voked attack upon our ancient ally, Runjeet Singh, and that 
 when the Persian army was besieging Herat, Dost Mahomed 
 was giving undisguised support to the designs of Persia. 
 The chiefs of Candahar, the brothers of Dost Mahomed, had 
 also, Lord Auckland declared, given in their adherence to 
 the plan of Persia. Great Britain regarded the advance of 
 Persian arms in Afghanistan as an act of hostility toward 
 herself. The Governor-general had, therefore, resolved to 
 support the claims of the Shah Soojah-ool-Moolk, whose do- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 159 
 
 minions had been usurped by the existing rulers of Cabul, 
 and who had found an honorable asylum in British territo- 
 ry ; and " whose popularity throughout Afghanistan " Lord 
 Auckland wrote in words that must afterward have read 
 like the keenest and cruellest satire upon his policy " had 
 been proved to his Lordship by the strong and unanimous 
 testimony of the best authorities." This popular sovereign, 
 this favorite of his people, was at the time living in exile, 
 without the faintest hope of ever again being restored to his 
 dominions. We pulled the poor man out of his obscurity, 
 told him that his people were yearning for him, and that we 
 would set him on his throne once more. We entered for the 
 purpose into the tripartite treaty already mentioned. Mr. 
 (afterward Sir W. H.) Macnaghten, Secretary to the Govern- 
 ment of India, was appointed to be envoy and minister at 
 the court of Shah Soojah ; and Sir Alexander Burnes (who 
 had been recalled from the court of Dost Mahomed, and re- 
 warded with a title for giving the advice which his superiors 
 thought absurd) was deputed to act under his direction. It 
 is only right to say that the policy of Lord Auckland had 
 the entire approval of the British Government. It was af- 
 terward stated in Parliament on the part of the ministry 
 that a despatch recommending to Lord Auckland exactly 
 such a course as he pursued crossed on the way his despatch 
 announcing to the Government at home that he had already 
 undertaken the enterprise. 
 
 We conquered Dost Mahomed and dethroned him. He 
 made a bold and brilliant, sometimes even a splendid resist- 
 ance. We took Ghuznee by blowing up one of its gates 
 with bags of powder, and thus admitting the rush of a 
 storming-party. It was defended by one of the sons of Dost 
 Mahomed, who became our prisoner. We took Jellalabad, 
 which was defended by Akbar Khan, another of Dost Ma- 
 homed's sons, whose name came afterward to have a hateful 
 sound in all English ears. As we approached Cabul, Dost 
 Mahomed abandoned his capital and fled with a few horse- 
 men across the Indus. Shah Soojah entered Cabul accom- 
 panied by the British officers. It was to have been a tri- 
 umphal entry. The hearts of those who believed in his 
 cause must have sunk within them when they saw how the 
 Shah was received by the people who, Lord Auckland was 
 
160 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 assured, were so devoted to him. The city received him in 
 sullen silence. Few of its people condescended even to turn 
 out to see him as he passed. The vast majority stayed 
 away, and disdained even to look at him. One would have 
 thought that the least observant eye must have seen that 
 his throne could not last a moment longer than the time 
 during which the strength of Britain was willing to support 
 it. The British army, however, withdrew, leaving only a 
 contingent of some eight thousand men, besides the Shah's 
 own hirelings, to maintain him for the present. Sir W. 
 Macnaghten seems to have really believed that the work 
 was done, and that Shah Soojah was as safe on his throne as 
 Queen Victoria. He was destined to be very soon and very 
 cruelly undeceived. 
 
 Dost Mahomed made more than one effort -to regain his 
 place. He invaded Shah Soojah's dominions, and met the 
 combined forces of the Shah and their English ally in more 
 than one battle. On November 2d, 1840, he won the admi- 
 ration of the English themselves by the brilliant stand he 
 made against them. With his Afghan horse he drove our 
 cavalry before him, and forced them to seek the shelter of 
 the British guns. The native troopers would not stand 
 against him : they fled, and left their English officers, who 
 vainly tried to rally them. In this battle of Purwandurrah 
 victory might not unreasonably have been claimed for Dost 
 Mahomed. He won at least his part of the battle. No 
 tongues have praised him louder than those of English his- 
 torians. But Dost Mahomed had the wisdom of a states- 
 man as well as the genius of a soldier. He knew well that 
 he could not hold out against the strength of England. A 
 savage or semi-barbarous chieftain is easily puifed up by a 
 seeming triumph over a great Power, and is led to his de- 
 struction by the vain hope that he can hold out against it 
 to the last. Dost Mahomed had no such ignorant and idle 
 notion. Perhaps he knew well enough, too, that time was 
 wholly on his side ; that he had only to wait and see the 
 sovereignty of Shah Soojah tumble into pieces. The even- 
 ing after his brilliant exploit in the field Dost Mahomed rode 
 quietly to the quarters of Sir W. Macnaghten, met the en- 
 voy, who was retaining from an evening ride, and to Mac- 
 nasfhten's utter amazement announced himself as Dost Ma- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 161 
 
 homed, tendered to the envoy the sword that had flashed 
 so splendidly across the field of the previous day's fight, 
 and surrendered himself a prisoner. His sword was return- 
 ed; he was treated with all honor; and a few days after- 
 ward he was sent to India, where a residence and a revenue 
 were assigned to him. 
 
 But the withdrawal of Dost Mahomed from the scene did 
 nothing to secure the reign of the unfortunate Shah Soojah. 
 The Shah was hated on his own account. He was regarded 
 as a traitor who had sold his country to the foreigners. In- 
 surrections began to be chronic. They were going on in the 
 very midst of Cabul itself. Sir W. Macnaghten was warned 
 of danger, but seemed to take no heed. Some fatal blind- 
 ness appears to have suddenly fallen on the eyes of our peo- 
 ple in Cabul. On November 2d, 1841, an insurrection broke 
 out. Sir Alexander Burnes lived in the city itself; Sir W. 
 Macnaghten and the military commander, Major-general 
 Elphinstone, were in cantonments at some little distance. 
 The insurrection might have been put down in the first in- 
 stance with hardly the need even of Napoleon's famous 
 " whiff of grape-shot." But it was allowed to grow up with- 
 out attempt at control. Sir Alexander Burnes could not 
 be got to believe that it was anything serious, even when 
 a fanatical and furious mob were besieging his own house. 
 The fanatics were especially bitter against Burnes, because 
 they believed that he had been guilty of treachery. They 
 accused him of having pretended to be the friend of Dost 
 Mahomed, deceived him, and brought the English into the 
 country. How entirely innocent of this charge Burnes was 
 we all now know ; but it would be idle to deny that there 
 was much in the external aspect of events to excuse such a 
 suspicion in the mind of an infuriated Afghan. To the last 
 Burnes refused to believe that he was in danger. He had 
 always been a friend to the Afghans, he said, and he could 
 have nothing to fear. It was true. He had always been 
 the sincere friend of the Afghans. It was his misfortune, 
 and the heavy fault of his superiors, that he had been made 
 to appear as an enemy of the Afghans. He had now to pay 
 a heavy penalty for the errors and the wrong-doing of oth- 
 ers. He harangued the raging mob, and endeavored to bring 
 them to reason. He does not seem to have understood, up 
 
162 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 to the very last moment, that by reminding them that he 
 was Alexander Burnes, their old friend, he was only giving 
 them a new reason for demanding his life. He was murder- 
 ed in the tumult. He and his brother and all those with 
 them were hacked to pieces with Afghan knives. He was 
 only in his thirty-seventh year when he was murdered. He 
 was the first victim of the policy which had resolved to in- 
 tervene in the affairs of Afghanistan. Fate seldom showed 
 with more strange and bitter malice her proverbial irony 
 than when she made him the first victim of the policy adopt- 
 ed in despite of his best advice and his strongest warnings. 
 
 The murder of Burnes was not a climax ; it was only a 
 beginning. The English troops were quartered in canton- 
 ments outside the city, and at some little distance from it. 
 These cantonments were, in any case of real difficulty, prac- 
 tically indefensible. The popular monarch, the darling of 
 his people, whom we had restored to his throne, was in the 
 Balla Hissar, or citadel of Cabul. From the moment when 
 the insurrection broke out he may be regarded as a prisoner 
 or a besieged man there. He was as utterly unable to help 
 our people as they were to help him. The whole country 
 threw itself into insurrection against him and us. The Af- 
 ghans attacked the cantonments, and actually compelled the 
 English to abandon the forts in which all our commissariat 
 was stored. We were thus threatened with famine, even 
 if we could resist the enemy in arms. We were strangely 
 unfortunate in our civil and military leaders. Sir W. Mac- 
 naghten was a man of high character and good purpose, 
 but he was weak and credulous. The commander, General 
 Elphinstone, was old, infirm, tortured by disease, broken 
 down both in mind and body, incapable of forming a pur- 
 pose of his own, or of holding to one suggested by anybody 
 else. His second in command was a far stronger and abler 
 man, but unhappily the two could never agree. " They were 
 both of them," says Sir J. W. Kaye, " brave men. In any 
 other situation, though the physical infirmities of the one 
 and the cankered vanity, the dogmatical perverseness of the 
 other, might have in some measure detracted from their ef- 
 ficiency as military commanders, I believe they would have 
 exhibited sufficient courage and constancy to rescue an army 
 from utter destruction, and the British name from indelible 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 163 
 
 reproach. But in the Cabul cantonments they were miser- 
 ably out of place. They seem to have been sent there, by 
 superhuman intervention, to work out the utter ruin and 
 prostration of an unholy policy by ordinary human means." 
 One fact must be mentioned by an English historian one 
 which an English historian has happily not often to record. 
 It is certain that an officer in our service entered into nego- 
 tiations for the murder of the insurgent chiefs, who were 
 our worst enemies. It is more than probable that he be- 
 lieved in doing so he was acting as Sir W. Macnaghten 
 would have had him do. Sir W. Macnaghten was innocent 
 of any complicity in such a plot, and was incapable of it. 
 But the negotiations were opened and carried on in his name. 
 A new figure appeared on the scene, a dark and a fierce 
 apparition. This was Akbar Khan, the favorite son of Dost 
 Mahomed. He was a daring, a clever, an unscrupulous 
 young man. From the moment when he entered Cabul he 
 became the real leader of the insurrection against Shah Soo- 
 jah and us. Macnaghten, persuaded by the military com- 
 mander that the position of things was hopeless, consented 
 to enter into negotiations with Akbar Khan. Before the 
 arrival of the latter the chiefs of the insurrection had offer- 
 ed us terms which made the ears of our envoy tingle. Such 
 terms had not often been even suggested to British soldiers 
 before. They were simply unconditional surrender. Mac- 
 naghten indignantly rejected them. Everything went wrong 
 with him, however. We were beaten again and again by 
 the Afghans. Our officers never faltered in their duty; but 
 the melancholy truth has to be told that the men, most of 
 whom were Asiatics, at last began to lose heart and would 
 not fight the enemy. So the envoy was compelled to enter 
 into terms with Akbar Khan and the other chiefs. Akbar 
 Khan received him at first with contemptuous insolence as 
 a haughty conqueror receives some ignoble and humiliated 
 adversary. It was agreed that the British troops should 
 quit Afghanistan at once; that Dost Mahomed and his fam- 
 ily should be sent back to Afghanistan ; that on his return 
 the unfortunate Shah Soojah should be allowed to take him- 
 self off to India or where he would ; and that some British 
 officers should be left at Cabul as hostages for the fulfilment 
 of the conditions. 
 
164 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 The evacuation did not take place at once, although the 
 fierce winter was setting in, and the snow was falling heav- 
 ily, ominously. Macnaghten seems to have had still some 
 lingering hopes that something would turn up to relieve 
 him from the shame of quitting the country ; and it must 
 be owned that he does not seem to have had any intention 
 of carrying out the terms of the agreement if by any chance 
 he could escape from them. On both sides there were dal- 
 lyings and delays. At last Akbar Khan made a new and 
 startling proposition to our envoy. It was that they two 
 should enter into a secret treaty, should unite their arms 
 against the other chiefs, and should keep Shah Soojah on 
 the throne as nominal king, with Akbar Khan as his vizier. 
 Macnaghten caught at the proposals. He had entered into 
 terms of negotiation with the Afghan chiefs together ; he 
 now consented to enter into a secret treaty with one of the 
 chiefs to turn their joint arms against the others. It would 
 be idle and shameful to attempt to defend such a policy. 
 We can only excuse it by considering the terrible circum- 
 stances of Macnaghten's position, the manner in which his 
 nerves and moral fibre had been shaken and shattered by 
 calamities, and his doubts whether he could place any reli- 
 ance on the promises of the chiefs. He had apparently sunk 
 into that condition of mind which Macaulay tells us that 
 Clive adopted so readily in his dealings with Asiatics, and 
 under the influence of which men naturalty honorable and 
 high-minded come to believe that it is right to act treacher- 
 ously with those whom we believe to be treacherous. All 
 this is but excuse, and rather poor excuse. When it has all 
 been said and thought of, we must still be glad to believe 
 that there are not many Englishmen who would, under any 
 circumstances, have consented even to give a hearing to the 
 proposals of Akbar Khan. 
 
 Whatever Macnaghten's error, it was dearly expiated. 
 He went out at noon next day to confer with Akbar Khan 
 on the banks of the neighboring river. Three of his officers 
 were with him. Akbar Khan was ominously surrounded 
 by friends and retainers. These kept pressing round the 
 unfortunate envoy. Some remonstrance was made by one 
 of the English officers, but Akbar Khan said it was of no 
 
 O ' 
 
 consequence, as they were all in the secret. Not many 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 165 
 
 words were spoken ; the expected conference had hardly 
 begun when a signal was given or an order issued by Akbar 
 Khan, and the envoy and the officers were suddenly seized 
 from behind. A scene of wild confusion followed, in which 
 hardly anything is clear and certain but the one most horri- 
 ble incident. The envoy struggled with Akbar Khan, who 
 had himself seized Macnaghten ; Akbar Khan drew from his 
 belt one of a pair of pistols which Macnaghten had present- 
 ed to him a short time before, and shot him through the 
 body. The fanatics who were crowding round hacked the 
 body to pieces with their knives. Of the three officers one 
 was killed on the spot ; the other two were forced to mount 
 Afghan horses and carried away as prisoners. 
 
 At first this horrid deed of treachery and blood shows 
 like that to which Clearchus and his companions, the chiefs 
 of the famous ten thousand Greeks, fell victims at the hands 
 of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap. But it seems certain 
 that the treachery of Akbar, base as it was, did not contem- 
 plate more than the seizure of the envoy and his officers. 
 There were jealousies and disputes among the chiefs of the 
 insurrection. One of them, in especial, had got his mind 
 filled with the conviction, inspired, no doubt, by the unfort- 
 unate and unparalleled negotiation already mentioned, that 
 the envoy had offered a price for his head. Akbar Khan 
 was accused by him of being a secret friend of the envoy 
 and the English. Akbar Khan's father was a captive in the 
 hands of the English, and it may have been thought that on 
 his account and for personal purposes Akbar was favoring 
 the envoy, and even intriguing with him. Akbar offered 
 to prove his sincerity by making the envoy a captive and 
 handing him over to the chiefs. This was the treacherous 
 plot which he strove to carry out by entering into the se- 
 cret negotiations with the easily -deluded envoy. On the 
 fatal day the latter resisted and struggled ; Akbar Khan 
 heard a cry of alarm that the English soldiers were coming 
 out of the cantonments to rescue the envoy ; and, wild with 
 passion, he suddenly drew his pistol and fired. This was 
 the statement made again and again by Akbar Khan him- 
 self. It does not seem an improbable explanation for what 
 otherwise looks a murder as stupid and purposeless as it was 
 brutal. The explanation does not much relieve the dark- 
 
166 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ness of Akbar Khan's character. It is given here as histo- 
 ry, not as exculpation. There is not the slightest reason 
 to suppose that Akbar Khan would have shrunk from any 
 treachery or any cruelty which served his purpose. His 
 own explanation of his purpose in this instance shows a de- 
 gree of treachery which could hardly be surpassed even in 
 the East. But it is well to bear in mind that the suspicion 
 of perfidy under which the English envoy labored, and 
 which was the main impulse of Akbar Khan's movement, 
 had evidence enough to support it in the eyes of suspicious 
 enemies ; and that poor Macnaghten would not have been 
 murdered had he not consented to meet Akbar Khan and 
 treat with him on a proposition to which an English official 
 should never have listened. 
 
 A terrible agony of suspense followed among the little 
 English force in the cantonments. The military chiefs after- 
 ward stated that they did not know until the following day 
 that any calamity had befallen the envoy. But a keen sus- 
 picion ran through the cantonments that some fearful deed 
 had been done. No step was taken to avenge the death of 
 Macnaghten, even when it became known that his hacked 
 and mangled body had been exhibited in triumph all through 
 the streets and bazars of Cabul. A paralysis seemed to 
 have fallen over the councils of our military chiefs. On 
 December 24th, 1841, came a letter from one of the officers 
 seized by Akbar Khan, accompanying proposals for a treaty 
 from the Afghan chiefs. It is hard now to understand how 
 any English officers could have consented to enter into 
 terms with the murderers of Macnaghten before his mangled 
 body could well have ceased to bleed. It is strange that it 
 did not occur to most of them that there was an alternative; 
 that they were not ordered by fate to accept whatever the 
 conquerors chose to offer. We can all see the difficulty of 
 their position. General Elphinstone and his second in com- 
 mand, Brigadier Shelton, were convinced that it would be 
 equally impossible to stay where they were or to cut their 
 way through the Afghans. But it might have occurred to 
 many that they were nevertheless not bound to treat with 
 the Afghans. They might have remembered the famous an- 
 swer of the father in Corneille's immortal drama, who is 
 asked what his son could have done but yield in the face of 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 167 
 
 such odds, and exclaims in generous passion that he could 
 have died. One English officer of mark did counsel his 
 superiors in this spirit. This was Major Eldred Pottinger, 
 whose skill and courage in the defence of Herat we have 
 already mentioned. Pottinger was for cutting their way 
 through all enemies and difficulties as far as they could, and 
 then occupying the ground with their dead bodies. But his 
 advice was hardly taken into consideration. It was deter- 
 mined to treat with the Afghans; and treating with the Af- 
 ghans now meant accepting any terms the Afghans chose 
 to impose on their fallen enemies. In the negotiations that 
 went on some written documents were exchanged. One of 
 these, drawn up by the English negotiators, contains a short 
 sentence which we believe to be absolutely unique in the 
 history of British dealings with armed enemies. It is an ap- 
 peal to the Afghan conquerors not to be too hard upon the 
 vanquished ; not to break the bruised reed. " In friendship, 
 kindness and consideration are necessary, not overpowering 
 the weak with sufferings !" In friendship ! we appealed to 
 the friendship of Macnaghten's murderers; to the friendship, 
 in any case, of the man whose father we had dethroned and 
 driven into exile. Not overpowering the weak with suffer- 
 ings ! The weak were the English ! One might fancy he 
 was reading the plaintive and piteous appeal of some forlorn 
 and feeble tribe of helpless half-breeds for the mercy of arro- 
 gant and mastering rulers. " Suffolk's imperious tongue is 
 stern and rough," says one in Shakspeare's pages, when he 
 is bidden to ask for consideration at the hands of captors 
 whom he is no longer able to resist. The tongue with which 
 the English force at Cabul addressed the Afghans was not 
 
 o o 
 
 imperious or stern or rough. It was bated, mild, and plain- 
 tive. Only the other day, it would seem, these men had 
 blown up the gates of Ghuznee, and rushed through the 
 dense smoke and the falling ruins to attack the enemy hand 
 to hand. Only the other day our envoy had received in sur- 
 render the bright sword of Dost Mahomed. Now the same 
 men who had seen these things could only plead for a little 
 gentleness of consideration, and had no thought of resistance, 
 and did not any longer seem to know how to die. 
 
 We accepted the terms of treaty offered to us. Nothing 
 else could be done by men who were not prepared to adopt 
 
168 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the advice of the heroic father in Corneille. The English 
 were at once to take themselves off out of Afghanistan, giv- 
 ing up all their guns except six, which they were allowed to 
 retain for their necessary defence in their mournful journey 
 home; they were to leave behind all the treasure, and to 
 guarantee the payment of something additional for the safe- 
 conduct of the poor little army to Peshawur or to Jellala- 
 bad ; and they were to hand over six officers as hostages for 
 the due fulfilment of the conditions. It is of course under- 
 stood that the conditions included the immediate release of 
 Dost Mahomed and his family and their return to Afghanis- 
 tan. When these should return, the six hostages were to be 
 released. Only one concession had been obtained from the 
 conquerors. It was at first demanded that some of the mar- 
 ried ladies should be left as hostages; but on the urgent 
 representations of the English officers this condition was 
 waived at least for the moment. When the treaty was 
 signed, the officers who had been seized when Macnaghten 
 was murdered were released. 
 
 It is worth mentioning that these officers were not badly 
 treated by Akbar Khan while they were in his power. On 
 the contrary, he had to make strenuous efforts, and did make 
 them in good faith, to save them from being murdered by 
 bands of his fanatical followers. One of the officers has 
 himself described the almost desperate efforts which Akbar 
 Khan had to make to save him from the fury of the mob, 
 who thi'onged thirsting for the blood of the Englishman up 
 to the very stirrup of their young chief. "Akbar Khan," 
 says this officer, " at length drew his sword and laid about 
 him right manfully " in defence of his prisoner. When, how- 
 ever, he had got the latter into a place of safety, the impet- 
 uous young Afghan chief could not restrain a sneer at his 
 captive and the cause his captive represented. Turning to 
 the English officer, he said more than once, "in a tone of 
 triumphant derision," some words such as these: "So you 
 are the man who came here to seize my country ?" It must 
 be owned that the condition of things gave bitter meaning 
 to the taunt, if they did not actually excuse it. At a later 
 period of this melancholy story it is told by Lady Sale that 
 crowds of the fanatical Ghilzyes were endeavoring to per- 
 suade Akbar Khan to slaughter all the English, and that 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 169 
 
 when he tried to pacify them they said that when Bnrnes 
 came into the country they entreated Akbar Khan's father 
 to have Burnes killed, or he would go back to Hindostan, 
 and on some future day return and bring an army with him, 
 " to take our country from us ;" and all the calamities had 
 come upon them because Dost Mahomed would not take 
 their advice. Akbar Khan either was or pretended to be 
 moderate. Pie might, indeed, safely put on an air of mag- 
 nanimity. His enemies were doomed. It needed no com- 
 mand from him to decree their destruction. 
 
 The withdrawal from Cabul began. It was the heart of 
 a cruel winter. The English had to make their way through 
 the awful pass of Koord Cabul. This stupendous gorge 
 runs for some five miles between mountain ranges so narrow, 
 lofty, and grim, that in the winter season the rays of the sun 
 can hardly pierce its darkness even at the noontide. Down 
 the centre dashed a precipitous mountain torrent so fiercely 
 that the stern frost of that terrible time could not stay its 
 course. The snow lay in masses on the ground ; the rocks 
 and stones that raised their heads above the snow in the 
 way of the unfortunate travellers were slippery with frost- 
 Soon the white snow began to be stained and splashed with 
 blood. Fearful as this Koord Cabul Pass was, it was only a 
 degree worse than the road which for two Avhole days the 
 English had to traverse to reach it. The army which set 
 out from Cabul numbered more than four thousand fighting 
 men of whom Europeans, it should be said, formed but a 
 small proportion and some twelve thousand camp followers 
 of all kinds. There were also many women and children. 
 Lady Macnaghten, widow of the murdered envoy; Lady 
 Sale, whose gallant husband was holding Jellalabad, at the 
 near end 'of the Khyber Pass, toward the Indian frontier; 
 Mrs. Sturt, her daughter, soon to be widowed by the death 
 of her young husband; Mrs. Trevor and her seven children, 
 and many other pitiable fugitives. The winter journey 
 would have been cruel and dangerous enough in time of 
 peace; but this journey had to be accomplished in the midst 
 of something far worse than common war. At every step 
 of the road, every opening of the rocks, the unhappy crowd 
 of confused and heterogeneous fugitives were beset by bands 
 of savage fanatics, who with their long guns and long knives 
 
 I. 8 
 
170 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 were murdering all they could reach. It was all the way 
 a confused constant battle against a guerilla enemy of the 
 most furious and merciless temper, who were perfectly fa- 
 miliar with the ground, and could rush forward and retire 
 exactly as suited their tactics. The English soldiers, weary, 
 weak, and crippled by frost, could make but a poor fight 
 against the savage Afghans. "It was no longer," says Sir 
 J. W. Kaye, " a retreating army; it Avas a rabble in chaotic 
 flight." Men, women, and children, horses, ponies, camels, 
 the wounded, the dying, the dead, all crowded together in 
 almost inextricable confusion among the snow and amidst the 
 relentless enemies. "The massacre" to quote again from 
 Sir J. W. Kaye, " was fearful in this Koord Cabul Pass. 
 Three thousand men are said to have fallen under the fire of 
 the enemy, or to have dropped down paralyzed and exhaust- 
 ed to be slaughtered by the Afghan knives. And amidst 
 these fearful scenes of carnage, through a shower of match- 
 lock balls, rode English ladies on horseback or in camel-pan- 
 niers, sometimes vainly endeavoring to keep their children 
 beneath their eyes, and losing them in the confusion and be- 
 wilderment of the desolating march." 
 
 Was it for this, then, that our troops had been induced to 
 capitulate? Was this the safe-conduct which the Afghan 
 chiefs had promised in return for their accepting the igno- 
 minious conditions imposed on them? Some of the chiefs 
 did exert themselves to their utmost to protect the unfort- 
 unate English. It is not certain what the real wish of 
 Akbar Khan may have been. He protested that he had no 
 power to restrain the hordes of fanatical Ghilzyes whose 
 own immediate chiefs had not authority enough to keep 
 them from murdering the English whenever they got a 
 chance. The force of some few hundred horsemen whom 
 Akbar Khan had with him were utterly incapable, he de- 
 clared, of maintaining order among such a mass of infuriated 
 and lawless savages. Akbar Khan constantly appeared on 
 the scene during this journey of terror. At every opening 
 or break of the long straggling flight he and his little band 
 of followers showed themselves on the horizon : trying still 
 to protect the English from utter ruin, as he declared ; come 
 to gloat over their misery, and to see th.it it was surely ac- 
 complished, some of the unhappy English were ready to be- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 171 
 
 lieve. Yet his presence was something that seemed to give 
 a hope of protection. Akbar Khan at length startled the 
 English by a proposal that the women and children who 
 were with the army should be handed over to his custody 
 to be conveyed by him in safety to Peshawar. There was 
 nothing better to be done. The only modification of his re- 
 quest, or command, that could be obtained was that the hus- 
 bands of the married ladies should accompany their wives. 
 With this agreement the women and children were handed 
 over to the care of this dreaded enemy, and Lady Mac- 
 naghten had to undergo the agony of a personal interview 
 with the man whose own hand had killed her husband. 
 Few scenes in poetry or romance can surely be more thrill- 
 ing with emotion than such a meeting as this must have 
 been. Akbar Khan was kindly in his language, and de- 
 clared to the unhappy widow that lie would give his right 
 arm to undo, if it were possible, the deed that he had done. 
 
 The women and children and the married men whose wives 
 were among this party were taken from the unfortunate 
 army and placed under the care of Akbar Khan. As events 
 turned out, this proved a fortunate thing for them. But 
 in any case it was the best thing that could be done. Not 
 one of these women and children could have lived through 
 the horrors of the journey which lay before the remnant of 
 what had once been a British force. The march was re- 
 sumed ; new horrors set in ; new heaps of corpses stained the 
 snow ; and then Akbar Khan presented himself with a fresh 
 proposition. In the treaty made at Cabul between the Eng- 
 lish authorities and the Afghan chiefs there was an article 
 which stipulated that " the English force at Jellalabad shall 
 march for Peshawar before the Cabul army arrives, and shall 
 not delay on the road." Akbar Khan was especially anx- 
 ious to get rid of the little army at Jellalabad, at the near 
 end of the Khyber Pass. He desired above all things that 
 it should be on the march home to India; either that it 
 might be out of his way, or that he might have a chance of 
 destroying it on its way. It was in great measure as a se- 
 curity for its moving that he desired to have the women 
 and children under his care. It is not likely that he meant 
 any harm to the women and children ; it must be remember- 
 ed that his father and many of the women of his family were 
 
172 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 under the control of the British Government as prisoners in 
 Hindostan. But he fancied that if he had the English worn- 
 
 O 
 
 en in his hands the army at Jellalabad could not refuse to 
 obey the condition set down in the article of the treaty. 
 Now that he had the women in his power, however, he de- 
 manded other guarantees with openly acknowledged pur- 
 pose of keeping these latter until Jellalabad should have 
 been evacuated. He demanded that General Elphinstone, 
 the commander, with his second in command, and also one 
 other officer, should hand themselves over to him as host- 
 ages. He promised, if this were done, to exert himself more 
 than before to res-train the fanatical tribes, and also to pro- 
 vide the army in the Koord Cabul Pass with provisions. 
 There was nothing for it but to submit; and the English 
 general himself became, with the women and children, a 
 captive in the hands of the inexorable enemy. 
 
 Then the march of the arrny, without a general, went on 
 again. Soon it became the story of a general without an 
 army ; before very long there was neither general nor army. 
 It is idle to lengthen a tale of mere horrors. The straggling 
 remnant of an array entered the Jugdulluk Pass a dark, 
 steep, narrow, ascending path between crags. The miserable 
 toilers found that the fanatical, implacable tribes had bar- 
 ricaded the pass. All was over. The army of Cabul was 
 finally extinguished in that barricaded pass. It was a trap; 
 the British were taken in it. A few mere fugitives escaped 
 from the scene of actual slaughter, and were on the road to 
 Jellalabad, where Sale and his little army were holding their 
 own. When they were within sixteen miles of Jellalabad 
 the number was reduced to six. Of these six, five were kill- 
 ed by straggling marauders on the way. One man alone 
 reached Jellalabad to tell the tale. Literally one man, Dr. 
 Brydon, came to Jellalabad out of a moving host which had 
 numbered in all some sixteen thousand when it set out on 
 its march. The curious eye will search through history or 
 fiction in vain for any picture more thrilling with the sug- 
 gestions of an awful catastrophe than that of this solitary 
 survivor, faint and reeling on his jaded horse, as he appear- 
 ed under the walls of Jellalabad, to bear the tidings of our 
 Thermopyla3 of pain and shame. 
 
 This is the crisis of the story. With this, at least, the 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 173 
 
 worst of the pain and shame were destined to end. The 
 rest is all, so far as we are concerned, reaction and recovery. 
 Our successes are common enough ; we may tell their tale 
 briefly in this instance. The garrison at Jellalabad had re- 
 ceived, before Dr. Brydon's arrival, an intimation that they 
 were to go out and march toward India in accordance with 
 the terms of the treaty extorted from Elphinstone at Cabul. 
 They very properly declined to be bound by a treaty which, 
 as General Sale rightly conjectured, had been " forced from 
 our envoy and military commander with the knives at their 
 throats." General Sale's determination was clear and simple. 
 " I propose to hold this place on the part of Government un- 
 til I receive its order to the contrary." This resolve of Sale's 
 was really the turning-point of the history. Sale held Jellal- 
 abad ; Nott was at Candahar. Akbar Khan besieged Jellal- 
 abad. Nature seemed to have declared herself emphatical- 
 ly on his side, for a succession of earthquake shocks shattered 
 the walls of the place, and produced more terrible destruc- 
 tion than the most formidable guns of modern warfare could 
 have done. But the garrison held out fearlessly ; they re- 
 stored the parapets, re-established every battery, re-trenched 
 the whole of the gates, and built up all the breaches. They 
 resisted every attempt of Akbar Khan to advance upon their 
 works, and at length, when it became certain that General 
 Pollock was forcing the Khyber Pass to come to their relief, 
 they determined to attack Akbar Khan's army ; they issued 
 boldly out of their forts, forced a battle on the Afghan chief, 
 and completely defeated him. Before Pollock, having gal- 
 lantly fought his way through the Khyber Pass, had reach- 
 ed Jellalabad, the beleaguering army had been entirely de- 
 feated and dispersed. General Nott at Candahar was ready 
 now to co-operate with General Sale and General Pollock for 
 any movement on Cabul which the authorities might advise 
 or sanction. Meanwhile the unfortunate Shah Soojah, whom 
 we had restored with so much pomp of announcement to the 
 throne of his ancestors, was dead. He was assassinated in 
 Cabul, soon after the depart in-e of the British, by the orders 
 of some of the chiefs who detested him; and his body, strip- 
 ped of its royal robes and its many jewels, was flung into a 
 ditch. Historians quarrel a good deal over the question of 
 his sincerity and fidelity in his dealings with us. It is not 
 
174 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 likely that an Oriental of his temperament and his weakness 
 could have been capable of any genuine and nnmixed loyal- 
 ty to the English strangers. It seems to us probable enough 
 that he may at important moments have wavered and even 
 faltered, glad to take advantage of any movement that might 
 safely rid him of us, and yet, on the whole, preferring our 
 friendship and our protection to the tender mercies which 
 he was doomed to experience when our troops had left him. 
 But if we ask concerning his gratitude to us, it may be well 
 also to ask what there was in our conduct toward him which 
 called for any enthusiastic display of gratitude. We did not 
 help him out of any love for him, or any concern for the jus- 
 tice of his cause. It served us to have a puppet, and we 
 took him when it suited us. We also abandoned him when 
 it suited us. As Lady Teazle proposes to do with honor in 
 her conference with Joseph Surface, so we ought to do with 
 gratitude in discussing the merits of Shah Soojah leave it 
 out of the question. What Shah Soojah owed to us was a 
 few weeks of idle pomp and absurd dreams, a bitter awaken- 
 ing, and a shameful death. 
 
 During this time a new Governor-general had arrived in 
 India. Lord Auckland's time had run out, and during its 
 latter months he had become nerveless and despondent be- 
 cause of the utter failure of the policy which, in an evil hour 
 for himself and his country, he had been induced to under- 
 take. It does not seem that it ever was at heart a policy 
 of his own, and he knew that the East India Company were 
 altogether opposed to it. The Company were well aware of 
 the vast expense which our enterprises in Afghanistan must 
 impose on the revenues of India, and they looked forward 
 eagerly to the earliest opportunity of bringing it to a close. 
 Lord Auckland had been persuaded into adopting it against 
 his better judgment, and against even the whisperings of 
 his conscience; and now he too longed to be done with it; 
 but he wished to leave Afghanistan as a magnanimous con- 
 queror. He had in his own person discounted the honors of 
 victory. He had received an earldom for the sei'vices he was 
 presumed to have rendered to his sovereign and his country. 
 He had, therefore, in full sight that mournful juxtaposition 
 of incongruous objects which a great English writer has de- 
 scribed so touchingly and tersely the trophies of victory 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 175 
 
 and the battle lost. He was an honorable, kindly gentle- 
 man, and the news of all the successive calamities fell upon 
 him with a crushing, an overwhelming weight. In plain 
 language, the Governor-general lost his head. He seemed 
 to have no other idea than that of getting all our troops as 
 quickly as might be out of Afghanistan, and shaking the 
 dust of the place off our feet forever. It may be doubted 
 whether, if we had pursued such a policy as this, we might 
 not as well have left India itself once for all. If AVC had al- 
 lowed it to seem clear to the Indian populations and princes 
 that we could be driven out of Afghanistan with humiliation 
 and disaster, and that we were unable or afraid to strike one 
 blow to redeem our military credit, we should before long 
 have seen in Hindostan many an attempt to enact there the 
 scenes of Cabul and Candahar. Unless a moralist is pre- 
 pared to say that a nation which has committed one error 
 of policy is bound in conscience to take all the worst and 
 most protracted consequences of that error, and never make 
 any attempt to protect itself against them, even a moralist 
 of the most scrupulous character can hardly deny that we 
 were bound, for the sake of our interests in Europe as well 
 as in India, to prove that our strength had not been broken 
 nor our counsels paralyzed by the disasters in Afghanistan. 
 Yet Lord Auckland does not appear to have thought any- 
 thing of the kind either needful or within the compass of 
 our national strength. He was, in fact, a broken man. 
 
 His successor came out with the brightest hopes of India 
 and the world, founded on his energy and strength of mind. 
 The successor was Lord Ellenborough, the son of that Ed- 
 ward Law, afterward Lord Ellenborough, Chief -justice of 
 the King's Bench, who had been leading counsel for Warren 
 Hastings when the latter was impeached before the House 
 of Lords.. The second Ellenborough was, at the time of his 
 appointment, filling the office of President of the Board of 
 Control, an office he had held before. He was therefore well 
 acquainted, with the affairs of India. He had come into of- 
 fice under Sir Robert Peel on the resignation of the Mel- 
 bourne Ministry. He was looked upon as a man of great 
 ability and energy. It was known that his personal predi- 
 lections were for the career of a soldier. He was fond of 
 telling his hearers then and since that the life of a camp was 
 
176 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 that which he should have loved to lead. He was a man 
 of great and, in certain lights, apparently splendid abilities. 
 There was a certain Orientalism about his language, his as- 
 pirations, and his policy. He loved gorgeousness and dra- 
 matic ill-natured persons said theatric effects. Life ar- 
 ranged itself in his eyes as a superb and showy pageant, of 
 which it would have been his ambition to form the central 
 figure. His eloquence was often of a lofty and noble order. 
 Men who are still hardly of middle age can remember Lord 
 Ellenborough on great occasions in the House of Lords, and 
 can recollect their having been deeply impressed by him, 
 even though they had but lately heard such speakers as 
 Gladstone or Bright in the other House. It was not easy, 
 indeed, sometimes to avoid the conviction that in listening 
 to Lord Ellenborough one was listening to a really great 
 orator of a somewhat antique and stately type, who attuned 
 his speech to the pitch of an age of loftier and less prosaic 
 aims than ours. When he had a great question to deal with, 
 and when his instincts, if not his reasoning power, had put 
 him on the right or at least the effective side of it, he could 
 speak in a tone of poetic and elevated eloquence to which it 
 was impossible to listen without emotion. But if Lord El- 
 lenborough was in some respects a man of genius, he was 
 also a man whose love of mere effects often made him seem 
 like a quack. There are certain characters in which a little 
 of unconscious quackery is associated with some of the ele- 
 ments of true genius. Lord Ellenborough was one of these. 
 Far greater men than he must be associated in the same cat- 
 egory. The elder Pitt, the first Napoleon, Mirabeau, Boling- 
 broke, and many others, were men in whom undoubtedly 
 some of the charlatan was mixed up with some of the very 
 highest qualities of genius. In Lord Ellenborough this 
 blending was strongly and sometimes even startlingly ap- 
 parent. To this hour there are men who knew him well in 
 public and private on whom his weaknesses made so dispro- 
 portionate an impression that they can see in him little more 
 than a mere charlatan. This is entirely unjust. He was a 
 man of great abilities and earnestness, who had in him a 
 strange dash of the play-actor, who at the most serious mo- 
 ment of emergency always thought of how to display him- 
 self effectively, and who would have met the peril of an em- 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 177 
 
 pire, as poor Narcissa met death, with an overmastering de- 
 sire to show to the best personal advantage. 
 
 Lord Ellenborough's appointment was hailed by all par- 
 ties in India as the most auspicious that could be made. 
 Here, people said, is surely the great stage for a great act- 
 or; and now the great actor is coming. There would be 
 something fascinating to a temper like his in the thought 
 of redeeming the military honor of his country and standing 
 out in history as the avenger of the shames of Cabul. But 
 those who thought in this way found themselves suddenly 
 disappointed. Lord Ellenborough uttered and wrote a few 
 showy sentences about revenging our losses and " re-estab- 
 lishing in all its original brilliancy our military character." 
 But when he had done this he seemed to have relieved his 
 mind and to have done enough. With him there was a con- 
 stant tendency to substitute grandiose phrases for deeds ; 
 or perhaps to think that the phrase was the thing of real 
 moment. He said these fine words, and then at once he an- 
 nounced that the only object of the Government was to get 
 the troops out of Afghanistan as quickly as might be, and 
 almost on any terms. The whole of Lord Ellenborough's 
 conduct during this crisis is inexplicable, except on the as- 
 sumption that he really did not know at certain times how 
 to distinguish between phrases and actions. A general out- 
 cry was raised in India and among the troops in Afghanis- 
 tan against the extraordinary policy which Lord Ellenbor- 
 ough propounded. Englishmen; in fact, refused to believe in 
 it; took it as something that must be put aside. English 
 soldiers could not believe that they were to be recalled after 
 defeat; they persisted in the conviction that, let the Gov- 
 ernor-general say what he might, his intention must be that 
 the army should retrieve its fame and retire only after com- 
 plete victory. The Governor-general himself after awhile 
 quietly acted on this interpretation of his meaning. He al- 
 lowed the military commanders in Afghanistan to pull their 
 resources together and prepare for inflicting signal chastise- 
 ment on the enemy. They were not long in doing this. 
 They encountered the enemy wherever he showed himself 
 and defeated him. They recaptured town after town, until 
 at length, on September 15th, 1842, General Pollock's force 
 entered Cabul. A few days after, as a lasting mark of retri- 
 
 8* 
 
178 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 bution for the crimes which had been committed there, the 
 British commander ordered the destruction of the great ba- 
 zar of Cabul, where the mangled remains of the unfortunate 
 envoy Macnaghten had been exhibited in brutal triumph and 
 joy to the Afghan populace. 
 
 It is not necessary to enter into detailed descriptions of 
 the successful progress of our arms. The war may be re- 
 garded as over. It is, however, necessary to say something 
 of the fate of the captives, or hostages, who were hurried 
 away that terrible January night at the command of Akbar 
 Khan. One thing has first to be told which some may now 
 receive with incredulity, but which is, nevertheless, true 
 there was a British general who was disposed to leave them 
 to their fate and take no trouble about them, and who de- 
 clared himself under the conviction, from the tenor of all 
 Lord Ellenborough's despatches, that the recovery of the 
 prisoners was "a matter of indifference to the Government." 
 There seems to have been some unhappy spell working 
 against us in all this chapter of our history, by virtue of 
 which even its most brilliant pages were destined to have 
 something ignoble or ludicrous written on them. Better 
 counsels, however, prevailed. General Pollock insisted on 
 an effort being made to recover the prisoners before the 
 troops began to return to India, and he appointed to this 
 noble duty the husband of one of the hostage ladies Sir 
 Robert Sale. The prisoners were recovered with greater 
 ease than was expected so many of them as were yet alive. 
 Poor General Elphinstone had long before succumbed to dis- 
 ease and hardship. The ladies had gone through strange 
 privations. Thirty-six years ago the tale of the captivity 
 of Lady Sale and her companions was in every mouth all 
 over England; nor did any civilized land fail to take an in- 
 terest in the strange and pathetic story. They were hur- 
 ried from fort to fort as the designs and the fortunes of Ak- 
 bar Khan dictated his disposal of them. They suffered al- 
 most every fierce alternation of cold and heat. They had 
 to live on the coarsest fare; they were lodged in a manner 
 which would have made the most wretched prison accom- 
 modation of a civilized country seem luxurious by compari- 
 son ; they were in constant uncertainty and fear, not know- 
 ing what might befall. Yet they seem to have held up 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 179 
 
 their courage and spirits wonderfully well, and to have kept 
 the hearts of the children alive with mirth and sport at mo- 
 ments of the utmost peril. Gradually it became more and 
 more suspected that the fortunes of Akbar Khan were fall- 
 ing. At last it was beyond doubt that he had been com- 
 pletely defeated. Then they were hurried away again, they 
 knew not whither, through ever-ascending mountain-passes, 
 under a scorching sun. They were being carried off to the 
 wild, rugged regions of the Indian Caucasus. They were 
 bestowed in a miserable fort at Bameean. They were now 
 under the charge of one of Akbar Khan's soldiers of fortune. 
 This man had begun to suspect that things were well-nigh 
 hopeless with Akbar Khan. He was induced by gradual 
 and very cautious approaches to enter into an agreement 
 with the prisoners for their release. The English officers 
 signed an agreement with him to secure him a large reward 
 and a pension for life if he enabled them to escape. He 
 accordingly declared that he renounced his allegiance to 
 Akbar Khan ; all the more readily seeing that news came in 
 of the chief's total defeat and flight, no one knew whither. 
 The prisoners and their escort, lately their jailer and guards, 
 set forth on their way to General Pollock's camp. On their 
 way they met the English parties sent out to seek for them. 
 Sir Robert Sale found his wife again. "Our joy," says one 
 of the rescued prisoners, " was too great, too overwhelming, 
 for tongue to utter." Description, indeed, could do nothing 
 for the effect of such a meeting but to spoil it. 
 
 There is a very different ending to the episode of the 
 English captives in Bokhara. Colonel Stoddart, who had 
 been sent to the Persian camp in the beginning of all these 
 events to insist that Persia must desist from the siege of 
 Herat, was sent subsequently on a mission to the Ameer of 
 Bokhara. The Ameer received him favorably at first, but 
 afterward became suspicious of English designs of conquest, 
 and treated Stoddart with marked indignity. The Ameer 
 appears to have been the very model of a melodramatic East- 
 ern tyrant. He was cruel and capricious as another Calig- 
 ula, and perhaps, in truth, quite as mad. He threw Stod- 
 dart into prison. Captain Conolly was appointed two years 
 after to proceed to Bokhara and other countries of the same 
 region. He undertook to endeavor to effect the liberation 
 
180 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of Stoddart, but could only succeed in sharing his sufferings, 
 and, at last, his fate. The Ameer had written a letter to 
 the Queen of England, and the answer was written by the 
 Foreign Secretary, referring the Ameer to the Governor- 
 general of India. The savage tyrant redoubled the ill-treat- 
 ment of his captives. He accused them of being spies and 
 of giving help to his enemies. The Indian Government were 
 of opinion that the envoys had in some manner exceeded 
 their instructions, and that Conolly, in particular, had con- 
 tributed by indiscretion to his own fate. Nothing, there- 
 fore, was done to obtain their release beyond diplomatic ef- 
 forts, and appeals to the magnanimity of the Ameer, which 
 had not any particular effect. Dr. Wolff, the celebrated 
 traveller and missionary, afterward undertook an expedi- 
 tion of his own in the hope of saving the unfortunate cap- 
 tives; but he only reached Bokhara in time to hear that 
 they had been put to death. The moment and the actual 
 manner of their death cannot be known to positive certain- 
 ty, but there is little doubt that they were executed on the 
 same day by the orders of the Arneer. The journals of 
 Conolly have been preserved up to an advanced period of 
 his captivity, and they relieve so far the melancholy of the 
 fate that fell on the unfortunate officers by showing that the 
 horrors of their hopeless imprisonment were so great that 
 their dearest friends must have been glad to know of their 
 release even by the knife of the executioner. It is perhaps 
 not the least bitter part of the story that, in the belief 
 of many, including the unfortunate officers themselves, the 
 course pursued by the English authorities in India had done 
 more to hand them over to the treacherous cruelty of their 
 captor than to release them from his power. In truth, the 
 authorities in India had had enough of intervention. It 
 would have needed a great exigency, indeed, to stir them 
 into energy of action soon again in Central Asia. 
 
 This thrilling chapter of English history closes with some- 
 thing like a piece of harlequinade. The curtain fell amidst 
 general laughter. Only the genius of Lord Ellenborough 
 could have turned the mood of India and of England to 
 mirth on such a subject. Lord Ellenborough was equal to 
 this extraordinary feat. The never-to-be-forgotten procla- 
 mation about the restoration to India of the gates of the 
 
THE DISASTERS OF CABUL. 181 
 
 Temple of Sornnauth, redeemed at Lord Ellenborough's or- 
 ders when Ghuznee was retaken by the English, was first 
 received with incredulity as a practical joke ; then with one 
 universal burst of laughter ; then with indignation ; and 
 then, again, when the natural anger had died away, with 
 laughter again. "My brothers and my friends," wrote Lord 
 Ellenborough "to all the princes, chiefs, and people of India," 
 " Our victorious army bears the gates of the Temple of 
 Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled 
 tomb of Sultan Mahmoud looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee. 
 The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged. The 
 gates of the Temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of 
 your humiliation, are become the proudest' record of your 
 national glory ; the proof of your superiority in arms over 
 the nations beyond the Indus." 
 
 No words of pompous man could possibly have put to- 
 gether greater absurdities. The brothers and friends were 
 Mohammedans and Hindoos, who were about as likely to 
 agree as to the effect of these symbols of triumph as a Fe- 
 nian and an Orangeman would be to fraternize in a toast to 
 the glorious, pious, and immortal memory. To the Moham- 
 medans the triumph of Lord Ellenborough was simply an 
 insult. To the Hindoos the offer was ridiculous, for the 
 Temple of Somnauth itself was in ruins, and the ground it 
 covered was trodden by Mohammedans. To finish the ab- 
 surdity, the gates proved not to be genuine relics at all. 
 
 On October 1st, 1842, exactly four years since Lord Auck- 
 land's proclamation announcing and justifying the interven- 
 tion to restore Shah Soojah, Lord Ellenborough issued an- 
 other proclamation announcing the complete failure and the 
 revocation of the policy of his predecessor. Lord Ellenbor- 
 ough declared that " to force a sovereign upon a reluctant 
 people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with 
 the principles of the British Government ;" that, therefore, 
 they would recognize any government approved by the Af- 
 ghans themselves; that the British arms would be withdrawn 
 from Afghanistan, and that the Government of India would 
 remain "content with the limits nature appears to have 
 assigned to its empire." Dost Mahomed was released from 
 his captivity, and before long was ruler ofCabul once again. 
 Thus ended the story of our expedition to reorganize the in- 
 
182 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ternal condition of Afghanistan. After four years of unpar- 
 alleled trial and disaster everything- was restored to the con- 
 dition in which we found it, except that there were so many 
 brave Englishmen sleeping in bloody graves. The Duke of 
 Wellington ascribed the causes of our failure to making war 
 with a peace establishment ; making war without a sale base 
 of operations ; carrying the native army out of India into 
 a strange and cold climate ; invading a poor country which 
 was unequal to the supply of our wants; giving undue pow- 
 er to political agents; want of forethought and undue con- 
 fidence in the Afghans on the part of Sir W. Macnaghten ; 
 placing our magazines, even our treasure, in indefensible 
 places ; great military neglect and mismanagement after the 
 outbreak. Doubtless these were, in a military sense, the 
 reasons for the failure of an enterprise which cost the rev- 
 enues of India an enormous amount of treasure. But the 
 causes of failure were deeper than any military errors could 
 explain. It is doubtful whether the genius of a Napoleon 
 and the forethought of a Wellington could have won any 
 permanent success for an enterprise founded on so false and 
 fatal a policy. Nothing in the ability or devotion of those 
 intrusted with the task of carrying it out could have made 
 it deserve success. Our first error of principle was to go 
 completely out of our way for the purpose of meeting mere 
 speculative dangers; our next and far greater error was 
 made when we attempted, in the words of Lord Ellenbor- 
 ough's proclamation, to force a sovereign upon a reluctant 
 people. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE REPEAL YEAR. 
 
 "THE year 1843," said O'Connell, " is and shall be the 
 great Repeal year." In the year 1843, at all events, O'Con- 
 riell and his Repeal agitation are entitled to the foremost 
 place. The character of the man himself well deserves some 
 calm consideration. We are now, perhaps, in a condition to 
 do it justice. We are far removed in sentiment and politi- 
 cal association, if not exactly in years, from the time when 
 O'Connell was the idol of one party, and the object of all the 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 183 
 
 bitterest scorn and hatred of the other. No man of his time 
 was so madly worshipped and so fiercely denounced. No 
 man in our time was ever the object of so much abuse in the 
 newspapers. The fiercest and coarsest attacks that we can 
 remember to have been made in English journals on Cobden 
 and Bright during the heat of the Anti-Corn-law agitation 
 seem placid, gentle, and almost complimentary when com- 
 pared with the criticisms daily applied to O'Connell. The 
 only vituperation which could equal in vehemence and scur- 
 rility that poured out upon O'Connell was that which O'Con- 
 nell himself poured out upon his assailants. His hand was 
 against every man, if every man's hand was against him. 
 He asked for no quarter, and he gave none. 
 
 We have outlived not the times merely, but the whole 
 spirit of the times, so far as political controversy is concern- 
 ed. We are now able to recognize the fact that a public 
 man may hold opinions which are distasteful to the majority, 
 and yet be perfectly sincere and worthy of respect. We are 
 well aware that a man may differ from us, even on vital 
 questions, and yet be neither fool nor knave. But this view 
 of things was riot generally taken in the days of O'Connell's 
 great agitation. He and his enemies alike acted in their 
 controversies on the principle that a political opponent is 
 necessarily a blockhead or a scoundrel. It is strange and 
 somewhat melancholy to read the strictures of so enlightened 
 a woman as Miss Martineau upon O'Connell. They are all 
 based upon what a humorous writer has called the "fiend- 
 in-human -shape theory." Miss Martineau not merely as- 
 sumes that O'Connell was absolutely insincere and untrust- 
 worthy, but discourses of him on the assumption that he was 
 knowingly and purposely a villain. Not only does she hold 
 that his Repeal agitation was an unqualified evil for his 
 country, and that Repeal, if gained, would have been a curse 
 to it, but she insists that O'Connell himself was thoroughly 
 convinced of the facts. She devotes whole pages of lively 
 and acrid argument to prove not only that O'Connell was 
 ruining his country, but that he knew he was ruining it, and 
 persevered in his wickedness out of pure self-seeking. No 
 writer possessed of one-tenth of Miss Martineau's intellect 
 and education would now reason after that fashion about 
 any public man. If there is any common delusion of past 
 
184 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 days which may be taken as entirely exploded now, it is the 
 idea that any man ever swayed vast masses of people, and 
 became the idol and the hero of a nation, by the strength of 
 a conscious hypocrisy and imposture. 
 
 O'Connell in this Repeal year, as he called it, was by far 
 the most prominent politician in these countries who had 
 never been in office. He had been the patron of the Mel- 
 bourne Ministry, and his patronage had proved baneful to 
 it. One of the great causes of the detestation in which the 
 Melbourne Whigs were held by a vast number of English 
 people was their alleged subserviency to the Irish agitator. 
 We cannot be surprised if the English public just then was 
 little inclined to take an impartial estimate of O'Connell. 
 He had attacked some of their public men in language of 
 the fiercest denunciation. He had started an agitation 
 which seemed as if it were directly meant to bring about a 
 break-up of the Imperial system so lately completed by the 
 Act of Union. He was opposed to the existence of the State 
 Church in Ireland. He was the bitter enemy of the Irish 
 landlord class of the landlords, that is to say, who took 
 their title in any way from England. He was familiarly 
 known in the graceful controversy of the time as the " Big 
 Beggarman." It was an article of faith with the general 
 public that he was enriching himself at the expense of a 
 poor and foolish people. It is a matter of fact that he had 
 given up a splendid practice at the bar to carry on his agi- 
 tation; that he lost by the agitation, pecuniarily, far more 
 than he ever got by it; that he had not himself received 
 from first to last anything like the amount of the noble trib- 
 ute so becomingly and properly given to Mr. Cobden, and so 
 honorably accepted by him ; arid that he died poor, leaving 
 his sons poor. Indeed, it is a remarkable evidence of the 
 purifying nature of any great political cause, even where the 
 object sought is but a phantom, that it is hardly possible to 
 give a single instance of a great political agitation carried 
 on in these countries and in modern times by leaders who 
 had any primary purpose of making money. But at that 
 time the general English public were firmly convinced that 
 O'Connell was simply keeping up his agitation for the sake 
 of pocketing " the rent." Some of the qualities, too, that 
 specially endeared him to his Celtic countrymen made him 
 
THE KEPEAL YEAR. 185 
 
 particularly objectionable to Englishmen ; and Englishmen 
 have never been famous for readiness to enter into the feel- 
 ings and accept the point of view of other peoples. O'Con- 
 nell was a thorough Celt. He represented all the impul- 
 siveness, the quick-changing emotions, the passionate, exag- 
 gerated loves and hatreds, the heedlessness of statement, the 
 tendency to confound impressions with facts, the ebullient 
 humor all the other qualities that are especially character- 
 istic of the Celt. The Irish people were the audience to 
 which O'Connell habitually played. It may, indeed, be said 
 that even in playing to this audience he commonly played 
 to the gallery. As the orator of a popular assembly, as the 
 orator of a monster meeting, he probably never had an equal 
 in these countries. He had many of the physical endow- 
 ments that are especially favorable to success in such a 
 sphere. He had a herculean frame, a stately presence, a face 
 capable of expressing easily and effectively the most rapid 
 .alternations of mood, and a voice which all hearers admit 
 to have been almost unrivalled for strength and sweetness. 
 Its power, its pathos, its passion, its music have been de- 
 scribed in words of positive rapture by men who detested 
 O'Connell, and who would rather, if they could, have denied 
 to him any claim on public attention, even in the matter of 
 voice. He spoke without studied preparation, and of course 
 had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition 
 and into carelessness of construction ; he was hurried away 
 into exaggeration and sometimes into mere bombast. But 
 he had all the peculiar success, too, which rewards the orator 
 who can speak without preparation. He always spoke right 
 to the hearts -of his hearers. On the platform or in Parlia- 
 ment, whatever he said was said to his audience, and was 
 never in the nature of a discourse delivered over their heads. 
 He entered the House of Commons when he was nearly fifty- 
 four years of age. Most persons supposed that the style of 
 speaking he had formed, first in addressing juries, and next 
 in rousing Irish mobs, must cause his failure when he came 
 to appeal to the unsympathetic and fastidious House of 
 Commons. But it is certain that O'Connell became one of 
 the most successful Parliamentary orators of his time. Lord 
 Jeffrey, a professional critic, declared that all other speakers 
 in the House seemed to him only talking school-boy talk af- 
 
186 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ter he had heard O'Connell. No man we now know of is 
 less likely to be carried away by any of the clap-trap arts 
 of a false demagogic style than Mr. Roebuck; and Mr. Koc- 
 buck has said that he considers O'Connell the greatest orator 
 he ever heard in the House of Commons. Charles Dickens, 
 when a reporter in the gallery, where he had few equals, if 
 any, in his craft, put down his pencil once when engaged in 
 reporting a speech of O'Connell's on one of the tithe riots in 
 Ireland, and declared that he could not take notes of the 
 speech, so moved was he by its pathos. Lord Beaconsfield, 
 who certainly had no great liking for O'Connell, has spoken 
 in terms as high as any one could use about his power over 
 the House. But O'Connell's eloquence only helped him to 
 make all the more enemies in the House of Commons. He 
 was reckless even there in his denunciation, although he took 
 care never to obtrude on Parliament the extravagant and 
 unmeaning abuse of opponents which delighted the Irish 
 mob meetings. 
 
 O'Connell was a crafty and successful lawyer. The Irish 
 peasant, like the Scottish, is, or at least then was, remarka- 
 bly fond of litigation. He delighted in the quirks and quib- 
 bles of law, and in the triumphs won by the skill of lawyers 
 over opponents. He admired O'Connell all the more when 
 O'Connell boasted and proved that he could drive a coach 
 and six through any Act of Parliament. One of the pet he- 
 roes of Irish legend is a personage whose cleverness and craft 
 procure for him a sobriquet which has been rendered into 
 English by the words "twists upon twists and tricks upon 
 tricks." O'Connell was in the eyes of many of the Irish 
 peasantry an embodiment of "twists upon twists and tricks 
 upon tricks," enlisted in their cause for the confusion of 
 their adversaries. He had borne the leading part in carry- 
 ing Catholic emancipation. He had encountered all the dan- 
 ger and responsibility of the somewhat aggressive move- 
 ment by which it was finally secured. It is true that it was 
 a reform which in the course of civilization must have been 
 carried. It had in its favor all the enlightenment of the 
 time. The eloquence of the greatest orators, the intellect of 
 the truest philosophers, the prescience of the wisest states- 
 men had pleaded for it and helped to make its way clear. 
 No man can doubt that it must in a short time have been 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 187 
 
 carried if O'Connell had never lived. But it was carried 
 just then by virtue of O'Conuell's bold agitation, and by 
 the wise resolve of the Tory Government not to provoke a 
 civil war. It is deeply to be regretted that Catholic eman- 
 cipation was not conceded to the claims of justice. Had it 
 been so yielded, it is very doubtful whether we should ever 
 have heard much of the Repeal agitation. But the Irish 
 people saw, and indeed all the world was made aware of the 
 fact, that emancipation would not have been conceded, just 
 then at least, but for the fear of civil disturbance. To an 
 Englishman looking coolly back from a distance, the differ- 
 ence is clear between granting to-day, rather than provoke 
 disturbance, that which every one sees must be granted 
 some time, and conceding what the vast majority of the 
 English people believe can never with propriety or even 
 safety be granted at all. But we can hardly wonder if the 
 Irish peasant did not make such distinctions. All he knew 
 was that O'Connell had demanded Catholic emancipation, 
 and had been answered at first by a direct refusal; that he 
 had said he would compel its concession, and that in the 
 end it was conceded to him. When, therefore, O'Coynell 
 said that he would compel the Government to give him re- 
 peal of the Union, the Irish peasant naturally believed that 
 he could keep his word. 
 
 Nor is there any reason to doubt that O'Connell himself 
 believed in the possibility of accomplishing his purpose. 
 We are apt now to think of the union between England and 
 Ireland as of time-honored endurance. It had been scarce- 
 ly thirty years in existence when O'Connell entered Parlia- 
 ment. The veneration of ancient lineage, the majesty of 
 custom, the respect due to the " wisdom of our ancestors " 
 none of these familiar claims could be urged on behalf 
 of the legislative union between England and Ireland. To 
 O'Connell it appeared simply as a modern innovation which 
 had nothing to be said for it except that a majority of Eng- 
 lishmen had by threats and bribery forced it oil a majority 
 of Irishmen. Mr. Lecky, the author of the " History of Eu- 
 ropean Morals," may be cited as an impartial authority on 
 such a subject. Let us see what he says in his work on 
 "The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," with regard to 
 the movement for repeal of the Union, of which it seems al- 
 
188 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 most needless to say he disapproves. " O'Connell perceived 
 clearly," says Mr. Lecky, " that the tendency of affairs in 
 Europe was toward the recognition of the principle that a 
 nation's will is the one legitimate rule of its government. 
 All rational men acknowledged that the Union was imposed 
 on Ireland by corrupt means, contrary to the wish of one 
 generation. O'Connell was prepared to show, by the pro- 
 test of the vast majority of the people, that it was retained 
 without the acquiescence of the next. He had allied him- 
 self with the parties that were rising surely and rapidly to 
 power in England with the democracy, whose gradual 
 progress is effacing the most venerable landmarks of the 
 Constitution with the Free-traders, whose approaching 
 triumph he had hailed and exulted in from afar. He had 
 perceived the possibility of forming a powerful party in Par- 
 liament, which would be free to co-operate with all English 
 parties without coalescing with any, and might thus turn 
 the balance of factions and decide the fate of ministries. 
 He saw, too, that while England in a time of peace might 
 resist the expressed will of the Irish nation, its policy would 
 be necessarily modified in time of war ; and he predicted 
 that should there bd a collision with France while the na- 
 tion was organized as in 1843, Repeal would be the imme- 
 diate and the inevitable consequence. In a word, he be- 
 lieved that under a constitutional government the will of 
 four-fifths of a nation, if peacefully, perseveringly, and ener- 
 getically expressed, must sooner or later be triumphant. If 
 a war had broken out during the agitation if the life of 
 
 O 3 
 
 O'Connell had been prolonged ten years longer if any wor- 
 thy successor had assumed his mantle if a fearful famine 
 had not broken the spirit of the people who can say that 
 the agitation would not have been successful?" No one, 
 we fancy, except those who are always convinced that noth- 
 ing can ever come to pass which. they think ought not to 
 come to pass. At all events, if an English political philoso- 
 pher, surveying the events after a distance of thirty years, 
 is of opinion that Repeal was possible, it is not surprising 
 that O'Connell thought its attainment possible at the time 
 when he set himself to agitate for it. Even if this be not 
 conceded, it will at least be allowed that it is not very sur- 
 prising if the Irish peasant saw no absurdity in the move- 
 
THE KEPEAL YEAR. 189 
 
 mcnt. Our system of government by party does not lay 
 claim to absolute perfection. It is an excellent mechanism, 
 on the whole ; it is probably the most satisfactory that the 
 wit of man has yet devised for the management of the af- 
 fairs of a State; but its greatest admirers will bear to be 
 told that it has its drawbacks and disadvantages. One of 
 these undoubtedly is found in the fact that so few reforms 
 are accomplished in deference to the claims of justice, in 
 comparison with those that are yielded to the pressure of 
 numbers. A great English statesman in our own day once 
 said that Parliament had done many just things, but few 
 things because they were just. O'Connell and the Irish 
 people saw that Catholic emancipation had been yielded to 
 pressure rather than to justice ; it is not wonderful if they 
 thought that pressure might prevail as well in the matter 
 of Repeal. 
 
 In many respects O'Connell differed from more modern 
 Irish Nationalists. He was a thorough Liberal. He was a 
 devoted opponent of negro slavery ; he was a stanch Free- 
 trader; he was a friend of popular education; he was an 
 enemy to all excess ; he was opposed to strikes ; he was an 
 advocate of religious equality everywhere; and he declined 
 to receive the commands of the Vatican in his political agi- 
 tation. "I am a Catholic, but I am not a Papist," was his 
 own definition of his religious attitude. He preached the 
 doctrine of constitutional agitation strictly, and declared 
 that no political Reform was worth the shedding of one 
 drop of blood. It may be asked how it came about that 
 with all these excellent attributes, which all critics now al- 
 low to him, O'Connell was so detested by the vast majori- 
 ty of the English people. One reason, undoubtedly, is, that 
 O'Connell deliberately revived and worked up for his polit- 
 ical purposes the almost extinct national hatreds of Celt and 
 Saxon. As a phrase of political controversy, he may be said 
 to have invented the word "Saxon." He gave a terrible li- 
 cense to his tongue. His abuse was outrageous; his praise 
 was outrageous. The very effusiveness of his loyalty told 
 to his disadvantage. People could not understand how one 
 who perpetually denounced "the Saxon" could be so enthu- 
 siastic and rapturous in his professions of loyalty to the Sax- 
 on's Queen. In the common opinion of Englishmen, all the 
 
190 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 evils of Ireland, all the troubles attaching to the connection 
 between the two countries, had arisen from this unmitigated, 
 rankling hatred of Celt for Saxon. It was impossible for 
 them to believe that a man who deliberately applied all the 
 force of his eloquence to revive it could be a genuine patriot. 
 It appeared intolerable that while thus laboring to make the 
 Celt hate the Saxon he should yet profess an extravagant 
 devotion to the Sovereign of England. Yet O'Connell was 
 probably quite sincere in his professions of loyalty. He was 
 in no sense a revolutionist. He had from his education in 
 a French college acquired an early detestation of the prin- 
 ciples of the French Revolution. Of the Irish rebels of 
 '98 lie spoke with as savage an intolerance as the narrow- 
 est English Tories could show in speaking of himself. The 
 Tones, and Emmetts, and Fitzgeralds, whom so many of the 
 Irish people adored, were, in O'Connell's eyes, and in his 
 words, only "a gang of miscreants." He grew angry at the 
 slightest expression of an opinion among his followers that 
 seemed to denote even a willingness to discuss any of the 
 doctrines of Communism. His theory and his policy evi- 
 dently were that Ireland was to be saved by a dictatorship 
 intrusted to himself, with the Irish priesthood acting as his 
 officers and agents. He maintained the authority of the 
 priests, and his own authority by means of them and over 
 them. The political system of the country for the purposes 
 of agitation was to be a sort of hierarchy; the parish priests 
 occupying the lowest grade, the bishops standing on the 
 higher steps, and O'Connell himself supreme, as the pontiff, 
 over all. 
 
 He had a Parliamentary system by means of which he 
 proposed to approach more directly the question of Repeal 
 of the Union. He got seats in the House of Commons for 
 a number of his sons, his nephews, and his sworn retainers. 
 "O'Connell's tail" was the precursor of "the Pope's Brass 
 Band" in the slang of the House of Commons. He had an 
 almost supreme control over the Irish constituencies, and 
 whenever a vacancy took place he sent down the Repeal 
 candidate to contest it. He always inculcated and insisted 
 on the necessity of order and peace. Indeed, as he proposed 
 to carry on his agitation altogether by the help of the bish- 
 ops and the priests, it was not possible for him, even were 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 191 
 
 he so inclined, to conduct it on any other than peaceful prin- 
 ciples. "The man who commits a crime gives strength to 
 the enemy," was a maxim which he was never weary of im- 
 pressing upon his followers. The Temperance movement set 
 on foot with such remarkable and sudden success by Father 
 Mathew was at once turned to account by O'Connell. He 
 was himself, in his later years at all events, a very temperate 
 man, and he was delighted at the prospect of good order and 
 discipline which the Temperance movement afforded. Fa- 
 ther Mathew was very far from sharing all the political opin- 
 ions of O'Connell. The sweet and simple friar, whose power 
 was that of goodness and enthusiasm only, and who had but 
 little force of character or intellect, shrank from political ag- 
 itation, and was rather Conservative than otherwise in his 
 views. But he could not afford to repudiate the support 
 of O'Connell, who on all occasions glorified the Temperance 
 movement, and called upon his followers to join it, and was 
 always boasting of his " noble army of Teetotallers." It was 
 probably when he found that the mere fact of his having 
 supported the Melbourne Government did so much to dis- 
 credit that Government in the eyes of Englishmen, and to 
 bring about its fall, that O'Connell went deliberately out 
 of the path of mere Parliamentary agitation, and started 
 that system of agitation by monster meeting which has since 
 his time been regularly established among us as a principal 
 part of all political organization for a definite purpose. He 
 founded in Dublin a Repeal Association which met in a place 
 on Burgh Quay, and which he styled Conciliation Hall. 
 Around him in this Association he gathered his sons, his rel- 
 atives, his devoted followers, priestly and lay. The Nation 
 newspaper, then in its youth and full of a fresh literary vig- 
 or, was one of his most brilliant instruments. At a later pe- 
 riod of the agitation it was destined to be used against him, 
 and with severe effect. The famous monster meetings were 
 usually held on a Sunday, on some open spot, mostly selected 
 for its historic fame, and with all the picturesque surround- 
 ings of hill and stream. From the dawn of the summer day 
 the Repealers were thronging to the scene of the meeting. 
 They came from all parts of the neighboring country for 
 miles and miles. They were commonly marshalled and 
 guided by their parish priests. They all attended the ser- 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 vices of their Church before the meeting began. The influ- 
 ence of his religion and of his patriotic feelings was brought 
 to bear at once upon the impressionable and emotional Irish 
 Celt. At the meeting O'Connell and several of his chosen 
 orators addressed the crowd on the subject of the wrongs 
 done to Ireland by "the Saxon," the claims of Ireland to the 
 restoration of her old Parliament in College Green, and the 
 certainty of her having it restored if Irishmen only obeyed 
 O'Connell and their priests, were sober, and displayed their 
 strength arid their unity. 
 
 O'Connell himself, it is needless to say, was always the 
 great orator of the day. The agitation developed a great 
 deal of literary talent among the younger men of education ; 
 but it never brought out a man who was even spoken of as 
 a possible successor to O'Connell in eloquence. His mag- 
 nificent voice enabled him to do what no genius and no elo- 
 quence less aptly endowed could have done. He could send 
 his lightest word thrilling to the extreme of the vast con- 
 course of people whom he desired to move. He swayed 
 them with the magic of an absolute control. He understood 
 all the moods of his people; to address himself to them 
 came naturally to him. He made them roar with laughter; 
 he made them weep; he made them thrill with indignation. 
 As the shadow runs over a field, so the impression of his 
 varying eloquence ran over the assemblage. He command- 
 ed the emotions of his hearers as a consummate conductor 
 sways the energies of his orchestra. Every allusion told. 
 When, in one of the meetings held in his native Kerry, he 
 turned solemnly round and appealed to " yonder blue moun- 
 tains whei*e you and I were cradled ;" or in sight of the ob- 
 jects he described he apostrophized Ireland as the " land 
 of the green valley and the rushing river" an admirably 
 characteristic and complete description ; or recalled some 
 historical association connected with the scene he surveyed 
 each was some special appeal to the instant feelings of his 
 peculiar audience. Sometimes he indulged in the grossest 
 and what ought to have been the most ridiculous flattery 
 of his hearers flattery which would have offended and dis- 
 gusted the dullest English audience. But the Irish peasant, 
 with all his keen sense of the ridiculous in others, is singu- 
 larly open to the influence of any appeal to his own vanity. 
 
THE KEPEAL YEAR. 193 
 
 There is a great deal of the " eternal-womanly " in the Cel- 
 tic nature, and it is not easy to overflatter one of the race. 
 Doubtless O'Connell knew this, and acted purposely on it; 
 and this was a peculiarity of his political conduct which it 
 would be hard indeed to commend or even to defend. But, 
 in truth, he adopted in his agitation the tactics he had em- 
 ployed at the bar. "A good speech is a good thing," lie 
 used. to say; "but the verdict is the thing." His flattery 
 of his hearers was not grosser than his abuse of all those 
 whom they did not like. His dispraise often had absolute- 
 ly no meaning in it. There was no sense whatever in call- 
 ing the Duke of Wellington "a stunted corporal;" one might 
 as well have called Mont Blanc a mole-hill. Nobody could 
 have shown more clearly than O'Connell did that he did not 
 believe the Times to be "an obscure rag." It would have 
 been as humorous and as truthful to say that there was no 
 such paper as the Times. But these absurdities made an 
 ignorant audience laugh for the moment, and O'Connell had 
 gained the only point he just then wanted to carry. He 
 would probably have answered any one who remonstrated 
 with him on the disingenuousness of such sayings, as Mrs. 
 Thrale, says Burke, once answered her Avhen she taxed him 
 with a want of literal accuracy, by quoting, "Odds life, must 
 one swear to the truth of a song?" But this recklessness 
 of epithet and description did much to make O'Connell dis- 
 trusted and disliked in England, where, in whatever heat of 
 political controversy, words are supposed to be the expres- 
 sions of some manner of genuine sentiment. Of course many 
 of O'Connell's abusive epithets were not only full of humor, 
 but did, to some extent, fairly represent the weaknesses at 
 least of those against whom they were directed. Some of 
 his historical allusions were of a more mischievous nature 
 than any mere personalities could have been. "Peel and 
 Wellington," he said at Kilkenny, "may be second Croin- 
 wells; they may get Cromwell's blunted truncheon, and they 
 may oh, sacred heavens! enact on the fair occupants of 
 that gallery" (pointing to the ladies' gallery), "the murder 
 of the Wexford women. Let it not be supposed that when I 
 made that appeal to the ladies it was but a flight of my im- 
 agination. No ! when Cromwell entered the town of Wex- 
 ford by treachery, three hundred ladies, the beauty and love- 
 I. 9 
 
194 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 liness of Wexford, the young and the old, the maid and the 
 matron, were collected round the Cross of Christ; they pray- 
 ed to Heaven for mercy, and I hope they found it ; they 
 prayed to the English for humanity, and Cromwell slaugh- 
 tered them. I tell you this: three hundred women, the 
 grace and beauty and virtue of Wexford, were slaughtered 
 by the English ruffians sacred heaven !" He went on then 
 to assure his hearers that " the ruffianly Saxon paper, the 
 Times, in the number received by me to-day, presumes to 
 threaten us again with such a scene." One would like to 
 see the copy of the Times which contained such a threat, 
 or, indeed, any words that could be tortured iuto a sem- 
 blance of any such hideous meaning. But the great agita- 
 tor, when he found that he had excited enough the horror 
 of his audience, proceeded to reassure them by the means 
 of all others most objectionable and dangerous at such a 
 time. " I am not imaginative," he said, " when I talk of the 
 possibility of such scenes anew ; but yet I assert that there 
 is no danger to our women now, for the men of Ireland 
 would die to the last in their defence." Here the whoJe 
 meeting broke into a storm of impassioned cheering. "Ay," 
 the orator exclaimed, when the storm found a momentary 
 hush, " we were a paltry remnant then; we are millions 
 now." At Mullaghmast, O'Connell made an impassioned 
 allusion to the massacre of Irish chieftains, said to have 
 taken place on that very spot in the reign of Queen Eliza- 
 beth. "Three hundred and ninety Irish chiefs perished 
 here ! They came, confiding in Saxon honor, relying on 
 the protection of the Queen, to a friendly conference. In 
 the midst of revelry, in the cheerful light of the banquet- 
 house, they were surrounded and butchered. None return- 
 ed save one. Their wives were widows, their children fa- 
 therless. In their homesteads was heard the shrill shriek 
 of despair the cry of bitter agony. Oh, Saxon cruelty, 
 how it cheers my heart to think that you dare not attempt 
 such a deed again !" It is not necessary to point out what 
 the effect of such descriptions and such allusions must have 
 been upon an excitable and an ignorant peasant audience 
 on men who were ready to believe in all sincerity that Eng- 
 land only wanted the opportunity to re-enact, in the reign of 
 Queen Victoria, the scenes of Elizabeth's or Cromwell's day. 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 195 
 
 The Late Lord Lytton has given, in his poem " St. Ste- 
 phens," a picturesque description of one of these meetings, 
 and of the effect produced upon himself by O'Connell's elo- 
 quence. " Once to my sight," he says, " the giant thus was 
 given ; walled by wide air and roofed by boundless heaven." 
 He describes " the human ocean " lying spread out at the 
 giant's feet ; its " wave on wave" flowing " into space away." 
 Not unnaturally, Lord Lytton thought, "no clarion could 
 have sent its sound even to the centre" of that crowd. 
 
 "And as I thought, rose the sonorous swell 
 As from some church tower swings the silvery bell; 
 Aloft and clear from airy tide to tide, 
 It glided easy as a bird may glide. 
 To the last verge of that vast audience sent, 
 It played with each wild passion as it went ; 
 Now stirred the uproar now the murmur stilled, 
 And sobs or laughter answered as it willed. 
 Then did I know what spells of infinite choice 
 To rouse or lull has the sweet human voice. 
 Then did I learn to seize the sudden clew 
 To the grand troublous life antique to view, 
 Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes, 
 Unstable Athens heave her noisy seas." 
 
 The crowds who attended the monster meetings came in 
 a sort of military order and with a certain parade of military 
 discipline. At the meeting held on the Hill of Tara, where 
 O'Connell stood beside the stone said to have been used for 
 the coronation of the ancient monarchs of Ireland, it is de- 
 clared, on the authority of careful and unsympathetic wit- 
 nesses, that a quarter of a million of people must have been 
 present. The Government naturally felt that there was a 
 very considerable danger in the massing together of such 
 vast crowds of men in something like military array and un- 
 der the absolute leadership of one man, who openly avowed 
 that he had called them together to show England what 
 was the strength her statesmen would have to fear if they 
 continued to deny Repeal to his demand. It is certain now 
 that O'Connell did not at any time mean to employ force 
 for the attainment of his ends. But it is equally certain that 
 he wished the English Government to see that he had the 
 command of an immense number of men, and probably even 
 to believe that he would, if needs were, hurl them in rebel- 
 
196 A HISTOEY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 lion upon England if ever she should be embarrassed with 
 a foreign war. It is certain, too, that many of O'Connell's 
 most ardent admirers, especially among the young men, 
 were fully convinced that some day or other their leader 
 would call on them to fight, and were much disappointed 
 when they found that he had no such intention. The Gov- 
 ernment at last resolved to interfere. A meeting was an- 
 nounced to be held at Clontarf on Sunday, October 8th, 1843. 
 Clontarf is near Dublin, and is famous in Irish history as the 
 scene of a great victory of the Irish over their Danish in- 
 vaders. It was intended that this meeting should surpass 
 in numbers and in earnestness the assemblage at Tara. On 
 the very day before the 8th the Lord -lieutenant issued a 
 proclamation prohibiting the meeting as "calculated to ex- 
 cite reasonable and well-grounded apprehension," in that its 
 object was "to accomplish alterations in the laws and con- 
 stitution of the realm by intimidation and the demonstra- 
 tion of physical force." O'Connell's power over the people 
 was never shown more effectively than in the control which 
 at that critical moment he was still able to exercise. The 
 populations were already coming in to Clontarf in streams 
 from all the country round when the proclamation of the 
 Lord - lieutenant was issued. No doubt the Irish Govern- 
 ment ran a terrible risk when they delayed so long the issue 
 of their proclamation. With the people already assembling 
 in such masses, the risk of a collision with the police and the 
 soldiery, and of a consequent massacre, is something still 
 shocking to contemplate. It is not surprising, perhaps, if 
 O'Connell and many of his followers made it a charge against 
 the Government that they intended to bring about such a 
 collision in order to make an example of some of the Repeal- 
 ers, and thus strike terror through the country. Some sort 
 of collision would almost undoubtedly have occurred but for 
 the promptitude of O'Connell himself. He at once issued a 
 proclamation of his own to which the populations were like- 
 ly to pay far more attention than they would to anything 
 coming from Dublin Castle. O'Connell declared that the or- 
 ders of the Lord-lieutenant must be obeyed ; that the meet- 
 ing must not take place; and that the people must return to 
 their homes. The " uncrowned king," as some of his admirers 
 loved to call him, was obeyed, and no tj.eeting was held. 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR 197 
 
 From that moment, however, the great power of the Re- 
 peal agitation was gone. The Government had accomplish- 
 ed far more by their proclamation than they could possibly 
 have imagined at the time. They had, without knowing it, 
 compelled O'Connell to show his hand. It was now made 
 clear that he did not intend to have resort to force. From 
 that hour there was virtually a schism between the elder 
 Repealers and the younger. The young and fiery followers 
 of the great agitator lost all faith in him. It would in any 
 case have been impossible to maintain for any very long time 
 the state of national tension in which Ireland had been kept. 
 It must soon come either to a climax or to an anti-climax. 
 It came to an anti-climax. All the imposing demonstrations 
 of physical strength lost their value when it was made posi- 
 tively known that they were only demonstrations, and that 
 nothing was ever to come of them. The eye of an attentive 
 foreigner was then fixed on Ireland and on O'Connell ; the 
 eye of one destined to play a part in the political history of 
 our time which none other has surpassed. Count Cavour had 
 not long returned to his own country from a visit made with 
 the express purpose of studying the politics and the gen- 
 eral condition of England and Ireland. He wrote to a friend 
 about the crisis then passing in Ireland. " When one is at 
 a distance," he said, " from the theatre of events, it is easy 
 to make prophecies which have already been contradicted by 
 facts. But according to my view O'Conneli's fate is sealed. 
 On the first vigorous demonstration of his opponents he has 
 drawn back; from that moment he has ceased to be danger- 
 
 J O 
 
 ous." Cavour was perfectly right. It was never again pos- 
 sible to bring the Irish people up to the pitch of enthusiasm 
 which O'Connell had wrought them to before the suppres- 
 sion of the Clontarf meeting; and before long the Irish na- 
 tional movement had split in two. 
 
 The Government at once proceeded to the prosecution of 
 O'Conuell and some of his principal associates. Daniel 
 O'Connell himself, his son John, the late Sir John Gray, and 
 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, were the most conspicuous of those 
 against whom the prosecution was directed. They were 
 charged with conspiring to raise and excite disaffection 
 among her Majesty's subjects, to excite them to hatred and 
 contempt of the Government and Constitution of the realm. 
 
198 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 The trial was, in many ways, a singularly unfortunate pro- 
 ceeding. The Government prosecutor objected to all the 
 Catholics whose names were called as jurors. An error of 
 the sheriff's in the construction of the jury-lists had already 
 reduced by a considerable number the roll of Catholics en- 
 titled to serve on juries. It therefore happened that the 
 greatest of Irish Catholics, the representative Catholic of 
 his day, the principal agent in the work of carrying Catho- 
 lic Emancipation, was tried by a jury composed exclusively 
 of Protestants. It has only to be added that this was done 
 in the metropolis of a country essentially Catholic; a conn- 
 try five-sixths of whose people were Catholics; and on a 
 question affecting indirectly, if not directly, the whole posi- 
 tion and claims of Catholics. The trial was long. O'Connell 
 defended himself; and his speech was universally regarded 
 as wanting the power that had made his defence of others 
 so effective in former days. It was for the most part a sober 
 and somewhat heavy argument to prove that Ireland had 
 lost instead of gained by her union with England. The jury 
 found O'Connell guilty, along with most of his associates, and 
 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment and a fine 
 of 2000. The others received lighter sentences. O'Connell 
 appealed to the House of Lords against the sentence. In 
 the mean time he issued a proclamation to the Irish people 
 commanding them to keep perfectly quiet and not to com- 
 mit any offence against the law. " Every man," said one of 
 his proclamations, " who is guilty of the slightest breach of 
 the peace is an enemy of me and of Ireland." The Irish peo- 
 ple took him at his word, and remained perfectly quiet. 
 
 O'Connell and his principal associates were committed to 
 Richmond Prison, in Dublin. The trial had been delayed 
 in various ways, and the sentence was not pronounced until 
 May 24th, 1844. The appeal to the House of Lords we 
 may pass over intermediate stages of procedure was heard 
 in the following September. Five law lords were present. 
 The Lord Chancellor (Lord Lyndhurst) and Lord Brougham 
 were of opinion that the sentence of the court below should 
 be affirmed. Lord Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord 
 Campbell were of the opposite opinion. Lord Denman, in 
 particular, condemned the manner in which the jury-lists 
 had been prepared. Some of his words on the occasion be- 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 199 
 
 came memorable, and passed into a sort of proverbial ex- 
 pression. Such practices, he said, would make of the law "a 
 mockery, a delusion, and a snare." A strange and memora- 
 ble scene followed. The constitution of the House of Lords 
 then, and for a long time after, made no difference between 
 law lords and others in voting on a question of appeal. As 
 a matter of practice and of fairness the lay peers hardly 
 ever interfered in the voting on an appeal. But they had 
 an undoubted right to do so ; and it is even certain that in 
 one or two peculiar cases they had exercised the right. If 
 the lay lords were to vote in this instance, the fate of O'Con- 
 nell and his companions could not be doubtful. O'Connell 
 had always been the bitter enemy of the House of Lords. 
 He had vehemently denounced its authority, its practices, 
 and its leading members. Nor, if the lay peers had voted 
 and confirmed the judgment of the court below, could it 
 have been positively said that an injustice was done by their 
 interference. The majority of the judges on the writ of er- 
 ror had approved the judgment of the court below. In the 
 House of Lords itself the Lord Chancellor and Lord Brough- 
 am were of opinion that the judgment ought to be sustained. 
 There would, therefore, have been some ground for main- 
 taining that the substantial justice of the case had been met 
 by the action of the lay peers. On the other hand, it would 
 have afforded a ground for a positive outcry in Ireland if a 
 question purely of law had been decided by tho votes of lay 
 peers against their bitter enemy. One peer, Lord Wharn- 
 eliffe, made a timely appeal to the better judgment and feel- 
 ing of his brethren. He urged them not to take a course 
 which might allow any one to say that political or personal 
 feeling had prevailed in a judicial decision of the House of 
 Lords. The appeal had its effect. A moment before one 
 lay peer at least had openly declared that he would insist 
 on his right to vote. When the Lord Chancellor was about 
 to put the question in the first instance, to ascertain in the 
 usual way whether a division would be necessary, several 
 lay peers seemed as if they were determined to vote. But 
 the appeal of Lord Wharncliffe settled the matter. All the 
 lay peers at once withdrew, and left the matter according to 
 the usual course in the hands of the law lords. The majority 
 of these being against the judgment of the court below, it 
 
200 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 was accordingly reversed, and O'Connell and his associates 
 were set at liberty. The propriety of a lay peer voting on 
 a question of judicial appeal was never raised again so long 
 as the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords was still 
 exercised in the old and now obsolete fashion. 
 
 Nothing could well have been more satisfactory and more 
 fortunate in its results than the conduct of the House of 
 Lords. The effect upon the mind of the Irish people would 
 have been deplorable if it had been seen that O'Connell was 
 convicted by a jury on which there were no Roman Catho- 
 lics, and that the sentence was confirmed, not by a judicial 
 but by a strictly political vote of the House of Lords. As 
 it was, the influence of the decision which proved that even 
 in the assembly most bitterly denounced by O'Connell he 
 could receive fair play, was in the highest degree satisfactory. 
 It cannot be doubted that it did something to weaken the 
 force of O'Connell's own denunciations of Saxon treachery 
 and wrong-doing. The influence of O'Connell was never 
 the same after the trial. Many causes combined to bring 
 about this result. Most writers ascribe it, above all, to the 
 trial itself, and the evidence it afforded that the English 
 Government were strong enough to prosecute and punish 
 even O'Connell if he provoked them too far. It is some- 
 what surprising to find intelligent men like Mr. Green, the 
 author of "A Short History of the English People," coun- 
 tenancing such a belief. If the House of Lords had, by the 
 votes of the lay peers, confirmed the sentence on O'Connell, 
 he would have come out of his prison at the expiration of 
 his period of sentence more popular and more powerful than 
 ever. Had his strength and faculty of agitation lasted, he 
 might have agitated thenceforth with more effect than ever. 
 If the Clontarf meeting had not disclosed to a large section 
 of his followers that his policy, after all, was only to be one 
 of talk, he might have come out of prison just the man he 
 had been, the leader of all classes of Catholics and Nation- 
 alists. But the real blow given to O'Connell's popularity 
 was given by O'Connell himself. The moment it was made 
 clear that nothing was to be done but agitate, and that all 
 the monster meetings, the crowds and banners and bands 
 of music, the marshalling and marching and reviewing, 
 meant nothing more than Father Mathew's temperance 
 
THE REPEAL YEAR. 201 
 
 meetings meant that moment all the youth of the move- 
 ment fell off from O'Connell. The young men were very 
 silly, as after-events proved. O'Connell was far more wise, 
 and had an infinitely better estimate of the strength of Eng- 
 land than they had. But it is certain that the young men 
 were disgusted with the kind of gigantic sham which the 
 great agitator seemed to have been conducting for so long a 
 time. It would have been impossible to keep up forever 
 such an excitement as that which got together the monster 
 meetings. Such heat cannot be brought up to the burning- 
 point and kept there at will. A reaction was inevitable. 
 O'Connell was getting old, and had lived a life of work and 
 wear-and-tear enough to break down even his constitution 
 of iron. He had kept a great part of his own followers in 
 heart, as he had kept the Government in alarm, by leaving 
 it doubtful whether he would not, in the end, make an appeal 
 to the reserve of physical force which he so often boasted 
 of having at his back. When the whole secret was out, he 
 ceased to be an object of fear to the one, and of enthusiasm 
 to the other. It was neither the Lord-lieutenant's procla- 
 mation nor the prosecution by the Government that impair- 
 ed the influence of O'Connell. It was O'Connell's own proc- 
 lamation, declaring for submission to the law, that dethroned 
 him. From that moment the political monarch had to dis- 
 pute with rebels for his crown ; and the crown fell off in 
 the struggle, like that which Uhland tells of in the pretty 
 poem. 
 
 For the Clontarf meeting had been the climax. There 
 was all manner of national rejoicing when the decision of 
 the House of Lords set O'Connell and his fellow-prisoners 
 free. There were illuminations and banquets and meetings 
 and triumphal processions, renewed declarations of alle- 
 giance to the great leader, and renewed protestations on 
 his part that Repeal was coming. But his reign was over. 
 His death may as well be recorded here as later. His 
 health broke down ; and the disputes in which he became 
 engaged with the Young Irelanders, dividing his party into 
 two hostile camps, were a grievous burden to him. In Lord 
 Beaconsfield's Life of Lord George Bentinck, a very touch- 
 ing description is given of the last speech made by O'Con- 
 nell in Parliament. It was on April 3d, 1846 : "His appear- 
 
 9* 
 
202 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ance," says Mr. Disraeli, " was of great debility, and the 
 tones of his voice were very still. His words, indeed, only 
 reached those who were immediately around him, and the 
 ministers sitting on the other side of the green table, and 
 listening with that interest and respectful attention which 
 became the occasion." O'Connell spoke for nearly two 
 hours. " It was a strange and touching spectacle to those 
 who remembered the form of colossal energy and the clear 
 and thrilling tones that had once startled, disturbed, and 
 controlled senates. ... To the House, generally, it was a 
 performance in dumb show: a feeble old man muttering be- 
 fore a table; but respect for the great Parliamentary per- 
 sonage kept all as orderly as if the fortunes of a party hung 
 upon his rhetoric; and though not an accent reached the 
 gallery, means were taken that next morning the country 
 should not lose the last, and not the least interesting, of the 
 speeches of one who had so long occupied and agitated the 
 mind of nations." 
 
 O'Connell became seized with a profound melancholy. 
 Only one desire seemed left to him, the desire to close his 
 stormy career in Rome. The Eternal City is the capital, 
 the shrine, the Mecca of the Church to which O'Connell was 
 undoubtedly devoted with all his heart. He longed to lie 
 down in the shadow of the dome of St. Peter's and rest 
 there, and there die. His youth had been wild in more ways 
 than one, and he had long been under the influence of a pro- 
 found penitence. He had killed a man in a duel, and was 
 through all his after-life haunted by regret for the deed, al- 
 though it was really forced on him, and he had acted only 
 as any other man of his time would have acted in such con- 
 ditions. But now, in his old and sinking days, all the errors 
 of his youth and his strong manhood came back upon him, 
 and he longed to steep the painful memories in the sacred 
 influences of Rome. He hurried to Italy at a time when 
 the prospect of the famine darkening down upon his coun- 
 try cast an additional shadow across his outward path. He 
 reached Genoa, and he went no farther. His strength wholly 
 failed him there, and he died, still far from Rome, on May 
 15th, 1847. The close of his career was a mournful collapse ; 
 it was like the sudden crumbling in of some stately and 
 commanding tower. The other day, it seemed, he filled a 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 203 
 
 space of almost unequalled breadth and height in the polit- 
 ical landscape; and now he is already gone. "Even with 
 a thought the rack dislimbs, and makes it indistinct, as wa- 
 ter is in water." 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 
 
 SOME important steps in the progress of what may be de- 
 scribed as social legislation are part of the history of Peel's 
 Government. The Act of Parliament which prohibited ab- 
 solutely the employment of women and girls in mines and 
 collieries was rendered unavoidable by the fearful exposures 
 made through the instrumentality of a commission appoint- 
 ed to inquire into the whole subject. This commission was 
 appointed on the motion of the then Lord Ashley, since bet- 
 ter known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, a man who during the 
 whole of a long career has always devoted himself some- 
 times wisely and successfully, sometimes indiscreetly and to 
 little purpose, always with disinterested and benevolent in- 
 tention to the task of brightening the lives and lightening 
 the burdens of the working-classes and the poor. The com- 
 mission found many hideous evils arising from the employ- 
 ment of women and girls underground, and Lord Ashley 
 made such effective use of their disclosures that he encoun- 
 tered very little opposition when he came to propose re- 
 strictive legislation. In some of the coal-mines women were 
 literally employed as beasts of burden. Where the seam of 
 coal was too narrow to allow them to stand upright, they 
 had to crawl back and forward on all-fours for fourteen or 
 sixteen hours a day, dragging the trucks laden with coals. 
 The trucks were generally fastened to a chain which passed 
 between the legs of the unfortunate women, and was then 
 connected with a belt which was strapped round their naked 
 waists. Their only clothing often consisted of an old pair 
 of trousers made of sacking ; and they were uncovered from 
 the waist up uncovered, that is to say, except for the grime 
 and filth that collected and clotted around them. All man- 
 ner of hideous diseases were generated in these unsexed bod- 
 
204: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ies. Unsexed almost literally some of them became ; for 
 their chests were often hard and flat as those of men ; and 
 not a few of them lost all reproductive power a happy con- 
 dition, truly, under the circumstances, where women who 
 bore children only went up to the higher air for a week 
 during their confinement, and were then back at their work 
 again. It would be superfluous to say that the immorality 
 engendered by such a state of things was in exact keeping 
 with the other evils which it brought about. Lord Ashley 
 had the happiness and the honor of putting a stop to this 
 infamous sort of labor forever by the Act of 1842, which de- 
 clared that, after a certain limited period, no woman or girl 
 whatever should be employed in mines and collieries. 
 
 Lord Ashley was less completely successful in his en- 
 deavor to secure a ten hours' limitation for the daily labor 
 of women and young persons in factories. By a vigorous 
 annual agitation on the general subject of factory labor, in 
 which Lord Ashley had followed in the footsteps of Mr. 
 Michael Thomas Sadler, he brought the Government up to 
 the point of undertaking legislation on the subject. They 
 first introduced a bill which combined a limitation of the 
 labor of children in factories with a plan for compulsory ed- 
 ucation among the children. The educational clauses of the 
 bill had to be abandoned in consequence of a somewhat nar- 
 row-minded opposition among the Dissenters, who feared 
 that too much advantage was given to the Church. After- 
 ward the Government brought in another bill, which be- 
 came, in the end, the Factories Act of 1844. It was during 
 the passing of this measure that Lord Ashley tried unsuc- 
 cessfully to introduce his ten hours' limit. The bill dimin- 
 ished the working hours of children under thirteen years of 
 age, and fixed them at six and a half hours each day ; ex- 
 tended somewhat the time during which they were to be 
 under daily instruction, and did a good many other useful 
 and wholesome things. The principle of legislative inter- 
 ference to protect youthful workers in factories had been 
 already established by the Act of 1833, and Lord Ashley's 
 agitation only obtained for it a somewhat extended appli- 
 cation. It has since that time again and again received fur- 
 ther extension ; and in this time, as in the former, there is a 
 constant controversy going on as to whether its principles 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 205 
 
 ought not to be so extended as to guard in almost every 
 way the labor of adult women, and even of adult men. The 
 controversy during Lord Ashley's agitation was always 
 warm and often impassioned. Many thoroughly benevo- 
 lent men and women could not bring themselves to believe 
 that any satisfactory and permanent results could come of 
 a legislative interference with what might be called the 
 freedom of contract between employers and employed. 
 They argued that it was idle to say the interference was 
 only made or sought in the case of women and boys ; for if 
 the women and boys stop off working, they pointed out, 
 the men must perforce in most cases stop off working too. 
 Some of the public men afterward most justly popular 
 among the English artisan classes were opposed to the 
 measure on the ground that it was a heedless attempt to in- 
 terfere with fixed economic laws. It was urged, too, and 
 with much semblance of justice, that the interference of the 
 State for the protection or the compulsory education of 
 children in factories would have been much better employ- 
 ed, and was far more loudly called for, in the case of the 
 children employed in agricultural labor. The lot of a fac- 
 tory child, it was contended, is infinitely better in most re- 
 spects than that of the poor little creature who is employed 
 in hallooing at the crows on a farm. The mill-hand is well 
 cared for, well paid, well able to care for himself and his 
 wife and his family, it was argued ; but what of the miser- 
 able Giles Scroggins of Dorsetshire or Somersetshire, who 
 never has more in all his life than just enough to keep body 
 and soul together ; and for whom, at the close, the work- 
 house is the only haven of rest ? Why not legislate for him 
 at least for his wife and children ? 
 
 Neither point requires much consideration from us at 
 present. We have to recognize historical facts ; and it is 
 certain that this country has made up its mind that for the 
 present and for a long time to come Parliament will inter- 
 fere in whatever way seems good to it with the conditions 
 on which labor is carried on. There has been, indeed, a very 
 marked advance or retrogression, whichever men may please 
 to call it, in public opinion since the ten hours' agitation. 
 At that time compulsory education and the principles of 
 Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act would have seemed alike 
 
206 A HISTOBY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 impossible to most persons in this country. The practical 
 mind of the Englishman carries to an extreme the dislike 
 and contempt for what the French call les principes in pol- 
 itics. Therefore we oscillate a good deal, the pendulum 
 swinging now very far in the direction of non-interference 
 with individual action, and now still farther in the direc- 
 tion of universal interference and regulation what was once 
 humorously described as grandmotherly legislation. With 
 our recent experiences we can only be surprised that a few 
 years ago there was such a repugnance to the modest 
 amount of interference with individual rights which Lord 
 Ashley's extremest proposals would have sought to intro- 
 duce. As regards the other point, it is certain that Parlia- 
 ment will at one time or another do for the children in the 
 fields something very like that which it has done for the 
 children in the factories. It is enough for us to know that 
 practically the factory legislation has worked very well ; 
 and that the non-interference in the fields is a far heavier re- 
 sponsibility on the conscience of Parliament than interfer- 
 ence in the factories. 
 
 Many other things done by Sir Robert Peel's Government 
 aroused bitter controversy and agitation. In one or two re- 
 markable instances the ministerial policy went near to pro- 
 ducing that discord in the Conservative party which we shall 
 presently see break out into passion and schism when Peel 
 came to deal with the Corn-laws. There was, for example, 
 the grant to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth, a 
 college for the education specially of young men who sought 
 to enter the ranks of the priesthood. The grant was not a 
 new thing. Since before the Act of Union a grant had been 
 made for the college. The Government of Sir Robert Peel 
 only proposed to make that which was insufficient sufficient; 
 to enable the college to be kept in repair, and to accomplish 
 the purpose for which it was founded. As Macaulay put it, 
 there was no more question of principle involved than there 
 would be in the sacrifice of a pound instead of a penny- 
 weight on some particular altar. Yet the ministerial prop- 
 osition called up a very tempest of clamorous bigotry all 
 over the country. What Macaulay described in fierce scorn 
 as "the bray of Exeter Hall" was heard resounding every 
 day and night. Peel carried his measure, although nearly 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 207 
 
 half his own party in the House of Commons voted against 
 it on the second reading. The whole controversy has little 
 interest now. Perhaps it will be found to live in the mem- 
 ory of many persons, chiefly because of the quarrel it caused 
 between Macaulay and his Edinburgh constituents, and of 
 the annual motion for the withdrawal of the grant which 
 was so long afterward one of the regular bores of the House 
 of Commons. Many of us can well remember the venerable 
 form of the late Mr. Spooner as year after year he address- 
 ed an apathetic, scanty, and half-amused audience, pottering 
 over his papers by the light of two candles specially placed 
 for his convenience on the table in front of the Speaker, and 
 endeavoring in vain to arouse England to serious attention 
 on the subject of the awful fate she was preparing for her- 
 self by her toleration of the principles of Rome. The May- 
 nooth grant was abolished, indeed, not long after Mr. Spoon- 
 er's death ; but the manner of its abolition would have given 
 him less comfort even than its introduction. It was abol- 
 ished when Mr. Gladstone's Government abolished the State 
 Church in Ireland. 
 
 Another of Peel's measures which aroused much clamor 
 on both sides was that for the establishment of what were 
 afterward called the "godless colleges" in Ireland. O'Con- 
 nell has often had the credit of applying this nickname to 
 the new colleges ; but it was, in fact, from the extremest of 
 all no-popery men, Sir Robert Harry Inglis, that the expres- 
 sion came. It was, indeed, from Sir Robert Inglis's side that 
 the first note sounded of opposition to the scheme, although 
 O'Connell afterward took it vigorously up, and the Pope and 
 the Irish bishops condemned the colleges. 
 
 There was objection within the ministry, as well as with- 
 out. Mr. Gladstone, who had been doing admirable work, 
 first as Vice-president, and afterward as President, of the 
 Board of Trade, and who had supported the Queen's colleges 
 scheme by voice and vote, resigned his office because of the 
 Maynooth grant. He acted, perhaps, with a too sensitive 
 chivalry. He had written a work, as all the world knows, 
 on the relation of Church and State, and he did not think 
 the views expressed in that book left him free to co-oper- 
 ate the ministerial measure. Some staid politicians were 
 shocked ; many more smiled ; not a few sneered. The public 
 
208 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 in general applauded the spirit of disinterestedness which 
 dictated the young statesman's act. 
 
 The proposal of the Government was to establish in Ire- 
 land three colleges one in Cork, the second in Belfast, and 
 the third in Galway and to affiliate these to a new univer- 
 sity, to be called the " Queen's University in Ireland." The 
 teaching in these colleges was to be purely secular. Noth- 
 ing could be more admirable than the intentions of Peel and 
 his colleagues. Nor could it be denied that there might 
 
 o o 
 
 have been good seeming hope for a plan which thus pro- 
 posed to open a sort of neutral ground in the educational 
 controversy. But from both sides of the House and from 
 the extreme party in each Church came an equally fierce 
 denunciation of the proposal to separate secular from relig- 
 ious education. Nor, surely, could the claim of the Irish 
 Catholics be said even by the warmest advocate of unde- 
 nominational education to have no reason on its side. The 
 small minority of Protestants in Ireland had their college 
 and their university established as a distinctively Protestant 
 institution. Why should not the great majority who were 
 Catholics ask for something of the same kind for themselves ? 
 Peel carried his measure ; but the controversy has gone on 
 ever since, and we have yet to see whether the scheme is a 
 success or a failure. 
 
 One small instalment of justice to a much -injured and 
 long-suffering religious body was accomplished without any 
 trouble by Sir Robert Peel's Government. This was the 
 bill for removing the test by which Jews were excluded 
 from certain municipal offices. A Jew might be high-sheriff 
 of a county, or sheriff of London, but with an inconsistency 
 which was as ridiculous as it was narrow-minded, he was 
 prevented from becoming a mayor, an alderman, or even a 
 member of the Common Council. The oath which had to 
 be taken included the words "on the true faith of a Chris- 
 tian." Lord Lyndhurst, the Lord Chancellor, introduced a 
 measure to get rid of this absurd anomaly ; and the House 
 of Lords, who had firmly rejected similar proposals of relief 
 before, passed it without any difficulty. It was, of course, 
 passed by the House of Commons, which had done its best 
 to introduce the reform in previous sessions, and without 
 success. 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION-. 209 
 
 The Bank Charter Act, separating the issue from the bank- 
 ing department of the Bank of England, limiting the issue 
 of notes to a fixed amount of securities, and requiring the 
 whole of the further circulation to be on a basis of bullion, 
 and prohibiting the formation of any new banks of issue, is 
 a characteristic and an important measure of Peel's Govern- 
 ment. To Peel, too, we owe the establishment of the income- 
 tax on its present basis a doubtful boon. The copyright 
 question was, at least, advanced a stage. Railways were reg- 
 ulated. The railway mania and railway panic also belong 
 to this active period. The country went wild with railway 
 speculations. The South Sea scheme was hardly more of a 
 bubble, or hardly burst more suddenly or disastrously. The 
 vulgar and flashy successes of one or two lucky adventurers 
 turned the heads of the whole community. For a time it 
 seemed to be a national article of faith that the capacity of 
 the country to absorb new railway schemes and make them 
 profitable was unlimited, and that to make a fortune one had 
 only to take shares in anything. 
 
 An odd feature of the time was the outbreak of what were 
 called the Rebecca riots in Wales. These riots arose out of 
 the anger and impatience of the people at the great increase 
 of toll-bars and tolls on the public roads. Some one, it was 
 supposed, had hit upon a passage in Genesis. which supplies 
 a motto for their grievance and their complaint. "And they 
 blessed Rebekah, and said unto her ... let thy seed possess 
 the gate of those which hate them." They set about, ac- 
 cordingly, to possess very eflectually the gates of those which 
 hated them. Mobs assembled every night, destroyed turn- 
 pikes, and dispersed. They met with little molestation in 
 most cases for awhile. The mobs were always led by a man 
 in woman's clothes, supposed to represent the typical Rebec- 
 ca. As the disturbances went on, it was found that no easi- 
 er mode of disguise could be got than a woman's clothes, and, 
 therefore, in many of the riots petticoats might almost be 
 said to be the uniform of the insurgent force. Night after 
 
 O 2 
 
 night for months these midnight musterings took place. 
 Rebecca and her daughters became the terror of many re- 
 gions. As the work went on it became more serious. Re- 
 becca and her daughters grew bold. There were conflicts 
 with the police and with the soldiers. It is to be feared 
 
210 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 that men and even women died for Rebecca. At last the 
 Government succeeded in putting down the riots, and had 
 the wisdom to appoint a commission to inquire into the cause 
 of so much disturbance ; and the commission, as will readily 
 be imagined, found that there were genuine grievances at the 
 bottom of the popular excitement. The farmers and the la- 
 borers were poor; the tolls were seriously oppressive. The 
 Government dealt lightly with most of the rioters who had 
 been captured, and introduced measures which removed the 
 grievances most seriously complained of. Rebecca and her 
 daughters were heard of no more. They had made out their 
 case, and done in their wild mumming way something of a 
 good work. Only a short time before the rioters would 
 have been shot down, and the grievances would have been 
 allowed to stand. Rebecca and her short career mark an 
 advancement in the political and social history of England. 
 
 Sir James Graham, the Home-secretary, brought himself 
 and the Government into some trouble by the manner in 
 which he made use of the power invested in the Administra- 
 tion for the opening of private letters. Mr. Duncombe, the 
 Radical member for Finsbury, presented a petition from Jo- 
 seph Mazzini and others complaining that letters addressed 
 to them had been opened in the Post-office. Many of Maz- 
 zini's friends, and perhaps Mazzini himself, believed that the 
 contents of these letters had been communicated to the Sar- 
 dinian and Austrian Governments, and that, as a result, men 
 who were supposed to be implicated in projects of insurrec- 
 tion on the Continent had actually been arrested and put to 
 death. Sir James Graham did not deny that he had issued 
 a warrant authorizing the opening of some of Mazzini's let- 
 ters; but he contended that the right to open letters had 
 been specially reserved to the Government on its responsi- 
 bility, that it had been always exercised, but by him with 
 special caution and moderation ; and that it would be im- 
 possible for any Government absolutely to deprive itself of 
 such a right. The public excitement was at first very great ; 
 but it soon subsided. The reports of Parliamentary commit- 
 tees appointed by the two Houses showed that all Govern- 
 ments had exercised the right, but naturally with decreasing 
 frequency and greater caution of late years ; and that there 
 was no chance now of its being seriously abused. No one, 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 211 
 
 not even Thomas Cavlyle, who had written to the Times in 
 generous indignation at the opening of Mazzini's letters, 
 went so far as to say that such a right should never be ex- 
 ercised. Carlyle admitted that he would tolerate the prac- 
 tice " when some new Gunpowder Plot may be in the wind, 
 some double-dyed high-treason or imminent national wreck 
 not avoidable otherwise." In the particular case of Mazzini 
 it seemed an odious trick, and every one was ashamed of it. 
 Such a feeling was the surest guard against abuse for the 
 future, and the matter was .allowed to drop. The minister 
 is to be pitied who is compelled even by legitimate necessi- 
 ty to have recourse to such an expedient; he would be de- 
 spised now by every decent man if he turned to it without 
 such justification. Many years had to pass away before Sir 
 James Graham was free from innuendoes and attacks on the 
 ground that he had tampered with the correspondence of an 
 exile. One remark, on the other hand, it is right to make. 
 An exile is sheltered in a country like England, on the as- 
 sumption that he does not involve her in responsibility and 
 danger by using her protection as a shield behind which 
 to contrive plots and organize insurrections against foreign 
 Governments. It is certain that Mazzini did make use of 
 the shelter England gave him for such a purpose. It would 
 in the end be to the heavy injury of all fugitives from des- 
 potic rule if to shelter them brought such consequences on 
 the countries that offered them a home. 
 
 The Peel Administration was made memorable by many 
 remarkable events at home as well as abroad. It had, as we 
 have seen, inherited wars and brought them to a close : it 
 had wars of its own. Scinde was annexed by Lord Ellen- 
 borough in consequence of the disputes which had arisen be- 
 tween us and the Ameers, whom we accused of having bro- 
 ken faith with us. They were said to be in correspondence 
 with our enemies, which may possibly have been true, and 
 to have failed to pay up our tribute, which was very likely. 
 Anyhow we found occasion for an attack on Scinde; and 
 the result was the total defeat of the Princes and their army, 
 and the annexation of the territory. Sir Charles Napier won 
 a splendid victory splendid, that is, in a military sense 
 over an enemy outnumbering him by more than twelve to 
 one at the battle of Meeanee ; and Scinde was ours. Peel 
 
212 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and his colleagues accepted the annexation. None of them 
 liked it ; but none saw how it could be undone. There was 
 nothing to be proud of in the matter, except the courage of 
 our soldiers, and the genius of Sir Charles Napier, one of the 
 most brilliant, daring, successful, eccentric, and self-conceited 
 captains who had ever fought in the service of England since 
 the days of Peterborough. Later on, the Sikhs invaded our 
 territory by crossing the Sutlej in great force. Sir Hugh 
 Gouflrh, afterward Lord Gough, fought several fierce battles 
 
 O 7 O 7 O 
 
 with them before he could conquer them; and even then 
 they were only conquered for the time. 
 
 We were at one moment apparently on the very verge of 
 what must have proved a far more serious war much nearer 
 home, in consequence of the dispute that arose between this 
 country and France about Tahiti and Queen Pomare. Queen 
 Pomare was sovereign of the island of Tahiti, in the South 
 Pacific, the Otaheite of Captain Cook. She was a pupil of 
 some of our missionaries, and was very friendly to England 
 and its people. She had been induced or compelled to put 
 herself and her dominion under the protection of France; a 
 step which was highly displeasing to her subjects. Some 
 ill-feeling toward the French residents of the island was 
 shown; and the French admiral, who had induced or com- 
 pelled the Queen to put herself under French protection, 
 now suddenly appeared off the coast, and called on her to 
 hoist the French flag above her own. She refused ; and he 
 instantly effected a landing on the island, pulled down her 
 flag, raised that of France in its place, and proclaimed that 
 the island was French territory. The French admiral ap- 
 pears to have been a hot-headed, thoughtless sort of man, 
 the Commodore Wilkes of his day. His act was at once 
 disavowed by the French Government, and condemned in 
 strong terms by M. Guizot. Buj; Queen Pomare had ap- 
 pealed to the Queen of England for assistance. "Do not 
 cast me away, my friend," she said ; " I run to you for ref- 
 uge, to be covered under your great shadow, the same that 
 afforded relief to my fathers by your fathers, who are now 
 dead, and whose kingdoms have descended to us, the weaker 
 vessels." A large party in France allowed themselves to 
 become inflamed with the idea that British intrigue was at 
 the bottom of the Tahiti people's dislike to the protectorate 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 213 
 
 of France, and that England wanted to get Queen Pomave's 
 dominions for herself. They cried out, therefore, that to take 
 down the flag of France from its place in Tahiti would be 
 to insult the dignity of the French nation, and to insult it at 
 the instance of England. The cry was echoed in the shrill- 
 est tones by a great number of French newspapers. Where 
 the flag of France has once been hoisted, they screamed, it 
 must never be taken down ; which is about equivalent to 
 saying that if a man's officious servant carries off the prop- 
 erty of some one else, and gives it to his master, the mas- 
 ter's dignity is lowered by his consenting to hand it back to 
 its owner. In the face of this clamor the French Govern- 
 ment, although they disavowed any share in the filibuster- 
 ing of their admiral, did not show themselves in great haste 
 to undo what he had done. Possibly they found themselves 
 in something of the same difficulty as the English Govern- 
 ment in regard to the annexation of Scinde. They could 
 not, perhaps, with great safety to themselves have ventured 
 to be honest all at once ; and in any case they did not want 
 to give up the protectorate of Tahiti. While the more hot- 
 headed on both sides of the English Channel were thus snarl- 
 ing at each other, the difficulty was immensely complicated 
 by the seizure of a missionary named Pritchard, who had 
 been our consul in the island up to the deposition of Po- 
 mare. A French sentinel had been attacked, or was said 
 to have been attacked, in the night, and in consequence the 
 French commandant seized Pritchard in reprisal, declaring 
 him to be "the only mover and instigator of disturbances 
 among the natives." Pritchard was flung into prison, and 
 only released to be expelled from the island. He came home 
 to England with his story ; and his arrival was the signal 
 for an outburst of indignation all over the country. Sir 
 Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen alike stigmatized the treat- 
 ment of Pritchard as a gross and intolerable outrage ; and 
 satisfaction was demanded of the French Government. The 
 King and M. Guizot were both willing that full justice should 
 be done, and both anxious to avoid any occasion of ill-feel- 
 ing with England. The King had lately been receiving, with 
 effusive show of affection, a visit from our Queen in France, 
 and was about to return it. But so hot was popular passion 
 on both sides, that it would have needed stronger and juster 
 
214 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 natures than those of the King and his minister to venture 
 at once on doing the right thing. It was on the last day of 
 the session of 1844, September 5th, that Sir Robert Peel was 
 able to announce that the French Government had agreed 
 to compensate Pritchard for his sufferings and losses. Queen 
 Pomare was nominally restored to power, but the French 
 protection proved as stringent as if it were a sovereign rule. 
 She might as well have pulled down her flag, for all the sov- 
 ereign right it secured to her. She died thirty-four years 
 after, and her death recalled to the memory of the English 
 public the long-forgotten fact that she had once so nearly 
 been the cause of a war between England and France. 
 
 The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Treaty belong 
 alike to the history of Peel's Administration. The Ashbur- 
 ton Treaty bears date August 9th, 1842, and arranges finally 
 the north-western boundary between the British Provinces 
 of North America and the United States. For many years 
 the want of any clear and settled understanding as to the 
 boundary line between Canada and the State of Maine had 
 been a source of some disturbance and of much controversy. 
 Arbitration between England and the United States had 
 been tried and failed, both parties declining the award. Sir 
 Robert Peel sent out Lord Ashburton, formerly Mr. Baring, 
 as plenipotentiary, to Washington, in 1842, and by his intel- 
 ligent exertions an arrangement was come to which appears 
 to have given mutual satisfaction ever since, despite of the 
 sinister prophesyings of Lord Palraerston at the time. The 
 Oregon question was more complicated, and was the source 
 of a longer controversy. More than once the dispute about 
 the boundary line in the Oregon region had very nearly be- 
 come an occasion for war between England and the United 
 States. In Canning's time there was a crisis during which, 
 to quote the words of an English statesman, war could have 
 been brought about by the holding up of a finger. The 
 question in dispute was as to the boundary line between 
 English and American territory west of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains. It had seemed a matter of little importance at one 
 time, when the country west of the Rocky Mountains was 
 regarded by most persons as little better than a desert idle. 
 But when the vast capacities and the splendid future of the 
 Pacific slope began to be recognized, and the importance to 
 
PEEL'S ADMINISTRATION. 215 
 
 us of some station and harbor there came to be more and 
 more evident, the dispute naturally swelled into a question 
 of vital interest to both nations. In 1818 an attempt at 
 arrangement was made, but failed. The two Governments 
 then agreed to leave the disputed regions to joint occupa- 
 tion for ten years, after which the subject was to be opened 
 again. When the end of the first term came near, Canning 
 did his best to bring about a settlement, but failed. The 
 dispute involved the ownership of the mouth of the Colum- 
 bia River, and of the noble island which bears the name of 
 Vancouver, off the shore of British Columbia. The joint oc- 
 cupancy was renewed for an indefinite time; but in 1843 
 the President of the United States somewhat peremptorily 
 called for a final settlement of the boundary. The question 
 was eagerly taken up by excitable politicians in the Ameri- 
 can House of Representatives. For more than two years 
 the Oregon question became a party cry in America. With 
 a large proportion of the American public, including, of 
 course, nearly all citizens of Irish birth or extraction, any 
 President would have been popular beyond measure who 
 had forced a war on England. Calmer and wiser counsels 
 prevailed, however, on both sides. Lord Aberdeen, our For- 
 eign Secretary, was especially moderate and conciliatory. 
 He offered a compromise which was at last accepted. On 
 June 15th, 1846, the Oregon Treaty settled the question for 
 that time at least ; the dividing line was to be " the forty- 
 ninth degree of latitude, from the Rocky Mountains west 
 to the middle of the channel separating Vancouver's Island 
 from the main-land; thence southerly through the middle 
 of the channel and of Fuca's Straits to the Pacific." The 
 channel and straits were to be free, as also the great north- 
 ern branch of the Columbia River. In other words, Van- 
 couver's Island remained to Great Britain, and the free navi- 
 gation of the Columbia River was secured. We have said 
 that the question was settled, "for that time;" because an 
 important part of it came up again for settlement many 
 years after. The commissioners appointed to determine that 
 portion of the boundary which was to run southerly through 
 the middle of the channel were unable to come to any agree- 
 ment on the subject, and the divergence of the claims made 
 on one side and the other constituted a new question, which 
 
216 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 became a part of the famous Treaty of Washington in 1871, 
 and was finally settled by the arbitration of the Emperor of 
 Germany. But it is much to the honor of the Peel Admin- 
 istration that a dispute which had for years been charged 
 with possibilities of war, and had become a stock subject of 
 political agitation in America, should have been so far set- 
 tled as to be removed forever after out of the category of 
 disputes which suggest an appeal to arms. This was one 
 of the last acts of Peel's Government, and it was not the 
 least of the great things he had done. We have soon to tell 
 how it came about that it was one of his latest triumphs, 
 and how an Administration which had come into power with 
 such splendid promise, and had accomplished so much in such 
 various fields of legislation, was brought so suddenly to a 
 fall. The story is one of the most remarkable and important 
 chapters in the history of English politics and parties. 
 
 During Peel's time we catch a last glimpse of the famous 
 Arctic navigator, Sir John Franklin. He sailed on the ex- 
 pedition which was doomed to be his last, on May 26th, 
 1845, with his two vessels, Erebus and Terror. Not much 
 more is heard of him as among the living. We may say of 
 him as Carlyle says of La Perouse, " The brave navigator 
 goes and returns not; the seekers search far seas for him in 
 vain ; only some mournful, mysterious shadow of him hovers 
 long in all heads and hearts." 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 FKEE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 
 
 FEW chapters of political history in modern times have 
 given occasion for more controversy than that which con- 
 tains the story of Sir Robert Peel's Administration in ita 
 dealing with the Corn-laws. Told in the briefest form, the 
 story is that Peel came into office in 1841 to maintain the 
 Corn-laws, and that in 1846 he repealed them. The contro- 
 versy as to the wisdom or unwisdom of repealing the Corn- 
 laws has long since come to an end. They who were the 
 uncompromising opponents of Free-trade at that time are 
 proud to call themselves its uncompromising zealots now. 
 
FKEE-TKADE AND THE LEAGUE. 217 
 
 Indeed, there is no more chance of a reaction against Free- 
 trade in England than there is of a reaction against the rule 
 of three. But the controversy still exists, and will probably 
 always be in dispute, as to the conduct of Sir Robert Peel. 
 
 The Melbourne Ministry fell, as we have seen, in conse- 
 quence of a direct vote of want of confidence moved by 
 their leading opponent, and the return of a majority hostile 
 to them at the general election that followed. The vote of 
 want of confidence was levelled against their financial poli- 
 cy, especially against Lord John Russell's proposal to sub- 
 stitute a fixed duty of eight shillings for Peel's sliding scale. 
 Sir Robert Peel came into office, and he introduced a reor- 
 ganized scheme of a sliding scale, reducing the duties and 
 improving the system, but maintaining the principle. Lord 
 John Russell proposed an amendment declaring that the 
 House of Commons, " considering the evils which have been 
 caused by the present Corn -laws, and especially by the 
 fluctuation of the graduated or sliding scale, is not prepared 
 to adopt the measure of her Majesty's Government, which is 
 founded on the same principles, and is likely to be attended 
 by similar results." The amendment was rejected by a large 
 majority, no less than one hundred and twenty-three. But 
 the question between Free-trade and Protection was even 
 more distinctly raised. Mr. Villiers proposed another amend- 
 ment declaring for the entire abolition of all duties on grain. 
 Only ninety votes were given for the amendment, while three 
 hundred and ninety- three were recorded against it. Sir 
 Robert Peel's Government, therefore, came into power dis- 
 tinctly pledged to uphold the principle of protection for 
 home-grown grain. Four years after this Sir Robert Peel 
 proposed the total abolition of the corn duties. For this he 
 was denounced by some members of his party in language 
 more fierce and unmeasured than ever since has been applied 
 to any leading statesman. Mr. Gladstone was never assailed 
 by the stanchest supporter of the Irish Church in words so 
 vituperative as those which rated Sir Robert Peel for his 
 supposed apostasy. One eminent person, at least, made his 
 first fame as a Parliamentary orator by his denunciations of 
 the great minister whom he had previously eulogized and 
 supported. 
 
 "The history of agricultural distress," it has been well 
 
 I. 10 
 
218 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 observed, " is the history of agricultural abundance." This 
 looks at first sight a paradox; but nothing can in reality be 
 more plain and less paradoxical. " Whenever," to follow 
 out the passage, "Providence, through the blessing of genial 
 seasons, fills the nation's stores with plenteousness, then, and 
 then only, has the cry of ruin to the cultivator been pro- 
 claimed as the one great evil for legislation to repress." 
 This is, indeed, the very meaning of the principle of protec- 
 tion. When the commodity which the protected interest 
 has to dispose of is so abundant as to be easily attained by 
 the common body of consumers, then, of course, the protect- 
 ed interest is injured in its particular way of making money, 
 and expects the State to do something to seciu*e it in the 
 principal advantage of its monopoly. The greater quantity 
 of grain a good harvest brings for the benefit of all the peo- 
 ple, the less the price the corn-grower can charge for it. His 
 interest as a monopolist is always and inevitably opposed to 
 the interest of the community. 
 
 But it is easy even now, when we have almost forgotten 
 the days of protection, to see that the corn-grower is not 
 likely either to recognize or to admit this conflict of inter- 
 ests between his protection and the public welfare. Apart 
 from the natural tendency of every man to think that that 
 which does him good must do good to the community, there 
 was, undoubtedly, something very fascinating in the theory 
 of protection. It had a charming give and take, live and let 
 live, air about it. "You give me a little more than the 
 market price for ray corn, and don't you see I shall be able 
 to buy all the more of your cloth and tea and sugar, or to 
 pay you the higher rent for your land?" Such a compact 
 seems reasonable and tempting. Almost up to our own time 
 the legislation of the country was in the hands of the classes 
 who had more to do with the growing of corn and the own- 
 ership of land than with the making of cotton and the work- 
 ing of machinery. The great object of legislation and of 
 social compacts of whatever kind seemed to be to keep the 
 rents of the land-owners and the prices of the farmers up to 
 a comfortable standard. It is not particularly to the dis- 
 credit of the landlords and the farmers that this was so. 
 We have seen, in later times, how every class in succession 
 lias resisted the movement of the principle of Free -trade 
 
FKEE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 219 
 
 when it came to be applied to its own particular interests. 
 The paper manufacturers liked it as little in 1860, as the 
 landlords and farmers had done fifteen years earlier. When 
 the cup comes to be commended to the lips of each interest 
 in turn, we always find that it is received as a poisoned chal- 
 ice, and taken with much shuddering and passionate protes- 
 tation. The particular advantage possessed by vested inter- 
 ests in the Corn-laws was that for a long time the landlords 
 possessed all the legislative power and all the prestige as 
 well. There was a certain reverence and sanctity about the 
 ownership of land, with its hereditary descent and its patri- 
 archal dignities, which the manufacture of paper could not 
 pretend to claim. 
 
 If it really were true that the legitimate incomes or the 
 legitimate influence of the landlord class in England went 
 down in any way because of the repeal of the Corn-laws, 
 it would have to be admitted that the landlords, like the 
 aristocrats before the French Revolution, had done some- 
 thing themselves to encourage the growth of new and dis- 
 turbing ideas. Before the Revolution, free thought and the 
 equality and brotherhood of man were beginning to be pet 
 doctrines among the French nobles and among their wives 
 and daughters. It was the whim of the hour to talk Rous- 
 seau, and to affect indifference to rank, and a general faith 
 in a good time coming of equality and brotherhood. In 
 something of the same fashion the aristocracy of England 
 were for some time before the repeal of the Corn-laws il- 
 lustrating a sort of revival of patriarchal ideas about the 
 duties of property. The influence was stirring everywhere. 
 Oxford was beginning to busy itself in the revival of the 
 olden influence of the Church. The Young England party, 
 as they were then called, were ardent to restore the good 
 old days when the noble was the father of the poor and the 
 chief of his neighborhood. All manner of pretty whimsies 
 were caught up with this ruling idea to give them an ap- 
 pearance of earnest purpose. The young landlord exhibited 
 himself in the attitude of a protector, patron, and friend to 
 all his tenants. Doles were formally given at stated hours 
 to all who would come for them to the castle gate. Young 
 noblemen played cricket with the peasants on their estate, 
 and the Saturnian Age was believed by a good many per- 
 
220 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 sons to be returning for the express benefit of Old, or rather 
 of Young, England. There was something like a party being 
 formed in Parliament for the realization of Young England's 
 idyllic purposes. It comprised among its numbers several 
 more or less gifted youths of rank, who were full of enthusi- 
 asm and poetic aspirations and nonsense ; and it had the en- 
 couragement and support of one man of genius, who had no 
 natural connection with the English aristocracy, but who was 
 afterward destined to be the successful leader of the Con- 
 servative and aristocratic party ; to be its savior when it 
 was all but down in the dust ; to 'guide it to victory, and 
 make it once more, for the time at least, supreme in the po- 
 litical life of the country. This brilliant champion of Con- 
 servatism has often spoken of the repeal of the Corn-laws 
 as the fall of the landlord class in England. If the land- 
 " lords fell, it must be said of them, as has been fairly said of 
 many a dynasty, that they never deserved better, on the 
 whole, than just at the time when the blow struck them 
 down. 
 
 The famous Corn -law of 1815 was a copy of the Corn- 
 law of 1670. The former measure imposed a duty on the 
 importation of foreign grain which amounted to prohibition. 
 Wheat might be exported upon the payment of one shilling 
 per quarter customs duty; but importation was practically 
 prohibited until the price of wheat had reached eighty shil- 
 lings a quarter. The Corn-law of 1815 was hurried through 
 Parliament, absolutely closing the ports against the impor- 
 tation of foreign grain until the price of our home- grown 
 grain had reached the magic figure of .eighty shillings a 
 quarter. It was hurried through, despite the most earnest 
 petitions from the commercial and manufacturing classes. 
 A great deal of popular disturbance attended the passing of 
 the measure. There were riots in London, and the houses 
 of several of the supporters of the bill were attacked. In- 
 cendiary fires blazed in many parts of the country. In the 
 Isle of Ely there were riots which lasted for two days and 
 two nights, and the aid of the military had to be called in 
 to suppress them. Five persons were hanged as the result 
 of these disturbances. One might excuse a demagogue who 
 compared the event to the suppression of some of the food 
 riots in France just before the Revolution, of which we only 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 221 
 
 read that the people the poor, that is to say turned out de- 
 manding bread, and the ringleaders were immediately hang- 
 ed, and there was an end of the matter. After the Corn- 
 law of 1815, thus ominously introduced, there were Sliding- 
 scale Acts, having for their business to establish a varying 
 system of duty, so that, according as the price of home- 
 produced wheat rose to a certain height, the duty on im- 
 ported wheat sank in proportion. The principle of all these 
 measures was the same. It was founded on the assumption 
 that the corn grew for the benefit of the grower first of all; 
 and that until he had been secured in a handsome profit 
 the public at large had no right to any reduction in the cost 
 of food. When the harvest was a good one, and the golden 
 grain was plenty, then the soul of the grower was afraid, 
 and he called out to Parliament to protect him against the 
 calamity of having to sell his corn any cheaper than in years 
 of famine. He did not see all the time that if the prosperi- 
 ty of the country in general was enhanced, he too must come 
 to benefit by it. 
 
 Naturally it was in places like Manchester that the falla- 
 cy of all this theory was first commonly perceived and most 
 warmly resented. The Manchester manufacturers saw that 
 the customers for their goods were to be found in all parts 
 of the world ; and they knew that at every turn they were 
 hampered in their dealings with the customers by the sys- 
 tem of protective duties. They wanted to sell their goods 
 wherever they could find buyers, and they chafed at any 
 barrier between them and the sale. Manchester, from the 
 time of its first having Parliamentary representation only 
 a few years before the foundation of the Anti- Corn -law 
 League had always spoken out for Free-trade. The fasci- 
 nating sophism which had such charms for other communi- 
 ties, that by paying more than was actually necessary for 
 everything all round, Dick enriched Tom, while Tom was at 
 the same time enriching Dick, had no charms for the intel- 
 ligence and the practical experience of Manchester. The 
 close of the year 1836 was a period of stagnant trade and 
 general depression, arising, in some parts of the country, to 
 actual and severe suffering. Some members of Parliament 
 and other influential men were stricken with the idea, which 
 it does not seem to have required much strength of observa- 
 
222 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tion to foster, that it could not be for the advantage of the 
 country in general to have the price of bread very high at a 
 time when wages were very low and work was scarce. A 
 movement against the Corn -laws began in London. An 
 Anti-Corn-law Association on a small scale was formed. 
 Its list of members bore the names of more than twenty 
 members of Parliament, and for a time the society had a 
 look of vigor about it. It came to nothing, however. Lon- 
 don has never been found an effective nursery of agitation. 
 It is too large to have any central interest or source of ac- 
 tion. It is too dependent, socially and economically, on the 
 patronage of the higher and wealthier classes. London has 
 never been to England what Paris has been to France. It 
 has hardly ever made or represented thoroughly the public 
 opinion of England during any great crisis. A new centre 
 of operations soon had to be sought, and various causes com- 
 bined to make Lancashire the proper place. In the year 
 1838 the town of Bolton-le- Moors, in Lancashire, was the 
 victim of a terrible commercial crisis. Thirty out of the 
 fifty manufacturing establishments which the town contain- 
 ed were closed; nearly a fourth of all the houses of business 
 were closed and actually deserted ; and more than five thou- 
 sand workmen were without homes or means of subsistence. 
 All the intelligence and energy of Lancashire was roused. 
 One obvious guarantee against starvation was cheap bread, 
 and cheap bread meant, of course, the abolition of the Corn- 
 laws, for these laws were constructed on the principle that 
 it was necessary to keep bread dear. A meeting was held 
 in Manchester to consider measures necessary to be adopted 
 for bringing about the complete repeal of these laws. The 
 Manchester Chamber of Commerce adopted a petition to 
 Parliament against the Corn-laws. The Anti-Corn-law asri- 
 
 o o 
 
 tation had been fairly launched. 
 
 From that time it grew, and grew in importance and 
 strength. Meetings were held in various towns of England 
 
 fj & o 
 
 and Scotland. Associations were formed everywhere to co- 
 operate with the movement, which had its head-quarters in 
 Manchester. In Newall's Buildings, Market Street, Man- 
 chester, the work of the League was really done for years. 
 The leaders of the movement gave up their time day by 
 day to its service. The League had to encounter a great 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 223 
 
 deal of rather fierce opposition from the Chartists, who loud- 
 ly proclaimed that the whole movement was only meant to 
 entrap them once more into an alliance with the middle 
 classes and the employers, as in the case of the Reform Bill, 
 in order that when they had been made the cat's-paw again 
 they might again be thrown contemptuously aside. On the 
 other hand, the League had from the first the cordial co-op- 
 eration of Daniel O'Connell, who became one of their prin- 
 cipal orators when they held meetings in the metropolis. 
 They issued pamphlets by hundreds of thousands, and sent 
 lecturers all over the country explaining the principles of 
 Free-trade. A gigantic propaganda of Free-trade opinions 
 was called into existence. Money was raised by the hold- 
 ing of bazars in Manchester and in London, and by calling 
 for subscriptions. A bazar in Manchester brought in ten 
 thousand pounds ; one in London raised rather more than 
 double that sum, not including the subscriptions that were 
 contributed. A Free- trade Hall was built in Manchester. 
 This building had an interesting history full of good omen 
 for the cause. The ground on which the hall was erected 
 was the property of Mr. Cobden, and was placed by him at 
 the disposal of the League. That ground was the scene of 
 what was known in Manchester as the Massacre of Peterloo. 
 On August 16th, 1819, a meeting of Manchester Reformers 
 was held on that spot, which was dispersed by an attack of 
 soldiers and militia, with the loss of many lives. The mem- 
 ory of that day rankled in the hearts of the Manchester Lib- 
 erals for long after, and perhaps no better means could be 
 found for purifying the ground from the stain and the shame 
 of such bloodshed than its dedication by the modern apos- 
 tle of peace and Free-trade as a site whereon to build a hall 
 sacred to the promulgation of his favorite doctrines. 
 
 The times were peculiarly favorable to the new sort of 
 propaganda which came into being with the Anti-Corn-law 
 League. A few years before such an agitation would hardly 
 have found the means of making its influence felt all over the 
 country. The very reduction of the cost of postage alone 
 must have facilitated its labors to an extent beyond calcula- 
 tion. The inundation of the country with pamphlets, tracts, 
 and reports of speeches would have been scarcely possible 
 under the old system, and would in any case have swallow- 
 
224 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ed up a far larger amount of money than even the League 
 with its ample resources would have been able to supply. 
 In all parts of the country railways were being opened, and 
 these enabled the lecturers of the League to hasten from 
 town to town and to keep the cause always alive in the pop- 
 ular mind. All these advantages and many others might, 
 however, have proved of little avail if the League had not 
 from the first been in the hands of men who seemed as if 
 they came by special appointment to do its work. Great 
 as the work was which the League did, it will be remem- 
 bered in England almost as much because of the men who 
 won the success as on account of the success itself. 
 
 The nominal leader of the Free-trade party in Parliament 
 was for many years Mr. Charles Villiers, a man of aristo- 
 cratic family and surroundings, of remarkable ability, and of 
 the steadiest fidelity to the cause he had undertaken. Noth- 
 ing is a more familiar phenomenon in the history of English 
 political agitation than the aristocrat who assumes the pop- 
 ular cause and cries out for the "rights" of the "unenfran- 
 chised millions." But it was something new to find a man 
 of Mr. Villiers's class devoting himself to a cause so entirely 
 practical and business-like as that of the repeal of the Corn- 
 laws. Mr. Villiers brought forward for several successive 
 sessions in the House of Commons a motion in favor of the 
 total repeal of the Corn-laws. His eloquence and his argu- 
 mentative power served the great purpose of drawing the 
 attention of the country to the whole question, and making 
 converts to the principle he advocated. The House of Com- 
 mons has always of late years been the best platform from 
 which to address the country. In political agitation it has 
 thus been made to prepare the way for the schemes of leg- 
 islation which it has itself always begun by reprobating. 
 But Mr. Villiers might have gone on for all his life dividing 
 the House of Commons on the question of Free-trade, with- 
 out getting much nearer to his object, if it were not for the 
 manner in which the cause was taken up by the country, and 
 more particularly by the great manufacturing towns of the 
 North. Until the passing of Lord Grey's Reform Bill these 
 towns had no representation in Parliament. They seemed 
 destined after that event to make up for their long exclusion 
 from representative influence by taking the government of 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 225 
 
 the country into their own hands. Of late years they have 
 lost some of their relative influence. They have not now all 
 the power that for no inconsiderable time they undoubted- 
 ly possessed. The reforms they chiefly aimed at have been 
 carried, and the spirit which in times of stress and struggle 
 kept their populations almost of one mind has less necessity 
 of existence now. Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds are 
 no whit less important to the life of the nation now than 
 they were before Free-trade. But their supremacy does not 
 exist now as it did then. At that time it was town against 
 country ; Manchester representing the town, and the whole 
 Conservative (at one period almost the whole land-owning) 
 body representing the country. The Manchester school, as 
 it was called, then and for long after had some teachers and 
 leaders who were of themselves capable of making any school 
 powerful and respected. With the Manchester school began 
 a new kind of popular agitation. Up to that time agitation 
 meant appeal to passion, and lived by provoking passion. 
 Its cause might be good or bad, but the way of promoting 
 it was the same. The Manchester school introduced the ag- 
 itation which appealed to reason and argument only; which 
 stirred men's hearts with figures of arithmetic, rather than 
 figures of speech, and which converted mob meetings to po- 
 litical economy. 
 
 The real leader of the movement was Mr. Richard Cobden. 
 Mr. Cobden was a man belonging to the yeoman class. He 
 had received but a moderate education. His father dying 
 while the great Free-trader was still young, Richard Cob- 
 den was taken in charge by an uncle, who had a wholesale 
 warehouse in the City of London, and who gave him em- 
 ployment there. Cobden afterward became a partner in a 
 Manchester printed -cotton factory; and he travelled occa- 
 sionally on the commercial business of this establishment. 
 He had a great liking for travel ; but not by any means as 
 the ordinary tourist travels ; the interest of Cobden was not 
 in scenery, or in art, or in ruins, but in men. He studied the 
 condition of countries with a view to the manner in which 
 it affected the men and women of the present, and through 
 them was likely to affect the future. On everything that 
 he saw he turned a quick and intelligent eye; and he saw 
 for himself and thought for himself. Wherever he went he 
 
 10* 
 
226 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 wanted to learn something. lie had in abundance that 
 peculiar faculty which some great men of widely different 
 stamp from him and from each other have possessed ; of 
 which Goethe frankly boasted, and which Mirabeau had 
 more largely than he was always willing to acknowledge ; 
 the faculty which exacts from every one with whom its 
 owner comes into contact some contribution to his stock 
 of information and to his advantage. Cobden could learn 
 something from everybody. It is doubtful whether he ever 
 came even into momentary acquaintance with any one whom 
 he did not compel to yield him something in the way of in- 
 formation. He travelled very widely for a time, when trav- 
 elling was more difficult work than it is at present. He 
 made himself familiar with most of the countries of Europe, 
 with many parts of the East, and, what was then a rarer ac- 
 complishment, with the United States and Canada. He did 
 not make the familiar grand tour, and then dismiss the places 
 he had seen from his active memory. He studied them, and 
 visited many of them again to compare early with later im- 
 pressions. This Avas in itself an education of the highest 
 value for the career ho proposed to pursue. When he was 
 about thirty years of age he began to acquire a certain repu- 
 tation as the author of pamphlets directed against some of 
 the pet doctrines of old-fashioned statesmanship the bal- 
 ance of power in Europe ; the necessity of maintaining a 
 State Church in Ireland; the importance of allowing no 
 European quarrel to go on without England's intervention ; 
 and similar dogmas. Mr. Cobden's opinions then were very 
 much as they continued to the day of his death. He seemed 
 to have come to the maturity of his convictions all at once, 
 and to have passed through no further change either of 
 growth or of decay. But whatever might be said then or 
 now of the doctrines he maintained, there could be only one 
 opinion as to the skill and force which upheld them with 
 pen as well as tongue. The tongue, however, was his best 
 weapon. If oratory were a business and not an art that 
 is, if its test were its success rather than its form then it 
 might be contended reasonably enough that Mr. Cobden 
 was one of the greatest orators England has ever known. 
 Nothing could exceed the persuasiveness of his style. His 
 manner was simple, sweet, and earnest. It was persuasive, 
 
FREE-TEADE AND THE LEAGUE. 227 
 
 but it had not the sort of persuasiveness which is merely 
 a better kind of plausibility. It persuaded by convincing. 
 It was transparently sincere. The light of its convictions 
 shone all through it. It aimed at the reason and the judg- 
 ment of the listener, and seemed to be convincing him to his 
 own interest against his prejudices. Cobden's style was al- 
 most exclusively conversational ; but he had a clear, well- 
 toned voice, with a quiet, unassuming power in it which en- 
 abled him to make his words heard distinctly and without 
 effort all through the great meetings he had often to address. 
 His speeches were full of variety. He illustrated every argu- 
 ment by something drawn from his personal observation or 
 from reading, and his illustrations were always striking, ap- 
 propriate, and interesting. He had a large amount of bright 
 and winning humor, and he spoke the simplest and purest 
 English. He never used an unnecessary sentence, or failed 
 for a single moment to make his meaning clear. Many 
 strong opponents of Mr. Cobden's opinions confessed, even 
 during his lifetime, that they sometimes found with dismay 
 their most cherished convictions crumbling away beneath 
 his flow of easy argument. In the stormy times of national 
 passion Mr. Cobden was less powerful. When the question 
 was one to be settled by the rules that govern man's sub- 
 stantial interests, or even by the standing rules, if such an 
 expression may be allowed, of morality, then Cobden was 
 unequalled. So long as the controversy could be settled 
 after this fashion " I will show you that in such a course 
 you are acting injuriously to your own interests;" or "You 
 are doing what a fair and just man ought not to do" so 
 long as argument of that kind could sway the conduct of 
 men, then there was no one who could convince as Cobden 
 could. But when the hour and mood of passion came, and 
 a man or a nation said, "I do not care any longer whether 
 this is for my interest or not I don't care whether you call 
 it right or wrong this way my instincts drive me, and this 
 way I am going" then Mr. Cobden's teaching, the very 
 perfection as it was of common-sense and fair play, was out 
 of season. It could not answer feeling with feeling. It was 
 not able to "overcrow," in the word of Shakspeare and 
 Spenser, one emotion by another. The defect of Mr. Cob- 
 den's style of mind and temper is fitly illustrated in the de- 
 
228 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ficiency of his method of argument. His sort of education, 
 his modes of observation, his way of turning travel to ac- 
 count, all went together to make him the man he was. The 
 apostle of common-sense and fair dealing, he had no sympa- 
 thy with the passions of men ; he did not understand them ; 
 they passed for nothing in his calculations. His judgment 
 of men and of nations was based far too much on his knowl- 
 edge of his own motives and character. He knew that in 
 any given case he could always trust himself to act the part 
 of a just and prudent man; and he assumed that all the 
 world could be governed by the rules of prudence and of 
 equity. History had little interest for him, except as it testi- 
 fied to man's advancement and steady progress, and furnish- 
 ed arguments to show that men prospered by liberty, peace, 
 and just dealings with their neighbors. He cared little or 
 nothing for mere sentiments. Even where these had their 
 root in some human tendency that was noble in itself, he did 
 not reverence them if they seemed to stand in the way of 
 men's acting peacefully and prudently. He did not see why 
 the mere idea of nationality, for example, should induce peo- 
 ple to disturb themselves by insurrections and wars, so long 
 as they were tolerably well governed, and allowed to exist 
 in peace and to make an honest living. Thus he never rep- 
 resented more than half the English character. He was al- 
 ways out of sympathy with his countrymen on some great 
 political question. 
 
 But he seemed as if he were designed by nature to con- 
 duct to success such an agitation as that against the Corn- 
 laws. He found some colleagues who were worthy of him. 
 His chief companion in the campaign was Mr. Bright. Mr. 
 B right's fame is not so completely bound up with the repeal 
 of the Corn-laws, or even with the extension of the suffrage, 
 as that of Mr. Cobden. If Mr. Bright had been on the wrong 
 side of every cause he pleaded; if his agitation had been as 
 conspicuous for failure as it was for success, he would still 
 be famous among English public men. He was what Mr. 
 Cobden was not, an orator of the very highest class. It is 
 doubtful whether English public life has ever produced a 
 man who possessed more of the qualifications of a great ora- 
 tor than Mr. Bright. He had a commanding presence; not, 
 indeed, the stately and colossal form of O'Connell,but a mas- 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 229 
 
 sive figure, a large head, a handsome and expressive face. 
 His voice was powerful, resonant, clear, with a peculiar vi- 
 bration in it which lent unspeakable effect to any passages 
 of pathos or of scorn. His style of speaking was exactly 
 what a conventional demagogue's ought not to be. It was 
 pure to austerity ; it was stripped of all superfluous orna- 
 ment. It never gushed or foamed. It never allowed itself 
 to be mastered by passion. The first peculiarity that struck 
 the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his 
 most powerful passages appeared as if he were rather keep- 
 ing in his strength than taxing it with effort. His voice was, 
 for the most part, calm and measured ; he hardly ever in- 
 dulged in much gesticulation. He never, under the pressure 
 of whatever emotion, shouted or stormed. The fire of his 
 eloquence was a white -heat, intense, consuming, but never 
 sparkling or sputtering. He had an admirable gift of hu- 
 mor and a keen ironical power. He had read few books, but 
 of those he read he was a master. The English Bible and 
 Milton were his chief studies. His style was probably form- 
 ed, for the most part, on the Bible ; for although he may have 
 moulded his general way of thinking and his simple, strong 
 morality on the lessons he found in Milton, his mere lan- 
 guage bore little trace of Milton's stately classicism with 
 its Hellenized and Latinized terminology, but was above all 
 things Saxon and simple. Bright was a man of the mid- 
 dle-class. His family were Quakers of a somewhat austere 
 mould. They were manufacturers of carpets in Rochdale, 
 Lancashire, and had made considerable money in their busi- 
 ness. John Bright, therefore, was raised above the tempta- 
 tions which often beset the eloquent young man who takes 
 up a democratic cause in a country like ours; and, as our 
 public opinion goes, it probably was to his advantage, when 
 first he made his appearance in Parliament, that he was well 
 known to be a man of some means, and not a clever and 
 needy adventurer. 
 
 Mr. Bright himself has given an interesting account of his 
 first meeting with Mr. Cobden : 
 
 "The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Cobden was 
 in connection with the great question of education. I went 
 over to Manchester to call upon him and invite him to come 
 to Rochdale to speak at a meeting about to be held in the 
 
230 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 school-room of the Baptist Chapel in West Street. I found 
 him in his counting-house. I told him what I wanted ; his 
 countenance lighted up with pleasure to find that others 
 were working in the same cause. He, without hesitation, 
 agreed to come. He came, and he spoke; and though he 
 was then so young a speaker, yet the qualities of his speech 
 were such as remained with him so long as he was able to 
 speak at all clearness, logic, a conversational eloquence, a 
 persuasiveness which, when combined with the absolute truth 
 there was in his eye and in his countenance, became a power 
 it was almost impossible to resist." 
 
 Still more remarkable is the description Mr. Bright has 
 given of Cobden's first appeal to him to join in the agita- 
 tion for the repeal of the Corn-laws : 
 
 "I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I 
 was then in the depths of grief I may almost say of de- 
 spair for the light and sunshine of my house had been ex- 
 tinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, 
 except the memory of a sainted life and a too brief happi- 
 ness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. 
 Cobden called on me as his friend and addressed me, as you 
 may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he 
 looked up and said : ' There are thousands and thousands of 
 homes in England at this moment where wives and mothers 
 and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first par- 
 oxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come 
 with me, and we will never rest until the Corn -laws are 
 repealed.' " 
 
 The invitation thus given was cordially accepted, and 
 from that time dates the almost unique fellowship of these 
 two men, who worked together in the closest brotherhood, 
 who loved each other as not all brothers do, who were as- 
 sociated so closely in the public mind that until Cobden's 
 death the name of one was scarcely ever mentioned without 
 that of the other. There was something positively romantic 
 about their mutual attachment. Each led a noble life ; each 
 was in his own way a man of genius; each was simple and 
 strong. Rivalry between them would have been impossible, 
 although they were every day being compared and contrast- 
 ed by both friendly and unfriendly critics. Their gifts were 
 admirably suited to make them powerful allies. Each had 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 231 
 
 something that the other wanted. Bright had not Cobden's 
 
 s o 
 
 winning persuasiveness nor his surprising ease and force of 
 argument. But Cobden had not anything like his compan- 
 ion's oratorical power. He had not the tones of scorn, of 
 pathos, of humor, and of passion. The two together made a 
 genuine power in the House of Commons and on the plat- 
 form. Mr. Kinglake, who is as little in sympathy with the 
 general political opinions of Cobden and Bright as any man 
 well could be, has borne admirable testimony to their ar- 
 gumentative power and to their influence over the House 
 of Commons : " These two orators had shown with what a 
 strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, 
 with what a high courage, they could carry a scientific truth 
 through the storms of politics. They had shown that they 
 could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who listen- 
 ed to them with delight that they could bend the House 
 of Commons that they could press their creed upon a 
 Prime-minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress, that 
 after awhile he felt it to be a torture and a violence to his 
 reason to have to make a stand against them. Nay, more. 
 Each of these gifted men had proved that he could go brave- 
 ly into the midst of angry opponents, could show them their 
 fallacies one by one, destroy their favorite theories before 
 their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down." It 
 was, indeed, a scientific truth which, in the first instance, 
 Cobden and Bright undertook to force upon the 1 recognition 
 of a Parliament composed in great measure of the very men 
 who were taught to believe that their own personal and 
 class interests were bound up with the maintenance of the 
 existing economical creed. Those who hold that because it 
 was a scientific truth the task of its advocates ought to have 
 been easy, will do well to observe the success of the resist- 
 ance which has been thus far offered to it in almost every 
 country but England alone. 
 
 These men had many assistants and lieutenants well 
 worthy to act with them and under them. Mr. W. J. Fox, 
 for instance, a Unitarian minister of great popularity and 
 remarkable eloquence, seemed at one time almost to divide 
 public admiration as an orator with Mr. Cobden and Mr. 
 Bright. Mr. Milner Gibson, who had been a Tory, went over 
 to the movement, and gave it the assistance of trained Par- 
 
232 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 liamentary knowledge and very considerable debating skill. 
 In the Lancashire towns the League had the advantage of 
 
 O O 
 
 being officered, for the most part, by shrewd and sound men 
 of business, who gave their time as freely as they gave their 
 money to the advancement of the cause. It is curious to 
 compare the manner in which the Anti-Corn-law agitation 
 was conducted with the manner in which the contemporary 
 agitation in Ireland for the repeal of the Union was carried 
 on. In England the agitation was based on the most strict- 
 ly business principles. The leaders spoke and acted as if. the 
 League itself were some great commercial firm, which was 
 bound, above all things, to fulfil its promises and keep to the 
 letter as well as the spirit of its engagements. There was 
 no boasting ; there was no exaggeration ; there were no ap- 
 peals to passion; no romantic rousings of sentimental emo- 
 tion. The system of the agitation was as clear, straightfor- 
 ward, and business - like as its purpose. In Ireland there 
 were monster meetings, with all manner of dramatic and 
 theatric effects with rhetorical exaggeration, and vehement 
 appeal to passion and to ancient memory of suffering. The 
 cause was kept up from day to day by assurances of neat- 
 success so positive that it is sometimes hard to believe those 
 who made them could themselves have been deceived by 
 them. No doubt the difference will be described by many 
 as the mere result of the difference between the one cause 
 and the other; between the agitation for Free-trade, clear, 
 tangible, and practical, and that for repeal of the Union, 
 with its shadowy object and its visionary impulses. But a 
 better explanation of the difference will be found in the dif- 
 ferent natures to which an appeal had to be made. It is 
 not by any means certain that O'Connell's cause was a mere 
 shadow; nor will it appear, if we study the criticism of the 
 time, that the guides of public opinion who pronounced the 
 repeal agitation absurd and ludicrous had any better words 
 at first for the movement against the Corn-law. Cobden 
 and Bright on the one side, O'Connell on the other, knew 
 the audiences they had to address. It would have been im- 
 possible to stir the blood of the Lancashire artisan by means 
 of the appeals which went to the very heart of the dreamy, 
 sentimental, impassioned Celt of the South of Ireland. The 
 Munster peasant would have understood little of such clear, 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 233 
 
 penetrating, business-like argument as that by which Cobden 
 and Bright enforced their doctrines. Had O'Connell's cause 
 been as practical and its success been as immediately attain- 
 able as that of the Anti-Corn-law League, the great Irish 
 agitator would still have had to address his followers in a 
 different tone of appeal. "All men are not alike," says the 
 Norman butler to the Flemish soldier in Scott's "Betrothed :" 
 " that which will but warm your Flemish hearts will put 
 wildfire into Norman brains ; and what may only encourage 
 your countrymen to man the walls, will make ours fly over 
 the battlements." The most impassioned Celt, however, will 
 admit that in the Anti-Corn-law movement of Cobden and 
 Bright, with its rigid truthfulness and its strict proportion 
 between capacity and promise, there was an entirely new 
 dignity lent to popular agitation which raised it to the con- 
 dition of statesmanship in the rough. The Reform agitation 
 in England had not been conducted without some exaggera- 
 tion, much appeal to passion, and some not by any means 
 indistinct allusion to the reserve of popular force which 
 might be called into action if legislators and peers proved 
 insensible to argument. The era of the Anti-Corn-law 
 movement was a new epoch altogether in English political 
 controversy. 
 
 The League, however, successful as it might be through- 
 out the country, had its great work to do in Parliament. 
 The Free -trade leaders must have found their hearts sink 
 within them when they came sometimes to confront that 
 fortress of traditions and of vested rights. Even after the 
 change made in favor of manufacturing and middle-class in- 
 terests by the Reform Bill, the House of Commons was still 
 composed, ag to nine-tenths of its whole number, by repre- 
 sentatives of the landlords. The entire House of Lords then 
 was constituted of the owners of land. All tradition, all 
 prestige, all the dignity of aristocratic institutions, seemed 
 to be naturally arrayed against the new movement, conduct- 
 ed as it was by manufacturers and traders for the benefit, 
 seemingly, of trade and those whom it employed. The artisan 
 population, who might have been formidable as a disturbing 
 element, were, on the whole, rather against the Free-traders 
 than for them. Nearly all the great official leaders had to 
 be converted to the doctrines of Free-trade. Many of the 
 
234 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Whigs were willing enough to admit the case of Free-trade 
 as the young Scotch lady mentioned by Sydney Smith ad- 
 mitted the case of love, "in the abstract;" but they could 
 not recognize the possibility of applying it in the compli- 
 cated financial conditions of an artificial system like ours. 
 Some of the Whigs were in favor of a fixed duty in place of 
 the existing sliding - scale. The leaders of the movement 
 had, indeed, to resist a very dangerous temptation coming 
 from statesmen who professed to be in accordance with 
 them as to the mere principle of protection, but who were 
 always endeavoring to persuade them that they had better 
 accept any decent compromise, and not push their demands 
 to extremes. The witty peer who in a former generation 
 answered an advocate of moderate reform by asking him 
 what he thought of moderate chastity, might have had 
 many opportunities, if he had been engaged in the Free- 
 trade movement, of turning his epigram to account. 
 
 Mr. Macaulay, for instance, wrote to the electors of Edin- 
 burgh to remonstrate with them on what he considered their 
 fanatical and uncompromising adherence to the principle of 
 Free-trade. " In my opinion," Mr. Macaulay wrote to his 
 constituents, " you are all wrong not because you think 
 all protection bad, for I think so too; not even because you 
 avow your opinion and attempt to propagate it, for I have 
 always done the same, and shall do the same ; but because, 
 being in a situation where your only hope is in a compro- 
 mise, you refuse to hear of compromise ; because, being in a 
 situation where every person who will go a step with you 
 on the right road ought to be cordially welcomed, you drive 
 from you those who are willing and desirous to go with yon 
 half-way. To this policy I will be no party. . I will not 
 abandon those with whom I have hitherto acted, and with- 
 out whose help I am confident that no great improvement 
 can be effected, for an object purely selfish." It had not oc- 
 curred to Mr. Macaulay that any party but the Whigs could 
 bring in any measure of fiscal or other reform worth the 
 having ; and, indeed, he probably thought it would be some- 
 thing like an act of ingratitude amounting to a species of 
 sacrilege to accept reform from any hands but those of its 
 recognized Whig patrons. The Anti-Corn-law agitation in- 
 troduced a game of politics into England which astonished 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 235 
 
 and considerably discomfited steady-going politicians like 
 Macaulay. The League men did not profess to be bound 
 by any indefeasible bond of allegiance to the Whig party. 
 They were prepared to co-operate with any party whatever 
 which would undertake to abolish the Coi'n - laws. Their 
 agitation would have done some good in this way, if in no 
 other sense. It introduced a more robust and independent 
 spirit into political life. It is almost ludicrous sometimes to 
 read the diatribes of suppoi'ters of Lord Melbourne's Gov- 
 ernment, for example, against any one who should presume 
 to think that any object in the mind of a true patriot, or at 
 least of a true Liberal, could equal in importance that of 
 keeping the Melbourne Ministry in power. Great reforms 
 have been made by Conservative governments in our own 
 days, because the new political temper which was growing 
 up in England refused to affirm that the patent of reform 
 rested in the possession of any particular party, and that if 
 the holders of the monopoly did not find it convenient, or 
 were not in the humor to use it any further just then, no 
 one else must venture to interfere in the matter, or to un- 
 dertake the duty which they had declined to perform. At 
 the time that Macaulay wrote his letter, however, it had 
 not entered into the mind of any Whig to believe it possi- 
 ble that the repeal of the Corn-laws was to be the work of 
 a great Conservative minister, done at the bidding of two 
 Radical politicians. 
 
 It is a significant fact that the Anti- Corn-law League 
 were not in the least discouraged by the accession of Sir 
 Robert Peel to power. To them the fixed duty proposed 
 by Lord John Russell was as objectionable as Peel's sliding- 
 scale. Their hopes seem rather to have gone up than gone 
 down when the minister came into power whose adherents, 
 unlike those of Lord John Russell, were absolutely against 
 the very principle of Free-trade. It is of some importance, 
 in estimating the morality of the course pursued by Peel, to 
 observe the opinion formed of his professions and his proba- 
 ble purposes by the shrewd men who led the Anti-Corn-law 
 League. The grand charge against Peel is that he betray- 
 ed his party; that he induced them to continue their alle- 
 giance to him on the promise that he would never concede 
 the principle of Free-trade ; and that he used his power to 
 
236 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 establish Free-trade when the time came to choose between 
 it and a surrender of office. Now it is certain that the 
 League always regarded Sir Robert Peel as a Free-trader in 
 heart; as one who fully admitted the principle of Free-trade, 
 but who did not see his way just then to deprive the agri- 
 cultural interest of the protection on which they had for so 
 many years been allowed and encouraged to lean. In the 
 debate after the general election of 1841 the debate which 
 turned out the Melbourne Ministry Mr. Cobden, then for 
 the first time a member of the House of Commons, said : "I 
 am a Free-trader; I call myself neither Whig nor Tory. I 
 am proud to acknowledge the virtue of the Whig Ministry 
 in coming out from the ranks of the monopolists and advan- 
 cing three parts out of four in my own direction. Yet if 
 the right honorable baronet opposite (Sir R. Peel) advances 
 one step farther, I will be the first to meet him half-way and 
 shake hands with him." Some years later Mr. Cobden said, 
 at Birmingham, "There can be no doubt that Sir Robert 
 Peel is at heart as good a Free-trader as I am. He has told 
 us so in the House of Commons again and again ; nor do I 
 doubt that Sir Robert Peel has in his inmost heart the de- 
 sire to be the man who shall carry out the principles of 
 Free-trade in this country." Sir Robert Peel had, indeed, 
 as Mr. Cobden said, again and again in Parliament express- 
 ed his conviction as to the general truth of the principles of 
 Free-trade. In 1842, he declared it to be utterly beyond the 
 power of Parliament, and a mere delusion, to say that by any 
 duty, fixed or otherwise, a certain, price could be guaranteed 
 to the producer. In the same year he expressed his belief 
 that "on the general principle of Free-trade there is now no 
 great difference of opinion, and that all agree in the general 
 rule that we should buy in the cheapest and sell in the dear- 
 est market." This expression of opinion called forth an iron- 
 ical cheer from the benches of opposition. Peel knew well 
 what the cheer was meant to convey. He knew it meant 
 to ask him why, then, he did not allow the country to buy 
 its grain in the cheapest market. He promptly added "I 
 know the meaning of that cheer. I do not wish to raise a 
 discussion on the Corn-laws or the Sugar Duties, which I 
 contend, however, are exceptions to the general rule, and I 
 will not go into that question now." The press of the day, 
 
FEEE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 237 
 
 whether for or against Peel, commented upon his declara- 
 tions and his measures as indicating clearly that the bent 
 of his mind was toward Free-trade even in grain. At all 
 events, he had reached that mental condition when he re- 
 garded the case of grain, like that of sugar, as a" necessary 
 exception, for the time, to the operation of a general rule. 
 
 It ought to have been obvious that if exceptional circum- 
 stances should arise, pulling more strongly in the direction 
 of the League, Sir Robert Peel's own explicit declarations 
 must bind him to recognize the necessity of applying the 
 Free-trade principles even to corn. " Sir Robert Peel," says 
 his cousin, Sir Laurence Peel, in a sketch of the life and char- 
 acter of the great statesman, " had been, as I have said, al- 
 ways a Free-trader. The questions to which he had declined 
 to apply those principles had been viewed by him as excep- 
 tional. The Corn-law had been so treated by many able 
 exponents of the principles of Free-trade." Sir Robert Peel 
 himself has left it on record that during the discussions on 
 the Corn-law of 1842 he was more than once pressed to give 
 a guarantee, " so far as a minister could give it," that the 
 amount of protection established by that law should be per- 
 manently adhered to ; " but although I did not then contem- 
 plate the necessity for further change, I uniformly refused to 
 fetter the discretion of the Government by any such assur- 
 ances as those that were required of me." It is evident that 
 the condition of Sir Robert Peel's opinions was, even as far 
 back as 1842, something very different indeed from that of 
 the ordinary county member or pledged Protectionist, and 
 that Peel had done all he could to make this clear to his 
 party. A minister Avho, in 1842, refused to fetter the dis- 
 cretion of his Government in dealing with the protection 
 of home-grown grain ought not, on the face of things, to be 
 accused of violating his pledges and betraying his party, if, 
 four years later, under the pressure of extraordinary circum- 
 stances, he made up his mind to the abolition of such a pro- 
 tection. Let us test this in a manner that will be familiar 
 to our own time. Suppose a Prime-minister is pressed by 
 some of his own party to give the House of Commons a 
 guarantee, "so far as a minister could give it," that the 
 principle of the State Church Establishment in England 
 shall be permanently adhered to. He declines to fetter the 
 
238 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 discretion of the Government in the future. Is it not evi- 
 dent that such an answer would be taken by nine out of 
 ten of his listeners to be ominous of some change to the 
 Established Church? If four years after the same minister 
 were to propose to disestablish the Church, he might be de- 
 nounced and he might even be execrated, but no one could 
 fairly accuse him of having violated his pledge and betrayed 
 his party. 
 
 The country party, however, did not understand Sir 
 Robert Peel as their opponents and his assuredly under- 
 stood him. They did not at this time believe in the possi- 
 bility of any change. Free-trade was to them little more 
 than an abstraction. They did not much care who preached 
 it out of Parliament. They were convinced that the state 
 of things they saw around them when they were boys would 
 continue to the end. They looked on Mr. Villiers and his 
 annual motion in favor of Free-trade very much as a stout 
 old Tory of later times might regard the annual motion for 
 woman suffrage. Both parties in the House that is to say, 
 both of the parties from whom ministers were taken alike 
 set themselves against the introduction of any such measure. 
 The supporters of it were, with one exception, not men of 
 family and rank. It was agitated for a good deal out-of- 
 doors, but agitation had not up to that time succeeded in 
 making much way even with a reformed Parliament. The 
 country party observed that some men among the two lead- 
 ing sets went farther in favor of the abstract principle than 
 others: but it did not seem to them that that really affected 
 the practical question very much. In 1842 Mr. Disraeli 
 himself was one of those who stood up for the Free-trade 
 principle, and insisted that it had been rather the inherited 
 principle of the Conservatives than of the Whigs. Country 
 gentlemen did not, therefore, greatly concern themselves 
 about the practical work doing in Manchester, or the pro- 
 fessions of abstract opinion so often made in Parliament. 
 They did not see that the mind of their leader was avowed- 
 ly in a progressive condition on the subject of Free-trade. 
 Because they could not bring themselves to question for a 
 moment the principle of protection for home-grown grain, 
 they made up their minds that it was a principle as sacred 
 with him. Against that conviction no evidence could pre- 
 
FREE-TRADE AND THE LEAGUE. 239 
 
 vail. It was with them a point of conscience and honor; 
 it would have seemed an insult to their leader to believe 
 even his own words, if these seemed to say that it was a 
 mere question of expediency, convenience, and time with 
 him. 
 
 Perhaps it would have been better if Sir Robert Peel had 
 devoted himself more directly to what Mr. Disraeli after- 
 ward called educating his party. Perhaps if he had made 
 it part of his duty as a leader to prepare the minds of his 
 followers for the fact that protection for grain, having ceased 
 to be tenable as an economic principle, would possibly some 
 day have to be given up as a practice, he might have taken 
 his party along with him. He might have been able to 
 show them, as the events have shown them since, that the 
 introduction of free corn would be a blessing to the popula- 
 tion of England in general, and would do nothing but good 
 for the landed interest as well. The influence of Peel at 
 that time, and indeed all through his administration up to 
 the introduction of his Free-trade measures, was limitless, so 
 far as his party were concerned. He could have done any- 
 thing with them. Indeed, we find no evidence so clear to 
 prove that Peel had not in 1842 made up his mind to the 
 introduction of Free -trade as the fact that he did not at 
 once begin to educate his party to it. This is to be regret- 
 ted. The measure might have been passed by common ac- 
 cord. There is something not altogether without pathetic 
 influence in the thought of that country party whom Peel 
 had led so long, and who adored him so thoroughly, turning 
 away from him and against him, and mournfully seeking an- 
 other leader. There is something pathetic in the thought 
 that, rightly or wrongly, they should have believed them- 
 selves betrayed by their chief. But Peel, to begin with, was 
 a reserved, cold, somewhat awkward man. He was not 
 effusive; he did not pour out his emotions and reveal all his 
 changes of opinion in bursts of confidence even to his habit- 
 ual associates. He brooded over these things in his own 
 mind ; he gave such expression to them in open debate as 
 any passing occasion seemed strictly to call for ; and he as- 
 sumed, perhaps, that the gradual changes operating in his 
 views when thus expressed were understood by his follow- 
 ers. Above all, it is probable that Peel himself did not see 
 
240 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 until almost the last moment that the time had actually 
 come when the principle of protection must give way to 
 other and more weighty claims. In his speech announcing 
 his intended legislation in 1846, Sir Robert Peel, with a 
 proud frankness which was characteristic of him, denied that 
 his altered course of action was due exclusively to the fail- 
 ure of the potato crop and the dread of famine in Ireland. 
 "I will not," he said," withhold the homage which is due 
 to the progress of reason and of truth by denying that my 
 opinions on the subject of Protection have undergone a 
 change. ... I will not direct the course of the vessel by 
 observations taken in 1842." But it is probable that if the 
 Irish famine had not threatened, the moment for introducing 
 the new legislation might have been indefinitely postponed. 
 The prospects of the Anti-Corn-law League did not look by 
 any means bright when the session preceding the introduc- 
 tion of the Free -trade legislation came to an end. The 
 number of votes that the League could count on in Parlia- 
 ment did not much exceed that which the advocates of 
 Home Rule have been able to reckon up in our day. Noth- 
 ing in 1843 or in the earlier part of 1845 pointed to any im- 
 mediate necessity for Sir Robert Peel's testing the progress 
 of his own convictions by reducing them into the shape of 
 practical action. It is, therefore, not hard to understand 
 how even a far-seeing and conscientious statesman, busy 
 with the practical work of each day, might have put off tak- 
 ing definite counsel with himself as to the introduction of 
 measures for which just then there seemed no special neces- 
 sity, and which could hardly be introduced without bitter 
 controversy. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 
 
 WE see how the two great parties of the State stood with 
 regard to this question of Free -trade. The Whigs were 
 steadily gravitating toward it. Their leaders did not quite 
 see their way to accept it as a principle of practical states- 
 manship, but it was evident that their acceptance of it was 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 241 
 
 only a question of time, and of no long time. The leader of 
 the Tory party was being drawn day by day more in the 
 same direction. Both leaders, Russell and Peel, had gone 
 so far as to admit the general principle of Free-trade. Peel 
 had contended that grain was, in England, a necessary ex- 
 ception ; Russell was not of opinion that the time had come 
 when it could be treated otherwise than as an exception. 
 The Free -trade party, small, indeed, in its Parliamentary 
 force, but daily growing more and more powerful with the 
 country, would take nothing from either leader but Free- 
 trade sans phrase; and would take that from either leader 
 without regard to partisan considerations. It is evident to 
 any one who knows anything of the working of our system 
 of government by party, that this must soon have ended in 
 one or other of the two great ruling parties forming an alli- 
 ance with the Free-traders. If unforeseen events had not 
 interposed, it is probable that conviction would first have 
 fastened on the minds of the Whigs, and that they would 
 have had the honor of abolishing the Corn -laws. They 
 were out of office, and did not seem likely to get back soon 
 to it by their own power, and the Free-trade party would 
 have come in time to be a very desirable ally. It would be 
 idle to pretend to doubt that the convictions of political par- 
 ties are hastened on a good deal under our system by the 
 yearning of those who are out of office to get the better of 
 those who are in. Statesmen in England are converted as 
 Henry of Navarre became Catholic : we do not say that they 
 actually change their opinions for the sake of making them- 
 selves eligible for power, but a change which has been grow- 
 ing up imperceptibly, and which might otherwise have taken 
 a long time to declare itself, is stimulated thus to confess 
 itself and come out into the light. But in the case of the 
 Anti-Corn-law agitation, an event over which political par- 
 ties had no control intervened to spur the. intent of the Prime- 
 minister. Mr. Bright, many years after, when pronouncing 
 the eulogy of his dead friend Cobden, described what hap- 
 pened in a fine sentence: "Famine itself, against which we 
 had warred, joined us." In the autumn of 1845 the potato 
 rot began in Ireland. 
 
 The vast majority of the working population of Ireland 
 were known to depend absolutely on the potato for subsist- 
 
 I. 11 
 
242 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ence. In the northern province, where the population were 
 of Scotch extraction, the oatmeal, the brose of their ances- 
 tors, still supplied the staple of their food ; but in the south- 
 ern and western provinces a large proportion of the peas- 
 antry actually lived on the potato, and the potato alone. In 
 these districts whole generations grew up, lived, married, and 
 passed away, without having ever tasted flesh meat. It 
 was evident, then, that a failure in the potato crop would be 
 equivalent to famine. Many of the laboring class received 
 little or no money wages. They lived on what was called 
 the " cottier tenant system ;" that is to say, a man worked 
 for a land-owner on condition of getting the use of a little 
 scrap of land for himself, on which to grow potatoes to be 
 the sole food of himself and his family. The news came, in 
 the autumn of 1845, that the long continuance of sunless wet 
 and cold had imperilled, if not already destroyed, the food 
 of a people. 
 
 The cabinet of Sir Robert Peel held hasty meetings close- 
 ly following each other. People began to ask whether Par- 
 liament was about to be called together, and whether the 
 Government had resolved on a bold policy. The Anti-Corn- 
 law League were clamoring for the opening of the ports. 
 The Prime-minister himself was strongly in favor of such a 
 course. He urged upon his colleagues that all restrictions 
 upon the importation of foreign corn should be suspended 
 either by an Order in Council, or by calling Parliament to- 
 gether and recommending such a measure from the throne. 
 It is now known that in offering this advice to his colleagues 
 Peel accompanied it with the expression of a doubt as to 
 whether it would ever be possible to restore the restrictions 
 that had once been suspended. Indeed, this doubt must 
 have filled every mind. The League were openly declaring 
 that one reason why they called for the opening of the ports 
 was that, once opened, they never could be closed again. 
 The doubt was enough for some of the colleagues of Sir 
 Robert Peel. It seems marvellous now how responsible 
 statesmen could struggle for the retention of restrictions 
 which were so unpopular and indefensible that if they were 
 once suspended, under the pressure of no matter what excep- 
 tional necessity, they never could be reimposed. The Duke 
 of Wellington and Lord Stanley, however, opposed the idea 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 243 
 
 of opening the ports, and the proposal fell through. The 
 Cabinet merely resolved on appointing a commission, con- 
 sisting of the heads of departments in Ireland, to take some 
 steps to guard against a sudden outbreak of famine, and the 
 thought of an autumnal session was abandoned. Sir Robert 
 Peel himself has thus tersely described the manner in which 
 his proposals were received: "The cabinet by a very con- 
 siderable majority declined giving its assent to the proposals 
 which I thus made to them. They were supported by only 
 three members of the cabinet the Earl of Aberdeen, Sir 
 James Graham, and Mr. Sidney Herbert. The other mem- 
 bers of the cabinet, some on the ground of objection to the 
 principle of the measures recommended, others upon the 
 ground that there was not yet sufficient evidence of the 
 necessity for them, withheld their sanction." 
 
 The great cry all through Ireland was for the opening of 
 the ports. The Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin 
 issued a series of resolutions declaring their conviction, from 
 the most undeniable evidence, that considerably more than 
 one-third of the entire potato crop in Ireland had been al- 
 ready destroyed by the disease, and that the disease had not 
 ceased its ravages, but on the contrary was daily expanding 
 more and more. " No reasonable conjecture can be formed," 
 the resolutions went on to state, " with respect to the limit 
 of its effects short of the destruction of the entire remaining 
 crop ;" and the document concluded with a denunciation of 
 the ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament 
 together before the usual time for its assembling. 
 
 Two or three days after the issue of these resolutions Lord 
 John Russell wrote a letter from Edinburgh to his constitu- 
 ents, the electors of the City of London a letter which is 
 one of the historical documents of the reign. It announced 
 his unqualified conversion to the principles of the Anti-Corn- 
 law League. The failure of the potato crop was, of com*se, 
 the immediate occasion of this letter. " Indecision and pro- 
 crastination," Lord John Russell wrote, " may produce a 
 
 state of suffering which it is frightful to contemplate 
 
 It is no longer worth while to contend for a fixed duty. In 
 1841 the Free-trade party would have agreed to a duty of 
 8s. per quarter on wheat, and after a lapse of years this duty 
 might have been further reduced, and ultimately abolished. 
 
244 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 But the imposition of any duty at present, without a provi- 
 sion for its extinction within a short period, would but pro- 
 long a contest already sufficiently fruitful of animosity and 
 discontent." Lord John Russell then invited a general un- 
 derstanding, to put an end to a system " which has been 
 proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agricult- 
 ure, the source of bitter division among classes, the cause of 
 penury, fever, mortality, and crime among the people." Then 
 the writer added a significant remark to the effect that the 
 Government appeared to be waiting for some excuse to give 
 up the present Corn-law, and urging the people to afford 
 them all the excuse they could desire, " by petition, by ad- 
 dress, by remonstrance." 
 
 Peel himself has told us in his Memoirs what was the ef- 
 fect which this letter produced upon his own councils. It 
 "could not," he points out, "fail to exercise a very material 
 influence on the public mind, and on the subject-matter of 
 our deliberations in the cabinet. It justified the conclusion 
 that the Whig party was prepared to unite with the Anti- 
 Corn-law League in demanding the total repeal of the Corn- 
 laws." Peel would not consent now to propose simply an 
 opening of the ports. It would seem, he thought, a mere 
 submission, to accept the minimum of the terms ordered by 
 the Whig leader. That would have been well enough when 
 
 o o 
 
 he first recommended it to his cabinet; and if it could then 
 have been offered to the country as the spontaneous move- 
 ment of a united ministry, it would have been becoming of 
 the emergency and of the men. But to do this no\v would 
 be futile ; would seem like trifling with the question. Sir 
 Robert Peel, therefore, recommended to his cabinet an early 
 meeting of Parliament with the view of bringing forward 
 some measure equivalent to a speedy repeal of the Corn- 
 laws. 
 
 The recommendation was wise : it was, indeed, indispen- 
 sable. Yet it is hard to think that an impartial posterity 
 will form a very lofty estimate of the wisdom with which 
 the counsels of the two great English parties were guided 
 in this momentous emergency. Neither Whigs nor Tories 
 appear to have formed a judgment because of facts or prin- 
 ciples, but only in deference to the political necessities of 
 the hour. Sir Robert Peel himself denied that it was the 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 245 
 
 resistless hand of famine in Ireland which had brought him 
 to his resolve that the Corn -laws ought to be abolished. 
 He grew into the conviction that they were bad in principle. 
 Lord John Russell had long been growing into the same 
 conviction. Yet the League had been left to divide with 
 but small numbers against overwhelming majorities made 
 up of both parties, until the very session before Peel pro- 
 posed to repeal the Corn-laws. Lord Beaconsfield, indeed, 
 indulges in something like exaggeration when he says, in 
 his " Life of Lord George Bentinck," that the close of the 
 session of 1845 found the League nearly reduced to silence. 
 But it is not untrue that, as he says, " the Manchester con- 
 federates seemed to be least in favor with Parliament and 
 the country on the very eve of their triumph." " They lost 
 at the same time elections and the ear of the House ; and 
 the cause of total and immediate repeal seemed in a not less 
 hopeless position than when, under circumstances of infinite 
 difficulty, it was first and solely upheld by the terse elo- 
 quence and vivid perception of Charles Villiers." Lord 
 Beaconsfield certainly ought to know what cause had and 
 what had not the ear of the House of Commons at that 
 time ; and yet we venture to doubt, even after his assurance, 
 whether the League and its speakers had in any way found 
 their hold on the attention of Parliament diminishing. But 
 the loss of elections is beyond dispute. It is a fact alluded 
 to in the very letter from Lord John Russell which was cre- 
 ating so much commotion. " It is not to be denied," Lord 
 John Russell writes, " that many elections for cities and 
 towns in 1841, and some in 1845, appear to favor the asser- 
 tion that Free-trade is not popular with the great mass of 
 the community." This is, from whatever cause, a very com- 
 mon phenomenon in our political history. A movement 
 which began with the promise of sweeping all before it 
 seems after awhile to lose its force, and is supposed by many 
 observers to be now only the work and the care of a few 
 earnest and fanatical men. Suddenly it is taken up by a 
 minister of commanding influence, and the bore or the 
 crotchet of one Parliament is the great party controversy 
 of a second, and the accomplished triumph of a third. In 
 this instance it is beyond dispute that the League seemed to 
 be somewhat losing in strength and influence just on the eve 
 
246 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of its complete triumph. He must, indeed, be the very op- 
 timist of Parliamentary government who upholds the man- 
 ner of Free-trade's final adoption as absolutely satisfactory, 
 and as reflecting nothing but credit upon the counsels of 
 our two great political parties. Such a well-contented per- 
 sonage might be fairly asked to explain why a system of 
 protective taxation, beginning to be regarded by all thought- 
 ful statesmen as bad in itself, should never be examined 
 with a view to its repeal until the force of a great emer- 
 gency and the rival biddings of party leaders came to render 
 its repeal inevitable. The Corn-laws, as all the world now 
 admits, were a cruel burden to the poor and the working- 
 class of England. They were justly described by Lord John 
 Russell as " the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, 
 the source of bitter division among classes; the cause of 
 penury, fever, mortality, and crime among the people." All 
 this was independent of the sudden and ephemeral calamity 
 of the potato rot, which at the time when Lord John Rus- 
 sell wrote that letter did not threaten to become nearly so 
 fatal as it afterward proved to be. One cannot help asking 
 how long would the Corn-laws have been suffered thus to 
 blight commerce and agriculture, to cau?e division among 
 classes, and to produce penury, mortality, and crime among 
 the people, if the potato rot in Ireland had not rendered it 
 necessary to do something without delay ? 
 
 The potato rot, however, inspired the writing of Lord 
 John Russell's letter; and Lord John Russell's letter in- 
 spired Sir Robert Peel with the conviction that something 
 must be done. Most of his colleagues were inclined to go 
 with him this time. A cabinet council was held on No- 
 vember 25th, almost immediately after the publication of 
 Lord John Russell's letter. At that council Sir Robert Peel 
 recommended the summoning of Parliament with a view to 
 instant measures to combat the famine in Ireland, but with 
 a view also to some announcement of legislation intended to 
 pave the way for the repeal of the Corn-laws. Lord Stan- 
 ley still hesitated, and asked time to consider his decision. 
 The Duke of Wellington was unchanged in his private opin- 
 ion that the Corn-laws ought to be maintained; but he de- 
 clared with a blunt simplicity that his only object in public 
 life was " to support Sir Robert Peel's administration of the 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 247 
 
 Government for the Queen." "A good government for the 
 country," said the sturdy and simple old hero, "is more im- 
 portant than Corn-laws or any other consideration." One 
 may smile at this notion of a good government without ref- 
 erence to the quality of the legislation it introduces; it re- 
 minds one a little of the celebrated study of history with- 
 out reference to time or place. But the Duke acted strictly 
 up to his principles of duty, and he declared that if Sir Rob- 
 ert Peel considered the repeal of the Corn -laws to be not 
 right or necessary for the welfare of England, but requisite 
 for the maintenance of Sir Robert Peel's position "in Par- 
 liament and in the public view," he should thoroughly sup- 
 port the proposal. Lord Stanley, however, was not to be 
 changed in the end. He took time to consider, and seems 
 really to have tried his best to persuade himself that he 
 could fall in with the new position which the Premier had 
 assumed. Meanwhile the most excited condition of public 
 feeling prevailed throughout London and the country gen- 
 erally. The Times newspaper came out on December 4th 
 with the announcement that the ministry had made up its 
 mind, and that the Royal speech at the commencement of 
 the session would recommend an immediate consideration 
 of the Corn-laws preparatory to their total repeal. It would 
 be hardly possible to exaggerate the excitement caused by 
 this startling piece of news. It was indignantly and in 
 unqualified terms declared a falsehood by the ministerial 
 prints. Long arguments were gone into to prove that even 
 if the fact announced were true, it could not possibly have 
 been known to the Times. In Disraeli's " Coningsby " Mr. 
 Rigby gives the clearest and most convincing reasons to 
 prove, first, that Lord Spencer could not be dead, as report 
 said he was ; and next, that even if he were dead, the fact 
 could not possibly be known to those who took on them- 
 selves to announce it. He is hardly silenced even by the 
 assurance of a great duke that he is one of Lord Spencer's 
 executors, and that Lord Spencer is certainly dead. So the 
 announcement in the Times was fiercely and pedantically 
 argued against. " It can't be true ;" " the Times could not 
 get to know of it ;" " it must be a cabinet secret if it were 
 true ;" " nobody outside the cabinet could possibly know of 
 it;" "if any one outside the cabinet could get to know of 
 
248 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 it, it would not be the Times;' 1 '' it would be this, that, or the 
 other person or journal ; and so forth. Long after it had 
 been made certain, beyond even Mr. Rigby's power of dis- 
 putation, that the announcement was true so far as the re- 
 solve of the Prime -minister was concerned, people contin- 
 ued to argue and controvert as to the manner in which the 
 Times became possessed of the secret. The general conclu- 
 sion come to among the knowing was that the blandish- 
 ments of a gifted and beautiful lady with a dash of polit- 
 ical intrigue in her had somehow extorted the secret from 
 a young and handsome member of the cabinet, and that 
 she had communicated it to the Times. It is not impossible 
 that this may have been the true explanation. It was be- 
 lieved in by a great many persons who might have been 
 in a position to judge of the probabilities. On the other 
 hand, there were surely signs and tokens enough by which 
 a shrewd politician might have guessed what was to come 
 without any intervention of petticoat diplomacy. It seems 
 odd now that people should then have distressed themselves 
 so much by conjectures as to the source of the information 
 when once it was made certain that the information itself 
 was substantially true. This it undoubtedly was, although 
 it did not tell all the truth, and could not foretell. For 
 there was an ordeal yet to be gone through before the 
 Prime-minister could put his plans into operation. On De- 
 cember 4th the Times made the announcement. On the 6th, 
 having been passionately contradicted, it repeated the as- 
 sertion. "We adhere to our original announcement that 
 Parliament will meet early in January, and that a repeal 
 of the Corn-laws will be proposed in one House by Sir R. 
 Peel, and in the other by the Duke of Wellington." But, 
 in the mean time, the opposition in the cabinet had proved 
 itself unmanageable. Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buc- 
 cleuch intimated to the Prime-minister that they could not 
 be parties to any measure involving the ultimate repeal of 
 the Corn - laws. Sir Robert Peel did not believe that he 
 could carry out his project satisfactorily under such cir- 
 cumstances, and he therefore hastened to tender his resig- 
 nation to the Queen. " The other members of the cabinet, 
 without exception, I believe " these are Sir Robert Peel's 
 own words " concurred in this opinion ; and under these 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 249 
 
 circumstances I consider it to be my duty to tender my 
 resignation to her Majesty. On the 5th of December I re- 
 paired to Osborne, Isle of Wight, and humbly solicited her 
 Majesty to relieve me from duties which I felt I could no 
 longer discharge with advantage to her Majesty's service." 
 The very day after the Times made its famous announce- 
 ment, the very day before the Times repeated it, the Prime- 
 minister who was to propose the repeal of the Corn -laws 
 went out of office. 
 
 Quern dixere chaos! Apparently chaos had come again. 
 Lord John Russell was sent for from Edinburgh. His letter 
 had, without any such purpose on his part, written him up 
 as the man to take Sir Robert Peel's place. Lord John 
 Russell came to London, and did his best to cope with the 
 many difficulties of the situation. His party were not very 
 strong in the country, and they had not a majority in the 
 House of Commons. He very naturally endeavored to 
 obtain from Peel a pledge that he would support the im- 
 mediate and complete repeal of the Corn-laws. Peel, writ- 
 ing to the Queen, " humbly expresses his regret that he 
 does not feel it to be consistent with his duty to enter upon 
 the consideration of this important question in Parliament 
 fettered by a previous engagement of the nature of that 
 required of hihf." The position of Lord John Russell was 
 awkward. He had been forced into it because one or two 
 of Sir Robert Peel's colleagues would not consent to adopt 
 the policy of their chief. But the very fact of so stubborn 
 an opposition from a man of Lord Stanley's influence showed 
 clearly enough that the passing of Free-trade measures was 
 not to be effected without stern resistance from the country 
 party. The whole risk and burden had seemingly been 
 thrown on Lord John Russell ; and now Sir Robert Peel 
 would not even pledge himself to unconditional support of 
 the very policy which was understood to be his own. Lord 
 John Russell showed, even then, his characteristic courage. 
 He resolved to form a ministry without a Parliamentary 
 majority. He was not, however, fated to try the ordeal. 
 Lord Grey, who was a few months before Lord Howick, and 
 who had just succeeded to the title of his father (the stately 
 Charles Earl Grey, the pupil of Fox, and chief of the cabinet 
 which passed the Reform Bill and abolished slavery) Lord 
 
 11* 
 
250 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Grey felt a strong objection to the foreign policy of Lord 
 Palmerston, and these two could not get on in one ministry, 
 as it was part of Lord John Russell's plan that they should 
 do. Lord Grey also was strongly of opinion that a seat in 
 the cabinet ought to be offered to Mr. Cobden ; but other 
 great Whigs could not bring themselves to any larger sacri- 
 fice to justice and common-sense than a suggestion that the 
 office of Vice - president of the Board of Trade should be 
 tendered to the leader of the Free - trade movement. Mr. 
 Macaulay describes the events in a letter to the Edinburgh 
 Chamber of Commerce. "All our plans were frustrated by 
 Lord Grey, who objected to Lord Palmerston being Foreign 
 Secretary. I hope that the public interests will not suffer. 
 Sir Robert Peel must now undertake the settlement of tbe 
 question. It is certain that he can settle it. It is by no 
 means certain that we could have done so. For we shall to 
 a man support him ; and a large proportion of those who 
 are now in office would have refused to support us." One 
 passage in Macaulay's letter will be read with peculiar in- 
 terest. "From the first," he says, "I told Lord John Rus- 
 sell that I. stipulated for one thing only total and immedi- 
 ate repeal of the Corn-laws; that my objections to gradual 
 abolition were insurmountable ; but that if he declared for 
 total and immediate repeal I would be as to all other mat- 
 ters absolutely in his hands; that I would take any office, 
 or no office, just as suited him best; and that he should 
 never be disturbed by any personal pretensions or jealous- 
 ies on my part." No one can doubt Macaulay's sincerity 
 and singleness of purpose. But it is surprising to note the 
 change that the agitation of little more than two years has 
 made in his opinions on the subject of a policy of immedi- 
 ate and unconditional abolition. In February, 1843, he was 
 pointing out to the electors of Edinburgh the unwisdom of 
 refusing a compromise, and in December, 1845, he is writing 
 to Edinburgh to say that the one only thing for which he 
 must stipulate was total and immediate repeal. The Anti- 
 Corn-law League might well be satisfied with the propagan- 
 dist work they had done. The League itself looked on very 
 composedly during these little altercations and embarrass- 
 ments of pai'ties. They knew well enough now that let who 
 would take power, he must carry out their policy. At a 
 
FAMINE F011CES PEEL'S HAND. 251 
 
 meeting of the League, which was held in Covent Garden 
 Theatre on the 17th of this memorable month, and while the 
 negotiations were still going on, Mr. Cobden declared that 
 he and his friends had not striven to keep one party in or 
 another out of office. "We have worked with but one prin- 
 ciple and one object in view ; and if we maintain that prin- 
 ciple for but six months more, we shall attain to that state 
 which I have so long and so anxiously desired, when the 
 League shall be dissolved into its primitive elements by the 
 triumph of its principles." 
 
 Lord John Russell found it impossible to form a ministry. 
 He signified his failure to the Queen. Probably, having 
 done the best he could, he was not particularly distressed to 
 find that his efforts were ineffectual. The Queen had to 
 send for Sir Robert Peel to Windsor, and tell him that she 
 must require him to withdraw his resignation and to remain 
 in her service. Sir Robert of course could only comply. 
 The Queen offered to give him some time to enter into com- 
 munication with his colleagues, but Sir Robert very wisely 
 thought that he could speak with much greater authority 
 if he were to invite them to support him in an effort on 
 which he was determined, and which he had positively un- 
 dertaken to make. He, therefore, returned from Windsor 
 on the evening of December 20th, " having resumed all the 
 functions of First Minister of the Crown." The Duke of 
 Buccleuch withdrew his opposition to the policy which Peel 
 was now to carry out ; but Lord Stanley remained firm. 
 The place of the latter was taken as Secretary of State 
 for the Colonies by Mr. Gladstone, who, however, curiously 
 enough remained without a seat in Parliament during the 
 eventful session that was now to come. Mr. Gladstone had 
 sat for the borough of Newark, but that borough being un- 
 der the influence of the Duke of Newcastle, who had with- 
 drawn his support from the ministry, he did not invite re- 
 election, but remained without a seat in the House of Com- 
 mons for some months. Sir Robert Peel then, to use his 
 own words in a letter to the Princess de Lieven, resumed 
 power " with greater means of rendering public service than 
 I should have had if I had not relinquished it." He felt, he 
 said, " like a man restored to life after his funeral service 
 had been preached." 
 
252 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Parliament was summoned to meet in January. In the 
 mean time it was easily seen how the Protectionists and the 
 Tories of the extreme order generally would regard the pro- 
 posals of Sir Robert Peel. Protectionist meetings were held 
 in various parts of the country, and they were all but unan- 
 imous in condemning by anticipation the policy of the re- 
 stored Premier. Resolutions were passed at many of 
 these meetings expressing an equal disbelief in the Prime- 
 minister and in the famine. The utmost indignation was 
 expressed at the idea of there being any famine in prospect 
 which could cause any departure from the principles which 
 secured to the farmers a certain fixed price for their grain, 
 or at least prevented the price from falling below what they 
 considered a paying amount. Not less absurd than the prot- 
 estations that there would be no famine were some of the 
 remedies which were suggested for it if it should insist on 
 coming in. The Duke of Norfolk of that time made himself 
 particularly conspicuous by a beneficent suggestion which 
 he oifered to a distressed population. He went about rec- 
 ommending a curry powder of his own device as a charm 
 against hunger. 
 
 Parliament met. The opening day was January 22d, 
 1846. The Queen in person opened the session, and the 
 speech from the throne said a good deal about the condition 
 of Ireland and the failure of the potato crop. The speech 
 contained one significant sentence. " I have had," her Maj- 
 esty was made to say, " great satisfaction in giving my as- 
 sent to the measures which you have presented to me from 
 time to time, calculated to extend commerce and to stimu- 
 late domestic skill and industry, by the repeal of prohibitive 
 and the relaxation of protective duties. I recommend you 
 to take into your early consideration whether the principle 
 on which you have acted may not with advantage be yet 
 more extensively applied." Before the address in reply to 
 the speech from the throne was moved, Sir Robert Peel gave 
 notice of the intention of the Government on the earliest 
 possible day to submit to the consideration of the House 
 measures connected with the commercial and financial affairs 
 of the country. 
 
 There are few scenes more animated and exciting than 
 that presented by the House of Commons on some night 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL'S HAND. 253 
 
 when a great debate is expected, or when some momentous 
 announcement is to be made. A common thrill seems to 
 tremble all through the assembly, as a breath of wind runs 
 across the sea. The House appears for the moment to be 
 one body, pervaded by one expectation. The ministerial 
 benches, the front benches of opposition, are occupied by the 
 men of political renown and of historic name. The bench- 
 es everywhere else are crowded to their utmost capacity. 
 Members who cannot get seats on such an occasion a good- 
 ly number stand below the bar or have to dispose them- 
 selves along the side galleries. The celebrities are not con- 
 fined to the Treasury benches or those of the leaders of op- 
 position. Here and there, among the independent members 
 and below the gangway on both sides, are SCCMI men of in- 
 fluence and renown. At the opening of Parliament in 1846 
 this was especially to be observed. The rising fame of the 
 Free-trade leaders made them almost like a third great par- 
 ty in the House of Commons. The strangers' gallery, the 
 Speaker's gallery, on such a night are crowded to excess. 
 The eye surveys the whole House and sees no vacant place. 
 In the very hum of conversation that runs along the benches 
 there is a tone of profound anxiety. The minister who has 
 to face that House and make the announcement for which 
 all are waiting in a most feverish anxiety is a man to be en- 
 vied by the ambitious. This time there was a curiosity 
 about everything. What was the minister about to an- 
 nounce? When and in what fashion would he announce it? 
 Would the Whig leaders speak before the ministerial an- 
 nouncement? Would the Free-traders? What voice would 
 first hint to the expectant Commons the course which polit- 
 ical events were destined to take? The moving of an ad- 
 dress to the throne is always a formal piece of business. It 
 would be hardly possible for Cicero or Burke to be very in- 
 teresting when performing such a task. On the other hand, 
 it is an excellent chance for a young beginner. He finds 
 the House in a sort of contemptuously indulgent mood, pre- 
 pared to welcome the slightest evidence of any capacity of 
 speech above the dullest mediocrity. He can hardly say 
 anything absurd or offensive unless he goes absolutely out 
 of his way to make a fool of himself ; and, on the other hand, 
 he can easily say his little nothings in a graceful way, and 
 
254 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMEri. 
 
 receive grateful applause, accordingly, from an assembly 
 which counts on being bored, and feels doubly indebted to 
 the speaker who is even in the slightest degree an agree- 
 able disappointment. On this particular occasion, however, 
 the duty of the proposer and seconder of the address was 
 made specially trying by the fact that they had to interfere 
 with merely formal utterances between an eager House and 
 an exciting announcement. A certain piquancy was lent, 
 however, to the performance of the duty by the fact, which 
 the speeches made evident beyond the possibility of mis- 
 take, that the proposer of the address knew quite well what 
 the Government were about to do, and that the seconder 
 knew nothing whatever. 
 
 Now the formal task is done. The address has been moved 
 and seconded. The Speaker puts the question that the ad- 
 dress be adopted. Now is the time for debate, if debate 
 there is to be. On such occasions there is always some dis- 
 cussion, but it is commonly as mere a piece of formality as 
 the address itself. It is understood that the leader of op- 
 position will say something meaning next to nothing ; that 
 two or three men will grumble vaguely at the ministry; 
 that the leader of the House will reply ; and then the affair 
 is all over. But on this occasion it was certain that some 
 momentous announcement would have to be made ; and the 
 question was when it would come. Perhaps no one expect- 
 ed exactly what did happen. Nothing can be more unusual 
 than for the leader of the House to open the debate on such 
 an occasion ; and Sir Robert Peel was usually somewhat of 
 a formalist, who kept to the regular ways in all that per- 
 tained to the business of the House. No eyes of expecta- 
 tion were turned, therefore, to the ministerial bench at the 
 moment after the formal putting of the question by the 
 Speaker. It was rather expected that Lord John Russell, or 
 perhaps Mr. Cobden, would rise. But a surprised murmur 
 running through all parts of the House soon told those who 
 could not see the Treasury bench t'hat something unusual 
 had happened ; and in a moment the voice of the Prime-minis- 
 ter was heard that marvellous voice of which Lord Beacons- 
 field says that it had not in his time any equal in the House, 
 " unless we except the thrilling tones of O'Connell " and it 
 was known that the great explanation was coming at once. 
 
FAMINE FORCES PEEL/S HAND. 255 
 
 The explanation even now, however, was somewhat de- 
 ferred. The Prime-minister showed a deliberate intention, 
 it might have been thought, not to come to the point at 
 once. He went into long and labored explanations of the 
 manner in which his mind had been brought into a change 
 on the subject of Free-trade and Protection ; and he gave 
 exhaustive calculations to show that the reduction of duty 
 was constantly followed by expansion of the revenue, and 
 even a maintenance of high prices. The duties on glass, the 
 duties on flax, the prices of salt pork and domestic lard, the 
 contract price of salt beef for the navy these and many 
 other such topics were discussed at great length and with 
 elaborate fulness of detail in the hearing of an eager House 
 anxious only, for that night, to know whether or not the 
 minister meant to introduce the principle of Free -trade. 
 Peel, however, made it clear enough that he had become a 
 complete convert to the doctrines of the Manchester school, 
 and that, in his opinion, the time had come when that pro- 
 tection which he had taken office to maintain must forever 
 be abandoned. One sentence at the close of his speech was 
 made the occasion of much labored criticism and some se- 
 vere accusation. It was that in which Peel declared that he 
 found it " no easy task to insure the harmonious and united 
 action of an ancient monarchy, a proud aristocracy, and a 
 reformed House of Commons." 
 
 The explanation was over. The House of Commons were 
 left rather to infer than to understand what the Government 
 proposed to do. Lord John Russell entered into some per- 
 sonal explanations relating to his endeavor to form a min- 
 istry, and the causes of its failure. These have not much 
 interest for a later time. It might have seemed that the 
 work of the night was done. It was evident that the min- 
 isterial policy could not be discussed then ; for, in fact, it had 
 not been announced. The House knew that the Prime-min- 
 ister was a convert to the principles of Free-trade ; but that 
 was all that any one could be said to know except those 
 who were in the secrets of the cabinet. There appeared, 
 therefore, nothing for it but to wait until the time should 
 come for the formal announcement and the full discussion 
 of the Government measures. Suddenly, however, a new 
 and striking figure intervened in the languishing debate, 
 
256 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and filled the House of Commons with a fresh life. There 
 is not often to be found in our Parliamentary history an ex- 
 ample like this of a sudden turn given to a whole career by 
 a timely speech. The member who rose to comment on the 
 explanation of Sir Robert Peel had been for many years in 
 the House of Commons. This was his tenth session. He 
 had spoken often in each session. He had made many bold 
 attempts to win a name in Parliament, and hitherto his 
 political career had been simply a failure. From the hour 
 when he spoke this speech it was one long, unbroken, brill- 
 iant success. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 MR. DISRAELI. 
 
 THE speaker who rose into such sudden prominence and 
 something like the position of a party leader was one of the 
 most remarkable men the politics of the reign have pro- 
 duced. Perhaps, if the word remarkable were to be used 
 in its most strict sense, and without particular reference to 
 praise, it would be just to describe him as emphatically the 
 most remarkable man that the political controversies of the 
 present reign have called into power. Mr. Disraeli entered 
 the House of Commons as Conservative member for Maid- 
 stone in 1837. He was then about thirty-two years of age. 
 He had previously made repeated and unsuccessful attempts 
 to get a seat in Parliament. He began his political career 
 as an advanced Liberal, and had come out under the auspices 
 of Daniel O'Connell and Joseph Hume. He had described 
 himself as one who desired to fight the battle of the people, 
 and who was supported by neither of the aristocratic parties. 
 He failed again and again, and apparently he began to think 
 that it would be a wiser thing to look for the support of 
 one or other of the aristocratic parties. He had before this 
 given indications of remarkable literary talent, if indeed it 
 might not be called genius. His novel, "Vivian Grey," 
 published when he was in his twenty-third year, was suffused 
 with extravagance, affectation, and mere animal spirits ; but 
 it was full of the evidences of a fresh and brilliant ability. 
 The son of a distinguished literary man, Mr. Disraeli had 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 257 
 
 probably at that time only a young literary man's notions 
 of politics. It is not necessary to charge him with deliber- 
 ate inconsistency because from having been a Radical of the 
 most advanced views he became by an easy leap a romantic 
 Tory. It is not likely that at the beginning of his career he 
 had any very clear ideas in connection with the words Tory 
 or Radical. " He wrote a letter to Mr. W. J. Fox, already 
 described as an eminent Unitarian minister and rising poli- 
 tician, in which he declared that his forte was sedition. 
 Most clever young men who are not born to fortune, and 
 who feel drawn into political life, fancy too that their forte 
 is sedition. When young Disraeli found that sedition and 
 even advanced Radicalism did not do much to get him into 
 Parliament, he probably began to ask himself whether his 
 Liberal convictions were so deeply rooted as to call for the 
 sacrifice of a career. He thought the question over, and 
 doubtless found himself crystallizing fast into an advocate 
 of the established order of things. In a purely personal 
 light this was a fortunate conclusion for the ambitious young 
 politician. He could not then have anticipated the extraor- 
 dinary change which was to be wrought in the destiny and 
 the composition of the Tory party by the eloquence, the 
 arguments, and the influence of two men who at that time 
 were almost absolutely unknown. Mr. Cobden stood for the 
 first time as a candidate for a seat in Parliament in the year 
 that saw Mr. Disraeli elected for the first time, and Mr. Cob- 
 den was unsuccessful. Cobden had to wait four years before 
 he found his way into the House of Commons ; Bright did 
 not become a member of Parliament until some two years 
 later still. It was, however, the Anti-Corn-law agitation 
 which, by conquering Peel and making him its advocate, 
 brought about the memorable split in the Conservative 
 party, and carried away from the cause of the country 
 squires nearly all the men of talent who had hitherto been 
 with them. A new or middle party of so-called Peelites 
 was formed. Graham, Gladstone, Sidney Herbert, Cardwell, 
 and other men of equal mark or promise, joined it, and the 
 country party was left to seek for leadership in the earnest 
 spirit and very moderate talents of Lord George Bentinck. 
 Mr. Disraeli then found his chance. His genius was such 
 that it must have made a way for him anywhere and in 
 
258 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 spite of any competition ; but it is not too much to say that 
 his career of political advancement might have been very 
 different if, in place of finding himself the only man of first- 
 class ability in the party to which he had attached himself, 
 he had been a member of a party which had Palinerston and 
 Russell and Gladstone and Graham for its captains, and 
 Cobden and Bright for its habitual supporters. 
 
 This, however, could not have been in Mr. Disraeli's 
 thoughts when he changed from Radicalism to Conserva- 
 tism. No trace of the progress of conversion can be found 
 in his speeches or his writings. It is not unreasonable to 
 infer that he took up Radicalism at the beginning because 
 it looked the most picturesque and romantic thing to do, 
 and that only as he found it fail to answer his personal ob- 
 ject did it occur to him that he had, after all, more affinity 
 with the cause of the country gentlemen. The reputation 
 he had made for himself before his going into Parliament 
 was of a nature rather calculated to retard than to advance 
 a political career. He was looked upon almost universal- 
 ly as an eccentric and audacious adventurer, who was kept 
 from being dangerous by the affectations and absurdities of 
 his conduct. He dressed in the extremest style of prepos- 
 terous foppery; he talked a blending of cynicism and senti- 
 ment ; he had made the most reckless statements ; his boast- 
 ing was almost outrageous ; his rhetoric of abuse was, even 
 in that free-spoken time, astonishingly vigorous and unre- 
 strained. Even his literary efforts did not then receive any- 
 thing like the appreciation they have obtained since. At 
 that time they were regarded rather as audacious whimsi- 
 calities, the fantastic freaks of a clever youth, than as genu- 
 ine works of a certain kind of art. Even when he did get 
 into the Plouse of Commons, his first experience there was 
 little calculated to give him much hope of success. Reading 
 over this first speech now, it seems hard to understand why 
 it should have excited so much laughter and derision ; why 
 it should have called forth nothing but laughter and deri- 
 sion. It is a clever speech, full of point and odd conceits; 
 very like in style and structure many of the speeches which 
 in later years won for the same orator the applause of the 
 House of Commons. But Mr. Disraeli's reputation had pre- 
 ceded him into the House. Up to this time his life had been, 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 259 
 
 says an unfriendly but not an unjust critic, "an almost un- 
 interrupted career of follies and defeats." The House was 
 probably in a humor to find the speech ridiculous because 
 the general impression was that the man himself was ridicu- 
 lous. Mr. Disraeli's appearance, too, no doubt, contributed 
 something to the contemptuous opinion which was formed 
 of him on his first attempt to address the assembly which 
 he afterward came to rule. He is described by an observer 
 as having been attired "in a bottle-green frock-coat and a 
 waistcoat of white, of the Dick Swiveller pattern, the front 
 of which exhibited a net-work of glittering chains ; large 
 fancy-pattern pantaloons, and a black tie, above which no 
 shirt -collar was visible, completed the outward man. A 
 countenance lividly pale, set out by a pair of intensely black 
 eyes, and a broad but not very high forehead, overhung by 
 clustering ringlets of coal-black hair, which, combed away 
 from the right temple, fell in bunches of well-oiled small 
 ringlets over his left cheek." His manner was intensely the- 
 atric ; his gestures were wild and extravagant. In all this 
 there is not much, however, to surprise those who knew Mr. 
 Disraeli in his greater days. His style was always extrava- 
 gant; his rhetoric constantly degenerated into vulgarity; 
 his whole manner was that of the typical foreigner whom 
 English people regard as the illustration of all that is ve- 
 hement and unquiet. But whatever the cause, it is certain 
 that on the occasion of his first attempt Mr. Disraeli made 
 not merely a failure, but even a ludicrous failure. One who 
 heard the debate thus describes the manner in which, baffled 
 by the persistent laughter and other interruptions of the 
 noisy House, the orator withdrew from the discussion, de- 
 feated but not discouraged. "At last, losing his temper, 
 which until now he had preserved in a wonderful manner, 
 he paused in the midst of a sentence, and looking the Liber- 
 als indignantly in the face, raised his hands, and, opening his 
 mouth as widely as its dimensions would admit, said, in a re- 
 markably loud and almost terrific tone, ' I have begun, sev- 
 eral times, many things, and I have often succeeded at last; 
 ay, sir, and though I sit down now, the time will come when 
 you will hear me.'" This final prediction is so like what a 
 manufacturer of biography would make up for a hero, and is 
 so like what was actually said in one or two other remarka- 
 
260 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ble instances, that a reader might be excused for doubting 
 its authenticity in this case. But nothing can be more cer- 
 tain than the fact that Mr. Disraeli did bring to a close his 
 maiden speech in the House of Commons with this bold pre- 
 diction. The words are to be found in the reports published 
 next morning in all the daily papers of the metropolis. 
 
 It was thus that Mr. Disraeli began his career as a Parlia- 
 mentary orator. It is a curious fact that on that occasion 
 almost the only one of his hearers who seems to have ad- 
 mired the speech was Sir Robert Peel. It is by his philip- 
 pic against Peel that Disraeli is now about to convince the 
 House of Commons that the man they laughed at before is 
 a great Parliamentary orator. 
 
 Disraeli was not in the least discouraged by his first fail- 
 ure. A few days after it he spoke again, and he spoke three 
 or four times more during his first session. But he had 
 learned some wisdom by rough experience, and he did not 
 make his oratorical flights so long or so ambitious as that 
 first attempt. Then he seemed after awhile, as he grew 
 more familiar with the House, to go in for being paradoxi- 
 cal; for making himself always conspicuous; for taking up 
 positions and expounding political creeds which other men 
 would have avoided. It is very difficult to get any clear 
 idea of what his opinions were about this period of his ca- 
 reer, if he had any political opinions at all. Our impression 
 is that he really had no opinions at that time ; that he was 
 only in quest of opinions. He spoke on subjects of which 
 it was evident that he knew nothing, and sometimes he man- 
 aged, by the sheer force of a strong intelligence, to discern 
 the absurdity of economic sophistries which had baffled men 
 of far greater experience, and which, indeed, to judge from 
 his personal declarations and political conduct afterward, he 
 allowed before long to baffle and bewilder himself. More 
 often, however, he talked with a grandiose and oracular 
 vagueness which seemed to imply that he alone of all men 
 saw into the very heart of the question, but that he of all 
 men must not yet reveal what he saw. At .his best of times 
 Mr. Disraeli was an example of that class of being whom 
 Macaulay declares to be so rare that Lord Chatham appears 
 to him almost a solitary illustration of it " a great man 
 of real genius, and of a brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 261 
 
 without simplicity of character. 11 What Macaulay goes on 
 to say of Chatham will bear quotation too. " He was an 
 actor in the closet, an actor at council, an actor in Parlia- 
 ment; and even in private society he could not lay aside his 
 theatrical tones and attitudes." Mr. Disraeli was at one pe- 
 riod of his career so affected that he positively aifected af- 
 fectation. Yet he was a man of undoubted genius; he had 
 a spirit that never quailed under stress of any circumstances, 
 however disheartening ; he commanded as scarcely any 
 statesman since Chatham himself has been able to do; and 
 it would be unjust and absurd to deny to a man gifted with 
 qualities like these the possession of a lofty nature. 
 
 For some time Mr. Disraeli then seemed resolved to make 
 himself remarkable to be talked about. He succeeded ad- 
 mirably. He was talked about. All the political and satir- 
 ical journals of the day had a great deal to say about him. 
 He is not spoken of in terms of praise as a rule; neither has 
 he much praise to shower about him. Any one who looks 
 back to the political controversies of that time will be as- 
 tounded at the language Avhich Mr. Disraeli addresses to 
 his opponents of the press, and which his opponents address 
 to him. In some cases it is no exaggeration to say that a 
 squabble between two Billingsgate fish-women in our day 
 would have good chance of ending without the use of words 
 and phrases so coarse as those which then passed between 
 this brilliant literary man and some of his assailants. "We 
 have all read the history of the controversy between him 
 and O'Connell, and the savage ferocity of the language with 
 which O'Connell denounced him as "a miscreant," as "a 
 wretch," " a liar," " whose life is a living lie ;" and, finally, as 
 " the heir-at-law of the blasphemous thief who died impeni- 
 tent on the Cross." Mr. Disraeli begins his reply by de- 
 scribing himself as one of those who " will not be insulted 
 even by a Yahoo without chastising it;" and afterward, in 
 a letter to one of Mr. O'Connell's sons, declares his desire to 
 express "the utter scorn in which I hold his [Mr. O'Connell's] 
 character, and the disgust with which his conduct inspires 
 me;" and informs the son that "I shall take every opportu- 
 nity of holding your father's name up to public contempt, 
 and I fervently pray that you or some one of your blood 
 may attempt to avenge the inextinguishable hatred with 
 
262 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 which I shall pursue his existence." In reading of a contro- 
 versy like this between two public men, we seem to be trans- 
 ported back to an age having absolutely nothing in common 
 with our own. It appears almost impossible to believe that 
 men still active in political life were active in political life 
 then. Yet this is not the most astonishing specimen of the 
 sort of controversy in which Mr. Disraeli became engaged in 
 hi younger days. Nothing, perhaps, that the political lit- 
 erature of the time preserves could exceed the ferocity of 
 his controversial duel with O'Connell ; but there are many 
 samples of the rhetoric of abuse to be found in the journals 
 of the time which would far less bear exposure to the gaze 
 of the fastidious public of our day. The duelling system 
 survived then and for long after, and Mr. Disraeli always 
 professed himself ready to sustain with his pistol anything 
 that his lips might have given utterance to, even in the reck- 
 less heat of controversy. The social temper which in our 
 time insists that the first duty of a gentleman is to apologize 
 for an unjust or offensive expression used in debate, was un- 
 known then. Perhaps it could hardly exist to any great ex- 
 tent in the company of the duelling system. When a man's 
 withdrawal of an offensive expression might be imputed to a 
 want of physical courage, the courtesy which impels a gen- 
 tleman to atone for a wrong is not likely to triumph very 
 often over the fear of being accounted a coward. If any 
 one doubts the superiority of manners as well as of morals 
 which comes of our milder ways, he has only to read a few 
 specimens of the controversies of Mr. Disraeli's earlier days, 
 when men who aspired to be considered great political lead- 
 prs thought it not unbecoming to call names like a coster- 
 monger, and to swagger like Bobadil or the Copper Captain. 
 Mr. Disraeli kept himself well up to the level of his time 
 in the calling of names and the swaggering ; but he was 
 making himself remarkable in political controversy as well. 
 In the House of Commons he began to be regarded as a dan- 
 gerous adversary in debate. He was wonderfully ready 
 with retort and sarcasm. But during all the earlier part of 
 his career he was thought of only as a free lance. He had 
 praised Peel when Peel said something that suited him, or 
 when to praise Peel seemed likely to wound some one else. 
 But it was during the debates on the abolition of the Corn- 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 263 
 
 laws that he first rose to the fame of a great debater and a 
 powerful Parliamentary orator. We use the words Parlia- 
 mentary orator with the purpose of conveying a special 
 qualification. lie is a great Parliamentary orator who can 
 employ the kind of eloquence and argument which tell most 
 readily on Parliament. But it must not be supposed that 
 the great Parliamentary orator is necessarily a great orator 
 in the wider sense. Some of the men who made the greatest 
 successes as Parliamentary orators have failed to win any 
 genuine reputations as orators of the broader and higher 
 school. The fame of Charles Townshend's "champagne 
 speech" has vanished, evanescent almost as the bubbles from 
 which it derived its inspiration and its name. No one now 
 reads many even of the fragments preserved for us of those 
 speeches of Sheridan which those who heard them declared 
 to have surpassed all ancient and modern eloquence. The 
 House of Commons often found Burke dull, and the speeches 
 of Burke have passed into English literature secure of a per- 
 petual place there. Mr. Disraeli never succeeded in being 
 more than a Parliamentary orator, and probably would not 
 have cared to be anything more. But even at this compar- 
 atively early date, and while he had still the reputation of 
 being a whimsical, self-confident, and feather-headed advent- 
 urer, he soon won for himself the name of one who could hold 
 his own in retort and in sarcasm against any antagonist. 
 The days of the more elaborate oratory were going by, and 
 the time was coming when the pungent epigram, the spark- 
 ling paradox, the rattling attack, the vivid repartee, would 
 count for the most attractive part of eloquence with the 
 House of Commons. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli was exactly the man to succeed under the 
 new conditions of Parliamentary eloquence. Hitherto he 
 had wanted a cause to inspire and justify audacity, and on 
 which to employ with effect his remarkable resources of sar- 
 casm and rhetoric. Hitherto he had addressed an audience 
 out of sympathy with him for the most part. Now he was 
 about to become the spokesman of a large body of men who, 
 chafing and almost choking with wrath, were not capable of 
 speaking effectively for themselves. Mr. Disraeli did, there- 
 fore, the very wisest thing he could do when he launched 
 at once into a savage personal attack upon Sir Robert Peel. 
 
264 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 The speech abounds in passages of audaciously powerful 
 sarcasm. "I am not one of the converts," Mr. Disraeli said. 
 "I am perhaps a member of a fallen party. To the opinions 
 which I have expressed in this House in favor of Protection 
 I still adhere. They sent me to this House, and if I had re- 
 linquished them I should have relinquished my seat also." 
 That was the key-note of the speech. He denounced Sir 
 Robert Peel, not for having changed his opinions, but for 
 having retained a position which enabled him to betray his 
 party. He compared Peel to the Lord High-Admiral of the 
 Turkish fleet, who, at a great warlike crisis, when he was 
 placed at the head of the finest armament that ever left the 
 Dardanelles since the days of Solyman the Great, steered at 
 once for the enemy's port, and when arraigned as a traitor, 
 said that he really saw no use in prolonging a hopeless strug- 
 gle, and that he had accepted the command of the fleet only 
 to put the Sultan out of pain by bringing the struggle to a 
 close at once. " Well do we remember, on this side of the 
 House not, perhaps, without a blush the efforts we made 
 to raise him to the bench where he now sits. Who does not 
 remember the sacred cause of Protection for which sover- 
 eigns were thwarted, Parliament dissolved, and a nation 
 taken in?" "I belong to a party which can triumph no 
 more, for we have nothing left on our side except the con- 
 stituencies which we have not betrayed." He denounced 
 Peel as "a man who never originates an idea; a watcher 
 of the atmosphere ; a man who takes his observations, and 
 when he finds the wind in a particular quarter trims his sails 
 to suit it;" and he declared that "such a man may be a 
 powerful minister, but he is no more a great statesman than 
 the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip." 
 
 "The opportune," says Mr. Disraeli himself in his "Lord 
 George Bentinck," "in a popular assembly has sometimes 
 more success than the weightiest efforts of research and 
 reason." He is alluding to this very speech, of which he 
 says, with perhaps a superfluous modesty, that " it was the 
 long -constrained passion of the House that now found a 
 vent, far more than the sallies of the speaker, that changed 
 the frigid silence of this senate into excitement and tumult." 
 The speech was indeed opportune. But it was opportune 
 in a far larger sense than as a timely philippic rattling up 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 265 
 
 an exhausted and disappointed House. That moment when 
 Disraeli rose was the very turning-point of the fortunes of 
 his part} 7 . There was genius, there was positive statesman- 
 ship, in seizing so boldly and so adroitly on the moment. 
 It would have been a great thing gained for Peel if he 
 could have got through that first night without any alarm- 
 note of opposition from his own side. The habits of Par- 
 liamentary discipline are very clinging. They are hard to 
 tear away. Every impulse of association and training pro- 
 tests against the very effort to rend them asunder. A once 
 powerful minister exercises a control over his long obedi- 
 ent followers somewhat like that of the heart of the Bruce 
 in the fine old Scottish story. Those who once follo\ved 
 will still obey the name and the symbol even when the act- 
 ual power to lead is gone forever. If one other night's hab- 
 itude had been added to the long discipline that bound his 
 party to Peel, if they had allowed themselves to listen to 
 that declaration of the session's first night without mur- 
 mur, perhaps they might never have rebelled. Mr. Disraeli 
 drew together into one focus all the rays of their gathering 
 anger against Peel, and made them light into a flame. He 
 showed the genius of the born leader by stepping forth at 
 the critical moment and giving the word of command. 
 
 From that hour Mr. Disraeli was the real leader of the 
 Tory squires ; from that moment his voice gave the word 
 of command to the Tory party. There was peculiar cour- 
 age, too, in the part he took. He must have known that he 
 was open to one retort from Peel that might have crushed 
 a less confident man. It was well known that when Peel 
 was coming into power Disraeli expected to be offered a 
 place of some kind in the ministry, and would have accept- 
 ed it. Mr. Disraeli afterward explained, when Peel made 
 allusion to the fact, that he never had put himself directly 
 forward as a candidate for office; but there had undoubt- 
 edly been some negotiation going forward which was con- 
 ducted on Mr. Disraeli's side by some one who supposed he 
 was doing what Disraeli would like to have done ; and Peel 
 had not taken any hint, and would not in any way avail 
 himself of Disraeli's services. Disraeli must have known 
 that when he attacked Peel, the latter would hardly fail to 
 make use of this obvious retort ; but he felt little daunted 
 
 I. 12 
 
266 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 on that score. He could have made a fair enough defence 
 of his consistency in any case, but he knew very well that 
 what the indignant Tories wanted just then was not a man 
 who had been uniformity consistent, but one who could at- 
 tack Sir Robert Peel without scruple and with effect. Dis- 
 raeli made his own career by the course he took on that 
 memorable night, and he also made a new career for the 
 Tory party. 
 
 Now that he had proved himself so brilliant a spadassin 
 in this debate, men began to remember that he had dealt 
 trenchant blows before. Many of his sentences attacking 
 Peel, which have passed into familiar quotation almost like 
 proverbs, were spoken in 1845. He had accused the great 
 minister of having borrowed his tactics from the Whigs. 
 "The right honorable gentleman caught the Whigs bathing, 
 and he walked away with their clothes. He has left them 
 in the full enjoyment of their liberal position, and he is him- 
 self a strict conservative of their garments." " I look on 
 the right-honorable gentleman as a man who has tamed the 
 shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He is the political 
 Petruchio who has outbid you all." " If the- right-honor- 
 able gentleman would only stick to quotation instead of 
 having recourse to obloquy, he may rely upon it he would 
 find it a safer weapon. It is one he always wields with the 
 hand of a master, and when he does appeal to any authority 
 in prose or verse, he is sure to be successful, partly because 
 he seldom quotes a passage that has not already received 
 the meed of Parliamentary approbation." We can all read- 
 ily understand how such a hit as the last would tell in the 
 case of an orator like Peel, who had the old-fashioned way 
 of introducing long quotations from approved classic au- 
 thors into his speeches, and who not unfrequently introduced 
 citations which were received with all the better welcome 
 by the House because of the familiarity of their language. 
 More fierce and cutting was the reference to Canning, with 
 whom Peel had quarrelled, and the implied contrast of Can- 
 ning with Peel. Sir Robert had cited against Disraeli Can- 
 ning's famous lines praying to be saved from a "candid 
 friend." Disraeli seized the opportunity thus given. " The 
 name of Canning is one," he said, " never to be mentioned, 
 I am sure, in this House without emotion. We all admire 
 
MB. DISRAELI. 267 
 
 his genius; we all, or at least most of us, deplore his un- 
 timely end ; and we all sympathize with him in his severe 
 struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, 
 with inveterate foes and with candid friends." The phrase 
 " sublime mediocrity " had a marvellous effect. As a hostile 
 description of Peel's character it had enough of seeming 
 truth about it to tell most effectively alike on friends and 
 enemies of the great leader. A friend, or even an impartial 
 enemy, would not indeed admit that it accurately described 
 Peel's intellect and position; but as a stroke of personal 
 satire it touched nearly enough the characteristics of its ob- 
 ject to impress itself at once as a master-hit on the minds 
 of all who caught its instant purpose. The words remained 
 in use long after the controversy and its occasion had passed 
 away ; and it was allowed that an unfriendly and bitter 
 critic could hardly have found a phrase more suited to its 
 ungenial purpose or more likely to connect itself at once in 
 the public mind with the name of him who was its object. 
 Mr. Disraeli did not, in fact, greatly admire Canning. He 
 has left a very disparaging criticism of Canning as an ora- 
 tor in one of his novels. On the other hand, he has shown 
 in his "Life of Lord George Bentinck" that he could do full 
 justice to some of the greatest qualities of Sir Robert Peel. 
 But at the moment of his attacking Peel and crying up Can- 
 ning he was only concerned to disparage the one, and it was 
 on this account that he eulogized the other. The famous 
 sentence, too, in which he declared that a Conservative Gov- 
 ernment was an " organized hypocrisy," was spoken during 
 the debates of the session of 1845, before the explanation of 
 the minister on the subject of Free-trade. All these brill- 
 iant things men now began to recall. Looking back from 
 this distance of time, we can see well enough that Mr. Dis- 
 raeli had displayed his peculiar genius long before the 
 House of Commons took the pains to recognize it. From 
 the night of the opening of the session of 1846 it Avas never 
 questioned. Thenceforward he was really the mouth-piece 
 and the sense-carrier of his party. For some time to come, 
 indeed, his nominal post might have seemed to be only that 
 of its bravo. The country gentlemen who cheered to the 
 echo his fierce attacks on Peel during the debates of the ses- 
 sion of 1846, had probably not the slightest suspicion that 
 
268 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the daring rhetorician who was so savagely revenging them 
 on their now hated leader was a man of as cool a judgment, 
 as long a head, and as complete a capacity for the control 
 of a party as any politician who for generations had appeared 
 in the House of Commons. 
 
 One immediate effect of the turn thus given by Disraeli's 
 timely intervention in the debate was the formation of a 
 Protection party in the House of Commons. The leader- 
 ship of this perilous adventure was intrusted to Lord 
 George Bentinck, a sporting nobleman of energetic charac- 
 ter, great tenacity of purpose and conviction, and a not in- 
 considerable aptitude for politics, which had hitherto had 
 no opportunity for either exercising or displaying itself. 
 Lord George Bentinck had sat in eight Parliaments with- 
 out taking part in any great debate. When he was sud- 
 denly drawn into the leadership of the Protection party in 
 the House of Commons, he gave himself up to it entirely. 
 He had at first only joined the party as one of its organ- 
 izers; but he showed himself in many respects well fitted 
 for the leadership, and the choice of leaders was in any case 
 very limited. When once he had accepted the position, he 
 was unwearying in his attention to its duties ; and, indeed, 
 up to the moment of his sudden and premature death he 
 never allowed himself any relaxation from the cares it im- 
 posed on him. Mr. Disraeli, in his "Life of Lord George 
 Bentinck," has indeed overrated, with the pardonable ex- 
 travagance of friendship, the intellectual gifts of his leader. 
 Bentinck's abilities were hardly even of the second class; 
 and the amount of knowledge which he brought to bear on 
 the questions he discussed with so much earnestness and 
 energy was often and of necessity little better than mere 
 cram. But in Parliament the essential qualities of a leader 
 are not great powers of intellect. A man of cool head, 
 good temper, firm will, and capacity for appreciating the 
 serviceable qualities of other men, may always, provided that 
 he has high birth and great social influence, make a very 
 successful leader, even though he be wanting altogether in 
 the higher attributes of eloquence and statesmanship. It 
 may be doubted whether, on the whole, great eloquence and 
 genius are necessary at all to the leader of a party in Parlia- 
 ment in times not specially troublous. Bentinck had pa- 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 269 
 
 tience, energy, good - humor, and considerable appreciation 
 of the characters of men. If he had a bad voice, was a poor 
 speaker, talked absolute nonsense about protective duties 
 and sugar and guano, and made up absurd calculations to 
 prove impossibilities and paradoxes, he at least always spoke 
 in full faith, and was only the more necessary to his party 
 because he could honestly continue to believe in the old 
 doctrines, no matter what political economy and hard facts 
 might say to the contrary. 
 
 The secession was, therefore, in full course of organization. 
 On January 27th Sir Robert Peel came forward to explain 
 his financial policy. It is almost superfluous to say that 
 the most intense anxiety prevailed all over the country, and 
 that the House was crowded. An incident of the night, 
 which then created a profound sensation, would not be 
 worth noticing now but for the evidence it gives of the bit- 
 terness with which the Protection party were filled, and of 
 the curiously bad taste of which gentlemen of position and 
 education can be guilty under the inspiration of a blind 
 fanaticism. There is something ludicrous in the pompous 
 tone, as of righteous indignation deliberately repressed, with 
 which Mr. Disraeli, in his "Life of Bentinck," announces the 
 event. The proceedings in the House of Commons, he says, 
 " were ushered in by a startling occurrence." What was 
 this portentous preliminary ? " His Royal Highness the 
 Prince Consort, attended by the Master of the Horse, ap- 
 peared and took his seat in the body of the House to listen 
 to the statement of the First Minister." In other words, 
 there was to be a statement of great importance and a 
 debate of profound interest, and the husband of the Queen 
 was anxious to be a listener. The Prince Consort did not 
 understand that because he had married the Queen he was 
 therefore to be precluded from hearing a discussion in the 
 House of Commons. The poorest man and the greatest 
 man in the land were alike free to occupy a seat in one of 
 the galleries of the House, and it is not to be wondered at 
 if the Prince Consort fancied that he too might listen to a 
 debate without unhinging the British Constitution. Lord 
 George Bentinck and the Protectionists were aflame with 
 indignation. They saw in the quiet presence of the intelli- 
 gent gentleman who came to listen to the discussion an at- 
 
270 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tempt to overawe the Commons and compel them to bend 
 to the will of the Crown. It is not easy to read without a 
 feeling of shame the absurd and unseemly comments which 
 were made upon this harmless incident. The Queen herself 
 has given an explanation of the Prince's visit which is 
 straightforward and dignified. "The Prince merely went, 
 as the Prince of Wales and the Queen's other sons do, for 
 once, to hear a fine debate, which is so useful to all princes." 
 "But this," the Queen adds, " he naturally felt unable to do 
 again." 
 
 The Prime-minister announced his policy. His object was 
 to abandon the sliding-scale altogether; but for the present 
 he intended to impose a duty of ten shillings a quarter on 
 corn when the price of it was under forty-eight shillings a 
 quarter; to reduce that duty by one shilling for every shil- 
 ling of rise in price until it reached fifty-three shillings a 
 quarter, when the duty should fall to four shillings. This 
 arrangement was, however, only to hold good for three 
 years, at the end of which time protective duties on grain 
 were to be wholly abandoned. Peel explained that he in- 
 tended gradually to apply the principle of Free-trade to 
 manufactures and every description of produce, bearing in 
 mind the necessity of providing for the expenditure of the 
 country, and of smoothing away some of the difficulties 
 which a sudden withdrawal of protection might cause. The 
 differential duties on sugar, which were professedly intended 
 to protect the growers of free sugars against the competition 
 of those who cultivated sugar by the use of slave labor, were 
 to be diminished, but not abolished. The duties on the im- 
 portation of foreign cattle were to be at once removed. In 
 order to compensate the agricultural interests for the grad- 
 ual withdrawal of protective duties, there were to be some 
 readjustments of local burdens. We need not dwell much 
 on this part of the explanation. We are familiar in late 
 years with the ingenious manner in which the principle of 
 the readjustment of local burdens is worked in the hope of 
 conciliating the agricultural interests. These readjustments 
 are not usually received with any great gratitude or attend- 
 ed by any particular success. In this instance Sir Robert 
 Peel could hardly have laid much serious stress on them. 
 If the land-owners and farmers had really any just ground 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 271 
 
 of complaint in the abolition of protection, the salve which 
 was applied to their wound would scarcely have caused 
 them to forget its pains. The important part of the expla- 
 nation, so far as history is concerned, consisted in the fact 
 that Peel proclaimed himself an absolute convert to the 
 Free-trade principle, and that the introduction of the prin- 
 ciple into all departments of our commercial legislation was, 
 according to his intention, to be a mere question of time 
 and convenience. The struggle was to be between Protec- 
 tion and Free-trade. 
 
 Not that the proposals of the ministry wholly satisfied 
 the professed Free-traders. These latter would have en- 
 forced, if they could, an immediate application of the prin- 
 ciple without the interval of three years, and the devices 
 and shifts which were to be put in operation during that 
 middle time. But of course, although they pressed their 
 protest in the form of an amendment, they had no idea of 
 not taking what they could get when the amendment failed 
 to secure the approval of the majority. The Protectionist 
 amendment amounted to a distinct proposal that the poli- 
 cy of the Government be absolutely rejected by the House. 
 The debate lasted for twelve nights, and at the end the Pro- 
 tectionists had 240 votes against 337 given on behalf of 
 the policy of the Government. The majority of 97 was not 
 quite so large as the Government had anticipated ; and the 
 result was to encourage the Protectionists in their plans of 
 opposition. The opportunities of obstruction were many. 
 The majority just mentioned was merely in favor of going 
 into committee of the whole House to consider the existing 
 Customs and Corn Acts ; but every single financial scheme 
 which the minister had to propose must be introduced, de- 
 bated, and carried, if it was to be carried, as a separate bill. 
 We shall not ask our readers to follow us into the details 
 of these long discussions. They were not important ; they 
 were often not dignified. They more frequently concerned 
 themselves about the conduct and personal consistency of 
 the minister than about the merits of his policy. The ar- 
 guments in favor of Protection, which doubtless seemed 
 
 O f 
 
 effective to the country gentlemen then, seem like the prat- 
 tle of children now. Thei-e were, indeed, some exciting 
 passages in the debates. For these the House was mainly 
 
272 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 indebted to the rhetoric of Mr. Disraeli. That indefatigable 
 and somewhat reckless champion occupied himself with in- 
 cessant attacks on the Prime-minister. He described Peel 
 as " a trader on other people's intelligence ; a political bur- 
 glar of other men's ideas." "The occupants of the Treasury 
 bench," he said, were " political peddlers, who had bought 
 their party in the cheapest market and sold it in the dear- 
 est." This was strong language. But it was, after all, more 
 justifiable than the attempt Mr. Disraeli made to revive an 
 old and bitter controversy between Sir Robert Peel and Mr. 
 Cobden, which, for the sake of the former, had better have 
 been forgotten. Three years before, Mr. Edward Drum- 
 mond, private secretary of Sir Robert Peel, was shot by an 
 assassin. There could be no doubt that the victim had been 
 mistaken for the Prime-minister himself. The assassin turn- 
 ed out to be a lunatic, and as such was found not guilty of 
 the murder, and was consigned to a lunatic asylum. The 
 event naturally had a profound effect on Sir Robert Peel; 
 and during one of the debates on Free -trade, Mr. Cobden 
 happening to say that he would hold the Prime -minister 
 responsible for the condition of the country, Peel, in an ex- 
 traordinary burst of excitement, interpreted the words as a 
 threat to expose him to the attack of an assassin. Nothing 
 could be more painfully absurd ; and nothing could better 
 show the unreasoning and discreditable hatred of the Tories 
 at that time for any one who opposed the policy of Peel, 
 than the fact that they actually cheered their leader again 
 and again when he made this passionate and half-frenzied 
 charge on one of the purest and noblest men who ever sat 
 in the English Parliament. Peel soon recovered his senses. 
 He saw the error of which he had been guilty, and regretted 
 it; and it ought to have been consigned to forgetfulness ; 
 but Mr. Disraeli, in repelling a charge made against him 
 of indulging in unjustifiable personalities, revived the whole 
 story, and reminded the House of Commons that the Prime- 
 minister had charged the leader of the Free-trade League 
 with inciting assassins to murder him. This unjustifiable 
 attempt to rekindle an old quarrel had, however, no other 
 effect than to draw from Sir Robert Peel a renewed expres- 
 sion of apology for the charge he had made against Mr. 
 Cobdon, " in the course of a heated debate, when I put an 
 
MR. DISRAELI. 273 
 
 erroneous construction on some expressions used by the hon- 
 orable member for Stockport." Mr. Cobden declared that 
 the explanation made by Peel was entirely satisfactory, and 
 expressed his hope that uo one on either side of the House 
 would attempt to revive the subject or make further allu- 
 sion to it. 
 
 The Government prevailed. It would be superfluous to 
 go into any details as to the progress of the Corn Bill. 
 Enough to say that the third reading of the bill passed the 
 House of Commons on May 15th, by a majority of 98 votes. 
 The bill was at once sent up to the House of Lords, and, by 
 means chiefly of the earnest advice of the Duke of Welling- 
 ton, was carried through that House without much serious 
 opposition. But June 25th, the day when the bill was read 
 for a third time in the House of Lords, was a memorable day 
 in the Parliamentary annals of England. It saw the fall of 
 the ministry who had carried to success the greatest piece 
 of legislation that had been introduced since Lord Grey's 
 Reform Bill. 
 
 A Coercion Bill for Ireland was the measure which brought 
 this catastrophe on the Government of Sir Robert Peel. 
 While the Corn Bill was yet passing through the House of 
 Commons, the Government felt called upon, in consequence 
 of the condition of crimefcgnd outrage in Ireland, to intro- 
 duce a Coercion Bill. Lord George Bentinck at first gave 
 the measure his support; but during the Whitsuntide recess 
 he changed his views. He now declared that he had only 
 supported the bill on the assurance of the Government that 
 it was absolutely necessary for the safety of life in Ireland, 
 and that as the Government had not pressed it on in ad- 
 vance of every other measure especially, no doubt, of the- 
 Corn Bill he could not believe that it was really a matter 
 of imminent necessity ; and that, furthermore, he had no long- 
 er any confidence in the Government, and could not trust 
 them with extraordinary powers. In truth, the bill was 
 placing the Government in a serious difficulty. All the 
 Irish followers of O'Connell would, of course, oppose the co- 
 ercion measure. The Whigs, when out of office, have usual- 
 ly made it a rule to oppose coercion bills if they do not 
 come accompanied with some promises of legislative reform 
 and concession. The English Radical members, Mr. Cobden 
 
 12* 
 
274 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and his followers, were almost sure to oppose it. Under 
 these circumstances, it seemed probable enough that if the 
 Protectionists joined with the other opponents of the Coer- 
 cion Bill, the Government must be defeated. The tempta- 
 tion was too great. As Mr. Disraeli himself candidly says 
 of his party, " Vengeance had succeeded in most breasts to 
 the more sanguine sentiment. The field was lost, but at any 
 rate there should be retribution for those who had betrayed 
 it." The question with many of the indignant Protection- 
 ists was, as Mr. Disraeli himself puts it, "How was Sir Rob- 
 ert Peel to be turned out?" It soon became evident that 
 he could be turned out by those who detested him and 
 longed for vengeance voting against him on the Coercion 
 Bill. This was done. The fiercer Protectionists voted with 
 the Free-traders, the Whigs, and the Irish Catholic and Lib- 
 eral members, and, after a debate of much bitterness and 
 passion, the division on the second reading of the Coercion 
 Bill took place on Thursday, June 25th, and the ministry 
 were left in a minority of 73. Two hundred and nineteen 
 votes only were given for the second reading of the bill, and 
 292 against it. Some eighty of the Protectionists followed 
 Lord George Bentinck into the lobby to vote against the 
 bill, and their votes settled the question. Mr. Disraeli has 
 given a somewhat pompous description of the scene " as the 
 Protectionists passed in defile before the minister to the hos- 
 tile lobby." ^Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat" cries 
 the hero of the JEneid, as he plunges his sword into the 
 heart of his rival. " Protection kills you ; not your Coer- 
 cion Bill," the irreconcilable Protectionists might have said 
 as they trooped past the ministry. Chance had put within 
 .their grasp the means of vengeance, and they had seized it, 
 and made successful use of it. The Peel Ministry had fallen 
 in its very hour of triumph. 
 
 Three days after Sir Robert Peel announced his resigna- 
 tion of office. His speech " was considered one of glori- 
 fication and pique," says Mr. Disraeli. It does not so im- 
 press most readers. It appears to have been full of dignity, 
 and of emotion, not usual with Peel, but not surely, under 
 the circumstances, incompatible with dignity. It contained 
 that often-quoted tribute to the services of a former oppo- 
 nent, in which Peel declared that " the name which ought 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 275 
 
 to be and which will be associated with the success of these 
 measures is the name of the man who, acting, I believe, from 
 pure and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause 
 with untiring energy, and with appeals to reason enforced 
 by an eloquence the more to be admired because it is unaf- 
 fected and unadorned the name of Richard Cobden." An 
 added effect was given to this well-deserved panegyric by 
 the little irregularity which the Prime-minister committed 
 when he mentioned in debate a member by name. The 
 closing sentence of the speech was eloquent and touching. 
 Many would censure him, Peel said ; his name would per- 
 haps be execrated by the monopolist, who would maintain 
 protection for his own individual benefit; "but it may be 
 that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with ex- 
 pressions of good-will in those places which are the abode of 
 men whose lot it is to labor and to earn their daily bread by 
 the sweat of their brow a name remembered with expres- 
 sions of good-will when they shall recreate their exhausted 
 strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter be- 
 cause it is no longer leavened with a sense of injustice." 
 
 The great minister fell. So great a success followed by 
 so sudden and complete a fall is hardly recorded in the Par- 
 liamentary history of our modern times. Peel had crushed 
 O'Connell and carried Free -trade, and O'Connell and the 
 Protectionists had life enough yet to pull him down. He is 
 as a conqueror who, having won the great victory of his life, 
 is struck by a hostile hand in some by-way as he passes 
 home to enjoy his triumph. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, AND FOREIGN INTRIGUE. 
 
 LORD JOHN RUSSELL succeeded Sir Robert Peel as First 
 Lord of the Treasury; Lord Palmerston became Foreign 
 Secretary; Sir Charles Wood was Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer ; Lord Grey took charge of the Colonies ; and Sir 
 George Grey was Home Secretary. Mr. Macaulay accept- 
 ed the office of Paymaster-general, with a seat in the cabi- 
 net, a distinction not usually given to the occupant of that 
 
276 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 office. The ministry was not particularly strong in admin- 
 istrative talent. The Premier and the Foreign Secretary 
 were the only members of the cabinet who could be called 
 statesmen of the first class ; and even Lord Palmerston had 
 not as yet won more than a somewhat doubtful kind of 
 fame, and was looked upon as a man quite as likely to do 
 mischief as good to any ministry of which he might happen 
 to form a part. Lord Grey then and since only succeeded 
 somehow in missing the career of a leading statesman. He 
 had great talents and some originality ; he was independent 
 and bold. But his independence degenerated too often into 
 impracticability and even eccentricity ; and he was, in fact, 
 a politician with whom ordinary men could not work. Sir 
 Charles Wood, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, had 
 solid sense and excellent administrative capacity, but he 
 was about as bad a public speaker as ever addressed the 
 House of Commons. His budget speeches were often made 
 so unintelligible by defective manner and delivery that they 
 might almost as well have been spoken in a foreign lan- 
 guage. Sir George Grey was a speaker of fearful fluency, 
 and a respectable administrator of the second or third class. 
 He was as plodding in administration as he was precipitate 
 of speech. 
 
 "Peel," wrote Lord Palmerston to a friend a short time 
 after the formation of the new ministry, " seems to have 
 made up his mind that for a year or two he cannot hope to 
 form a party, and that he must give people a certain time 
 to forget the events of last year; in the mean while, it is 
 evident that he does not wish that any other Government 
 should be formed out of the people on his side of the House, 
 because of that Government he would not be a member. 
 For these reasons, and also because he sincerely thinks it 
 best that we should, for the present, remain in, he gives us 
 very cordial support, as far as he can, without losing his in- 
 dependent position. Graham, who sits up under his old pil- 
 lar, and never comes down to Peel's bench even for personal 
 communication, seems to keep himself aloof from everybody, 
 and to hold himself free to act according to circumstances ; 
 but as yet he is not considered as the head of any party. 
 George Bentinck has entirely broken down as a candidate 
 for ministerial position ; and thus we are left masters of the 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TKOUBLE, ETC. 277 
 
 field, not only on account of our own merits, which, though 
 we say it ourselves, are great, but by virtue of the absence 
 of any efficient competitors." Palmerston's humorous esti- 
 mate of the state of affairs was accurate. The new ministry 
 was safe enough, because there was no party in a condition 
 to compete with it. 
 
 The position of the Government of Lord John Russell was 
 not one to be envied. The Irish famine occupied all atten- 
 tion, and soon seemed to be an evil too great for any minis- 
 try to deal with. The failure of the potato was an over- 
 whelming disaster for a people almost wholly agricultural 
 and a peasantry long accustomed to live upon that root 
 alone. Ireland contains very few large towns ; when the 
 names of four or five are mentioned the list is done with, 
 and we have to come to mere villages. The country has 
 hardly any manufactures except that of linen in the north- 
 ern province. In the south and west the people live by ag- 
 riculture alone. The cottier system, which prevailed almost 
 universally in three of the four provinces, was an arrange- 
 ment by which a man obtained in return for his labor a 
 right to cultivate a little patch of ground, just enough to 
 supply him with food for the scanty maintenance of his fam- 
 ily. The great landlords were for the most part absentees ; 
 the smaller landlords were often deeply in debt, and were, 
 therefore, compelled to screw every possible penny of rent 
 out of their tenants-at-will. They had not, however, even 
 that regularity and order in their exactions that might at 
 least have forced upon the tenants some habits of fore- 
 thought and exactness. There was a sort of understanding 
 that the rent was always to be somewhat in arrear ; the 
 supposed kindness of a landlord consisted in his allowing 
 the indebtedness to increase more liberally than others of 
 his class would do. There was a demoralizing slatternliness 
 in the whole system. It was almost certain that if a ten- 
 ant, by greatly increased industry and good fortune, made 
 the land which he held more valuable than before, his rent 
 would at once be increased. On the other hand, it was held 
 an act of tyranny to dispossess him so long as he made even 
 any fair promise of paying up. There was, therefore, a thor- 
 oughly vicious system established all round, demoralizing 
 alike to the landlord and the tenant. 
 
278 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Underlying all the relations of landlord and tenant in 
 Ireland were two great facts. The occupation of land was 
 virtually a necessity of life to the Irish tenant. That is the 
 first fact. The second is that the land system under which 
 Ireland was placed was one entirely foreign to the tradi- 
 tions, the ideas, one might say the very genius, of the Irish 
 people. Whether the system introduced by conquest and 
 confiscation was better than the old one or not does not in 
 the slightest degree affect the working of this fact on the 
 relations between the landlord and the tenant in Ireland. 
 No one will be able to understand the whole meaning and 
 bearing of the long land struggle in Ireland who does not 
 clearly get into his mind the fact that, rightly or wrongly, 
 the Irish peasant regarded the right to have a bit of land, 
 his share, exactly as other peoples regard the right to live. 
 It was in his mind something elementary and self-evident. 
 He could not be loyal to, he could not even understand, any 
 system which did not secure that to him. According to 
 Michelet, the land is the French peasant's mistress. It was 
 the Irish peasant's life. 
 
 The Irish peasant, with his wife and his family, lived on 
 the potato. Hardly in any country coming within the pale 
 of civilization was there to be found a whole peasant popu- 
 lation dependent for their living on one single root. When 
 the potato failed in 1845 the life-system of the people seem- 
 ed to have given way. At first it was not thought that 
 the failure must necessarily be anything more than partial. 
 But it soon began to appear that for at least two seasons 
 the whole food of the peasant population and of the poor in 
 towns was absolutely gone. Lord John Russell's Govern- 
 ment pottered with the difficulty rather than encountered 
 it. In their excuse it has to be said, of course, that the 
 calamity they had to meet was unprecedented, and that it 
 must have tried the resources of the most energetic and 
 foreseeing statesmanship. Still, the fact remains that the 
 measures of the Government were at first utterly inadequate 
 to the occasion, and that afterward some of them were even 
 calculated to make bad worse. Not a county in Ireland 
 wholly escaped the potato disease, and many of the south- 
 ern and western counties were soon in actual famine. A 
 peculiar form of fever famine-fever it was called began 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 279 
 
 to show itself everywhere. A terrible dysentery set in as 
 well. In some districts the people died in hundreds daily 
 from fever, dysentery, or sheer starvation. The districts of 
 Skibbereen, Skull, Westport, and other places obtained a 
 ghastly supremacy in misery. In some of these districts 
 the parochial authorities at last declined to put the rate- 
 payers to the expense of coffins for the too frequent dead. 
 The coroners declared it impossible to keep on holding in- 
 quests. There was no time for all the ceremonies of that 
 kind that would have to be gone through if they made any 
 pretence at keeping up the system of ordinary seasons. In 
 other places where the formula was still kept up the juries 
 added to their verdicts of death by starvation some chai'ge 
 of wilful murder against Lord John Russell, or the Lord- 
 lieutenant, or some other official whose supposed neglect 
 was set down as the cause of the death. Unfortunately the 
 Government had to show an immense activity in the intro- 
 duction of coercion bills and other repressive measures. It 
 would have been impossible that in such a country as Ire- 
 land a famine of that gigantic kind should set in without 
 bringing crimes of violence along with it. The peasantry 
 had always hated the land tenure system ; they had always 
 been told, not surely without justice, that it was at the bot- 
 tom of all their miseries; they were now under the firm 
 conviction that the Government could have saved them if it 
 would. What wonder, then, if there were bread riots and 
 agrarian disturbances? Who can now wonder, that being 
 so, that the Government introduced exceptional measures 
 of repression ? But it certainly had a grim and a disheart- 
 ening effect on the spirits of the Irish people when it seemed 
 as if the Government could only potter and palter with fam- 
 ine, but could be earnest and energetic when devising coer- 
 cion bills. 
 
 Whatever might be said of the Government, no one could 
 doubt the good-will of the English people. In every great 
 English community, from the metropolis downward, sub- 
 scription lists were opened, and the most liberal contribu- 
 tions poured in. In Liverpool, for example, a great number 
 of the merchants of the place put down a thousand pounds 
 each. The Quakers of England sent over a delegation of 
 their number to the specially famine -stricken districts of 
 
280 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Ireland to administer relief. Many other sects and bodies 
 followed the example. National Relief Associations were 
 specially formed in England. Relief, indeed, began to be 
 poured in from all countries. The United States employed 
 some of their war vessels to send gifts of grain and other 
 food to the starving places. In one Irish seaport the joy- 
 bells of the town were kept ringing all day in honor of the 
 arrival of one of these grain -laden vessels a mournfully 
 significant form of rejoicing, surely. One of the national 
 writers said at the time that the misery of Ireland touched 
 "even the heart of the Turk at the far Dardanelles, and he 
 sent her in pity the alms of a beggar." It was true that 
 from Turkey, as from most other countries, had come some 
 contribution toward the relief of Irish distress. At the 
 same time there were some very foolish performances gone 
 through in Dublin under the sanction and patronage of the 
 Lord-lieutenant the solemn "inauguration," as it would 
 be called by a certain class of writers now, of a public soup- 
 kitchen, devised and managed by the fashionable French 
 cook M. Soyer, for the purpose of showing the Irish people 
 what remarkably sustaining potage might be made out of 
 the thinnest and cheapest materials. This exposition would 
 have been well enough in a quiet and practical way, but 
 performed as a grand national ceremony of regeneration, 
 under the patronage of the Viceroy, and with accompani- 
 ment of brass -bands and pageantry, it had a remarkably 
 foolish and even offensive aspect. The performance was re- 
 sented bitterly by many of the impatient young spirits of 
 the national party in Dublin. 
 
 Meanwhile the misery went on deepening and broaden- 
 ing. It was far too great to be effectually encountered 
 by subscriptions, however generous ; and the Government, 
 meaning to do the best they could, were practically at their 
 wits' end. The starving peasants streamed into the nearest 
 considerable town hoping for relief there, and found too 
 often that there the very sources of charity were dried up. 
 Many, very many, thus disappointed, merely lay down on 
 the pavement and died there. Along the country roads one 
 met everywhere groups of gaunt, dim-eyed wretches clad in 
 miserable old sacking, and wandering aimlessly with some 
 vague idea of finding food, as the boy in the fable hoped to 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TKOUBLE, ETC. 281 
 
 find the gold where the rainbow touched the earth. Many 
 remained in their empty hovels, and took death there when 
 he came. In some regions the country seemed unpeopled 
 for miles. A fervid national writer declared that the im- 
 pression made on him by the aspect of the country then was 
 that of " one silent, vast dissolution." Allowing for rhet- 
 oric, there was not much exaggeration in the words. Cer- 
 tainly the Ireland of tradition was dissolved in the opera- 
 tion of that famine. The old system gave way utterly. 
 The landlordism of the days before the famine never revived 
 in its former strength and its peculiar ways. For the land- 
 lord class there came out of the famine the Encumbered 
 Estates Court ; for the small farmer and peasant class there 
 floated up the American emigrant ship. 
 
 Acts and even conspiracies of violence, as we have said, 
 began to be not uncommon throughout the country and in 
 the cities. One peculiar symptom of the time was the glass- 
 breaking mania that set in throughout the towns of the 
 south and west. It is, perhaps, not quite reasonable to call 
 it a mania, for it had melancholy method in it. The work- 
 houses were overcrowded, and the authorities could not re- 
 ceive there or feed there one-fourth of the applicants who 
 besieged them. Suddenly it seemed to occur to the minds 
 of many of famine's victims that there were the prisons for 
 which one might qualify himself, and to which, after quali- 
 fication, he could not be denied admittance. The idea was 
 simple: go into a town, smash deliberately the windows of 
 a shop, and some days of a jail and of substantial food must 
 follow. The plan became a favorite. Especially was it 
 adopted by young girls and women. After a time the puz- 
 zled magistrates resolved to put an end to this device by 
 refusing to inflict the punishment which these unfortunate 
 creatures sought as a refuge and a comfort. One early re- 
 sult of the famine and the general breakdown of property 
 is too significant to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Some of 
 the landlords had been living for a long time on a baseless 
 system, on a credit which the failure of the crops brought 
 to a crushing test. Not a few of these were utterly broken. 
 They could maintain their houses and halls no longer, and 
 often were only too happy to let them to the poor-law 
 guardians to be used as extra workhouses. In the near 
 
282 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 neighborhood of many a distressed country town the great 
 house of the local magnate thus became a receptacle for the 
 pauperism which could not find a refuge in the overcrowd- 
 ed asylums which the poor-law system had already pro- 
 vided. The lion and the lizard, says the Persian poet, keep 
 the halls where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep. The pau- 
 per devoured his scanty dole of Indian meal porridge in the 
 hall where his landlord had gloried and drunk deep. 
 
 When the famine was over and its results came to be es- 
 timated, it was found that Ireland had lost about two mill- 
 ions of her population. She had come down from eight 
 millions to six. This was the combined effect of starvation, 
 of the various diseases that followed in its path gleaning 
 where it had failed to gather, and of emigration. Long af- 
 ter all the direct effects of the failure of the potato had 
 ceased, the population still continued steadily to decrease 
 The Irish peasant had in fact had his eyes turned, as Mr. 
 Bright afterward expressed it, toward the setting sun, and 
 for long years the stream of emigration westward never 
 abated in its volume. A new Ireland began to grow up 
 across the Atlantic. In every great city of the United 
 States the Irish element began to form a considerable con- 
 stituent of the population. From New York to San Fran- 
 cisco, from St. Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans, the Irish ac- 
 cent is heard in every street, and the Irish voter comes to 
 the polling-booth ready, far too heedlessly, to vote for any 
 politician who will tell him that America loves the green 
 flag and hates the Saxon. 
 
 Terrible as the immediate effects of the famine were, it is 
 impossible for any friend of Ireland to say that, on the whole, 
 it did not bring much good with it. It first applied the 
 scourge which was to drive out of the land a thoroughly 
 vicious and rotten system. It first called the attention of 
 English statesmen irresistibly to the fact that the system 
 was bad to its heart's core, and that nothing good could 
 come of it. It roused the attention of the humble Irishman, 
 too often inclined to put up with everything in the lazy spir- 
 it of a Neapolitan or a fatalist, to the fact that there was for 
 him too a world elsewhere. The famine had, indeed, many 
 a bloody after-birth, but it gave to the world a new Ireland. 
 
 The Government, as it may be supposed, had hard work 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 283 
 
 to do all this time. They had the best intentions toward 
 Ireland, and were always, indeed, announcing that they had 
 found out some new way of dealing with the distress, and 
 modifying or withdrawing old plans. They adopted meas- 
 ures from time to time to expend large sums in something 
 like systematic employment for the poor in Ireland ; they 
 modified the Irish Poor-laws ; they agreed at length to sus- 
 pend temporarily the Corn-laws and the Navigation Laws, 
 so far as these related to the importation of grain. A tre- 
 mendous commercial panic, causing the fall of great houses, 
 especially in the corn trade, all over the country, called for 
 the suspension of the Bank Charter Act of 1844, and the 
 measures of the ministers were, for the most part, treated 
 considerately and loyally by Sir Robert Peel ; but a new 
 opposition had formed itself under the nominal guidance of 
 Lord George Bentinck, and the real inspiration of Mr. Dis- 
 raeli. Lord George Bentinck brought in a bill to make a 
 
 o o 
 
 grant of sixteen millions to be expended as an advance on 
 the construction and completion of Irish railways. This 
 proposal was naturally very welcome to many in Ireland. 
 It had a lavish and showy air about it; and Lord George 
 Bentinck talked grandiosely in his speech about the readi- 
 ness with which he, the Saxon, would, if his measure were 
 carried, answer with his head for the loyalty of the Irish 
 people. But it soon began to appear that the scheme was 
 not so much a question of the Irish people as of certain mon- 
 eyed classes who might be helped along at the expense of 
 the English and the Irish people. Lord George Bentinck 
 certainly had no other than a direct and single-minded pur- 
 pose to do good to Ireland ; but his measure would have 
 been a failure if it had been carried. It was fairly open in 
 some respects to the criticism of Mr. Roebuck, that it pro- 
 posed to relieve Irish landlordism of its responsibilities at 
 the expense of the British tax-payer. The measure was re- 
 jected. Lord George Bentinck was able to worry the min- 
 istry somewhat effectively when they introduced a measure 
 to reduce gradually the differential duties on sugar for a few 
 years, and then replace these duties by a fixed and uniform 
 rate. This was, in short, a proposal to apply the principle 
 of Free-trade, instead of that of Protection, to sugar. The 
 protective principle had, in this case, however, a certain fas- 
 
284 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 cination about it, even for independent minds ; for an excep- 
 tional protection had been retained by Sir Robert Peel in 
 order to enable the planters in our colonies to compensate 
 themselves for the loss they might suffer in the transition 
 from slavery to free labor. Lord George Bentinck, there- 
 fore, proposed an amendment to the resolutions of the Gov- 
 ernment, declaring it unjust and impolitic to reduce the duty 
 on foreign slave-grown sugar, as tending to check the ad- 
 vance of production by British free labor, and to give a great 
 additional stimulus to slave labor. Many sincere and inde- 
 pendent opponents of slavery, Lord Brougham in the House 
 of Lords among them, were caught by this view of the ques- 
 tion. Lord George and his brilliant lieutenant at one time 
 appeared as if they were likely to carry their point in the 
 Commons. But it was announced that if the resolutions of 
 the Government were defeated ministers would resign, and 
 there was no one to take their place. Peel could not return 
 to power; and the time was far distant yet when Mr. Dis- 
 raeli could form a ministry. The opposition crumbled away, 
 therefore, and the Government measures were carried. Lord 
 George Bentinck made himself for awhile the champion of 
 the West India sugar-producing interest. He was a man 
 who threw himself with enormous energy into any work he 
 undertook; and he had got up the case of the West India 
 planters with all the enthusiasm that inspired him in his 
 more congenial pursuits as one of the principal men on the 
 turf. The alliance between him and Mr. Disraeli is curious. 
 The two men, one would think, could have had absolutely 
 nothing in common. Mr. Disraeli knew nothing about horses 
 and racing. Lord George Bentinck could not possibly have 
 understood, not to say sympathized with, many of the lead- 
 ing ideas of his lieutenant. Yet Bentinck had evidently 
 formed a just estimate of Disraeli's political genius; and Dis- 
 raeli saw that in Bentinck were many of the special qualities 
 which go to make a powerful party leader in England. Time 
 has amply justified, and more than justified, Bentinck's con- 
 victions as to Disraeli; Bentinck's premature death leaves 
 Disraeli's estimate of him an untested speculation. 
 
 There were troubles abroad as well as at home for the 
 Government. Almost immediately on their coming into 
 office, the project of the Spanish marriages, concocted be- 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 285 
 
 tween King Louis Philippe and his minister, M. Guizot, dis- 
 turbed for a time, and very seriously, the good understand- 
 ing between England and France. It might, so far as this 
 country was concerned, have had much graver consequences, 
 but for the fact that it bore its bitter fruit so soon for the 
 dynasty of Louis Philippe, and helped to put a new ruler on 
 the throne of France. It is only as it affected the friendly 
 feeling between this country and France that the question 
 of the Spanish marriages has a place in such a work as this; 
 but at one time it seemed likely enough to bring about con- 
 sequences which would link it closely and directly with the 
 history of England. The ambition of the French minister 
 and his master was to bring the throne of Spain in some 
 way under the direct influence of France. Such a scheme 
 had again and again been at the heart of French rulers and 
 statesmen, and it had always failed. At least it had always 
 brought with it jealousy, hostility, and war. Louis Philippe 
 and his minister were untaught by the lessons of the past. 
 The young Queen Isabella of Spain was unmarried, and of 
 course a high degree of public anxiety existed in Europe as 
 to her choice of a husband. No delusion can be more pro- 
 found or more often exposed than that which inspires am- 
 bitious princes and enterprising statesmen to imagine that 
 they can control nations by the influence of dynastic alli- 
 ances. In every European war we see princes closely con- 
 nected by marriage in arms against each other. The great 
 political forces which bring nations into the field of battle 
 are not to be charmed into submission by the rubbing of a 
 princess's wedding-ring. But a certain class of statesman, 
 n man of the order who in ordinary life would be called too 
 clever by half, is always intriguing about royal marriages, 
 as if thus alone he could hold in his hands the destinies of 
 nations. 
 
 In an evil hour for themselves and their fame, Louis 
 Philippe and his minister believed that they could obtain 
 a virtual ownership of Spain by an ingenious marriage 
 scheme. There was at one time a project, talked of rather 
 than actually entertained, of marrying the young Queen of 
 Spain and her sister to the Due d'Aumale and the Due de 
 Montpensier, both sons of Louis Philippe. But this would 
 have been too daring a venture on the part of the King of 
 
286 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the French. Apart from any objections to be entertained 
 by other states, it was certain that England could not " view 
 with indifference," as the diplomatic phrase goes, the pros- 
 pect of a son of the French King occupying the throne of 
 Spain. It may be said that after all it was of little concern 
 to England who married the Queen of Spain. Spain was 
 nothing to us. It would not follow that Spain must be the 
 tool of France because the Spanish Queen married a son of 
 the French King, any more than it was certain in a former 
 day that Austria must link herself with the fortunes of the 
 great Napoleon because he had married an Austrian princess. 
 Probably it would have been well if England had concerned 
 herself in nowise with the domestic affairs of Spain, and had 
 allowed Louis Philippe to spin what ignoble plots he pleased, 
 if the Spanish people themselves had not wit enough to see 
 through and power enough to counteract them. At a later 
 period France brought on herself a terrible war and a crush- 
 ing defeat because her Emperor chose to believe, or allowed 
 himself to be persuaded into believing, that the security of 
 France would be threatened if a Prussian prince were called 
 to the throne of Spain. The Prussian prince did not ascend 
 that throne ; but the war between France and Prussia went 
 on ; France was defeated ; and after a little the Spanish 
 people themselves got rid of the prince whom they had con- 
 sented to accept in place of the obnoxious Prussian. If the 
 French Emperor had not interfered, it is only too probable 
 that the Prussian prince would have gone to Madrid, reigned 
 there for a few unstable and tremulous months, and then 
 have been quietly sent back to his own country. But at 
 the time of Louis Philippe's intrigues about the Spanish 
 marriages the statesmen of England were by no means dis- 
 posed to take a cool and philosophic view of things. The 
 idea of non-intervention had scarcely come up then, and the 
 English minister who was chiefly concerned in foreign affairs 
 was about the last man in the world to admit that anything 
 could go on in Europe or elsewhere in which England was 
 not entitled to express an opinion, and to make her influence 
 felt. The marriage, therefore, of the young Queen of Spain 
 had been long a subject of anxious consideration in the 
 councils of the English Government. Louis Philippe knew 
 very well that he could not venture to marry one of his sons 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 287 
 
 to the young Isabella. But he and his minister devised a 
 scheme for securing to themselves and their policy the same 
 effect in another way. They contrived that the Queen and 
 her sister should be married at the same time the Queen 
 to her cousin, Don Francisco d'Assis, Duke of Cadiz ; and 
 her sister to the Duke de Montpensier, Louis Philippe's -son. 
 There was reason to expect that the Queen, if married to 
 Don Francisco, would have no children, and that the wife of 
 Louis Philippe's son, or some of her children, would come to 
 the throne of Spain. 
 
 On the moral guilt of a plot like this it would be super- 
 fluous to dwell. Nothing in the history of the perversions 
 of human conscience and judgment can be more extraordi- 
 nary than the fact that a man like M. Guizot should have 
 been its inspiring influence. It came with a double shock 
 upon the Queen of England and her ministers, because they 
 had every reason to think that Louis Philippe had bound 
 himself by a solemn promise to discourage any such policy. 
 When the Queen paid her visit to Louis Philippe at Eu, 
 the King made the most distinct and the most spontaneous 
 promise on the subject both to her Majesty and to Lord 
 Aberdeen. The Queen's own journal says : " The King told 
 Lord Aberdeen as well as me he never would hear of Mont- 
 pensier's marriage with the Infanta of Spain which they are 
 in a great fright about in England until it was no longer a 
 political question, which would be when the Queen is mar- 
 ried and has children." The King's own defence of himself 
 afterward, in a letter intended to be a reply to one written 
 to his daughter, the Queen of the Belgians, by Queen Vic- 
 toria, admits the fact. " I shall tell you precisely," he says, 
 " in what consists the deviation on my side. Simply in my 
 having arranged for the marriage of the Due de Montpen- 
 sier, not before the marriage of the Queen of Spain, for she 
 is to be married to the Due de Cadiz at the very moment 
 when my son is married to the Infanta, but before the Queen 
 has a child. That is the whole deviation, nothing more, 
 nothing less." This was surely deviation enough from the 
 King's promise to justify any charge of bad faith that could 
 be made. The whole question was one of succession. The 
 objection of England and other Powers was, from first to 
 last, an objection to any arrangement which might leave 
 
288 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the succession to one of Louis Philippe's children or grand- 
 children. For this reason the King had given his word to 
 Queen Victoria that he would not hear of his son's marriage 
 with Isabella's sister until the difficulty about the succession 
 had been removed by Isabella herself being married and 
 having a child. Such an agreement was absolutely broken 
 when the King arranged for the marriage of his son to the 
 sister of Queen Isabella at the same time as Isabella's own 
 marriage, and when, therefore, it was not certain that the 
 young Queen would have any children. The political ques- 
 tion the question of succession remained then open as be- 
 fore. All the objections that England and other Powers 
 had to the marriage of the Due de Montpensier stood out as 
 strong as ever. It was a question of the birth of a child, 
 and no child was born. The breach of faith was made in- 
 finitely more grave by the fact that in the public opinion of 
 Europe Louis Philippe was set down as having brought 
 about the marriage of the Queen of Spain with her cousin 
 Don Francisco in the hope and belief that the union would 
 be barren of issue, and that the wife of his son would stand 
 on the next step of the throne. 
 
 The excuse which Louis Philippe put forward to palliate 
 what he called his "deviation" from the promise to the 
 Queen was not of a nature calculated to allay the ill feeling 
 which his policy had aroused in England. He pleaded in 
 substance that he had reason to believe in an intended piece 
 of treachery on the part of the English Government, the 
 consequences of which, if it were successful, would have 
 been injurious to his policy, and the discovery of which, 
 therefore, released him from his promise. He had found 
 out, as he declared, that there was an intention on the part 
 of England to put forward, as a candidate for the hand of 
 Queen Isabella, Prince Leopold of Coburg, a cousin of Prince 
 Albert. There was so little justification for any such sus- 
 picion that it hardly s'eemed possible a man of Louis Phi- 
 lippe's shrewdness can really have entertained it. The Eng- 
 lish Government had always steadfastly declined to give 
 any support whatever to the candidature of this young 
 prince. Lord Aberdeen, who was then Foreign Secretary, 
 had always taken his stand on the broad principle that the 
 marriage of the Queen of Spain was the business of Isabella 
 
FAMINE, COMMERCIAL TROUBLE, ETC. 289 
 
 herself and of the Spanish people; and that so long as that 
 Queen and that people were satisfied, and the interests of 
 England were in nowise involved, the Government of Queen 
 Victoria would interfere in no manner. The candidature of 
 Prince Leopold had been, in the first instance, a project of the 
 Dowager Queen of Spain, Christina, a woman of intriguing 
 character, on whose political probity no great reliance could 
 be placed. The English Government had in the most de- 
 cided and practical manner proved that they took no share 
 in the plans of Queen Christina, and had no sympathy with 
 them. But while the whole negotiations were going on, the 
 defeat of Sir Robert Peel's Ministry brought Lord Palmer- 
 ston into the Foreign Office in place of Lord Aberdeen. The 
 very name of Palmerston produced on Louis Philippe and 
 his minister the effect vulgarly said to be wrought on a 
 bull by the display of a red rag. Louis Philippe treasured 
 in bitter memory the unexpected success which Palmerston 
 had won from him in regard to Turkey and Egypt. At 
 that time, and especially in the court of Louis Philippe, for- 
 eign politics were looked upon as the field in which the 
 ministers of great Powers contended against each other 
 with brag and trickery and subtle arts of all kinds ; the 
 plain principles of integrity and truthful dealing did not 
 seem to be regarded as properly belonging to the rules of 
 the game. Louis Philippe probably believed in good faith 
 that the return of Lord Palmerston to the Foreign Office 
 must mean the renewed activity of treacherous plans against 
 himself. This, at least, is the only assumption on which we 
 can explain the King's conduct, if we do not wish to believe 
 that he put forward excuses and pretexts which were wilful 
 in their falsehood. Louis Philippe seized on some words in 
 a despatch of Lord Palmerston's, in which the candidature 
 of Prince Leopold was simply mentioned as a matter of fact ; 
 declared that these words showed that the English Govern- 
 ment had at last openly adopted that candidature, professed 
 himself relieved from all previous engagements, and at once 
 hurried on the marriage between Queen Isabella and her 
 cousin, and that of his own son with Isabella's sister. On 
 October 10th, 1846, the double marriage took place at Ma- 
 drid ; and on February 5th following, M. Guizot told the 
 French Chambers that the Spanish marriages constituted 
 I. 13 
 
290 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the first great thing France had accomplished completely 
 single-handed in Europe since 1830. 
 
 Every one knows what a failure this scheme proved, so 
 far as the objects of Louis Philippe and his minister were 
 concerned. Queen Isabella had children ; Montpensier's wife 
 did not come to the throne; and the dynasty of Louis Phi- 
 lippe fell before long, its fall undoubtedly hastened by the 
 position of utter isolation and distrust in which it was placed 
 by the scheme of the Spanish marriages and the feelings 
 which it provoked in Europe. The fact with which we have 
 to deal, however, is that the friendship between England and 
 France, from which so many happy results seemed likely to 
 come to Europe and the cause of free government, was nec- 
 essarily interrupted. It would have been impossible to trust 
 any longer to Louis Philippe. The Queen herself entered into 
 a correspondence with his daughter, the Queen of the Bel- 
 gians, in which she expressed in the clearest and most em- 
 phatic manner her opinion of the treachery with which Eng- 
 land had been encountered, and suggested plainly enough her 
 sense of the moral wrong involved in such ignoble policy. 
 The whole transaction is but another and a most striking 
 condemnation of that odious creed, for a long time tolerated 
 in state-craft, that there is one moral code for private life and 
 another for the world of politics. A man who in private 
 affairs should act as Louis Philippe and M. Guizot acted 
 would be justly considered infamous. It is impossible to 
 suppose that M. Guizot, at least, could have so acted in pri- 
 vate life. M. Guizot was a Protestant of a peculiarly austere 
 type, who professed to make religious duty his guide in all 
 things, and who doubtless did make it so in all his dealings 
 
 O t O 
 
 as a private citizen. But it is only too evident that he be- 
 lieved the policy of states to allow of other principles than 
 those of Christian morality. He allowed himself to be gov- 
 erned by the odious delusion that the interests of a state 
 can be advanced and ought to be pursued by means which 
 an ordinary man of decent character would scorn to employ 
 for any object in private life. A man of any high principle 
 would not employ such arts in private life to save all his 
 earthly possessions, and his life and the lives of his wife and 
 children. Any one who will take the trouble to think over 
 the whole of this plot for it can be called by no other 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 291 
 
 name over the ignoble object which it had in view, the 
 base means by which it was carried out, the ruthless disre- 
 gard for the inclinations, the affections, the happiness, and 
 the morality of its principal victims ; and will then think of 
 it as carried on in private life in order to come at the re- 
 version of some young and helpless girl's inheritance, will 
 perhaps find it hard to understand how the shame can be 
 any the less because the principal plotter was a king, and 
 the victims were a queen and a nation. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 
 
 THE year 1848 was an era in the modern history of Eu- 
 rope. It was the year of unfulfilled revolutions. The fall 
 of the dynasty of Louis Philippe may be said to have set 
 the revolutionary tide flowing. The event in France had 
 long been anticipated by keen-eyed observers. There are 
 many predictions, delivered and recorded before the revo- 
 lution was yet near, which show that it ought not to have 
 taken the world by surprise. The reign of the Bourgeois 
 King was unsuited in its good and in its bad qualities alike 
 to the genius and the temper of the French people. The 
 people of France have defects enough which friends and en- 
 emies are ready to point out to them; but it can hardly be 
 denied that they like at least the appearance of i certain 
 splendor and magnanimity in their systems of government. 
 This is, indeed, one of their weaknesses. It lays them open 
 to the allurements of any brilliant adventurer, like the First 
 Napoleon or the Third, who can promise them national 
 greatness and glory at the expense perhaps of domestic lib- 
 erty. But it makes them peculiarly intolerant of anything 
 mean and sordid in a system or a ruler. There are peoples, 
 no doubt, who could be persuaded, and wisely persuaded, to 
 put up with a good deal of the ignoble and the shabby in 
 their foreign policy for the sake of domestic comfort and 
 tranquillity. But the French people are always impatient 
 of anything like meanness in their rulers, and the govern- 
 ment of Louis Philippe was especially mean. Its foreign 
 
292 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 policy was treacherous ; its diplomatists were commissioned 
 to act as tricksters ; the word of a French minister at a for- 
 eign court began to be regarded as on a level of credibility 
 with a dicer's oath. The home policy of the King was nar- 
 row-minded and repressive enough ; but a man who played 
 upon the national weakness more wisely might have per- 
 suaded his people to be content with defects at home for 
 the sake of prestige abroad. From the hour when it be- 
 came apparent in France that the nation was not respected 
 abroad, the fall of the dynasty was only a matter of time 
 and change. The terrible story of the De Praslin family 
 helped to bring about the catastrophe ; the alternate weak- 
 ness and obstinacy of the Government forced it on; and the 
 King's own lack of decision made it impossible that when 
 the trial had come it could end in any way but one. 
 
 Louis Philippe fled to England, and his flight was the 
 signal for long pent-up fires to break out all over Europe. 
 Revolution soon was aflame over nearly all the courts and 
 capitals of the Continent. Revolution is like an epidemic ; 
 it finds out the weak places in systems. The two European 
 countries which, being tried by it, stood it best, were Eng- 
 land and Belgium. In the latter country the King made 
 frank appeal to his people, and told them that if they wish- 
 ed to be rid of him he was quite willing to go. Language 
 of this kind is new in the mouths of sovereigns; and the 
 Belgians are a people well able to appreciate it. They de- 
 clared for their King, and the shock of the revolution pass- 
 ed harmlessly away. In England and Ireland the effect 
 of the events in France was instantly made manifest. The 
 Chartist agitation at once came to a head. Some of the 
 Chartist leaders called out for the dismissal of the ministry, 
 the dissolution of the Parliament, the Charter and " no sur- 
 render." A national convention of Chartists began its sit- 
 tings in London to arrange for a monster demonstration on 
 April 10th. Some of the speakers openly declared that the 
 people were now quite ready to fight for their Charter. 
 Others, more cautious, advised that no step should be taken 
 against the law until at least it was quite certain that the 
 people were stronger than the upholders of the existing 
 laws. Nearly all the leading Chartists spoke of the revolu- 
 tion in France as an example offered in good time to the 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 293 
 
 English people; and it is somewhat curious to observe how 
 it was assumed in the most evident good faith that what 
 we may call the wage-receiving portion of the population 
 of these islands constitutes exclusively the English people. 
 What the educated, the wealthy, the owners of land, the 
 proprietors of factories, the ministers of the different denom- 
 inations, the authors of books, the painters of pictures, the 
 bench, the bar, the army, the navy, the medical profession 
 what all these or any of them might think with regard to 
 any proposed constitutional changes was accounted a mat- 
 ter in nowise affecting the resolve of the English "people." 
 The moderate men among the Chartists themselves were 
 soon unable to secure a hearing; and the word of order 
 went round among the body, that " the English people " 
 must have the Charter or a Republic. What had been 
 done in France enthusiasts fancied might well be done in 
 England. 
 
 It was determined to present a monster petition to the 
 House of Commons demanding the Charter, and, in fact, of- 
 fering a last chance to Parliament to yield quietly to the 
 demand. The petition was to be presented by a deputation 
 who were to be conducted by a vast procession up to the 
 doors of the House. The procession was to be formed on 
 Kennington Common, the space then unenclosed which is 
 now Kennington Park, on the south side of London. There 
 the Chartists were to be addressed by their still trusted 
 leader, Feargus O'Connor, and they were to march in mili- 
 tary order to present their petition. The object undoubt- 
 edly was to make such a parade of physical force as should 
 overawe the Legislature and the Government, and demon- 
 strate the impossibility of refusing a demand backed by 
 such a reserve of power. The idea was taken from O'Con- 
 nell's policy in the monster meetings ; but there were many 
 of the Chartists who hoped for something more than a mere 
 demonstration of physical force, and who would have been 
 heartily glad if some untimely or unreasonable interference 
 on the part of the authorities had led to a collision. A strong 
 faith still survived at that day in what was grandiosely 
 called the might of earnest numbers. Ardent young Char- 
 tists who belonged to the time of life when anything seems 
 possible to the brave and faithful, and when facts and exam- 
 
294 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 pies count for nothing unless they favor one's own views, 
 fully believed that it needed but the firing of the first shot, 
 " the sparkle of the first sword drawn," to give success to 
 the arms, though but the bare arms, of the people, and to 
 inaugurate the reign of liberty. Therefore, however differ- 
 ently and harmlessly events may have turned out, we may 
 be certain that there went to the rendezvous at Kenning- 
 ton Common, on that April 10th, many hundreds of ignorant 
 and excitable young men who desired nothing so much as 
 a collision with the police and the military, and the reign 
 of liberty to follow. The proposed procession was declared 
 illegal, and all peaceful and loyal subjects were warned not 
 to take any part in it. But this was exactly what the more 
 ardent among the Chartists expected and desired to see. 
 They were rejoiced that the Government had proclaimed 
 the procession unlawful. Was not that the proper occasion 
 for resolute patriots to show that they represented a cause 
 above despotic law ? Was not that the very opportunity 
 offered to them to prove that the people were more mighty 
 than their rulers, and that the rulers must obey or abdicate ? 
 Was not the whole sequence of proceedings thus far ex- 
 actly after the pattern of the French Revolution? The 
 people resolve that they will have a certain demonstration 
 in a certain way; the oligarchical Government declare that 
 they shall not do so; the people persevere, and of course 
 the next thing must be that the Government falls, exactly 
 as in Paris. When poor Dick Swiveller, in Dickens's story, 
 is recovering from his fever, he looks forth of his miserable 
 bed and makes up his mind that he is under the influence of 
 some such magic spell as he has become familiar with in the 
 "Arabian Nights." His poverty-stricken little nurse claps 
 her thin hands with joy to see him alive ; and Dick makes 
 up his mind that the clapping of the hands is the sign un- 
 derstood of all who read Eastern romance, and that next 
 must appear at the princess's summons the row of slaves 
 with jars of jewels on their heads. Poor Dick, reasoning 
 from his experiences in the "Arabian Nights," was not one 
 whit more astray than enthusiastic Chartists reasoning for 
 the sequence of English politics from the evidence of what 
 had happened in France. The slaves with the jars of jewels 
 on their heads were just as likely to follow the clap of the 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 295 
 
 poor girl's hands, as the events that had followed a popular 
 demonstration in Paris to follow a popular demonstration 
 in London. To begin with, the Chartists did not represent 
 any such power in London as the Liberal deputies of the 
 French Chamber did in Paris. In the next place, London 
 does not govern England, and in our time, at least, never did. 
 In the third place, the English Government knew perfectly 
 well that they were strong in the general support of the 
 nation, and were not likely to yield for a single moment 
 to the hesitation which sealed the fate of the French mon- 
 archy. 
 
 The Chartists fell to disputing among themselves very 
 much as O'Connell's Repealers had done. Some were for 
 disobeying the orders of the authorities and having the pro- 
 cession, and provoking rather than avoiding a collision. At 
 a meeting of the Chartist Convention held the night before 
 the demonstration, "the eve of Liberty," as some of the or- 
 ators eloquently termed it, a considerable number were for 
 going armed to Kennington Common. Feargus O'Connor 
 had, however, sense enough still left to throw the weight of 
 his influence against such an insane pi'oceeding, and to insist 
 that the demonstration must show itself to be, as it was from 
 the first proclaimed to be, a strictly pacific proceeding. This 
 was the parting of the ways in the Chartist as it had been 
 in the Repeal agitation. The more ardent spirits at once 
 withdrew from the organization. Those who might even at 
 the very last have done mischief if they had remained part 
 of the movement, withdrew from it; and Chartism was left 
 to be represented by an open-air meeting and a petition to 
 Parliament, like all the other demonstrations that the me- 
 tropolis had seen to pass, hardly heeded, across the field of 
 politics. But the public at large was not aware that the 
 fangs of Chartism had been drawn before it was let loose to 
 play on Kennington Common that memorable 10th of April. 
 London awoke in great alarm that day. The Chartists in 
 their most sanguine moments never ascribed to themselves 
 half the strength that honest alarmists of the bourgeois class 
 were ready that morning to ascribe to them. The wildest 
 rumors were spread abroad in many parts of the metropolis. 
 Long before the Chartists had got together on Kennington 
 Common at all, various remote quarters of London were filled 
 
296 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 witli horrifying reports of encounters between the insurgents 
 and the police or the military, in which the Chartists inva- 
 riably had the better, and as a result of which they were 
 marching in full force to the particular district where the 
 momentary panic prevailed. London is worse off than most 
 cities in such a time of alarm. It is too large for true ac- 
 counts of things rapidly to diffuse themselves. In April, 
 1848, the street telegraph was not in use for carrying news 
 through cities, and the rapidly succeeding editions of the 
 cheap papers were as yet unknown. In various quarters of 
 London, therefore, the citizen was left through the greater 
 part of the day to all the agonies of doubt and uncertainty. 
 
 There was no lack, however, of public precautions against 
 an outbreak of armed Chartism. The Duke of Wellington 
 took charge of all the arrangements for guarding the public 
 buildings and defending the metropolis generally. He act- 
 ed with extreme caution, and told several influential persons 
 that the troops were in readiness everywhere, but that they 
 would not be seen unless an occasion actually rose for call- 
 ing on their services. The coolness and presence of mind of 
 the stern old soldier are well illustrated in the fact that to 
 several persons of influence and authority who came to him 
 with suggestions for the defence of this place or that, his al- 
 most invariable answer was " done already," or " done two 
 hours ago," or something of the kind. A vast number of 
 Londoners enrolled themselves as special constables for the 
 maintenance of law and order. Nearly two hundred thou- 
 sand persons, it is said, were sworn in for this purpose ; and 
 it will always be told as an odd incident of that famous 
 scare, that the Prince Louis Napoleon, then living in Lon- 
 don, was one of those who volunteered to bear arms in the 
 preservation of order. Not a long time was to pass away 
 before the most lawless outrage on the order and life of a 
 peaceful city was to be perpetrated by the special command 
 of the man who was so ready to lend the saving aid of his 
 constable's staff to protect English society against some poor 
 hundreds or thousands of English working-men. 
 
 The crisis, however, luckily proved not to stand in need 
 of such saviors of society. The Chartist demonstration 
 was a wretched failure. The separation of the Chartists 
 who wanted force from those who wanted orderly proceed- 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 297 
 
 ings reduced the project to nothing. The meeting on Ken- 
 nington Common, so far from being a gathering of half a 
 million of men, was not a larger concourse than a temper- 
 ance demonstration had often drawn together on the same 
 spot. Some twenty or twenty-five thousand persons were 
 on Kennington Common, of whom at least half were said to 
 be mere lookers-on, come to see what was to happen, and 
 caring nothing whatever about the People's Charter. The 
 procession was not formed, O'Connor himself strongly insist- 
 ing on obedience to the orders of the authorities. There 
 were speeches of the usual kind by O'Connor and others ; 
 and the opportunity was made available by some of the 
 more extreme, and consequently disappointed Chartists, to 
 express in very vehement language their not unreasonable 
 conviction that the leaders of the convention were hum- 
 bugs. The whole affair, in truth, was an absurd anachro- 
 nism. The lovers of law and order could have desired noth- 
 ing better than that it should thus come forth in the light 
 of day and show itself. The clap of the "hand was given, 
 but the slaves with the jars of jewels did not appear. It is 
 not that the demands of the Chartists were anachronisms 
 or absurdities. We have already shown that many of them 
 were just and reasonable, and that all came within the fair 
 scope of political argument. The anachronism was in the 
 idea that the display of physical force could any longer be 
 needed or be allowed to settle a political controversy in 
 England. The absurdity was in the notion that the wage- 
 receiving classes, and they alone, are " the people of Eng- 
 land." 
 
 The great Chartist petition itself, which was to have 
 made so profound an impression on the House of Commons, 
 proved as utter a failure as the demonstration on Kenning- 
 ton Common. Mr. O'Connor, in presenting this portentous 
 document, boasted that it would be found to have five mill- 
 ion seven hundred thousand signatures in round numbers. 
 The calculation was made in very round numbers indeed. 
 The Committee on Public Petitions were requested to make 
 a minute examination of the document, and to report to the 
 House of Commons. The committee called in the service 
 of a little army of law-stationers' clerks, and went to work 
 to analyze the signatures. They found, to begin with, that 
 
 13* 
 
298 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the whole number of signatures, genuine or otherwise, fell 
 short of two millions. But that was not all. The commit- 
 tee found in many cases that whole sheets of the petition 
 were signed by the one hand, and that eight per cent, of the 
 signatures were those of women. It did not need much in- 
 vestigation to prove that a large, proportion of the signa- 
 tures were not genuine. The name of the Queen, of Prince 
 Albert, of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Lord 
 John Russell, Colonel Sibthorp, and various other public 
 personages, appeared again and again on the Chartist roll. 
 Some of these eminent persons would appear to have car- 
 ried their zeal for the People's Charter so far as to keep 
 signing their names untiringly all over the petition. A 
 large number of yet stranger allies would seem to have been 
 drawn to the cause of the Charter. "Cheeks the Marine" 
 was a personage very familiar at that time to the readers 
 of Captain Marryat's sea stories; and the name of that 
 mythical hero appeared with bewildering iteration in the 
 petition. So did " Davy Jones ;" so did various persons de- 
 scribing themselves as Pugnose, Flatnose, Wooden-legs, and 
 by other such epithets acknowledging curious personal de- 
 fects. We need not describe the laughter and scorn which 
 these revelations produced. There really was not anything 
 very marvellous in the discovery. The petition was got 
 up in great haste and with almost utter carelessness. Its 
 sheets used to be sent anywhere, and left lying about any- 
 where, on a chance of obtaining signatures. The tempta- 
 tion to school-boys and practical jokers of all kinds was ir- 
 resistible. Wherever there was a mischievous hand that 
 could get hold of a pen, there was some name of a royal per- 
 sonage or some Cheeks the Marine at once added to the 
 muster-roll of the Chartists. As a matter of fact, almost all 
 large popular petitions are found to have some such buffoon- 
 eries mixed up with their serious business. The Committee 
 on Petitions have on several occasions had reason to draw 
 attention to the obviously fictitious nature of signatures 
 appended to such documents. The petitions in favor of 
 O'Connell's movement used to lie at the doors of chapels all 
 the Sunday long in Ireland, with pen and ink ready for all 
 who approved to sign ; and it was many a time the favor- 
 ite amusement of school-boys to scrawl clown the most gro- 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 299 
 
 tesque names and nonsensical imitations of names. But the 
 Chartist petition had been so loudly boasted of, and the 
 whole Chartist movement had created such a scare, that the 
 delight of the public generally at any discovery that threw 
 both into ridicule was overwhelming. It was made certain 
 that the number of genuine signatures was ridiculously be- 
 low the estimate formed by the Chartist leaders ; and the 
 agitation, after terrifying respectability for a long time, sud- 
 denly showed itself as a thing only to be laughed at. The 
 laughter was stentorian and overwhelming. The very fact 
 that the petition contained so many absurdities was in itself 
 an evidence of the sincerity of those who presented it. It 
 was not likely that they would have furnished their enemies 
 with so easy and tempting a way of turning them into ridi- 
 cule, if they had known or suspected that there was any lack 
 of genuineness in the signatures, or that they would have 
 provided so ready a means of decrying their truthfulness as 
 to claim five millions of names for a document which they 
 knew to have less than two millions. The Chartist leaders 
 in all their doings showed a want of accurate calculation, 
 and of the frame of mind which desires or appreciates such 
 accuracy. The famous petition was only one other exam- 
 ple of their habitual weakness. It did not bear testimony 
 against their good faith. 
 
 The effect, however, of this unlucky petition on the Eng- 
 lish public mind was decisive. From that day Chartism 
 never presented itself to the ordinary middle-class English- 
 man as anything but an object of ridicule. The terror of 
 the agitation was gone. There were efforts made again and 
 again during the year by some of the more earnest and ex- 
 treme of the Chartist leaders to renew the strength of the 
 agitation. The outbreak of the Young Ireland movement 
 found many sympathizers among the English Chartists, more 
 especially in its earlier stages ; and some of the Chartists in 
 London and other great English cities endeavored to light 
 up the fire of their agitation again by the help of some brands 
 caught up from the pile of disaffection which Mitchel and 
 Meagher were setting ablaze in Dublin. A monster gath- 
 ering of Chartists was announced for Whit-Monday, June 
 12th, and again the metropolis was thrown into a momen- 
 tary alarm, very different in strength, however, from that of 
 
300 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the famous 10th of April. Again precautions were taken 
 by the military authorities against the possible rising of an 
 insurrectionary mob. Nothing came of this last gasp of 
 Chartism. The Times of the following day remarked that 
 there was absolutely nothing to record, " nothing except the 
 blankest expectation, the most miserable gaping, gossiping, 
 and grumbling of disappointed listeners ; the standing about, 
 the roaming to and fro, the dispersing and the sneaking 
 home of some poor simpletons who had wandered forth in 
 the hope of some miraculous crisis in their affairs." It is 
 impossible not to pity those who were thus deceived ; not 
 to feel some regret for the earnestness, the hope, the igno- 
 rant, passionate energy which were thrown away. 
 
 Nor can we feel only surprise and contempt for those 
 who imagined that the Charter and the rule of what was 
 called in their jargon " the people " would do something to 
 regenerate their miserable lot. They had at least seen that 
 up to that time Parliament had done little for them. There 
 had been a Parliament of aristocrats and landlords, and it 
 had for generations troubled itself little about the class from 
 whom Chartism was recruited. The sceptre of legislative 
 power had passed into the hands of a Parliament made up 
 in great measure of the wealthy middle ranks, and it had 
 thus far shown no inclination to distress itself overmuch 
 about them. Almost every single measure Parliament has 
 passed to do any good for the wages-receiving classes and 
 the poor generally has been passed since the time when the 
 Chartists began to be a power. Our Corn-laws' repeal, our 
 factory acts, our sanitary legislation, our measures referring 
 to the homes of the poor all these have been the work of 
 later times than those which engendered the Chartist move- 
 ment. It is easy to imagine a Chartist replying, in the early 
 days of the movement, to some grave remonstrances from 
 wise legislators. He might say, " You tell me I am mad to 
 think the Charter can do anything for me and my class. 
 But can you tell me what else ever has done, or tried to 
 do, any good for them ? You think I am a crazy person, be- 
 cause I believe that a popular Parliament could make any- 
 thing of the task of govei*nment. I ask you what have 
 you and your like made of it already? Things are well 
 enough, no doubt, for you and your class, a pitiful minority; 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 301 
 
 but they could not be any worse for us, and we might make 
 them better, so far as the great majority are concerned. 
 We may fairly crave a trial for our experiment. No mat- 
 ter how wild and absurd it may seem, it could not turn out 
 for the majority any worse than your scheme has done." 
 It would not have been very easy then to answer a speaker 
 who took this line of argument. In truth there was, as we 
 have already insisted, grievance enough to excuse the Char- 
 tist agitation, and hope enough in the scheme the Chartists 
 proposed to warrant its fair discussion. Such movements 
 are never to be regarded by sensible persons as the work 
 merely of knaves and dupes. 
 
 Chartism bubbled and sputtered a little yet in some of 
 the provincial towns, and even in London. There were 
 Chartist riots in Ashton, Lancashire, and an affray with the 
 police, and the killing, before the affray, it is painful to have 
 to say, of one policeman. There were Chartists arrested 
 in Manchester on the charge of preparing insurrectionary 
 movements. In two or three public-houses in London some 
 Chartist juntas were arrested, and the police believed they 
 had got evidence of a projected rising to take in the whole 
 of the metropolis. It is not impossible that some wild and 
 frantic schemes of the kind were talked of and partly hatch- 
 ed by some of the disappointed fanatics of the movement. 
 Some of them were fiery and ignorant enough for anything; 
 and throughout this memorable year thrones and systems 
 kept toppling down all over Europe in a manner that might 
 well have led feather-headed agitators to fancy that nothing 
 was stable, and that in England, too, the whistle of a few 
 conspirators might bring about a transformation scene. All 
 this folly came to nothing but a few arrests and a few not 
 heavy sentences. Among those tried in London on charges 
 of sedition merely was Mr. Ernest Jones, who was sentenced 
 to two years' imprisonment. Mr. Jones has been already 
 spoken of as a man of position and of high culture ; a poet 
 whose verses sometimes might almost claim for their author 
 the possession of genius. He was an orator whose speeches 
 then and after obtained the enthusiastic admiration of John 
 Bright. He belonged rather to the school of revolutionists 
 which established itself as Young Ireland, than to the class 
 of the poor Fussells and Cuffeys and uneducated working- 
 
302 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 men who made up the foremost ranks of the aggressive 
 Chartist movement in its later period. He might have had 
 a brilliant and a useful career. He outlived the Chartist 
 era ; lived to return to peaceful agitation, to hold public 
 controversy with the eccentric and clever Professor Blackie, 
 of Edinburgh, on the relative advantages of republicanism 
 and monarchy, and to stand for a Parliamentary borough at 
 the general election of 1868 ; and then his career was closed 
 by death. The close was sadly premature even then. He 
 had plunged immaturely into politics, and although a whole 
 generation had passed away since his debut, he was but a 
 young man comparatively when the last scene came. 
 
 Here comes, not inappropriately, to an end the history of 
 English Chartism. It died of publicity ; of exposure to the 
 air; of the Anti-Corn-law League; of the evident tendency 
 of the time to settle all questions by reason, argument, and 
 majorities; of growing education; of a strengthening sense 
 of duty among all the more influential classes. When Sir 
 John Campbell spoke its obituary years before, as we have 
 seen, he treated it as simply a monster killed by the just 
 severity of the law. Ten years' experience taught the Eng- 
 lish public to be wiser than Sir John Campbell. Chartism 
 did not die of its own excesses; it became an anachronism; 
 no one wanted it any more. All that was sound in its 
 claims asserted itself, and was in time conceded. But its ac- 
 tive or aggressive influence ceased with 1848. The history 
 of the reign of Queen Victoria has not any further to con- 
 cern itself about Chartism. Not since that year has there 
 been serious talk or thought of any agitation asserting its 
 claims by the use or even the display of armed force in 
 England. 
 
 The spirit of the time had, meanwhile, made itself felt in 
 a different way in Ireland. For some months before the 
 beginning of the year the Young Ireland party had been es- 
 tablished as a rival association to the Repealers who still 
 believed in the policy of O'Connell. It was inevitable that 
 O'Connell's agitation should beget some such movement. 
 The great agitator had brought the temperament of the 
 younger men of his party up to a fever heat, and it was out 
 of the question that all that heat should subside in the veins 
 of young collegians and school-boys at the precise moment 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 303 
 
 when the leader found that he had been going too far, and 
 gave the word for peace and retreat. The influence of 
 O'Connell had been waning for a time before his death. It 
 was a personal influence depending on his eloquence and his 
 power, and these of course had gone down with his personal 
 decay. The Nation newspaper, which was conducted and 
 written for by some rising young men of high culture and 
 remarkable talent, had long been writing in a style of ro- 
 mantic find sentimental nationalism which could hardly give 
 much satisfaction to or derive much satisfaction from the 
 somewhat cunning and trickish agitation which O'Connell 
 
 ~ o 
 
 had set going. The Nation and the clever youths who 
 wrote for it were all for nationalism of the Hellenic or French 
 type, and were disposed to laugh at constitutional agitation, 
 and to chafe against the influence of the priests. The famine 
 had created an immense amount of unreasonable but certain- 
 ly not unnatural indignation against the Government, who 
 were accused of having paltered with the agony and danger 
 of the time, and having clung to the letter of the doctrines 
 of political economy when death was invading Ireland in 
 full force. The Young Ireland party had received a new 
 support by the adhesion of Mr. William Smith O'Brien to 
 their ranks. Mr. O'Brien was a man of considerable influ- 
 ence in Ireland. He had large property and high rank. He 
 was connected with or related to many aristocratic families. 
 His brother was Lord Inchiquin ; the title of the marquisate 
 of Thomond was in the family. He was undoubtedly de- 
 scended from the famous Irish hero and king, Brian Born, 
 and was almost inordinately proud of his claims of long de- 
 scent. He had the highest personal character and the finest 
 sense of honor; but his capacity for leadership of any move- 
 ment was very slender. A poor speaker, with little more 
 than an ordinary country gentleman's shai'e of intellect, 
 O'Brien was a well-meaning but weak and vain man, whose 
 head at last became almost turned by the homage which his 
 followei's and the Irish people generally paid to him. He 
 was, in short, a sort of Lafayette manque / under the happi- 
 est auspices he could never have been more than a successful 
 Lafayette. But his adhesion to the cause of Young Ireland 
 gave the movement a decided impulse. His rank, his legen- 
 dary descent, his undoubted chivalry of character and purity 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of purpose, lent a romantic interest to his appearance as the 
 recognized leader, or at least the figure-head, of the Young 
 Irelanders. 
 
 Smith O'Brien was a man of more mature years than most 
 of his companions in the movement. He was some forty-three 
 or four years of age when he took the leadership of the move- 
 ment. Thomas Francis Meagher, the most brilliant orator of 
 the party, a man who under other conditions might have risen 
 to great distinction in public life, was then only about two 
 or three and twenty. Mitchel and Duffy, who were regard- 
 ed as elders among the Young Irelanders, were perhaps each 
 some thirty years of age. There were many men, more or 
 less prominent in the movement, who were still younger than 
 Meagher. One of these, who afterward rose to some distinc- 
 tion in America, and is long since dead, wrote a poem about 
 the time when the Young Ireland movement was at its 
 height, in which he commemorated sadly his attainment of 
 his eighteenth year, and deplored that, at an age when Chat- 
 terton was mighty and Keats had glimpses into spirit-land 
 the age of eighteen, to wit he, this young Irish patriot, had 
 yet accomplished nothing for his native country. Most of 
 his companions sympathized fully with him, and thought his 
 impatience natural and reasonable. The Young Ireland agi- 
 tation was at first a sort of college debating society move- 
 ment, and it never became really national. It was com- 
 posed for the most part of young journalists, young schol- 
 ars, amateur litterateurs, poets en herbe, orators moulded on 
 the finest patterns of Athens and the French Revolution, and 
 aspiring youths of the Cherubino time of life, who were am- 
 bitious of distinction as heroes in the eyes of young ladies. 
 Among the recognized leaders of the party there was hardly 
 one in want of money. Some of them were young men of 
 fortune, or at least the sons of wealthy parents. Not many 
 of the dangerous revolutionary elements were to be found 
 among these clever, respectable, and precocious youths. 
 The Young Ireland movement was as absolutely unlike the 
 Chartist movement in England as any political agitation 
 could be unlike another. Unreal and unlucky as the Char- 
 tist movement proved to be, its ranks were recruited by 
 genuine passion and genuine misery. 
 
 Before the death of O'Connell the formal secession of the 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. . 305 
 
 Young Ireland party from the regular Repealers had taken 
 place. It arose out of an attempt of O'Connell to force 
 upon the whole body a declaration condemning the use of 
 physical force of the sword, as it was grandiosely called 
 in any patriotic movement whatever. It was in itself a sign 
 of O'Connell's failing powers and judgment that he expected 
 to get a body of men about the age of Meagber to make a 
 formal declaration against the weapon of Leonidas and Mil- 
 tiades, and all the other heroes dear to classically-instructed 
 youth. Meagher declaimed against the idea in a burst of 
 poetic rhetoric which made his followers believe that, a new 
 Grattan of bolder style was coming up to recall the manhood 
 of Ireland that had been banished by the agitation of O'Con- 
 nell and the priests. "I am riot one of those tame moral- 
 ists," the young orator exclaimed, " who say that liberty is 
 not worth one drop of blood. . . . Against this miserable 
 maxim the noblest virtue that has saved and sanctified hu- 
 manity appears in judgment. From the blue waters of the 
 Bay of Salamis ; from the valley over which the sun stood 
 still and lit the Israelite to victory; from the cathedral in 
 which the sword of Poland has been sheathed in the shroud 
 of Kosciusko ; from the convent of St. Isidore, where the fiery 
 hand that rent the ensign of St. George upon the plains of 
 Ulster has mouldered into dust; from the sands of the des- 
 ert, where the wild genius of the Algerine so long has scared 
 the eagle of the Pyrenees ; from the ducal palace in this 
 kingdom, where the memory of the gallant and seditious 
 Geraldine enhances more than royal favor the splendor of 
 his race ; from the solitary grave within this mute city which 
 a dying bequest has left without an epitaph oh ! from ev- 
 ery spot where heroism has had a sacrifice or a triumph, a 
 voice breaks in upon the cringing crowd that cherishes this 
 maxim, crying, Away with it away with it !" 
 
 The reader will probably think that a generation of young 
 men might have enjoyed as much as they could get of this 
 sparkling declamation without much harm being done there- 
 by to the cause of order. Only a crowd of well-educated 
 young Irishmen fresh from college, and with the teaching of 
 their country's history which the Nation was pouring out 
 weekly in prose and poetry, could possibly have understood 
 all its historical allusions. No harm, indeed, would have 
 
306 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 come of this graceful and poetic movement were it not for 
 events which the Young Ireland party had no share in bring- 
 ing about. 
 
 The Continental revolutions of the year 1848 suddenly 
 converted the movement from a literary and poetical organ- 
 ization into a rebellious conspiracy. The fever of that wild 
 epoch spread itself at once over Ireland. When crowns 
 were going down everywhere, what wonder if Hellenic 
 Young Irelandism believed that the moment had come when 
 the crown of the Saxon invader too was destined to fall? 
 The French Revolution and the flight of Louis Philippe set 
 Ireland in a rapture of hope and rebellious joy. Lamartine 
 became the hero of the hour. A copy of his showy, super- 
 ficial " Girondists " was in the hand of every true Young 
 Irelander. Meagher was at once declared to be the Vergn- 
 iaud of the Irish revolution. Smith O'Brien was called 
 upon to become its Lafayette. A deputation of Young Ire- 
 landers, with O'Brien and Meagher at their head, waited 
 upon Lamartine, and were received by him with a cool good- 
 sense which made Englishmen greatly respect his judgment 
 and prudence, but which much disconcerted the hopes of 
 the Young Irelanders. Many of these latter appear to have 
 taken in their most literal sense some words of Lamartine's 
 about the sympathy of the new French Republic with the 
 struggles of oppressed nationalities, and to have fancied that 
 the Republic would seriously consider the propriety of go- 
 ing to war with England at the request of a few young men 
 from Ireland, headed by a country gentleman and member 
 of Parliament. In the mean time a fresh and a stronger in- 
 fluence than that of O'Brien or Meagher had arisen in Young 
 Irelandism. Young Ireland itself now split into two sec- 
 tions, one for immediate action, the other for caution and 
 delay. The party of action acknowledged the leadership of 
 John Mitchel. The organ of this section was the newspa- 
 per started by Mitchel in opposition to the Nation, which 
 had grown too slow for him. The new journal was called 
 the United Irishman, and in a short time it had completely 
 distanced the Nation in popularity and in circulation. The 
 deliberate policy of the United Irishman was to force the 
 hand first of the Government and then of the Irish people. 
 Mitchel had made up his mind so to rouse the passion of the 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 307 
 
 people as to compel the Government to take steps for the 
 prevention of rebellion by the arrest of some of the leaders. 
 Then Mitchel calculated upon the populace rising to defend 
 or rescue their heroes and then the game would be afoot ; 
 Ireland would be entered in rebellion ; and the rest would 
 be for fate to decide. 
 
 This looks now a very wild and hopeless scheme. So, of 
 course, it proved itself to be. But it did not appear so hope- 
 less at the time, even to cool heads. At least it may be 
 called the only scheme which had the slightest chance of 
 success; we do not say of success in establishing the in- 
 dependence of Ireland, which Mitchel sought for, but in set- 
 ting a genuine rebellion afoot. Mitchel was the one formi- 
 dable man among the rebels of '48. He was the one man 
 who distinctly knew what he wanted, and was prepared to 
 run any risk to get it. He was cast in the very mould of 
 the genuine revolutionist, and under different circumstances 
 might have played a formidable part. He came from the 
 northern part of the island, and was a Protestant Dissenter. 
 It is a fact worthy of note that all the really formidable 
 rebels Ireland has produced in modern times, from Wolfe 
 Tone to Mitchel, have been Protestants. Mitchel was a man 
 of great literary talent ; indeed a man of something like 
 genius. He wrote a clear, bold, incisive prose, keen in its 
 scorn and satire, going directly to the heart of its purpose. 
 As mere prose, some of it is worth reading even to-day for 
 its cutting force and pitiless irony. Mitchel issued in his 
 paper week after week a challenge to the Government to 
 prosecute him. He poured out the most fiery sedition, and 
 used every incentive that words could supply to rouse a hot- 
 headed people to arms, or an impatient Government to some 
 act of severe repression. Mitchel was quite ready to make 
 a sacrifice of himself if it were necessary. It is possible 
 enough that he had persuaded himself into the belief that a 
 rising in Ireland against the Government might be success- 
 ful. But there is good reason to think that he would have 
 been quite satisfied if he could have stirred up by any proc- 
 ess a genuine and sanguinary insurrection, which would 
 have read well in the papers, and redeemed the Irish Nation- 
 alists from what he considered the disgrace of never having 
 shown that they knew how to die for their cause. He kept 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 on urging the people to prepare for warlike effort, and every 
 week's United Irishman contained long descriptions of how 
 to make pikes and how to use them ; how to cast bullets, 
 how to make the streets as dangerous for the hoofs of caval- 
 ry horses as Bruce made the field of Bannockburn. Some 
 of the recipes, if we may call them so, were of a peculiarly 
 ferocious kind. The use of vitriol was recommended among 
 other destructive agencies. A feeling of detestation was 
 not unnaturally aroused against Mitchel, even in the minds 
 of many who sympathized with his general opinions ; and 
 those whom we may call the Girondists of the party some- 
 what shrank from him, and would gladly have been rid of 
 him. It is true that the most ferocious of these vitriolic 
 articles were not written by him ; nor did he know of the 
 famous recommendation about the throwing of vitriol until 
 it appeared in print. He was, however, justly and properly 
 as well as technically responsible for all that appeared in a 
 paper started with such a purpose as that of the United Irish- 
 man, and it is not even certain that he would have disap- 
 proved of the vitriol -throwing recommendation if he had 
 known of it in time. He never disavowed it, nor took any 
 pains to show that it was not his own. The fact that he 
 was not its author is, therefore, only mentioned here as a 
 matter more or less interesting, and not at all as any excuse 
 for Mitchel's general style of newspaper war-making. He 
 was a fanatic, clever and fearless ; he would neither have 
 asked quarter nor given it; and, undoubtedly, if Ireland had 
 had many men of his desperate resolve she would have been 
 plunged into a bloody, an obstinate, and a disastrous contest 
 against the strength of the British Government. 
 
 In the mean time that Government had to do something. 
 The Lord -lieutenant could not go on forever allowing a 
 newspaper to scream out appeals to rebellion, and to pub- 
 lish every week minute descriptions of the easiest and quick- 
 est way of killing off English soldiers. The existing laws 
 were not strong enough to deal with Mitchel and to sup- 
 press his paper. It would have been of little account to 
 proceed against him under the ordinary laws which con- 
 demned seditious speaking or writing. Prosecutions were, 
 in fact, set on foot against O'Brien, Meagher, and Mitchel 
 himself for ordinary offences of that kind ; but the accused 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 309 
 
 men got bail, and went on meantime speaking and writing 
 as before, and when the cases came to be tried by a jury the 
 Government failed to obtain a conviction. The Government, 
 therefore, brought in a bill for the better security of the 
 Crown and Government, making all written incitement to 
 insurrection or resistance to the law felony, punishable with 
 transportation. This measure was passed rapidly through 
 nil its stages. It enabled the Government to suppress news- 
 papers like the United Irishman^ and to keep in prison with- 
 out bail, while awaiting trial, any one charged with an of- 
 fence under the new Act. Mitchel soon gave the authorities 
 an opportunity of testing the efficacy of the Act in his per- 
 son. He repeated his incitements to insurrection, was ar- 
 rested alid thrown into prison. The climax of the excite- 
 ment in Ireland was reached when Mitchel's trial came on. 
 There can be little doubt that he was filled with a strong 
 hope that his followers would attempt to rescue him. He 
 wrote from his cell that he could hear around the walls of 
 his prison every night the tramp of hundreds of sympathiz- 
 ers, "felons in heart and soul." The Government, for their 
 part, were in full expectation that some sort of rising would 
 take place. For the time, Smith O'Brien, Meagher, and all 
 the other Young Irelanders were thrown into the shade, and 
 the eyes of the whole country were turned upon Mitchel's 
 cell. Had there been another Mitchel out-of-doors, as fear- 
 less and reckless as the Mitchel in the prison, a sanguinary 
 outbreak would probably have taken place. But the lead- 
 ers of the movement outside were by no means clear in their 
 own minds as to the course they ought to pursue. Many of 
 them were well satisfied of the hopelessness and folly of any 
 rebellious movement, and nearly all were quite aware that, 
 in any case, the country just then was wholly unprepared for 
 . anything of the kind. Not a few had a shrewd suspicion 
 that the movement never had taken any real hold on the 
 heart of the country. Some were jealous of Mitchel's sud- 
 den popularity, and in their secret hearts were disposed to 
 curse him for the trouble he had brought on them. But 
 they could not attempt to give open utterance to such a 
 sentiment. Mitchel's boldness and resolve had placed them 
 at a sad disadvantage. He had that superiority of influence 
 over them that downright determination always gives a man 
 
310 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 over colleagues who do not quite know what they would 
 have. One thing, however, they could do ; and that they 
 did. They discouraged any idea of an attempt to rescue 
 Mitchel. His trial came on. He was found guilty. He 
 made a short but powerful and impassioned speech from the 
 dock ; he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation ; 
 he was hurried under an escort of cavalry through the streets 
 of Dublin, put on board a ship of war, and in a few hours 
 was on his way to Bermuda. Dublin remained perfectly 
 quiet ; the country outside hardly knew what was happen- 
 ing until Mitchel was well on his way, and far-seeing per- 
 sons smiled to themselves and said the danger was all over. 
 So, indeed, it proved to be. The remainder of the proceed- 
 ings partook rather of the nature of burlesque. The Young 
 Ireland leaders became more demonstrative than ever. The 
 Nation newspaper now went in openly for rebellion, but re- 
 bellion at some unnamed time, and when Ireland should be 
 ready to meet the Saxon. It seemed to be assumed that the 
 Saxon, with a characteristic love of fair-play, would let his 
 foes make all the preparations they pleased without any in- 
 terference, and that when they announced themselves ready, 
 then, but not until then, would he come forth to fight with 
 them. Smith O'Brien went about the country holding re- 
 views of the "Confederates," as the Young Irelanders called 
 themselves. The Government, however, showed a contempt 
 for the rules of fair-play, suspended the Habeas Corpus Act 
 in Ireland, and issued warrants for the arrest of Smith 
 O'Brien, Meagher, and other Confederate leaders. The 
 Young Irelanders received the news of this unchivalric pro- 
 ceeding with an outburst of anger and surprise which was 
 evidently genuine. They had clearly made up their minds 
 that they were to go on playing at preparation for rebel- 
 lion as long as they liked to keep up the game. They were 
 completely puzzled by the new condition of things. It was 
 not very clear what Leonidas or Vergniaud would have done 
 under such circumstances; it was certain that if they were 
 all arrested the country would not stir hand or foot on their 
 behalf. Some of the principal leaders, therefore Smith 
 O'Brien, Meagher, Dillon, and others left Dublin and went 
 down into the country. It is not certain even yet whether 
 they had any clear purpose of rebellion at first. It seems 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 311 
 
 probable that they thought of evading arrest for awhile, and 
 trying meantime if the country was ready to follow them 
 into an armed movement. They held a series of gatherings 
 which might be described as meetings of agitators, or mar- 
 shallings of rebels, according as one was pleased to interpret 
 their purpose. But this sort of thing very soon drifted into 
 rebellion. The principal body of the followers of Smith 
 O'Brien came into collision with the police at a place called 
 Ballingarry, in Tipperary. They attacked a small force of 
 police, who took refuge in the cottage of a poor widow 
 named Cormack. The police held the house as a besieged 
 fort, and the rebels attacked them from the famous cabbage- 
 garden outside. The police fired a few volleys. The rebels 
 fired, with what wretched muskets and rifles they possessed, 
 but without harming a single policeman. After a few of 
 them had been killed or wounded it never was perfectly 
 certain that any were actually killed the rebel army dis- 
 persed, and the rebellion was all over. In a few days after, 
 poor Smith O'Brien was taken quietly at the railway station 
 in Thurles, Tipperary. He was calmly buying a ticket for 
 Limerick when he was recognized. He made no resistance 
 whatever, and seemed to regard the whole mummery as at 
 an end. He accepted his fate with the composure of a gen- 
 tleman, and, indeed, in all the part which was left for him 
 to play he bore himself with dignity. It is but justice to an 
 unfortunate gentleman to say that some reports which were 
 rather ignobly set abroad about his having showed a lack 
 of personal courage in the Ballingarry affray were, as all 
 will readily believe, quite untrue. Some of the police de- 
 posed that during the fight, if fight it could be called, poor 
 O'Brien exposed his life with entire recklessness. One 
 policeman said he could have shot him easily at several 
 periods of the little drama, but he felt reluctant to be the 
 slayer of the misguided descendant of the Irish kings. It 
 afterward appeared, also, that any little chance of carrying 
 on any manner of rebellion was put a stop to by Smith 
 O'Brien's own resolution that his rebels must not seize the 
 private property of any one. He insisted that his rebellion 
 must pay its way, and the funds were soon out. The Con- 
 federate leader woke from a dream when he saw his follow- 
 ers dispersing after the first volley or two from the police. 
 
312 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 From that moment he behaved like a dignified gentleman, 
 equal to the fate he had brought upon him. 
 
 Meagher and two of his companions were arrested a few 
 days after, as they were wandering hopelessly and aimlessly 
 through the mountains of Tipperary. The prisoners were 
 brought for trial before a special commission held at Clon- 
 mel, in Tipperary, in the following September. Smith 
 O'Brien was the first put on trial, and he was found guilty. 
 He said a few words with grave and dignified composure, 
 simply declaring that he had endeavored to do his duty to 
 his native country, and that he was prepared to abide the 
 consequences. He was sentenced to death after the old form 
 in cases of high-treason to be hanged, beheaded, and quar- 
 tered. Meagher was afterward found guilty. Great com- 
 miseration was felt for him. His youth and his eloquence 
 made all men and women pity him. His father was a 
 wealthy man who had had a respected career in Parliament ; 
 and there had seemed at one time to be a bright and happy 
 life before young Meagher. The short address in which 
 Meagher vindicated his actions, when called upon to show 
 cause why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, 
 was full of manly and pathetic eloquence. He had nothing, 
 he said, to retract or to ask pardon for. " I am not here to 
 crave with faltering lip the life I have consecrated to the 
 independence of my country. ... I offer to my country, 
 as some proof of the sincerity with which I have thought 
 and spoken and struggled for her, the life ' of a young 
 heart. . . . The history of Ireland explains my crime, and 
 justifies it. ... Even here, where the shadows of death 
 surround me, and from which I see my early grave opening 
 for me in no consecrated soil, the hope which beckoned me 
 forth on that perilous sea whereon I have been wrecked, ani- 
 mates, consoles, enraptures me. No, I do not despair of my 
 poor old countty, her peace, her liberty, her glory." 
 
 Meagher was sentenced to death with the same hideous 
 formularies as those which had been observed in the case 
 of Smith O'Brien. No one, however, really believed for a 
 moment that such a sentence was likely to be carried out 
 in the reign of Queen Victoria. The sentence of death was 
 changed into one of transportation for life. Nor was even 
 this carried out. The convicts were all sent to Australia, 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 313 
 
 and a few years after Mitchel contrived to make his escape, 
 followed by Meagher. The manner of escape was at least 
 of doubtful credit to the prisoners, for they were placed 
 under parole, and a very nice question was raised as to 
 whether they had not broken their parole by the attempt to 
 escape. It was a nice question, which in the case of men of 
 very delicate sense of honor could, one would think, hardly 
 have arisen at all. The point in Mitchel's case was, that he 
 actually went to the police court within whose jurisdiction 
 he was, formally and publicly announced to the magistrate 
 that he withdrew his parole, and invited the magistrate to 
 arrest him then and there. But the magistrate was unpre- 
 pared for his coming, and was quite thrown oif his guard. 
 Mitchel was armed, and so was a friend who accompanied 
 him, and who had planned and carried out the escape. 
 They had horses waiting at the door, and when they saw 
 that the magistrate did not know what to do, they left the 
 court, mounted the horses, and rode away. It was contend- 
 ed by Mitchel and by his companion, Mr. P. J. Smyth (af- 
 terward a distinguished member of Parliament), that they 
 had fulfilled all the conditions required by the parole, and 
 had formally and honorably withdrawn it. One is only sur- 
 prised how men of honor could thus puzzle and deceive 
 themselves. The understood condition of a parole is that a 
 man who intends to withdraw it shall place himself before 
 his captors in exactly the same condition as he was when 
 on his pledged word of honor they allowed him a compara- 
 tive liberty. It is evident that a prisoner would never be 
 allowed to go at large on parole if he were to make use of 
 his liberty to arrange all the conditions of an escape, and, 
 when everything was ready, take his captors by surprise, 
 tell them he was no longer bound by the conditions of the 
 pledge, and that they might keep him if they could. This 
 was the view taken by Smith O'Brien, who declined to have 
 anything to do with any plot for escape while he was on 
 parole. The advisers of the Crown recommended that a 
 conditional pardon should be given to the gallant and un- 
 fortunate gentleman who had behaved in so honorable a 
 manner. Smith O'Brien received a pardon on condition of 
 his not retxirning to these islands ; but this condition was 
 withdi-awn after a time, and lie came back to Ireland. He 
 I. 14 
 
314 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 died quietly in Wales, in 1864. Mitchel settled for awhile 
 in Richmond, Virginia, and became an ardent advocate of 
 slavery and an impassioned champion of the Southern rebel- 
 lion. He returned to the North after the rebellion, and 
 more lately came to Ireland, where, owing to some defect in 
 the criminal law, he could not be arrested, his time of penal 
 servitude having expired, although he had not served it. He 
 was still a hero with a certain class of the people ; he was 
 put up as a candidate for an Irish county, and elected. He 
 was not allowed to enter the House of Commons, however ; 
 the election was declared void, and a new writ was issued. 
 He was elected again, and some turmoil was expected, when 
 suddenly Mitchel, who had long been in sinking health, was 
 withdrawn from the controversy by death. He should have 
 died before. The later years of his life were only an anti- 
 climax. His attitude in the dock in 1848 had something of 
 dignity and heroism in it, and even the stanchest enemies 
 of his> cause admired him. He had undoubtedly great liter- 
 ary ability, and if he had never reappeared in politics the 
 world would have thought that a really brilliant light had 
 been prematurely extinguished. Meagher served in the 
 army of the Federal States when the war broke out, and 
 showed much of the soldier's spirit and capacity. His end 
 was premature and inglorious. He fell from the deck of a 
 steamer one night ; it was dark, and there was a strong 
 current running ; help came too late. A false step, a 
 dark night, and the muddy waters of the Missouri closed 
 the career that had opened with so much promise of bright- 
 ness. 
 
 Many of the conspicuous Young Irelanders rose to some 
 distinction. Charles Gavan Duffy, the editor of the Nation, 
 who was twice put on his trial after the failure of the insur- 
 rection, but whom the jury would not on either occasion 
 convict, became a member of the House of Commons, and 
 afterward emigrated to the colony of Victoria. He rose to 
 be Prime- minister there, and received knighthood and a 
 pension. Thomas Darcy M'Gee, another prominent rebel, 
 went to the United States, and thence to Canada, where he 
 rose to be a minister of the Crown. He was one of the 
 most loyal supporters of the British connection. His un- 
 timely death by the hand of an assassin was lamented in 
 
CHARTISM AND YOUNG IRELAND. 315 
 
 England as well as in the colony be had served so well. 
 Some of the young Irelanders remained in the United States 
 and won repute ; others returned to England, and of these 
 not a few entered the House of Commons and were respect- 
 ed there, the follies of their youth quite forgotten by their 
 colleagues, even if not disowned by themselves. A remark- 
 able illustration of the spirit of fairness that generally per- 
 vades the House of Commons is found in the fact that ev- 
 ery one there respected John Martin, who to the day of 
 his death avowed himself, in Parliament and out of it, a con- 
 sistent and unrepentant opponent of British rule in Ireland. 
 He was respected because of the purity of his character and 
 the transparent sincerity of his purpose. Martin had been 
 devoted to Mitchel in his lifetime, and he died a few days 
 after Mitchel's death. 
 
 The Young Ireland movement came and vanished like a 
 shadow. It never had any reality or substance in it. It 
 Avas a literary and poetic inspiration altogether. It never 
 took the slightest hold of the peasantry. It hardly touch- 
 ed any men of mature years. It was a rather pretty play- 
 ing at rebellion. It was an imitation of the French Revolu- 
 tion, as the Girondists imitated the patriots of Greece and 
 Rome. But it might, perhaps, have had a chance of doing 
 memorable mischief if the policy of the one only man in 
 the business who really was in earnest, and was reckless, 
 had been carried out. It is another illustration of the fact, 
 which O'Connell's movement had exemplified before, that 
 in Irish politics a climax cannot be repeated or recalled. 
 There is something fitful in all Irish agitation. The na- 
 tional emotion can be wrought up to a certain temperature ; 
 and if at that boiling-point nothing is done, the heat sud- 
 denly goes out, and no blowing of Cyclopean bellows can 
 rekindle it. The Repeal agitation was brought up to this 
 point when the meeting at Clontarf was convened ; the dis- 
 persal of the meeting was the end of the whole agitation. 
 With the Young Ireland movement the trial of Mitchel 
 formed the climax. After that a wise legislator would 
 have known that there was nothing more to fear. Petion, 
 the revolutionary Mayor of Paris, knew that when it rained 
 his partisans could do nothing. There were, in 1848, ob- 
 servant Irishmen who knew that after the Mitchel climax 
 
316 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 had been reached the crowd would disperse, not to be col- 
 lected again for that time. 
 
 These two agitations, the Chartist and the Young Ireland, 
 constituted what may be called our tribute to the power 
 of the insurrectionary spirit that was abroad over Europe 
 in 1848. In almost every other European State revolution 
 raised its head fiercely, and fought out its claims in the very 
 capital, under the eyes of bewildered royalty. The whole 
 of Italy, from the Alps to the Straits of Messina, and from 
 Venice to Genoa, was thrown into convulsion ; " Our Italy " 
 once again " shone o'er with civil swords." There was in- 
 surrection in Berlin and in Vienna. The Emperor had to 
 fly from the latter city as the Pope had fled from Rome. 
 In Paris there came a Red Republican rising against a Re- 
 public that strove not to be Red, and the rising was crushed 
 by Cavaignac with a terrible strenuousness that made some 
 of the streets of Paris literally to run with blood. It was 
 a grim foreshadowing of the Commune of 1871. Another 
 remarkable foreshadowing of what was to come was seen in 
 the fact that the Prince Louis Napoleon, long an exile from 
 France, had been allowed to return to it, and at the close of 
 the year, in the passion for law and order at any price born 
 of the Red Republican excesses, had been elected President 
 of the French Republic. Hungary was in arms; Spain was 
 in convulsion ; even Switzerland was not safe. Our contri- 
 bution to this general commotion was to be found in the 
 demonstration on Kennington Common, and the abortive 
 attempt at a rising near Ballingarry. There could not pos- 
 sibly be a truer tribute to the solid strength of our system. 
 Not for one moment was the political constitution of Eng- 
 land seriously endangered. Not for one hour did the safety 
 of our great communities require a call upon the soldiers in- 
 stead of upon the police. Not one charge of cavalry was 
 needed to put down the fiercest outburst of the rebellious 
 spirit in England. Not one single execution took place. 
 The meaning of this is clear. It is not that there were no 
 grievances in our system calling for redress. It is not that 
 the existing institutions did not bear heavily down on many 
 classes. It is not that our political or social system was so 
 conspicuously better than that of some European countries 
 which were torn and ploughed up by revolution. To imag- 
 
DON PACIFICO. 317 
 
 ine that we owed our freedom from revolution to our free- 
 dom from serious grievance, would be to misread altogether 
 the lessons offered to our statesmen by that eventful year. 
 We have done the work of whole generations of Reformers 
 in the interval between this time and that. We have made 
 peaceful reforms, political, industrial, legal, since then, which, 
 if not to be had otherwise, would have justified any appeal 
 to revolution. There, however, we touch upon the lesson of 
 the time. Our political and constitutional system rendered 
 an appeal to force unnecessary and superfluous. No call to 
 arms was needed to bring about any reform that the com- 
 mon judgment of the country might demand. Other peo- 
 ples flew to arms because they were driven by despair; be- 
 cause there was no way in their political constitution for 
 the influence of public opinion to make itself justly felt; be- 
 cause those who were in power held it by the force of bay- 
 onets, and not of public agreement. The results of the year 
 were, on the whole, unfavorable to popular liberty. The re- 
 sults of the year that followed were decidedly reactionary. 
 The time had not come, in 1848 or 1849, for Liberal princi- 
 ples to assert themselves. Their "great deed," to quote 
 some of the words of our English poetess, Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning, " was too great." We in this country were saved 
 alike from the revolution and the reaction by the universal 
 recognition of the fact, among all who gave themselves time 
 to think, that public opinion, being the ultimate ruling pow- 
 er, was the only authority to which an appeal was needed, 
 and that in the ,end justice would be done. All but the very 
 wildest spirits could afford to wait ; and no revolutionary 
 movement is really dangerous which is only the work of the 
 wildest spirits. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 DON PACIFICO. 
 
 THE name of Don Pacifico was as familiar to the world 
 some quarter of a century ago as that of M. Jecker was 
 about the time of the French invasion of Mexico. Don 
 Pacifico became famous for a season as the man whose quar- 
 
318 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 rcl had nearly brought on a European war, caused a tem- 
 porary disturbance of good relations between England and 
 France, split up political parties in England in a manner 
 hardly ever known before, and established the reputation of 
 Lord Palmerston as one of the greatest Parliamentary de- 
 baters of his time. Among the memorable speeches deliv- 
 ered in the English House of Commons, that of Lord Palmer- 
 ston on the Don Pacifico debate must always take a place. 
 It was not because the subject of the debate was a great 
 one, or because there were any grand principles involved. 
 The question originally in dispute was unutterably trivial 
 and paltry ; there was no particular principle involved ; it 
 was altogether what is called in commercial litigation a 
 question of account; a controversy about the amount and 
 time of payment of a doubtful claim. Nor was the speech 
 delivered by Lord Palmerston one of the grand historical 
 displays of oratory that, even when the sound of them is 
 lost, send their echoes to " roll from soul to soul." It was 
 not like one of Burke's great speeches, or one of Chatham's. 
 It was not one calculated to provoke keen literary contro- 
 versy, like Sheridan's celebrated " Begum speech," which all 
 contemporaries held to be unrivalled, but which a later gen- 
 eration assumes to have been rather flashy rhetoric. There 
 are no passages of splendid eloquence in Palmerston's Pa- 
 cifico speech. Its great merit was its wonderful power as a 
 contribution to Parliamentary argument ; as a masterly ap- 
 peal to the feelings, the prejudices, and the passions of the 
 House of Commons; as a complete Parliamentary victory 
 over a combination of the most influential, eloquent, and 
 heterogeneous opponents. 
 
 Don Pacifico was a Jew, a Portuguese by extraction, but 
 a native of Gibraltar, and a British subject. His house in 
 Athens was attacked and plundered in the open day, on 
 April 4th, 1847, by an Athenian mob, who were headed, it 
 was affirmed, by two sons of the Greek Minister of War. 
 The attack came about in this way : It had been customary 
 in Greek towns to celebrate Easter by burning an effigy of 
 Judas Iscariot. In 1847 the police of Athens were ordered 
 to prevent this performance, and the mob, disappointed of 
 their favorite amusement, ascribed the new orders to the 
 influence of the Jews. Don Pacifico's house happened to 
 
DON PACIFICO. 319 
 
 stand near the spot where the Judas was annually burnt ; 
 Don Pacifico was known to be a Jew, and the anger of the 
 mob was wreaked upon him accordingly. There could be 
 no doubt that the attack was lawless, and that the Greek 
 authorities took no trouble to protect Pacifico against it. 
 Don Pacifico made a claim against the Greek Government 
 for compensation. He estimated his losses, direct and in- 
 direct, at nearly thirty-two thousand pounds sterling. An- 
 other claim was made at the same time by another British 
 subject, a man of a very different stamp from Don Pacifico. 
 This was Mr. Finlay, the historian of Greece. Mr. Finlay 
 had gone out to Greece in the enthusiastic days of Byron 
 and Cochrane and Church and Hastings; and he settled in 
 Athens when the independence of Greece had been estab- 
 lished. Some of his land had been taken for the purpose 
 of rounding off the new palace gardens of King Otho ; and 
 Mr. Finlay had declined to accept the terms offered by the 
 Greek Government, to which other land-owners in the same 
 position as himself had assented. Some stress was laid by 
 Lord Palmerston's antagonists, in the course of the debate, 
 on the fact that Mr. Finlay thus stood out apart from other 
 land-owners in Athens. Mr. Finlay, however, had a perfect 
 right to stand out for any price he thought fit. He was in 
 the same position as a Greek resident of London or Man- 
 chester whose land is taken for the purposes of a railway or 
 other public improvement, and who declines to accept the 
 amount of compensation tendered for it in the first instance. 
 The peculiarity of the case was that Mr. Finlay was not 
 left, as the supposed Greek gentleman assuredly would be, 
 to make good his claims for himself in the courts of law. 
 Neither Don Pacifico nor Mr. Finlay had appealed to the 
 law courts at all. But about this time our Foreign Office 
 had had several little complaints against the Greek authori- 
 ties. We had taken so considerable a part in setting up 
 Greece that our ministers not unnaturally thought Greece 
 ought to show her gratitude by attending a little more 
 closely to our advice. On the other hand, Lord Palmerston 
 had made up his mind that there was constant intrigue go- 
 ing on against our interests among the foreign diplomatists 
 in Athens. He was convinced that France was perpetually 
 plotting against us there, and that Russia was watching an 
 
320 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 opportunity to supersede once for all our influence by com- 
 pletely establishing hers. Don Pacifico's sheets, counter- 
 panes, and gold watch had the advantage of being made the 
 subject of a trial of strength between England on the one 
 side, and France and Russia on the other. 
 
 There had been other complaints as well. Ionian subjects 
 of her Majesty had sent in remonstrances against lawless or 
 high-handed proceedings; and a midshipman of her Majes- 
 ty's ship fhntome, landing from a boat at night on the shore 
 of Patras, had been arrested by mistake. None of these 
 questions would seem at first sight to wear a very grave 
 international character. All they needed for settlement, it 
 might be thought, was a little open discussion, and the exer- 
 cise of some good sense and moderation on both sides. It 
 cannot be doubted that the Greek authorities were lax and 
 careless, and that acts had been done which they could not 
 justify. It is only fair to say that they do not appear to 
 have tried to justify some of them; but they were of opin- 
 ion that certain of the claims were absurdly exaggerated, 
 and in this belief they proved to be well sustained. The 
 Greeks were very poor, and also very dilatory ; and they 
 gave Lord Palmerston a reasonable excuse for a little impa- 
 tience. Unluckily Lord Palmerston became possessed with 
 the idea that the French minister in Greece was secretly 
 setting the Greek Government on to resist our claims; for 
 the Foreign Office had made the claims ours. They had 
 lumped up the outrages on Ionian seamen, the mistaken ar- 
 rest of the midshipman (who had been released with apol- 
 ogies the moment his nationality and position were discov- 
 ered), Mr. Finlay's land, and Don Pacifico's household fur- 
 niture in one claim, converted it into a national demand, 
 and insisted that Greece must pay up within a given time 
 or take the consequences. Greece hesitated, and according- 
 ly the British fleet was ordered to the Pira3us. It made its 
 appearance very promptly there, and seized all the Greek 
 vessels belonging to the Government and to private mer- 
 chants that were found within the waters. 
 
 The Greek Government appealed to France and Russia as 
 Powers joined with us in the treaty to protect the indepen- 
 dence of Greece. France and Russia were both disposed to 
 make bitter complaint of not having been consulted, in the 
 
DON PACIFICO. 321 
 
 first instance, by the British Government; nor was their 
 feeling greatly softened by Lord Palmerston's peremptory 
 reply that it was all a question between England and Greece, 
 with which no other Power had any business to interfere. 
 The Russian Government wrote an angry and, indeed, an of- 
 fensive remonstrance. The Russian Foreign Minister spoke 
 of " the very painful impression produced upon the mind of 
 the Emperor by the unexpected acts of violence which the 
 British authorities had just directed against Greece;" and 
 asked if Great Britain, " abusing the advantages which are 
 afforded to her by her immense maritime superiority," in- 
 tended to " disengage herself from all obligation," and to 
 " authorize all Great Powers, on every fitting opportunity, to 
 recognize toward the weak no other rule but their own will, 
 no other right but their own physical strength." The French 
 Government, perhaps under the pressure of difficulties and 
 uncertain affairs at home, in their unsettled state showed a 
 better temper, and intervened only in the interests of peace 
 and good understanding. Something like a friendly arbitra- 
 tion was accepted from France, and the French Government 
 sent a special representative to Athens to try to come to 
 terms with our minister there. The difficulties appeared 
 likely to be adjusted. All the claims, except those of Don 
 Pacifico, were matter of easy settlement, and at first the 
 French commissioner seemed even willing to accept Don 
 Pacifico's stupendous valuation of his household goods. But 
 Pacifico had introduced other demands of a more shadowy 
 character. He said that he had certain claims on the Port- 
 uguese Government, and that the papers on which these 
 claims rested for support were destroyed in the sacking of 
 his house, and therefore he felt entitled to ask for 26,618, 
 as compensation on that account also. The French commis- 
 sioner was a little staggered at this demand, and declined 
 to accede to it without further consideration; and as our 
 minister, Mr. Wyse, did not bejieve he had any authority to 
 abate any of the now national demand, the negotiation was 
 for the time broken off. In the mean time, however, negotia- 
 tions had still been going on between the English and French 
 Governments in London, and these had resulted in a conven- 
 tion disposing of all the disputed claims. By the terms of 
 this agreement a sum of eight thousand five hundred pounds 
 
 14* 
 
322 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 was to be paid by the Greek Government, to be divided 
 among the various claimants; and Greece was also to pay 
 whatever sum might be found to be fairly due on account 
 of Don Pacifico's Portuguese claims, after these had been in- 
 vestigated by arbitrators. This would seem a very satisfac- 
 tory and honorable arrangement. But some demon of mis- 
 chief appeared to have this unlucky affair in charge from the 
 first. The two negotiations going on in London and Ath- 
 ens simultaneously got in each other's way. Instructions as 
 to what had been agreed to in London were not forwarded 
 to Athens quickly enough by the English Government, and 
 when the French Government sent out to their commission- 
 er the news of the convention, he found that Mr. Wyse knew 
 nothing about the matter, and had no authority which, as he 
 conceived, would have warranted him in departing from the 
 course of action he was following out. Mr. Wyse, therefore, 
 proceeded with his measures of coercion, and at length the 
 Greek Government gave way. The convention having, how- 
 ever, been made in the mean time in London, there then arose 
 a question as to whether that convention or the terms ex- 
 torted at Athens should be the basis of arrangement. Over 
 this trumpery dispute, which a few words of frank good sense 
 and good temper on both sides would have easily settled, a 
 new quarrel seemed at one time likely to break out between 
 England and France. The French Government actually 
 withdrew their ambassador, M. Drouyri de Lhuys, from Lon- 
 don ; and there was for a short time a general alarm over 
 Europe. But the question in dispute was really too small 
 and insignificant for any two rational governments to make 
 it a cause of serious quarrel ; and after awhile our Govern- 
 ment gave way, and agreed to an arrangement which was, 
 in the main, all that France desired. When, after a long 
 lapse of time, the arbitrators came to settle the claims of 
 Don Pacifico, it was found that he was entitled to about one- 
 thirtieth of the sum he had originally demanded. He had 
 assessed all his claims on the same liberal and fanciful scale 
 as that which he adopted in estimating the value of his 
 household property. Don Pacifico, it seems, charged in his 
 bill one hundred and fifty pounds sterling for a bedstead, 
 thirty pounds for the sheets of the bed, twenty-five pounds 
 for two coverlets, and ten pounds for a pillow-case. Cleopa- 
 
DON PACIFICO. 323 
 
 tra might have been contented with bed furniture so luxuri- 
 ous as Don Pacifico represented himself to have in his com- 
 mon use. The jewellery of his wife and daughters he esti- 
 mated at two thousand pounds. He gave no vouchers for 
 any of these claims, saying that all his papers had been de- 
 stroyed by the mob. It seemed, too, that he had always 
 lived in a humble sort of way, and was never supposed by 
 his neighbors to possess such splendor of ornament and 
 household goods. 
 
 While the controversy between the English and French 
 Governments was yet unfinished, a Parliamentary controver- 
 sy between the former Government and the Opposition in 
 the House of Lords was to begin. Lord Stanley proposed 
 a resolution which was practically a vote of censure on the 
 Government. The resolution, in fact, expressed the regret 
 of the House to find that "various claims against the Greek 
 Government, doubtful in point of justice, or exaggerated in 
 amount, have been enforced by coercive measures, directed 
 against the commerce and people of Greece, and calculated 
 to endanger the continuance of our friendly relations with 
 foreign Powers." The resolution was carried, after a debate 
 of great spirit and energy, by a majority of thirty -seven. 
 Lord Palmerston was not dismayed. A ministry is seldom 
 greatly troubled by an adverse vote in the House of Lords. 
 The Foreign Secretary, writing about the result of the di- 
 vision the following day, merely said : " We were beaten last 
 night in the Lords by a larger majority than we had, up 
 to the last moment, expected ; but when we took office we 
 knew that our opponents had a larger pack in the Lords 
 than we had, and that whenever the two packs were to be 
 fully dealt out, theirs would show a larger number than 
 ours." Still, it was necessary that something should be done 
 in the Commons to counterbalance the stroke of the Lords, 
 and accordingly Mr. Roebuck, acting as an independent mem- 
 ber, although on this occasion in harmony with the Govern- 
 ment, gave notice of a resolution which boldly affirmed that 
 the principles on which the foreign policy of the Govern- 
 ment had been regulated were " such as were calculated to 
 maintain the honor and dignity of this country, and in times 
 of unexampled difficulty to preserve peace between England 
 and the various nations of the world." On June 24th, 1850, 
 
324 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 a night memorable in Parliamentary annals as the opening 
 night of the debate which established Lord Palmerston's po- 
 sition as a great leader of party, Mr. Roebuck brought for- 
 ward his resolution. 
 
 A reader unaccustomed to Parliamentary tactics may fail 
 to observe the peculiar shrewdness of the resolution. It was 
 framed, at least it reads as if it had been framed, to accom- 
 plish one purpose while professing to serve another. It was 
 intended, of course, as a reply to the censure of the House 
 of Lords. It was to proclaim to the world that the Repre- 
 sentative Chamber had reversed the decision of the House 
 of Peers, and acquitted the ministry. But what did Mr. 
 Roebuck's resolution actually do? Did it affirm that the 
 Government had acted rightly with regard to Greece ? The 
 dealings with Greece were expressly censured by the House 
 of Lords; but Mr. Roebuck proposed to affirm that the gen- 
 eral policy of the ministry deserved the approval of the 
 House of Commons. It was well known that there were 
 many men of Liberal opinions in the House of Commons who 
 did not approve of the course pursued with regard to Greece, 
 but who would yet have been very sorry to give a vote 
 which might contribute to the overthrow of a Liberal Gov- 
 ernment. The resolution was so framed as to offer to all 
 such an opportunity of supporting the Government, and yet 
 satisfying their consciences. For it might be thus put to 
 them: "You think the Government were too harsh with 
 Greece? Perhaps you are right. But this resolution does 
 not say that they were quite free of blame in their way of 
 dealing with Greece. It only says that their policy, on the 
 whole, has been sound and successful ; and of course you 
 must admit that. They may have made a little mistake with 
 regard to Greece ; but admitting that, do you not still think 
 that on the whole they had done very well, and much better 
 than any Tory minister would be likely to do? This is all 
 that Roebuck's resolution asks you to affirm; and you really 
 cannot vote against it." 
 
 A large number of Liberals were, no doubt, influenced by 
 this view of the situation, and by the framing of the resolu- 
 tion. But there were some who could not be led into any 
 approval of the particular transaction which the resolution, 
 if not intended to cover, would certainly be made to cover. 
 
DON PACIFICO. 325 
 
 There were others, too, who, even on the broader field opened 
 purposely up by the resolution, honestly believed that Lord 
 Palmerston's general policy was an incessant violation of 
 the principle of non-intervention, and was, therefore, injuri- 
 ous to the character and the safety of the country. In a 
 prolonged and powerful debate some of the foremost men on 
 both sides of the House opposed and denounced the policy of 
 the Government, for which, as every one knew, Lord Palmer- 
 ston was almost exclusively responsible. " The allied troops 
 who led the attack," says Mr. Evelyn Ashley, in his life of 
 Lord Palmerston, " were English Protectionists and foreign 
 Absolutists." It is strange that an able and usually fair- 
 minded man should be led into such absurdity. Lord Palm- 
 erston himself called it " a shot fired by a foreign conspir- 
 acy, aided and abetted by a domestic intrigue." But Lord 
 Palmerston was the minister personally assailed, and might 
 be excused, perhaps, for believing at the moment that war- 
 ring monarchs were giving the fatal wound, and that the 
 attack on him was the work of the combined treachery of 
 Europe. A historian looking back upon the events after an 
 interval of a quarter of a century ought to be able to take 
 a calmer view of things. Among the "English Protection- 
 ists" who took a prominent part in condemning the policy 
 of Lord Palmerston were Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, Sir 
 Robert Peel, Sir William Molesworth, and Mr. Sidney Her- 
 bert. In the House of Lords, Lord Brougham, Lord Canning, 
 and Lord Aberdeen had supported the resolution of Lord 
 Stanley. The truth is that Lord Palmerston's proceedings 
 were fairly open to difference of judgment, even on the part 
 of the most devoted Liberals and the most independent 
 thinkers. It did not need that a man should be a Protec- 
 tionist or an Absolutist to explain his entire disapproval of 
 such a course of conduct as that which had been followed 
 out with regard to Greece. It seems to us now, quietly 
 looking back at the whole story, hardly possible that a man 
 with, for example, the temperament and the general views 
 of Mr. Gladstone could have appi'oved of such a policy; ob- 
 viously impossible that a man like Mr. Cobden could have 
 approved of it. These men simply followed their judgment 
 and their conscience. 
 
 The principal interest of the debate now rests in the man- 
 
326 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ner of Lord Palmerstori's defence. The speech was, indeed, 
 a masterpiece of Parliamentary argument and address. It 
 was, in part, a complete exposition and defence of the whole 
 course of the foreign policy which the noble speaker had 
 directed. But although the resolution treated only of the 
 general policy of the Government, Lord Palmerston did not 
 fail to make a special defence of his action toward Greece. 
 He based his vindication of this particular chapter of his 
 policy on the ground which, of all others, gave him most ad- 
 vantage in addressing a Parliamentary assembly. He con- 
 tended that in all he had done he had been actuated by the 
 resolve that the poorest claimant who bore the name of an 
 English citizen should be protected by the whole strength 
 of England against the oppression of a foreign Government. 
 His speech was an appeal to all the elementary emotions 
 of manhood and citizenship and good-fellowship. To vote 
 against him seemed to be to declare that England was un- 
 able or unwilling to protect her children. A man appeared 
 to be guilty of an unpatriotic and ignoble act who censured 
 the minister whose only error, if error it were, was a too 
 proud and generous resolve to make the name of England 
 and the rights of Englishmen respected throughout the 
 world. A good deal of ridicule had been heaped, not unnat- 
 urally, on Don Pacifico, his claims, his career, and his costly 
 bed furniture. Lord Palmerston turned that very ridicule 
 to good account for his own cause. He repelled with a 
 warmth of seemingly generous indignation the suggestion 
 that because a man was lowly, pitiful, even ridiculous, even 
 of doubtful conduct in his earlier career, therefore he was 
 one with whom a foreign Government was not bound to ob- 
 serve any principles of fair dealing at all. He protested 
 against having serious things treated jocosely; as if any 
 man in Parliament had ever treated serious things more 
 often in a jocose spirit. He protested against having the 
 House kept " in a roar of laughter at the poverty of one suf- 
 ferer, or at the miserable habitation of another; at the na- 
 tionality of one man, or the religion of another ; as if because 
 a man was poor he might be bastinadoed and tortured with 
 impunity, as if a man who was born in Scotland might be 
 robbed without redress, or because a man is of the Jewish 
 persuasion he is a fair mark for any outrage." Lord Palmer- 
 
DON PACIFICO. 327 
 
 ston had also a great advantage given to him by the argu- 
 ment of some of his opponents, that whatever the laws of a 
 foreign country, a stranger has only to abide by them, and 
 that a Government claiming redress for any wrong done to 
 one of its subjects is completely answered by the statement 
 that he has suffered only as inhabitants of the country them- 
 selves have suffered. The argument against Lord Palmer- 
 ston was pushed entirely too far in this instance, and it gave 
 him one of his finest opportunities for reply. It is true, as 
 a general rule in the intercourse of nations, that a stranger 
 who goes voluntarily into a country is expected to abide by 
 its laws, and that his Government will not protect him from 
 their ordinary operation in every case where it may seem to 
 press hardly or even unfairly against him. But in this un- 
 derstanding is always involved a distinct assumption that 
 the laws of the State are to be such as civilization would 
 properly recognize, supposing that the State in question 
 pi-ofesses to be a civilized State. It also distinctly assumed 
 that the State must be able and willing to enforce its own 
 laws where they are fairly invoked on behalf of a foreigner. 
 If, for instance, a foreigner has a just claim against some con- 
 tinental Government, and that Government will not recog- 
 nize the claim, or, recognizing it, will not satisfy it, and the 
 Government of the injured man intervenes and asks that his 
 claim shall be met it would never be accounted a sufficient 
 answer to say that many of the inhabitants of the country 
 had been treated just in the same way, and had got no re- 
 dress. If there were a law in Turkey, or any other slave- 
 owning State, that a man who could not pay his debts was 
 liable to have his wife and daughter sold into slavery, it is 
 certain that no Government like that of England would h'ear 
 of the application of such a law to the family of a poor Eng- 
 lish trader settled in Constantinople. There is no clear rule 
 easy to be laid down ; perhaps there can be no clear rule on 
 the subject at all. But it is evident that the govei'nments 
 of all civilized countries do exercise a certain protectorate 
 over their subjects in foreign countries, and do insist in ex- 
 treme cases that the laws of the country shall not be applied 
 or denied to them in a manner which a native resident might 
 think himself compelled to endure without protest. It is 
 not even so in the case of manifestly harsh and barbarous 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 laws alone, or of the denial of justice in a harsh and barbar- 
 ous way. The principle prevails even in regard to laws 
 which are in themselves unexceptionable and necessary. 
 No Government, for example, will allow one of its subjects 
 living in a foreign country to be brought under the law for 
 the levying of the conscription there, and compelled to serve 
 in the army of the foreign State. 
 
 All this only shows that the opponents of Lord Palmerston 
 made a mistake when they endeavored to obtain any gen- 
 eral assent to the principle that a minister does wrong who 
 asks for his fellow-subjects at the hands of a foreign Gov- 
 ernment any better treatment than that which the Govern- 
 ment in question administers, and without revolt, to its own 
 people. Lord Palmerston was not the man to lose so splen- 
 did an opportunity. He really made it appear as if the 
 question between him and his opponents was that of the 
 protection of Englishmen abroad ; as if he were anxious 
 to look after their lives and safety, while his opponents were 
 urging the odious principle that when once an Englishman 
 put his foot on a foreign shore his own Government re- 
 nounced all intent to concern themselves with any fate that 
 might befall him. Here was a new turn given to the de- 
 bate, a new opportunity afforded to those who, while they 
 did not approve exactly of what had been done with Greece, 
 were nevertheless anxious to support the general principles 
 of Lord Palmcrston's foreign policy. The speech was a 
 marvellous appeal to what are called "English interests." 
 In a peroration of thrilling power Lord Palmerston asked 
 for the verdict of the House to decide " whether, as the Ro- 
 man in days of old held himself free from indignity when 
 he could say 'Civis Romanus sum,' so also a British subject, 
 in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the 
 watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect 
 him against injustice and wi'ong." 
 
 When Lord Palmerston closed his speech the overwhelm- 
 ing plaudits of the House foretold the victory he had won. 
 It was, indeed, a masterpiece of telling defence. The speech 
 occupied some five hours in delivery. It was spoken, as 
 Mr. Gladstone afterward said, from the dusk of one day to 
 the dawn of the next. It was spoken without the help of a 
 single note. Lord Palmerston always wisely thought that 
 
DON PACIFICO. 329 
 
 in order to have full command of such an audience a man 
 should, if possible, never use notes. He was quite conscious 
 of his own lack of the higher gifts of imagination and emo- 
 tion that make the great orator; but he knew also what a 
 splendid weapon of attack and defence was his fluency and 
 readiness, and he was not willing .to weaken the effect of 
 its spontaneity by the interposition of a single note. All 
 this great speech, therefore, full as it was of minute details, 
 names, dates, figures, references of all kinds, was delivered 
 with the same facility, the same lack of effort, the same ab- 
 sence of any adventitious aids to memory, which character- 
 ized Palmerston's ordinary style when he answered a simple 
 question. Nothing could be more complete than Palmer- 
 ston's success. "Civis Romanus" settled the matter. Who 
 was in the House of Commons so rude that would not be a 
 Roman? Who was there so lacking in patriotic spirit that 
 would not have his countrymen as good as any Roman citi- 
 zen of them all? It was to little purpose that Mr. Gladstone, 
 in a speech of singular argumentative power, pointed out that 
 " a Roman citizen was the member of a privileged caste, of 
 a victorious and conquering nation, of a nation that held all 
 others bound down by the strong arm of power which had 
 one law for him and another for the rest of the world, which 
 asserted in his favor principles which it denied to all others." 
 It was in vain that Mr. Gladstone asked whether Lord Palm- 
 erston thought that was the position which it would become 
 a civilized and Christian nation like England to claim for 
 her citizens. The glory of being a " civis Romanus" was 
 far too strong for any mere argument drawn from fact and 
 common-sense to combat against it. The phrase had carried 
 the day. When Mr. Cockburn, in supporting Lord Palmer- 
 ston's policy, quoted from classical authority to show that 
 the Romans had always avenged any wrongs done to their 
 citizens, and cited the words, " Quot bella majores nostri 
 suscepti erint, quot cives Roman! injuria affecti sunt, navicu- 
 larii retenti, mercatores spoliati esse dicerentur," the House 
 cheered more tumultuously than ever. In vain was the calm, 
 grave, studiously moderate remonstrance of Sir Robert Peel, 
 who, while generously declaring that Palmerston's speech 
 " made us all proud of the man who delivered it," yet re- 
 corded his firm protest against the style of policy which 
 
330 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Palmerston's eloquence had endeavored to glorify. The 
 victory was all with Palmerston. He had, in the words of 
 Shakspeare's Rosalind, wrestled well, and overthrown more 
 than his enemies. 
 
 After a debate of four nights, a majority of forty-six was 
 given for the resolution. The ministry came out not only 
 absolved but triumphant. The odd thing about the whole 
 proceeding is that the ministers in general heartily disap- 
 proved of the sort of policy which Palmerston put so ener- 
 getically into action at least they disapproved, if not his 
 principles, yet certainly his way of enforcing them. Before 
 this debate carne on, Lord John Russell had made up his 
 mind that it would be impossible for him to remain in office 
 with Lord Palmerston as Foreign Secretary. None the less, 
 however, did Lord John Russell defend the policy of the 
 Foreign Office in a speech which Palmerston himself de- 
 scribed as "admirable and first-rate." The ministers felt 
 bound to stand by the actions which they had not repudi- 
 ated at the time when they were done. They could not 
 allow Lord Palmerston to be separated from them in polit- 
 ical responsibility when they had not separated themselves 
 from moral responsibility for his proceedings in time. There- 
 fore they had to defend in Parliament what they did not 
 pretend to approve in pri-vate. The theory of a cabinet al- 
 ways united when attacked rendered, doubtless, such a course 
 of proceeding necessary in Parliamentary tactics. It would, 
 perhaps, be hard to make it seem quite satisfactory to the 
 simple and unsophisticated mind. No part of our duty calls 
 on us to attempt such a task. It was a famous victory we 
 must only settle the question as old Caspar disposed of the 
 doubts about the propriety of the praise given to the Duke 
 of Marlborough and " our good Prince Eugene." " It is not 
 telling a lie," says some one in Thackeray, " it is only voting 
 with your party." But Thackeray had never been in the 
 House of Commons. 
 
 Of many fine speeches made during this brilliant debate 
 we must notice one in particular. It was that of Mr. Cock- 
 burn, then member for Southampton a speech to which 
 allusion has already been made. Never in our time has a 
 reputation been more suddenly, completely, and deservedly 
 made than Mr. Cockburn won by his brilliant display of in- 
 
DON PACIFICO. 331 
 
 genious argument and stirring words. The manner of the 
 speaker lent additional effect to his clever and captivating 
 eloquence. He had a clear, sweet, penetrating voice, a flu- 
 ency that seemed so easy as to make listeners sometimes 
 fancy that it ought to cost no effort, and a grace of gestures 
 such as it must be owned the courts of law where he had 
 had his training do not often teach. Mr. Cockburn defend- 
 ed the policy of Palmerston with an effect only inferior to 
 that produced by Palmerston's own speech, and with a rhe- 
 torical grace and finish to which Palmerston made no preten- 
 sion. In writing to Lord Normanby about the debate, Lord 
 Palmerston distributed his praise to friends and enemies with 
 that generous impartiality which was a fine part of his char- 
 acter. Gladstone's attack on his policy he pronounced " a 
 first-rate performance." Peel and Disraeli he praised like- 
 wise. But " as to Cockburn's," he said, " I do not know that 
 I ever in the course of my life heard a better speech from 
 anybody, without any exception." The effect which Cock- 
 burn's speech produced on the House was well described in 
 the House itself by one who rose chiefly for the purpose of 
 disputing the principles it advocated. Mr. Cobden observed 
 that when Mr. Cockburn had concluded his speech, " one- 
 half of the Treasury benches were left empty, while honor- 
 able members ran after one another, tumbling over each 
 other in their haste to shake hands with the honorable and 
 learned member." Mr. Cockburn's career was safe from 
 that hour. It is needless to say that he well upheld in 
 after years the reputation he won in a night. The brilliant 
 and sudden success of the member for Southampton was but 
 the fitting prelude to the abiding distinction won by the 
 Lord Chief-justice of England. 
 
 One associatiofl^of profound melancholy clings to that 
 great debate. The speech delivered by Sir Robert Peel 
 was the last that was destined to come from his lips. The 
 debate closed on the morning of Saturday, June 29th. It 
 was nearly four o'clock when the division was taken, and 
 Peel left the House as the sunlight was already beginning 
 to stream into the corridors and lobbies. He went home to 
 rest; but his sleep could not be long. He had to attend a 
 meeting of the Royal Commissioners of the Great Industrial 
 Exhibition at twelve, and the meeting was important. The 
 
332 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 site of the building had to be decided upon, and Prince Al- 
 bert and the Commissioners generally relied greatly on the 
 influence of Sir Robert Peel to sustain them against the 
 clamorous objection out-of-doors to the choice of a place in 
 Hyde Park. Peel went to the meeting, and undertook to 
 assume the leading part in defending the decision of the 
 Commissioners before the House of Commons. He return- 
 ed home for a short time after the meeting, and then set out 
 for a ride in the Park. He called at Buckingham Palace, 
 and wrote his name in the Queen's visiting-book. Then, as 
 he was riding up Constitution Hill, he stopped to talk to a 
 young lady, a friend of his, who was also riding. His horse 
 suddenly shied and flung him off; and Peel clinging to the 
 bridle, the animal fell with its knees on his shoulders. The 
 injuries which he received proved beyond all skill of sur- 
 gery. He lingered, now conscious, now delirious with pain, 
 for two or three days ; and he died about eleven o'clock on 
 the night of July 2d. Most of the members of his family 
 and some of his dearest old friends and companions in polit- 
 ical arms were beside him when he died. The tears of the 
 Duke of Wellington in one House of Parliament, and the 
 eloquence of Mr. Gladstone in the other, were expressions as 
 fitting and adequate as might be of the universal feeling of 
 the nation. 
 
 There was no honor which Parliament and the country 
 would not willingly have paid to the memory of Peel. 
 Lord John Russell proposed, with the sanction of the 
 Crown, that his remains should be buried with public hon- 
 ors. But Peel had distinctly declared in his will that lie 
 desired his remains to lie beside those of his father and 
 mother in the family vault at Drayton Bassett. All that 
 Parliament and the country could do, therefore, was to de- 
 cree a monument to him in Westminster Abbey. The offer 
 of a peerage was made to Lady Peel, but, as might perhaps 
 have been expected, it was declined. Lady Peel declared 
 that her own desire was to bear no other name than that by 
 which her husband had been known. She also explained 
 that the express wish of her husband, recorded in his will, 
 was that no member of his family should accept any title or 
 other reward on account of any services Peel might have 
 rendered to his country. No desire could have been more 
 
DON PACIFICO. 333 
 
 honorable to the statesman who had formed and expressed 
 it; none certainly more in keeping with all that was known 
 of the severely unselfish and unostentatious character of Sir 
 Robert Peel. Yet there were persons found to misconstrue 
 his meaning, and to discover offence to the order of aristoc- 
 
 O7 
 
 racy in Peel's determination. A report went about that the 
 great statesman's objection to the acceptance of a peerage 
 by one of his family implied a disparagement of the order 
 of peers, and was founded on feelings of contempt or hostil- 
 ity to the House of Lords. Mr. Goulburn, who was one of 
 Peel's executors, easily explained Peel's meaning, if indeed 
 it needed explanation to any reasonable mind. Peel was 
 impressed with the conviction that it was better for a man 
 to be the son of his own works ; and he desired that his 
 sons, if they were to bear titles and distinctions given them 
 by the State, should win them by their own services and 
 worth, and not simply put them on as an inheritance from 
 their father. As regards himself, it may well be that he 
 thought the name under which he had made his reputation 
 became him better than any new title. He had not looked 
 for reward of that kind, and might well prefer to mark the 
 fact that he did not specially value such distinctions. Nor 
 would it be any disparagement to the peerage a thing 
 which in the case of a man with Peel's opinions is utterly 
 out of the question to think that much of the dignity of a 
 title depends on its long descent and its historic record, and 
 that a fire-new, specially invented title to a man already 
 great is a disfigurement, or at least a disguise, rather than 
 an adornment. When titles were abolished during the great 
 French Revolution, Mirabeau complained of being called 
 " Citizen Riquetti " in the official reports of the Assembly. 
 "With your Riquetti," he said, angrily, " you have puzzled 
 all Europe for days." Europe knew Count Mirabeau, but 
 was for some time bewildered by Citizen Riquetti. Sir 
 Robert Peel may well have objected to a reversal of the 
 process, and to the bewildering of Europe by disguising a 
 famous citizen in a new peerage. 
 
 "Peel's death," Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a 
 few days after, putting the remark at the close of a long 
 letter about the recent victory of the Government and the 
 congratulations he had personally received, "is a great ca- 
 
334 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 lamity, and one that seems to have had no adequate cause. 
 He was a very bad and awkward rider, and his horse might 
 have been sat by any better equestrian ; but he seems some- 
 how or other to have been entangled in the bridle, and to 
 have pulled the horse to step or kneel upon him. The in- 
 jury to the shoulder was severe but curable; that which 
 killed him was a broken rib forced with great violence in- 
 ward into the lungs." The cause of Peel's death would 
 certainly not have been adequate, as Lord Palmerston put 
 it, if great men needed prodigious and portentous events 
 to bring about their end. But the stumble of a horse has 
 been found enough in other instances too. Peel seemed des- 
 tined for great things yet when he died. He was but in his 
 sixty -third year; he was some years younger than Lord 
 Palmerston, who may be said, without exaggeration, to have 
 just achieved his first great success. Many circumstances 
 were pointing to Peel as likely before long to be summoned 
 again to the leadership in the government of the country. 
 It is superfluous to say that his faculties as Parliamentary 
 orator or statesman were not showing any signs of decay. 
 An English public man is not supposed to show signs of 
 decaying faculties at sixty-two. The shying horse, and per- 
 haps the bad ridership, settled the question of Peel's career 
 between them. We have already endeavored to estimate 
 that career and to do justice to Peel's great qualities. He 
 was not a man of original genius, but he was one of the best 
 administrators of other men's ideas that ever knew how and 
 when to leave a party and to serve a country. He was 
 never tried by the severe tests which tell whether a man is 
 a statesman of the highest order. He was never tried as 
 Cavour, for example, was tried, by conditions which placed 
 the national existence of his country in jeopardy. He had 
 no such trials to encounter as ^yere forced on Pitt. He was 
 the minister of a country always peaceful, safe, and prosper- 
 ous. But he was called upon at a trying moment to take a 
 step on which assuredly much of the prosperity of the peo- 
 ple and nearly all the hopes of his party, along with his 
 own personal reputation, were imperilled. He did not want 
 courage to take the step, and he had the judgment to take 
 it at the right time. He bore the reproaches of that which 
 had been his party with dignity and composure. He was 
 
DON PACIFICO. 335 
 
 undoubtedly, as Lord Beaconsfield calls him, a great mem- 
 ber of Parliament ; but he was surely also a great minister. 
 Perhaps he only needed a profounder trial at the hands of 
 fate to have earned the title of a great man. 
 
 To the same year belongs the close of another remarkable 
 career. On August 26th, 1850, Louis Philippe, lately King 
 of the French, died at Claremont, the guest of England. 
 Few men in history had gone through greater reverses. 
 Son of Philippe Egalite, brought up in a sort of blending of 
 luxury and scholastic self-denial, under the contrasting in- 
 fluence of his father, and of his teacher, Madame de Gen- 
 lis, a woman full, at least, of virtuous precept and Rousseau- 
 like profession, he showed great force of character during 
 the Revolution. He still regarded France as his country, 
 though she no longer gave a throne to any of his family. 
 He had fought like a brave young soldier at Valmy and 
 Jemappes. "Egalite Fils" says Carlyle, speaking of the 
 young man at Valmy "Equality Junior, a light, gallant 
 field-officer, distinguished himself by intrepidity it is the 
 same intrepid individual who now, as Louis Philippe, with- 
 out the Equality, struggles under sad circumstances to be 
 called King of the French for a season." It is he who, as 
 Carlyle also describes it, saves his sister with such spirit and 
 energy, when Madame de Genlis, with nil her fine precepts, 
 would have left her behind to whatever danger. "Behold 
 the young Princely Brother, struggling hitherward, hastily 
 calling; bearing the Princess in his arms. Hastily he has 
 clutched the poor young lady up, in her very night-gown, 
 nothing saved of her goods except the watch from the pil- 
 low; with brotherly despair he flings her in, among the 
 bandboxes, into Geulis's chaise, into Genlis's arms. . . . 
 The brave young Egalite has a most wild morrow to look 
 for; but now only himself to carry through it." The brave 
 young Egalite had, indeed, a wild time before him. A wan- 
 derer, an exile, a fugitive, a teacher in Swiss and American 
 schools; bearing many and various names as he turned to 
 many callings and saw many lands, always, perhaps, keeping 
 in mind that Danton had laid his great hand upon his head 
 and declared that the boy must one day be King of France. 
 Then in the whirligig of time the opportunity that long 
 might have seemed impossible came round at last; and the 
 
336 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 soldier, exile, college teacher, wanderer among American 
 Indian tribes, resident of Philadelphia, and of Bloomingdale 
 in the New York suburbs, is King of the French. Well had 
 Carlyle gauged his position, after some years of reign, when 
 he described him " as struggling under sad circumstances 
 to be called King of the French for a season." He ought 
 to have been a great man ; he had had a great training. 
 All his promise as a man faded when his seeming success 
 began to shine. He had apparently learned nothing of ad- 
 versity; he was able to learn nothing of prosperity and 
 greatness. Of all men whom his time had tried, he ought 
 best to have known, one might think, the vanity of human 
 schemes, and the futility of trying to uphold thrones on 
 false principles. He intrigued for power as if his previous 
 experience had taught him that power once obtained was 
 inalienable. He seemed at one time to have no real faith in 
 anything but chicane. He made the fairest professions, and 
 did the meanest, falsest things. He talked to Queen Vic- 
 toria in language that might have brought tears into a 
 father's eyes; and he was all the time planning the detest- 
 able juggle of the Spanish marriages. He did not even 
 seem to retain the courage of his youth. It went, apparent- 
 ly, with whatever of true, unselfish principle he had when 
 he was yet a young soldier of the Republic. He was like 
 our own James II., who as a youth extorted the praise of 
 the great Turenne for his bravery, and as a king earned the 
 scorn of the world for his pusillanimous imbecility. Some 
 people say that there remained a gleam of perverted princi- 
 ple in Louis Philippe which broke out just at the close, and, 
 unluckily for him, exactly at the wrong time. It is assert- 
 ed that he could have put down the movement of 1848 in 
 the beginning with one decisive word. Certainly those 
 who began that movement were as little prepared as he for 
 its turning out a revolution. It is generally assumed that 
 he halted and dallied and refused to give the word of com- 
 mand out of sheer weakness of mind and lack of courage. 
 But the assumption, according to some, is unjust. Their 
 theory is that Louis Philippe at that moment of crisis was 
 seized with a conscientious scruple, and believed that having 
 been called to power by the choice of the people called to 
 rule not as King of France, but as King of the French as 
 
DON PACIFICO. 337 
 
 King, that is to say, of the French people so long as they 
 chose to have him he was not authorized to maintain him- 
 self on that throne by force. The feeling would have been 
 just and right if it were certain that the French people, or 
 any majority of the French people, really wished him away, 
 and were prepared to welcome a republic. But it was 
 hardly fair to those who set him on the throne to assume at 
 once that he was bound to come down from it at the bid- 
 ding of no matter whom, how few or how many, and with- 
 out in some way trying conclusions to see if it were the 
 voice of France that summoned him to descend, or only the 
 outcry of a moment and a crowd. The scruple, if it existed, 
 lost the throne ; in which we are far from saying that France 
 suffered any great loss. We are bound to say that M. 
 Thiers, who ought to have known, does not seem to have 
 believed in the operation of any scruple of the kind, and 
 ascribes the King's fall simply to blundering and to bad 
 advice. But it would have been curiously illustrative of 
 the odd contradictions of human nature, and especially 
 curious as illustrating that one very odd and mixed nature, 
 if Louis Philippe had really felt such a scruple and yielded 
 to it. He had carried out with full deliberation, and in 
 spite of all remonstrance, schemes which tore asunder hu- 
 man lives, blighted human happiness, played at dice with 
 the destinies of whole nations, and might have involved all 
 Europe in war, and it does not seem that he ever felt one 
 twinge of scruple or acknowledged one pang of remorse. 
 His policy had been unutterably mean and selfish and de- 
 ceitful. His very bourgeois virtues, on which he was so 
 much inclined to boast himself, had been a sham ; for he 
 had carried out schemes which defied and flouted the first 
 principles' of human virtue, and made as light of the honor 
 of woman as of the integrity of man. It would humor the 
 irony of fate if he had sacrificed his crown to a scruple 
 which a man of really high principle would well have felt 
 justified in banishing from his mind. One is reminded of 
 the daughter of Macklin, the famous actor, who having 
 made her success on the stage by appearing constantly in 
 pieces which compelled the most liberal display of form and 
 limbs to all the house and all the town, died of a slight in- 
 jury to her knee, which she allowed to grow mortal rather 
 I. 15 
 
338 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 than permit any doctor to look at the suffering place. In 
 Louis Philippe's case, too, the scruple would show so oddly 
 that even the sacrifice it entailed could scarcely make us 
 regard it with respect. 
 
 He died in exile among us, the clever, unwise, grand, mean 
 old man. There was a great deal about him which made 
 him respected, in private life, and when he had nothing to 
 do with state intrigues and the foreign policy of courts. 
 He was much liked in England, where for many years after 
 his sons lived. But there were Englishmen who did not 
 like him, and did not readily forgive him. One of these was 
 Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother a 
 few days after the death of Louis Philippe, expressing his 
 sentiments thereupon with the utmost directness. "The 
 death of Louis Philippe," he said, "delivers me from my 
 most artful and inveterate enemy, whose position gave him 
 in many ways the power to injure me." Louis Philippe al- 
 ways detested Lord Palmerston, and, according to Thiers, 
 was constantly saying witty and spiteful things of the Eng- 
 lish minister, which good-natured friends as constantly 
 brought to Palmerston's ears. When Lord Palmerston did 
 not feel exactly as a good Christian ought to have felt, he 
 at least never pretended to any such feeling. The same 
 letter contains immediately after a reference to Sir Robert 
 Peel. It, too, is characteristic. " Though I am sorry for 
 the death of Peel from personal regard, and because it is no 
 doubt a great loss to the country, yet, so far as my own 
 political position is concerned, I do not think that lie was 
 ever disposed to do me any good turn." A little while be- 
 fore, Prince Albert, writing to his friend Baron Stockmar, 
 had spoken of Peel as having somewhat unduly favored 
 Palmerston's foreign policy in the great Pacifico debate, or 
 at least not having borne as severely as he might upon it, 
 and for a certainly not selfish reason. " He " (Peel) " could 
 not call the policy good, and yet he did not wish to damage 
 the ministry, and this solely because he considered that a 
 Protectionist Ministry succeeding them would be dangerous 
 to the country, and had quite determined not to take office 
 himself. But would the fact that his health no longer ad- 
 mitted of his doing so have been sufficient, as time went on, 
 to make his followers and friends bear with patient resigna- 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 339 
 
 tion their own permanent exclusion from office ? I doubt 
 it." The Prince might well doubt it: if Peel had lived, it is 
 all but certain that he would have had to take office. It is 
 curious, however, to notice how completely Prince Albert 
 and Lord Palmerston are at odds in their way of estimating 
 Peel's political attitude before his death. Lord Palmer- 
 ston's quiet way of setting Peel down as one who would 
 never be disposed to do him a good turn is characteristic 
 of the manner in which the Foreign Secretary went in for 
 the game of politics. Palmerston was a man of kindly 
 instincts and genial temperament. He was much loved by 
 his friends. His feelings were always directing him toward 
 a certain half-indolent benevolence. But the game of poli- 
 tics was to him like the hunting-field. One cannot stop to 
 help a friend out of a ditch, or to lament over him if he is 
 down and seriously injured : for the hour the only thing is 
 to keep on one's way. In the political game Lord Palmer- 
 ston was playing, enemies were only obstacles, and it would 
 be absurd to pretend to be sorry when they were out of his 
 path : therefore there is no affectation of generous regret 
 for Louis Philippe. Political rivals, even if private friends, 
 are something like obstacles too. Palmerston is of opinion 
 that Peel would never be disposed to do him a good turn, 
 and therefore indulges in no sentimental regret for his death. 
 He is a loss to the country, no doubt, and personally one 
 is sorry for him, of course, and all that : " which done, God 
 take King Edward to his mercy, and leave the world for 
 me to bustle in." The world certainly was more free hence- 
 forth for Lord Palmerston's active and unresting spirit to 
 bustle in. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 
 
 THE autumn of 1850 and the greater part of 1851 were 
 disturbed by an agitation which seems strangely out of 
 keeping with our present condition of religious liberty and 
 civilization. A struggle with the Papal Court might ap- 
 pear to be a practical impossibility for the England of our 
 time. The mind has to go back some centuries to put it- 
 
340 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 self into what would appear the proper framework for such 
 events. Legislation or even agitation against Papal aggres- 
 sion would seem about as superfluous in our modern Eng- 
 lish days, as the use of any of the once -popular charms 
 which were believed to hinder witches of their will. The 
 story is extraordinary, and is in many ways instructive. 
 
 For some time previous to 1850 there had been, as we 
 have seen already, a certain movement among some schol- 
 arly, mystical men in England toward the Roman Church. 
 We have already shown how this movement began, and 
 how little it could fairly be said to represent any actual im- 
 pulse of reaction among the English people. But it unques- 
 tionably made a profound impression in Rome. The court 
 of Rome then saw everything through the eyes of ecclesias- 
 tics ; and a Roman Catholic ecclesiastic not well acquainted 
 with the actual conditions of English life might well be ex- 
 cused if, when he found that two or three great Englishmen 
 had gone over to the Church, he fancied that they were but 
 the vanguard of a vast popular or national movement. It 
 is clear that the court of Rome was quite mistaken as to 
 the religious condition of England. The most chimerical 
 notions prevailed in the Vatican. To the eyes of Papal en- 
 thusiasm the whole English nation was only waiting for 
 some word in season to return to the spiritual jurisdiction 
 of Rome. The Pope had not been fortunate in many things. 
 He had been a fugitive from his own city, and had been re- 
 stored only by the force of French arms. He was a thor- 
 oughly good, pious, and genial man, not seeing far into the 
 various ways of human thought and national character ; 
 and to his mind there was nothing unreasonable in the idea 
 that Heaven might have made up for the domestic disasters 
 of his reign by making him the instrument of the conver- 
 sion of England. No better proof can be given of the man- 
 ner in which he and his advisers misunderstood the English 
 people than the step with which his sanguine zeal inspired 
 him. The English people, even while they yet bowed to 
 the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy, were always keenly 
 jealous of any ecclesiastical attempt to control the political 
 action or restrict the national independence of England. 
 The history of the relations between England and Rome, 
 for long generations before England had any thought of re- 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 841 
 
 nouncing the faith of Rome, might have furnished ample 
 proof of this to any one who gave himself the trouble to 
 turn over a few pages of English chronicles. The Pope did 
 not read English, and his advisers did not understand Eng- 
 land. Accordingly, he took a step, with the view of encour- 
 aging and inviting England to become converted, which 
 was calculated specially and instantly to defeat its own pur- 
 pose. Had the great majority of the English people been 
 really drawing toward the verge of a reaction to Rome, 
 such an act as that done by the Pope might have startled 
 them back to their old attitude. The assumption of Papal 
 authority over England only filled the English people with 
 a new determination to repudiate and resist every preten- 
 sion at spiritual authority on the part of the court of Rome. 
 The time has so completely passed away, and the sup- 
 posed pretensions have come to so little, that the most zeal- 
 ous Protestant can afford to discuss the whole question now 
 with absolute impartiality and unruffled calmness. Every 
 one can clearly see now that if the Pope was mistaken in 
 the course he took, and if the nation in general was amply 
 justified in resenting even a supposed attempt at foreign 
 interference, the piece of legislation to which the occasion 
 gave birth was riot a masterpiece of statesmanship, nor was 
 the manner in which it was carried through always credita- 
 ble to the good-sense of Parliament and the public. The 
 Papal aggression in itself was perhaps a measure to smile at 
 rather than to arouse great national indignation. It con- 
 
 O O 
 
 sisted in the issue of a Papal bull, "given at St. Peter's, 
 Rome, under the seal of the fisherman," and directing the 
 establishment in England "of a hierarchy of bishops deriv- 
 ing their titles from their own sees, which we constitute by 
 the present letter in the various apostolic districts." It is a 
 curious evidence of the little knowledge of England's con- 
 dition possessed by the court of Rome then, that although 
 five-sixths at least of the Catholics in England were Irish by 
 birth or extraction, the newly -appointed bishops were all, 
 or nearly all, Englishmen unconnected with Ireland. 
 
 An Englishman of the present day would be probably in- 
 clined to ask, on hearing the effect of the bull, Is that all ? 
 Being told that that was all, he would probably have gone 
 on to ask, What does it matter? Who cares whether the 
 
342 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Pope gives new titles to his English ecclesiastics or not ? 
 What Protestant is even interested in knowing whether a 
 certain Catholic bishop living in England is called Bishop 
 of Mesopotamia, or of Lambeth? There always were Cath- 
 olic bishops in England. There were Catholic archbishops. 
 They were free to go and come, to preach and teach as they 
 liked ; to dress as they liked ; for all that nineteen out of 
 every twenty Englishmen cared, they might have been also 
 free to call themselves what they liked. Any Protestant 
 who mixed with Roman Catholics, or knew anything about 
 their usages, knew that they were in the habit of calling 
 their bishops " rny lord," and their archbishops "your grace." 
 He knew, of course, that they had not the slightest legal 
 right to use such high-sounding titles, but this did not trou- 
 ble him in the least. It was only a ceremonial intended for 
 Catholics, and it did not give him either offence or concern. 
 Why then should he be expected to disturb his mind be- 
 cause the Pope chose to direct that the English Roman 
 Catholics should call a man Bishop of Liverpool or Arch- 
 bishop of Westminster ? The Pope could not compel him 
 to call them by any such names if he did not think fit ; and 
 unless his attention had been very earnestly drawn to the 
 fact, he never, probably, would have found out that any 
 new titles had been invented for the Catholic hierarchy in 
 England. 
 
 This was the way in which a great many Englishmen re- 
 garded the matter even then. But it must be owned that 
 there was something about the time and manner of the 
 Papal bull calculated to offend the susceptibility of a great 
 and independent nation. The mere fact that a certain move- 
 ment toward Rome had been painfully visible in the ranks 
 of the English Church itself, was enough to make people sen- 
 sitive and jealous. The plain sense of many thoroughly im- 
 partial and cool-headed Englishmen showed them that the 
 two things were connected in the mind of the Pope, and that 
 he had issued his bull because he thought the time was act- 
 ually coming when he might begin to take measures for the 
 spiritual annexation of England. His pretensions might be 
 of no account in themselves ; but the fact that he made them 
 in the evident belief that they were justified by realities, 
 produced a jarring and painful effect on the mind of Eng- 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 343 
 
 land. The offence lay in the Pope's evident assumption that 
 the change he was making was the natural result of an act- 
 ual change in the national feeling of England. The anger 
 was not against the giving of the new titles, but against 
 the assumption of a new right to give titles representing 
 territorial distinctions in this country. The agitation that 
 sprang up was fiercely heated by the pastoral letter of the 
 chief of the new hierarchy. The Pope had divided England 
 into various dioceses, which he placed under the control of 
 an archbishop and twelve suffragans ; and the new archbish- 
 op was Cardinal Wiseman. Under the title of Archbishop 
 of Westminster and Administrator Apostolic of the Diocese 
 of Southwark, Cardinal Wiseman was now to reside in Lon- 
 don. Cardinal Wiseman was already well known in Eng- 
 land. He was of English descent on his father's side, and 
 of Irish on his mother's; he was a Spaniard by birth, and a 
 Roman by education. His family on both sides was of good 
 position ; his father came of a long line of Essex gentry. 
 Wiseman had held the professorship of Oriental languages 
 in the English College at Rome, and afterward became rec- 
 tor of the college. In 1840 he was appointed by the Pope 
 one of the Vicars Apostolic in England, and held his posi- 
 tion here as Bishop of Melipotamus in partibus infidelium. 
 He was well known to be a fine scholar, an accomplished 
 linguist, and a powerful preacher and controversialist. But 
 he was believed also to be a man of great ecclesiastical am- 
 bition ambition for his Church, that is to say of singular 
 boldness, and of much political ability. The Pope's action 
 was set down as in great measure the work of Wiseman. 
 The Cardinal himself was accepted in the minds of most 
 Englishmen as a type of the regular Italian ecclesiastic 
 bold, clever, ambitious, and unscrupulous. The very fact of 
 his English extraction only militated the more against him 
 in the public feeling. He was regarded as in some sense 
 one who had gone over to the enemy, and who was the more 
 to be dreaded because of the knowledge he carried with 
 him. Perhaps it is not too much to say that in the existing 
 mood of the English people the very title of Cardinal exas- 
 perated the feeling against Wiseman. Had he come as a 
 simple archbishop, the aggression might not have seemed 
 so marked. The title of Cardinal brought back unwelcome 
 
344 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 memories to the English public. It reminded them of a pe- 
 riod of their history when the forces of Rome and those of 
 the national independence were really arrayed against each 
 other in a struggle which Englishmen might justly look on 
 as dangerous. Since those times there had been no cardinal 
 in England. Did it not look ominous that a cardinal should 
 present himself now? The first step taken by Cardinal 
 Wiseman did not tend to charm away this feeling. He is- 
 sued a pastoral letter, addressed to England, on October 7th, 
 1850, which was set forth as "given out of the Flaminian 
 Gate of Rome." This description of the letter was after- 
 ward stated to be in accordance with one of the necessary 
 formularies of the Church of Rome; but it was then as- 
 sumed in England to be an expression of insolence and au- 
 dacity intended to remind the English people that from out 
 of Rome itself came the assertion of supremacy over them. 
 This letter was to be read publicly in all the Roman Cath- 
 olic churches in London. It addressed itself directly to the 
 English people, and it announced that "your beloved coun- 
 try has received a place among the fair churches which, nor- 
 mally constituted, form the splendid aggregate of Catholic 
 communion ; Catholic England has been restored to its orbit 
 in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long 
 vanished ; and begins now anew its course of regularly-ad- 
 justed action round the centre of unity, the source of juris- 
 diction, of light, and of vigor." 
 
 It must be allowed that this was rather imprudent lan- 
 guage to address to a people peculiarly proud of being Prot- 
 estant ; a people of whom their critics say, not wholly with- 
 out reason, that they are somewhat narrow and unsympa- 
 thetic in their Protestantism; that their national tendency 
 is to believe in the existence of nothing really good out- 
 side the limits of Protestantism. In England the National 
 Church is a symbol of victory over foreign enemies and 
 domination at home. It was not likely that the English 
 people could regard it as anything but an offence to be told 
 that they were resuming their place as a part of an ecclesi- 
 astical system to which they, of all peoples, looked with dis- 
 like and distrust. We are not saying that the feeling with 
 which the great bulk of the English people regarded Cardi- 
 nal Wiseman's Church was just or liberal. We are simply 
 
 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 345 
 
 recording the unquestionable historical fact that such was 
 the manner in which the English people regarded the Roman 
 Church, in order to show how slender was the probability 
 of their being moved to anything but anger by such expres- 
 sions as those contained in Cardinal Wiseman's letter. But 
 the letter had hardly reached England when the country 
 was aroused by another letter coming from a very different 
 quarter, and intended as a counterblast to the Papal assump- 
 tion of authority. This was Lord John Russell's famous 
 Durham letter. Russell had the art of writing letters that 
 exploded like bomb-shells in the midst of some controversy. 
 His Edinburgh letter had set the cabinet of Sir Robert Peel 
 on to recognize the fact that something must be done with 
 the Free-trade question; and now his Durham letter spoke 
 the word that let loose a very torrent of English public feel- 
 ing. The letter was in reply to one from the Bishop of 
 Durham, and was dated "Downing Street, November the 
 4th." Lord John Russell condemned in the most unmeas- 
 ured terms the assumption of the Pope as "a pretension of 
 supremacy over the realm of England, and a claim to sole 
 and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the Queen's 
 supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and 
 with 'the spiritual independence of the nation as asserted 
 even in the Roman Catholic times." Lord John Russell 
 went on to say that his alarm was by no means equal to his 
 indignation ; that the liberty of Protestantism had been 
 enjoyed too long in England to allow of any successful 
 attempt to impose a foreign yoke npon men's minds and 
 consciences, and that the laws of the country should be care- 
 fully examined, and the propriety of adopting some addi- 
 tional measures deliberately considered. But Lord John 
 Russell went farther than all this. He declared that there 
 was a danger that alarmed him more than any aggression 
 from a foreign sovereign, and that was "the danger within 
 the gates from the unworthy sons of the Church of England 
 herself." Clergymen of that Church, he declared, had been 
 " leading their flocks step by step to the verge of the preci- 
 pice." What, he asked, meant " the honor paid to saints, 
 the claim of infallibility for the Church, the superstitious 
 use of the sign of the Cross, the muttering of the Liturgy so 
 as to disguise the language in which it is written, the recom- 
 
 15* 
 
346 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 mendation of auricular confession, and the administration of 
 penance and absolution?" The letter closed with a sentence 
 which gave especial offence to Roman Catholics, but which 
 Lord John Russell afterward explained, and indeed the con- 
 text ought to have shown, was not meant as any attack on 
 their religion or their ceremonial: "I have little hope that 
 the propounders and framers of these innovations will desist 
 from their insidious course; but I rely with confidence on 
 the people of England; and I will not bate one jot of heart 
 or hope so long as the glorious principles and the immortal 
 martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by 
 the great mass of a nation which looks with contempt on 
 the mummeries of superstition, and with scorn at the labori- 
 ous endeavors which are now making to confine the intellect 
 and enslave the soul." It is now clear, from the very terms 
 of this letter, that Lord John Russell meant to apply these 
 words to the practices within the English Church which he 
 had so strongly condemned in the earlier passages, and which 
 alone, he said, he regarded with any serious alarm. But the 
 Roman Catholics in general, and the majority of persons of 
 all sects, accepted them as a denunciation of "Popery." 
 The Catholics looked upon them as a declaration of war 
 against Catholicism ; the fanatical of the other side wel- 
 comed them as a trumpet-call to a new "No Popery" 
 agitation. 
 
 The very day after the letter appeared was the Guy Faux 
 anniversary. All over the country the effigies of the Pope 
 and Cardinal Wiseman took the place of the regulation 
 " Guy," and were paraded and burnt amidst tumultuous 
 demonstrations. A colossal procession of "Guys" passed 
 down Fleet Street, the principal figure of which, a gigantic 
 form of sixteen feet high, seated in a .chariot, had to be bent 
 down, compelled to " veil his crest," in order to pass under 
 Temple Bar. This Titanic " Guy " was the new Cardinal in 
 his red robes. In Exeter a yet more elaborate Anti-Papal 
 demonstration was made. A procession of two hundred per- 
 sons in character-dresses marched round the venerable cathe- 
 dral amidst the varied effulgence of colored lights. The pro- 
 cession represented the Pope, the new Cardinal, and the In- 
 quisition, various of the Inquisitors brandishing instruments 
 of torture. Considerable sums of money were spent on these 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 347 
 
 popular demonstrations, the only interest in which now is 
 that they serve to illustrate the public sentiment of the 
 hour. Mr. Disraeli good-naturedly endeavored at once to 
 foment the prevailing heat of public temper, and at the same 
 time to direct its fervor against the ministry themselves, by 
 declaring in a published letter that he could hardly blame 
 the Pope for supposing himself at liberty to divide England 
 into bishoprics, seeing the encouragement he had got from 
 the ministers themselves by the recognition they had offered 
 to the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland. "The fact is," 
 Mr. Disraeli said, " the whole question has been surrendered 
 and decided in favor of the Pope by the present Govern- 
 ment. The ministers who recognized the pseudo-Archbish- 
 op of Tuam as a peer and a prelate cannot object to the 
 appointment of a pseudo- Archbishop of Westminster, even 
 though he be a cardinal." As a matter of fact, it was not 
 the existing Government that had recognized the rank of 
 the Irish Catholic prelates. The recognition had been for- 
 mally arranged in January, 1845, by a royal warrant or com- 
 mission for carrying out the Charitable Bequests Act, which 
 gave the Irish Catholic prelates rank immediately after the 
 prelates of the Established Church of the same degree. But 
 the letter of Mr. Disraeli, like that of Lord John Russell, 
 served to inflame passions on both sides, and to put the coun- 
 try in the worst possible mood for any manner of wholesome 
 legislation. Never during the same generation had there 
 been such an outburst of anger on both sides of the religious 
 controversy. It was a curious incident in political history 
 that Lord John Russell, who had, more than any Englishman 
 then living, been identified with the principles of religious 
 liberty, who had sat at the feet of Fox, and had for his 
 closest friend the Catholic poet, Thomas Moore, came to be 
 regarded by Roman Catholics as the bitterest enemy of 
 their creed and their rights of worship. 
 
 The ministry felt that something must be done. They 
 could not face Parliament without some piece of legislation 
 to satisfy public feeling. Many, even among the most zeal- 
 ous Protestants, deeply regretted that Lord John Russell 
 had written anything on the subject. Not a few Roman 
 Catholics of position and influence bitterly lamented the in- 
 discretion of the Papal court. The mischief, however, was 
 
348 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 now fairly afoot. The step taken by the Pope had set the 
 country aflame. Every day crowded and tumultuous meet- 
 ings were held to denounce the action of the court of Rome. 
 Before the end of the year something like seven thousand 
 such meetings had been held throughout the kingdom. 
 Sometimes the Roman Catholic party mustered strong at 
 such demonstrations, and the result was rioting and dis- 
 turbance. Addresses poured in upon the Queen and the 
 ministers calling for decided action against the assumption 
 of Papal authority. About the same time Father Gavazzi, 
 an Italian republican who had been a priest, came to Lon- 
 don and began a series of lectures against the Papacy. He 
 was a man of... great rhetorical power, with a remarkable 
 command of the eloquence of passion and denunciation. 
 His lectures were at first given only in Italian, and there- 
 fore did not appeal to a popular English audience. But 
 they were reported in the papers at much length, and they 
 contributed not a little to swell the tide of public feeling 
 against the Pope and the court of Rome. The new Lord 
 Chancellor, Lord Truro, created great applause and tumult 
 at the Lord Mayor's dinner by quoting from Shakspeare the 
 words, "Under my feet I'll stamp thy cardinal's hat, in spite 
 of Pope or dignities of Church." Charles Kean, the trage- 
 dian, was interrupted by thundering peals of applause and 
 the rising of the whole audience to their feet when, as King 
 John, he proclaimed that " no Italian priest shall tithe or 
 toll in our dominion." Long afterward, and when the storm 
 seemed to have wholly died away, Cardinal Wiseman, going 
 in a carriage through the streets of Liverpool to deliver a 
 lecture on a purely literary subject to a general audience, 
 was pelted with stones by a mob who remembered the Pa- 
 pal assumption and the passions excited by the Ecclesias- 
 tical Titles Act. 
 
 The opening of Parliament came. The ministry had to 
 do something. No ministry that ever held power in Eng- 
 land could have attempted to meet the House of Commons 
 without some project of a measure to allay public excite- 
 ment. On February 4th, 1851, the Queen in person opened 
 Parliament. Her speech contained some sentences which 
 were listened to with the profoundest interest because they 
 referred to the question which was agitating all England. 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 349 
 
 " The recent assumption of certain ecclesiastical titles con- 
 ferred by a foreign Power has excited strong feelings in 
 this country ; and large bodies of my subjects have present- 
 ed addresses to me expressing attachment to the Throne, 
 and praying that such assumptions should be resisted. I 
 have assured them of my resolution to maintain the rights 
 of my crown and the independence of the nation against all 
 encroachments, from whatever quarter they may proceed. 
 I have at the same time expressed my earnest desire and 
 firm determination, under God's blessing, to maintain unim- 
 paired the religious liberty which is so justly prized by the 
 people of this country." How little of inclination to any 
 measures dealing unfairly with Roman Catholics was in 
 the mind of the Queen herself may be seen from a letter in 
 which, when the excitement was at its height, she had ex- 
 pressed her opinion to her aunt, the Duchess of Gloucester. 
 "I would never have consented to anything which breathed 
 a spirit of intolerance. Sincerely Protestant as I always 
 have been and always shall be, and indignant as I am at 
 those who call themselves Protestants while they are, in 
 fact, quite the contrary, I much regret the unchristian and 
 intolerant spirit exhibited by many people at the public 
 meetings. I cannot bear to hear the violent abuse of the 
 Catholic religion, which is so painful and so cruel toward 
 the many good and innocent Roman Catholics. However, 
 we must hope and trust this excitement will soon cease, 
 and that the wholesome effect of it upon our own Church 
 will be lasting." 
 
 "The Papal aggression question," Lord Palmerston wrote 
 to his brother just before the opening of Parliament, " will 
 give us some trouble, and give rise to stormy debates. Our 
 difficulty will be to find out a measure which shall satisfy 
 reasonable Protestants without violating those principles 
 of liberal toleration which we are pledged to. I think we 
 shall succeed. . . . The thing itself, in truth, is little or noth- 
 ing, and does not justify the irritation. What has goaded 
 the nation is the manner, insolent and ostentatious, in which 
 it has been done. . . . We must bring in a measure. The 
 country would not be satisfied without some legislative en- 
 actment. We shall make it as gentle as possible. The vio- 
 lent party will object to it for its mildness, and will endeavor 
 
350 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 to drive us farther." A measure brought in only because 
 something must be done to satisfy public opinion is not like- 
 ly to be a very valuable piece of legislation. The ministry 
 in this case were embarrassed by the fact that they really 
 did not particularly want to do anything except to satisfy 
 public opinion for the moment, and get rid of all the contro- 
 versy. They were placed between two galling fires. On 
 the one side were the extreme Protestants, to whom Palm- 
 erston alluded as violent, and who were eager for severe 
 measures against the Catholics ; and on the other were the 
 Roman Catholic supporters of the ministry, who protested 
 against any legislation whatever on the subject. It would 
 have been simply impossible to find any safe and satisfactory 
 path of compromise which all could consent to walk. The 
 ministry did the best they could to frame a measure which 
 should seem to do something and yet do little or nothing. 
 Two or three days after the meeting of Parliament, Lord 
 John Russell introduced his bill to prevent the assumption 
 by Roman Catholics of titles taken from any territory or 
 place within the United Kingdom. The measure proposed 
 to prohibit the use of all such titles under penalty, and to 
 render void all acts done by or bequests made to persons 
 under such titles. The Roman Catholic Relief Act imposed 
 a penalty of one hundred pounds for every assumption of a 
 title taken from an existing see. Lord John Russell pro- 
 posed now to extend the penalty to the assumption of any 
 title whatever from any place in the United Kingdom. The 
 reception which was given to Lord John Russell's motion 
 for leave to bring in this bill was not encouraging. Usually 
 leave to bring in a bill is granted as a matter of course. 
 Some few general observations of extemporaneous and 
 guarded criticism are often made ; but the common practice 
 is to offer no opposition. On this occasion, however, it was 
 at once made manifest that no measure, however " gentle," 
 to use Lord Palmerston's word, would be allowed to pass 
 without obstinate opposition. Mr. Roebuck described the 
 bill as "one of the meanest, pettiest, and most futile meas- 
 ures that ever disgraced even bigotry itself." Mr. Bright 
 called it " little, paltry, and miserable a mere sham to bol- 
 ster up Church ascendency." Mr. Disraeli declared that he 
 would not oppose the introduction of the bill ; but he spoke 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 351 
 
 of it in language of as much contempt as Mr. Roebuck and 
 Mr. Bright had used, calling it a mere piece of petty perse- 
 cution. " Was it for this," Mr. Disraeli scornfully asked, 
 " that the Lord Chancellor trampled on a cardinal's hat 
 amidst the patriotic acclamations of the metropolitan munic- 
 ipality V" Sir Robert Inglis, on the part of the more extreme 
 Protestants, objected to the bill on the ground that it did 
 not go far enough. The debate on the motion for leave to 
 bring in the bill was renewed for night after night, and the 
 fullest promise of an angry and prolonged resistance was 
 given. Yet so strong was the feeling in favor of some leg- 
 islation that when the division was taken, three hundred and 
 ninety-five votes were given for the motion and only sixty- 
 three against it. The opponents of the measure had on their 
 side not only all the prominent champions of religious liber- 
 ty, like Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and 
 Mr. Bright, but also Protestant politicians of such devotion 
 to the interests of the Church as Mr. Roundell Palmer, after- 
 ward Lord Selborne, and Mr. Beresford Hope ; and of course 
 they had with them all the Irish Catholic members. Yet 
 the motion for leave to bring in the bill was carried by this 
 overwhelming majority. The ministers had, at all events, 
 ample justification, so far as Parliamentary tactics were 
 concerned, for the introduction of their measure. 
 
 If, however, we come to regard the ministerial proposal as 
 a piece of practical legislation, the case to be made out for 
 them is not strong, nor is the abortive result of their efforts 
 at all surprising. They set out on the enterprise without 
 any real interest in it, or any particular confidence in its 
 success. It is probable that Lord John Russell alone of all 
 the ministers had any expectation of a satisfactory result to 
 come of the piece of legislation they were attempting. We 
 have seen what Lord Palmerston thought on the whole sub- 
 ject. The ministers were, in fact, in the difficulty of all 
 statesmen who bring in a measure, not because they them- 
 selves are clear as to its necessity or its efficacy, but because 
 they find that something must be done to satisfy public feel- 
 ing, and they do not know of anything better to do at the 
 moment. The history of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was, 
 therefore, a history of blunder, unlucky accident, and failure 
 from the moment it was brought in until its ignominious and 
 
352 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ridiculous repeal many years after, and when its absolute 
 impotence had been not merely demonstrated but forgotten. 
 
 The Government at first, as we have seen, resolved to im- 
 pose a penalty on the assumption of ecclesiastical titles by 
 Roman Catholic prelates from places in the United King- 
 dom, and to make null and void all acts done or bequests 
 made in virtue of such titles. But they found that it would 
 be absolutely impossible to apply such legislation to Ire- 
 land. In that country a Catholic hierarchy had long been 
 tolerated, and all the functions of a regular hierarchy had 
 been in full and formal operation. To apply the new meas- 
 ure to Ireland would have been virtually to repeal the Ro- 
 man Catholic Relief Act and restore the penal laws. On 
 the other hand, the ministers were not willing to make one 
 law against titles for England and another for Ireland. They 
 were driven, therefore, to the course of withdrawing two of 
 the stringent clauses of the bill, and leaving it little more 
 than a mere declaration against the assumption of unlawful 
 titles. But by doing this they furnished stronger reasons 
 for opposition to both of the two very different parties who 
 had hitherto denounced their way of dealing with the crisis. 
 Those who thought the bill did not go far enough before 
 were, of course, indignant at the proposal to shear it of what- 
 ever little force it had originally possessed. They, on the 
 other hand, who had opposed it as a breach of the principle 
 of religious liberty could now ridicule it with all the great- 
 er effect, on the ground that it violated a principle without 
 even the pretext of doing any practical good as a compensa- 
 tion. In the first instance, the ministry might plead that the 
 crisis was exceptional; that it called for exceptional meas- 
 ures; that something must be done; and that they could 
 not stand on ceremony even with the principle of religious 
 liberty when the interest of the State was at stake. Now 
 they left it in the power of their opponents to say that 
 they were breaking a principle for the sake of introducing a 
 nonentity. 
 
 The debates were long, fierce, and often passionate. The 
 bill, even cut down as it was, had a vast majority on its 
 side. But some of the most illustrious names in the House 
 of Commons were recorded against it ; by far the most elo- 
 quent voices in the House were raised to condemn it. The 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 353 
 
 Irish Roman Catholic members set up a persistent opposi- 
 tion to it, and up to a certain period of its progress put in 
 requisition all the forms of the House to impede it. This 
 part of the story ought not to be passed over without men- 
 tion of the fact that among other effects produced by the 
 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, perhaps the most distinct was the 
 creation of the most worthless band of agitators who ever 
 pretended to speak with the voice of Ireland. These were 
 the men who were called in the House "the Pope's Brass 
 Band," and who were regarded with as much dislike and 
 distrust by all intelligent Irish Catholics and Irish Nation- 
 alists as by the most inveterate Tories. These men leaped 
 into influence by their denunciations of the Ecclesiastical 
 Titles Bill. They were successful for a time in palming 
 themselves off as patriots upon Irish constituencies. They 
 thundered against the bill; they put in motion every mech- 
 anism of delay and obstruction ; some of them were really 
 clever and eloquent; most of them were loud-voiced; they 
 had a grand and heaven-sent opportunity given to them, and 
 they made use of it. They had a leader, the once famous 
 John Sadleir. This man possessed marked ability, and was 
 further gifted with an unscrupulous audacity at least equal 
 to his ability. He went to work deliberately to create for 
 himself a band of followers by whose help he might mount 
 to power. He was a financial swindler as well as a political 
 adventurer. By means of the money he had suddenly ac- 
 quired, and by virtue of his furious denunciations of the anti- 
 Catholic policy of the Government, he was, for a time, able 
 to work the Irish popular constituencies so as to get his own 
 followers into the House and become for the hour a sort of 
 little O'Connell. He had with him some two or three hon- 
 est men, whom he deluded into a belief in the sincerity of 
 himself and his gang of swindling adventurers; and it is only 
 fair to say that by far the most eloquent man of the party 
 appears to have been one of those on whom Sadleir was thus 
 able to impose. Mr. Sadleir's band afterward came to sad 
 grief. He committed .suicide himself to escape the punish- 
 ment of his frauds ; some of his associates fled to foreign 
 countries and hid themselves under feigned names. James 
 Sadleir, brother and accomplice of John, was among these, 
 and underwent that rare mark of degradation in our days, 
 
354 A HISTORY OF OUIi OWN TIMES. 
 
 a formal expulsion from the House of Commons. The Pope's 
 Brass Band and its subsequent history, culminating in the 
 suicide on Hampstead Heath, was about the only practical 
 result of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. 
 
 The bill, reduced in stringency as has been described, 
 made, however, some progress through the House. It was 
 interrupted at one stage by events which had nothing to do 
 with its history. The Government got into trouble of an- 
 other kind. At the opening of the session Mr. Disraeli in- 
 troduced a motion to the effect that the agricultural distress 
 of the country called upon the Government to introduce 
 without delay some measures for its relief. This motion 
 was, in fact, the last spasmodic cry of Protection. Many in- 
 fluential politicians still believed that the cause of Protec- 
 tion was not wholly lost ; that a reaction was possible ; that 
 the Free-trade doctrine would prove a failure and have to 
 be given up ; and they regarded Mr. Disraeli's as a very im- 
 portant motion calling for a strenuous effort in its favor. 
 The Government treated the motion as one for restored 
 Protection, and threw all their strength into the struggle 
 against it. They won, but only by a majority of fourteen. 
 A few days after, Mr. Locke King, member for East Surrey, 
 asked for leave to bring in a bill to assimilate the county 
 franchise to that existing in boroughs. Lord John Russell 
 opposed the motion, and the Government were defeated by 
 100 votes against 52. It was evident that this was only 
 what is called a " snap " vote ; that the House was taken by 
 surprise, and that the result in nowise represented the gen- 
 eral feeling of Parliament. But still it was a vexatious oc- 
 currence for the ministry already humiliated by the small 
 majority they had obtained on Disraeli's motion. Their 
 budget had already been received with very general marks 
 of dissatisfaction. The Chancellor of the Exchequer only 
 proposed a partial and qualified repeal of the window-tax, an 
 impost which was justly detested, and he continued the in- 
 come-tax. The budget was introduced shortly before Mr. 
 Locke King's motion, and every day that had elapsed since 
 its introduction only more and more developed the public 
 dissatisfaction with which it was regarded. IJnder all these 
 circumstances Lord John Russell felt that he had no alter- 
 native but to tender his resignation to the Queen. Leaving 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 355 
 
 his Ecclesiastical Titles Bill suspended in air, he announced 
 that he could no longer think of carrying on the government 
 of the country. 
 
 The question was, who should succeed him. The Queen 
 sent for Lord Stanley, afterward Lord Derby. Lord Stan- 
 ley offered to do his best to form a Government, but was 
 not at all sanguine about the success of the task, nor eager 
 to undertake it. He even recommended that before he made 
 any experiment Lord John Russell should try if he could 
 not do something by getting some of the Peelites, as they 
 were then beginning to be called the followers of Sir Rob- 
 ert Peel who had held with him to the last to join him, and 
 thus patch up the Government anew. This was tried, and 
 failed. The Peelites would have nothing to do with the Ec- 
 clesiastical Titles Bill, and Lord John Russell would not 
 go on without it. On the other hand, Lord Aberdeen, the 
 chief of the Peelites in the House of Lords, would not at- 
 tempt to form a ministry of his own, frankly acknowledging 
 that in the existing temper of the country it would be im- 
 possible for any Government to get on without legislating 
 in some way on the Papal aggression. There was nothing 
 for it but for Lord Stanley to try. He tried without hope, 
 and of course he was unsuccessful. The position of parties 
 was very peculiar. It was impossible to form any combina- 
 tion which could really agree upon anything. There were 
 three parties out of which a ministry might be formed. 
 These were the Whigs, the Conservatives, and the Peelites. 
 The Peelites were a very rising and promising body of men. 
 Among them were Sir James Graham, Lord Canning, Mr. 
 Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, Mr. Cardwell, and some oth- 
 ers almost equally well known. Only these three groups 
 were fairly in the competition for office ; for the idea of a 
 ministry of Radicals and Manchester men was not then like- 
 ly to present itself to any official mind. But how could any 
 one put together a ministry formed from a combination of 
 these three ? The Peelites would not coalesce with the To- 
 ries because of the Protection question, to which Mr. Dis- 
 raeli's motion had given a new semblance of vitality, and be- 
 cause of Lord Stanley's own declaration that he still regard- 
 ed the policy of Free-trade as only an experiment. The 
 Peelites would not combine with the Whigs because of the 
 
356 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The Conservatives would not dis- 
 avow protective ideas ; the Whigs would not give up the Ec- 
 clesiastical Titles Bill. No statesman, therefore, could form 
 a Government without having to count on two great parties 
 being against him on one question or the other. All man- 
 ner of delays took place. The Duke of Wellington was con- 
 sulted ; Lord Lansdowne was consulted. The wit of man 
 could suggest nothing satisfactory. The conditions for ex- 
 tracting any satisfactory solution did not exist. There was 
 nothing better to be done than to ask the ministers who had 
 resigned to resume their places and muddle on as they best 
 could. It is not enough to say that there was nothing bet- 
 ter to be done : there was nothing else to be done. They 
 were, at all events, still administering the affairs of the coun- 
 try, and no one would relieve them of the task. Ipso facto 
 they had to stay. 
 
 The ministers returned to their places and resumed the 
 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. It was then that they made the 
 change in its conditions which has already been mentioned, 
 and thus created new argument against them on both sides 
 of the House of Commons. They struck out of the bill ev- 
 ery word that might appear like an encroachment on the 
 Roman Church within the sphere of its own ecclesiastical 
 operations, and made it simply an Act against the public 
 and ostentatious assumption of illegal titles. The bill was 
 wrangled over until the end of June, and then a large num- 
 ber, some seventy, of the Irish Catholic members publicly 
 seceded from the discussion, and announced that they would 
 take no further part in the divisions. On this some of the 
 strongest opponents of the Papal aggression, led by Sir 
 Frederick Thesiger, afterward Lord Chehnsford, brought in 
 a series of resolutions intended to make the bill more strin- 
 gent than it had been even as originally introduced. The 
 object of the resolutions was principally to give the power 
 of prosecuting and claiming a penalty to anybody, provided 
 he obtained the consent of the law-officers of the Crown, and 
 to make penal the introduction of bulls. The Government 
 opposed the introduction of these amendments, and were put 
 in the awkward position of having to act as antagonists of 
 the party in the country who represented the strongest hos- 
 tility to the Papal aggression. Thus, for the moment, the 
 
THE ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. 357 
 
 author of the Durham letter was seemingly converted into 
 a champion of the Roman Catholic side of the controversy. 
 His championship was ineffective. The Irish members took 
 no part in the controversy, and the Government were beat- 
 en by the ultra-Protestant party on every division. Lord 
 John Russell was bitterly taunted by various of his op- 
 ponents, and was asked with indignation why he did not 
 withdraw the bill when it ceased to be any longer his own 
 scheme. He probably thought by this time that it really 
 made little matter what bill was passed so long as any bill 
 was passed, and that the best thing to do was to get the 
 controversy out of the way by any process. He did not, 
 therefore, withdraw the bill, although Sir Frederick Thesiger 
 carried all his stringent clauses. When the measure came 
 on for a third reading, Lord John Russell moved the omis- 
 sion of the added clauses, but he was defeated by large ma- 
 jorities. The bill was done with so far as the House of 
 Commons was concerned. After an eloquent and powerful 
 protest from Mr. Gladstone against the measure, as one dis- 
 paraging to the great principle of religious freedom, the bill 
 was read a third time. It went up to the House of Lords, 
 was passed there without alteration, although not without 
 opposition, and soon after received the Royal assent. 
 
 This was practically the last the world heard about it. 
 In the Roman Church everything went on as before. The 
 new Cardinal Archbishop still called himself Archbishop of 
 Westminster; some of the Irish prelates made a point of 
 ostentatiously using their territorial titles, in letters address- 
 ed to the ministers themselves. The bitterness of feeling 
 which the Papal aggression and the legislation against it 
 had called up did not indeed pass away very soon. It broke 
 out again and again, sometimes in the form of very serious 
 riot. It turned away, at many an election, the eyes and 
 minds of the constituencies from questions of profound and 
 genuine public interest to dogmatic controversy and the 
 hates of jarring sectaries. It furnished political capital for 
 John Sadleir and his band, and kept them flourishing for 
 awhile ; and it set up in the Irish popular mind a purely im- 
 aginary figure of Lord John Russell, who became regarded 
 as the malign enemy of the Catholic faith and of all relig- 
 ious liberty. But, save for the quarrels aroused at the time, 
 
358 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the act of the Pope and the Act of Parliament were alike 
 dead letters. Nothing came of the Papal bull. England 
 was not restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic 
 Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of 
 London retained their places and their spiritual jurisdiction 
 as before. Cardinal Wiseman remained only a prelate of 
 Roman Catholics. On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Ti- 
 tles Act was never put in force. Nobody troubled about 
 it. Many years after, in 1871,11 was quietly repealed. It 
 died in such obscurity that the outer public hardly knew 
 whether it was above ground or below. Certainly, if the 
 whole agitation showed that England was thoroughly Prot- 
 estant, it also showed that English Protestants had not 
 much of the persecuting spirit. They had no inclination to 
 molest their Catholic neighbors, and only asked to be let 
 alone. The Pope, they be'lieved, had insulted them ; they 
 resented the insult : that was all. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PAKE. 
 
 THE first of May, 1851, will always be memorable as the 
 day on which the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde 
 Park. The year 1851, indeed, is generally associated in the 
 memory of Englishmen with that first Great International 
 Exhibition. As we look back upon it pleasant recollections 
 come up of the great glass palace in Hyde Park, the palace 
 " upspringing from the verdant sod," which Thackeray de- 
 scribed so gracefully and with so much poetic feeling. The 
 strange crowds of the curious of all provinces and all nations 
 are seen again. The marvellous and at that time wholly 
 unprecedented collection of the products of all countries; 
 the glitter of the Koh-i-Noor, the palm-trees beneath the 
 glass roof, the leaping fountains, the statuary, the ores, the 
 ingots, the huge blocks of coal, the lace-work, the loom- work; 
 the Oriental stuffs all these made on the mind of the or- 
 dinary inexpert a confused impression of lavishness, and 
 profusion, and order, and fantastic beauty which was then 
 wholly novel, and could hardly be recalled except in mere 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 359 
 
 memory. The novelty of the experiment was that which 
 made it specially memorable. Many exhibitions of a similar 
 kind have taken place since. Some of these far surpassed 
 that of Hyde Park in the splendor and variety of the collec- 
 tions brought together. Two of them at least those of 
 
 o O 
 
 Paris in 1867 and 1878 were infinitely superior in the array 
 and display of the products, the dresses, the inhabitants of 
 far-divided countries. But the impression which the Hyde 
 Park Exhibition made upon the ordinary mind was like that 
 of the boy's first visit to the play an impression never to 
 be equalled, no matter by what far superior charm of spec- 
 tacle it may in after-years again and again be followed. 
 
 Golden, indeed, were the expectations with which hopeful 
 people welcomed the Exhibition of 1851. It was the first 
 organized to gather all the representatives of the world's 
 industry into one great fair; and there were those who 
 seriously expected that men who had once been prevailed 
 upon to meet together in friendly and peaceful rivalry would 
 never again be persuaded to meet in rivalry of a fiercer kind. 
 It seems extraordinary now to think that any sane person 
 can have indulged in such expectations, or can have imag- 
 ined that the tremendous forces generated by the rival in- 
 terests, ambitions, and passions of races could be subdued 
 into harmonious co-operation by the good sense and good 
 feeling born of a friendly meeting. The Hyde Park Exhi- 
 bition, and all the exhibitions that followed it, have not as 
 yet made the slightest perceptible difference in the warlike 
 tendencies of nations. The Hyde Park Exhibition was 
 often described as the festival to open the long reign of 
 Peace. It might, as a mere matter of chronology, be called 
 without any impropriety the festival to celebrate the close 
 of the short reign of Peace. From that year, 1851, it may 
 be said fairly enough that the world has hardly known a 
 week of peace. The coup (Petal in France closed the year. 
 The Crimean War began almost immediately after, and was 
 followed by the Indian Mutiny, and that by the war between 
 France and Austria, the long civil war in the United States, 
 the Neapolitan enterprises of Garibaldi, and the Mexican 
 intervention, until we come to the war between Austria, 
 Prussia, and Denmark ; the short, sharp struggle for German 
 supremacy between Austria and Prussia, the war between 
 
860 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 France and Germany, and the war between Russia and Tur- 
 key. Such were, in brief summary, the events that quickly 
 followed the great inaugurating Festival of Peace in 1851. 
 Of course those who organized the Great Exhibition were 
 in no way responsible for the exalted and extravagant ex- 
 pectations which were formed as to its effects on the history 
 of the world and the elements of human nature. But there 
 was a great deal too much of the dithyrambic about the 
 style in which many writers and speakers thought fit to 
 describe the Exhibition. With some of these all this was 
 the result of genuine enthusiasm. In other instances the 
 extravagance was indulged in by persons not habitually 
 extravagant, but, on the contrary, very sober, methodical, 
 and calculating, who by the very fact of their possessing 
 eminently these qualities were led into a total misconcep- 
 tion of the influence of such assemblages of men. These 
 calm and wise persons assumed that because they them- 
 selves, if shown that a certain course of conduct was for 
 their material and moral benefit, would instantly follow it 
 and keep to it, it must therefore follow that all peoples and 
 states were amenable to the same excellent principle of self- 
 discipline. War is a foolish and improvident, not to say 
 immoral and atrocious, way of trying to adjust our disputes, 
 they argued; let peoples far divided in geographical situa- 
 tion be only brought together and induced to talk this over, 
 and see how much more profitable and noble is the rivalry 
 of peace in trade and commerce, and they will never think 
 of the coarse and brutal arbitrament of battle any more. 
 Not a few others, it must be owned, indulged in the high- 
 flown glorification of the reign of peace to come because the 
 Exhibition was the special enterprise of the Prince Consort, 
 and they had a natural aptitude for the production of courtly 
 strains. But among all these classes of pa3an-singers it did 
 happen that a good deal of unmerited discredit was cast 
 upon the results of the Great Exhibition, for the enterprise 
 was held responsible for illusions it had of itself nothing to 
 do with creating, and disappointments which were no con- 
 sequence of any failure on its part. Even upon trade and 
 production it is very easy to exaggerate the beneficent in- 
 fluences of an international exhibition. But that such enter- 
 prises have some beneficial influence is beyond doubt; and 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 361 
 
 that they are interesting, instructive, well calculated to edu- 
 cate and refine the minds of nations, may be admitted by 
 the least enthusiastic of men. 
 
 The first idea of the Exhibition was conceived by Prince 
 Albert; and it was his energy and influence which succeed- 
 ed in carrying the idea into practical execution. Probably 
 no influence less great than that which his station gave to 
 the Prince would have prevailed to carry to success so diffi- 
 cult an enterprise. There had been industrial exhibitions 
 before on a small scale and of local limit; but if the idea of 
 an exhibition in which all the nations of the world were to 
 compete had occurred to other minds before, as it may well 
 have done, it was merely as a vague thought, a day-dream, 
 without any claim to a practical realization. Prince Albert 
 was President of the Society of Arts, and this position se- 
 cured him a platform for the effective promulgation of his 
 ideas. On June 30th, 1849, he called a meeting of the Soci- 
 ety of Arts at Buckingham Palace. He proposed that the 
 Society should undertake the initiative in the promotion of 
 an exhibition of the works of all nations. The main idea of 
 Prince Albert was that the exhibition should be divided into 
 four great sections the first to contain raw materials and 
 produce; the second, machinery for ordinary industrial and 
 productive purposes, and mechanical inventions of the more 
 ingenious kind ; the third, manufactured articles ; and the 
 fourth, sculpture, models, and the illustrations of the plastic 
 arts generally. The idea was at once taken up by the Soci- 
 ety of Arts, and by their agency spread abroad. On October 
 17th in the same year a meeting of merchants and bankers 
 was held in London to promote the success of the under- 
 taking. In the first few days of 1850 a formal Commission 
 was appointed "for the promotion of the Exhibition of 
 the Works of All Nations, to be holden in the year 1851." 
 Prince Albert was appointed President of the Commission. 
 The enterprise was now fairly launched. A few days after, 
 a meeting was held in the Mansion House to raise funds in 
 aid of the Exhibition, and ten thousand pounds was at once 
 collected. This, of course, was but the beginning, and a 
 guarantee fund of two hundred thousand pounds was very 
 soon obtained. 
 
 On March 21st, in the same year, the Lord Mayor ofLon- 
 
 I. 16 
 
fc 3b'2 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 don gave a banquet at the Mansion House to the chief 
 magistrates of the cities, towns, and boroughs of the United 
 Kingdom, for the purpose of inviting their co-operation in 
 support of the undertaking. Prince Albert was present, and 
 spoke. He had cultivated the art of speaking with much 
 success, and had almost entirely overcome whatever difficul- 
 ty stood in his way from his foreign birth and education. 
 He never quite lost his foreign accent. No man coming to 
 a new country at the age of manhood as Prince Albert did 
 ever acquired the new tongue in such a manner as to lose 
 all trace of a foreign origin ; and to the end of his career 
 Prince Albert spoke with an accent which, however careful- 
 ly trained, still betrayed its early habitudes. But, except 
 for this slight blemish, Prince Albert may be said to have 
 acquired a perfect mastery of the English language, and he 
 became a remarkably good public speaker. He had, indeed, 
 nothing of the orator in his nature. It was but the extrav- 
 agance of courtliness which called his polished and thought- 
 ful speeches oratory. In the Prince's nature there was nei- 
 ther the passion nor the poetry that are essential to genuine 
 eloquence ; nor were the occasions on which he addressed 
 the English people likely to stimulate a man to eloquence. 
 But his style of speaking was clear, thoughtful, stately, and 
 sometimes even noble. It exactly suited its purpose. It 
 was that of a man who did not set up for an orator; and 
 who, when he spoke, wished that his ideas rather than his 
 words should impress his hearers. It is very much to be 
 doubted whether the English public would be quite delight- 
 ed to have a prince who was also a really great orator. 
 Genuine eloquence would probably impress a great many 
 respectable persons as a gift not exactly suited to a prince. 
 There is even still a certain distrust of the artistic in the 
 English mind as of a sort of thing which is very proper in pro- 
 fessional writers and painters and speakers, but which would 
 hardly become persons of the highest station. Prince Al- 
 bert probably spoke just as well as he could have done with 
 successful effect upon his English audiences. At the dinner 
 in the Mansion House he spoke with great clearness and 
 grace of the purposes of the Great Exhibition. It was, he 
 said, to " give the world a true test, a living picture, of the 
 point of industrial development at which the whole of man- 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 363 
 
 kind has arrived, and a new starting-point from which all 
 nations will be able to direct their further exertions." 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that the project of 
 the Great Exhibition advanced wholly without opposition. 
 Many persons were disposed to sneer at it; many were scep- 
 tical about its doing any good ; not a few still regarded 
 Prince Albert as a foreigner and a pedant, and were slow to 
 believe that anything really practical was likely to be de- 
 veloped under his impulse and protection. A very whim- 
 sical sort of opposition was raised in the House of Commons 
 by a once famous eccentric, the late Colonel Sibthorp. Sib- 
 thorp was a man who might have been drawn by Smollett. 
 His grotesque gestures, his overboiling energy, his uncouth 
 appearance, his huge mustache, marked him out as an object 
 of curiosity in any crowd. He was the subject of one of the 
 most amusing pieces of impromptu parody ever thrown off 
 by a public speaker that in which O'Connell travestied the 
 famous lines about the three poets in three different ages 
 born, and pictured three colonels in three different countries 
 born, winding up with: "The force of Nature could no far- 
 ther go ; to beard the one she shaved the other two." One 
 of the gallant Sibthorp's especial weaknesses was a distrust 
 and detestation of all foreigners. Foreigners he lumped to- 
 gether as a race of beings whose chief characteristics were 
 Popery and immorality. While three -fourths of the pro- 
 moters of the Exhibition were dwelling with the strongest 
 emphasis on the benefit it would bring by drawing into 
 London the representatives of all nations, Colonel Sibthorp 
 was denouncing this agglomeration of foreigners as the 
 greatest curse that could fall upon England. He regarded 
 foreigners much as Isaac of York, in " Ivanhoe," regards the 
 Knight Templars. "When," asks Isaac, in bitter remon- 
 strance, " did Templars breathe aught but cruelty to men 
 and dishonor to women?" Colonel Sibthorp kept asking 
 some such question with regard to foreigners in general and 
 their expected concourse to the Exhibition. In language 
 somewhat too energetic and broad for our more polite time, 
 he warned the House of Commons and the country of the 
 consequences to English morals which must come of the in- 
 flux of a crowd of foreigners at a given season. " Take 
 care," he exclaimed, in the House of Commons, "of your 
 
364: A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 wives and daughters ; take cave of your property and your 
 lives !" He declared that he prayed for some tremendous 
 hail-storm or visitation of lightning to be sent from heaven 
 expressly for the purpose of destroying in advance the 
 building destined for the ill-omened Exhibition. When 
 Free-trade had left nothing else needed to complete the ruin 
 of the nation, the enemy of mankind, he declared, had in- 
 spired us with the idea of the Great Exhibition, so that the 
 foreigners who had first robbed us of our trade might now 
 be enabled to rob us of our honor. 
 
 The objections raised to the Exhibition M r ere not by any 
 means confined to Colonel Sibthorp or to his kind of argu- 
 ment. After some consideration the Royal Commissioners 
 had fixed upon Hyde Park as the best site for the great 
 building, and many energetic and some influential voices 
 were raised in fierce outcry against what was called the prof- 
 anation of the park. It was argued that the public use of 
 Hyde Park would be destroyed by the Exhibition ; that the 
 park would be utterly spoiled; that its beauty could never 
 be restored. A petition was presented by Lord Campbell 
 to the House of Lords against the occupation of any part of 
 Hyde Park with the Exhibition building. Lord Brougham 
 supported the petition with his characteristic impetuosity 
 and vehemence. He denounced the Attorney-general with 
 indignant eloquence because that official had declined to file 
 an application to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to 
 stay any proceeding with the proposed building in the park. 
 He denounced the House of Lords itself for what he consid- 
 ered its servile deference to royalty in the matter of the Ex- 
 hibition and its site. He declared that when he endeavored 
 to raise the question there he was received in dead silence ; 
 and he asserted that an effort to bring on a discussion in the 
 House of Commons was received with a silence equally pro- 
 found and servile. Such facts, he shouted, only showed 
 more painfully " that absolute prostration of the under- 
 standing which takes place even in the minds of the bravest 
 when the word prince is mentioned in this country !" It is. 
 probably true enough that only the influence of a prince 
 could have carried the scheme to success against the storms 
 of opposition that began to blow at various periods and 
 from different points. Undoubtedly a vast number, prob- 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 365 
 
 ably the great majority, of those who supported the enter- 
 prise in the beginning did so simply because it was the proj- 
 ect of a prince. Their numbers and their money enabled 
 it to be carried on, and secured it the test of the world's 
 examination and approval. In that sense the very servili- 
 ty which accepts with delight whatever a prince proposes 
 stood the Exhibition in good stead. A courtier may plead 
 that if English people in general had been more independent 
 and less given to admiration of princes, the excellent project 
 devised by Prince Albert would never have had a fair trial. 
 Many times during its progress the Prince himself trembled 
 for the success of his scheme. Many a time he must have 
 felt inclined to renounce it, or at least to regret that he had 
 ever taken it up. 
 
 Absurd as the opposition to the scheme may now seem, 
 it is certain that a great many sensible persons thought the 
 moment singularly inopportune for the gathering of large 
 crowds, and were satisfied that some inconvenient, if not 
 dangerous, public demonstration must be provoked. The 
 smouldering embers of Chartism, they said, were everywhere 
 under society's feet. The crowds of foreigners whom Col- 
 onel Sibthorp so dreaded would, calmer people said, natu- 
 rally include large numbers of the "Reds" of all Conti- 
 nental nations, who would be only too glad to coalesce with 
 Chartism and discontent of all kinds, for the purpose of dis- 
 turbing the peace of London. The agitation caused by the 
 Papal aggression was still in full force and flame. By an 
 odd coincidence the first column of the Exhibition building 
 had been set up in Hyde Park almost at the same moment 
 with the issue of the Papal bull establishing a Roman Cath- 
 olic hierarchy in England. These conditions looked gloomy 
 for the project. " The opponents of the Exhibition," wrote 
 the Prince himself, " work with might and main to throw 
 all the old women here into a panic and to drive myself 
 crazy. The strangers, they give out, are certain to com- 
 mence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and 
 myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England ; the 
 plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such .vast 
 multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased 
 price of everything has not already swept away. For all 
 this I am to be responsible, and against all this I have to 
 
366 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 make efficient provision." Most of the Continental sover- 
 eigns looked coldly on the undertaking. The King of Prus- 
 sia took such alarm at the thought of the Red Republicans 
 whom the Exhibition would draw together, that at first he 
 positively prohibited his brother, then Prince of Prussia, 
 now German Emperor, from attending the opening ceremo- 
 nial; and though he afterward withdrew the prohibition, he 
 remained full of doubts and fears as to the pei'sonal safety 
 of any royal or princely personage found in Hyde Park on 
 the opening day. The Duke of Cambridge, being appealed 
 to on the subject, acknowledged himself also full of appre- 
 hensions. The objections to the site continued to grow up 
 to a certain time. " The Exhibition," Prince Albert wrote 
 once to Baron Stockmar, his friend and adviser, "is now at- 
 tacked furiously by the Times, and the House of Commons 
 is going to drive us out of the park. There is immense ex- 
 citement on the subject. If we are driven out of the park 
 the work is done for." At one time, indeed, this result 
 seemed highly probable ; but public opinion gradually un- 
 derwent a change, and the opposition to the site was defeat- 
 ed in the House of Commons by a large majority. 
 
 Even, however, when the question of the site had been 
 disposed of, there remained immense difficulties in the way. 
 The press was not, on the whole, very favorable to the proj- 
 ect; Punch, in particular, was hardly ever weary of mak- 
 ing fun of it. Such a project, while yet only in embryo, 
 undoubtedly furnished many points on which satire could 
 fasten ; and nothing short of complete success could save it 
 from falling under a mountain of ridicule. No half success 
 would have rescued it. The ridicule was naturally provoked 
 and aggravated to an unspeakable degree by the hyperbol- 
 ical expectations and preposterous dithyrambics of some of 
 the well-meaning but unwise and somewhat too obstreper- 
 ously loyal supporters of the enterprise. To add to all this, 
 as the time for the opening drew near, some of the foreign 
 diplomatists in London began to sulk at the whole project. 
 There were small points of objection made about the posi- 
 tioa and functions of foreign ambassadors at the opening 
 ceremonial, and what the Queen and Prince meant for po- 
 liteness was, in one instance at least, near being twisted into 
 cause of offence. Up to the last moment it was not quite 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK. 367 
 
 certain whether an absurd diplomatic quarrel might not have 
 been part of the inaugural ceremonies of the opening day. 
 
 The Prince did not despair, however, and the project went 
 on. There was a great deal of difficulty in selecting a plan 
 for the building. Huge structures of brick- work, looking 
 like enormous railway sheds, costly and hideous at once, 
 were proposed ; it seemed almost certain that some one of 
 them must be chosen. Happily, a sudden inspiration struck 
 Mr. (afterward Sir Joseph) Paxton, who was then in charge 
 of the Duke of Devonshire's superb grounds at Chatsworth. 
 Why not try glass and iron ? he asked himself Why not 
 build a palace of glass and iron large enough to cover all 
 the intended contents of the Exhibition, and which should 
 be at once light, beautiful, and cheap? Mr. Paxton sketch- 
 ed out his plan hastily, and the idea was eagerly accepted 
 by the Royal Commissioners. He made many improve- 
 ments afterward in his design ; but the palace of glass and 
 iron arose within the specified time on the green turf of 
 Hyde Park. The idea so happily hit upon was serviceable 
 in more ways than one to the success of the Exhibition. It 
 made the building itself as much an object of curiosity and 
 wonder as the collections under its crystal roof. Of the 
 hundreds of thousands who came to the Exhibition, a good- 
 ly proportion were drawn to Hyde Park rather by a wish to 
 see Paxton's palace of glass than all the wonders of indus- 
 trial and plastic art that it enclosed. Indeed, Lord Palmer- 
 ston, writing to Lord Normanby on the day after the open- 
 ing of the Exhibition, said : "The building itself is far more 
 worth seeing than anything in it, though many of its con- 
 tents are worthy of admiration." Perhaps the glass build- 
 ing was like the Exhibition project itself in one respect. It 
 did not bring about the involution which it was confidently 
 expected to create. Glass and iron have not superseded 
 brick and stone, any more than competitions of peaceful in- 
 dustry have banished arbitrament by war. But the build- 
 ing, like the Exhibition itself, fulfilled admirably its more 
 modest and immediate purpose, and was in that way a com- 
 plete success. The structure of glass is, indeed, in every 
 mind inseparably associated with the event and the year. 
 
 The Queen herself has written a very interesting account 
 of the success of the opening day. Her description is inter- 
 
368 A' HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 estiug as an expression of the feelings of the writer, the 
 sense of profound relief and rapture, as well as for the sake 
 of the picture it gives of the ceremonial itself. The enthusi- 
 asm of the wife over the complete success of the project on 
 which her husband had set his heart and staked his name is 
 simple and touching. If the importance of the undertaking 
 and the amount of fame it was to bring to its author may 
 seem a little overdone, not many readers will complain of the 
 womanly and wifely feeling which could not be denied such 
 fervent expression. "The great event," wrote the Queen, 
 "has taken place a complete and beautiful triumph a glo- 
 rious and touching sight, one which I shall ever be proud of 
 for my beloved Albert and my country. . . . The park pre- 
 sented a wonderful spectacle crowds streaming through it, 
 carriages and troops passing, quite like the Coronation-day, 
 and for me the same anxiety no, much greater anxiety, on 
 account of my beloved Albert. The day was bright, and 
 all bustle and excitement. . . . The Green Park and Hyde 
 Park were one densely crowded mass of human beings, in 
 the highest good -humor, and most enthusiastic. I never 
 saw Hyde Park look as it did as far as the eye could 
 reach. A little rain fell just as we started, but before we 
 came near the Crystal Palace the sun shone and gleamed 
 upon the gigantic edifice, upon which the flags of all nations 
 were floating. . . . The glimpse of the transept through the 
 iron gates, the waving palms, flowers, statues, myriads of 
 people filling the galleries and se'ats around, with the flour- 
 ish of trumpets as we entered, gave us a sensation which I 
 can never forget, and I felt much moved. . . . .The sight as 
 we came to the middle was magical so vast, so glorious, 
 so touching one felt, as so many did whom I have since 
 spoken to, filled with devotion more so than by any ser- 
 vice I have ever heard. The tremendous cheers, the joy 
 expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the 
 mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains; the or- 
 gan (with two hundred instruments and six hundred voices, 
 which sounded like nothing), and my beloved husband the 
 author of this peace festival, which united the industry of 
 all nations of the earth all this was moving indeed, and it 
 
 O ' 7 
 
 was and is a day to live forever. God bless my dearest Al- 
 bert ! God bless my dearest country, which has shown it- 
 
THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PAKK. 369 
 
 self so great to-day ! One felt so grateful to the great God, 
 who seemed to pervade all and to bless all !" 
 
 The success of the opening day was, indeed, undoubted. 
 There were nearly thirty thousand people gathered together 
 within the building, and nearly three-quarters of a million 
 of persons lined the way between the Exhibition and Buck- 
 ingham Palace ; and yet no accident whatever occurred, 
 nor had the police any trouble imposed on them by the 
 conduct of anybody in the crowd. " It was impossible," 
 wrote Lord Palmerston, " for the invited guests of a lady's 
 drawing-room to have conducted themselves with more per- 
 fect propriety than did this sea of human beings." It is 
 needless to say that there were no hostile demonstrations 
 by Red Republicans, or malignant Chartists, or infuriated 
 Irish Catholics. The one thing which especially struck for- 
 eign observers, and to which many eloquent pens and 
 tongues bore witness, was the orderly conduct of the peo- 
 ple. Nor did the subsequent history of the Exhibition in 
 any way belie the promise of its opening day. It continued 
 to attract delighted crowds to the last, and more than once 
 held within its precincts at one moment nearly a hundred 
 thousand persons, a concourse large enough to have made 
 the population of a respectable Continental capital. In an- 
 other way the Exhibition proved even more successful than 
 was anticipated. There had been some difficulty in raising 
 money in the first instance, and it was thought something 
 of a patriotic risk when a few spirited citizens combined to 
 secure the accomplishment of the undertaking by means of 
 a guarantee fund. But the guarantee fund became in the 
 end merely one of the forms and ceremonials of the Exhibi- 
 tion ; for the undertaking not only covered its expenses, but 
 left a huge sum of money in the hands of the Royal Com- 
 missioners. The Exhibition was closed by Prince Albert 
 on October 15th. That, at least, may be described as the 
 closing day, for it was then that the awards of prizes were 
 made known in presence of the Prince and a large concourse 
 of people. The Exhibition itself had actually been closed 
 to the general public on the eleventh of the month. It has 
 been imitated again and again. It was followed by an 
 exhibition in Dublin ; an exhibition of the paintings and 
 sculptures of all nations in Manchester ; three great exhibi- 
 
 16* 
 
370 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tions in Paris ; the International Exhibition in Kensington 
 in 1862 the enterprise too of Prince Albert, although not 
 destined to have his presence at its opening ; an exhibition 
 at Vienna ; one in Philadelphia ; and various others. Where 
 all nations seem to have agreed to pay Prince Albert's en- 
 terprise the compliment of imitation, it seems superfluous to 
 say that it was a success. Time has so toned down our ex- 
 pectations in regard to these enterprises, that no occasion 
 now arises for the feeling of disappointment which was long 
 associated in the minds of once-sanguine persons witli the 
 Crystal Palace of Hyde Park. We look on such exhibi- 
 tions now as useful agencies in the work of industrial de- 
 velopment, and in promoting the intercourse of peoples, and 
 thus co-operating with various other influences in the gen- 
 eral business of civilization. But the impressions produced 
 by the Hyde Park Exhibition were unique. It was the first 
 thing of the kind ; the gathering of peoples it brought to- 
 gether was as new, odd, and interesting as the glass build- 
 ing in which the industry of the world was displayed. For 
 the first time in their lives Londoners saw the ordinary as- 
 pect of London distinctly modified and changed by the in- 
 cursion of foreigners who came to take part in or to look at 
 our Exhibition. London seemed to be playing at holiday 
 in a strange carnival sort of way during the time the Ex- 
 hibition was open. The Hyde Park enterprise bequeathed 
 nothing very tangible or distinct to the world, except in- 
 deed the palace which, built out of its fabric, not its ruins, 
 so gracefully ornaments one of the soft hills of Syclenham. 
 But the memory of the Exhibition itself is very distinct 
 with all who saw it. None of its followers were exactly 
 like it, or could take its place in the recollection of those 
 who were its contemporaries. In a year made memorable 
 by many political events of the greatest importance, of dis- 
 turbed and tempestuous politics abroad and at home, of the 
 deaths of many illustrious men and the failure of many 
 splendid hopes, the Exhibition in Hyde Park still holds its 
 place in memory not for what it brought or accomplished, 
 but simply for itself, its surroundings, and its house of glass. 
 
PALMERSTON. 371 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 PALMEKSTON. 
 
 THE death of Sir Robert Peel had left Lord Palmerston 
 the most prominent, if not actually the most influential, 
 among the statesmen of England. Palmerston's was a stren- 
 
 o o 
 
 uous, self-asserting character. He loved, whenever he had 
 an opportunity, to make a stroke, as he frequently put it 
 himself, " off his own bat." He had given himself up to the 
 study of foreign affairs as no minister of his time had done. 
 He had a peculiar capacity for understanding foreign poli- 
 tics and people as well as foreign languages, and he had 
 come somewhat to pique himself upon his knowledge. As 
 Bacon said that he had taken all learning for his province, 
 Palmerston seemed to have made up his mind that he had 
 taken all European affairs for his province. His sympathies 
 were markedly liberal. As opinions went then, they might 
 have been considered among statesmen almost revolutiona- 
 ry ; for the Conservative of our day is to the full as liberal 
 as the average Liberal of 1848 and 1850. In all the popular 
 movements going on throughout the Continent, Palmerston's 
 sympathies were generally with the peoples and against the 
 governments ; while he had, on the other hand, a very strong 
 contempt, which he took no pains to conceal, even for the 
 very best class of the Continental demagogue. It was not, 
 however, in his sympathies that Palmerston differed from 
 most of his colleagues. He was not more liberal even in 
 his views of foreign affairs than Lord John Russell; he was 
 probably not so consistently and on principle a supporter of 
 free and popular institutions. But Lord Palmerston's en- 
 ergetic, heedless temperament, his exuberant animal spirits, 
 and his profound confidence in himself and his opinions, 
 made him much more liberal and spontaneous in his ex- 
 pressions of sympathy than a man of Russell's colder nature 
 could well have been. Palmerston seized a conclusion at 
 once, and hardly ever departed from it. He never seemed to 
 
372 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 care who knew what he thought on any subject. He had a 
 contempt for men of more deliberate temper, and often spoke 
 and wrote as if he thought a man slow in forming an opinion 
 must needs be a dull man, not to say a fool. All opinions 
 not his own he held in good-humored scorn. In some of his 
 letters we find him writing of men of the most undoubted 
 genius and wisdom, whose views have since stood all the 
 test of time and trial, as if they were mere blockheads for 
 whom no practical man could feel the slightest respect. It 
 would be almost superfluous to say, in describing a man of 
 such a nature, that Lord Palmerston sometimes fancied he 
 saw great wisdom and force of character in men for whom 
 neither then nor since did the world in general show much 
 regard. As with a man, so with a cause. Lord Palmerston 
 was, to all appearance, capricious in his sympathies. Calmer 
 and more earnest minds were sometimes offended at what 
 seemed a lack of deep-seated principle in his mind and his 
 policy, even when it happened that he and they were in ac- 
 cord as to the course that ought to be pursued. His levi- 
 ty often shocked them : his blunt, brusque ways of speaking 
 and writing sometimes gave downright offence. 
 
 In his later years Lord Palmerston's manner in Parliament 
 and out of it had greatly mellowed and softened and grown 
 more genial. He retained all the good spirits and the ready, 
 easy, marvellously telling humor ; but he had grown more 
 considerate of the feelings of opponents in debate, and he 
 allowed his genuine kindness of heart a freer influence upon 
 his mode of speech. He had grown to prefer, on the whole, 
 his friend, or even his honorable opponent, to his joke. They 
 who only remember Palmerston in his very later years in 
 the House of Commons, and who can only recall to memory 
 that bright, racy humor which never offended, will perhaps 
 find it hard to understand how many enemies he made for 
 himself at an earlier period by the levity and flippancy of 
 his manner. Many grave statesmen thought that the levity 
 and flippancy were far less dangerous, even when employed 
 in irritating his adversaries in the House of Commons, than 
 when exercised in badgering foreign ministers and their gov- 
 ernments and sovereigns. Lord Palmerston was unsparing 
 in his lectures to foi'eign States. He was always admonish- 
 ing them that they ought to lose no time in at once adopting 
 
PALMERSTON. 373 
 
 the principles of government which prevailed in England. 
 He not uncommonly put his admonitions in the tone of one 
 who meant to say: "If you don't take my advice you will 
 be ruined, and your ruin will serve you right for being such 
 fools." While, therefore, he was a Conservative in home 
 politics, and never even professed the slightest personal in- 
 terest in any projects of political reform in England, he got 
 the credit all over the Continent of being a supporter, pro- 
 moter, and patron of all manner of revolutionary movements, 
 and a disturber of the relations between subjects and their 
 sovereigns. 
 
 Lord Palmerston was not inconsistent in thus being a Con- 
 servative at home and something like a revolutionary abroad. 
 He was quite satisfied with the state of things in England. 
 He was convinced that when a people had got a well-limited 
 suiFrage and a respectable House of Commons elected by 
 open vote, a House of Lords, and a constitutional Sovereign, 
 they had got all that, in a political sense, man has to hope 
 for. Pie was not a far-seeing man, nor a man who much 
 troubled himself about what a certain class of writers and 
 thinkers are fond of calling "problems of life." It did not 
 occur to him to think that as a matter of absolute necessity 
 the very reforms we enjoy in one day are only putting us 
 into a mental condition to aspire after and see the occasion 
 for further reforms as the days go on. But he clearly saw 
 that most Continental countries were governed on a system 
 which was not only worn out and decaying, but which was 
 the source of great practical and personal evils to their in- 
 habitants. He desired, therefore, for every country a politi- 
 cal system like that of Great Britain, and neither for Great 
 Britain nor for any other country did he desire anything 
 more. He was, accordingly, looked upon by Continental 
 ministers as a patron of revolution, and by English Radicals 
 as the steady enerny of political reform. Both were right 
 from their own point of view. The familiar saying among 
 Continental Conservatives was expressed in the well-known 
 German lines, which affirm that "If the devil had a son, he 
 must be surely Palmerston." On the other hand, the Eng- 
 lish Radical party regarded him as the most formidable ene- 
 my they had. Mr. Cobden deliberately declared him to be 
 the worst minister that had ever governed England. At a 
 
374: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 later period, when Lord Palmerston invited Cobden to take 
 office under him, Cobden referred to what he had said of 
 Palmerston, and gave this as a reason to show the impossi- 
 bility of his serving such a chief. The good-natured states- 
 man only smiled, and observed that another public man who 
 had just joined his Administration had often said things as 
 hai'd of him in other days. "Yes," answered Cobden, quiet- 
 ly, " but I meant what I said." 
 
 Palmerston, therefore, had many enemies among Europe- 
 an statesmen. It is now certain that the Queen frequent- 
 ly winced under the expressions of ill-feeling which were 
 brought to her ears as affecting England, and, as she sup- 
 posed, herself, and which she believed to have been drawn 
 on her by the inconsiderate and impulsive conduct of Palm- 
 erston. The Prince Consort, on whose advice the Queen 
 very naturally relied, was a man of singularly calm and ear- 
 nest nature. He liked to form his opinions deliberately and 
 slowly, and disliked expressing any opinion until his mind 
 was well made up. Lord Palmerston, Avhen Secretary for 
 Foreign Affairs, was much in the habit of writing and an- 
 swering despatches on the spur of the moment, and without 
 consulting either the Queen or his colleagues. Palmerston 
 complained of the long delays which took place on several 
 occasions when, in matters of urgent importance, he waited 
 to submit despatches to the Queen before sending them off. 
 He was of opinion that during the memorable controversy 
 on the Spanish marriages the interests of England were once 
 in danger of being compromised by the delay thus forced 
 upon him. He contended, too, that where the general policy 
 of a state was clearly marked out and well known, it would 
 have been idle to insist that a Foreign Secretary capable of 
 performing the duties of his office should wait to submit for 
 the inspection and approval of the Sovereign and his col- 
 leagues every scrap of paper he wrote on before it was al- 
 lowed to leave England. If such precautions were needful, 
 Lord Palmerston contended, it could only be because the 
 person holding the office of Foreign Secretary was unfit for 
 his post ; and he ought, therefore, to be dismissed, and some 
 better qualified man put in his place. Of course there is 
 some obvious justice in this view of the case. It would per- 
 haps have been unreasonable to expect that, at a time when 
 
PALMERSTON. 375 
 
 the business of the Foreign Office had suddenly swelled to 
 unprecedented magnitude, the same rules and formalities 
 could be kept up which had suited slower and less busy 
 days. But the complaint made by the Queen was not that 
 Palmerston failed to consult her on every detail, and to sub- 
 mit every line relating to the organization of the Foreign 
 Office for her approval before he sent it off. The complaint 
 was clear, and full of matter for very grave consideration. 
 The Queen complained that on matters concerning the act- 
 ual policy of the State Palmerston was in the habit of acting 
 on his own independent judgment and authority; that she 
 found herself more than once thus pledged to a course of 
 policy which she had not had an opportunity of considering, 
 and would not have approved if she had had such an oppor- 
 tunity; and that she hardly ever found any question abso- 
 lutely intact and uncompromised when it was submitted to 
 her judgment. The complaint was justified in many cases. 
 Lord Palmerston frequently acted in a manner which almost 
 made it seem as if he were purposely ignoring the authority 
 of the Sovereign. In part this came from the natural impa- 
 tience of a quick man confident in his own knowledge of a 
 subject, and chafing at any delay which he thought unnec- 
 essary and merely formal. But it is not easy to avoid a sus- 
 picion that Lord Palrnerston's rapidity of action sometimes 
 had a different explanation. Two impressions seem to have 
 had a place deeply down in the mind of the Foreign Secre- 
 tary. He appears to have felt sure that, roughly speaking, 
 the s}'mpathies of the English people were with the Conti- 
 nental movements against the sovereigns, and that the sym- 
 pathies of the English court were with the sovereigns against 
 the popular movements. In the first belief he was undoubt- 
 edly right. In the second he was probably right. It is not 
 likely that a man of Prince Albert's peculiar turn of mind 
 could have admitted much sympathy with revolution against 
 constituted authority of any kind. Even his Liberalism, un- 
 doubtedly a deep and genuine conviction, did not lead him 
 to make much allowance for any disturbing impulses. His 
 orderly intellectual nature, with little of fire or passion in it, 
 was prone to estimate everything by the manner in which 
 it stood the test of logical argument. He could understand 
 arguing against a bad system better than he could under- 
 
376 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 stand taking the risk of making things worse by resisting 
 it. Some of the published memoranda or other writings of 
 Prince Albert are full of a curious interest as showing the 
 
 o 
 
 way in which a calm, intellectual, and earnest man could ap- 
 proach some of the burning questions of the day with the 
 belief apparently that the great antagonisms of systems and 
 of opposing national forces could be argued into moderation 
 and persuaded into compromise. In Prince Albert there 
 were two tendencies counteracting each other. His natural 
 sympathies were manifestly with the authority of thrones. 
 His education taught him that thrones can only exist by 
 virtue of their occupants recognizing the fact that they do 
 not exist of their own authority, and taking care that they 
 do not became unsuited to the time. The influence of Prince 
 Albert would, therefore, be something very different from the 
 impulses and desires of Lord Palmerston. It is hardly to be 
 doubted that Palmerston sometimes /vcted upon this convic- 
 tion. He thought he understood better than others not only 
 the tendencies of events in foreign politics, but also the ten- 
 dencies of English public opinion with regard to them. He 
 well knew that so long as he had public opinion with him, 
 no influence could long prevail against him. His knowledge 
 of English public opinion was something like an instinct. 
 It could always be trusted. It had, indeed, no far reach. 
 Lord Palmerston never could be relied upon for a judgment 
 as to the possible changes of a generation, or even a few 
 years. But he was an almost infallible guide as to what a 
 majority of the English people were likely to say if asked 
 at the particular moment when any question was under dis- 
 pute. Palmerston never really guided, but always follow- 
 ed, the English public, even in foreign affairs. He was, it 
 seems almost needless to say, an incompai*ably better judge 
 of the direction English sentiment was likely to take than 
 the most acute foreigner put in such a place as Prince Al- 
 bert's could possibly hope to be. It may be assumed, then, 
 that some at least of Lord Palmerston's actions were dictated 
 by the conviction that he had the general force of that sen- 
 timent to sustain him in case his mode of conducting the 
 business of the Foreign Office should ever be called into 
 account. 
 
 A time came when it was called into account. The Queen 
 
PALMERSTON. 377 
 
 and the Prince had long chafed under Lord Palmerston's 
 cavalier way of doing business. So far back as 1849 her 
 Majesty had felt obliged to draw the attention of the For- 
 eign Secretary to the fact that his office was constitutional- 
 ly under the control of the Prime-minister, and that the de- 
 spatches to be submitted for her approval should, therefore, 
 pass through the hands of Lord John Russell. Lord John 
 Russell approved of this arrangement, only suggesting and 
 the suggestion is of some moment in considering the defence 
 of his conduct afterward made by Lord Palmerston that 
 every facility should be given for the transaction of business 
 by the Queen's attending to the draft despatches as soon as 
 possible after their arrival. The Queen accepted the sug- 
 gestion good-humoredly, only pleading that she should "not 
 be pressed for an answer within a few minutes, as is done 
 now sometimes." One can see tolerably well what a part 
 of the difficulty was, even from these slight hints. Lord 
 Palmerston was rapid in forming his judgments, as in all his 
 proceedings, and when once he had made up his mind was 
 impatient of any delay which seemed to him superfluous. 
 Prince Albert was slow, deliberate, reflective, and methodi- 
 cal. Lord Palmerston was always sure he was right in every 
 judgment he formed, even if it were adopted on the spur of 
 the moment ; Prince Albert loved reconsideration, and was 
 open to new argument and late conviction. However, the 
 difficulty was got over in 1849. Lord Palmerston agreed to 
 every suggestion, and for the time all seemed likely to go 
 smoothly. It was only for the time. The Queen soon be- 
 lieved she had reason to complain that the new arrangement 
 was not carried out. Things were going on, she thought, 
 in just the old way. Lord Palmerston dealt as before with 
 foreign courts according to what seemed best to him at the 
 moment ; and his Sovereign and his colleagues often only 
 knew of some important despatch or instruction when the 
 thing was done, and could not be conveniently or becoming- 
 ly undone. The Prince, at her Majesty's request, wrote to 
 Lord John Russell, complaining strongly of the conduct of 
 Lord Palmerston. The letter declared that Lord Palmerston 
 had failed in his duty toward her, "and not from oversight 
 or negligence, but upon principle, and with astonishing per- 
 tinacity, against every eftbrt of the Queen. Besides which, 
 
378 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Lord Palmerston does not scruple to let it appear in public 
 as if the Sovereign's negligence in attending to the papers 
 sent to her caused delay and annoyance." Even before this 
 it seems that the Queen had drawn up a memorandum to lay 
 down in clear and severe language the exact rules by which 
 the Foreign Secretary must be bound in his dealings with 
 her. The memorandum was not used at that time, as it was 
 thought that the remonstrances of the Sovereign and the 
 
 o O 
 
 Prime-minister alike could hardly fail to have some effect on 
 the Foreign Secretary. This time, however, the Queen ap- 
 pears to have felt that she could no longer refrain ; and, 
 accordingly, the following important memorandum was ad- 
 dressed by her Majesty to the Prime -minister. It is well 
 worth quoting in full, partly because it became a subject of 
 much interest and controversy afterward, and partly because 
 of the tone of peculiar sternness, rare indeed from a sover- 
 eign to a minister in our times, in which its instructions are 
 conveyed. 
 
 Osborne, August 12th, 1850. 
 
 With reference to the conversation about Lord Palmerston which the 
 Queen had with Lord John Russell the other day, and Lord Palmerston 's 
 disavowal that he ever intended any disrespect to her by the various neglects 
 of which she has had so long and so often to complain, she thinks it right, in 
 order to prevent any mistake for the future, to explain what it is she expects 
 from the Foreign Secretary. 
 
 She requires : 
 
 First. That he will distinctly state what he proposes to do jn a given case, 
 in order that the Queen may know as distinctly to what she has given her 
 royal sanction. 
 
 Second. Having once given her sanction to a measure, that it be not arbi- 
 trarily altered or modified by the minister ; such an act she must consider 
 as failure in sincerity toward the Crown, and justly to be visited by the exer- 
 cise of her constitutional right of dismissing that minister. She expects to 
 be kept informed of what passes between him and the foreign ministers, be- 
 fore important decisions are taken based upon that intercourse ; to receive 
 the foreign despatches in good time, and to have the drafts for her approval 
 sent to her in sufficient time to make herself acquainted with their contents 
 before they must be sent off. The Queen thinks it best that Lord John Rus- 
 sell should show this letter to Lord Palmerston. 
 
 The tone of the memorandum was severe, but there was 
 nothing unreasonable in its stipulations. On the contrary, 
 it simply prescribed what every one might have supposed 
 to be the elementary conditions on which the duties of a 
 
PALMERSTON. 379 
 
 sovereign and a foreign minister can alone be satisfactorily 
 carried on. Custom as well as obvious convenience demand- 
 ed such conditions. The Duke of Wellington declared that 
 when he was Prime-minister no despatch left the Foreign 
 Office without his seeing it. No sovereign, one would think, 
 could consent to the responsibility of rule on any other 
 terms. We have, perhaps, got into the habit of thinking, 
 or at least of saying, that the sovereign of a constitutional 
 country only rules through the ministers. But it would be 
 a gi'eat mistake to suppose that the sovereign has no consti- 
 tutional functions whatever provided by our system of gov- 
 ernment, and that the sole duty of a monarch is to make a 
 figure in certain state pageantry. It has sometimes been 
 said that the sovereign in a country like England is only the 
 signet-ring of the nation. If this were true, it might be ask- 
 ed with unanswerable force why a veritable signet-ring cost- 
 ing a few pounds, and never requiring to be renewed, would 
 not serve all purposes quite as well, and save expense. But 
 the position of the sovereign is not one of meaningless in- 
 activity. The sovereign has a very distinct and practical 
 office to fulfil in a constitutional country. The monarch in 
 England is the chief magistrate of the State, specially raised 
 above party and passion and change in order to be able to 
 look with a clearer eye to all that concerns the interests of 
 the nation. Our constitutional system grows and develops 
 itself year after year as our requirements and conditions 
 change ; and the position of the sovereign, like everything 
 else, has undergone some modification. It is settled now 
 beyond dispute that the sovereign is not to dismiss ministers, 
 or a minister, simply from personal inclination or conviction, 
 as until a very recent day it was the right and the habit of 
 English monarchs to do. The sovereign now retains, in vir- 
 tue of usage having almost the force of constitutional law, 
 the ministers of whom the House of Commons approves. 
 But the Crown still has the right, in case of extreme need, 
 of dismissing any minister who actually fails to do his duty. 
 The sovereign is always supposed to understand the business 
 of the State, to consider its affairs, and to oifer an opinion, 
 and enforce it by argument, on any question submitted by 
 the ministers. When the ministers find that they cannot 
 allow their judgment to bend to that of the sovereign, then 
 
380 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 indeed the sovereign gives way or the ministers resign. In 
 all ordinary cases the sovereign gives way. But it was 
 never intended by the English Constitution that the minis- 
 ters and the country were not to have the benefit of the ad- 
 vice and the judgment of a magistrate who is purposely 
 placed above all the excitements and temptations of party, 
 its triumphs and its reverses, and who is assumed, therefore, 
 to have no other motive than the good of the State in offer- 
 ing an advice. The sovereign would grossly fail in public 
 duty, and would be practically disappointing the confidence 
 of the nation, who consented to act simply as the puppet of 
 the; minister, and to sign mechanically and without question 
 every document he laid on the table. 
 
 In the principles which she laid down, therefore, the 
 Queen was strictly right. But the memorandum was none 
 the less a severe and a galling rebuke for the Foreign Sec- 
 retary. We can imagine with what emotions Lord Palmer- 
 ston must have received it. He was a proud, self-confident 
 man ; and it came on him just in the moment of his great- 
 est triumph. Never before, never since, did Lord Palmer- 
 ston win so signal and so splendid a victory as that which 
 he had extorted by the sheer force of his eloquence and his 
 genius from a reluctant House of Commons in the Don Pa- 
 cifico debate. Never, probably, in our Parliamentary his- 
 tory did a man of years so advanced accomplish such a feat 
 of eloquence, argument, and persuasion as he had achieved. 
 He stood up before the world the foremost English states- 
 man of the day. It is easy to imagine how deeply he must 
 have felt the rebuke conveyed in the memorandum of the 
 Queen. We know, as a matter of fact, from what lie him- 
 self afterward said, that he did feel it bitterly. But he kept 
 down his- feelings. Whether he was right or wrong in the 
 matter of dispute, he undoubtedly showed admirable self- 
 control and good-temper in his manner of receiving the rep- 
 rimand. He wrote a friendly and good-humored letter to 
 Lord John Russell, saying, "I have taken a copy of this 
 memorandum of the Queen, and will not fail to attend to 
 the directions which it contains." The letter then gave a 
 few lines of explanation about the manner in which delays 
 had arisen in the sending of despatches to the Queen, but 
 promising to return to the old practice, and expressing a 
 
PALMERSTOK 381 
 
 hope that if the return required an additional clerk or two, 
 the Treasury would be liberal in allowing him that assist- 
 ance. Nothing could be more easy and pleasant. It might 
 have seemed the ease of absolute carelessness. But it was 
 nothing of the kind. Lord Palmerston had acted deliber- 
 ately and with a purpose. He afterward explained why he 
 had not answered the rebuke by resigning his office. " The 
 paper," he said, " was written in anger by a lady as well as 
 by a sovereign, and the difference between a lady and a 
 man could riot be forgotten even in the case of the occupant 
 of the throne." He had " no reason to suppose that this 
 memorandum would ever be seen by or be known to any- 
 body but the Queen, John Russell, and myself." Again, "I 
 had lately been the object of violent political attack, and 
 had gained a great and signal victory in the House of Com- 
 mons and in public opinion ; to have resigned then would 
 have been to have given the fruits of victory to antagonists 
 whom I had defeated, and to have abandoned my political 
 supporters at the very moment when by their means I had 
 triumphed." But beyond all that, Lord Palmerston said 
 that by suddenly resigning "I should have been bringing 
 for decision at the bar of public opinion a personal quarrel 
 between myself and my Sovereign a step which no sub- 
 ject ought to take if he can possibly avoid it ; for the result 
 of such a course must be either fatal to him or injurious to 
 the country. If he should prove to be in the wrong, he 
 would be irretrievably condemned ; if the Sovereign should 
 be proved to be in the wrong, the monarchy would suffer." 
 
 It is impossible not to feel a high respect for the manner 
 in which, having come to this determination, Lord Palmer- 
 ston at once acted upon it. As he had resolved not to re- 
 sent the rebuke, he would not allow any gleam of feeling to 
 creep into his letter which could show that he felt any re- 
 sentment. Few men could have avoided the temptation to 
 throw into a reply on such an occasion something of the 
 tone of the injured, the unappreciated, the martyr, the 
 wronged one who endures much and will not complain. 
 Lord Palmerston felt instinctively the bad taste and unwis- 
 dom of such a style of reply. He took his rebuke in the 
 most perfect good-humor. His letter must have surprised 
 Lord John Russell. Macaulay observes that Warren Has- 
 
382 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tings, confident that he knew best and was acting rightly, 
 endured the rebukes of the East India Company with a 
 patience which was sometimes mistaken for the patience 
 of stupidity. It is not unlikely that when the Prime-min- 
 ister received Lord Palmerston's reply he may have mis- 
 taken its patience for the patience of downright levity and 
 indifference. 
 
 Lord Palmerston went a step farther in the way of con- 
 ciliation. He asked for an interview with Prince Albert, 
 and he explained to the Prince in the most emphatic and 
 indignant terms that the accusation against him of being 
 purposely wanting in respect to the Sovereign was absolute- 
 ly unfounded. " Had it been deserved, he ought to be no 
 longer tolerated in society." But he does not seem, in the 
 course of the interview, to have done much more than argue 
 the point as to the propriety and convenience of the system 
 he had lately been adopting in the business of the Foreign 
 Office. 
 
 So for the hour the matter dropped. Other events inter- 
 fered ; there were many important questions of domestic 
 policy to be attended to; and for some time Lord Palmer- 
 ston's policy and his way of conducting the business of the 
 Foreign Office did not invite any particular attention. But 
 the old question was destined to come up again in more 
 serious form than before. 
 
 The failure of the Hungarian rebellion, through the inter- 
 vention of Russia, called up a wide and deep feeling of re- 
 gret and indignation in this country. The English people 
 had very generally sympathized with the cause of the Hun- 
 garians, and rejoiced in the victories which, up to a certain 
 point, the arms of the insurgents had won. When the 
 Hungarians were put down at last, not by the strength of 
 Austria, but by the intervention of Russia, the anger of Eng- 
 lishmen in general found loud -spoken expression. Louis 
 Kossuth, who had been Dictator of Hungary during the 
 greater part of the insurrection, and who represented, in the 
 English mind at least, the cause of Hungary and her nation- 
 al independence, came to England. He was about to take 
 up his residence, as he then intended, in the United States, 
 and on his way thither he visited England. He had applied 
 for permission to pass through French territory, and had 
 
PALMERSTON. 383 
 
 been refused the favor. The refusal only gave one ad- 
 ditional reason to the English public for welcoming him 
 with especial coi'diality. He was accordingly received at 
 Southampton, in Birmingham* in London, with an enthusiasm 
 such as no foreigner except Garibaldi alone has ever drawn 
 in our time from the English people. There was much in 
 Kossuth himself, as well as in his cause, to attract the en- 
 thusiasm of popular assemblages. He had a strikingly 
 handsome face and a stately presence. He was picturesque 
 and perhaps even theatric in his dress and his bearing. He 
 looked like a picture; all his attitudes and gestures seemed 
 as if they were meant to be reproduced by a painter. He 
 was undoubtedly one of the most eloquent men who ever 
 addressed an English popular audience. In one of his im- 
 prisonments Kossuth had studied the English language, 
 chiefly from the pages of Shakspeare. He had mastered our 
 tongue as few foreigners have ever been able to do; but 
 what he had mastered was not the common colloquial Eng- 
 lish of the streets and the drawing-rooms. The English he 
 
 o o 
 
 spoke was the noblest in its style from which a student 
 could supply his eloquence : Kossuth spoke the English of 
 Shakspeare. He could address a public meeting for an hour 
 or more with a fluency not inferior, seemingly, to that of 
 Gladstone, with a measured dignity and well - restrained 
 force that were not unworthy of Bright, and in curiously 
 expressive, stately, powerful, pathetic English, which sound- 
 ed as if it belonged to a higher time and to loftier interests 
 than ours. Viewed as a mere performance, the achievement 
 of Kossuth was unique. It may well be imagined what the 
 eflect was on a popular audience, when such eloquence was 
 poured forth in glowing eulogy of a cause with which they 
 sympathized, and in denunciation of enemies and principles 
 they detested. It was impossible not to be impressed by 
 the force of some of the striking and dramatic passages in 
 Kossuth's fervid, half-Oriental orations. He stretched out 
 his right hand, and declared that " the time was when I held 
 the destinies of the House of Hapsburg in the hollow of that 
 hand !" He apostrophized those who fought and fell in the 
 rank-and-file of Hungary's champions as " unnamed demi- 
 gods." He prefaced a denunciation of the Papal policy by 
 an impassioned lament over the brief hopes that the Pope 
 
384 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 was about to head the Liberal movement in Italy, and re- 
 minded his hearers that " there was a time when the name 
 of Pio Nono, coupled with that of Louis Kossuth, was 
 thundered in vivas along the sunny shores of the Adriatic." 
 Every appeal was vivid and dramatic ; every allusion told. 
 Throughout the whole there ran the thread of one distinct 
 principle of international policy to which Kossuth endeav- 
 ored to obtain the assent of the English people. This was 
 the principle that if one State intervenes in the domestic 
 affairs of another for the purpose of putting down revolu- 
 tion, it then becomes the right, and may even be the duty, 
 of any third State to throw in the weight of her sword 
 against the unjustifiable intervention. As a principle this 
 is nothing more than some of the ablest and most thought- 
 ful Englishmen had advocated before and have advocated 
 since. But in Kossuth's mind, and in the understanding of 
 those who heard him, it meant that England ought to de- 
 clare war against Russia or Austria, or both ; the former for 
 having intervened between the Emperor of Austria and the 
 Hungarians, and the latter for having invited and profited 
 by the intervention. 
 
 The presence of Kossuth and the reception lie got excited 
 a wild anger and alarm among Austrian statesmen. The 
 
 o o 
 
 Austrian minister was all sensitiveness and remonstrance. 
 The relations between this country and Austria seemed to 
 become every day more and more strained. Lord Palmer- 
 ston regarded the anger and the fears of Austria with a con- 
 tempt which he took no pains to conceal. Before the Hun- 
 garian exile had reached this country, while he was still un- 
 der the protection of the Sultan of Turkey, and Austria was 
 in wild alarm lest he should be set at liberty and should 
 come to England, Lord Palmerston wrote to a British diplo- 
 matist, saying, "What a childish, silly fear this is of Kossuth ! 
 What great harm could he do to Austria while in France or 
 England ? He would be the hero of half a dozen dinners in 
 England, at which would be made speeches not more violent 
 than those which have been made on platforms here within 
 the last four months, and he would soon sink into compara- 
 tive obscurity ; while, on the other hand, so long as he is a 
 State detenu in Turkey he is a martyr and the object of nev- 
 er-ceasing interest." Lord Palmerston understood thorough- 
 
PALMERSTON. 385 
 
 ]y the temper of his countrymen in general. The English 
 public never had any serious notion of going to war with 
 Austria in obedience to Kossuth's appeal. They sympa- 
 thized generally with Kossuth's cause, or with the cause 
 which they understood him to represent; they were taken 
 with his picturesque appearance and his really wonderful el- 
 oquence ; they wanted a new hero, and Kossuth seemed pos- 
 itively cut out to supply the want. The enthusiasm cooled 
 down after awhile, as was indeed inevitable. The time was 
 not far off when Kossuth was to make vain appeals to al- 
 most empty halls, and when the eloquence that once could 
 cram the largest buildings with excited admirers was to call 
 
 ^ o 
 
 aloud to solitude. There came a time when Kossuth lived 
 in England forgotten and unnoticed ; when his passing away 
 from England was unobserved, as his presence there had long 
 been. There seems, one can hardly help saying, something 
 cruel in this way of suddenly taking up the representative 
 of some foreign cause, the spokesman of some " mission ;" and 
 then, when he has been filled with vain hopes, letting him 
 drop down to disappointment and neglect. It was not, per- 
 haps, the fault of the English people if Kossuth mistook, as 
 many another man in like circumstances has done, the mean- 
 ing of English popular sympathy. The English crowds who 
 applauded Kossuth at first meant nothing more than general 
 sympathy with any hero of Continental revolution, and per- 
 sonal admiration for the eloquence of the man who addressed 
 them. But Kossuth did not thus accept the homage paid to 
 him. No foreigner could have understood it in his place. 
 Lord Palmerston understood it thoroughly, and knew what 
 it meant, and how long it would last. 
 
 The time, however, had not yet come when the justice of 
 Lord Palmerston's words was to be established. Kossuth 
 was the hero of the hour, the comet of the season. The Aus- 
 trian statesmen were going on as if every word spoken at a 
 Kossuth meeting were a declaration of war against Austria. 
 Lord Palmerston was disposed to chuckle over the anger 
 thus displayed. "Kossuth's reception," he wrote to his 
 brother, " must have been gall and wormwood to the Aus- 
 trians and to the absolutists generally." Some of Lord 
 Palmerston's colleagues, however, became greatly alarmed 
 when it was reported that the Foreign Minister was about 
 
 I. 17 
 
386 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 to receive a visit from Kossuth in person, to thank him for 
 the sympathy and protection which England had accorded 
 to the Hungarian refugees while they were still in Turkey, 
 and without which it is only too likely that they would have 
 been handed over to Austria or Russia. It was thought that 
 for the Foreign Secretary to receive a formal visit of thanks 
 from Kossuth would be regarded by Austria as a recognition 
 by England of the justice of Kossuth's cause, and an expres- 
 sion of censure against Austria. If Kossuth were received 
 by Lord Palmerston, the Austrian ambassador, it was con- 
 fidently reported, would leave England. Lord John Russell 
 took alarm, and called a meeting of the cabinet to consider 
 the momentous question. Lord Palmerston reluctantly con- 
 sented to appease the alarms of his colleagues by promising 
 to avoid an interview with Kossuth. 
 
 It does not seem to us that there was much dignity in 
 the course taken by the cabinet. Lord Palmerston actually 
 used, and very properly used, all the influence England could 
 command to protect the Hungarian refugees in Turkey. He 
 had intimated very distinctly, and with the full approval of 
 England, that he would use still stronger measures if neces- 
 sary to protect at once the Sultan and the refugees. It seems 
 to us that, having done this openly, and compelled Russia 
 and Austria to bend to his urgency, there could be little 
 harm in his receiving a visit from one of the men whom he 
 had thus protected. Austria's sensibilities must have been 
 of a peculiar nature indeed, if they could bear Lord Palmer- 
 ston's very distinct and energetic intervention between her 
 and her intended victim, but could not bear to hear that 
 the rescued victim had paid Lord Palmerston a formal visit 
 of gratitude. At all events, it does not seem as if an Eng- 
 
 O 7 O 
 
 lish minister was bound to go greatly out of his way to con- 
 ciliate such very eccentric and morbid sensibilities. We 
 owe to a foreign state with which we are on friendly terms 
 a strict and honorable neutrality. Our ministers are bound 
 by courtesy, prudence, and good-sense not to obtrude any 
 expression of their opinion touching the internal dissensions 
 of a foreign state on the representatives of that state or the 
 public. But they are not by any means bound to treat the 
 enemies of every foreign state as our enemies. They are 
 not expected to conciliate the friendship of Austria, for ex- 
 
PALMERSTON. 387 
 
 ample, by declaring that any one who is disliked by the Em- 
 peror of Austria shall never be admitted to speech of them. 
 If Kossuth had come as the professed representative of an. 
 established government, and had sought an official inter- 
 view with Lord Palmerston in that capacity, then, indeed, 
 it would have been proper for the English Foreign Secre- 
 tary to refuse to receive him. Our ministers, Avith perfect 
 propriety, refused to receive Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell, the 
 emissaries of the Southern Confederation, as official represent- 
 atives of any state. But it is absurd to suppose that when 
 the civil war was over in America an English statesman in 
 office would be bound to decline receiving a visit from Mr. 
 Jefferson Davis. We know, in fact, that the ex-King of 
 Naples, the ex-King of Hanover, Don Carlos, and the royal 
 representatives of various lost causes, are constantly re- 
 ceived by English ministers and by the Queen of England, 
 and no representatives of any of the established govern- 
 ments would think of offering a remonstrance. If the Em- 
 peror of Austria was likely to be offended by Lord Palmer- 
 ston's receiving a visit from Kossuth, the only course for an 
 English minister, as it seems to us, was to leave him to be 
 offended, and to recover from his anger whenever he chose 
 to allow common -sense to resume possession of his mind. 
 The Queen of England might as well have taken offence at 
 the action of the American Government, who actually gave, 
 not merely private receptions, but public appointments, to 
 Irish refugees after the outbreak of 1848. 
 
 Lord Palmerston, however, gave way, and did not receive 
 the visit from Kossuth. The hoped-for result, that of spar- 
 ing the sensibilities of the Austrian Government, was not at- 
 tained. In fact, things turned out a great deal worse than 
 they might have done if the interview between Lord Palm- 
 erston and Kossuth had been quietly allowed to come off. 
 Meetings were held to express sympathy with Kossuth, and 
 addresses were voted to Lord Palmerston thanking him for 
 the influence he had exerted in preventing the surrender of 
 Kossuth to Austria. Lord Palmerston consented to receive 
 these addresses from the hands of deputations at the For- 
 eign Office. The deputations represented certain metropoli- 
 tan parishes, and were the exponents of markedly Radical 
 opinions. Some of the addresses contained strong language 
 
388 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 with reference to the Austrian Government nnd the Aus- 
 trian Sovereign. Lord Palmerston observed, in his reply, 
 that there were expressions contained in the addresses with 
 which he could hardly be expected to concur; but he spoke 
 in a manner which conveyed the idea that his sympathies 
 generally were with the cause which the deputations had 
 adopted. This was the speech containing a phrase which 
 was identified with Palmerston's name, and held to be spe- 
 cially characteristic of his way of speaking, and indeed of 
 thinking, for many years after in fact, to the close of his 
 career. The noble lord told the deputation that the past cri- 
 sis was one which required on the part of the British Govern- 
 ment much generalship and judgment; and that "a good 
 deal of judicious bottle-holding was obliged to be brought 
 into play." The phrase " bottle - holding," borrowed from 
 the prize-ring, offended a good many persons who thought 
 the past crisis far too grave, and the issues it involved too 
 stern, to be properly described in language of such levity. 
 But the general public were amused and delighted by the 
 words, and the judicious bottle-holder became more of a 
 popular favorite than ever. Some of the published reports 
 put this a good deal more strongly than Lord Palmerston 
 did, or at least than he intended to do; and he always in- 
 sisted that he said no more to the deputations than he had 
 often said in the House of Commons; and that he had ex- 
 pressly declared he could not concur in some of the expres- 
 sions contained in the addresses. Still, the whole proceed- 
 ing considerably alarmed some of Lord Palmerston's col- 
 leagues, and was regarded with distinct displeasure by the 
 Queen and Prince Albert. The Queen specially requested 
 that the matter should be brought before a cabinet council. 
 Lord John Russell, accordingly, laid the whole question be- 
 fore his colleagues, and the general opinion seemed to be 
 that Lord Palmerston had acted Avith want of caution. No 
 formal resolution was adopted. It was thought that the 
 general expression of opinion from his colleagues and the 
 known displeasure of the Queen would be enough to impress 
 the necessity for greater prudence on the mind of the For- 
 eign Secretary. Lord John Russell, in communicating with 
 her Majesty as to the proceedings of the cabinet council, 
 expressed a hope that "it will have its effect upon Lord 
 
PALMERSTON. 389 
 
 Palmerston, to whom Lord John Russell has written urging 
 the necessity of a guarded conduct in the present very crit- 
 ical condition of Europe." This letter was not written when 
 startling evidence was on its way to show that the irresisti- 
 ble Foreign Secretary had been making a stroke off his own 
 bat again, and a stroke this time of capital importance in 
 the general game of European politics. The possible indis- 
 cretion of Lord Palmerston's dealings with a deputation or 
 two from Finsbury and Islington became a matter of little 
 interest when the country was called upon to consider the 
 propriety of the Foreign Secretary's dealings with the new 
 ruler of a new state system, with the author of the coup 
 d'etat. 
 
 The news of the coup d'etat took England by surprise. 
 A shock went through the whole country. Never, probably, 
 was public opinion more unanimous, for the hour at least, 
 than in condemnation of the stroke of policy ventured on 
 by Louis Napoleon, and the savage manner in which it was 
 carried to success. After awhile, no doubt, a considerable 
 portion of the English public came to look more leniently 
 on what had been done. Many soon grew accustomed to 
 the story of the massacres along the Boulevards of Paris, 
 and lost all sense of their horror. Some disposed of the 
 whole affair after the satisfactory principle so commonly 
 adopted by English people in judging of foreign affairs, and 
 assumed that the system introduced by Louis Napoleon was 
 a very good sort of thing for the French. After awhile 
 a certain admiration, not to say adulation, of Louis Napo- 
 leon, began to be a kind of faith with many Englishmen, 
 and the coup d'etat was condoned and even approved by 
 them. But there can be no doubt that when the story first 
 carne to be told in England, the almost universal voice of 
 opinion condemned it as strongly as nearly all men of gen- 
 nine enlightenment and feeling condemned it then and 
 since. The Queen was particularly anxious that nothing 
 should be said by the British ambassador to commit us to 
 any approval of what had been done. On December 4th 
 the Queen wrote to Lord John Russell from Osborne, ex- 
 pressing her desire that Lord Normanby, our ambassador at 
 Paris, should be instructed to remain entirely passive, and 
 say no word that might be misconstrued into approval of 
 
390 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the action of the Prince President. The cabinet met that 
 same day, and decided that it was expedient to follow most 
 closely her Majesty's instructions. But they decided also, 
 and very properly, that there was no reason for Lord Nor- 
 manby suspending his diplomatic functions. Lord Nor- 
 manby had, in fact, applied for instructions on this point. 
 Next day Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, wrote to 
 Lord 'Normanby, informing him that he was to make no 
 change in his diplomatic relations with the French Govern- 
 ment. Lord Normanby's reply to this despatch created a 
 startling sensation. Our ambassador wrote to say that 
 when he called on the French Minister for Foreign Affairs 
 to inform him that he had been instructed by her Majesty's 
 Government not to make any change in his relations with 
 the French Government, the Minister, M. Turgot, told him 
 that he had heard two days before from Count Walewski, 
 the French ambassador in London, that Lord Palmerston 
 had expressed to him his entire approval of what Louis Na- 
 poleon had done, and his conviction that the Prince Presi- 
 dent could not have acted otherwise. It would not be easy 
 to exaggerate the sensation produced among Lord Palmer- 
 ston's colleagues by this astounding piece of news. The 
 Queen wrote at once to Lord John Russell, asking him if he 
 knew anything about the approval which " the French Gov- 
 ernment pretend to have received ;" declaring that she could 
 not "believe in the truth of the assertion, as such an ap- 
 proval given by Lord Palmerston would have been in com- 
 plete contradiction to the line of strict neutrality and pas- 
 siveness which the Queen had expressed her desire to see 
 followed with regard to the late convulsions at Paris." 
 Lord John Russell replied that he had already written to 
 Lord Palmerston, "saying that he presumed there was no 
 truth in the report." The reply of Lord Palmerston was 
 delayed for what Lord John Russell thought an unreason- 
 able length of time at such a crisis; but when it came it 
 left no doubt that Lord Palmerston had expressed to Count 
 Walewski his approval of the coup d'etat. Lord Palmer- 
 ston observed, indeed, that Walewski had probably given 
 to M. Turgot a somewhat highly colored report of what he 
 had said, and that the report had lost nothing in passing 
 from M. Turgot to Lord Normanby ; but the substance of 
 
PALMERSTOjS'. 391 
 
 the letter was a full admission that Lord Palmerston ap- 
 proved of what had been done, and had expressed his ap- 
 proval to Count Walewski. The letters of explanation 
 which the Foreign Minister wrote on the subject, whether 
 to Lord Normanby or to Lord John Russell, were elaborate 
 justifications of the coup d'etat; they were, in fact, exactly 
 such arguments as a minister of Louis Napoleon might with 
 great propriety address to a foreign Court. They were full 
 'of an undisguised and characteristic contempt for any one 
 who could think otherwise on the subject than as Lord 
 Palmerston thought. In replying to Lord John Russell the 
 contempt was expressed in a quiet sneer; in the letters to 
 Lord Normanby it was obtrusively and offensively put for- 
 ward. Lord John Russell in vain endeavored to fasten 
 Palmerston's attention on the fact that the question was not 
 whether the action of Louis Napoleon was historically justi- 
 fiable, but whether the conduct of the English Foreign Min- 
 ister, in expressing approval of it without the knowledge 
 and against the judgment of the Queen and his colleagues, 
 was politically justifiable. Lord Palmerston simply return- 
 ed to his defence of Louis Napoleon, and his assertion that 
 the Prince President was only anticipating the intrigues of 
 the Orleans family and the plans of the Assembly. Lord 
 Palmerston, indeed, gave a very minute account of a plot 
 among the Orleans princes for a military rising against 
 Louis Napoleon. No evidence of the existence of any 
 such plot has ever been discovered. Louis Napoleon never 
 pleaded the existence of such a plot in his own justification ; 
 it if now, we believe, universally admitted that Lord Palm- 
 erston was for once the victim of a mere canard. But even 
 if there had been an Orleanist plot, or twenty Orleanist 
 plots, it never has been part of the duty or the policy of an 
 English Government to express approval of anything and 
 everything that a foreign rufer may do to anticipate or put 
 down a plot against him. The measures may be unjusti- 
 fiable in their principle or in their severity ; the plot may 
 be of insignificant importance, utterly inadequate to excuse 
 any extraordinary measures. The English Government is 
 not in ordinary cases called upon to express any opinion 
 whatever. It had, in this case, deliberately decided that all 
 expression of opinion should be scrupulously avoided, lest 
 
392 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 by any chance the French Government should be led to be- 
 lieve that England approved of what had been done. 
 
 Lord Palmerston endeavored to draw a distinction be- 
 tween the expressions of a Foreign Secretary in conversa- 
 tion with an ambassador, and a formal declaration of opin- 
 ion. But it is clear that the French ambassador did not 
 understand Lord Palmerston to be merely indulging in the 
 irresponsible gossip of private life, and that Lord Palmer- 
 ston never said a word to impress him Avith the belief that 
 their conversation had that colorless and unmeaning charac- 
 ter. In any case, it was surely a piece of singular indiscre- 
 tion on the part of a Foreign Minister to give to the French 
 ambassador, even in private conversation, an unqualified 
 opinion in favor of a stroke of policy of which the British 
 Government, as a whole, and indeed with the one exception 
 of Lord Palmerston, entirely disapproved. To give such an 
 opinion without qualification or explanation was to mislead 
 the French ambassador in the grossest manner, and to send 
 him away, as in fact he was sent, under the impression that 
 the conduct of his chief had the approval of the Sovereign 
 and Government of England. Let it be remembered further 
 that the Foreign Secretary who did this had been again and 
 again rebuked for acting on his own responsibility, for say- 
 ing and doing things which pledged, or seemed to pledge, 
 the responsibility of the Government without any authority, 
 that a formal threat of dismissal actually hung over his head 
 in the event of his repeating such indiscretions, and we shall 
 be better able to form some idea of the sensation which was 
 created in England by the revelation of Lord Palmerston's 
 conduct. Many of his colleagues had cordially sympathized 
 with his views on the occasion of former indiscretions; and 
 even while admitting that he had been indiscreet, yet ac- 
 knowledged to themselves that their opinion on the broad 
 question involved was not different from his. But even 
 these drew back from any approval of his conduct in regard 
 to the coup d'etat. The almost universal judgment was 
 that he had gone surprisingly wrong. Not a few, finding 
 it impossible to account otherwise for such a proceeding, 
 came to the conclusion that he must have been determined 
 somehow to bring about a rupture with his colleagues of 
 the cabinet, and had chosen this high-handed assertion of 
 
PALMERSTON. 393 
 
 his will as the best means of flinging his defiance in their 
 teeth. 
 
 Lord John Russell made up his mind. He came to the 
 conclusion that he could no longer go on with Lord Palmer- 
 ston as a colleague in the Foreign Office, and lie signified 
 his decision to Lord Palmerston himself. "While I concur," 
 thus Lord John Russell wrote, "in the foreign policy of 
 which you have been the adviser, and much as I admire the 
 energy and ability with which it has been carried into ef- 
 fect, I cannot but observe that misunderstandings perpetu- 
 ally renewed, violations of prudence and decorum too fre- 
 quently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to 
 have followed from a sound policy and able administration. 
 I am, therefore, most reluctantly compelled to come to the 
 conclusion that the conduct of foreign affairs can no longer 
 be left in your hands with advantage to the country." 
 Rather unfortunately, Lord John Russell endeavored to 
 soften the blow by offering, if Lord Palmerston should be 
 willing, to recommend him to the Queen to fill the office of 
 Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. This was a proposal which we 
 agree with Mr. Evelyn Ashley,Lord Palmerston's biographer, 
 in regarding as almost comical in its character. Lord Palm- 
 erston's whole soul was in foreign affairs. He had never 
 affected any particular interest in Irish business. He cared 
 little even for the home politics of England ; it was out of 
 the question to suppose that he would consent to bury him- 
 self in the Viceregal Court of Dublin, and occupy his diplo- 
 matic talents in composing disputes for precedence between 
 Protestant deans and Catholic bishops, and in doling out the 
 due proportion of invitations to the various ranks of aspiring 
 traders and shopkeepers and their wives. Lord Palmerston 
 declined the offer Avith open contempt, and, indeed, it can 
 hardly be supposed for a moment that Lord John Russell 
 expected he would have seriously entertained it. The quar- 
 rel was <:omplte ; Lord Palmerston ceased for the time to 
 be Foreign Secretary, and his place was taken by Lord 
 Gran vi lie. 
 
 Seldom has a greater sensation been produced by the re- 
 moval of a minister. The effect which was created all over 
 Europe was probably just what Lord Palmerston himself 
 would have desired ; the belief prevailed everywhere that 
 
 17* 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 he had been sacrificed to the monarchical and reactionary 
 influences all over the Continent. The statesmen of Europe 
 were under the impression that Lord Palmerston was put 
 out of oftice as an evidence that England was about to with- 
 draw from her former attitude of sympathy with the popu- 
 lar movements of the Continent. Lord Palmerston himself 
 fell under a delusion which seems marvellous in a man pos- 
 sessed of his clear, strong common-sense. He conceived that 
 lie had been sacrificed to reactionary intrigue. He wrote to 
 his brother to say that the real ground for his dismissal was 
 a " weak truckling to the hostile intrigues of the Orleans 
 family, Austria, Russia, Saxony, and Bavaria, and, in some 
 degree, of the present Prussian Government." "All these 
 parties," he said, "found their respective views and systems 
 of policy thwarted by the course pursued by the British 
 Government, and they thought that if they could remove 
 the minister they would change the policy. They had, for 
 a long time past, effectually poisoned the mind of the Queen 
 and Prince against me, and John Russell giving way rather 
 encouraged than discountenanced the desire of the Queen 
 to remove me from the Foreign Oftice." So strongly did 
 the idea prevail that an intrigue of foreign diplomatists had 
 overthrown Palmerston, that the Russian ambassador, Bar- 
 on Brunnow,took the very ill-advised step of addressing to 
 Lord John Russell a disclaimer of any participation in such 
 a proceeding. The Queen made a proper comment on the 
 letter of Baron Brunnow by describing it as " very presum- 
 ing," inasmuch as it insinuated the possibility " of changes 
 of governments in this country taking place at the instiga- 
 tion of foreign ministers." Lord Palmerston was, of course, 
 entirely mistaken in supposing that any foreign interference 
 had contributed to his removal from the Foreign Office. 
 The only wonder is how a man so experienced as he could 
 have convinced himself of such a thing; at least it would 
 be a wonder if one did not know that the mo^t experienced 
 author or -artist can always persuade himself that a dispar- 
 aging critique is the result of personal and malignant hostil- 
 ity. But that the feeling of the Queen and the Prince had 
 long been against him can hardly admit of dispute. Prince 
 Albert seems not to have taken any pains to conceal his dis- 
 like and distrust of Palmerston. Nearly two years before, 
 
PALMERSTOX. 395 
 
 when the French ambassador was recalled for a time, the 
 Prince wrote to Lord John Russell to say that both the 
 Queen and himself were exceedingly sorry to hear of the 
 recall ; adding, " We are not surprised, however, that Lord 
 Palmerston's mode of doing business should not be borne 
 by the susceptible French Government with the same good- 
 humor and forbearance as by his colleagues." At the mo- 
 ment when Lord John Russell resolved on getting rid of 
 Lord Palmerston, Prince Albert wrote to him to say that 
 " the sudden termination of your difference with Lord Palm- 
 erston has taken us much by surprise, as we were wont to 
 see such differences terminate in his carrying his points, and 
 leaving the defence of them to his colleagues, and the dis- 
 credit to the Queen." It is clear from this letter alone that 
 the court was set against Lord Palmerston at that time. 
 The court was sometimes right where Palmerston was 
 wrong; but the fact that he then knew himself to be in an- 
 tagonism to the court is of importance both in judging of 
 his career and in estimating the relative strength of forces 
 in the politics of England. 
 
 Lord Palmerston then was dismissed. The meeting of 
 Parliament took place on the 3d of February following, 
 1852. It would be superfluous to say that the keenest anx- 
 iety was felt to know the full reasons of the sudden dismis- 
 sal. To quote the words used by Mr. Roebuck, " The most 
 marked person in the Administration, he around whom all 
 the party battles of the Administration had been fought, 
 whose political existence had been made the political exist- 
 ence of the Government itself, the person on whose being 
 in office the Government rested their existence as a gov- 
 ernment, was dismissed; their right hand was cut off, their 
 most powerful arm was taken away, and at the critical time 
 when it was most needed." The House of Commons was 
 not long left to wait for an explanation. Lord John Rus- 
 sell made a long speech, in which he went into the whole 
 history of the differences between Lord Palmerston and his 
 colleagues ; and, what was more surprising to the House, 
 into a history of the late Foreign Secretary's differences 
 with his Sovereign, and the threat of dismissal which had so 
 long been hanging over his head. The Prime-minister read 
 to the House the Queen's memorandum, which we have al- 
 
396 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 ready quoted. Lord John Russell's speech was a great suc- 
 cess. Lord Palmerston's was, even in the estimation of his 
 closest friends, a failure. Far different, indeed, was the ef- 
 fect it produced from the almost magical influence of that 
 wonderful speech on the "Don Pacifico" question, which had 
 compelled even unconvinced opponents to genuine admira- 
 tion. Palmerston seemed to have practically no defence. 
 He only went over again the points put by him in the cor- 
 respondence already noticed ; contended that, on the whole, 
 he had judged rightly of the French crisis, and that he could 
 not help forming an opinion on it, and so forth. Of the 
 Queen's memorandum he said nothing. He did not even 
 attempt to explain how it came about that, having received 
 so distinct and severe an injunction, he had ventured deliber- 
 ately to disregard it in a matter of the greatest national im- 
 portance. Some of his admirers were of opinion then, and 
 long after, that the reading of the memorandum must have 
 come on him by surprise ; that Lord John Russell must have 
 sprung a mine upon him; and that Palmerston was taken 
 unfairly and at a disadvantage. But it is certain that Lord 
 John Russell gave notice to his late colleague of his inten- 
 tion to read the memorandum of the Queen. Besides, Lord 
 Palmerston was one of the most ready and self-possessed 
 speakers that ever addressed the House of Commons. Dur- 
 ing the very reading of the memorandum he could have found 
 time to arrange his ideas, and to make out some show of a 
 case for himself. The truth, we believe, is that Lord Palm- 
 erston deliberately declined to make any reply to that part 
 of Lord John Russell's speech which disclosed the letter from 
 the Queen. He made up his mind that a dispute between a 
 sovereign and a subject would be unbecoming of both, and 
 he passed over the memorandum in deliberate silence. He 
 doubtless felt convinced that, even though such discretion 
 involved him for the moment in seeming defeat, it would in 
 the long-run reckon to his credit and his advantage. Lord 
 Dnlling, better known as Sir Henry Bnlwer, was present dur- 
 ing the debate, and formed an opinion of Palmerston's con- 
 duct which seems in every way correct and far-seeing. " I 
 must say," Lord Dalling writes, "that I never admired him 
 so much as at this crisis. He evidently thought he had 
 been ill-treated ; but I never heard him make an unfair or 
 
PALMERSTOK 397 
 
 irritable remark, nor did he seem in anywise stunned by the 
 blow he had received, or dismayed by the isolated position 
 in which he stood. I should say that he seemed to con- 
 sider that he had a quarrel put upon him which it was his 
 wisest course to close by receiving the fire of his adversary 
 and not returning it. He could not, in fact, have gained a 
 victory against the Premier on the ground which Lord John 
 Russell had chosen for the combat, which would not have 
 been more permanently disadvantageous to him than a de- 
 feat. The faults of which he had accused him did not touch 
 his own honor nor that of his country. Let them be admit- 
 ted, and there was an end of the matter. By-and-by an oc- 
 casion would probably arise in which he might choose an ad- 
 vantageous occasion for giving battle, and he was willing to 
 wait calmly for that occasion." 
 
 Lord Bailing judged accurately so far as his judgment 
 went. But while we agree with him in thinking that Lord 
 Palmerston refrained from returning his adversary's fire for 
 the reasons Lord Dalling has given, we are strongly of opin- 
 ion that other reasons too influenced Palmerston. He knew 
 that he was not at that time much liked or trusted by the 
 Queen and Prince Albert. He was not sorry that the fact 
 should be made known to the world. He thoroughly un- 
 derstood English public opinion, and was not above taking 
 advantage of its moods and its prejudices. He did not think 
 a statesman would stand any the worse in the general esti- 
 mation of the English public, then, because it was known that 
 lie was not admire'd by Prince Albert. 
 
 But the almost universal opinion of the House of Com- 
 mons and of the clubs was that Lord Palmerston's career was 
 closed. "Palmerston is smashed!" was the common saying 
 of the clubs. A night or two after the debate Lord Dalling 
 met Mr. Disraeli on the staircase of the Russian Embassy, 
 and Disraeli remarked to him that "there was a Palmerston." 
 
 Lord Palmerston evidently did not think so. The letters 
 he wrote to friends immediately after his fall show him as 
 jaunty and full of confidence as ever. He was quite satis- 
 fied with the way things had gone. He waited calmly for 
 what he called, a few days afterward, " my tit-for-tat with 
 John Russell," which came about, indeed, sooner than even 
 lie himself could well have expected. 
 
398 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 We have not hesitated to express our opinion that 
 throughout the whole of this particular dispute Lord Palm- 
 crston was in the wrong. He was in the wrong in many, 
 if not most, of the controversies which had preceded it; that 
 is to say, he was wrong in committing England, as he so 
 often did, to measures which had not had the approval of 
 the Sovereign or his colleagues. In the memorable dispute 
 which brought matters to a crisis, he seems to us to have 
 been in the wrong not less in what he did than in his man- 
 ner of doing it. Yet it ought not to have been difficult for 
 a calm observer, even at the time, to see that Lord Palrner- 
 ston was likely to have the best of the controversy in the 
 end. The faults of which he was principally accused were 
 not such as the English people would find it very hard to 
 forgive. He was said to be too brusque and high-handed in 
 his dealings with foreign states and ministers; but it did 
 not seem to the English people in general as if this was an 
 offence for which his own countrymen were bound to con- 
 demn him too severely. There was a general impression 
 that his influence was exercised on behalf of popular move- 
 ments abroad ; and an impression nearly as general that if 
 he had not acted a good deal on his own impulses and of 
 his own authority he could hardly have served any popular 
 cause so well. The coup cVetat certainly was not popular in 
 England. For a long time it was a subject of general rep- 
 rehension ; but even at that time men who condemned the 
 coup d'etat were not disposed to condemn Lord Palmerston 
 overmuch because, acting as usual on a personal impulse, he 
 had in that instance made a mistake. There was even in his 
 error something dashing, showy, and captivating to the gen- 
 eral public. He made the influence of England felt, people 
 said. His chief fault was that he was rather too strong for 
 those around him. If any grave crisis came, he, it was mur- 
 mured, and he alone, would be equal to the occasion, and 
 would maintain the dignity of England. Neither in war 
 nor in statesmanship does a man suffer much loss of pop- 
 ularity by occasionally disobeying orders and accomplishing 
 daring feats. Lord Palmerston saw his way clearly at :i 
 critical period of his career. He saw that at that time there 
 was, rightly or wrongly, a certain jealousy of the influence 
 of Prince Albeit, and he did not hesitate to take advantage 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 399 
 
 of the fact. He bore his temporary disgrace with well-justi- 
 fied composure. "The devil aids him, surely," said Sussex, 
 speaking to Raleigh of Leicester in Scott's " Kenilworth," 
 "for all that would sink another ten fathom deep seems but 
 to make him float the more easily." Some rival may have 
 thought thus of Lord Palmerston. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 BIRTH OP THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 
 
 THE year 1852 was one of profound emotion and even ex- 
 citement in England. An able writer has remarked that 
 the history of the Continent of Europe might be traced 
 through the history of England, if all other sources of in- 
 formation were destroyed, by the influence which every 
 great event in Continental affairs produces on the mood and 
 policy of England. As the astronomer infers the existence 
 and the attributes of some star his keenest glass will not 
 reveal by the perturbations its neighborhood causes to some 
 body of light within his ken, so the student of English his- 
 tory might well discover commotion on the Continent by 
 the evidence of a corresponding movement in England. All 
 through the year 1852 the national mind of England was 
 disturbed. The country was stirring itself in quite an Tin- 
 usual manner. A military spirit was exhibiting itself every- 
 where, not unlike that told of in Shakspeare's "Henry the 
 Fourth." The England of 1852 seems to threaten that " ere 
 this year expire we bear our civil swords and native fire as 
 far as France." At least the civil swords were sharpened 
 in order that the country might be ready for a possible and 
 even an anticipated invasion from France. The Volunteer 
 movement sprang into sudden existence. All over the 
 country corps of young volunteers were being formed. An 
 immense amount of national enthusiasm accompanied and 
 acclaimed the formation of the volunteer army, which re- 
 ceived the sanction of the Crown early in the year, and thus 
 became a national institution. 
 
 The meaning of all this movement was explained some 
 years after by Mr. Tennyson, in a string of verses which did 
 
400 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 more honor perhaps to his patriotic feeling than to his po- 
 etic genius. The verses are absurdly unworthy of Tenny- 
 son as a poet; but they express with unmistakable clearness 
 the popular sentiment of the hour; the condition of uncer- 
 tainty, vague alarm, and very general determination to be 
 ready at all events for whatever might come. " Form, form, 
 riflemen, form !" wrote the Laureate ; " better a rotten bor- 
 ough or two than a rotten fleet and a town in flames." " True 
 that we have a faithful ally, but only the devil knows what 
 he means." This was the alarm and the explanation. We 
 had a faithful ally, no doubt ; but we certainly did not quite 
 know what he meant. All the earlier part of the year had 
 witnessed the steady progress of the Prince President of 
 France to an imperial throne. The previous year had closed 
 upon his coup d'etat. He had arrested, imprisoned, banish- 
 ed, or shot his principal enemies, and had demanded from 
 the French people a Presidency for ten years a ministry 
 responsible to the executive power himself alone and 
 two political Chambers to be elected by universal suffrage. 
 Nearly five hundred prisoners, untried before any tribunal, 
 even that of a drum-head, had been shipped off to Cayenne. 
 The sti'eets of Paris had been soaked in blood. The Presi- 
 dent instituted a plebiscite, or vote of the whole people, and 
 of course he got all he asked for. There was no arguing 
 with the commander of twenty legions, and of such legions 
 as those that had operated with terrible efficiency on the 
 Boulevards. The first day of the new year saw the relig- 
 ious ceremony at Notre Dame to celebrate the acceptance 
 of the ten years' presidency by Louis Napoleon. The same 
 day a decree was published in the name of the President 
 declaring that the French eagle should be restored to the 
 standards of the army, as a symbol of the regenerated mili- 
 tary genius of France. A few days after, the Prince Presi- 
 dent decreed the confiscation of the property of the Orleans 
 family and restored titles of nobility in France. The birth^ 
 day of the Emperor Napoleon was declared by decree to be 
 the only national holiday. When the two legislative bodies 
 came to be sworn in, the President made an announcement 
 which certainly did not surprise many persons, but which 
 nevertheless sent a thrill abroad over all parts of Europe. 
 If hostile parties continued to plot against him, the Presi- 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 401 
 
 dent intimated, and to question the legitimacy of the power 
 he had assumed by virtue of the national vote, then it might 
 be necessary to demand from the people, in the name of the 
 repose of France, " a new title which will irrevocably fix 
 upon my head the power with which they have invested 
 me." There could be no further doubt. The Bonapartist 
 Empire was to be restored. A new Napoleon was to come 
 to the throne. 
 
 "Only the devil knows what he means," indeed. So peo- 
 ple were all saying throughout England in 1852. The scheme 
 went on to its development, and before the year was quite 
 out Louis Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor of the French. 
 Men had noticed as a curious, not to say ominous, coinci- 
 dence that on the very day when the Duke of Wellington 
 died the Moniteur announced that the French people were 
 receiving the Prince President everywhere as the Emperor- 
 elect, and as the elect of God ; and another French journal 
 published an article hinting, not obscurely, at the invasion 
 and conquest of England as the first great duty of a new 
 Napoleonic Empire. The Prince President, indeed, in one of 
 the provincial speeches which he delivered just before he was 
 proclaimed Emperor, had talked earnestly of pence. In his 
 famous speech to the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux 
 on October 9th, he denied that the restored Empire would 
 mean war. " I say," he declared, raising his voice and speak- 
 ing with energy and emphasis, " the Empire is peace." But 
 the assurance did not do much to satisfy Europe. Had* not 
 the same voice, it was asked, declaimed Avith equal energy 
 and earnestness the terms of the oath to the Republican 
 Constitution? Never, said a bitter enemy of the new Em- 
 pire, believe the word of a Bonaparte, unless when he prom- 
 ises to kill somebody. Such was, indeed, the common sen- 
 timent of a large number of the English people during the 
 eventful year when the President became Emperor, and 
 Prince Louis Napoleon was Napoleon the Third. 
 
 It would have been impossible that the English people 
 could view all this without emotion and alarm. It had been 
 clearly seen how the Prince President had carried his point 
 thus far. He had appealed at every step to the memory of 
 the Napoleonic legend. He had in every possible way re- 
 vived and reproduced the attributes of the reign of the Great 
 
402 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Emperor. His accession to power was strictly a military 
 and a Napoleonic triumph. In ordinary circumstances the 
 English people would not have troubled themselves much 
 about any change in the form of government of a foreign 
 country. They might have felt a strong dislike for the 
 manner in which such a change had been brought about; 
 but it would have been in nowise a matter of personal con- 
 cern to them. But they could not see with indifference the 
 rise of a new Napoleon to power on the strength of the old 
 Napoleonic legend. The one special characteristic of the 
 Napoleonic principle was its hostility to England. The life 
 of the Great Napoleon in its greatest days had been devoted 
 .to the one purpose of humiliating England. His plans had 
 been foiled by England. Whatever hands may have joined in 
 pressing him to the ground, there could be no doubt that he 
 owed his fall principally to England. Pie died a prisoner of 
 England, and with his hatred of her embittered rather than 
 appeased. It did not seem unreasonable to believe that the 
 successor who had been enabled to mount the Imperial 
 throne simply because he bore the name and represented 
 the principles of the First Napoleon would inherit the hatred 
 to England and the designs against England. Everything 
 else that savored of the Napoleonic era had been revived ; 
 why should this, its principal characteristic, be allowed to 
 lie in the tomb of the First Emperor? The policy of the 
 First Napoleon had lighted up a fire of hatred between Eng- 
 land and France which at one time seemed inextinguishable. 
 There were many who regarded that international hate as 
 something like that of the hostile brothers in the classic 
 story, the very flames of whose funeral piles refused to min- 
 gle in the air; or like that of the rival Scottish families, 
 whose blood, it was said, would never commingle though 
 poured into one dish. It did not seem possible that a new 
 Emperor Napoleon could arise without bringing a restora- 
 tion of that hatred along with him. 
 
 There were some personal reasons, too, for particular dis- 
 trust of the upcoming Emperor among the English people. 
 Louis Napoleon had lived many years in England. He was 
 as well known there as any prominent member of the Eng- 
 lish aristocracy. He Avent a good deal into very various so- 
 ciety, literary, artistic, merely fashionable, purely rowdy, as 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 403 
 
 well as into that political soc'icty which might have seemed 
 natural to him. In all circles the same opinion appears to 
 have been formed of him. From the astute Lord Palmer- 
 ston to the most ignorant of the horse-jockeys and ballet- 
 girls with Avhom he occasionally consorted, all who met him 
 seemed to think of the Prince in much the same way. It 
 was agreed on all hands that he was a fatuous, dreamy, 
 rnoony, impracticable, stupid young man. A sort of stolid 
 amiability, not enlightened enough to keep him out of low 
 company and questionable conduct, appeared to be his prin- 
 cipal characteristic. He constantly talked of his expected 
 accession somehow and some time to the throne of France, 
 and people only smiled pityingly at him. His attempts at 
 Strasburg and Boulogne had covered him with ridicule and 
 contempt. We cannot remember one authentic account of 
 any Englishman of mark at that time having professed to 
 see any evidence of capacity and strength of mind in Prince 
 Louis Napoleon. 
 
 When the coup (Vetat came and was successful, the amaze- 
 ment of the English public was unbounded. Never had any 
 plot been more skilfully and more carefully planned, more 
 daringly carried out. Here evidently was a master in the 
 art of conspiracy. Here was the combination of steady 
 caution and boundless audacity. What a subtlety of de- 
 sign ; what a perfection of silent self-control ! How slowly 
 the plan had been matured; how suddenly it was flashed 
 upon the world and carried to success ! No haste, no delay, 
 no scruple, no remorse, no fear ! And all this was the work 
 of the dull dawdler of English drawing-rooms; the heavy, 
 apathetic, unmoral rather than immoral haunter of English 
 race - courses and gambling-houses! What new surprise 
 might not be feared, what subtle and daring enterprise 
 might not reasonably be expected, from one who could thus 
 conceal and thus reveal himself, and do both with a like 
 success ! 
 
 Louis Napoleon, said a member of his family, deceived 
 Europe twice: first when he succeeded in passing oif as an 
 idiot, and next when he succeeded in passing oif as a states- 
 man. The epigram had doubtless a great deal of truth in 
 it. The coup d'etat was probably neither planned nor car- 
 ried to success by the cleverness and energy of Louis Napo- 
 
404 A HISTORY OF OUE OWN TIMES. 
 
 leon. Cooler and stronger heads and hands are responsible 
 for the execution at least of that enterprise. The Prince, it 
 is likely, played little more than a passive part in it, and 
 might have lost his nerve more than once but for the great- 
 er resolution of some of his associates, who were determined 
 to crown him for their own sakes as well as for his. But at 
 the time the world at large saw only Louis Napoleon in the 
 whole scheme, conception, execution, and all. The idea was 
 formed of a colossal figure of cunning and daring a Brutus, 
 a Talleyrand, a Philip of Spain, and a Napoleon the First all 
 in one. Those who detested him most admired and feared 
 him not the least. Who can doubt, it was asked, that he 
 will endeavor to make himself the heir of the revenges of 
 Napoleon? Who can believe any pledges he may give? 
 How enter into any treaty or bond of any kind with such a 
 man? Where is the one that can pretend to say he sees 
 through him and understands his schemes? 
 
 Had Louis Napoleon any intention at anytime of invading 
 England ? We are inclined to believe that he never had a 
 
 O 
 
 regular fixed plan of the kind. But we are also inclined to 
 think that the project entered into his mind, with various 
 other ideas and plans more or less vague, and that circum- 
 stances might have developed it into an actual scheme. 
 Louis Napoleon was, above all things, a man of ideas in the 
 inferior sense of the word ; that is to say, he was always oc- 
 cupying himself with vague, dreamy suggestions of plans 
 that might in this, that, or the other case be advantageously 
 pursued. He had come to power probably with the deter- 
 mination to keep it, and make himself acceptable to France 
 first of all. After this came, doubtless, the sincere desire to 
 make France great and powerful and prosperous. At first 
 he had no particular notion of the way to establish himself 
 as a popular ruler, and it is certain that he turned over all 
 manner of plans in his mind for the purpose. Among these 
 must certainly have been one for the invasion of England 
 and the avenging of Waterloo. He let drop hints at times 
 which showed that he was thinking of something of the 
 kind. He talked of himself as representing a defeat. He 
 was attacked with all the bitterness of a not unnatural but 
 very unrestrained animosity in the English press for his 
 conduct in the coup cVetat; and no doubt lie and his com- 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 405 
 
 panions were greatly exasperated. The mood of a large 
 portion of the French people was distinctly aggressive. 
 Ashamed to some degree of much that had been done and 
 that they had had to suffer, many Frenchmen were in that 
 state of dissatisfaction with themselves which makes people 
 eager to pick a quarrel with some one else. Had Louis 
 Napoleon been inclined, he might doubtless have easily 
 stirred his people to the war mood ; and it is not to be be- 
 lieved that he did not occasionally contemplate the expe- 
 diency of doing something of the kind. Assuredly, if he 
 had thought such an enterprise necessary to the stability of 
 his reign, he would have risked even a war with England. 
 But it would not have been tried except as a last resource ; 
 and the need did not arise. No one could have known bet- 
 ter the risks of such an attempt. He knew England as his 
 uncle never did ; and if he had not his uncle's energy or 
 military genius, he had far more knowledge of the world 
 and of the relative resources and capabilities of nations. 
 He would not have done anything rash without great ne- 
 cessity, or the prospect of very certain benefit in the event 
 of success. 
 
 An invasion of England was not, therefore, a likely event. 
 Looking back composedly now on what actually did happen, 
 we may safely say that few things were less likely. But it 
 was not by any means an impossible event. The more com- 
 posedly one looks back to it now, the more he will be com- 
 pelled to admit that it was at least on the cards. The feel- 
 ing of national uneasiness and alarm was not a mere panic. 
 There were five projects with which public opinion all over 
 Europe specially credited Louis Napoleon when he began 
 his imperial reign. One was a war with Russia. Another 
 was a war with Austria. A third was a war with Prussia. 
 A fourth was the annexation of Belgium. The fifth was the 
 invasion of England. Three of these projects were carried 
 out. The fourth we know was in contemplation. Our com- 
 bination with France in the first project probably put all 
 serious thought of the fifth out of the head of the French 
 Emperor. He got far more prestige out of an alliance with 
 us than he could ever have got out of any quarrel with us ; 
 and he had little or no risk. We do not count for anything 
 the repeated assurances of Louis Napoleon that he desired 
 
406 A HISTORY OP OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 above all things to be on friendly terms with England. 
 These assurances were doubtless sincere at the moment 
 when they were made, and under the circumstances of that 
 moment. But altered circumstances might at any time 
 have induced an altered frame of mind. The very same as- 
 surances were made again and again to Russia, to Austria, 
 and to Prussia. The pledge that the Empire was peace was 
 addressed, like the Pope's edict, ^lrbi et orbi. 
 
 Therefore we do not look upon the mood of England in 
 1852 as one of idle and baseless panic. The same feeling 
 broke into life again in 1859, when the Emperor of the 
 French suddenly announced his determination to go to war 
 with Austria. It was in this latter period, indeed, that the 
 Volunteer movement became a great national organization, 
 and that the Laureate did his best to rouse it into activity 
 in the verses of hardly doubtful merit to which we have 
 already referred. But in 1852 the beginning of an army of 
 volunteers was made, and, what is of more importance to 
 the immediate business of our history, the Government de- 
 termined to bring in a bill for the reorganization of the na- 
 tional militia. 
 
 Our militia was not in any case a body to be particularly 
 proud of at that time. It had fallen into decay, and almost 
 into disorganization. Nothing could have been a more 
 proper work for any Government than its restoration to 
 efficiency and respectability. Nothing, too, could have been 
 more timely than a measure to make it efficient in view of 
 the altered condition of European aifairs and the increased 
 danger of disturbance at home and abroad. We had on our 
 hands at the time, too, one of our little wars a Caffre war, 
 which was protracted to a vexatious length, and which was 
 not without serious military difficulty. It began in the De- 
 cember of 1850, and was not completely disposed of before 
 the early part of 1853. We could not, therefore, afford to 
 have our defences in any defective condition, and no labor 
 was more fairly incumbent on a Government than the task 
 of making them adequate to their purpose. But it was an 
 unfortunate characteristic of Lord John Russell's Govern- 
 ment that it attempted so much legislation, not because 
 some particular scheme commended itself to tlie mature 
 wisdom of the ministry, but because something had to be 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 407 
 
 done in a hurry to satisfy public opinion ; and the Govern- 
 ment could not think of anything better at the moment 
 than the first scheme that came to hand. Lord John Rus- 
 sell, accordingly, introduced a Militia Bill, which was in the 
 highest degree inadequate and unsatisfactory. The princi- 
 pal peculiarity of it was that it proposed to substitute a 
 local militia for the regular force that had been in existence. 
 Lord Palmerston saw great objections to this alteration, and 
 urged them with much briskness and skill on the night 
 when Lord John Russell explained his measure. When 
 Palmerston began his speech, he probably intended to be 
 merely critical as regarded points in the measure which 
 were susceptible of amendment ; but as he went on he 
 found moi m e and more that he had the House with him. 
 Every objection he made, every criticism he urged, almost 
 every sentence he spoke, drew down increasing cheers. 
 Lord Palmerston saw that the House was not only thor- 
 oughly with him on this ground, but thoroughly against the 
 Government on various grounds. A few nights after he 
 followed up his first success by proposing a resolution to 
 substitute the word "regular" for the word "local" in the 
 bill; thus, in fact, to reconstruct the bill on an entirely dif- 
 ferent principle from that adopted by its framer. The eifort 
 was successful. The Peelites went with Palmerston; the 
 Protectionists followed him as well; and the result was that 
 136 votes were given for the amendment, and only 125 
 against it. The Government were defeated by a majority 
 of eleven. Lord John Russell instantly announced that he 
 could no longer continue in office, as he did not possess the 
 confidence of the country. 
 
 The announcement took the House by surprise. Lord 
 Palmerston had not himself expected any such result from 
 his resolution. There was no reason why the Government 
 should not have amended their bill on the basis of the reso- 
 lution passed by the House. The country wanted a scheme 
 of efficient defence, and the Government were only called 
 upon to make their scheme efficient. But Lord John Rus- 
 sell was well aware that his Administration had been losing 
 its authority little by little. Since the time when it had re- 
 turned to power, simply because no one could form a minis- 
 try any stronger than itself, it had been only a Government 
 
408 A HISTORY OF OUli OWN TIMES. 
 
 on sufferance. Ministers who assume office in that stop-gap 
 way seldom retain it long in England. The Gladstone Gov- 
 ernment illustrated this fact in 1873, when they consented 
 to return to office because Mr. Disraeli was not then in a 
 condition to come in, and were dismissed by an overwhelm- 
 ing majority at the elections in the following spring. Lord 
 ( Palmerston assigned one special reason for Lord John Rus- 
 sell's promptness in resigning on the change in the Militia 
 Bill. The great motive for the step was, according to Palm- 
 erston^" the fear of being defeated on the vote of censure 
 about the Cape affairs, which was to have been moved to- 
 day ; as it is, the late Government have gone out on a ques- 
 tion which they have treated as a motion, merely asserting 
 that they had lost the confidence of the House; whereas, if 
 they had gone out on a defeat upon the motion about the 
 Cape, they would have carried with them the direct censure 
 of the House of Commons." The letter from Lord Palm- 
 erston to his brother, from which these words are quoted, 
 begins with a remarkable sentence: "I have had my tit-for- 
 tat with John Russell, and I turned him out on Friday last." 
 Palmerston did not expect any such result, he declared; but 
 the revenge was doubtless sweet, for all that. This was in 
 February, 1852 ; and it was only in the December of the pre- 
 vious year that Lord Palmerston was compelled to leave the 
 Foreign Office by Lord John Russell. The same influence, 
 oddly enough, was the indirect cause of both events. Lord 
 Palmerston lost his place because of his recognition of Louis 
 Napoleon; Lord John Russell fell from power while endeav- 
 oring to introduce a measure suggested by Louis Napoleon's 
 successful usurpation. It will be seen in a future chapter 
 how the influence of Louis Napoleon was once again fatal to 
 each statesman in turn. 
 
 The Russell Ministry had done little and initiated less. 
 It had carried on Peel's system by throwing open the mar- 
 kets to foreign as well as colonial sugar, and by the repeal 
 of the Navigation Laws enabled merchants to employ for- 
 eign ships and seamen in the conveyance of their goods. It 
 had made a mild and ineffectual effort at a Reform Bill, and 
 had feebly favored attempts to admit Jews to Parliament. 
 It sank from power with an unexpected collapse in which 
 the nation felt small concern. 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 409 
 
 Lord Palraerston did not come to power again at that 
 moment. He might have gone in with Lord Derby if he 
 
 O O ' 
 
 had been so inclined. But Lord Derby, who, it may be said, 
 had succeeded to that title on the death of his father in the 
 preceding year, still talked of testing the policy of Free-trade 
 at a general election, and of course Palmerston was not dis- 
 posed to have anything to do with such a proposition. Nor 
 had Palmerston in any case much inclination to serve under 
 Derby, of whose political intelligence he thought poorly, and 
 whom he regarded principally as what he called "a flashy 
 speaker." Lord Derby tried various combinations in vain, 
 and at last had to experiment with a cabinet of undiluted 
 Protectionists. He had to take office, not because he want- 
 ed it, or because any one in particular wanted him, but sim- 
 ply and solely because there was no one else who could un- 
 dertake the task. He formed a cabinet to carry on the bus- 
 iness of the country for the moment, and until it should be 
 convenient to have a general election, when he fondly hoped 
 that by some inexplicable process a Protectionist reaction 
 would be brought about, and he should find himself at the 
 head of a strong administration. 
 
 The ministry which Lord Derby was able to form was not 
 a strong one. Lord Palmerston described it as containing 
 two men of mark, Derby and Disraeli, and a number of ci- 
 phers. It had not, except for these two, a single man of any 
 political ability, and had hardly one of any political experi- 
 ence. It had an able lawyer for Lord Chancellor, Lord St. 
 Leonards, but he was nothing of a politician. The rest of 
 the members of the Government were respectable country 
 gentlemen. One of them, Mr. Herries, had been Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer in a short-lived Government, that of Lord 
 Goderich, in 1827; and he had held the office of Secretary 
 of War for a few months some time later. He was forgot- 
 ten by the existing generation of politicians, and the gen- 
 eral public only knew that he was still living when they 
 heard of his accession to Lord Derby's Government. The 
 Earl of Malmesbury, Sir John Pakington, Mr. Walpole, Mr. 
 Henley, and the rest, were men whose antecedents scarcely 
 gave them warrant for any higher claim in public life than 
 the position of chairman of quarter-sessions ; nor did their 
 subsequent career in office contribute much to establish a 
 
 I. 18 
 
410 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 loftier estimate of their capacity. The head of the Govern- 
 ment was remarkable for his dashing blunders as a politician, 
 quite as much as for his dashing eloquence. His new lieu- 
 tenant, Mr. Disraeli, had in former days christened him, very 
 happily, " The Rupert of Debate," after that fiery and gal- 
 lant prince whose blunders generally lost the battles which 
 his headlong courage had nearly won. 
 
 Concerning Mr. Disraeli himself it is not too much to say 
 that many of his own party were rather more afraid of his 
 genius than of the dulness of any of his colleagues. It is 
 not a pleasant task, in the best of circumstances, to be at the 
 head of a tolerated ministry in the House of Commons : a 
 ministry which is in a minority, and only holds its place be- 
 cause there is no one ready to relieve it of the responsibility 
 of office. Mr. Disraeli himself, at a much later date, gave the 
 House of Commons an amusing picture of the trials and hu- 
 miliations which await the leader of such a forlorn hope. 
 He had now to assume that position without any previous 
 experience of office. Rarely, indeed, is the leadership of the 
 House of Commons undertaken by any one who has not pre- 
 viously held office ; and Mr. Disraeli entered upon leader- 
 ship and office at the same moment for the first time. He 
 became Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the 
 House of Commons. Among the many gifts with which 
 he was accredited by fame, not a single admirer had hither- 
 to dreamed of including a capacity for the mastery of fig- 
 ures. In addition to all the ordinary difficulties of the min- 
 istry of a minority, there was, in this instance, the difficul- 
 ty arising from the obscurity and inexperience of nearly all 
 its members. Facetious persons dubbed the new adminis- 
 tration the "Who? Who? Ministry." The explanation of 
 this odd nickname was found in a story then in circulation 
 about the Duke of Wellington. The Duke, it was said, was 
 anxious to hear from Lord Derby at the earliest moment all 
 about the composition of his cabinet. He was overheard 
 asking the new Prime-minister in the House of Lords the 
 names of his intended colleagues. The Duke w r as rather 
 deaf, and, like most deaf persons, spoke in very loud tones, 
 and of course had to be answered in tones also rather ele- 
 vated. That which was meant for a whispered conversation 
 became audible to the whole House. As Lord Derby men- 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 411 
 
 tioned each name, the Duke asked in wonder and eagerness, 
 "Who? Who?" After each new name came the same in- 
 quiry. The Duke of Wellington had clearly never heard of 
 most of the new ministers before. The story went about : 
 and Lord Derby's Administration was familiarly known as 
 the "Who? Who? Government." 
 
 Lord Derby entered office with the avowed intention of 
 testing the Protection question all over again ; but he was 
 no sooner in office than he found that the bare suggestion 
 had immensely increased his difficulties. The formidable 
 organization which had worked the Free-trade cause so suc- 
 cessfully seemed likely to come into political life again with 
 all its old vigor. The Free-traders began to stand together 
 again the moment Lord Derby gave his unlucky hint. Ev- 
 ery week that passed over his head did something to show 
 him the mistake he had made when he hampered himself 
 with any such undertaking as the revival of the Protection 
 question. Some of his colleagues had been unhappily and 
 blunderingly outspoken in their addresses to their constitu- 
 ents seeking for re-election, and had talked as if the restora- 
 tion of Protection itself were the grand object of Lord Der- 
 by's taking office. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 had been far more cautious. He only talked vaguely of 
 " those remedial measures which great productive interests, 
 suffering from unequal taxation, have a right to expect from 
 a just Government." In truth, Mr. Disraeli was well con- 
 vinced at this time of the hopelessness of any agitation for 
 the restoration of Protection, and would have been only too 
 glad of any opportunity for a complete and at the same 
 time a safe disavowal of any sympathy with such a project. 
 The Government found their path bristling with troubles, 
 created for them by their own mistake in giving any hint 
 about the demand for a new trial of the Free-trade question. 
 Any chance they might otherwise have had of making effec- 
 tive head against their very trying difficulties was complete- 
 ly cut away from them. 
 
 The Free -trade League was reorganized. A conference 
 of Liberal members of the House of Commons was held at 
 the residence of Lord John Russell ,in Chesharn Place, at 
 which it was resolved to extract or extort from the Govern- 
 ment a full avowal of their policy with regard to Protection 
 
412 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and Free-trade. The feat would have been rather difficult 
 of accomplishment, seeing that the Government had abso- 
 lutely no policy to offer on the subject, and were only hop- 
 ing to be able to consult the country as one might consult 
 an oracle. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he made 
 his financial statement, accepted the increased prosperity of 
 the few years preceding with an unction which showed that 
 he, at least, had no particular notion of attempting to reverse 
 the policy which had so greatly contributed to its progress. 
 Mr. Disraeli pleased the Peelites and the Liberals much 
 more by his statement than he pleased his chief or many of 
 his followers. His speech, indeed, was very clever. A new 
 financial scheme he could not produce, for he had not had 
 time to make anything like a complete examination of the 
 finances of the country ; but he played very prettily and 
 skilfully with the facts and figures, and conveyed to the 
 listeners the idea of a man who could do wonderful things 
 in finance if he only had a little time and were in the humor. 
 Every one outside the limits of the extreme and unconverted 
 Protectionists was pleased with the success of his speech. 
 People were glad that one who had proved himself so clever 
 with many things should have shown himself equal to the 
 uncongenial and unwonted task of dealing with dry facts 
 and figures. The House felt that he was placed in a very 
 trying position, and was well pleased to see him hold his 
 own so successfully in it. 
 
 Mr. Disraeli merely proposed in his financial statement to 
 leave things as he found them ; to continue the income-tax 
 for another year, as a pi'ovisional arrangement pending that 
 complete re-examination of the financial affairs of the coun- 
 try to which he intimated that he found himself quite equal 
 at the proper time. No one could suggest any better 
 course ; and the new Chancellor came off, on the whole, 
 with flying colors. His very difficulties had been a source 
 of advantage to him. He was not expected to produce a 
 financial scheme at such short notice; and if he was not 
 equal to a financier's task, it did not so appear on this first 
 occasion of trial. The Government, on the whole, did not 
 do so badly during this period of their probation. They in- 
 troduced and carried a Militia Bill, for which they obtained 
 the cordial support of Lord Palmerston; and they gave a 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 413 
 
 Constitution to New Zealand ; and then, in the beginning 
 of July, the Parliament was prorogued and the dissolution 
 took place. The elections were signalized by very serious 
 riots in many parts of the country. In Ireland, particularly, 
 party passions ran high. The landlords and the police were 
 on one side ; the priests and the popular party on the other ; 
 and in several places there was some bloodshed. It was not 
 in Ireland, however, a question about Free-trade or Protec- 
 tion. The great mass of the Irish people knew nothing 
 about Mr. Disraeli probably had never heard his name, 
 and did not care who led the House of Commons. The 
 question which agitated the Irish constituencies was that of 
 Tenant-right, in the first instance ; and the time had not yet 
 arrived when a great minister from either party was pre- 
 pared to listen to their demands on this subject. There 
 was also much bitterness of feeling remaining from the dis- 
 cussions on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. But it may be 
 safely said that not one of the questions that stirred up 
 public feeling in England had the slightest popular interest 
 in Ireland, and the question which the Irish people consid- 
 ered essential to their very existence did not enter for one 
 moment into the struggles that were going on all over 
 England. 
 
 The speeches of ministers in England showed the same 
 lively diversity as before on the subject of Protection. Mr. 
 Disraeli not only threw Protection overboard, but boldly 
 declared that no one could have supposed the ministry had 
 the slightest intention of proposing to bring back the laws 
 that were repealed in 1846. In fact the time, he declared, 
 had gone by when such exploded politics could even interest 
 the people of this country. On the other hand, several of 
 Mr. Disraeli's colleagues evidently spoke in the fulness of 
 their simple faith that Lord Derby was bent on setting up 
 again the once beloved and not yet forgotten protective 
 system. But from the time of the elections nothing more 
 was heard about Protection, or about the possibility of get- 
 ting a new trial for its principles. The elections did little 
 or nothing for the Government. The dreams of a strength- 
 
 o O 
 
 ened party at their back were gone. They gained a little, 
 just enough to make it unlikely that any one would move a 
 vote of want of confidence at the very outset of their reap- 
 
414 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 pearance before Parliament, but not nearly enough to give 
 them a chance of carrying any measure which could really 
 propitiate the Conservative party throughout the country. 
 They were still to be the ministry of a minority a ministry 
 on sufferance. They were a ministry on sufferance when 
 they appealed to the country, but they were able to say 
 then that when their cause had been heard the country 
 would declare for them. They now came back to be a min- 
 istry on sufferance, who had made the appeal and had seen 
 it rejected. It was plain to every one that their existence 
 as a ministry was only a question of days. Speculation was 
 already busy as to their successors ; and it was evident that 
 a new Government could only be formed by some sort of 
 coalition between the Whigs and the Peelites. 
 
 Among the noteworthy events of the general elections 
 was the return of Macaulay to the House of Commons. 
 Edinburgh elected him in a manner particularly compli- 
 mentary to him and honorable to herself. He was elected 
 without his solicitation, without his putting himself forward 
 as a candidate, Without his making any profession of faith, 
 or doing any of the things that the most independent can- 
 didate was then expected to do ; and, in fact, in spite of his 
 positive declaration -that he would do nothing to court elec- 
 tion. He had for some years been absent from Parliament. 
 Some difference had arisen between him and certain of his 
 constituents on the subject of the Maynooth grant. Com- 
 plaints, too, had been made by Edinburgh constituents of 
 Macaulay's lack of attention to local interests, and of the 
 intellectual scorn which, as they believed, he exhibited in 
 his intercourse with many of those who had supported him. 
 The result of this was, that at the general election of 1847 
 Macaulay was left third on the poll at Edinburgh. He felt 
 this deeply. He might have easily found some other con- 
 stituency; but his wounded pride hastened a resolution he 
 had for some time been forming to retire to a life of private 
 literary labor. He therefore remained out of Parliament. 
 In 1852 the movement of Edinburgh toward him was en- 
 tirely spontaneous. Edinburgh was anxious to atone for 
 the error of which she had been guilty. Macaulay would 
 go no farther than to say that if Edinburgh spontaneous- 
 ly elected him he should deem it a very high honor, and 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 415 
 
 "should not feel myself justified in refusing to accept a 
 public trust offered to me in a manner so honorable and 
 so peculiar." But he would not do anything whatever to 
 court favor. He did not want to be elected to Parliament, 
 he said ; he was very happy in his retirement. Edinburgh 
 elected him on those terms. He was not long allowed by 
 his health to serve her; but so long as he remained in the 
 House of Commons it was as member for Edinburgh. 
 
 On September 14th, 1852, the Duke of Wellington died. 
 His end was singularly peaceful. He fell quietly asleep 
 about a quarter-past three in the afternoon in Walmer Cas- 
 tle, and he did not wake any more. He was a very old 
 man in his eighty-fourth year and his death had natural- 
 ly been looked for as an event certain to come soon. Yet 
 when it did come thus naturally and peacefully, it created 
 a profound public emotion. No other man in our time ever 
 held the position in England which the Duke of Wellington 
 had occupied for more than a whole generation. The place 
 he had won for himself was absolutely unique. His great 
 deeds belonged to a past time. He was hardly anything 
 of a statesman ; he knew little and cared less about what 
 may be called states-craft ; and as an administrator he had 
 made many mistakes. But the trust which the nation had 
 in him as a counsellor was absolutely unlimited. It never 
 entered into the mind of any one to suppose that the Duke 
 of Wellington was actuated in any step he took, or advice 
 he gave, by any feeling but a desire for the good of the 
 State. His loyalty to the Sovereign had something antique 
 and touching in it. There was a blending of personal affec- 
 tion with the devotion of a state servant which lent a cer- 
 tain romantic dignity to the demeanor and character of one 
 who otherwise had but little of the poetical or the senti- 
 mental in his nature. In the business of politics he had but 
 one pi'evailing anxiety, and that was that the Queen's Gov- 
 ernment should be satisfactorily carried on. He gave up 
 again and again his own most cherished convictions, most 
 ingrained prejudices, in order that he might not stand in 
 the way of the Queen's Government, and the proper carry- 
 ing of it on. This simple fidelity, sometimes rather whim- 
 sically displayed, stood him often in stead of an exalted 
 statesmanship, and enabled him to extricate the Government 
 
416 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 and the nation from difficulties in which a political insight 
 far more keen than his might have failed to prove a guide. 
 
 It was for this true and tried, this simple and unswerving 
 devotion to the national good, that the people of England 
 admired and revered him. He had not what would be called 
 a lovable temperament, and yet the nation loved him. He 
 was cold and brusque in manner, and seemed in general to 
 have hardly a gleam of the emotional in him. This was 
 not because he lacked affections. On the contrary, his affec- 
 tions and his friendships were warm and enduring ; and 
 even in public he had more than once given way to out- 
 bursts of emotion such as a stranger would never have ex- 
 pected from one of that cold and rigid demeanor. When 
 Sir Robert Peel died, Wellington spoke of him in the House 
 of Lords with the tears, which he did not even try to control, 
 running down his cheeks. But in his ordinary bearing there 
 was little of the manner that makes a man a popular idol. 
 He was not brilliant or dashing, or emotional or graceful; 
 he was dry, cold, self-contained. Yet the people loved him 
 and trusted in him; loved him perhaps especially because 
 they so trusted in him. No face and figure were better 
 known at one time to the population of London than those 
 of the Duke of Wellington. Of late his form had grown 
 
 O O 
 
 stooped, and he bent over his horse as he rode in the Park 
 or down Whitehall like one who could hardly keep himself 
 in the saddle. Yet he mounted his horse to the last, and in- 
 deed could keep in the saddle after he had ceased to be able 
 to sit erect in an arm-chair. He sometimes rode in a curi- 
 ous little cab of his own devising ; but his favorite way of 
 going about London was on the back of his horse. He was 
 called, par excellence, " the Duke." The London working- 
 man who looked up as he went to or from his work and 
 caught a sight of the bowed figure on the horse, took off his 
 hat and told some passer-by, " There goes the Duke !" His 
 victories belonged to the past. They were but traditions 
 even to middle-aged men in " the Duke's " later years. But 
 he was regarded still as an embodiment of the national 
 heroism and success a modern St. George in a tightly-but- 
 toned frock-coat and white trousers. 
 
 Wellington belonged so much to the past at the time of 
 his death, that it seems hardly in place here to say anything 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 417 
 
 about his character as a soldier. But it may be remarked 
 that his success was due in great measure to a sort of in- 
 spired common-sense which rose to something like genius. 
 He had in the highest conceivable degree the art of winning 
 victories. In war, as in statesmanship, he had one charac- 
 teristic which is said to have been the special gift of Julius 
 Caesar, and for the lack of which Caesar's greatest modern 
 rival in the art of conquest, the first Napoleon, lost all, or 
 nearly all, that he had won. Wellington not only under- 
 stood what could be done, but also what could not be done. 
 The wild schemes of almost universal rule which set Napo- 
 leon astray and led him to his destruction would have ap- 
 peared to the strong common-sense of the Duke of Welling- 
 ton as impossible and absurd as they would have looked to 
 the lofty intelligence of Caesar. It can hardly be questioned 
 that in original genius Napoleon far surpassed the Duke of 
 Wellington. But Wellington always knew exactly what 
 he could do, and Napoleon often confounded his ambitions 
 with his capacities. Wellington provided for everything, 
 looked after everything ; never trusted to his star or to 
 chance, or to anything but care and preparation, and the 
 proper application of means to ends. Under almost any 
 conceivable conditions, Wellington, pitted against Napoleon, 
 was the man to win in the end. The very genius of Napo- 
 leon would sooner or later have left him open to the nn- 
 sleeping watchfulness, the almost infallible judgment, of 
 Wellington. 
 
 He was as fortunate as he was deserving. No man could 
 have drunk more deeply of the cup of fame and fortune than 
 Wellington ; and he was never for one moment intoxicated 
 by it. After all his long wars and his splendid victories he 
 had some thirty-seven years of peace and glory to enjoy. 
 He held the loftiest position in this country that any man 
 not a sovereign could hold, and he ranked far higher in the 
 estimation of his countrymen than most of their sovereigns 
 have done. The rescued emper6rs and kings of Europe had 
 showered their honors on him. His fame was as complete- 
 ly secured during his lifetime as if death, by removing him 
 from the possibility of making a mistake, had consecrated it. 
 No new war under altered conditions tried the flexibility 
 and the endurance of the military genius which had defeated 
 
 18* 
 
418 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 in turn all Napoleon's great marshals as a prelude to the 
 defeat of Napoleon himself. If ever any mortal may be 
 said to have had in life all he could have desired, Welling- 
 ton was surely that man. He might have found a new con- 
 tentment in his honors, if he really cared much about them, 
 in the reflection that he had done nothing for himself, but 
 all for the State. He did not love war. He had no inclina- 
 tion whatever for it. When Lord John Russell visited Na- 
 poleon in Elba, Napoleon asked him whether he thought 
 the Duke of Wellington would be able to live thencefor- 
 ward without the excitement of war. It was probably in 
 Napoleon's mind that the English soldier would be constant- 
 ly entangling his country in foreign complications for the 
 sake of gratifying his love for the brave squares of war. 
 Lord John Russell endeavored to impress upon the great 
 fallen Emperor that the Duke of Wellington would, as a 
 matter of course, lapse into the place of a simple citizen, and 
 would look with no manner of regret to the stormy days 
 of battle. Napoleon seems to have listened with a sort 
 of melancholy incredulity, and only observed once or twice 
 that " it was a splendid game, war." To Wellington it was 
 no splendid game, or game of any sort. It was a stern duty 
 to be done for his Sovereign and his country, and to be got 
 through as quickly as possible. The difference between the 
 two men cannot be better illustrated. It is impossible to 
 compare two such men. There is hardly any common basis 
 of comparison. To say which is the greater, one must first 
 make up his mind as to whether his standard of greatness is 
 genius or duty. Napoleon has made a far deeper impression 
 on history. If that be superior greatness, it would be scarce- 
 ly possible for any national partiality to claim an equal 
 place for Wellington. But Englishmen may be content 
 with the reflection that their hero saved his country, and 
 that Napoleon nearly ruined his. We write this without 
 the slightest inclination to sanction what may be called the 
 British Philistine view of the character of Napoleon. Up 
 to a certain period of his career it seems to us deserving of 
 almost unmingled admiration ; just as his country, in her 
 earlier disputes with the other European Powers, seems to 
 have been almost entirely in the right. But his success and 
 his glory were too strong for Napoleon. He fell for the 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 419 
 
 1 
 
 very want of that simple, steadfast devotion to duty which 
 inspired Wellington always, and which made him seem 
 dignified and great, even in statesmanship for which he was 
 unfitted, and even when in statesmanship he was acting in 
 a manner that would have made another man seem ridic- 
 ulous rather than respectable. Wellington more nearly 
 resembled Washington than Napoleon. He was a much 
 greater soldier than Washington ; but he was not, on the 
 whole, so great a man. 
 
 It is fairly to be said for Wellington that the proportions 
 of his personal greatness seem to grow rather than to dwin- 
 dle as he and his events are removed from us by time. The 
 battle of Waterloo does not indeed stand, as one of its his- 
 torians has described it, among the decisive battles of the 
 world. It was fought to keep the Bonapartes off the throne 
 of France ; and in twenty-five years after Waterloo, while 
 the victor of Waterloo was yet living, another Bonaparte 
 w r as preparing to mount that throne. It was the climax of 
 a national policy which, however justifiable and inevitable 
 it may have become in the end, would hardly now be justi- 
 fied as to its origin by one intelligent Englishman out of 
 twenty. The present age is not, therefore, likely to become 
 rhapsodical over Wellington, as our forefathers might have 
 been, merely because he defeated the French and crushed 
 Napoleon. Yet it is impossible for the coolest mind to 
 study the career of Wellington without feeling a constant 
 glow of admiration for that singular course of simple an- 
 tique devotion to duty. His was truly the spirit in which 
 a great nation must desire to be served. 
 
 The nation was not ungrateful. It heaped honors on Wel- 
 lington ; it would have heaped more on him if it knew how. 
 It gave him its almost unqualified admiration. On his death 
 it tried to give him such a public funeral as hero never had. 
 The pageant was, indeed, a splendid and a gorgeous exhibi- 
 tion. It was not, perhaps, very well suited to the tempera- 
 ment and habits of the cold and simple hero to whose hon- 
 or it was got up. Nor, perhaps, are gorgeous pageants ex- 
 actly the sort of performance in which, as a nation, England 
 particularly excels. But in the vast, silent, respectful crowd 
 that thronged the London streets a crowd such as no other 
 city in the world could show there was better evidence 
 
420 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 than pageantry or ceremonial could supply of the esteem in 
 which the living generation held the hero of the last. The 
 name of Wellington had long ceased to represent any hos- 
 tility of nation to nation. The crowds who filled the streets 
 of London that day had no thought of the kind of sentiment 
 which used to fill the breasts of their fathers when France 
 and Napoleon were named. They honored Wellington only 
 as one who had always served his country ; as the soldier 
 of England and not as the invader of France, or even as the 
 conqueror of Napoleon. The homage to his memory was as 
 pure of selfish passion as his own career. 
 
 The new Parliament was called together in November. 
 It brought into public life in England a man who afterward 
 made some mark in our politics, and whose intellect and de- 
 bating power seemed at one time to promise him a position 
 inferior to that of hardly any one in the House of Commons. 
 This was Mr. Robert Lowe, who had returned from one of 
 the Australian colonies to enter political life in his native 
 country. Mr. Lowe was a scholar of a highly cultured or- 
 der; and, despite some serious defects of delivery, he proved 
 to be a debater of the very highest class, especially gifted 
 with the weapons of sarcasm, scorn, and invective. He was 
 a Liberal in the intellectual sense; he was opposed to all 
 restraints on education and on the progress of a career; but 
 he had a detestation for democratic doctrines which almost 
 amounted to a mania. He despised with the whole force of 
 a temperament very favorable to intellectual scorn alike the 
 rural Tory and the town Radical. His opinions were gener- 
 ally rather negative than positive. He did not seem to have 
 any very positive opinions of any kind where politics were 
 concerned. He was governed by a detestation of abstrac- 
 tions and sentimentalities, and "views" of all sorts. An in- 
 tellectual Don Juan of the political world, he believed with 
 Moliere's hero that two and two make four, and that four 
 and four make eight, and he was impatient of any theory 
 which would commend itself to the mind on less rigorous 
 evidence. If contempt for the intellectual weaknesses of 
 an opposing party or doctrine could have made a great po- 
 litican, Mr. Lowe would have won that name. In politics, 
 however, criticism is not enough. One must be able to orig- 
 inate, to mould the will of others, to compromise, to lead 
 
BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE; DEATH OF "THE DUKE." 421 
 
 while seeming to follow, often to follow while seeming to 
 lead. Of gifts like these Mr. Lowe had no share. He never 
 became more than a great Parliamentary critic of the acrid 
 and vitriolic style. 
 
 Almost immediately on the assembling of the new Par- 
 liament, Mr. Villiers brought forward a resolution not mere- 
 ly pledging the House of Commons to a Free-trade policy, 
 but pouring out a sort of censure on all who had hitherto 
 failed to recognize its worth. This step was thought neces- 
 sary, and was indeed made necessary by the errors of which 
 Lord Derby had been guilty, and the preposterous vaporings 
 of some of his less responsible followers. If the resolution 
 had been passed, the Government must have resigned. They 
 were willing enough now to agree to any resolution declar- 
 ing that Free-trade was the established policy of the coun- 
 try; but they could not accept the triumphant eulogium 
 which the resolution proposed to offer to the commercial 
 policy of the years when they were the uncompromising en- 
 emies of that very policy. They could submit to the pun- 
 ishment imposed on them ; but they did not like this public 
 kissing of the rod and doing penance. Lord Palmerston, 
 who, even up to that time, regarded his ultimate acceptance 
 of office under Lord Derby as a not impossible event if once 
 the Derby party could shake themselves quite free of Pro- 
 tection, devised an amendment which afforded them the 
 means of a more or less honorable retreat. This resolution 
 pledged the House to the " policy of unrestricted competi- 
 tion firmly maintained and prudently extended ;" but re- 
 corded no panegyric of the legislation of 1846, and conse- 
 quent condemnation of those who opposed that legislation. 
 The amendment was accepted by all but the small band 
 of irreconcilable Protectionists: 468 voted for it; only 53 
 against it; and the moan of Protection was made. All that 
 long chapter of English legislation was closed. Various 
 commercial and other " interests" did indeed afterward de- 
 mur to the application of the principle of unrestricted com- 
 petition to their peculiar concerns. But they did not plead 
 for Protection. They only contended that the Protection 
 they sought for was not, in fact, Protection at all, but Free- 
 trade under peculiar circumstances. The straightforward doc- 
 trine of Protection perished of the debate of November, 1852. 
 
422 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Still, the Government only existed on sufferance. Their 
 tenure of office was somewhat rudely compai'ed to that of a 
 bailiff put into possession of certain premises, who is liable 
 to be sent away at any moment when the two parties con- 
 cerned in the litigation choose to come to terms. There was 
 a general expectation that the moment Mr. Disraeli came to 
 set out a genuine financial scheme the fate of the Govern- 
 ment would be decided. So the event proved. Mr. Disraeli 
 made a financial statement which showed remarkable capac- 
 ity for dealing with figures. It was subjected to a far more 
 serious test than his first budget, for that was necessarily a 
 mere stop-gap or makeshift. This was a real budget, alter- 
 ing and reconstructing the financial system and the taxation 
 of the country. The skill with which the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer explained his measures and tossed his figures 
 about convinced many even of his strongest opponents that 
 he had the capacity to make a good budget if he only were 
 allowed to do so by the conditions of his party's existence. 
 But- his cabinet had come into office under special obliga- 
 tions to the country party and the farmers. They could 
 not avoid making some experiment in the way of special leg- 
 islation for the farmers : they had, at the very least, to put 
 on an appearance of doing something for them. The Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer might be supposed to be in the po- 
 sition of the soldier in Hogarth's " March to Finchley," be- 
 tween the rival claimants on his attention. He has prom- 
 ised and vowed to the one; but he knows that the slightest 
 mark of civility he offers to her will be fiercely resented by 
 the other. When Mr. Disraeli undertook to favor the coun- 
 try interest and the farmers, he must have known only too 
 well that he was setting all the Free-traders and Peelites 
 against him; and he knew at the same time that if he neg- 
 lected the country party he was cutting the ground from 
 beneath his feet. The principle of his budget was the re- 
 duction of the malt duties and the increase of the inhabited 
 house duty. Some manipulations of the income-tax were to 
 be introduced, chiefly with a view to lighten the impost on 
 farmers' profits ; and there was to be a modest reduction 
 of the tea duty. The two points that stood out clear and 
 prominent before the House of Commons were the reduction 
 of the malt duty and the increase of the duty on inhabited 
 
MR. GLADSTONE. 423 
 
 houses. The reduction of the malt-tax, as Mr. Lowe said in 
 his pungent criticism, was the key-stone of the budget. That 
 reduction created a deficit, which the inhabited house duty 
 had to be doubled in order to supply. The scheme was a 
 complete failure. The farmers did not care much about the 
 concession which had been made in their favor ; those Avho 
 had to pay for it in doubled taxation were bitterly indignant. 
 Mr. Disraeli had exasperated the one claimant, and not great- 
 ly pleased the other. The Government soon saw how things 
 were likely to go. The Chancellor of the Exchequer began 
 to see that he had only a desperate fight to make. The 
 Whigs, the Free-traders, the Peelites, and such independent 
 members or unattached members as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Ber- 
 nal Osborne, all fell on him. It became a combat d outrance. 
 It well suited Mr. Disraeli's peculiar temperament. During 
 the whole of his Parliamentary career he has never fought 
 so well as when he has been free to indulge to the full the 
 courage of despair. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 MR. GLADSTONE. 
 
 THE debate was one of the finest of its kind ever heard in 
 Parliament during our time. The excitement on both sides 
 was intense. The rivalry was hot and eager. Mr. Disraeli 
 was animated by all the power of desperation, and was evi- 
 dently in a mood neither to give nor to take quarter. He 
 assailed Sir Charles Wood, the late Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, with a vehemence and even a virulence which cer- 
 tainly added much to the piquancy and interest of the dis- 
 cussion so far as listeners were concerned, but which more 
 than once went to the very verge of the limits of Parliamen- 
 tary decorum. It was in the course of this speech that Dis- 
 raeli, leaning across the table and directing his words full at 
 Sir Charles Wood, declared, "I care not to be the right hon- 
 orable gentleman's critic, but if he has learned his business, 
 he has yet to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that 
 insolence is not invective." The House had not heard the 
 concluding word of Disraeli's bitter and impassioned speech, 
 
424 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 when at t\vo o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone leaped 
 to his feet to answer him. Then began that long Parlia- 
 mentary duel which only knew a truce when at the close of 
 the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli crossed the threshold of the 
 House of Commons for the last time, thenceforward to take 
 his place among the peers as Lord Beaconsfield. During all 
 the intervening four-and-twenty years these two men were 
 rivals in power and in Parliamentary debate as much as 
 ever Pitt and Fox had been. Their opposition, like that of 
 Pitt and Fox, was one of temperament and character as well 
 as of genius, position, and political opinion. The rivalry of 
 this first heated and eventful night was a splendid display. 
 Those who had thought it impossible that any impression 
 could be made upon the House after the speech of Mr. Dis- 
 raeli, had to acknowledge that a yet greater impression was 
 produced by the unprepared reply of Mr. Gladstone. The 
 House divided about four o'clock in the morning, and the 
 Government were left in a minority of nineteen. Mr. Dis- 
 raeli took the defeat with his characteristic composure. The 
 morning was cold and wet. "It will be an unpleasant day 
 for going to Osborne," he quietly remarked to a friend as 
 they went down Westminster Hall together and looked out 
 into the dreary streets. That day, at Osborne, the resigna- 
 tion of the ministry was formally placed in the hands of the 
 Queen. 
 
 In a few days after, the Coalition Ministry was formed. 
 Lord Aberdeen was Prime-minister; Lord John Russell took 
 the Foreign Office ; Lord Palmerston became Home Secre- 
 tary; Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The 
 public were a good deal surprised that Lord Palmerston had 
 taken such a place as that of Home Secretary. His name 
 had been identified with the foreign policy of England, and 
 it was not supposed that he felt the slightest interest in the 
 ordinary business of the Home Department. Palmerston him- 
 self explained in a letter to his brother that the Home Office 
 was his own choice. He was not anxious to join the ministry 
 at all ; and if he had to make one, he preferred that he should 
 hold some office in which he had personally no traditions. 
 " I had long settled in my own mind," he said, " that I would 
 not go back to the Foreign Office, and that if I ever took 
 any office it should be the Home. It does not do for a man 
 
MR. GLADSTONE. 425 
 
 to pass his whole life in one department, and the Home Office 
 deals with the concerns of the country internally, and brings 
 one in contact with one's fellow-countrymen ; besides which 
 it gives one more influence in regard to the militia and the 
 defences of the country." Lord Palmerston, in fact, an- 
 nounces that he has undertaken the business of the Home 
 Office for the same reason as that given by Fritz, in the 
 "Grande Duchesse," for becoming a school -master. "Can 
 you teach ?" asks the Grande Duchesse. " No," is the an- 
 swer; " <? est pour apprendre y" "I go to learn." The reader 
 may well suspect, however, that it was not only with a view 
 of learning the business of the internal administration and 
 becoming acquainted with his fellow-countrymen that Palm- 
 erston preferred the Home Office. He would not consent to 
 be Foreign Secretary on any terms but his own, and these 
 terms were then out of the question. 
 
 The principal interest felt in the new Government was not, 
 however, centred in Lord Palmerston. The new Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer was the man upon whom the eyes of curi- 
 osity and interest were chiefly turned. Mr. Gladstone was 
 still a young man, in the Parliamentary sense at least. He 
 was but forty-three. His career had been in every way re- 
 markable. He had entered public life at a very early age. 
 He had been, to quote the words of Macaulay, a distinguish- 
 ed debater in the House of Commons ever since he was one- 
 and-twenty. Criticising his book, " The State in its Rela- 
 tions with the Church," which was published in 1838, 
 Macaulay speaks of Gladstone as "a young man of unblem- 
 ished character and of distinguished Parliamentary talents, 
 the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who 
 follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader whose experi- 
 ence is indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper 
 and moderate opinions they abhor." The time was not so 
 far away when the stern and unbending Tories would regard 
 Gladstone as the greatest hope of their most bitter enemies. 
 Lord Macaulay goes on to overwhelm the views expressed 
 by Mr. Gladstone as to the relations between State and 
 Church, with a weight of argument and gorgeousness of il- 
 lustration that now seem to have been hardly called for. 
 One of the doctrines of the young statesman which Macau- 
 lay confutes with especial warmth is the principle which, as 
 
426 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 he states it, " would give the Irish a Protestant Church 
 whether they like it or not." The author of the book which 
 contained this doctrine was the author of the disestablish- 
 ment of the State Church in Ireland. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone was by birth a Lancashire man. It is not 
 unworthy of notice that Lancashire gave to the Parliaments 
 of recent times their three greatest orators Mr. Gladstone, 
 Mr. Bright, and the late Lord Derby. Mr. Gladstone was 
 born in Liverpool, and was the son of Sir John Gladstone, a 
 Scotchman, who founded a great house in the seaport of the 
 Mersey. He entered Parliament when very young as a 
 protege of the Newcastle family, and he soon faithfully at- 
 tached himself to Sir Robert Peel. His knowledge of 
 finance, his thorough appreciation of the various needs of a 
 nation's commerce and business, his middle-class origin, all 
 brought him into natural affinity with his great leader. He 
 became a Free-trader with Peel. He was not in the House 
 of Commons, oddly enough, during the session when the 
 Free-trade battle was fought and won. It has already been 
 explained in this history that as he had changed his opinions 
 with his leader he felt a reluctance to ask the support of the 
 Newcastle family for the borough which by virtue of their 
 influence he had previously represented. But, except for 
 that short interval, his whole career may be pronounced one 
 long Parliamentary success. He was from the very first 
 recognized as a brilliant debater, and as one who promised 
 to be an orator; but it was riot until after the death of Sir 
 Robert Peel that he proved himself the master of Parlia- 
 mentary eloquence we all now know him to be. It was he 
 who pronounced what may be called the funeral oration 
 upon Peel in the House of Commons ; but the speech, 
 although undoubtedly inspired by the truest and the deep- 
 est feelings, does not seem by any means equal to some of 
 his more recent efforts. There is an appearance of elabo- 
 ration about it which goes far to mar its effect. Perhaps 
 the first really great speech made by Gladstone was the re- 
 ply to Disraeli on the memorable December morning which 
 we have just described. That speech put him in the very 
 foremost rank of English orators. Then, perhaps, he first 
 showed to the full the one great quality in which as a Par- 
 liamentary orator he lias never had a rival in our time the 
 
MR. GLADSTONE. 427 
 
 readiness which seems to require no preparation, but can 
 marshal all its arguments as if by instinct at a given mo- 
 ment, and the fluency which can pour out the most eloquent 
 language as freely as though it were but the breath of the 
 nostrils. When, shortly after the formation of the Coalition 
 Ministry, Mr. Gladstone delivered his first budget, it was re- 
 garded as a positive curiosity of financial exposition. It 
 was a performance that belonged to the department of the 
 fine arts. The speech occupied several hours, and assuredly 
 no listener wished it the shorter by a single sentence. Pitt, 
 we read, had the same art of making a budget speech a fas- 
 cinating discourse ; but in our time no minister has had this 
 gift except Mr. Gladstone. Each time that he essayed the 
 same task subsequently he accomplished just the same suc- 
 cess. Mr. Gladstone's first oratorical qualification was his 
 exquisite voice. Such a voice would make commonplace 
 seem interesting, and lend something of fascination to dul- 
 
 O 7 O 
 
 ness itself. It was singularly pure, clear, resonant, and 
 sweet. The orator never seemed to use the slightest effort 
 or strain in filling any hall and reaching the ear of the far- 
 thest among the audience. It was not a loud voice or of 
 great volume; but strong, vibrating, and silvery. The 
 words were always aided by energetic action and by the 
 deep-gleaming eyes of the orator. Somebody once said that 
 Gladstone was the only man in the House who could talk in 
 italics. The saying was odd, but was nevertheless appro- 
 priate and expressive. Gladstone could by the slightest 
 modulation of his voice give all the emphasis of italics, of 
 small print, or large print, or any other effect he might de- 
 sire, to his spoken words. It is not to be denied that his 
 wonderful gift of words sometimes led him astray. It was 
 often such a fluency as that of a torrent on which the orator 
 was carried away. Gladstone had to pay for his fluency by 
 being too fluent. He could seldom resist the temptation to 
 shower too many words on his subject and his hearers. 
 Sometimes he involved his sentence in parenthesis within 
 parenthesis until the ordinary listener began to think extri- 
 cation an impossibility ; but the orator never failed to un- 
 ravel all the entanglements, and to bring the passage out to 
 a clear and legitimate conclusion. There was never any 
 halt or incoherency, nor did the joints of the sentence fail 
 
428 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 to fit together in the right way. Harley once described a 
 famous speech as "a circumgyration of incoherent words." 
 This description certainly could not be applied even to Mr. 
 Gladstone's most involved passages; but if some of those 
 were described as a circumgyration of coherent words, the 
 phrase might be considered germane to the matter. His 
 style was commonly too redundant. It seemed as if it be- 
 longed to a certain school of exuberant Italian rhetoric. 
 Yet it was hardly to be called florid. Gladstone indulged 
 in few flowers of rhetoric, and his great gift was not irnag- 
 
 / o o o 
 
 ination. His fault was simply the habitual use of too many 
 words. This defect was, indeed, a characteristic of the Peel- 
 ite school of eloquence. Mr. Gladstone retained some of 
 the defects of the school in which he had been trained, even 
 after he had come to surpass its greatest master. 
 
 Often, however, this superb, exuberant rush of words add- 
 ed indescribable strength to the eloquence of the speaker. 
 In passages of indignant remonstrance or denunciation, when 
 word followed word, and stroke came down upon stroke, 
 with a wealth of resource that seemed inexhaustible, the 
 very fluency and variety of the speaker overwhelmed his 
 audience. Interruption only gave him a new stimulus, and 
 appeared to supply him with fresh resources of argument 
 and illustration. His retorts leaped to his lips. His eye 
 caught, sometimes, even the mere gesture that indicated dis- 
 sent or question ; and perhaps some unlucky opponent who 
 was only thinking of what might be said in opposition to the 
 great orator found himself suddenly dragged into the con- 
 flict, and overwhelmed with a torrent of remonstrance, argu- 
 ment, and scornful words. Gladstone had not much humor 
 of the playful kind, but he had a certain force of sarcastic 
 and scornful rhetoric. He was always terribly in earnest. 
 Whether the subject were great or small, he threw his whole 
 soul into it. Once, in addressing a school-boy gathering, he 
 told his young listeners that if a boy ran, he ought always 
 to run as fast as he could ; if he jumped, he ought always 
 to jump as far as he could. He illustrated his maxim in 
 his own career. He had no idea, apparently, of running or 
 jumping in such measure as happened to please the fancy 
 of the moment. He always exercised his splendid powers 
 to the uttermost strain. 
 
MR. GLADSTONE. 429 
 
 A distinguished critic once pronounced Mr. Gladstone to 
 be the greatest Parliamentary orator of our time, on the 
 ground that he had made by for the greatest number of 
 fine speeches, while admitting that two or three speeches 
 had been made by other men of the day which might rank 
 higher than any of his. This is, however, a principle of 
 criticism which posterity never sanctions. The greatest 
 speech, the greatest poem, give the author the highest 
 place, though the effort were but single. Shakspeare would 
 rank beyond Massinger just as he does now, had he written 
 only "The Tempest." We cannot say how many novels, 
 each as good as " Gil Bias," would make La Sage the equal 
 of Cervantes. On this point fame is inexorable. We are 
 not, therefore, inclined to call Mr. Gladstone the greatest 
 English orator of our time when we remember some of the 
 finest speeches of Mr. Bright; but did we regard Parlia- 
 mentary speaking as a mere instrument of Parliamentary 
 business and debate, then unquestionably Mr. Gladstone is 
 not only the greatest, but by far the greatest English orator 
 of our time; for he had a richer combination of gifts than 
 any other man we can remember, and he could use them 
 oftenest with effect. He was like a racer which cannot in- 
 deed always go faster than every rival, but can win more 
 races in the year than any other horse. Mr. Gladstone 
 could get up at any moment, and no matter how many 
 times a night, in the House of Commons, and be argumenta- 
 tive or indignant, pour out a stream of impassioned elo- 
 quence or a shower of figures, just as the exigency of the 
 debate and the moment required. He was not, of course, 
 always equal; but he was always eloquent and effective. 
 He seemed as if he could not be anything but eloquent. 
 Perhaps, judged in this way, he never had an equal in the 
 English Parliament. Neither Pitt nor Fox ever made so 
 many speeches combining so many great qualities. Chat- 
 ham was a great actor rather than a great orator. Burke 
 was the greatest political essayist who ever addressed the 
 House of Commons. Canning did not often rise above the 
 level of burnished rhetorical commonplace. Macaulay, who 
 during his time drew the most crowded houses of any speak- 
 er, not even excepting Peel, was not an orator in the true 
 sense. Probably no one, past or present, had in combina- 
 
430 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tion so many gifts of voice, manner, fluency and argument, 
 style, reason and passion, as Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 The House of Commons was his ground. There he was 
 himself; there he was always seen to the best advantage. 
 As a rule, he was not so successful on the platform. His 
 turn of mind did not tit him well for the work of addressing 
 great public meetings. He loved to look too carefully at 
 every side of a question, and did not always go so quickly 
 to the heart of it as would suit great popular audiences. 
 The principal defect of his mind was probably a lack of 
 simplicity, a tendency to over-refining and supersubtle ar- 
 gument. Not perhaps unnaturally, however, when he did, 
 during some of the later passages of his career, lay him- 
 self out for the work of addressing popular audiences, he 
 threw away all discrimination, and gave loose to the full 
 force with which, under the excitement of great pressure, 
 he was wont to rush at a principle. There seemed a cer- 
 tain lack of balance in his mind ; a want of the exact poise 
 of all his faculties. Either he must refine too much, or he 
 did not refine at all. Thus he became accused, and with 
 some reason, of over-refining and all but quibbling in some 
 of his Parliamentary arguments ; of looking at all sides of a 
 question so carefully that it was too long in doubt whether 
 he was ever going to form any opinion of his own ; and he 
 was sometimes accused, with equal justice, of pleading one 
 side of a political cause before great meetings of his coun- 
 trymen with all the passionate blindness of a partisan. The 
 accusations might seem self-contradictory, if we did not re- 
 member that they will apply, and with great force and jus- 
 tice, to Burke. Burke cut blocks with a razor, and went on 
 refining to an impatient House of Commons, only eager for 
 its dinner; and the same Burke threw himself into antag- 
 onism to the French Revolution as if he were the wildest 
 of partisans ; as if the question had but one side, and only 
 fools or villains could possibly say it had any other. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone grew slowly into Liberal convictions. At 
 the time when he joined the Coalition Ministry he was still 
 regarded as one who had scarcely left the camp of Toryism, 
 and who had only joined that ministry because it was a 
 coalition. Years after, he was applied to by the late Lord 
 Derby to join a ministry formed by him ; and it was not 
 
MR. GLADSTONE. 431 
 
 supposed that there was anything unreasonable in the prop- 
 osition. The h'rst impulse toward Liberal principles was 
 given to his mind, probably, by his change with his leader 
 from Protection to Free-trade. When a man like Gladstone 
 saw that his traditional principles and those of his party 
 had broken down in any one direction, it was but natural 
 that he should begin to question their endurance in other 
 directions. The whole fabric of belief was built up togeth- 
 er. Gladstone's was a mind of that order that sees a prin- 
 ciple in everything, and must, to adopt the phrase of a great 
 preacher, make the ploughing as much a part of religious 
 duty as the praying. The interests of religion seemed to 
 him bound up with the creed of Conservatism ; the princi- 
 ples of Protection must, probably, at one time have seemed 
 a part of the whole creed of which one article was as sacred 
 as another. His intellect and his principles, however, found 
 themselves compelled to follow the guidance of his leader 
 in the matter of Free-trade ; and when inquiry thus began 
 it was not very likely soon to stop. He must have seen 
 how much the working of such a principle as that of Protec- 
 tion became a class interest in England, and how impossible 
 it would have been for it to continue long in existence un- 
 der an extended and a popular suffrage. In other countries 
 the fallacy of Protection did not show itself so glaringly in 
 the eyes of the poorer classes, for in other countries it was 
 not the staple food of the population that became the prin- 
 cipal object of a protective duty. But in England the 
 bread on which the poorest had to live was made to pay a 
 tax for the benefit of landlords and farmers. As long as 
 one believed this to be a necessary condition of a great un- 
 questionable creed, it was easy for a young statesman to rec- 
 oncile himself to it. It might bear cruelly on individuals, 
 or even multitudes; but so would the law of gravitation, as 
 Mill lias remarked, bear harshly on the best of men when it 
 dashed him down from a height and broke his bones. It 
 would be idle to question the existence of the law on that 
 account; or to disbelieve the whole teaching of the physical 
 science which explains its movements. But when Mr. Glad- 
 stone came to be convinced that there was no such law as 
 the Protection principle at all ; that it was a mere sham ; 
 that to believe in it was to be guilty of an economic heresy 
 
432 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 then it was impossible for him not to begin questioning 
 the genuineness of the whole system of political thought of 
 which it formed but a part. Perhaps, too, he was impelled 
 toward Liberal principles at home by seeing what the effects 
 of opposite doctrines had been abroad. He rendered memo- 
 rable service to the Liberal cause of Europe by his eloquent 
 protest against the brutal treatment of Baron Poerio and 
 other Liberals of Naples who were imprisoned by the Nea- 
 politan king a protest which Garibaldi declared to have 
 sounded the first trumpet-call of Italian liberty. In render- 
 ing service to Liberalism and to Europe he rendered service 
 also to his own intelligence. He helped to set free his own 
 spirit as well as the Neapolitan people. We find him, as 
 his career goes on, dropping the traditions of his youth, al- 
 ways rising higher in Liberalism, and not going back. One 
 of the foremost of his compeers, and his only actual rival in 
 popular eloquence, eulogized him as always struggling to- 
 ward the light. The common taunts addressed to public 
 men who have changed their opinions were hardly ever ap- 
 plied to him. Even his enemies felt that the one idea al- 
 ways inspired him a conscientious anxiety to do the right 
 thing. None accused him of being one of the politicians 
 who mistake, as Victor Hugo says, a weather-cock for a flag. 
 With many qualities which seemed hardly suited to a prac- 
 tical politician; with a sensitive and eager temper, like that 
 of Canning, and a turn for theological argument that, as a 
 rule, Englishmen do not love in a statesman ; with an im- 
 petuosity that often carried him far astray, and a deficiency 
 of those genial social qualities that go so far to make a pub- 
 lic success in England, Mr. Gladstone maintained through 
 the whole of his career a reputation against which there Avas 
 hardly a serious cavil. The worst thing that was said of 
 him was that he was too impulsive, and that his intelligence 
 was too restless. He was an essayist, a critic, a Homeric 
 scholar; a dilettante in art, music, and old china; lie was a 
 theological controversialist ; he was a political economist, a 
 financier, a practical administrator whose gift of mastering 
 details has hardly ever been equalled ; he was a statesman 
 and an orator. No man could attempt so many things and 
 not occasionally make himself the subject of a sneer. The 
 intense gravity and earnestness of Gladstone's mind always, 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 433 
 
 however, saved him from the special penalty of such versa- 
 tility; no satirist described him as not one, but all man- 
 kind's epitome. 
 
 As yet, however, he is only the young statesman who was 
 the other day the hope of the more solemn and solid Con- 
 servatives, and in whom they have not even yet entirely 
 ceased to put some faith. The Coalition Ministry was so 
 formed that it was not supposed a man necessarily nailed his 
 colors to any mast when he joined it. More than one of 
 Gladstone's earliest friends and political associates had a 
 part in it. The ministry might undoubtedly be called an 
 Administration of All the Talents. Except the late Lord 
 Derby and Mr. Disraeli, it included almost every man of real 
 ability who belonged to either of the two great parties of 
 the State. The Manchester School had, of course, no place 
 there ; but they were not likely just yet to be recognized as 
 constituting one of the elements out of which even a Coali- 
 tion Ministry might be composed. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE EASTERN QUESTION. 
 
 FOR forty years England had been at peace. There had, 
 indeed, been little wars here and there with some of her Asi- 
 atic and African neighbors ; and once or twice, as in the in- 
 stance of the quarrel between Turkey and Egypt, she had 
 been menaced for a moment with a dispute of a more for- 
 midable kind and nearer home. But the trouble had passed 
 away, and from Waterloo downward England had known no 
 real war. The new generation were growing up in a kind 
 of happy belief that wars were things of the past for us ; 
 out of fashion ; belonging to a ruder and less rational soci- 
 ety, like the wearing of armor and the carrying of weapons 
 in the civil streets. It is not surprising if it seemed possi- 
 ble to many that the England of the future might regard 
 the instruments and the ways of war with the same curious 
 wonder as that which Virgil assumes would one day fill the 
 minds of the rustic laborers whose ploughs turned up on 
 some field of ancient battle the rusted swords and battered 
 
 I. 19 
 
434 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 helmets of forgotten warriors. During all the convulsions 
 of the Continent, England had remained undisturbed. When 
 bloody revolutions were storming through other capitals, 
 London was smiling over the dispersion of the Chartists by 
 a few special constables. When the armies of Austria, of 
 Russia, of France, of Sardinia were scattered over vast and 
 various Continental battle-grounds, our troops were passing 
 in peaceful pageantry of review before the well-pleased eyes 
 of their Sovereign in some stately royal park. A new school 
 as well as anew generation had sprung up. This school, full 
 of faith, but full of practical, shrewd logic as well, was teach- 
 ing with great eloquence and effect that the practice of set- 
 tling international controversy by the sword was costly, 
 barbarous, and blundering, as well as wicked. The practice 
 of the duel in England had utterly gone out. Battle was 
 forever out of fashion as a means of settling private con- 
 troversy in England. Why then should it be unreasonable 
 to believe that the like practice among nations might soon 
 become equally obsolete? 
 
 Such, certainly, was the faith of a great many intelligent 
 persons at the time when the Coalition Ministry was form- 
 ed. The majority tacitly acquiesced in the belief without 
 thinking much about it. They had never in their time seen 
 England engaged in European war; and it was natural to 
 assume that what they had never seen they were never like- 
 ly to see. Any one who retraces attentively the history of 
 English public opinion at that time will easily find evidence 
 enough of a commonly accepted understanding that Eng- 
 land had done with great wars. Even then, perhaps, a 
 shrewd observer might have been inclined to conjecture 
 that by the very force of reaction a change would soon set 
 in. Man, said Lord Palmerston, is by nature a fighting and 
 quarrelling animal. This was one of those smart saucy 
 generalizations characteristic of its author, and which used 
 to provoke many graver and more philosophic persons, but 
 which nevertheless often got at the heart of a question in a 
 rough-and-ready sort of way. In the season of which we 
 are now speaking, it was not, however, the common belief 
 that man was by nature a fighting and a quarrelling animal, 
 at least in England. Bad government, the arbitrary power 
 of an aristocracy, the necessity of finding occupation for a 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 435 
 
 standing army, the ambitions of princes, the misguiding les- 
 sons of romance and poetry these and other influences had 
 converted man into an instrument of war. Leave him to his 
 own impulses, his own nature, his own ideas of self-interest, 
 and the better teachings of wiser guides, and he is sure to 
 remain in the paths of peace. Such Avas the common belief 
 of the year or two after the Great Exhibition the belief 
 fervently preached by a few and accepted without contra- 
 diction by the majority, as most common beliefs are the 
 belief floating in the air of the time, and becoming part of 
 the atmosphere in which the generation was brought up. 
 Suddenly all this happy, quiet faitli was disturbed, and the 
 long peace, which the hero of Tennyson's "Maud "says he 
 thought no peace, was over and done. The hero of" Maud " 
 had, it will be observed, the advantage of explaining his 
 convictions after the war had broken out. The name was 
 indeed legion of those who, under the same conditions, dis- 
 covered, like him, that they had never relished the long, long 
 peace, or believed in it much as a peace at all. 
 
 The Eastern Question it was that disturbed the dream of 
 peace. The use of such phrases as " the Eastern Question," 
 borrowed chiefly from the political vocabulary of France, is 
 not in general to be commended ; but we can in this instance 
 find no more ready and convenient way of expressing clearly 
 and precisely the meaning of the crisis which had arisen in 
 Europe. It was strictly the Eastern " question " the ques- 
 tion of what to do with the East of Europe. It was certain 
 that things could not remain as they then were, and nothing 
 else was certain. The Ottoman Power had been settled 
 during many centuries in the south-east of Europe. It had 
 come in there as a conqueror, and had remained there only 
 as a conqueror occupies the ground his tents are covering. 
 The Turk had many of the strong qualities and even the 
 virtues of a great warlike conqueror; but he had no capacity 
 or care for the arts of peace. He never thought of assimi- 
 lating himself to those whom he had conquered, or them to 
 him. He disdained to learn anything from them; he did 
 not care whether or no they learned anything from him. It 
 has been well remarked, that of all the races who conquered 
 Greeks, the Turks alone learned nothing from their gifted 
 captives. Captive Greece conquered all the world except 
 
436 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the Turks. They defied her. She could not teach them 
 letters or arts, commerce or science. The Turks were not, 
 as a rule, oppressive to the races that lived under them. 
 They were not habitual persecutors of the faiths they deem- 
 ed heretical. In this respect they often contrasted favora- 
 bly with states that ought to have been able to show them 
 a better example. In truth, the Turk, for the most part, was 
 disposed to look with disdainful composure on what he con- 
 sidered the religious follies of the heretical races who did not 
 believe in the Prophet. They were objects of his scornful 
 pity rather than of his anger. Every now and then, indeed, 
 some sudden fierce outburst of fanatical cruelty toward some 
 of the subject-sects horrified Europe, and reminded her that 
 the conqueror who had settled himself down in her south- 
 eastern corner was still a barbarian who had no right or 
 place in civilized life. But, as a rule, the Turk did not care 
 enough about the races he ruled over to feel the impulses 
 of the perverted fanaticism which would strive to scourge 
 men into the faith itself believes needful to salvation. 
 
 At one time there can be little doubt that all the Powers 
 of civilized Europe would gladly have seen the Turk driven 
 out of our Continent. But the Turk was powerful for a long 
 series of generations, and it seemed for awhile rather a ques- 
 tion whether he would not send the Europeans out of their 
 own grounds. He was for centuries the great terror, the 
 nightmare, of Western Europe. When he began to decay, 
 and when his aggressive strength was practically all gone, 
 it might have been thought that the Western Powers would 
 then have managed somehow to get rid of him. But in the 
 mean time the condition of Europe had greatly changed. No 
 one not actually subject to the Turk was afraid of him any 
 more; and other States had arisen strong for aggression. 
 The uncertainties of these States as to the intentions of their 
 neighbors and each other proved a better bulwark for the 
 Turks than any warlike strength of their own could any 
 longer have furnished. The growth of the great Russian 
 empire was of itself enough to change the whole conditions 
 of the problem. 
 
 Nothing in our times has been more remarkable than the 
 sudden growth of Russia. The rise of the United States is 
 not so wonderful : for the men who made the United States 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 437 
 
 were civilized men; men of our own race who might be ex- 
 pected to mafce a way for themselves anywhere, and who 
 were, moreover, put by destiny in possession of a vast and 
 splendid continent having all variety of climate and a limit- 
 less productiveness, and where they had no neighbors or ri- 
 vals to molest them. But Russia was peopled by a race 
 who, even down to our own times, remain in many respects 
 little better than semi-barbarous; and she had enemies and 
 obstacles on all sides. A few generations ago Russia was 
 literally an inland state. She was shut up in the heart of 
 Eastern Europe as if in a prison. The genius, the craft, and 
 the audacity of Peter the Great first broke the narrow 
 bounds set to the Russia of his day, and extended her fron- 
 tier to the sea. He was followed, after a reign or two, by 
 a woman ^of genius, daring, unscrupulousness, and profligacy 
 equal to his own the greatest woman probably who ever 
 sat on a throne, Elizabeth of England not even excepted. 
 Catherine the Second so ably followed the example of Peter 
 the Great, that she extended the Russian frontier in direc- 
 tions which he had not had opportunity to stretch to. By 
 the time her reign was done Russia was one of the Great 
 Powers of Europe, entitled to enter into negotiations on a 
 footing of equality with the proudest States of the Conti- 
 nent. Unlike Turkey, Russia had always showed a yearn- 
 ing after the latest developments of science and of civiliza- 
 tion. There was something even of affectation, provoking 
 the smiles of an older and more ingrained culture, in the ef- 
 forts persistently made by Russia to put on the garments 
 of Western civilization. Catherine the Great, in especial, 
 had set the example in this way. She invited Diderot to 
 her court. She adorned her cabinet with a bust of Charles 
 James Fox. While some of the personal habits of herself 
 and of those who surrounded her at court would have seemed 
 too rude and coarse for Esquimaux, and while she was put- 
 ting down free opinion at home with a severity worthy only 
 of some mediaeval Asiatic potentate, she was always talking 
 as though she were a disciple of Rousseau's ideas, and a pupil 
 of Chesterfield in manners. This may have seemed ridicu- 
 lous enough sometimes ; and even in our own days the con- 
 trast between the professions and the practices of Russia is 
 a familiar subject of satire. But in nations, at least, the horn- 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 age which imitation pays often wins for half-conscious hy- 
 pocrisy as much success as earnest and sincere endeavor. A 
 nation that tries to appear more civilized than it really is 
 ends very often by becoming more civilized than its neigh- 
 bors ever thought it likely to be. 
 
 The wars against Napoleon brought Russia into close al- 
 liance with England, Austria, Prussia, and other European 
 States of old and advanced civilization. Russia was, during 
 one part of that great struggle, the leading spirit of the alli- 
 ance against Napoleon. Her soldiers were seen in Italy and 
 in France, as well as in the east of Europe. The semi-sav- 
 age state became in the eyes of Europe a power charged, 
 along with others, with the protection of the conservative 
 interests of the Continent. She was recognized as a valua- 
 ble friend and a most formidable enemy. Gradually it be- 
 came evident that she could be aggressive as well as con- 
 servative. In the war between Austria and Hungary, Rus- 
 sia intervened and conquered Austria's rebellious Hungari- 
 ans for her. Russia had already earned the hatred of Eu- 
 ropean Liberals by her share in the partition of Poland and 
 her manner of dealing with the Poles. After awhile it grew 
 to be a fixed conviction in the mind of the Liberalism of 
 Western Europe that Russia was the greatest obstacle then 
 existing in civilization to the spread of popular ideas. The 
 Turk was comparatively harmless in that sense. He was 
 well content now, so much had his ancient ambition shrunk 
 and his ancient war spirit gone out, if his strong and restless 
 neighbors would only let him alone. But he was brought 
 at more than one point into especial collision with Russia. 
 Many of the pi-ovinces he ruled over in European Turkey 
 were of Sclavonian race, and of the religion of the Greek 
 Church. They were thus affined by a double tie to the Rus- 
 sian people, and therefore the manner in which Turkey dealt 
 with those provinces was a constant source of dispute be- 
 tween Russia and her. The Russians are a profoundly re- 
 ligious people. No matter what one may think of their 
 form of faith, no matter how he may sometimes observe that 
 religious profession contrasts with the daily habits of life, 
 yet he cannot but see that the Russian character is steeped 
 in religious faith or fanaticism. To the Russian fanatic there 
 was something intolerable in the thought of a Sclave popu- 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 439 
 
 lation professing the religion of the orthodox Church being 
 persecuted by the Turks. No Russian ruler could hope to 
 be popular who ventured to show a disregard for the na- 
 tional sentiment on this subject. The Christian popula- 
 tions of Turkey were to the Russian sovereigns what the 
 Germans of Schleswig - Holstein were to the great German 
 princes of later years, an indirect charge to which they 
 could not, if they would, profess any indifference. A Ger- 
 man prince, in order to be popular, had to proclaim him- 
 self enthusiastic about the cause of Schleswig -Holstein ; 
 a Russian emperor could not be loved if he did not declare 
 his undying resolve to be the protector of the Christian 
 populations of Turkey. Much of this was probably sincere 
 and single-minded on the part of the Russian people and 
 most of the Russian politicians. But the other States of 
 Europe began to suspect that mingled up with benign ideas 
 of protecting the Christian populations of Turkey might be 
 a desire to extend the frontier of Russia to the southward 
 in a new direction. Europe had seen by what craft and 
 what audacious enterprises Russia had managed to extend 
 her empire to the sea in other quarters ; it began to be com- 
 monly believed that her next object of ambition would be 
 the possession of Constantinople and the Bosphorus. It was 
 reported that a will of Peter the Great had left it as an in- 
 junction to his successors to turn all the efforts of their pol- 
 icy toward that object. The particular document which 
 was believed to be a will of Peter the Great enjoined on all 
 succeeding Russian sovereigns never to relax in the extension 
 of their territory northward on the Baltic and southward on 
 the Black Sea shores, and to encroach as far as possible in 
 the direction of Constantinople and the Indies. "To work 
 out this, raise wars continually at one time against Turkey, 
 at another against Persia; make dock-yards on the Black 
 Sea; by degrees make yourselves masters of that sea as well 
 as of the Baltic; hasten the decay of Persia, and penetrate 
 to the Persian Gulf; establish, if possible, the ancient com- 
 merce of the East via Syria, and push on to the Indies, which 
 are the entrepot of the world. Once there, you need not 
 fear the gold of England." We now know that the alleged 
 will was not genuine ; but there could be little doubt that 
 the policy of Peter and of his great follower, Catherine, 
 
440 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 would have been in thorough harmony with such a project. 
 It therefore seemed to be the natural business of other Euro- 
 pean Powers to see that the defects of the Ottoman Govern- 
 ment, such as they were, should not be made an excuse for 
 helping Russia to secure the objects of her special ambition. 
 One Great Power, above all the rest, had an interest in 
 watching over every movement that threatened in any way 
 to interfere with the highway to India; still more with her 
 peaceful and secure possession of India itself. That Power, 
 of course, was England. England, Russia, and Turkey were 
 alike in one respect : they were all Asiatic as well as Euro- 
 pean powers. But Turkey could never come into any man- 
 ner of collision with the interests of England i,n the East. 
 The days of Turkey's interfering with any great State were 
 long over. Neither Russia nor England nor any other Pow- 
 er in Europe or Asia feared her any more. On the contrary, 
 there seemed something like a natural antagonism between 
 
 3 o 
 
 England and Russia in the East. The Russians were ex- 
 tending their frontier toward that of our Indian empire. 
 They were showing in that quarter the same mixture of 
 craft and audacity which had stood them in good stead in 
 various parts of Europe. Our officers and diplomatic emis- 
 saries reported that they were continually confronted by 
 the evidences of Russian intrigue in Central Asia. We 
 have already seen how much influence the real or supposed 
 intrigues of Russia had in directing our policy in Afghan- 
 istan. Doubtless there was some exaggeration and some 
 panic in all the tales that were told of Russian intrigue. 
 Sometimes the alarm spread by these tales conjured up a 
 kind of Russian hobgoblin, bewildering the minds of public 
 servants, and making even statesmen occasionally seem like 
 affrighted children. The question that at present concerns 
 us is not whether all the apprehensions of danger from Rus- 
 sia were just and reasonable, but whether, as a matter of fact, 
 they did exist. They certainly counted for a great deal in 
 determining the attitude of the English people toward both 
 Turkey and Russia. It was in great measure out of these 
 alarms that there grew up among certain statesmen and 
 classes in this country the conviction that the maintenance 
 of the integrity of the Turkish empire was part of the na- 
 tional duty of England. 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 441 
 
 It is not too much, therefore, to say that the States of Eu- 
 rope generally desired the maintenance of the Ottoman em- 
 pire, simply because it was believed that while Turkey held 
 her place she was a barrier against vague dangers, which it 
 was not worth while encountering as long as they could pos- 
 sibly be averted. Sharply defined, the condition of things 
 was this : Russia, by reason of her sympathy of religion or 
 race with Turkey's Christian populations, was brought into 
 chronic antagonism with Turkey ; England, by reason of her 
 Asiatic possessions, was kept in just the same state of antag- 
 onism to Russia. The position of England was trying and 
 difficult. She felt herself compelled, by the seeming neces- 
 sity of her national interests, to maintain the existence of a 
 Power which on its own merits stood condemned, and for 
 which, as a Power, no English statesman ever cared to say a 
 word. The position of Russia had more plausibility about 
 it. It sounded better when described in an official document 
 or a popular appeal. Russia was the religious State which 
 had made it her mission and her duty to protect the suffer- 
 ing Christians of Turkey. England, let her state her case no 
 matter how carefully or frankly, could only affirm that her 
 motive in opposing Russia was the protection of her own in- 
 terests. One inconvenient result of this condition of things 
 was that here, among English people, there was always a 
 wide diffei-ence of opinion as to the national policy with re- 
 gard to Russia and Turkey. Many public men of great abil- 
 ity and influence were of opinion that England had no right 
 to uphold the Ottoman Power because of any fancied danger 
 that might come to us from its fall. It was the simple duty 
 of England, they insisted, to be just and fear not. In pri- 
 vate life, they contended, we should all abhor a man who as- 
 sisted a ruffian to live in a house which he had only got into 
 as a burglar, merely because there was a chance that the 
 dispossession of the ruffian might enable his patron's rival 
 in business to become the owner of the premises. The duty, 
 they insisted, of a conscientious man is clear. He must not 
 patronize a ruffian, whatever comes. Let what will happen, 
 that he must not do. So it was, according to their argu- 
 ment, with national policy. We are not concerned in dis- 
 cussing this question just now; we are merely acknowledg- 
 ing a fact which came to be of material consequence when 
 
 19* 
 
442 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the crisis arose that threw England into sudden antagonism 
 with Russia. 
 
 That crisis came about during the later years of the reign 
 of the Emperor Nicholas. He saw its opening, but not the 
 close of even its first volume. Nicholas was a man of re- 
 markable character. He had many of the ways of an Asiatic 
 despot. He had a strong ambition, a fierce and fitful tem- 
 per, a daring but sometimes, too, a vacillating will. He had 
 many magnanimous and noble qualities, and moods of sweet- 
 ness and gentleness. He reminded people sometimes of an 
 Alexander the Great; sometimes of the "Arabian Nights" 
 version of Haroun Alraschid. A certain excitability ran 
 through the temperament of all his house, Avhich, in some of 
 its members, broke into actual madness, and in others pre- 
 vailed no farther than to lead to wild outbreaks of temper 
 such as those that often convulsed the frame and distorted 
 the character of a Charles the Bold or a Cceur de Lion. We 
 cannot date the ways and characters of Nicholas's family 
 from the years of Peter the Great. We must, for tolerably 
 obvious reasons, be content to deduce their origin from the 
 reign of Catherine II. The extraordinary and almost un- 
 paralleled conditions of the early married life of that much- 
 injured, much-injuring woman, would easily account for any 
 aberrations of intellect and will among her immediate de- 
 scendants. Her son was a madman ; there was madness, or 
 something very like it, among the brothers of the Emperor 
 Nicholas. The Emperor at one time was very popular in 
 England. He had visited the Queen, and he had impressed 
 every one by his noble presence, his lofty stature, his singular 
 personal beauty, his blended dignity and familiarity of man- 
 ner. He talked as if he had no higher ambition than to be 
 in friendly alliance with England. When he wished to con- 
 vey his impression of the highest degree of personal loyalty 
 and honor, he always spoke of the word of an English gen- 
 tleman. There can, indeed, be little doubt that the Emperor 
 was sincerely anxious to keep on terms of cordial friendship 
 with England ; and, what is more, had no idea until the very 
 last that the way he was walking was one which England 
 could not consent to tread. His brother and predecessor 
 had been in close alliance with England ; his own ideal hero 
 was the Dnke of Wellington; he had made up his mind that 
 
THE EASTEKN QUESTION". 443 
 
 when the division of the spoils of Turkey came about, Eng- 
 land and he could best consult for their own interests and 
 the peace of the world by making the appropriation a mat- 
 ter of joint arrangement. 
 
 We do not often in history find a great despot explaining 
 in advance and in irank words a general policy like that 
 which the Emperor Nicholas cherished with regard to Tur- 
 key. We are usually left to infer his schemes from his acts. 
 Not uncommonly we have to set his acts and the fair infer- 
 ences from them against his own positive and repeated as- 
 surances. But in the case of the Emperor Nicholas we are 
 left in no such doubt. He told England exactly what he 
 proposed to do. He told the story twice over; more than 
 that, he consigned it to writing for our clearer understand- 
 ing. When he visited England in 1844, for the second time, 
 Nicholas had several conversations with the Duke of Wel- 
 lington and with Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary, 
 about Turkey and her prospects, and what would be likely 
 to happen in the case of her dissolution, which he believed 
 to be imminent. When he returned to Russia, he had a 
 memorandum drawn up by Count Nesselrode, his Chancel- 
 lor, embodying the views which, according to Nicholas's 
 impressions, were entertained alike by him and by the Brit- 
 ish statesmen with whom he had been conversing. Mr. 
 King-lake says that he sent this document to England with 
 the view of covering his retreat, having met with no encour- 
 agement from the English statesmen. Our idea of the mat- 
 ter is different. It may be taken for granted that the Eng- 
 lish statesmen did not give Nicholas any encouragement, 
 or at least that they did not intend to do so; but it seems 
 clear to us that he believed they had done so. The memo- 
 randum drawn up by Count Nesselrode is much more like 
 a formal reminder or record of a general and oral engage- 
 ment than a withdrawal from a proposal which was evident- 
 ly not likely to be accepted. The memorandum set forth 
 that Russia and England were alike penetrated by the con- 
 viction that it was for their common interest that the Otto- 
 man empire should maintain itself in its existing indepen- 
 dence and extent of territory, and that they had an equal in- 
 terest in averting all the dangers that might place its safety 
 in jeopardy. With this object, the memoi'andum declared, 
 
444: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the essential point was to suffer the Porte to live in repose 
 without needlessly disturbing it by diplomatic bickering. 
 Turkey, however, had a habit of constantly breaking her en- 
 gagements ; and the memorandum insisted strongly that 
 while she kept up this practice it was impossible for her in- 
 tegrity to be secure ; and this practice of hers was indulged 
 in because she believed she might do so with impunity, 
 reckoning on the mutual jealousies of the cabinets, and 
 thinking that if she failed in her engagements toward one 
 of them, the rest would espouse her cause. "As soon as the 
 Porte shall perceive that it is not supported by the other 
 cabinets, it will give way, and the differences which have 
 arisen will be arranged in a conciliatory manner, without 
 any conflict resulting from them." The memorandum spoke 
 of the imperative necessity of Turkey being led to treat her 
 Christian subjects with toleration and mildness. On such 
 conditions it was laid down that England and Russia must 
 alike desire her preservation ; but the document proceeded 
 to say that, nevertheless, these States could not conceal from 
 themselves the fact that the Ottoman empire contained 
 within itself many elements of dissolution, and that unfore- 
 seen events might at any time hasten its fall. "In the un- 
 certainty which hovers over the future, a single fundamental 
 idea seems to admit of a really practical application ; that 
 is, that the danger which may result from a catastrophe in 
 Turkey will be much .diminished if in the event of its occur- 
 ring Russia and England have come to an understanding as 
 to the course to be taken by them in common. That under- 
 standing will be the more beneficial inasmuch as it will 
 have the full assent of Austria, between whom and Russia 
 there already exists an entire accord." This document was 
 sent to London, and kept in the archives of the Foreign Of- 
 fice. It was only produced and made public when, at a 
 much later day, the Russian press began to insist that the 
 English Government had always been in possession of the 
 views of Russia in regard to Turkey. It seems to us evi- 
 dent that the Emperor of Russia really believed that his 
 views were shared by English statesmen. The mere fact 
 that his memorandum was received and retained in the Eng- 
 lish Foreign Office might well of itself tend to make Nicho- 
 las assume that its principles were recognized by the Eng- 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION, 445 
 
 lish Government as the basis of a common action, or at least 
 a common understanding, between England and Russia. 
 Nothing is more easy than to allow a fanatic or a man of 
 one idea to suppose that those to whom he explains his 
 views are convinced by him and in agreement with him. 
 It is only necessary to listen and say nothing. Therefore, 
 it is to be regretted that the English statesmen should have 
 listened to Nicholas without saying something very distinct 
 to show that they were not admitting or accepting any com- 
 bination or purpose ; or that they should have received his 
 memorandum without some distinct disclaimer of their be- 
 ing in any way bound by its terms. Some of the statements 
 in the memorandum were, at the least, sufficiently remarka- 
 ble to have called for comment of some kind from the Eng- 
 lish statesmen who received it. For example, the Emperor 
 of Russia professed to have in his hands not alone the policy 
 of Russia, but that of Austria as well. He spoke for Aus- 
 tria, and he stated that he understood himself to be speak- 
 ing for England too. Accordingly, England, Austria, and 
 Russia were, in his understanding, entering into a secret 
 conspiracy among themselves for the disposal of the terri- 
 tory of a friendly Power in the event of that Power getting 
 into difficulties. This might surely be thought by the Eng- 
 lish statesmen to bear an ominous and painful resemblance 
 to the kind of pourparlers that were going on between Rus- 
 sia, Prussia, and Austria before the partition of Poland, and 
 might well have seemed to call for a strong and unmistak- 
 able repudiation on the part of England. We could scarce- 
 ly have been too emphatic or too precise in conveying to 
 the Emperor of Russia our determination to have nothing 
 to do with any such conspiracy. 
 
 Time went on, and the Emperor thought he saw an occa-- 
 sion for still more clearly explaining his plans and for reviv- 
 ing the supposed understanding with England. Lord Aber- 
 deen came into office as Prime-minister of this country Lord 
 Aberdeen, who was Foreign Secretary when Nicholas was in 
 England in 1844. On January 9th, 1853, before the re-elec- 
 tions which were consequent upon the new ministerial ap- 
 pointments had yet taken place, the Emperor met our min- 
 ister, Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, at a party given by the Arch- 
 duchess Helen, at her palace in St. Petersburg, and he drew 
 
446 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 him aside, and began to talk with him in the most outspoken 
 manner about the future of Turkey, and the arrangements it 
 might be necessary for England and Russia to make regard- 
 ing it. The conversation was renewed again and again af- 
 terward. Few conversations have had greater fame than 
 these. One phrase which the Emperor employed has passed 
 into the familiar political language of the world. As long 
 as there is memory of an Ottoman empire in Europe, so long 
 the Turkey of the days before the Crimean War will be call- 
 ed " the sick man." " We have on our hands," said the Em- 
 peror, " a sick man a very sick man ; it will be a great mis- 
 fortune if one of these days he should slip away from us be- 
 fore the necessary arrangements have been made." The con- 
 versations all tended toward the one purpose. The Emperor 
 urged that England and Russia ought to make arrangements 
 beforehand as to the inheritance of the Ottoman in Europe 
 before what he regarded as the approaching and inevita- 
 ble day when the sick man must come to die. The Emperor 
 explained that he did not contemplate nor would he allow a 
 permanent occupation of Constantinople by Russia ; nor, on 
 the other hand, would he consent to see that city held by 
 England or France, or any other Great Power. He would 
 not listen to any plans for the reconstruction of Greece in 
 the form of a Byzantine empire, nor would he allow Turkey 
 to be split up into little republics asylums, as he said, for 
 the Kossuths and Mazzinis of Europe. It was not made very 
 clear what the Emperor wished to have done with Constan- 
 tinople, if it was not to be Russian, nor Turkish, nor English, 
 nor French, nor Greek, nor yet a little republic ; but it was 
 evident, at all events, that Nicholas had made up his mind as 
 to what it was not to be. He thought that Servia and Bul- 
 garia might become independent States; that is to say, in- 
 dependent States, such as he considered the Danubian Prin- 
 cipalities then to be, "under my protection." If the reor- 
 ganization of South-eastern Europe made it seem necessary 
 to England that she should take possession of Egypt, the Em- 
 peror said he should offer no objection. He said the same 
 thing of Candia: if England desired to have that island, he 
 saw no objection. He did not ask for any formal treaty, he 
 said ; indeed, such arrangements as that are not generally 
 consigned to formal treaties ; be only wished for such an un- 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 447 
 
 derstanding as might be come to among gentlemen, as he 
 was satisfied that if he had ten minutes' conversation with 
 Lord Aberdeen the thing could be easily settled. If only 
 England and Russia could arrive at an understanding on the 
 subject, he declared that it was a matter of indifference to 
 him what other Powers might think or say. He spoke of 
 the several millions of Christians in Turkey whose rights he 
 was called upon to watch over, and he remarked the re- 
 mark is of significance that the right of watching over 
 them was secured to him by treaty. 
 
 The Emperor was evidently under the impression that the 
 interests of England and of Russia were united in this pro- 
 posed transaction. He had no idea of anything but the most 
 perfect frankness, so far as we were concerned. It clearly 
 had not occurred to him to suspect that there could be any- 
 thing dishonorable, anything England might recoil from, in 
 the suggestion that the two Powers ought to enter into a 
 plot to divide the sick man's goods between them while the 
 breath was yet in the sick man's body. It did not even occur 
 to him that there could be anything dishonorable in enter- 
 ing into such a compact without the knowledge of any other 
 of the great European Powers. The Emperor desired to act 
 like a man of honor ; but the idea of Western honor was as 
 yet new to Russia, and it had not quite got possession of the 
 mind of Nicholas. He was like the savage who is ambitious 
 of learning the ways of civilization, and who may be counted 
 on to do whatever he knows to be in accordance with these 
 ways, but who is constantly liable to make a mistake, simply 
 from not knowing how to apply them in each new emer- 
 gency. The very consequences which came from Nicho- 
 las's confidential communications with our minister would 
 of themselves testify to his sincerity, and in a certain sense 
 to his simplicity. But the English Government never, after 
 the disclosure of Sir Hamilton Seymour, put any faith in Nich- 
 olas. They regarded him as nothing better than a plotter. 
 They did not, probably, even make allowance enough for the 
 degree of religious or superstitious fervor which accompanied 
 and qualified all his ambition and his craft. Human nature 
 is so oddly blent that we ought not to be surprised if we find 
 a very high degree of fanatical and sincere fervor in com- 
 pany with a crafty selfishness. The English Government and 
 
448 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 most of the English people ever after looked on Nicholas as a 
 determined plotter and plunderer, who was not to be made 
 an associate in any engagement. On the other hand, Nich- 
 olas was as much disappointed as an honest highwayman of 
 the days of Captain Macheath might have been who, on 
 making a handsome offer of a share in a new enterprise to 
 a trusted and familiar " pal," finds that the latter is taken 
 with a fit of virtuous indignation, and is hurrying off to Bow 
 Street to tell the whole story. 
 
 The English minister and the English Government could 
 only answer the Emperor's overtures by saying that they 
 did not think it quite usual to enter into arrangements for 
 the spoliation of a friendly Power, and that England had no 
 desire to succeed to any of the possessions of Turkey. The 
 Emperor, doubtless, did not believe these assurances. He 
 probably felt convinced that England had some game of her 
 own in hand into which she did not find it convenient to ad- 
 mit him on terms of partnership. He must have felt bitterly 
 annoyed at the Ihought that he had committed himself so 
 far for nothing. The communications, were of course, under- 
 stood to be strictly confidential ; and Nicholas had no fear 
 that they would be given to the public at that time. They 
 were, in fact, not made publicly known for more than a year 
 after. But Nicholas had the dissatisfaction of knowing that 
 her Majesty's ministers were now in possession of his designs. 
 He had the additional discomfort of believing that while he 
 had shown his hand to them, they had contrived to keep 
 whatever designs of their own they were preparing a com- 
 plete secret from him. One unfortunate admission, the sig- 
 nificance of which will be seen hereafter, was made on the 
 part of the English Government during the correspondence 
 caused by the conversation between the Emperor and Sir 
 Hamilton Seymour. It was Lord John Russell who, inad- 
 vertently no doubt, made this admission. In his letter to Sir 
 Hamilton Seymour on February 9th, 1853, he wound up with 
 the words/ "The more the Turkish Government adopts the 
 rules of impartial law and equal administration, the less will 
 the Emperor of Russia find it necessary to apply that ex- 
 ceptional protection which his Imperial Majesty has found 
 so burdensome and inconvenient, though no doubt prescribed 
 by duty and sanctioned by treaty." 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 449 
 
 These conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour formed 
 but an episode in the history of the events that were then 
 going on. It was an episode of great importance, even to 
 the immediate progress of the events, and it had much to do 
 with the turn they took toward war; but there were great 
 forces moving toward antagonism in the South-east of Eu- 
 rope that must, in any case, have come into collision. Russia, 
 with her ambitions, her tendency to enlarge her frontier on 
 all sides, and her natural sympathies of race and religion 
 with the Christian and Sclave populations under Turkish 
 rule, must before long have come into active hostility with 
 the Porte. Even at the present somewhat critical time we 
 are not under any necessity to persuade ourselves that 
 Russia was actuated in the movements she made by merely 
 selfish ambition and nothing else ; that all the wrong was 
 on her side of the quarrel, and all the right upon ours. It 
 may be conceded, without any abrogation of patriotic Eng- 
 lish sentiment, that in standing up for the populations so 
 closely affined to her in race and religion, Russia was acting 
 very much as England would have acted under similar cir- 
 cumstances. If we can imagine a number of English and 
 Christian populations under the sway of some Asiatic despot 
 on the frontiers of our Indian empire, we shall admit that it 
 is likely the sentiments of all Englishmen in India would be 
 extremely sensitive on their behalf, and that it would not 
 be difficult to get us to believe that we were called upon to 
 interfere for their protection. Certainly any one who should 
 try to persuade us that after all these Englishmen were 
 nearly as well off under the Asiatic and despotic rule as 
 many other people, or as they deserved to be, would not 
 have much chance of a patient hearing from us. 
 
 The Russian Emperor fell back a little after the failure of 
 his efforts with Sir Hamilton Seymour, and for awhile seem- 
 ed to agree with the English Government as to the necessity 
 of not embarrassing Turkey by pressing too severely upon 
 her. He was, no doubt, seriously disappointed when he 
 found that England would not go with him; and his cal- 
 culations were put out by the discovery. He therefore saw 
 himself compelled to act with a certain moderation while 
 feeling his way to some other mode of attack. But the 
 natural forces which were in operation did not depend on 
 
450 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the will of any empire or government for their tendency. 
 Nicholas would have had to move in any case. There is 
 really no such thing in modern politics as a genuine autocrat. 
 Nicholas of Russia could no more afford to overlook the 
 evidences of popular and national feeling among his people 
 than an English sovereign could. He was a despot by 
 virtue of the national will which he embodied. The nation- 
 al will was in decided antagonism to the tendencies of the 
 Ottoman Power in Europe; and afterward to the policy 
 which the English Government felt themselves compelled 
 to adopt for the support of that Power against the schemes 
 of the Emperor of Russia. 
 
 There had long been going on a dispute about the Holy 
 Places in Palestine. The claims of the Greek Church and 
 those of the Latin Church were in antagonism there. The 
 Emperor of Russia was the protector of the Greek Church ; 
 the Kings of France had long had the Latin Church under 
 their protection. France had never taken our views as to 
 the necessity of maintaining the Ottoman Power in Europe. 
 On the contrary, as we have seen, the policy of England and 
 that of France were so decidedly opposed at the time when 
 France favored the independence of Egypt, and England 
 would not hear of it, that the two countries very nearly 
 came to war. Nor did France really feel any very profound 
 sympathy with the pretensions which the Latin monks were 
 constantly making in regard to the Holy Places. There was, 
 unquestionably, downright religious fanaticism on the part 
 of Russia to back up the demands of the Greek Church; but 
 we can hardly believe that opinion in France or in the cabi- 
 nets of French ministers really concerned itself much about 
 the Latin monks, except in so far as political purposes might 
 be subserved by paying some attention to them. But it 
 happened somewhat unfortunately that the French Govern- 
 ment began to be unusually active in pushing the Latin 
 claims just then. The whole dispute on which the fortunes 
 of Europe seemed for awhile to depend was of a strangely 
 medieval character. The Holy Places to which the Latins 
 raised a claim were the great Church in Bethlehem ; the 
 Sanctuary of the Nativity, with the right to place a new 
 star there (that which formerly ornamented it having been 
 lost) ; the Tomb of the Virgin ; the Stone of Anointing; the 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 451 
 
 Seven Arches of the Virgin in the Church of the Holy Sep- 
 ulchre, lu the reign of that remarkably pious, truthful, and 
 virtuous monarch, Francis the First of France, a treaty was 
 made with the Sultan by which France was acknowledged 
 the protector of the Holy Places in Palestine, and of the 
 monks of the Latin Church who took on themselves the care 
 of the sacred monuments and memorials. But the Greek 
 Church afterward obtained firmans from the Sultan ; each 
 Sultan gave away privileges very much as it pleased him, 
 and without taking much thought of the manner in which 
 his firman might affect the treaties of his predecessors ; and 
 the Greeks claimed, on the strength of these concessions, 
 that they had as good a right as the Latins to take care of 
 the Holy Places. Disputes were always arising, and of 
 course these were aggravated by the fact that France was 
 supposed to be concerned in the protection of one set of dis- 
 putants and Russia in that of another. The French and the 
 Russian Governments did, in point of fact, interfere from 
 time to time for the purpose of making good their claims. 
 The claims at length came to be identified with the States 
 which respectively protected them. An advantage of the 
 smallest kind gained by the Latins was viewed as an insult 
 to Russia; a concession to the Greeks was a snub to France. 
 The subject of controversy seemed trivial and odd in itself. 
 But it had even in itself a profounder significance than many 
 a question of diplomatic etiquette which has led great States 
 to the verge of war or into war itself. Mr. Kinglake, whose 
 brilliant history of the Invasion of the Crmiea is too often 
 disfigured by passages of solemn and pompous monotony, 
 has superfluously devoted several eloquent pages to prove 
 that the sacredness of association attaching to some partic- 
 ular spot has its roots in the very soil of human nature. 
 The custody of the Holy Places was, in this instance, a sym- 
 bol of a religious inheritance to the monastic disputants, and 
 of political power to the diplomatists. 
 
 It was France which first stirred the controversy in the 
 time just before the Crimean War. That fact is beyond 
 dispute. Lord John Russell had hardly come into office 
 when he had to observe, in writing to Lord Cowley, our am- 
 bassador in Paris, that "her Majesty's Government cannot 
 avoid perceiving that the ambassador of France at Constan- 
 
452 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tinople was the first to disturb the status quo in which the 
 matter rested." " Not," Lord John Russell went on to say, 
 " that the disputes of the Latin and Greek Churches were 
 not very active, but without some political action on the 
 part of France those quarrels would never have troubled the 
 relations of friendly Powers." Lord John Russell also com- 
 plained that the French ambassador was the first to speak 
 of having recourse to force, and to threaten the intervention 
 of a French fleet. " I regret to say," the despatch continued, 
 " that this evil example has been partly followed by Russia." 
 The French Government were, indeed, unusually active at 
 that time. The French ambassador, M. de Lavalette, is said 
 to have threatened that a French fleet should appear off 
 Jaffa, and even hinted at a French occupation of Jerusalem, 
 " when," as he significantly put it, " we should have all the 
 sanctuaries." One French army occupying Rome, and an- 
 other occupying Jerusalem, would have left the world in no 
 doubt as to the supremacy of France. The cause of all this 
 energy is not far to seek. The Prince President had only 
 just succeeded in procuring himself to be installed as Em- 
 peror, and he was very anxious to distract the attention of 
 Frenchmen from domestic politics to some showy and star- 
 tling policy abroad. He was in quest of a policy of advent- 
 ure. This controversy between the Church of the East and 
 the Church of the West tempted him into activity as one 
 that seemed likely enough to give him an opportunity of 
 displaying the power of France and of the new system with- 
 out any very gVeat danger or responsibility. Technically, 
 therefore, we are entitled to lay the blame of disturbing the 
 peace of Europe in the first instance on the Emperor of the 
 French. But while we must condemn the restless and self- 
 interested spirit which thus set itself to stir up disturbance, 
 we cannot help seeing that the quarrel must have come at 
 some time, even if the plebiscite had never been invited, and 
 a new Emperor had never been placed upon the throne of 
 France. The Emperor of Russia had made up his mind that 
 the time had come to divide the property of the sick man, 
 and he was not likely to remain long without an opportunity 
 of quarrelling with anyone who stood at the side of the sick 
 man's bed, and seemed to constitute himself a protector of 
 the sick man's interests. 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 453 
 
 The key of the whole controversy out of which the East- 
 ern war arose, and out of which, indeed, all subsequent com- 
 plications in the East came as well, was said to be found in 
 the clause of the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji. During the 
 negotiations for peace that took place in Vienna while the 
 Crimean War was yet going on, the assembled plenipoten- 
 tiaries declared that the whole dispute was owing to a mis- 
 interpretation of a clause in this unfortunate treaty. In a 
 time much nearer to our own, the discussion on the same 
 clause in the same treaty was renewed with all the old ear- 
 nestness, and with the same diffei'ence of interpretation. It 
 may not, perhaps, give an uninitiated reader any very exalt- 
 ed opinion of the utility and beauty of diplomatic arrange- 
 ments to hear that disputes covering more than a century 
 of time, and causing at least two great wars, arose out of 
 the impossibility of reconciling two different interpretations 
 of the meaning of two or three lines of a treaty. The Amer- 
 ican Civil War was said, with much justice, to have been 
 fought to obtain a definition of the limits of the rights of the 
 separate States as laid down in the Constitution; the Cri- 
 mean War was apparently fought to obtain a satisfactory 
 and final definition of the seventh clause of the Treaty of 
 Kainardji; and it did not fulfil its purpose. The historic 
 value, therefore, of this seventh clause may in one sense be 
 considered greater than that of the famous disputed words 
 which provoked the censure of the Jansenists and the immor- 
 tal letters of Pascal. 
 
 The Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji was made in 1774, be- 
 tween the Ottoman Porte and Catherine II. of Russia. On 
 sea and land the arms of the great Empress had been victo- 
 rious. Turkey was beaten to her knees. She had to give up 
 Azof and Taganrog to Russia, and to declare the Crimea in- 
 dependent of the Ottoman empire; an event which, it is al- 
 most needless to say, was followed not many years after by 
 the Russians taking the Crimea for themselves and making 
 it a province of Catherine's empire. The Treaty of Kainar- 
 dji, as it is usually called, was that which made the arrange- 
 ments for peace. When it exacted from Turkey such heavy 
 penalties in the shape of cession of territory, it was hardly 
 supposed that one seemingly insignificant clause was des- 
 tined to threaten the very existence of the Turkish empire. 
 
454 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 The treaty bore date July 10th, 1774; and it was made, so 
 to speak, in the tent of the victor. The seventh clause de- 
 clared that the Sublime Porte promised " to protect con- 
 stantly the Christian religion and its churches; and also to 
 allow the minister of the Imperial Court of Russia to make, 
 on all occasions, representations as well in favor of the new 
 church in Constantinople, of which mention will be made in 
 the fourteenth article, as in favor of those who officiate there- 
 in, promising to take such representations into due consider- 
 ation as being made by a confidential functionary of a neigh- 
 boring and sincerely friendly Power." Not much possibil- 
 ity of misunderstanding about these words, one might feel 
 inclined to say. We turn then to the fourteenth article al- 
 luded to, in order to discover if in its wording lies the per- 
 plexity of meaning which led to such momentous and calam- 
 itous results. We find that by this article it is simply per- 
 mitted to the court of Russia to build a public church of 
 the Greek rite in the Galata quarter of Constantinople, in 
 addition to the chapel built in the house of the minister; 
 and it is declared that the new church "shall be always un- 
 der the protection of the ministers of the (Russian) empire, 
 and shielded from all obstruction and all damage." Here, 
 then, we seem to have two clauses of the simplest meaning 
 and by no means of first-class importance. The latter clause 
 allows Russia to build a new church in Constantinople ; the 
 former allows the Russian minister to make representations 
 to the Porte on behalf of the church and of those who officiate 
 in it. What difference of opinion, it may be asked, could 
 possibly arise ? The difference was this : Russia claimed a 
 right of protectorate over all the Christians of the Greek 
 Church in Turkey as the consequence of the seventh clause 
 of the treaty. She insisted that when Turkey gave her a 
 right to interfere on behalf of the worshippers in one par- 
 ticular church, the same right extended so far as to cover 
 all the worshippers of the same denomination in every part 
 of the Ottoman dominions. The great object of Russia 
 throughout all the negotiations that preceded the Crimean 
 War was to obtain from the Porte an admission of the ex- 
 istence of such a protectorate. Such an acknowledgment 
 would, in fact, have made the Emperor of Russia the patron 
 and all but the ruler of by far the larger proportion of the 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 455 
 
 populations of European Turkey. The Sultan would no long- 
 er have been master in his own dominions. The Greek Chris- 
 tians would naturally have regarded the Russian Emperor's 
 right of intervention on their behalf as constituting a pro- 
 tectorate far more powerful than the nominal rule of the 
 Sultan. They would have known that the ultimate decision 
 of any dispute in which they were concerned rested with the 
 Emperor, and not with the Sultan ; and they would soon 
 have come to look upon the Emperor, and not the Sultan, as 
 their actual sovereign. 
 
 Now it does not seem likely, on the face of things, that 
 any ruler of a state would have consented to hand over 
 to a more powerful foreign monarch such a right over the 
 great majority of his subjects. Still, if Turkey, driven to 
 her last defences, had no alternative but to make such a 
 concession, the Emperors of Russia could not be blamed for 
 insisting that it should be carried out. The terms of the 
 article in the treaty itself certainly do not seem to admit 
 of such a construction. But for the views always advo- 
 cated by Mr. Gladstone, we should say it was self-evident 
 that the article never had any such meaning. We cannot, 
 however, dismiss the argument of such a man as Mr. Glad- 
 stone as if it were unworthy of consideration, or say that 
 an interpretation is obviously erroneous which he has delib- 
 erately and often declared to be accurate. We may as well 
 mention here at once that Mr. Gladstone rests his argument 
 
 O 
 
 on the first line of the famous article. The promise of the 
 Sultan, he contends, to protect constantly the Christian re- 
 ligion and its churches, is an engagement distinct in itself, 
 and disconnected from the engagement that follows in the 
 same clause, and which refers to the new building and its 
 ministrauts. The Sultan engages to protect the Christian 
 churches ; and with whom does he enter into this engage- 
 ment? With the Sovereign of Russia. Why does he make 
 this engagement? Because he has been defeated by Russia 
 and compelled to accept terms of peace; and one of the con- 
 ditions on which he is admitted to peace is his making this 
 engagement. How does he make the engagement ? By an 
 article in a treaty agreed to between him and the Sovereign 
 of Russia. But if a state enters into treaty engagement 
 with another that it will do a certain thing, it is clear that 
 
456 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the other state must have a special right of remonstrance 
 and of representation if the thing be not done. Therefore 
 Mr. Gladstone argues that as the Sultan made a special 
 treaty with Russia to protect the Christians, he gave, in 
 the very nature of things, a special right to Russia to com- 
 plain if the protection was not given. We are far from de- 
 nying that there is force in the argument ; and it is, at all 
 events, worthy of being recorded for its mere historical im- 
 portance. But Mr. Gladstone's was certainly not the Euro- 
 pean interpretation of the clause, nor does it seem to us the 
 interpretation that history will accept. Lord John Russell, 
 as we have seen, made a somewhat unlucky admission that 
 the claims of Russia to protectorate were " prescribed by 
 duty and sanctioned by treaty." But this admission seems 
 rather to have been the result of inadvertence or heedless- 
 ness, than of any deliberate intention to recognize the par- 
 ticular claim involved. The admission was afterward made 
 the occasion of many a severe attack upon Lord John Rus- 
 sell by Mr. Disraeli and other leading members of the Op- 
 position. Assuredly, Lord John Russell's admission, if it is 
 really to be regarded as such, was not endorsed by the Eng- 
 lish Government. Whenever we find Russia putting the 
 claim into plain words, we find England, through her min- 
 isters, refusing to give it their acknowledgment. During 
 the discussions before the Crimean War, Lord Clarendon, 
 our Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Stratford de Redclifle 
 a letter embodying the views of the English Government 
 on the claim. No Sovereign, Lord Clarendon says, having 
 a due regard for his own dignity and independence, could 
 admit proposals which conferred upon a foreign and more 
 powerful sovereign a right of protection over his own sub- 
 jects. "If such a concession were made, the result," as Lord 
 Clarendon pointed out, " would be that fourteen millions of 
 Greeks would henceforward regard the Emperor as their su- 
 preme protector, and their allegiance to the Sultan would be 
 little more than nominal, while his own independence would 
 dwindle into vassalage. Diplomacy, therefore, was powerless 
 to do good during all the protracted negotiations that set in, 
 for the plain reason that the only object of the Emperor of 
 Russia in entering upon negotiation at all was one which the 
 other European Powers regarded as absolutely inadmissible. 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 457 
 
 The dispute about the Holy Places was easily settled. 
 The Porte cared very little about the matter, and was will- 
 ing enough to come to any fair terms by which the whole 
 controversy could be got rid of. But the demands of Rus- 
 sia went on just as before. Prince Mentschikoff, a man of 
 the Potemkin school, fierce, rough, and unable or unwilling 
 to control his temper, was sent with demands to Constanti- 
 nople; and his very manner of making the demands seemed 
 as if it were taken up for the purpose of insuring their re- 
 jection. If the envoy fairly represented the sovereign, the 
 demands must have been so conveyed with the deliberate 
 intention of immediately and irresistibly driving the Turks 
 to reject every proposition coming from such a negotiator. 
 Mentschikoff brought his proposals with him cut and dry in 
 the form of a convention which he called upon Turkey to ac- 
 cept without more ado. In other words, he put a pistol at 
 Turkey's head and told her to sign at once, or else he would 
 pull the trigger. Turkey refused, and Prince Mentschikoff 
 withdrew in real or affected rage, and presently the Emper- 
 or Nicholas sent two divisions of his army across the Pruth 
 to take possession of the Danubian principalities. 
 
 Diplomacy, however, did not give in even then. The Em- 
 peror announced that he had occupied the principalities not 
 as an act of war, but with the view of obtaining material 
 guarantees for the concession of the demands which Turkey 
 had already declared that she would not concede. The Eng- 
 lish Government advised the Porte not to treat the occupa- 
 tion as an act of war, although fully admitting that it was 
 strictly a casus belli, and that Turkey would have been am- 
 ply justified in meeting it by an armed resistance if it were 
 prudent for her to do so. It would, of course, have been 
 treated as war by any strong Power. We might well have 
 retorted upon Russia the harsh but not wholly unjustifiable 
 language she had employed toward us when we seized pos- 
 session of material guarantees from the Greek Government 
 in the harbor of the Pira3us. In our act, however, there was 
 less of that which constitutes war than in the arbitrary con- 
 duct of Russia. Greece did not declare that our demands 
 were such as she could not admit in principle. She did ad- 
 mit most of them in principle, but Avas only, as it seemed to 
 our Government, or at least to Lord Palmerston, trying to 
 
 I. 20 
 
458 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 evade an actual settlement. There was nothing to go to 
 war about; and our seizure of the ships, objectionable as it 
 was, might be described as only a way of getting hold of 
 a material guarantee for the discharge of a debt which was 
 not in principle disputed. But in the dispute between Rus- 
 sia and Turkey the claim was rejected altogether; it was 
 declared intolerable; its principle was absolutely repudiated, 
 and any overt act on the part of Russia must therefore have 
 had for its object to compel Turkey to submit to a demand 
 which she would yield to force alone. This is, of course, in 
 the very spirit of war ; and if Turkey had been a stronger 
 Power, she would never have dreamed of meeting it in any 
 other way than by an armed resistance. She was, however, 
 strongly advised by England and other Powers to adopt a 
 moderate course; and, in fact, throughout the whole of the 
 negotiations she showed a remarkable self-control and a dig- 
 
 o o 
 
 nified courtesy which must sometimes have been very vex- 
 ing to her opponent. Diplomacy went to work again, and a 
 Vienna note was concocted which Russia at once oifered to 
 accept. The four great Powers who were carrying on the 
 business of mediation were at first quite charmed with the 
 note, with the readiness of Russia to accept it, and with 
 themselves; and but for the interposition of Lord Stratford 
 de Redcliflfe it seems highly probable that it would have 
 been agreed to by all the parties concerned. Lord Stratford, 
 however, saw plainly that the note was a virtual concession 
 to Russia of all that she specially desired to have, and all 
 that Europe was unwilling to concede to her. The great ob- 
 ject of Russia was to obtain an acknowledgment, however 
 vague or covert, of her protectorate over the Christians of 
 the Greek Church in the Sultan's dominions ; and the Vien- 
 na note was so constructed as to affirm, much rather than 
 to deny, the claim which Russia had so long been setting 
 up. Assuredly such a note could at some future time have 
 been brought out in triumph by Russia as an overwhelm- 
 ing evidence of the European recognition of such a protec- 
 torate. 
 
 Let us make this a little more plain. Suppose the ques- 
 tion at issue were as to the payment of a tribute claimed by 
 one prince from another. The one had been always insist- 
 ing that the other was his vassal, bound to pay him tribute ; 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 459 
 
 the other always repudiated the claim in principle. This 
 was the subject of dispute. After awhile the question is left 
 to arbitration, and the arbitrators, without actually declar- 
 ing in so many words that the claim to the tribute is estab- 
 lished, yet go so far as to direct the payment of a certain 
 sum of money, and do not introduce a single word to show 
 that in their opinion the original claim was unjust in princi- 
 ple. Would not the claimant of the tribute be fully enti- 
 tled in after-years, if any new doubt of his claim were raised, 
 to appeal to this arbitration as confirming it? Would he 
 not be entitled to say, " The dispute was about my right to 
 tribute. Here is a document awarding to me the payment 
 of a certain sum, and not containing a word to show that 
 the arbitrators disputed the principle of my claim. Is it 
 possible to construe that otherwise than as a recognition of 
 my claim ?" We certainly cannot think it would have been 
 otherwise regarded by any impartial mind. The very readi- 
 ness with which Russia consented to accept the Vienna note 
 ought to have taught its framers that Russia found all her 
 account in its vague and ambiguous language. The Prince 
 Consort said it was a trap laid by Russia through Austria ; 
 and it seems hardly possible to regard it now in any other 
 light. 
 
 The Turkish Government, therefore, acting under the ad- 
 vice of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our ambassador to Con- 
 stantinople, who had returned to his post after a long ab- 
 sence, declined to accept the Vienna note unless with consid- 
 erable modifications. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe showed 
 great acuteness and force of character throughout all these 
 negotiations. A reader of Mr. Kinglake's history is some- 
 times apt to become nauseated by the absurd pompousness 
 with which the historian overlays his descriptions of " the 
 great Eltchi," as he is pleased to call him, and is inclined 
 to wish that the great Eltchi could have imparted some of 
 his own sober gravity and severe simplicity of style to his 
 adulator. Mr. Kinglake writes of Lord Stratford de Red- 
 cliffe as if he were describing the all-compelling movements 
 of some divinity or providence. A devoted imperial histo- 
 rian would have made himself ridiculous by writing of the 
 great Napoleon at the height of his power in language of 
 such inflated mysticism as this educated Englishman has al- 
 
460 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 lowed himself to employ when describing the manner in 
 which our ambassador to Constantinople did his duty dur- 
 ing the days before the Crimean War. But the extraordi- 
 nary errors of taste and good-sense into which Mr. Kinglake 
 occasionally descends cannot prevent us from doing justice 
 to the keen judgment and the inflexible will which Lord 
 Stratford displayed during this critical time. He saw the 
 fatal defect of the note which, prepared in Paris, had been 
 brought to its supposed perfection at Vienna, and had there 
 received the adhesion of the English Government along 
 
 o o 
 
 with that of the governments of the other Great Powers 
 engaged in the conference. A hint from Lord Stratford 
 made the ministers of the Porte consider it with suspicious 
 scrutiny, and they too saw its weakness and its conscious 
 or unconscious treachery. They declared that unless cer- 
 tain modifications were introduced they would not accept 
 the note. The reader will at first think, perhaps, that some 
 of these modifications were mere splittings of hairs, and 
 diplomatic, worse even than lawyer-like, quibbles. But, in 
 truth, the alterations demanded were of the greatest impor- 
 tance for Turkey. The Porte had to think, not of the im- 
 mediate purpose of the note, but of the objects it might be 
 made to serve afterward. It contained, for instance, words 
 which declared that the Government of his Majesty the Sul- 
 tan would remain "faithful to the letter and the spirit of 
 the stipulations of the Treaties of Kainardji and of Adri- 
 anople, relative to the protection of the Christian religion." 
 These words, in a note drawn up for the purpose of satisfy- 
 ing the Emperor of Russia, could not but be understood as 
 recognizing the interpretation of the Treaty of Kainardji on 
 which Russia has always insisted. The Porte, therefore, 
 proposed to strike out these words and substitute the fol- 
 lowing : "To the stipulations of the Treaty of Kainardji, 
 confirmed by that of Adrianople, relative to the protection 
 by the Sublime Porte of the Christian religion." By these 
 words the Turkish ministers quietly affirm that the only 
 protectorate exercised over the Christians of Turkey is that 
 of the Sultan of Turkey himself. The difference is simply 
 that between a claim conceded and a claim repudiated. 
 The Russian Government refused to accept the modifica- 
 tions; and in arguing against them, the Russian minister, 
 
THE EASTERN QUESTION. 461 
 
 Count Nesselrode, made it clear to the English Government 
 that Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was right when he held the 
 note to be full of weakness and of error. For the Russian 
 minister argued against the modifications on the very ground 
 that they denied to the claims of Russia just that satisfac- 
 tion that the statesmanship arid the public opinion of Europe 
 had always agreed to refuse. The Prince Consort's expres- 
 sion was appropriate : the Western Powers had nearly been 
 caught in a trap. 
 
 From that time all hopes of peace were over. There 
 were, to be sure, other negotiations still. A ghastly sem- 
 blance of faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement 
 was kept up for awhile on both sides. Little plans of ad- 
 justment were tinkered up and tried, and fell to pieces the 
 moment they were tried. It is not necessary for us to de- 
 scribe them. Not many persons put any faith or even pro- 
 fessed any interest in them. They were conducted amidst 
 the most energetic preparations for war on both sides. Our 
 troops were moving toward Malta; the streets of London, 
 of Liverpool, of Southampton, and other towns, were ringing 
 with the cheers of enthusiastic crowds gathered together to 
 watch the marching of troops destined for the East. Tur- 
 key had actually declared war against Russia. People now 
 were anxious rather to see how the war would open between 
 Russia and the allies than when it would open : the time 
 when could evidently only be a question of a few days ; the 
 way how was a matter of more peculiar interest. We had 
 known so little of war for nearly forty years, that added to 
 all the other emotions which the coming of battle must bring 
 was the mere feeling of curiosity as to the sensation pro- 
 duced by a state of war. It was an abstraction to the living 
 generation a thing to read of and discuss and make poetry 
 and romance out of; but they could not yet realize what 
 itself was like. 
 
462 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 WHERE WAS LORD PALHERSTON ? 
 
 MEANTIME where was Lord Palmerston V He of all men, 
 one Avould think, must have been pleased with the turn 
 things were taking. He had had from the beginning little 
 faith in any issue of the negotiations but war. Probably he 
 did not really wish for any other result. We are well in- 
 clined to agree with Mr. Kinglake, that of all the members 
 of the cabinet he alone clearly saw his way, and was satis- 
 fied with the prospect. But, according to the supposed nat- 
 ure of his office, he had now nothing to do with the war or 
 with foreign affairs, except as every member of the cabinet 
 shares the responsibilities of the whole body. He had ap- 
 parently about as much to do with the war as the Postmas- 
 ter-general or the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster 
 might have. He had accepted the office of Plome Secretary ; 
 he had declared that he did not choose to be Foreign Secre- 
 tary any more. He affirmed that he wanted to learn some- 
 thing about home affairs, and to get to understand his coun- 
 trymen, and so forth. He was really very busy all this 
 time in his new duties. Lord Palmerston was a remarkably 
 efficient and successful Home Secretary. His unceasing ac- 
 tivity loved to show itself in whatever department he might 
 be called upon to occupy. He brought to the somewhat 
 prosaic duties of his new office not only all the virile energy 
 but also all the enterprise which he had formerly shown in 
 managing revolutions and dictating to foreign courts. The 
 ticket-of-leave system dates from the time of his administra- 
 tion. Our transportation system had broken down ; for, in 
 fact, the colonies would stand it no longer, and it fell to Lord 
 Palmerston to find something to put in its place ; and the 
 plan of granting tickets-of-leave to convicts who had shown 
 that they were capable of regeneration was the outcome of 
 the necessity and of his administration. The measures to 
 abate the smoke nuisance by compelling factories, under pen- 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 463 
 
 allies, to consume their own smoke, is also the offering of 
 Palmerston's activity in the Home Office. The Factory 
 Acts were extended by him. He went energetically to 
 work in the shutting up of graveyards in the metropolis; 
 and in a letter to his brother he declared that he should like 
 to "put down beer-shops, and let shopkeepers sell beer like 
 oil, and vinegar, and treacle, to be carried home and drunk 
 with wives and children." 
 
 This little project is worthy of notice, because it illus- 
 trates, more fairly perhaps than some far greater plan might 
 do, at once the strength and the weakness of Palmerston's 
 intelligence. He could not see why everything should not 
 be done in a plain straightforward way, and why the ar- 
 rangements that were good for the sale of one thing might 
 not be good also for the sale of another. He did not stop 
 to inquire whether, as a matter of fact, beer is a commodity 
 at all like oil, and vinegar, and treacle ; whether the same 
 consequences follow the drinking of beer and the consump- 
 tion of treacle. His critics said that he was apt to manage 
 his foreign affairs on the same rough-and-ready principle. 
 If a system suited England, why should it not suit all other 
 places as well? If treacle may be sold safely without any 
 manner of authoritative regulation, why not beer? The 
 answer to the latter question is plain because treacle is 
 not beer. So, people said, with Palmerston's constitutional 
 projects for every place. Why should not that which suits 
 England suit also Spain ? Because, to begin with, a good 
 many people urged, Spain is not England. 
 
 There was one department of his duties in which Palmer- 
 ston was acquiring a new and a somewhat odd reputation. 
 That was in his way of answering deputations and letters. 
 "The mere routine business of the Home Office," Palmer- 
 ston writes to his brother, " as far as that consists in daily 
 correspondence, is far lighter than that of the Foreign Of- 
 fice. But during a session of Parliament the whole time of 
 the Secretary of State, up to the time when he must go to 
 the House of Commons, is taken up by the deputations of 
 all kinds, and interviews with members of Parliament, mili- 
 tia colonels, etc." Lord Palmerston was always civil and 
 cordial ; he Avas full of a peculiar kind of fresh common- 
 sense, and always ready to apply it to any subject what- 
 
464: A HISTORY OF OUR OWIST TIMES. 
 
 ever. lie could at any time say some racy thing which 
 set the public wondering and laughing. He gave some- 
 thing like a shock to the Presbytery of Edinburgh when 
 they wrote to him, through the moderator, to ask whether 
 a national fast ought not to be appointed in consequence 
 of the appearance of cholera. Lord Palmerston gravely 
 admonished the Presbytery that the Maker of the universe 
 had appointed certain laws of nature for the planet on 
 which we live, and that the weal or woe of mankind de- 
 pends on the observance of those laws one of them con- 
 necting health "with the absence of those noxious exhala- 
 tions which proceed from overcrowded human beings, or 
 from decomposing substances, whether animal or vegeta- 
 ble." He therefore recommended that the purification of 
 towns and cities should be more strenuously carried on, and 
 remarked that the causes and sources of contagion, if allow- 
 ed to remain, " will infallibly breed pestilence and be fruit- 
 ful in death, in spite of all the prayers and fastings of a 
 united but inactive nation." When Lord Stanley of Alder- 
 ley applied to Lord Palmerston for a special permission for 
 a deceased dignitary of a church to be buried under the 
 roof of the sacred building, the Home Secretary declined to 
 accede to the request in a letter that might have come from, 
 or might have delighted, Sydney Smith. "What special 
 connection is there between church dignities and the privi- 
 lege of being decomposed under the feet of survivors? Do 
 you seriously mean to imply that a soul is more likely to 
 go to heaven because the body which it inhabited lies de- 
 composing under the pavement of a church instead of being 
 placed in a church-yard ? . . . England is, I believe, the 
 only country in which, in these days, people accumulate pu- 
 trefying dead bodies amidst the dwellings of the living; and 
 as to burying bodies under thronged churches, you might 
 as well put them under libraries, drawing-rooms, and dining- 
 rooms." 
 
 Lord Palmerston did not see what a very large field of 
 religious and philosophical controversy he opened np by 
 some of his arguments, both as to the fasting and as to the 
 burial in church-yards. He only saw, for the moment, what 
 appeared to him the healthy common-sense aspect of the po- 
 sition he had taken up, and did not think or care about what 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 465 
 
 
 
 other positions he might be surrendering by the very act. 
 He had not a poetic or philosophic mind. In clearing his 
 intelligence from all that he would have called prejudice 
 or superstition, he had cleared out also much of the deeper 
 sympathetic faculty which enables one man to understand 
 the feelings and get at the springs of conduct in the breasts 
 of other men. No one can doubt that his jaunty way of 
 treating grave and disputed subjects oifended many pure 
 and simple minds. Yet it was a mistake to suppose that 
 mere levity dictated his way of dealing with the prejudices 
 of others. He had often given the question his deepest at- 
 tention, and come to a conclusion with as much thought as 
 his temperament would have allowed to any subject. The 
 difference between him and graver men was that when he 
 had come to a conclusion seriously, he loved to express his 
 views humorously. He resembled in this respect some of 
 the greatest and the most earnest men of his time. Count 
 Cavotir delighted in jocose and humorous answers; so did 
 President Lincoln ; so at one period of his public career did 
 Prince Bismarck. But there can be no doubt that Palmer- 
 ston often made enemies by his seeming levity, when another 
 man could easily have made friends by saying just the same 
 thing in grave words. The majority of the House of Com- 
 mons liked him because he amused them and made them 
 laugh ; and they thought no more of the matter. 
 
 But the Avar is now fairly launched ; and Palmerston is 
 to all appearance what would be vulgarly called "out of the 
 swim." Every eye was turned to him. He was like Pitt 
 standing up on one of the back benches to support the ad- 
 ministration of Addington. For years he had been identified 
 with the Foreign Office, and with that sort of foreign policy 
 which would seem best suited to the atmosphere of war; 
 and now war is on foot, and Palmerston is in the Home Of- 
 fice pleasantly " chaffing " militia colonels, and making sensi- 
 tive theologians angry by the flippancy of his replies. Per- 
 haps there was something flattering to Palmerston's feeling 
 of self-love in the curious wonder with which people turned 
 their eyes upon him during all that interval. Every one 
 seemed to ask how the country was to get on without him 
 to manage its foreign affairs, and when he would be good 
 enough to come down from his quiet seat in the Home Qf- 
 
 20* 
 
466 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 
 
 fice and assume what seemed his natural duties. A famous 
 tenor singer of our day once had some quarrel with his man- 
 ager. The singer withdrew from the company ; some one 
 else had to be put in his place. On the first night, when the 
 new man made his appearance before the public, the great 
 singer was seen in a box calmly watching the performance 
 like any other of the audience. The new man turned out a 
 failure. The eyes of the house began to fix themselves upon 
 the one who could sing, but who was sitting as unconcern- 
 edly in his box as if he never meant to sing any more. The 
 audience at first were incredulous. It was in a great pro- 
 vincial city where the singer had always been a prime favor- 
 ite. They could not believe that they were in good faith to 
 be expected to put up with bad singing while he was there. 
 At last their patience gave way. They insisted on the one 
 singer leaving his place on the stage, and the other coming 
 down from his box and his easy attitude of unconcern, and 
 resuming what they regarded as his proper part. They 
 would have their way ; they carried their point ; and the 
 man who could sing was compelled at last to return to the 
 scene of his old triumphs and sing for them again. The at- 
 titude of Lord Palmerston, and the manner in which the 
 public eyes were turned upon him during the early days of 
 the war, could hardly be illustrated more effectively than 
 by this story. As yet the only wonder was why he did not 
 take somehow the directorship of affairs; the time was to 
 come when the general voice would insist upon his doing so. 
 One day a startling report ran through all circles. It was 
 given out that Palmerston had actually resigned. So far was 
 he from any intention of taking on himself the direction of 
 affairs even of war or of foreign affairs that he appeared 
 to have gone out of the ministry altogether. The report 
 was confirmed: Palmerstou actually had resigned. It was 
 at once asserted that his resignation was caused by differ- 
 ence of opinion between him and his colleagues on the East- 
 ern policy of the Government. But, on the other hand, it 
 was as stoutly affirmed that the difference of opinion had 
 only to C}Q with the new Reform Bill which Lord John Rus- 
 sell was preparing to introduce. Now it is certain that Lord 
 Palmerston did differ in opinion with L.or4 John Russell on 
 the subject of hjs Reform Bil]. It is certain that this was 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 467 
 
 the avowed cause, and the only avowed cause, of Pal mer- 
 ston's resignation. But it is equally certain that the real 
 cause of the resignation was the conviction in Palmerston's 
 mind that his colleagues were not up to the demands of the 
 crisis in regard to the Eastern war. Lord Palmerston's let- 
 ters to his brother on the subject are amusing. They re- 
 semble some of the epistles which used to pass between sus- 
 pected lovers in old days, and in which the words were so 
 arranged that the sentences conveyed an obvious meaning 
 good enough for the eye of jealous authority, but had a very 
 different tale to tell to the one being for whom the truth was 
 intended. Lord Palmerston gives his brother a long and 
 circumstantial account of the differences about the Reform 
 Bill, and about the impossibility of a Home Secretary either 
 supporting by speech a Bill he did not like, or sitting silent 
 during the whole discussion on it in the House of Commons. 
 He shows that he could not possibly do otherwise under such 
 trying circumstances than resign. The whole letter, until 
 we come to the very last paragraph, is about the Reform 
 Bill, and nothing else. One might suppose that nothing else 
 whatever was entering into the writer's thoughts. But at 
 the end Palmerston just remembers to add that the Times 
 was telling "an untruth" when it said there had been no dif- 
 ference in the cabinet about Eastern affairs; for, in fact, there 
 had been some little lack of agreement on the subject, but it 
 would have looked rather silly, Palmerston thinks, if he were 
 to have gone out of office merely because he could not have 
 his own way about Turkish affairs. Exactly; and in a few 
 days after Palmerston was induced to withdraw his resigna- 
 tion, and to remain in the Government ; and then he wrote 
 to his brother again explaining how and all about it. He 
 explains that several members of the cabinet told him they 
 considered the details of the Reform Bill quite open to dis- 
 cussion, and so forth. "Their earnest representations, and 
 the knowledge that the cabinet had on Thursday taken a 
 decision on Turkish affairs in entire accordance with opinions 
 which I had long unsuccessfully pressed upon them, decided 
 me to withdraw my resignation, which I did yesterday." 
 " Of course," Lord Palmerston quietly adds, " what I say to 
 you about the cabinet decision on Turkish affairs is entirely 
 for yourself, and not to be mentioned to anybody; but it is 
 
468 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 very important, and will give the allied squadrons the com- 
 mand of the Black Sea." All this was very prudent, of 
 course, and very prettily arranged. But we doubt whether 
 a single man in England who cared anything about the whole 
 question was imposed upon for one moment. Nobody be- 
 lieved that at such a time Lord Palmerston would have gone 
 out of office because he did not quite like the details of a 
 Reform Bill, or that the cabinet would have obstinately 
 clung to such a scheme just then in spite of his opposition. 
 Indeed, the first impression of every one was that Palmerston 
 had gone out only in order to come back again much strong- 
 er than before ; that he resigned when he could not have 
 his way in Eastern aifairs; and that he would resume office 
 empowered to have his way in everything. The explana- 
 tions about the Reform Bill found as impatient listeners 
 among the public at large as the desperate attempts of the 
 young heroine in "She Stoops to Conquer "to satisfy hon- 
 est Tony Lumpkin with her hasty and ill-concocted devices 
 about Shakebag and Green and the rest of them, whose story 
 she pretends to read for him from the letter which is not in- 
 tended to reach the suspicious ears of his mother. When 
 Lord Palmerston resumed his place in the ministry, the pub- 
 lic at large felt certain that the war spirit was now at last 
 to have its way, and that the dallyings of the peace-lovers 
 were over. 
 
 Nor was England long left to guess at the reason why 
 Lord Palmerston had so suddenly resigned his office, and so 
 suddenly returned to it. A great disaster had fallen upon 
 Turkey. Her fleet had been destroyed by the Russians at 
 Sinope, in the Black Sea. Sinope is, or was, a considerable 
 seaport town and naval station belonging to Turkey, and 
 standing on a rocky promontory on the southern shore of 
 the Black Sea. On November 30th, 1853, the Turkish squad- 
 ron was lying there at anchor. The squadron consisted of 
 seven frigates, a sloop, and a steamer. It had no ship of the 
 line. The Russian fleet, consisting of six ships of the line 
 and some steamers, had been cruising about the Black Sea 
 for several days previously, issuing from Sebastopol, and 
 making an occasional swoop now and then as if to bear down 
 npon the Turkish squadron. The Turkish commander was 
 quite aware of the danger, and pressed for re-enforcements; 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 469 
 
 but nothing was done, either by the Turkish Government or 
 by the ambassadors of the allies at Constantinople. On No- 
 vember 30th, however, the Sebastopol fleet did actually bear 
 down upon the Turkish vessels lying at Sinope. The Turks, 
 seeing that an attack was coming at last, not only accepted 
 but even anticipated it; for they were the first to fire. The 
 fight was hopeless for them. They fought with all the des- 
 perate energy of fearless and unconquerable men ; uncon- 
 querable, at least, in the sense that they would not yield. 
 But the odds were too much against them to give them any 
 chance. Either they would not haul down their flag, which 
 is very likely, or if they did strike their colors the Russian 
 admiral did not see the signal. The fight went on until the 
 
 o o 
 
 whole Turkish squadron, save for the steamer, was destroyed. 
 It was asserted on official authority that moro than four 
 thousand Turks were killed ; that the survivors hardly num- 
 bered four hundred; and that of these every man was 
 wounded. Sinope itself was ranch shattered and battered 
 by the Russian fleet. The affair was at once the destruction 
 of the Turkish ships and an attack upon Turkish territory. 
 
 This was " the massacre of Sinope." When the news 
 came to England there arose one cry of grief and anger and 
 shame. It was regarded as a deliberate act of treachery, 
 consummated amidst conditions of the most hideous barbar- 
 ity. A clamor arose against the Emperor of Russia, as if he 
 were a monster outside the pale of civilized law, like some 
 of the furious and treacherous despots of medieval Asiatic 
 history. Mr. Kinglake has shown and, indeed, the sequence 
 of events must in time have shown every one that there 
 was no foundation for these accusations. The attack was 
 not treacherous, but openly made; not sudden, but clearly 
 announced by previous acts, and long expected, as we have 
 seen, by the Turkish commander himself; and it was not in 
 breach even of the courtesies of war. Russia and Turkey 
 were not only formally but actually at war. The Turks 
 were the first to begin the actual military operations. More 
 than five weeks before the affair at Sinope they had opened 
 the business by firing from a fortress on a Russian flotilla ; 
 a few days after this act they crossed the Danube at Wid- 
 din, and occupied Kalafat; and for several days they had 
 fought under Omar Pasha with brilliant success acraiust the 
 
470 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Russians at Oltenitza. All England had been enthusiastic 
 about the bravery which the Turks had shown at Oltenitza, 
 and the success which had attended their first encounter 
 with the enemy. It was hardly to be expected that the 
 Emperor of Russia would only fight where he was at a dis- 
 advantage, and refrain from attack where his power was 
 overwhelming. Still, there was an impression among Eng- 
 lish and French statesmen that while negotiations for peace 
 were actually going on between the Western Powers and 
 Russia, and while the fleets of England and France were 
 remaining peacefully at anchor in the Bosphorus, whither 
 they had been summoned by this time, the Russian Emperor 
 would abstain from complicating matters by making use of 
 his Sebastopol fleet. Nothing could have been more unwise 
 than to act upon an impression of this kind as if it were a 
 regular agreement. But the English public did not under- 
 stand at that moment the actual condition of things, and 
 may well have supposed that if our Government seemed se- 
 cure and content, there must have been some definite ar- 
 rangement to create so happy a condition of mind. It may 
 look strange to readers now, surveying this chapter of past 
 history with cool, unimpassioned mind, that anybody could 
 have believed in the existence of any arrangement by virtue 
 of which Turkey could be at war with Russia and not at 
 war with her at the same time ; which would have allowed 
 Turkey to strike her enemy when and how she pleased, and 
 would have restricted the enemy to such time, place, and 
 method of retort as might suit the convenience of the neu- 
 tral Powers. But at the time, when the true state of affairs 
 was little known in England, the account of the " massacre 
 of Sinope " was received as if it had been the tale of some 
 unparalleled act of treachery and savagery ; and the eager- 
 ness of the country for war against Russia became inflamed 
 to actual passion. 
 
 It was at that moment that Palmerston resigned his office. 
 The cabinet were still not prepared to go as far as he would 
 have gone. They had believed that the Sebastopol fleet 
 would do nothing as long as the Western Powers kept talk- 
 ing about peace ; they now believed, perhaps, that the Em- 
 peror of Russia would say he was very sorry for what had 
 been done, and promise not to do so any more. Lord Palm- 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 471 
 
 erston, supported by the urgent pressure of the Emperor of 
 the French, succeeded, however, in at last overcoming their 
 determination. It was agreed that some decisive announce- 
 ment should be made to the Emperor of Russia on the part 
 of England and France ; and Lord Palmerston resumed his 
 place, master of the situation. This was the decision of 
 which he had spoken in his letter to his brother; the deci- 
 sion which he said he had long unsuccessfully pressed upon 
 his colleagues, and which would give the allied squadrons 
 the command of the Black Sea. It was, in fact, an intima- 
 tion to Russia that France and England were resolved to 
 prevent any repetition of the Sinope affair; that their squad- 
 rons would enter the Black Sea with orders to request, and, 
 if necessary, to constrain, every Russian ship met in the 
 Euxine to return to Sebastopol ; and to repel by force any 
 act of aggression afterward attempted against the Ottoman 
 territory or flag. This was not, it should be observed, sim- 
 ply an intimation to the Emperor of Russia that the Great 
 Powers would impose and enforce the neutrality of the 
 Black Sea. It was an announcement that if the flag of 
 Russia dared to show itself on that sea, which washed 
 Russia's southern shores, the war- ships of two far foreign 
 States, taking possession of those waters, would pull it down, 
 or compel those who bore it to fly ignominiously into port. 
 This was in fact war. 
 
 Of course Lord Palmerston knew this. Because it meant 
 war, he accepted it and returned to his place, well pleased 
 with the way in which things were going. From his point 
 of view he was perfectly right. He had been consistent all 
 through. He believed from the first that the pretensions 
 of Russia would have to be put down by force of arms, and 
 could not be put down in any other way ; he believed that 
 the danger to England from the aggrandizement of Russia 
 was a capital danger calling for any extent of national sac- 
 rifice to avert it. He believed that a war with Russia was 
 inevitable, and he preferred taking it sooner to taking it 
 later. He believed that an alliance with the Emperor of 
 the French was desirable, and a war with Russia would be 
 the best means of making this effective. Lord Palmerston, 
 therefore, was determined not to remain in the cabinet un- 
 less some strenuous measures were taken, and now, as on a 
 
472 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 memorable former occasion, he understood better than any 
 one else the prevailing temper of the English people. 
 
 When the resolution of the Western cabinets was com- 
 municated to the Emperor of Russia he withdrew his repre- 
 sentatives from London and Paris. On February 21st, 1854, 
 the diplomatic relations between Russia and the two allied 
 Powers were brought to a stop. Six weeks before this the 
 English and French fleets had entered the Black Sea, The 
 interval was filled up with renewed efforts to bring about 
 a peaceful arrangement, which were conducted with as 
 much gravity as if any one believed in the possibility of 
 their success. The Emperor of the French, who always 
 loved letter- writing, and delighted in what Cobden once 
 happily called the " monumental style," wrote to the Russian 
 Emperor appealing to him, professedly in the interests of 
 peace, to allow an armistice to be signed, to let the belliger- 
 ent forces on both sides retire from the places to which mo- 
 tives of war had led them, and then to negotiate a conven- 
 tion with the Sultan which might be submitted to a con- 
 ference of the four Powers. If Russia would not do this, 
 then Louis Napoleon, undertaking to speak in the name of 
 the Queen of Great Britain as well as of himself, intimated 
 that France and England would be compelled to leave to 
 the chances of war what might now be decided by reason 
 and justice. The Emperor Nicholas replied that he had 
 claimed nothing but what was confirmed by treaties; that 
 his conditions were perfectly well known ; that he was still 
 willing to treat on these conditions; but if Russia were 
 driven to arms, then he quietly observed that he had no 
 doubt she could hold her own as well in 1854 as she had 
 done in 1812. That year, 1812, it is hardly necessary to 
 say, was the year of the burning of Moscow and the dis- 
 astrous retreat of the French. We can easily understand 
 what faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement the 
 Russian Emperor must have had when he made the allusion, 
 and the French Emperor must have had when it met his 
 eye. Of course if Louis Napoleon had had the faintest be- 
 lief in any good result to come of his letter, he would never 
 have closed it with the threat which provoked the Russian 
 sovereign into his insufferable rejoinder. The correspond- 
 ence micrht remind one of that which is said to have passed 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? 473 
 
 between two Irish chieftains. "Pay me ray tribute," wrote 
 the one, " or else!" "I owe you no tribute," replied the 
 other, " and if" 
 
 England's ultimatum to Russia was despatched on Feb- 
 ruary 27th, 1854. It was conveyed in a letter from Lord 
 Clarendon to Count Nesselrode. It declared that the Brit- 
 ish Government had exhausted all the efforts of negotiation, 
 and was compelled to announce that "if Russia should de- 
 cline to restrict within purely diplomatic limits the discus- 
 sion in which she has for some time past been engaged with 
 the Sublime Porte, and does not, by return of the messenger 
 who is the bearer of my present letter, announce her inten- 
 tion of causing the Russian troops under Prince GortschakofF 
 to commence their march with a view to recross the Pruth, 
 so that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia shall be 
 completely evacuated on April 30th next, the British Gov- 
 ernment must consider the refusal or the silence of the cabi- 
 net of St. Petersburg as equivalent to a declaration of war, 
 and will take its measures accordingly." It is not, perhaps, 
 very profitable work for the historian to criticise the mere 
 terms of a document announcing a course of action which 
 long before its issue had become inevitable. But it is worth 
 while remarking, perhaps, that it would have been better 
 and more dignified to confine the letter to the simple demand 
 for the evacuation of the Danubian provinces. To ask Rus- 
 sia to promise that her controversy with the Porte should 
 be thenceforward restricted within purely diplomatic limits 
 was to make a demand with which no Great Power would, 
 or indeed could, undertake to comply. A member of the 
 Peace Society itself might well hesitate to give a promise 
 that a dispute in which he was engaged should be forever 
 confined within purely diplomatic limits. In any case, it was 
 certain that Russia would not now make any concessions 
 tending toward peace. The messenger who was the bearer 
 of the letter was ordered not to wait more than six days for 
 an answer. On the fifth day the messenger was informed 
 by word of mouth from Count Nesselrode that the Emperor 
 did not think it becoming in him to give any reply to the 
 letter. The die was cast. Rather, truly, the fact was re- 
 corded that the die had been cast. A few days after a 
 crowd assembled in front of the Royal Exchange to watch 
 
474: A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the performance of a ceremonial that had been little known 
 to the living generation. The Sergeant-at-arms, accompa- 
 nied by some of the officials of the City, read from the steps 
 of the Royal Exchange her Majesty's declaration of war 
 against Russia. 
 
 The causes of the declaration of war were set forth in an 
 official statement published in the London Gazette. This 
 document is an interesting and a valuable State-paper. It 
 recites with clearness and deliberation the successive steps 
 by which the allied Powers had been led to the necessity 
 of an armed intervention in the controversy between Turkey 
 and Russia. It described, in the first place, the complaint 
 of the Emperor of Russia against the Sultan with reference 
 to the claims of the Greek and Latin Churches, and the ar- 
 rangement promoted satisfactorily by her Majesty's ambas- 
 sador at Constantinople for rendering justice to the claim, 
 "an arrangement to which no exception was taken by the 
 Russian Government." Then came the sudden unmasking 
 of the other and quite different claims of Prince Mentschi- 
 koff, "the nature of which, in the first instance, he endeavor- 
 ed, as far as possible, to conceal from her Majesty's ambas- 
 sador." These claims, " thus studiously concealed," affected 
 not merely, or at all, the privileges of the Greek Church at 
 Jerusalem, " but the position of many millions of Turkish 
 subjects in their relations to their sovereign the Sultan." 
 The declaration recalled the various attempts that were 
 made by the Queen's Government in conjunction with the 
 Governments of France, Austria, and Prussia, to meet any 
 just demands of the Russian Emperor without affecting the 
 dignity and independence of the Sultan; and showed that 
 if the object of Russia had been solely to secure their proper 
 privileges and immunities for the Christian populations of 
 the Ottoman empire, the offers that were made could not 
 have failed to meet that object. Her Majesty's Govern- 
 ment, therefore, held it as manifest that what Russia was 
 really seeking was not the happiness of the Christian com- 
 munities of Turkey, but the right to interfere in the ordina- 
 ry relations between Turkish subjects and their sovereign. 
 The Sultan refused to consent to this, and declared war in 
 self-defence. Yet the Government of her Majesty did not 
 renounce all hope of restoring peace between the contending 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? 475 
 
 parties until advice and remonstrance proving wholly in 
 vain, and Russia continuing to extend her military prepara- 
 tions, her Majesty felt called upon, " by regard for an ally 
 the integrity and independence of whose empire have been 
 recognized as essential to the peace of Europe; by the sym- 
 pathies of her people with right against wrong; by a desire 
 to avert from her dominions most injurious consequences, 
 and to save Europe from the preponderance of a Power 
 which has violated the faith of treaties and defies the opin- 
 ion of the civilized world, to take up arms, in conjunction 
 with the Emperor of the French, for the defence of the 
 Sultan." 
 
 Some passages of this declaration have invited criticism 
 from English historians. It opens, for example, with a 
 statement of the fact that the efforts for an arrangement 
 were made by her Majesty in conjunction with France, 
 Austria, and Prussia. It speaks of this concert of the four 
 Powers down almost to the very close; and then it sudden- 
 ly breaks off, and announces that in consequence of all that 
 has happened her Majesty has felt compelled to take up 
 arms "in conjunction with the Emperor of the French." 
 What strange diplomatic mismanagement, it was asked, has 
 led to this singular non sequitur? Why, after having car- 
 ried on the negotiations through all their various stages with 
 three other Great Powers, all of them supposed to be equal- 
 ly interested in a settlement of the question, is England at 
 the last moment compelled to take up arms with only one 
 of those Powers as an ally ? 
 
 The principal reason for the separation of the two West- 
 ern Powers of Europe from the other great States was 
 found in the condition of Prussia. Prussia was then great- 
 ly under the influence of the Russian court. The Prussian 
 sovereign was related to the Emperor of Russia, and his 
 kingdom was almost overshadowed by Russian influence. 
 Prussia had come to occupy a lower position in Europe 
 than she had ever before held during her existence as a 
 kingdom. It seemed almost marvellous how by any proc- 
 ess the country of the Great Frederick could have sunk to 
 such a condition of insignificance. She had been compelled 
 to stoop to Austria after the events of 1848. The King of 
 Prussia, tarn poring with the offers of the strong national par- 
 
476 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ty who desired to make him Emperor of Germany, now mov- 
 ing forward and now drawing back, "letting I dare not wait 
 upon I would," was suddenly pulled up by Austria. The 
 famous arrangement called afterward "the humiliation of 
 Olmiitz," and so completely revenged at Sadowa, compelled 
 him to drop all his triflings with nationalism and repudiate 
 his former instigators. The King of Prussia was a highly- 
 cultured, amiable, literary man. He loved letters and arts in 
 a sort of dilettante way; he had good impulses and a weak 
 nature; he was a dreamer; a sort of philosopher manque. 
 He was unable to make up his mind to any momentous de- 
 cision until the time for rendering it effective had gone by. 
 A man naturally truthful, he was often led by very weak- 
 ness into acts that seemed irreconcilable with his previous 
 promises and engagements. He could say witty and sar- 
 castic things, and when political affairs went wrong with 
 him he could console himself with one or two sharp sayings 
 only heard of by those immediately around him; and then 
 the world might go its way for him. He was, like Rob Hoy, 
 "ower good for banning and ower bad for blessing." Like 
 our own Charles II., he never said a foolish thing and never 
 did a wise one. He ought to have been an aesthetic essay- 
 ist, or a lecturer on art and moral philosophy to young 
 ladies; and an unkind destiny had made him the king of a 
 state specially embarrassed in a most troublous time. So 
 unkindly was popular rumor as well as fate to him, that he 
 got the credit in foreign countries of being a stupid sensual- 
 ist when he was really a man of respectable habits and re- 
 fined nature; and in England at least the nickname "King 
 Clicquot" was long the brand by which the popular and 
 most mistaken impression of his character was signified. 
 
 The King of Prussia was the elder brother of the present 
 German Emperor. Had the latter been then on the throne 
 he would probably have taken some timely and energetic 
 decision with regard to the national duty of Prussia during 
 the impending crisis. Right or wrong, he would doubtless 
 have contrived to see his way and make up his mind at an 
 early stage of the European movement. It is by no means 
 to be assumed that he would have taken the course most 
 satisfactory to England and France ; but it is likely that 
 his action might have prevented the war, either by render- 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? 477 
 
 ing the allied Powers far too strong to be resisted by Rus- 
 sia, or by adding to Russia an influence which would have 
 rendered the game of war too formidable to suit the calcu- 
 lations of the Emperor of the French. The actual King of 
 Prussia, however, went so far with the allies as to lead them 
 for awhile to believe that he was going all the way ; but at 
 the last moment he broke off, declared that the interests of 
 Prussia did not require or allow him to engage in a war, 
 and left France and England to walk their own road. Aus- 
 tria could not venture upon such a war without the co-op- 
 eration of Prussia ; and, indeed, the course which the cam- 
 paign took seemed likely to give both Austria and Prussia 
 a good excuse for assuming that their interests were not 
 closely engaged in the struggle. Austria would most cer- 
 tainly have gone to war if the Emperor of Russia had kept 
 up the occupation of the Danubian Principalities; and for 
 that purpose her territorial situation made her irresistible. 
 But when the seat of war was transferred to the Black Sea, 
 and when after awhile the Czar withdrew his troops from 
 the Principalities, and Austria occupied them by virtue of a 
 convention with the Sultan, her direct interest in the strug- 
 gle was reduced almost to nothing. Austria and Prussia 
 were, in fact, solicited by both sides of the dispute, and at 
 one time it was even thought possible that Prussia might 
 give her aid to Russia. This, however, she refrained from 
 doing ; Austria and Prussia made an arrangement between 
 themselves for mutual defence in case the progress of the 
 war should directly imperil the interests of either; and Eng- 
 land and France undertook in alliance the task of chastising 
 the presumption and restraining the ambitious designs of 
 Russia. Mr. Kinglake finds much fault with the policy of 
 the English Government, on which he lays all the blame of 
 the severance of interests between the two Western States 
 and the other two Great Powers. But we confess that we 
 do not see how any course within the reach of England 
 could have secured just then the thorough alliance of Prus- 
 sia ; and without such an alliance it would have been vain 
 to expect that Austria would throw herself unreservedly 
 into the policy of the Western Powers. It must be remem- 
 bered that the controversy between Russia and the West 
 really involved several distinct questions, in some of which 
 
478 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Prussia had absolutely no direct interest, and Austria very 
 little. Let us set out some of these questions separately. 
 There was the Russian occupation of the Principalities. In 
 this Austria frankly acknowledged her capital interest. Its 
 direct bearing was on her more than any other Power. It 
 concerned Prussia as it did England and France, inasmuch 
 as it was an evidence of an aggressive purpose which might 
 very seriously threaten the general stability of the institu- 
 tions of Europe ; but Prussia had no closer interest in it. 
 Austria was the State most affected by it, and Austria was 
 the State which could with most effect operate against it, 
 and was always willing and resolute if needs were to do so. 
 Then there was the question of Russia's claim to exercise 
 a protectorate over the Christian populations of Turkey. 
 This concerned England and France in one sense as part of 
 the general pretensions of Russia, and concerned each of 
 them separately in another sense. To France it told of a 
 rivalry with the right she claimed to look after the interests 
 of the Latin Church ; to England it spoke of a purpose to 
 obtain a hold over populations nominally subject to the 
 Sultan which might in time make Russia virtual master of 
 the approaches to our Eastern possessions. Austria, too, had 
 a direct interest in repelling these pretensions of Russia, for 
 some of the populations they referred to were on her very 
 frontier. But Prussia can hardly be said to have had any 
 direct national interest in that question at all. Then there 
 came, distinct from all these, the question of the Straits of 
 the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. 
 
 This question of the Straits, which has so much to do with 
 the whole European aspect of the war, is not to be under- 
 stood except by those who bear the conformation of the map 
 of Europe constantly in their minds. The only outlet of 
 "Russia on the southern side is the Black Sea. The Black 
 Sea is, save for one little outlet at its south-western extrem- 
 ity, a huge land-locked lake. That little outlet is the nar- 
 row channel called the Bosphorus. Russia and Turkey, be- 
 tween them, surround the whole of the Black Sea with their 
 territory. Russia has the north and some of the eastern 
 shore ; Turkey has all the southern, the Asia Minor shore, 
 and nearly all the western shore. Close the Straits of the 
 Bosphorus and Russia would be literally locked into the 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON? 479 
 
 Black Sea. The Bosphorus is a narrow channel, as has been 
 said ; it is some seventeen miles in length, and in some places 
 it is hardly more than half a mile in breadth. But it is very 
 deep all through, so that ships of war can float close up to 
 its very shores on either side. This channel in its course 
 passes between the city of Constantinople and its Asiatic 
 suburb of Scutari. The Bosphorus then opens into the little 
 Sea of Marmora ; and out of the Sea of Marmora the way 
 westward is through the channel of the Dardanelles. The 
 Dardanelles form the only passage into the Archipelago, and 
 thence into the Mediterranean. The channel of the Darda- 
 nelles is, like the Bosphorus, very narrow and very deep, 
 but it pursues its course for some forty miles. Any one who 
 holds a map in his hand will see at once how Turkey and 
 Russia alike are affected by the existence of the Straits on 
 either extremity of the Sea of Marmora. Close up these 
 Straits against vessels of war, and the capital of the Sultan 
 is absolutely unassailable from the sea. Close them, on the 
 other hand, and the Russian fleet in the Black Sea is ab- 
 solutely cut off from the Mediterranean and the Western 
 world. But then it has to be remembered that the same 
 act of closing would secure the Russian ports and shores on 
 the Black Sea from the approach of any of the great navies 
 of the West. The Dardanelles and the Bosphorus being 
 alike such narrow channels, and being edged alike by Turk- 
 ish territory, were not regarded as high seas. The Sultans 
 always claimed the right to exclude foreign ships of war 
 from both the Straits. The Treaty of 1841 secured this 
 right to Turkey by the agreement of the five Great Powers 
 of Europe. The treaty acknowledged that the Porte had 
 the right to shut the Straits against the armed navies of 
 any foreign Power; and the Sultan, for his part, engaged 
 not to allow any such navy to enter either of the Straits in 
 time of peace. The closing of the Straits had been the sub- 
 ject of a perfect succession of treaties. The Treaty of 1809 
 between Great Britain and Turkey confirmed by engage- 
 ment " the ancient rule of the Ottoman Empire " forbidding 
 vessels of war at all times to enter the " Canal of Constanti- 
 nople." The Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi between Russia and 
 Turkey, arising out of Russia's co-operation with the Porte 
 to put down the rebellious movement of Mohammed Ali, the 
 
480 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Egyptian vassal of the latter, contained a secret clause bind- 
 ing the Porte to close "the Dardanelles" against all war 
 
 o o 
 
 vessels whatever, thus shutting Russia's enemies out of the 
 Black Sea, but leaving Russia free to pass the Bosphorus, 
 so far, at least, as that treaty engagement was concerned. 
 Later, when the Great Powers of Europe combined to put 
 down the attempts of Egypt, the Treaty of July 13th, 1841, 
 made in London, engaged that in time of peace no foreign 
 ships of war should be admitted into the Straits of the Bos- 
 phorus and the Dardanelles. This treaty was but a renewal 
 of a convention made the year before, while France was still 
 sulking away from the European concert, and did nothing 
 more than record her return to it. 
 
 As matters stood then, the Sultan was not only permitted 
 but was bound to close the Straits in times of peace, and no 
 navy might enter them without his consent even in times of 
 war. But in times of war he might, of course, give the per- 
 mission, and invite the presence and co-operation of the arm- 
 ed vessels of a foreign Power in the Sea of Marmora. By 
 this treaty the Black Sea fleet of Russia became literally a 
 Black Sea fleet, and could no more reach the Mediterranean 
 and Western Europe than a boat on the Lake of Lucerne 
 could do. Naturally Russia chafed at this ; but at the same 
 time she was not willing to see the restriction withdrawn in 
 favor of an arrangement that would leave the Straits, and 
 consequently the Black Sea, open to the navies of France 
 and England. Her supremacy in Eastern Europe would 
 count for little, her power of coercing Turkey would be sad- 
 ly diminished, if the war-flag of England, for example, were 
 to float side by side with her own in front of Constantino- 
 ple or in the Euxine. Therefore it was natural that the am- 
 bition of Russia should tend toward the ultimate possession 
 of Constantinople and the Straits for herself; but as this 
 was an ambition the fulfilment of which seemed far off" and 
 beset with vast dangers, her object, meanwhile, was to gain 
 as much influence and ascendency as possible over the Otto- 
 man Government; to make it practically the vassal of Rus- 
 sia, and, in any case, to prevent any other Great Power from 
 obtaining the influence and ascendency which she coveted 
 for herself. Now the tendency of this ambition and of all 
 the intermediate claims and disputes with regard to the 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 481 
 
 opening or closing of the Straits was of importance to Eu- 
 rope generally as a part of Russian aggrandizement; but of 
 the Great Powers they concerned England most ; France as 
 a Mediterranean and a naval power; Austria only in a third 
 and remoter degree ; and Prussia at the time of King Fred- 
 erick William least of all. It is not surprising, therefore, 
 that the two Western Powers were not able to carry their 
 accord with Prussia to the extent of an alliance in war 
 against Russia ; and it was hardly possible then for Austria 
 to go on if Prussia insisted on drawing back. Thus it came 
 that at a certain point of the negotiations Prussia fell off ab- 
 solutely, or nearly so; Austria undertook but a conditional 
 co-operation, of which, as it happened, the conditions did not 
 arise ; and the Queen of England announced that she had 
 taken up arms against Russia "in conjunction with the Em- 
 peror of the French." 
 
 To the great majority of the English people this war was 
 popular. It was popular partly because of the natural and 
 inevitable reaction against the doctrines of peace and mere 
 trading prosperity which had been preached somewhat too 
 pertinaciously for some time before. But it was popular, 
 too, because of its novelty. It was like a return to the youth 
 of the world when England found herself once more prepar- 
 ing for the field. It was like the pouring of new blood into 
 old veins. The public had grown impatient of the common 
 saying of foreign capitals that England had joined the Peace 
 Society, and would never be seen in battle any more. Mr. 
 Kinglake is right when he says that the doctrines of the 
 Peace Society had never taken any hold of the higher 
 classes in this country at all. They had never, we may 
 venture to add, taken any real hold of the humbler class- 
 es ; of the workingmen, for example. The well educated, 
 thoughtful middle -class, who knew how much of worldly 
 happiness depends on a regular income, moderate taxation, 
 and a comfortable home, supplied most of the advocates of 
 " peace," as it was scornfully said, " at any price." Let us 
 say, in justice to a very noble and very futile doctrine^ that 
 there were no persons in England who advocated peace " at 
 any price," in the ignominious sense which hostile critics 
 pressed upon the words. There was a small, a serious, and 
 a very respectable body of persons who, out of the purest 
 
 I. 21 
 
482 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 motives of conscience, held that all war was criminal and 
 offensive to the Deity. They were for peace at any price, 
 exactly as they were for truth at any price, or conscience 
 at any price. They were opposed to Avar as they were to 
 falsehood or to impiety. It seemed as natural to them that 
 a man should die unresisting rather than resist and kill, as 
 it does to most persons who profess any sentiment of re- 
 ligion or even of honor, that a man should die rather than 
 abjure the faith he believes in, or tell a lie. It is assumed, 
 as a matter of course, that any Englishman worthy of the 
 name would have died by any torture tyranny could put on 
 him rather than perform the old ceremony of trampling on 
 the crucifix, which certain heathen states were said to have 
 sometimes insisted on as the price of a captive's freedom. 
 To the believers in the peace doctrine the act of war was 
 a trampling on the crucifix, which brought with it evil 
 consequences unspeakably worse than the mere performance 
 of a profane ceremonial. To declare that they would rath- 
 er suffer any earthly penalty of defeat or national servitude 
 than take part in a war, was only consistent with the great 
 creed of their lives. It ought not to have been held as any 
 reproach to them. Even those who, like this writer, have 
 no personal sympathy with such a belief, and who hold that 
 a war in a just cause is an honor to a nation, may still rec- 
 ognize the purity and nobleness of the principle which in- 
 spired the votaries of peace and do honor to it. But these 
 men were, in any case, not many at the time when the 
 Crimean War broke out. They had veiy little influence 
 on the course of the national policy. They were assailed 
 with a flippant and a somewhat ignoble ridicule. The worst 
 reproach that could be given to men like Mr. Cobden and 
 Mr. Bright was to accuse them of being members of the 
 Peace Society. It does not appear that either man was a 
 member of the actual organization. Mr. Bright's religious 
 creed made him necessarily a votary of peace ; Mr. Cobden 
 had attended meetings called with the futile purpose of es- 
 tablishing peace among nations by the operation of good 
 feeling and of common-sense. But for a considerable time 
 the temper of the English people was such as to render any 
 talk about peace not only unprofitable but perilous to the 
 very cause of peace itself. Some of the leading members 
 
WHERE WAS LORD PALMERSTON ? 483 
 
 of the Peace Society did actually get up a deputation to 
 the Emperor Nicholas to appeal to his better feelings; and 
 of course they were charmed by the manners of the Emper- 
 or, who made it his business to be in a very gracious humor, 
 and spoke them fair, and introduced them in the most un- 
 ceremonious way to his wife. Such a visit counted for noth- 
 ing in Russia, and at home it only tended to make people 
 angry and impatient, and to put the cause of peace in great- 
 er jeopardy than ever. Viewed as a practical influence, the 
 peace doctrine as completely broke down as a general reso- 
 lution against the making of monqy might have done dur- 
 ing the time of the mania for speculation in railway shares. 
 But it did not merely break down of itself. It carried some 
 great influences down with it for the time influences that 
 were not a part of itself. The eloquence that had coerced 
 the intellect and reasoning power of Peel into a complete 
 surrender to the doctrines of Free-trade, the eloquence that 
 had aroused the populations of all the cities of England and 
 had conquered the House of Commons, was destined now to 
 call aloud to solitude. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright address- 
 ed their constituents arid their countrymen in vain. The 
 fact that they were believed to be opposed on principle to 
 all wars put them out of court in public estimation, as Mr. 
 Kinglake justly observes, when they went about to argue 
 against this particular war. 
 
 In the cabinet itself there were men who disliked the idea 
 of a war quite as much as they did. Lord Aberdeen detest- 
 ed war, and thought it so absurd a way of settling national 
 disputes, that almost until the first cannon-shot had been 
 fired he could not bring himself to believe in the possibility 
 of the intelligent English people being drawn into it. Mr. 
 Gladstone had a conscientious and a sensitive objection to 
 war in general as a brutal and an unchristian occupation ; al- 
 though his feelings would not have carried him so far away 
 as to prevent his recognition of the fact that war might often 
 be a just, a necessary, and a glorious undertaking on the part 
 of a civilized nation. The difficulties of the hour were con- 
 siderably enhanced by the differences of opinion that pre- 
 vailed in the cabinet. 
 
 There were other differences there as well as those that 
 belonged to the mere abstract question of the glory or the 
 
484 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 guilt of war. It soon became clear that two parties of the 
 cabinet looked on the war and its objects with different eyes 
 and interests. Lord Palmerston wanted simply to put down 
 Russia and uphold Turkey. Others were specially con- 
 cerned for the Christian populations of Turkey and their 
 better government. Lord Palmerston not merely thought 
 that the interests of England called for some check to the 
 aggressiveness of Russia; he liked the Turk for himself; he 
 had faith in the future of Turkey: he went so far, even, as 
 to proclaim his belief in the endurance of her military pow- 
 er. Give Turkey single-handed a fair chance, he argued, and 
 she would beat Russia. He did not believe either in the 
 disaffection of the Christian populations or in the stories of 
 their oppression. He regarded all these stories as part of 
 the plans and inventions of Russia. He had no half beliefs 
 in the matter at all. The Christian populations and their 
 grievances he regarded, in plain language, as mere hum- 
 bugs ; he looked upon the Turk as a very fine fellow whom 
 all chivalric minds ought to respect. He believed all that 
 was said upon the one side and nothing upon the other; he 
 had made up his mind to this long ago, and no arguments or 
 facts could now shake his convictions. A belief of this kind 
 may have been very unphilosophic. It was undoubtedly, in 
 many respects, the birth of mere prejudice, independent of 
 fact or reasoning. But the temper born of such a belief is 
 exactly that which should have the making of a war intrust- 
 ed to it. Lord Palmerston saw his way straight before him. 
 The brave Turk had to be supported ; the wicked Russian 
 had to be put down. On one side there were Lord Aber- 
 deen, who did not believe any one seriously meant to be so 
 barbarous as to go to war, and Mr. Gladstone, who shrank 
 from war in general, and was not yet quite certain whether 
 England had any right to undertake this war; the two be- 
 ing, furthermore, concerned far more for the welfare of Tur- 
 key's Christian subjects than for the stability of Turkey 
 or the humiliation of Russia. On the other side was Lord 
 Palmerston, gay, resolute, clear as to his own purpose, con- 
 vinced to the heart's core of everything which just then it 
 was for the advantage of his cause to believe. It was im- 
 possible to doubt on which side were to be found the mate- 
 rials for the successful conduct of the enterprise which was 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 485 
 
 now so popular with the country. The most conscientious 
 men might differ about the prudence or the moral propriety 
 of the war ; but to those who once accepted its necessity and 
 wished our side to win, there could be no possible doubt, 
 even for members of the Peace Society, as to the importance 
 of having Lord Palmerston either at the head of affairs or 
 in charge of the war itself. The moment the war actually 
 broke out it became evident to every one that Palmerston's 
 interval of comparative inaction and obscurity was well-nigh 
 over. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE INVASION OF THE CKIMEA. 
 
 ENGLAND, then, and France entered the war as allies. 
 Lord Raglan, formerly Lord Fitzroy Somerset, an old pupil 
 of the Great Duke in the Peninsular War, and who had lost 
 his right arm serving under Wellington at Waterloo, was 
 appointed to command the English forces. Marshal St. Ar- 
 naud, a bold, brilliant soldier of fortune, was intrusted by the 
 Emperor of the French with the leadership of the soldiers 
 of France. The allied forces went out to the East and as- 
 sembled at Varna, on the Black Sea shore, from which they 
 were to make their descent on the Crimea. The war, mean- 
 time, had gone badly for the Emperor of Russia in his at- 
 tempt to crush the Turks. The Turks had found in Omar 
 Pasha a commander of remarkable ability and energy ; and 
 they had in one or two instances received the unexpected 
 aid and counsel of clever and successful Englishmen. A sin- 
 gularly brilliant episode in the opening part of the war was 
 the defence of the earthworks of Silistria, on the Bulgarian 
 bank of the Danube, by a body of Turkish troops under the 
 directions of two young Englishmen Captain Butler, of the 
 Ceylon Rifles, and Lieutenant Nasmyth, of the East India 
 Company's Service. These young soldiers had voluntarily 
 undertaken the danger and responsibility of the defence. 
 Butler was killed, but the Russians were completely foiled, 
 and had to raise the siege. At Giurgevo and other places 
 the Russians were likewise repulsed ; and the invasion of the 
 Danubian provinces was already, to all intents, a failure. 
 
486 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Mr. Kinglake and other writers have argued that but for 
 the ambition of the Emperor of the French and the excited 
 temper of the English people the war might well have end- 
 ed then and there. The Emperor of Russia had found, it is 
 contended, that he could not maintain an invasion of Euro- 
 pean Turkey ; his fleet was confined to its ports in the Black 
 Sea, and there was nothing for him but to make peace. But 
 we confess we do not see with what propriety or wisdom 
 the allies, having entered on the enterprise at all, could have 
 abandoned it at such a moment, and allowed the Czar to es- 
 cape thus merely scotched. However brilliant and gratify- 
 ing the successes obtained against the Russians, they were 
 but a series of what might be called outpost actions. They 
 could not be supposed to have tested the resources of Russia 
 or weakened her strength. They had humbled and vexed 
 her just enough to make her doubly resentful, and no more. 
 It seems impossible to suppose that such trivial disasters 
 could have affected in the slightest degree the historic march 
 of Russian ambition, supposing such a movement to exist. 
 If we allow the purpose with which England entered the 
 war to be just and reasonable, then we think the instinct of 
 the English people was sound and true which would have 
 refused to allow Russia to get off with one or two trifling 
 checks, and to nurse her wrath and keep her vengeance wait- 
 ing for a better chance some other time. The allies went 
 on. They sailed from Varna for the Crimea nearly three 
 months after the raising of the siege of Silistria. 
 
 There is much discussion as to the original author of the 
 project for the invasion of the Crimea. The Emperor Na- 
 poleon has had it ascribed to him ; so has Lord Palmerston ; 
 so has the Duke of Newcastle ; so, according to Mr. King- 
 lake, has the Times newspaper. It does not much concern 
 us to know in whom the idea originated, but it is of some 
 importance to know that it was essentially a civilian's .and 
 not a soldier's idea. It took possession almost simultaneous- 
 ly, so far as we can observe, of the minds of several states- 
 men, and it had a sudden fascination for the public. The 
 Emperor Nicholas had raised and sheltered his Black Sea 
 fleet at Sebastopol. That fleet had sallied forth from Se- 
 bastopol to commit what was called the massacre of Sinope. 
 Sebastopol was the great arsenal of Russia. It was the point 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 487 
 
 from which Turkey was threatened ; from which, it was uni- 
 versally believed, the embodied ambition of Russia was one 
 day to make its most formidable effort of aggression. With- 
 in the fence of its vast sea-forts the fleet of the Black Sea 
 lay screened. From the moment when the vessels of Eng- 
 land and France entered the Euxine the Russian fleet had 
 withdrawn behind the curtain of these defences, and was 
 seen upon the open waves no more. If, therefore, Sebastopol 
 could be taken or destroyed, it would seem as if the whole 
 material fabric, put together at such cost and labor for the 
 execution of the schemes of Russia, would be shattered at 
 a blow. There seemed a dramatic justice in the idea. It 
 could not fail to commend itself to the popular mind. 
 
 Mr. Kinglake has given the world an amusing picture of 
 the manner in which the despatch of the Duke of Newcastle, 
 ordering the invasion of the Crimea for it really amounted 
 to an order was read to his colleagues in the cabinet. It 
 was a despatch of the utmost importance ; for the terms in 
 which it pressed the project on Lord Raglan really rendered 
 it almost impossible for the commander-in-chief to use his 
 own discretion. It ought to have been considered sentence 
 by sentence, word by word. It was read, Mr. Kinglake af- 
 firms, to a number of cabinet ministers, most of whom had 
 fallen fast asleep. The day was warm, he says ; the despatch 
 was long ; the reading was somewhat monotonous. Most 
 of those who tried to listen found the soporific influence ir- 
 resistible. As Sam Weller would have said, poppies were 
 nothing to it. The statesmen fell asleep ; and there was no 
 alteration made in the despatch. All this is very amusing ; 
 and it is, we believe, true enough that at the particular meet- 
 ing to which Mr. Kinglake refers there was a good deal of 
 nodding of sleepy heads and closing of tired eyelids. But 
 it is not fair to say that these slumbers had anything to do 
 with the subsequent events of the war. The reading of the 
 despatch was purely a piece of formality ; for the project it 
 was to recommend had been discussed very fully before, and 
 the minds of most members of the cabinet were finally made 
 up. The 28th of June, 1854, was the day of the slumbering 
 cabinet. But Lord Palmerston had, during the whole of the 
 previous fortnight at least, been urging on the cabinet, and 
 on individual members of it separately, the Duke of New- 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 castle iii especial, the project of an invasion of the Crimea 
 and an attempt on Sebastopol. With all the energy and 
 strenuousness of his nature, he had been urging this by argu- 
 ments in the cabinet, by written memoranda for the consid- 
 eration of each member of the cabinet separately, and by long, 
 earnest letters addressed to particular members of the cab- 
 inet. Many of these documents, of the existence of which 
 Mr. Kinglake was doubtless not aware when he set down his 
 vivacious and satirical account of the sleeping cabinet, have 
 since been published. The plan had also been greatly fa- 
 vored and much urged by the Emperor of the French before 
 the day of the sleep of the statesmen ; indeed, as has been 
 said already, he receives from manjr persons the credit of 
 having originated it. The plan, therefore, good or bad, was 
 thoroughly known to the cabinet, and had been argued for 
 and against over and over again before the Duke of Newcas- 
 tle read aloud to drowsy ears the despatch recommending it 
 to the commander-in-chief of the British forces in the field. 
 The perusal of the despatch was a mere form. It would, 
 indeed, have been better if the most wearied statesman had 
 contrived to pay a full attention to it, but the want of such 
 respect in nowise affected the policy of the country. It is a 
 pity to have to spoil so amusing a story as Mr. Kinglake's ; 
 but the commonplace truth has to be told that the invasion 
 of the Crimea was not due to the crotchet of one minister 
 and the drowsiness of all the rest. 
 
 The invasion of the Crimea, however, was not a soldier's 
 project. It was not welcomed by the English or the French 
 commander. It was undertaken by Lord Raglan out of def- 
 erence to the recommendations of the Government; and by 
 Marshal St. Arnaud out of deference to the Emperor of the 
 French, and because Lord Raglan, too, did not see his way to 
 decline the responsibility of it. The allied forces were, there- 
 fore, conveyed to the south-western shore of the Crimea, and 
 effected a landing in Kalamita Bay, a short distance north 
 of the point at which the river Alma runs into the sea. Se- 
 bastopol itself lies about thirty miles to the south ; and then 
 more southward still, divided by the bulk of a jutting prom- 
 ontory from Sebastopol, is the harbor of Balaklava. The 
 disembarkation began on the morning of September 14th, 
 1854. It was completed on the fifth day; and there were 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 489 
 
 then some 27,000 English, 30,000 French, and 7000 Turks 
 landed on the shores of Catherine the Great's Crimea. The 
 landing was effected without any opposition from the Rus- 
 sians. On September 19th, the allies marched out of their 
 encampments and moved southward in the direction of Se- 
 bastopol. They had a skirmish or two with a reconnoitring 
 force of Russian cavalry and Cossacks; but they had no bus- 
 iness of genuine war until they reached the nearer bank of 
 the Alma. The Russians, in great strength, had taken up a 
 splendid position on the heights that fringed the other side of 
 the river. The allied forces reached the Alma about noon on 
 September 20th. They found that they had to cross the river 
 in the face of the Russian batteries armed with heavy guns 
 on the highest point of the hills or bluffs, of scattered artil- 
 lery, and of dense masses of infantry which covered the hills. 
 The Russians were under the command of Prince Mentschi- 
 koff. It is certain that Prince MentschikofF believed his po- 
 sition unassailable, and was convinced that his enemies were 
 delivered into his hands when he saw the allies approach and 
 attempt to effect the crossing of the river. He had allowed 
 them, of deliberate purpose, to approach thus far. He might 
 have attacked them on their landing, or on their two days' 
 march toward the river. But he did not choose to do any- 
 thing of the kind. He had carefully sought out a strong and 
 what he considered an impregnable position. He had found 
 it, as he believed, on the south bank of the Alma; and there 
 he was simply biding his time. His idea was that he could 
 hold his ground for some days against the allies with ease ; 
 that he would keep them there, play with them, until the 
 great re-enforcements he was expecting could come to him; 
 and then he would suddenly take the offensive and crush the 
 enemy. He proposed to make of the Alma and its banks the 
 grave of the invaders. But with characteristic arrogance 
 and lack of care he had neglected some of the very precau- 
 tions which were essentially necessary to secure any posi- 
 tion, however strong. He had not taken the pains to make 
 himself certain that every easy access to his position was 
 closed against the attack of the enemy. The attack was 
 made with desperate courage on the part of the allies, but 
 without any great skill of leadership or tenacity of discipline. 
 It was rather a pell-mell sort of fight, in which the headlong 
 
 21* 
 
490 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN" TIMES. 
 
 courage and the indomitable obstinacy of the English and 
 French troops carried all before them at last. A study of 
 the battle is of little profit to the ordinary reader. It was 
 an heroic scramble. There was little coherence of action 
 between the allied forces. But there was happily an almost 
 total absence of generalship on the part of the Russians. 
 The soldiers of the Czar fought stoutly and stubbornly, as 
 they have always done ; but they could not stand up against 
 the blended vehemence and obstinacy of the English and 
 French. The river was crossed, the opposite heights were 
 mounted, Prince Mentschikoff's great redoubt was carried, 
 the Russians were driven from the field, the allies occupied 
 their ground ; the victory was to the Western Powers. In- 
 deed, it would not be unfair to say that the victory was to 
 the English : owing to whatever cause, the French did not 
 take that share in the heat of the battle which their strength 
 and their military genius might have led men to expect. St. 
 Arnaud, their commander-in-chief, was in wretched health, 
 on the point of death, in fact ; he was in no condition to 
 guide the battle ; a brilliant enterprise of General Bosquet 
 was ill-suppoi'ted, and had nearly proved a failure ; and Prince 
 Napoleon's division got hopelessly jammed up and confused. 
 Perhaps it would be fairer to say that in the confusion and 
 scramble of the whole affair we were more lucky than the 
 French. If a number of men are rushing headlong and in 
 the dark toward some distant point, one may run against an 
 unthought-of obstacle and fall down, and so lose his chance, 
 while his comrade happens to meet with no such stumbling- 
 block, and goes right on. Perhaps this illustration may not 
 unfairly distribute the parts taken in the battle. It would 
 be superfluous to say that the French fought splendidly 
 where they had any real chance of fighting. But the luck 
 of the day was not with them. On all sides the battle was 
 fought without generalship. On all sides the bravery of the 
 officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were 
 the luckiest. They saw the heights; they saw the enemy 
 there ; they made for him ; they got at him ; they would not 
 go back; and so he had to give way. That was the history 
 of the day. The big scramble was all over in a few hours. 
 The first field was fought, and we had won. 
 
 The Russians ought to have been pursued. They them- 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 491 
 
 selves fully expected a pursuit. They retreated in some- 
 thing like utter confusion, eager to put the Katcha river, 
 which runs south of the Alma and with a somewhat simi- 
 lar course, between them and the imaginary pursuers. Had 
 they been followed to the Katcha they might have been all 
 made prisoners or destroyed. But there was no pursuit. 
 Lord Raglan was eager to follow up the victory; but the 
 French had as yet hardly any cavalry, and Marshal St. Ar- 
 naud would not agree to any further enterprise that day. 
 Lord Raglan believed that he ought not to persist; and 
 nothing was done. The Russians were unable at first to be- 
 lieve in their good fortune. It seemed to them for a long 
 time impossible that any commanders in the world could 
 have failed, under conditions so tempting, to follow a flying 
 and disordered enemy. 
 
 Except for the bravery of those who fought, the battle 
 was not much to boast of. The allies together considerably 
 outnumbered the Russians, although, from the causes we 
 have mentioned, the Englishmen were left throughout the 
 greater part of the day to encounter an enemy numerically 
 superior, posted on difficult and commanding heights. But 
 it was the first great battle which for nearly forty years our 
 soldiers had fought with a civilized enemy. The military 
 authorities and the country were well disposed to make the 
 most of it. At this distance of time it is almost touching to 
 read some of the heroic contemporaneous descriptions of the 
 great scramble of the Alma. It might almost seem as if, 
 in the imaginings of the enthusiastic historians, Englishmen 
 had never mounted heights and defeated superior numbers 
 before. The sublime triumphs against every adverse condi- 
 tion which had been won by the genius of a Marlborough or 
 a Wellington could not have been celebrated in language 
 of more exalted dithyrambic pomp. The gallant medley on 
 the banks of the Alma and the fruitless interval of inaction 
 that followed it were told of as if men were speaking of 
 some battle of the gods. 
 
 Very soon, however, a different note came to be sounded. 
 The campaign had been opened under conditions differing 
 from those of most campaigns that went before it. Science 
 had added many new discoveries to the art of war. Litera- 
 ture had added one remarkable contribution of her own to 
 
492 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the conditions amidst which campaigns were to be carried 
 on. She had added the " special correspondent." The old- 
 fashioned historiographer of wars travelled to please sover- 
 eigns, and minister to the self-conceit of conquerors. The 
 modern special correspondent had a very different purpose. 
 He watched the movements of armies and criticised the pol- 
 icy of generals in the interest of some journal, which for its 
 part was concerned only for the information of the public. 
 No favor that courts or monarchs could bestow was worthy 
 a moment's consideration in the mind even of the most self- 
 ish proprietor of a newspaper when compared with the re- 
 ward which the public could give to him and to his paper 
 for quick and accurate news and trustworthy comment. 
 The business of the special correspondent has grown so 
 much since the Crimean War that we are now inclined to 
 look back upon the war correspondents of those days almost 
 as men then did upon the old-fashioned historiographer. 
 The war correspondent now scrawls his despatches as he sits 
 in his saddle under the fire of the enemy ; he scrawls them 
 with a pencil, noting and describing each incident of the 
 fight, so far as he can see it, as coolly as if he were describ- 
 ing a review of volunteers in Hyde Park; and he contrives 
 to send off his narrative by telegraph before the victor in 
 the fight has begun to pursue, or has settled down to hold 
 the ground he won; and the war correspondent's story is 
 expected to be as brilliant and picturesque in style as it 
 ought to be exact and faithful in its statements. In the 
 days of the Crimea things had not advanced quite so far as 
 that ; the war was well on before the submarine telegraph 
 between Varna and the Crimea allowed of daily reports ; 
 but the feats of the war correspondent then filled men's 
 minds with wonder. When the expedition was leaving 
 England it was accompanied by a special correspondent 
 from each of the great daily papers of London. The Times 
 sent out a representative whose name almost immediately 
 became celebrated Mr. William Howard Russell, the preux 
 chevalier of war correspondents in that day, as Mr. Archi- 
 bald Forbes of the Daily JVeics is in this. Mr. Russell ren- 
 dered some service to the English army and to his country, 
 however, which no brilliancy of literary style would alone 
 have enabled him to do. It was to his sreat credit as a 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 493 
 
 man of judgment and observation that, being a civilian who 
 had never before seen one puff of war-smoke, he was able to 
 distinguish between the confusion inseparable from all act- 
 ual levying of war and the confusion that comes of distinct- 
 ly bad administration. To the unaccustomed eye of an or- 
 dinary civilian the whole progress of a campaign, the devel- 
 opment of a battle, the arrangements of the commissariat, 
 appear, at any moment of actual pressure, to be nothing but 
 a mass of confusion. He is accustomed in civil life to find 
 everything in its proper place, and every emergency well 
 provided for. When he is suddenly plunged into the midst 
 of a campaign he is apt to think that everything must be 
 going wrong; or else he assumes contentedly that the whole 
 is in the hands of persons who know better than he, and 
 that it would be absurd on his part to attempt to criticise 
 the arrangements of the men whose business it is to under- 
 stand them. Mr. Russell soon saw that there was confu- 
 sion ; and he had the soundness of judgment to know that 
 the confusion was that of a breaking-down system. There- 
 fore, while the fervor of delight in the courage and success 
 of our army was still fresh in the minds of the public at 
 home, while every music-hall was ringing with the cheap re- 
 wards of valor in the shape of popular glorifications of our 
 commanders and our soldiers, the readers of the Times be- 
 gan to learn that things were faring badly indeed with the 
 conquering army of the Alma. The ranks were thinned by 
 the ravages of cholera. The men were pursued by cholera 
 to the very battle-field, Lord Raglan himself said. No sys- 
 tem can charm away all the effects of climate ;. but it ap- 
 peared only too soon that the arrangements made to encoun- 
 ter the indirect and inevitable dangers of a campaign were 
 miserably inefficient. The hospitals were in a wretchedly 
 disorganized condition. Stores of medicines and strength- 
 ening food were decaying in places where no one wanted 
 them or could well get at them, while men were dying in 
 hundreds among our tents in the Crimea for lack of them. 
 The system of clothing, of transport, of feeding, of nursing 
 everything had broken down. Ample provisions had been 
 got together and paid for ; and when they came to be need- 
 ed no one knew where to get at them. The special corre- 
 spondent of the Times and other correspondents continued 
 
494 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 to din these things into the ears of the public at home. 
 Exultation began to give Avay to a feeling of dismay. The 
 patriotic anger against the Russians was changed for a 
 mood of deep indignation against our own authorities and 
 our own war administration. It soon became apparent to 
 every one that the whole campaign had been planned on 
 the assumption that it was to be like the career of the hero 
 whom Byron laments, " brief, brave, and glorious." Our 
 military authorities here at home we do not speak of the 
 commanders in the field had made up their minds that Se- 
 bastopol was to fall, like another Jericho, at the sound of 
 the war-trumpets' blast. 
 
 Our commanders in the field were, on the contrary, rather 
 disposed to overrate than to underrate the strength of the 
 Russians. It was, therefore, somewhat like the condition 
 of things described in Macaulay's ballad ; those behind cried 
 forward, those in front called back. It is very likely that 
 if a sudden dash had been made at Sebastopol by land and 
 sea, it might have been taken almost at the very opening 
 of the war. But the delay gave the Russians full warning, 
 and they did not neglect it. On the third day after the 
 battle of the Alma the Russians sank seven vessels of their 
 Black Sea fleet at the entrance of the harbor of Sebastopol. 
 This was done full in the sight of the allied fleets, who at 
 first, misunderstanding the movements going on among the 
 enemy, thought the Russian squadron were about to come 
 out from their shelter and try conclusions with the Western 
 ships. But the real purpose of the Russians became soon 
 apparent. Under the eyes of the allies the seven vessels 
 slowly settled down and sank in the water, until at last only 
 the tops of their masts were to be seen ; and the entrance 
 of the harbor was barred as by sunken rocks against any 
 approach of an enemy's ship. There was an end to every 
 dream of a sudden capture of Sebastopol. 
 
 The allied armies moved again from their positions on the 
 Alma; but they did not direct their march to the north side 
 of Sebastopol. They made for Balaklava, which lies south 
 of the city, on the other side of a promontory, and which has 
 a port that might enable them to secure a constant means 
 of communication between the armies and the fleets. To 
 reach Balaklava the allied forces had to undertake a long 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CKIMEA. 495 
 
 and fatiguing flank march, passing Sebastopol on their right. 
 They accomplished the march in safety, and occupied the 
 heights above Balaklava, while the fleets appeared at the 
 same time in the harbor. Sebastopol was but a few miles 
 off", and preparations were at once made for an attack on it 
 by land and sea. On October 17th the attack began. It 
 was practically a failure. Nothing better, indeed, could 
 well have been expected. The fleet could not get near 
 enough to the sea-forts of Sebastopol to make their broad- 
 sides of any real effect, because of the shallow water and 
 the sunken ships ; and although the attack from the land 
 was vigorous and was fiercely kept up, yet it could not carry 
 its object. It became clear that Sebastopol was not to be 
 taken by any coup de main, and the allies had not men 
 enough to invest it. They were, therefore, to some extent 
 themselves in the condition of a besieged force, for the Rus- 
 sians had a large anny outside Sebastopol ready to make 
 every sacrifice for the purpose of preventing the English 
 and French from getting even a chance of undisturbed 
 operations against it. 
 
 The Russians attacked the allies fiercely on October 25th, 
 in the hope of obtaining possession of Balaklava. The at- 
 tempt was bold and brilliant, but it was splendidly repulsed. 
 Never did a day of battle do more credit to English courage, 
 or less, perhaps, to English generalship. The cavalry par- 
 ticularly distinguished themselves. It was in great meas- 
 ure, on our side, a cavalry action. It will be memorable in 
 all English history as the battle in which occurred the fa- 
 mous charge of the Light Brigade. Owing to some fatal 
 misconception of the meaning of an order from the com- 
 mander-in-chief, the Light Brigade, 607 men in all, charged 
 what has been rightly described as "the Russian army in 
 position." The brigade was composed of 118 men of the 
 4th Light Dragoons; 104 of the 8th Hussars; 110 of the 
 llth Hussars; 130 of the 13th Light Dragoons; and 145 of 
 the 17th Lancers. Of the 607 men 198 came back. Long, 
 painful, and hopeless were the disputes about this fatal or- 
 der. The controversy can never be wholly settled. The of- 
 ficer who bore the order was one of the first who fell in the 
 outset. All Europe, all the world, rang with wonder and 
 admiration of the futile and splendid charge. The poet- 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 laureate sang of it in spirited verses. Perhaps its best 
 epitaph was contained in the celebrated comment ascribed 
 to the French General Bosquet, and which has since become 
 proverbial, and been quoted until men are well-nigh tired 
 of it "It was magnificent, but it was not war." 
 
 Next day the enemy made another vigorous attack, on a 
 much larger scale, moving out of Sebastopol itself, and were 
 again repulsed. The allies were able to prevent the troops 
 who made the sortie from co-operating with the Russian 
 army outside who had attacked at Balaklava. The latter 
 were endeavoring to intrench themselves at the little village 
 of Inkerman, lying on the north of Sebastopol ; but the stout 
 resistance they met with from the allies frustrated their 
 plans. On November 5th the Russians made another grand 
 attack on the allies, chiefly on the British, and were once 
 more splendidly repulsed. The plateau of Inkerman was the 
 principal scene of the struggle. It was occupied by the 
 Guards and a few British regiments, on whom fell, until 
 General Bosquet with his French was able to come to their 
 assistance, the task of resisting a Russian army. This was 
 the severest and the fiercest engagement of the campaign. 
 The loss to the English was 2612, of whom 145 were officers. 
 The French lost about 1700. The Russians were believed 
 to have lost 12,000 men ; but at no time could any clear ac- 
 count be obtained of the Russian losses. It was believed 
 that they brought a force of 50,000 men to the attack. 
 Inkerman was described at the time as the soldiers' battle. 
 Strategy, it was said everywhere, there was none. The at- 
 tack was made under cover of a dark and drizzling mist. 
 The battle was fought for awhile almost absolutely in the 
 dark. There was hardly any attempt to direct the allies 
 by any principles of scientific warfare. The soldiers fought 
 stubbornly a series of hand-to-hand fights, and we are enti- 
 tled to say that the better men won in the end. We fully 
 admit that it was a soldiers' battle. All the comment we 
 have to make upon the epithet is, that we do not exactly 
 know which of the engagements fought in the Crimea was 
 anything but a soldiers' battle. Of course, with the soldiers 
 we take the officers. A battle in the Crimea with which 
 generalship had anything particular to do has certainly not 
 come under the notice of this writer. Mr. Kinglake tells 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 497 
 
 that at Alma Marshal St. Arnaud, the French commander- 
 in-chief, addressing General Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, 
 said : " With such men as you I have no orders to give ; I 
 have but to point to the enemy." This seems to have been 
 the general principle on which the commanders conducted 
 the campaign. There were the enemy's forces let the men 
 go at them any way they could. Nor under the circum- 
 stances could anything much better have been done. When 
 orders were given, it appeared more than once as if things 
 would have gone better without them. The soldier won 
 his battle always. No general could prevent him from 
 doing that. 
 
 Meanwhile, what were people saying in England? They 
 were indignantly declaring that the whole campaign was a 
 muddle. It was evident now that Sebastopol was not go- 
 ing to fall all at once; it was evident, too, that the prepara- 
 tions had been made on the assumption that it must fall at 
 once. To make the disappointment more bitter at home, the 
 public had been deceived for a few days by a false report of 
 the taking of Sebastopol ; and the disappointment naturally 
 increased the impatience and dissatisfaction of Englishmen. 
 The fleet that had been sent out to the Baltic came back 
 without having accomplished anything in particular; and 
 although there really was nothing in particular that it could 
 have accomplished under the circumstances, yet many people 
 were as angry as if it had culpably avowed the enemy to es- 
 cape it on the open seas. The sailing of the Baltic fleet had, 
 indeed, been preceded by ceremonials especially calculated 
 to make any enterprise ridiculous which failed to achieve 
 some startling success. It was put under the command 
 of Sir Charles Napier, a brave old salt of the fast-fading 
 school of Smollett's Commodore Trunnion, rough, dashing, 
 bull-headed, likely enough to succeed where sheer force and 
 courage could win victories, but wanting in all the intellect- 
 ual qualities of a commander, and endowed with a violent 
 tongue and an almost unmatched indiscretion. Sir Charles 
 Napier was a member of a family famed for its warriors; 
 but he had not anything like the capacity of his cousin, the 
 other Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, or the intel- 
 lect of Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular 
 War. He had won some signal and surprising successes in 
 
498 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 the Portuguese civil war and in Syria; all under conditions 
 wholly different, and with an enemy wholly different from 
 those he would have to encounter in the Baltic. But the 
 voice of admiring friends was tumultuously raised to pre- 
 dict splendid things for him before his fleet had left its 
 port, and he himself quite forgot, in his rough self-confi- 
 dence, the difference between boasting when one is taking 
 
 Zj & 
 
 off his armor and boasting when one is only putting it on. 
 His friends entertained him at a farewell dinner at the Re- 
 form Club. Lord Palmerston was present, and Sir James 
 Graham, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and a great deal 
 of exuberant nonsense was talked. Lord Palmerston, car- 
 ried away by his natural bonhomie and his high animal 
 spirits, showered the most extravagant praises upon the 
 gallant admiral, intermixed with jokes which set the com- 
 pany laughing consumedly, but which read by the outer 
 public next day seemed unbecoming preludes to an expedi- 
 tion that was to be part of a great war and of terrible na- 
 tional sacrifices. The one only thing that could have ex- 
 cused the whole performance would have been some over- 
 whelming success on the part of him who was its hero. 
 But it is not probable that a Pundonald or even a Nelson 
 could have done much in the Baltic just then ; and Napier 
 was not a Dundonald or a Nelson. The Baltic fleet came 
 home safely after awhile, its commander having brought 
 with him nothing but a grievance which lasted him all 
 the remainder of his life. The public were amazed, scorn- 
 ful, wrathful ; they began to think that they were destined 
 to see nothing but failure as the fruit of the campaign. 
 In truth, they were extravagantly impatient. Perhaps they 
 were not to be blamed. Their leaders, who ought to have 
 known better, had been filling them with the idea that they 
 had nothing to do but to sweep the enemy from sea and 
 land. 
 
 The temper of a people thus stimulated and thus disap- 
 pointed is almost always indiscriminating and unreasonable 
 in its censure. The first idea is to find a victim. The vic- 
 tim on whom the anger of a large portion of the public 
 turned in this instance was the Prince Consort. The most 
 absurd ideas, the most cruel and baseless calumnies, were in 
 circulation about him. He was accused of having, out of 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 499 
 
 some inscrutable motive, made use of all his secret influence 
 to prevent the success of the campaign. He was charged 
 with being in a conspiracy with Prussia, with Russia, with 
 no one knew exactly whom, to weaken the strength of Eng- 
 land, and secure a triumph for her enemies. Stories were 
 actually told at one time of his having been arrested for high- 
 treason. He had, in one of his speeches about this time, 
 said that constitutional government was under a heavy trial, 
 and could only pass triumphantly through it if the country 
 would grant its confidence to her Majesty's Government. 
 In this observation, as the whole context of the speech show- 
 ed, the Prince was only explaining that the Queen's Govern- 
 ment were placed at a disadvantage in the carrying on of a 
 war, as compared with a Government like that of the Em- 
 peror of the French, who could act of his own arbitrary will, 
 without check, delay, or control on the part of any Parlia- 
 mentary body. But the speech was instantly fastened on 
 as illustrating the Prince's settled and unconquerable dislike 
 of all constitutional and popular principles of government. 
 Those who opposed the Prince had not, indeed, been waiting 
 for his speech at the Trinity House dinner to denounce and 
 condemn him; but the sentence in that speech to which ref- 
 erence has been made opened upon him a new torrent of 
 hostile criticism. The charges which sprang of this heated 
 and unjust temper on the part of the public did not, indeed, 
 long prevail against the Prince Consort. When once the 
 subject came to be taken up in Parliament, it was shown al- 
 most in a moment that there was not the slightest ground 
 or excuse for any of the absurd surmises and cruel suspicions 
 which had been creating so much agitation. The agitation 
 collapsed in a moment. But while it lasted it was both 
 vehement and intense, and gave much pain to the Prince, 
 and far more pain still to the Queen his wife. 
 
 We have seen more lately, and on a larger scale, something 
 like the phenomenon of that time. During the war between 
 France and Germany the people of Paris went nearly wild 
 with the idea that they had been betrayed, and were clamor- 
 ous for victims to punish anywhere or anyhow. To many 
 calm Englishmen this seemed monstrously unreasonable and 
 unworthy; and the French people received from English 
 writers many grave rebukes and wise exhortations. But 
 
A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 the temper of the English public at one period of the Cri- 
 mean War was becoming very like that which set Paris 
 wild during the disastrous struggle with Germany. The 
 passions of peoples are, it is to be feared, very much alike 
 in their impulses and even in their manifestations; and if 
 England during the Crimean War never came to the wild 
 
 o o 
 
 condition into which Paris fell during the later struggle, it 
 is perhaps rather because, on the whole, things went well 
 with England, than in consequence of any very great supe- 
 riority of Englishmen in judgment and self-restraint over 
 the excitable people of France. Certainly those who re- 
 member what we may call the dark days of the Crimean 
 campaign, when disappointment following on extravagant 
 confidence had incited popular passion to call for some vic- 
 tim, will find themselves slow to set a limit to the lengths 
 that passion might have reached if the Russians had actual- 
 ly been successful even in one or two battles. 
 
 The winter was gloomy at home as well as abroad. The 
 news constantly arriving from the Crimea told only of devas- 
 tation caused by foes far more formidable than the Russians 
 sickness, bad weather, bad management. The Black Sea 
 was swept and scourged by terrible storms. The destruc- 
 tion of transport-ships laden with winter stores for our men 
 was of incalculable injury to the army. Clothing, blanket- 
 ing, provisions, hospital necessaries of all kinds, were de- 
 stroyed in vast quantities. The loss of life among the crews 
 of the vessels was immense. A storm was nearly as disas- 
 trous in this way as a battle. On shore the sufferings of the 
 army were unspeakable. The tents were torn from their pegs 
 and blown away. The officers and men were exposed to 
 the bitter cold and the fierce stormy blasts. Our soldiers had 
 for the most part little experience or even idea of such cold 
 as they had to encounter this gloomy winter. The inten- 
 sity of the cold was so great that no one might dare to 
 touch any metal substance in the open air with his bare 
 hand under penalty of leaving the skin behind him. The 
 hospitals for the sick and wounded at Scutari were in a 
 wretchedly disorganized condition. They were, for the 
 most part, in an absolutely chaotic condition as regards 
 ai'rangement and supply. In some instances medical stores 
 were left to decay at Varna, or were found lying useless in 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 501 
 
 the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay, which were needed 
 for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers were able 
 and zealous men ; the stores were provided and paid for, so 
 far as our Government was concerned ; but the stores were 
 not brought to the medical men. These had their hands 
 all but idle, their eyes and souls tortured by the sight of 
 sufferings which they were unable to relieve for want of 
 the commonest appliances of the hospital. The most ex- 
 traordinary instances of blunder and confusion were con- 
 stantly coming to light. Great consignments of boots ar- 
 rived, and were found to be all for the left foot. Mules for 
 the conveyance of stores were contracted for and delivered, 
 but delivered so that they came into the hands of the Rus- 
 sians, and not of us. Shameful frauds were perpetrated in 
 the instance of some of the contracts for preserved meat. 
 " One man's preserved meat," exclaimed Punch, with bitter 
 humor, "is another man's poison." The evils of the hos- 
 pital disorganization were happily made a means of bring- 
 ing about a new system of attending to the sick and wound- 
 ed in war, which has already created something like a revo- 
 lution in the manner of treating the victims of battle. Mr. 
 Sidney Herbert, horrified at the way in which things were 
 managed in Scutari and the Crimea, applied to a distin- 
 guished woman, who had long taken a deep interest in hos- 
 pital reform, to superintend personally the nursing of the 
 soldiers. Miss Florence Nightingale was the daughter of a 
 wealthy English country gentleman. She had chosen not to 
 pass her life in fashionable or aesthetic inactivity, and had 
 from a very early period turned her attention to sanatory 
 questions. She had studied nursing as a science and a sys- 
 tem ; and had made herself acquainted with the working 
 of various Continental institutions ; and about the time 
 when the war broke out she was actually engaged in reor- 
 ganizing the Sick Governesses' Institution in Harley Street, 
 London. To her Mr. Sidney Herbert turned. He offered 
 her, if she would accept the task he proposed, plenary au- 
 thority over all the nurses, and an unlimited power of draw- 
 ing on the Government for whatever she might think neces- 
 sary to the success of the undertaking. Miss Nightingale 
 accepted the task, and went out to Scutari, accompanied by 
 some women of rank like her own, and a trained staff of 
 
502 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 nurses. They speedily reduced chaos into order; and from 
 the time of their landing in Scutari there was at least one 
 department of the business of war which was never again a 
 subject of complaint. The spirit of the chivalric days had 
 been restored under better auspices for its abiding influence. 
 Ladies of rank once more devoted themselves to the service 
 of the wounded, and the end was come of the Mrs. Gamp 
 and Mrs. Prig type of nurse. Sidney Herbert, in his letter 
 to Miss Nightingale, had said that her example, if she accept- 
 ed the task he had proposed, would " multiply the good to 
 all time." These words proved to have no exaggeration 
 in them. "VVe have never seen a war since in which women 
 of education and of genuine devotion have not given them- 
 selves up to the task of caring for the wounded. The Geneva 
 Convention and the bearing of the Red Cross are among 
 the results of Florence Nightingale's work in the Crimea. 
 
 But the siege of Sebastopol was meanwhile dragging heav- 
 ily along ; and sometimes it was not quite certain which 
 ought to be called the besieged the Russians in the city or 
 the allies encamped in sight of it. During some months the 
 allied armies did little or nothing. The commissariat sys- 
 tem and the land transport system had broken down. The 
 armies were miserably weakened by sickness. Cholera was 
 ever and anon raging anew among our men. Horses and 
 mules were dying of cold and starvation. The roads were 
 only deep irregular ruts filled with mud ; the camp was a 
 marsh; the tents stood often in pools of water; the men had 
 sometimes no beds but straw dripping with wet, and hardly 
 any bed coverings. Our unfortunate Turkish allies were in 
 a far more wretched plight than even we ourselves. The 
 authorities, who ought to have looked after them, were im- 
 pervious to the criticisms of special correspondents, and un- 
 assailable by Parliamentary votes of censure. A condemna- 
 tion of the latter kind was hanging over our Government. 
 Lord John Russell became impressed with the conviction 
 that the Duke of Newcastle was not strong enough for the 
 post of War Minister, and he wrote to Lord Aberdeen urg- 
 ing that the War Department should be given to Lord Palm- 
 erston. Lord Aberdeen replied that although another per- 
 son might have been a better choice when the appointments 
 were made in the first instance, yet in the absence of any 
 
THE INVASION OF THE CRIMEA. 503 
 
 proved defect or alleged incapacity there was no sufficient 
 ground for making a kind of speculative change. Parlia- 
 ment was called together before Christmas ; and after the 
 Christmas recess Mr. Roebuck gave notice that he would 
 move for a select committee to inquire into the condition of 
 the army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those 
 departments of the Government whose duty it had been to 
 minister to the wants of the army. Lord John Russell did 
 not believe for himself that the motion could be conscien- 
 tiously resisted ; but as it necessarily involved a censure 
 upon some of his colleagues, he did not think he ought to 
 remain longer in the ministry, and he therefore resigned his 
 office. The sudden resignation of the leader of the House 
 of Commons was a death-blow to any plans of resistance 
 by which the Government might otherwise have thought of 
 encountering Mr. Roebuck's motion. Lord Palmerston, al- 
 though Lord John Russell's course was a marked tribute to 
 his own capacity, had remonstrated warmly with Russell by 
 letter as to his determination to resign. "You will have 
 the appearance," he said, "of having remained in office aid- 
 ing in carrying on a system, of which you disapprove until 
 driven out by Roebuck's announced notice; and the Gov- 
 ernment will have the appearance of self-condemnation by 
 flying from a discussion which they dare not face ; while, as 
 regards the country, the action of the executive will be par- 
 alyzed for a time in a critical moment of a great war, with 
 an impending negotiation, and we shall exhibit to the world 
 a melancholy spectacle of disorganization among our politi- 
 cal men at home similar to that which has prevailed among 
 our military men abroad." The remonstrance, however, 
 came too late, even if it could have had any effect at any 
 time. Mr. Roebuck's motion came on, and was resisted with 
 vigor by Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone. Lord Palm- 
 erston insisted that the responsibility ought to fall not on 
 the Duke of Newcastle but on the whole cabinet; and with 
 a generosity which his keenest opponents might have ad- 
 mitted to be characteristic of him, he accepted the task of 
 defending an Administration whose chief blame was in the 
 eyes of most persons that they had not given the control of 
 the war into his hands. Mr. Gladstone declared that the in- 
 quiry sought for by the resolution could lead to nothing but 
 
504 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 "confusion and disturbance, increased disasters, shame at 
 home and weakness abroad ; it would convey no consolation 
 to those whom you seek to aid, but it would carry malig- 
 nant joy to the hearts of the enemies of England." The 
 House of Commons was not to be moved by any such argu- 
 ment or appeal. The one pervading idea was that England 
 had been endangered and shamed by the breakdown of her 
 army organization. When the division took place, 305 mem- 
 bers voted for Mr. Roebuck's motion, and only 148 against. 
 The majority against ministers was therefore 157. Every 
 one knows what a scene usually takes place when a minis- 
 try is defeated in the House of Commons cheering again 
 and again renewed, counter-cheers of defiance, wild exulta- 
 tion, vehement indignation, a whole whirlpool of various 
 emotions seething in that little hall in St. Stephen's. But 
 this time there was no such outburst. The House could 
 hardly realize the fact that the ministry of all the talents 
 had been thus completely and ignominiously defeated. A 
 dead silence followed the announcement of the numbers. 
 Then there was a half-breathless murmur of amazement and 
 incredulity. The Speaker repeated the numbers, and doubt 
 was over. It was still uncertain how the House would ex- 
 press its feelings. Suddenly some one laughed. The sound 
 gave a direction and a relief to perplexed, pent-up emotion. 
 Shouts of laughter followed. Not merely the pledged oppo- 
 nents of the Government laughed ; many of those who had 
 voted with ministers found themselves laughing too. It 
 seemed so absurd, so incongruous, this way of disposing of 
 the great Coalition Government. Many must have thought 
 of the night of fierce debate, little more than two years be- 
 fore, when Mr. Disraeli, then on the verge of his fall from 
 power, and realizing fully the strength of the combination 
 against him, consoled his party and himself for the immi- 
 nent fatality awaiting them by the defiant words, "I know 
 that I have to face a Coalition ; the combination may be suc- 
 cessful. A combination has before this been successful ; but 
 coalitions, though they may be successful, have always found 
 that their triumphs have been brief. This I know, that Eng- 
 land does not love coalitions." Only two years had passed and 
 the great Coalition had fallen, overwhelmed with reproach and 
 popular indignation, and amidst sudden shouts of laughter. 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 505 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 
 
 ON February 15th, 1855, Lord Palmerston wrote to his 
 brother: "A month ago, if any man had asked me to say 
 what was one of the most improbable events, I should have 
 said my being Prime-minister. Aberdeen was there ; Derby 
 was head of one great party, John Russell of the other, and 
 yet iu about ten days' time they all gave way like straws 
 before the wind ; and so here am I, writing to you from 
 Downing Street, as First Lord of the Treasury." 
 
 No doubt Lord Palmerston was sincere in the expression 
 of surprise which we have quoted ; but there were not many 
 other men in the country who felt in the least astonished at 
 the turn of events by which he had become Prime-minister. 
 Indeed, it had long become apparent to almost every one 
 that his assuming that place was only a question of time. 
 The country was in that mood that it would absolutely have 
 somebody at the head of affairs who knew his own mind and 
 saw his way clearly before him. When the Coalition Min- 
 istry broke down, Lord Derby was invited by the Queen to 
 form a Government. He tried, and failed. He did all in his 
 power to accomplish the task with which the Queen had in- 
 trusted him. He invited Lord Palmerston to join him, and 
 it was intimated that if Palmerston consented Mr. Disraeli 
 would waive all claim to the leadership of the House of 
 Commons, in order that Palmerston should have that place. 
 Lord Derby also offered, through Lord Palmerston, places in 
 his Administration to Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney Herbert. 
 Palmerston did not see his way to join a Derby Administra- 
 tion, and without him Lord Derby could not go on. The 
 Queen then sent for Lord John Russell ; but Russell's late 
 and precipitate retreat from his office had discredited him 
 with most of his former colleagues, and he found that he 
 could not get a Government together. Lord Palmerston 
 was then, to use his own phrase, V inevitable. There was not 
 
 I. 2'2 
 
506 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 much change in the personnel of the ministry. Lord Aber- 
 deen was gone, and Lord Palmerston took his place ; and 
 Lord Panmure, who had formerly, as Fox Maule, administer- 
 ed the affairs of the army, succeeded the Duke of Newcastle. 
 Lord Panmure, however, combined in his own person the 
 functions, up to that time absurdly separated, of Secretary 
 at War and Secretary for War. The Secretary at War un- 
 der the old system was not one of the principal Secretaries 
 of State. He was merely the officer by whom the regular 
 communication was kept up between the War-office and the 
 ministry, and has been described as the civil officer of the 
 army. The Secretary for War was commonly intrusted with 
 the colonial department as well. The two War-offices were 
 now made into one. It was hoped that by this change great 
 benefit would come to our whole army system. Lord Palm- 
 erston acted energetically, too, in sending out a sanitary 
 commission to the Crimea, and a commission to superintend 
 the commissariat, a department that, almost more than any 
 other, had broken down. Nothing could be more strenuous 
 than the terms in which Lord Palmerston recommended the 
 sanitary commission to Lord Raglan. He requested that 
 Lord Raglan would give the commissioners every assist- 
 ance in his power. " They will, of coui'se, be opposed and 
 thwarted by the medical officers, by the men who have 
 charge of the port arrangements, and by those who have the 
 cleaning of the camp. Their mission will be ridiculed, and 
 their recommendations and directions set aside, unless en- 
 forced by the peremptory exercise of your authority. But 
 that authority I must request you to exert in the most per- 
 emptory manner for the immediate and exact carrying into 
 execution whatever changes of arrangement they may rec- 
 ommend ; for these are matters on which depend the health 
 and lives of many hundreds of men, I may, indeed, say of 
 thousands." Lord Palmerston was strongly pressed by some 
 of the more strenuous Reformers of the House. Mr. Layard, 
 who had acquired some celebrity before in a very different 
 field as a discoverer, that is to say, in the ruins of Nineveh 
 and Babylon was energetic and incessant in his attacks on 
 the administration of the war, and was not disposed even 
 now to give the new Government a moment's rest. Mr. Lay- 
 ard was a man of a certain rough ability, immense self-suf- 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 507 
 
 ficiency, and indomitable egotism. He was not in any sense 
 an eloquent speaker; he was singularly wanting in all the 
 graces of style and manner. But he was fluent, he was vo- 
 ciferous, he never seemed to have a moment's doubt on any 
 conceivable question, he never admitted that there could 
 by any possibility be two sides to any matter of discussion. 
 He did really know a great deal about the East at a time 
 when the habit of travelling in the East was comparatively 
 rare. He stamped down all doubt or difference of view with 
 the overbearing dogmatism of Sir Walter Scott's Touchwood, 
 
 O O ' 
 
 or of the proverbial man who has been there and ought to 
 know; and he was in many respects admirably fitted to be 
 the spokesman of all those, and they were not a few, who 
 saw that things had been going wrong without exactly see- 
 ing why, and were eager that something should be done, 
 although they did not clearly know what. Lord Palmer- 
 ston strove to induce the House not to press for the 
 appointment of the committee recommended in Mr. Roe- 
 buck's motion. The Government, he said, would make the 
 needful inquiries themselves. He reminded the House of 
 Richard II. 's offer to lead the men of the fallen Tyler's 
 insurrection himself; and in the same spirit he offered, on 
 the part of the Government, to take the lead in every nec- 
 essary investigation. Mr. Roebuck, however, would not 
 give way; and Lord Palmerston yielded to a demand which 
 had, undoubtedly, the support of a vast force of public opin- 
 ion. The constant argument of Mr. Layard had some sense 
 in it : the Government now in office was very much like the 
 Government in which the House had declared so lately that 
 it had no confidence. It could hardly, therefore, be expect- 
 ed that the House should accept its existence as guarantee 
 enough that everything should be done which its predeces- 
 sor had failed to do. Lord Palmerston gave way, but his 
 unavoidable concession brought on a new ministerial crisis. 
 Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Sidney Herbert 
 declined to hold office any longer. They had opposed the 
 motion for an inquiry most gravely and strenuously, and 
 they would not lend any countenance to it by remaining in 
 office. Sir Charles Wood succeeded Sir James Graham as 
 First Lord of the Admiralty ; Lord John Russell took the 
 place of Secretary of the Colonies, vacated by Sidney Her- 
 
508 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 bert ; and Sir George Cornewall Lewis followed Mr. Glad- 
 stone as Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
 
 Meanwhile new negotiations for peace, set on foot under 
 the influence of Austria, had been begun at Vienna, and Lord 
 John Russell had been sent there to represent the interests 
 of England. The Conference opened at Vienna under cir- 
 cumstances that might have seemed especially favorable to 
 peace. We had got a new ally, a State not, indeed, com- 
 manding any great military strength, but full of energy and 
 ambition, and representing more than any other, perhaps, the 
 tendencies of liberalism and the operation of the compara- 
 tively new principle of the rights of nationalities. This was 
 the little kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was then 
 under the control of one of the master-spirits of modern poli- 
 tics; a man who belonged to the class of the Riehelieus and 
 the Orange Williams the illustrious Count Cavour. Sar- 
 dinia, it may be frankly said, did not come into the alliance 
 because of any particular sympathies that she had with one 
 side or the other of the quarrel between Russia and the 
 Western Powers. She went into the war in order that she 
 might have a locus standi in the councils of Europe from 
 which to set forth her grievances against Austria. In the 
 marvellous history of the uprise of the kingdom of Italy 
 there is a good deal over which, to use the words of Carlyle, 
 moralities not a few must shriek aloud. It would not be 
 easy to defend on high moral principles the policy which 
 struck into a war without any particular care for either side 
 of the controversy, but only to serve an ulterior and person- 
 al, that is to say, national purpose. But, regarding the poli- 
 cy merely by the light of its results, it must be owned that 
 it was singularly successful, and entirely justified the expec- 
 tations of Cavour. The Crimean War laid the foundations 
 of the kingdom of Italy. 
 
 That was one fact calculated to inspire hopes of a peace. 
 The greater the number and strength of the allies, the great- 
 er, obviously, the pressure upon Russia and the probability 
 of her listening to reason. But there was another event of 
 a very different nature, the effect of which seemed at first 
 likely to be all in favor of peace. This was the death of the 
 man whom the united public opinion of Europe regarded as 
 the author of the war. On March 2d, 1855, the Emperor 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 509 
 
 Nicholas of Russia died of pulmonary apoplexy, after an at- 
 tack of influenza. In other days it would have been said he 
 had died of a broken heart. Perhaps the description would 
 have been more strictly true than the terms of the medical 
 report. It was doubtless the effect of utter disappointment, 
 of the wreck and ruin of hopes to which a life's ambition had 
 been directed and a life's energy dedicated, which left that 
 frame of adamant open to the sudden dart of sickness. One 
 of the most remarkable illustrations of an artist's genius de- 
 voted to a political subject was the cartoon which appeared 
 in Punch, and which was called " General Fevrier turned 
 Traitor." The Emperor Nicholas had boasted that Russia 
 had two generals on whom she could always rely, General 
 Janvier and General Fevrier; and now the English artist 
 represented General February, a skeleton in Russian uni- 
 form, turning traitor, and laying his bony ice-cold hand on 
 the heart of the Sovereign and betraying him to the tomb. 
 But, indeed, it was not General February alone who doomed 
 Nicholas to death. The Czar died of broken hopes ; of the 
 recklessness that comes from defeat and despair. He took 
 no precautions against cold and exposure; he treated with 
 a magnanimous disdain the remonstrances of his physicians 
 and his friends. As of Max Piccolomini in Schiller's noble 
 play, so of him : men whispered that he wished to die. The 
 Alma was to him what Austcrlitz was to Pitt. From the 
 moment when the news of that defeat was announced to him 
 he no longer seemed to have hope of the campaign. He 
 took the story of the defeat very much as Lord North took 
 the surrender of Cornwallis as if a bullet had struck him. 
 Thenceforth he was like one whom the old Scotch phrase 
 would describe as fey one who moved, spoke, and lived 
 under the shadow of coming death until the death came. 
 
 The news of the sudden death of the Emperor created a 
 profound sensation in England. Mr. Bright, at Manchester, 
 shortly after rebuked what he considered an ignoble levity 
 in the manner of commenting on the event among some 
 
 ~ O 
 
 of the English journals; but it is right to say that, on the 
 whole, nothing could have been more decorous and dignified 
 than the manner in which the English public generally re- 
 ceived the news that the country's great enemy was no more. 
 At first there was, as we have said, a common impression that 
 
510 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 Nicholas's son and successor, Alexander II., would be more 
 anxious to make peace than his father had been. But this 
 hope was soon gone. The new Czar could not venture to 
 show himself to his people in a less patriotic light than his 
 predecessor. The prospects of the allies were at the time 
 remarkably gloomy. There must have seemed to the new 
 Russian Emperor considerable ground for the hope that dis- 
 ease, and cold, and bad management would do more harm to 
 the army of England, at least, than any Russian general could 
 do. The Conference at Vienna proved a failure, and even in 
 some respects a. fiasco. Lord John Russell, sent to Vienna 
 as our representative, was instructed that the object he must 
 hold in view was the admission of Turkey into the great 
 family of European States. For this end there were four 
 principal points to be considered the condition of the Dan- 
 nbian Principalities, the free navigation of the Danube, the 
 limitation of Russian supremacy in the Black Sea, and the 
 independence of the Porte. It was on the attempt to limit 
 Russian supremacy in the Black Sea that the negotiations 
 became a failure. Russia would not consent to any proposal 
 which could really have the desired effect. She would agree 
 to an arrangement between Turkey and herself, but this was 
 exactly what the Western Powers were determined not to 
 allow. She declined to have the strength of her navy re- 
 stricted; and proposed as a counter -resolution that the 
 Straits should be opened to the war flags of all nations, so 
 that if Russia were strong as a naval Power in the Black 
 Sea, other Powers might be just as strong if they thought fit. 
 Lord Palmerston, in a letter to Lord John Russell, dryly 
 characterized this proposition, involving as it would the 
 maintenance by England and France of permanent fleets in 
 the Black Sea to counterbalance the fleet of Russia, as a 
 " mauvaise plaisanterie." Lord Palmerston, indeed, believed 
 no more in the sincerity of Austria throughout all these 
 transactions than he did in that of Russia. The Conference 
 proved a total failure, and in its failure it involved a good 
 deal of the reputation of Lord John Russell. Like the French 
 representative, M. Drouyn de Lhuys,Lord John Russell had 
 been taken by the proposals of Austria, and had supported 
 them in the first instance; but when the Government at 
 home would not have them, he was still induced to remain a 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 511 
 
 member of the Cabinet, and even to condemn in the House 
 of Commons the recommendations he had supported at Vi- 
 enna. He was charged by Mr. Disraeli with having en- 
 couraged the Russian pretensions by declaring at a critical 
 point of the negotiations that he was disposed to favor what- 
 ever arrangement would best preserve the honor of Russia. 
 "What has the representative of England," Mr. Disraeli in- 
 dignantly asked, "to do with the honor of Russia?" Lord 
 John, had indeed, a fair reply. He could say with justice 
 and good-sense that no settlement was likely to be lasting 
 which simply forced conditions upon a great Power like Rus- 
 sia without taking any account of what is considered among 
 nations to be her honor. But he was not able to give any 
 satisfactory explanation of his having approved the condi- 
 tions iu Vienna which he afterward condemned in West- 
 minster. He explained in Parliament that he did, in the first 
 instance, regard the Austrian propositions as containing the 
 possible basis of a satisfactory and lasting peace ; but that, 
 as the Government would not hear of them, he had rejected 
 them against his own judgment; and that he had afterward 
 been converted to the opinion of his colleagues and believed 
 them inadmissible in principle. This was a sort of explana- 
 tion more likely to alarm than to reassure the public. What 
 manner of danger, it was asked on all sides, may we not be 
 placed in when our representatives do not know their own 
 minds as to proper terms of peace ; when they have no opin- 
 ion of their own upon the subject, but are loud in approval 
 of certain conditions one day which they are equally loud 
 in condemning the next ? There was a general impression 
 throughout England that some of our statesmen in office 
 had never been sincerely in favor of the war from the first ; 
 that even still they were cold, doubtful, and half-hearted 
 about it, and that the honor of the country was not safe in 
 such hands. The popular instinct, whether it was right as 
 to facts or not, was perfectly sound as to inferences. We 
 may honor, in many instances we must honor, the consci- 
 entious scruples of a public man who distrusts the objects 
 and has no faith in the results of some war in which his peo- 
 ple are engaged. But such a man has no business in the 
 Government which has the conduct of the war. The men 
 who are to carry on a war must have no doubt of its right- 
 
512 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 fulness of purpose, and must not be eager to conclude it on 
 any terms. In the very interests of peace itself they must 
 be resolute to carry on the war until it has reached the end 
 they sought for. 
 
 Lord John Russell's remaining in office after these dis- 
 closures was practically impossible. Sir E. B. Lytton gave 
 notice of a direct vote of censure on "the minister charged 
 Avith the negotiations at Vienna." But Russell anticipated 
 the certain effect of a vote in the House of Commons by 
 resigning his office. This step, at least, extricated his col- 
 leagues from any share in the censure, although the recrim- 
 inations that passed on the occasion in Parliament were 
 many and bitter. The vote of censure was, however, with- 
 drawn. Sir William Molesworth, one of the most distin- 
 guished of the school who were since called Philosophical 
 Radicals, succeeded him as Colonial Secretary ; and the 
 ministry carried one or two triumphant votes against Mr. 
 Disraeli, Mr. Roebuck, and other opponents, or at least tin- 
 friendly critics. Meanwhile the Emperor of the French and 
 his wife had paid a visit to London, and had been received 
 with considerable enthusiasm. The Queen seems to have 
 been very favorably impressed by the Emperor. She sin- 
 cerely admired him, and believed in his desire to maintain 
 peace as far as possible, and to do his best for the promotion 
 of liberal principles and sound economic doctrines through- 
 out Europe. The beauty and grace of the Empress like- 
 wise greatly won over Queen Victoria. The Prince Consort 
 seems to have been less impressed. He was, indeed, a be- 
 liever in the sincerity and good disposition of the Emperor, 
 but he found him strangely ignorant on most subjects, even 
 the modern political history of England and France. Dur- 
 ing the visit of the Royal family of England to France, and 
 now while the Emperor and Empress were in London, the 
 same impression appears to have been left on the mind of 
 the Prince Consort. He also seems to have noticed a cer- 
 tain barrack- room flavor about the Emperor's entourage 
 which was not agreeable to his own ideas of dignity and re- 
 finement. The Prince Consort appears to have judged the 
 Emperor almost exactly as we know now that Prince Bis- 
 marck did then, and as impartial opinion has judged him 
 everywhere in Europe since that time. 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 513 
 
 The operations in the Crimea were renewed with some 
 vigor. The English army lost much by the death of its 
 brave and manly commander- in -chief, Lord Raglan. He 
 was succeeded by General Simpson, who had recently been 
 sent out to the Crimea as chief of the staff, and whose ad- 
 ministration during the short time that he held the com- 
 mand was at least well qualified to keep Lord Raglan's 
 memory green, and to prevent the regret for his death from 
 losing any of its keenness. The French army had lost its 
 first commander long before the versatile, reckless, brill- 
 iant soldier of fortune, St. Arnaud, whose broken health had 
 from the opening of the campaign prevented him from dis- 
 playing any of the qualities which his earlier career gave 
 men reason to look for under his command. After St. Ar- 
 naud's death the command was transferred for awhile to 
 General Canrobert, who, finding himself hardly equal to the 
 task, resigned it in favor of General Pelissier. The Sardin- 
 ian contingent had arrived, and had given admirable proof 
 of its courage and discipline. On August 16th, 1855, the 
 Russians, under General Liprandi, made a desperate effort 
 to raise the siege of Sebastopol by an attack on the allied 
 forces. The attack was skilfully planned during the night, 
 and was made in great strength. The French divisions had 
 to bear the principal weight of the attack ; but the Sardin- 
 ian contingent also had a prominent place in the resistance, 
 and bore themselves with splendid bravery and success. 
 The attempt of the Russians was completely foiled ; and all 
 Northern Italy was thrown into wild delight by the news 
 that the flag of Piedmont had been carried to victory over 
 the troops of one great European Power, and side by side 
 with those of two others. The unanimous voice of the coun- 
 try now approved and acclaimed the policy of Cavour, 
 which had been sanctioned only by a very narrow majority, 
 had been denounced from all sides as reckless and senseless, 
 and had been carried out in the face of the most tremen- 
 dous difficulties. It was the first great illustration of Ca- 
 vour's habitual policy of blended audacity and cool, far-see- 
 ing judgment. It is a curious fact that the suggestion to 
 send Sardinian troops to the Crimea did not originate in 
 Cavour's own busy brain. The first thought of it came up 
 in the mind of a woman, Cavour's niece. The great states- 
 
 22* 
 
514 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 man was struck with the idea from the moment when she 
 suggested it. He thought over it deeply, resolved to adopt 
 it, and carried it to triumphant success. 
 
 The repulse of the Tchernaya was a heavy, indeed a fatal, 
 stroke for the Russians. The siege had been progressing 
 for some time with considerable activity. The French had 
 drawn their lines nearer and nearer to the besieged city. 
 The Russians, however, had also been throwing up fresh 
 works, which brought them nearer to the lines of the allies, 
 and sometimes made the latter seem as if they were the be- 
 sieged rather than the besiegers. The Malakoff tower and 
 the Mamelon battery in front of it became the scenes and 
 the objects of constant struggle. The Russians made des- 
 perate night sorties again and again, and were always re- 
 pulsed. On June Yth the English assaulted the quarries in 
 front of the Redan, and the French attacked the Mamelon. 
 The attack on both sides was successful; but it was follow- 
 ed on the 18th of the sa.me month by a desperate and whol- 
 ly unsuccessful attack on the Redan and Malakoff batteries. 
 There was some misapprehension on the side of the French 
 commander, which led to a lack of precision and unity in 
 the carrying out of the enterprise, and it became, therefore, 
 a, failure on the part of both the allies. A pompous and ex- 
 ulting address was issued by Prince Gortschakoff, in which 
 he informed the Russian army that the enemy had been 
 beaten, driven back with enormous loss; and announced 
 that the hour was approaching "when the pride of the ene- 
 my will be lowered, their armies swept from our soil like 
 chaff blown away by the wind." 
 
 On September 5th the allies made an attack almost simul- 
 taneously upon the Malakoff and the Redan. It was agreed 
 that as soon as the French had got possession of the Mala- 
 koff the English should attack the Redan, the hoisting of 
 the French flag on the former fort to be the signal for our 
 men to move. The French were brilliantly successful in 
 their part of the attack, and in a quarter of an hour from 
 the beginning of the attempt the flag of the empire was 
 floating on the parapets. The English then at once ad- 
 vanced upon the Redan ; but it was a very different task 
 from that which the French had had to undertake. The 
 French were near the Malakoff; the English wore very far 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 515 
 
 away from the Redan. The distance our soldiers had to 
 traverse left them almost helplessly exposed to the Russian 
 fire. They stormed the parapets of the Redan despite all 
 the difficulties of their attack; but they were not able to 
 hold the place. The attacking party were far too small in 
 numbers; re-enforcements did not come in time; the English 
 held their own for an hour against odds that might have 
 seemed overwhelming; but it was simply impossible for 
 them to establish themselves in the Redan, and the remnant 
 of them that could withdraw had to retreat to the trenches. 
 It was only the old story of the war. Superb courage and 
 skill of officers and men ; outrageously bad generalship. 
 The attack might have been renewed that day, but the Eng- 
 lish commander-in- chief, General Simpson, declared with 
 naivete that the trenches were too crowded for him to do 
 anything. Thus the attack failed because there Avere too 
 few men, and could not be renewed because there were too 
 many. The cautious commander resolved to make another 
 attempt the next morning. But before the morrow came 
 there was nothing to attack. The Russians withdrew dur- 
 ing the night from the 1 south side of Sebastopol. A bridge 
 of boats had been constructed across the bay to connect the 
 north and the south sides of the city, and across this bridge 
 Prince Gortschakoff quietly withdrew his troops. The bom- 
 bardment kept up by the allies had been so terrible and so 
 close for several days, and their long-range guns were so en- 
 tirely superior to anything possessed by or, indeed, known 
 to the Russians, that the defences of the south side were be- 
 ing irreparably destroyed. The Russian general felt that it 
 would be impossible for him to hold the city much longer, 
 and that to remain there was only useless waste of life. 
 But, as he said in his own despatch, " it is not Sebastopol 
 which we have left to them, but the burning ruins of the 
 town, which we ourselves set fire to, having maintained the 
 honor of the defence in such a manner that our great-grand- 
 children may recall with pride the remembrance of it and 
 send it on to all posterity." It was some time before the al- 
 lies could venture to enter the abandoned city. The arsenals 
 and powder-magazines were exploding, the flames were burst- 
 ing out of every public building and every private house. 
 The Russians had made of Sebastopol another Moscow. 
 
516 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 With the close of that long siege, which had lasted nearly 
 a year, the war may be said to have ended. The brilliant 
 episode of Kars, its splendid defence and its final surrender, 
 was brought to its conclusion, indeed, after the fall of Se- 
 bastopol ; but, although it naturally attracted peculiar atten- 
 tion in this country, it could have no effect on the actual 
 fortunes of such a war. Kars was defended by Colonel 
 Fenwick Williams, an English officer, who had been sent, 
 all too late, to reorganize the Turkish forces in Armenia after 
 they had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Rus- 
 sians. Never, probably, had a man a more difficult task 
 than that which fell to the lot of Williams. He had to con- 
 tend against official stupidity, corruption, delay ; he could 
 get nothing done without having first to remove whole moun- 
 tains of obstruction, and to quicken into life and movement 
 an apathy which seemed like that of a paralyzed system. 
 He concentrated his efforts at last upon the defence of Kars, 
 and he held the place against overwhelming Russian forces, 
 and against an enemy far more appalling, starvation itself! 
 With his little garrison he repelled a tremendous attack of 
 the Russian army under General Mouravieff, in a battle that 
 lasted nearly seven hours, and as the result of which the 
 Russians left on the field more than five thousand dead. He 
 had to surrender at last to famine ; but the very articles 
 of surrender to which the conqueror consented became the 
 trophy of Williams and his men. The garrison were allow- 
 ed to leave the place with all the honors of war ; and, " as a 
 testimony to the valorous resistance made by the gai-rison 
 of Kars, the officers of all ranks are to keep their swords." 
 Williams and his English companions Colonel Lake, Major 
 Teesdale, Major Thompson, and Dr. Sand with had done as 
 much for the honor of their country at the close of the war 
 as Butler and Nasmyth had done at its opening. The cur- 
 tain of that great drama rose and fell upon a splendid scene 
 of English heroism. 
 
 The war was virtually over. Austria had been exerting 
 herself throughout its progress in the interests of peace, and 
 after the fall of Sebastopol she made a new effort with greater 
 success. Two of the belligerents were, indeed, now anxious 
 to be out of the struggle almost on any terms. These were 
 France and Russia. The new Emperor of Russia was not 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 517 
 
 a man personally inclined for war; nor had he his father's 
 overbearing and indomitable temper. He could not but see 
 that his father had greatly overrated the military strength 
 and resources of his country. He had accepted the war only 
 as a heritage of necessary evil, with little hope of any good 
 to come of it to Russia; and he welcomed any chance of 
 ending it on fair terms. France, or at least her Emperor, 
 was all but determined to get back again into peace. If 
 England had held out, it is highly probable that she would 
 have had to do so alone. For this, indeed, Lord Palmerston 
 was fully prepared as a last resource, sooner than submit to 
 terms which he considered unsatisfactory. He said so, and 
 lie meant it. " I can fancy," Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord 
 Clarendon in his bright, good-humored way, "how I should 
 be hooted in the House of Commons if I were to get up and 
 say that we had agreed to an imperfect and unsatisfactory 
 arrangement. ... I had better beforehand take the Chiltern 
 Hundreds." Lord Palmerston, however, had no occasion to 
 take the Chiltern Hundreds; the Congress of Paris opened 
 on February 26th, 1 856, and on March 30th the treaty of 
 peace was signed by the plenipotentiaries of the Great Pow- 
 ers. Prussia had been admitted to the Congress, which 
 therefore represented England, France, Austria, Prussia, Tur- 
 key, and Sardinia. 
 
 The treaty began by declaring that Kars was to be re- 
 stored to the Sultan, and that Sebastopol and all other 
 places taken by the allies were to be given back to Russia. 
 The Sublime Porte was admitted to participate in all the 
 advantages of the public law and system of Europe. The 
 other Powers engaged to respect the independence and ter- 
 ritorial integrity of Turkey. They guaranteed in common 
 the strict observance of that engagement, and announced 
 that they would in consequence consider any act tending 
 to a violation of it as a question of general interest. The 
 Sultan issued a firman for ameliorating the condition of his 
 Christian subjects, and communicated to the other Powers 
 the purposes of the firman " emanating spontaneously from 
 his sovereign will." No right of interference, it was dis- 
 tinctly specified, was given to the other Powers by this 
 concession on the Sultan's part. The article of the treaty 
 which referred to the Black Sea is of especial importance. 
 
518 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 "The Black Sea is neutralized; its waters and its ports, 
 thrown open to the mercantile marine of every nation, are 
 formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the flag of war, 
 either of the Powers possessing its coasts or of any other 
 Power, with the exceptions mentioned in articles fourteen 
 and nineteen." The exceptions only reserved the right of 
 each of the Powers to have the same number of small armed 
 vessels in the Black Sea to act as a sort of maritime police 
 and to protect the coasts. The Sultan and the Emperor en- 
 gaged to establish and maintain no military or maritime 
 arsenals in that sea. The navigation of the Danube was 
 thrown open. In exchange for the towns restored to him, 
 and in order more fully to secure the navigation of the 
 Danube, the Emperor consented to a certain rectification 
 of his frontier in Bessarabia, the territory ceded by Russia 
 to be annexed to Moldavia under the suzerainty of the 
 Porte. Moldavia and Wallachia, continuing under the su- 
 zerainty of the Sultan, were to enjoy all the privileges and 
 immunities they already possessed under the guarantee of 
 the contracting Powers, but with no separate right of inter- 
 vention in their affairs. The existing position of Servia was 
 assured. A convention respecting the Dardanelles and the 
 Bosphorus was made by all the Powers. By this conven- 
 tion the Sultan maintained the ancient rule prohibiting 
 ships of war of foreign Powers from entering the Straits 
 so long as the Porte is at peace. During time of peace the 
 Sultan engaged to admit no foreign ships of war into the 
 Bosphorus or the Dardanelles. The Sultan reserved to him- 
 self the right, as in former times, of delivering firmans of 
 passage for light vessels under the flag of war employed in 
 the service of foreign Powers; that is to say, of their diplo- 
 matic missions. A separate convention as to the Black Sea 
 between Russia and Turkey agreed that the contracting 
 parties should have in that sea six light steam- vessels of 
 not more than 800 tons, and four steam or sailing vessels 
 of not more than 200 tons each. 
 
 Thus the controversies about the Christian provinces, the 
 Straits, and the Black Sea were believed to be settled. The 
 great central business of the Congress, however, was to as- 
 sure the independence and the territorial integrity of Turkey, 
 now admitted to a place in the family of European States. 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 519 
 
 As it did not seem clear to those most particularly con- 
 cerned in bringing about this result that the arrangements 
 adopted in full congress had been sufficient to guarantee 
 Turkey from the enemy they most feared, there was a tri- 
 partite treaty afterward agreed to between England, France, 
 and Austria. This document bears date in Paris, April 15th, 
 1856; by it the contracting parties guaranteed jointly and 
 severally the independence and integrity of the Ottoman 
 empire, and declared that any infraction of the general treaty 
 of March 30th would be considered by them as casus belli. 
 It is probable that not one of the three contracting parties 
 was quite sincere in the making of this treaty. It appears 
 to have been done, at the instigation of Austria, much less 
 for the sake of Turkey than in order that she might have 
 some understanding of a special kind with some of the Great 
 Powers, and thus avoid the semblance of isolation which she 
 now especially dreaded, having Russia to fear on the one 
 side, and seeing Italy already raising its head on the other. 
 England did not particularly care about the tripartite treaty, 
 which was pressed upon her, and which she accepted trust- 
 ing that she might never have to act upon it; and France 
 accepted it without any liking for it, probably without the 
 least intention of ever acting on it. 
 
 The Congress was also the means of bringing about a 
 treaty between England and France and Sweden. By this 
 engagement Sweden undertook not to cede to Russia any 
 part of her present territories or any rights of fishery; and 
 the two other Powers agreed to maintain Sweden by force 
 against aggression. 
 
 The Congress of Paris was remarkable, too, for the fact 
 that the plenipotentiaries before separating came to an agree- 
 ment on the subject of the right of search, and the rules gen- 
 erally of maritime war. They agreed to the four following 
 declarations : " First, privateering is and remains abolished. 
 Second, the neutral flag covers enemies' goods, with the ex- 
 ception of contraband of war. Third, neutral goods, with 
 the exception of contraband of war, are not liable to capture 
 under an enemy's flag. Fourth, blockades, in order to be 
 binding, must be effective ; that is to say, maintained by a 
 force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy's coast." 
 At the opening of the war Great Britain had already virtu- 
 
520 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ally given up the claims she once made against neutrals, and 
 which were indeed untenable in the face of modern civiliza- 
 tion. She gladly agreed, therefore, to ratify, so far as her 
 declaration Avent, the doctrines which would abolish forever 
 the principle upon which those and kindred claims once 
 rested. It was agreed, however, that the rules adopted at 
 the Congress of Paris should only be binding on those States 
 that had acceded or should accede to them. The Govern- 
 ment of the United States had previously invited the great 
 European Powers, by a circular, to assent to the broad doc- 
 trine that free ships make free goods. At the instance of 
 England, it was answered that the adoption of that doctrine 
 must be conditional on America's renouncing the right of 
 privateering. To this the United States raised some diffi- 
 culty, and the declarations of the Congress were, therefore, 
 made without America's assenting to them. 
 
 With many other questions, too, the Congress of Paris oc- 
 cupied itself. At the instigation of Count Cavour the con- 
 dition of Italy was brought under its notice; and there can 
 be no doubt that out of the Congress, and the part that Sar- 
 dinia assumed as representative of Italian nationality, came 
 the great succession of events which ended in the establish- 
 ment of a King of Italy in the palace of the Quirinal. The 
 adjustment of the condition of the Danubian Principalities, 
 too, engaged much attention and discussion, and a highly in- 
 genious arrangement was devised for the purpose of keeping 
 those provinces from actual union, so that they might be co- 
 herent enough to act as a rampart against Russia, without 
 being so coherent as to cause Austria any alarm for her own 
 somewhat disjointed, not to say distracted, political system. 
 All these artificial and complex arrangements presently fell 
 to pieces, and the Principalities became in course of no very 
 long time an independent State under an hereditary prince. 
 But for the hour it was hoped that the independence of Tur- 
 key and the restriction of Russia, the security of the Chris- 
 tian provinces, the neutrality of the Black Sea, and the clos- 
 ing of the Straits against war vessels, had been bought by 
 the war. 
 
 England lost some twenty-four thousand men in the war; 
 of whom hardly a sixth fell in battle or died of wounds. 
 Cholera and other diseases gave grim account of the rest., 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 521 
 
 Forty-one millions of money were added by the campaign 
 to the national debt. Not much, it will be seen, was there 
 in the way of mere military glory to show for the cost. Our 
 fleets had hardly any chance of making their power felt. 
 The ships of the allies took Bomarsund in the Baltic, and 
 Kinburn in the Black Sea, and bombarded several places ; 
 but the war was not one that gave a chance to a Nelson, 
 even if a Nelson had been at hand. Among the accidental 
 and unpleasant consequences of the campaign it is worth 
 mentioning the quarrel in which England became involved 
 with the United States because of our Foreign Enlistment 
 Act. At the close of December, 1854, Parliament hurriedly 
 passed an Act authorizing the formation of a Foreign Legion 
 for service in the war, and some Swiss and Germans were 
 recruited who never proved of the slightest service. Prus- 
 sia and America both complained that the zeal of our re- 
 cruiting functionaries outran the limits of discretion and of 
 law. One of our consuls was actually put on trial at Co- 
 logne ; and America made a serious complaint of the enlist- 
 ment of her citizens. England apologized ; but the United 
 States were out of temper, and insisted on sending our min- 
 ister, Mr. Crampton, away from Washington, and some little 
 time passed before the friendly relations of the two States 
 were completely restored. 
 
 So the Crimean War ended. It was one of the unlucky 
 accidents of the hour tli.it the curtain fell in the Crimea 
 upon what may be considered a check to the arms of Eng- 
 land. There were not a few in this country who would 
 gladly have seen the peace negotiations fail, in order that 
 England might thereby have an opportunity of reasserting 
 her military supremacy in the eyes of Europe. Never dur- 
 ing the campaign, nor for a long time before it, had England 
 been in so excellent a condition for war as she was when the 
 warlike operations suddenly came to an end. The campaign 
 had, indeed, only been a training-time for us after the un- 
 nerving relaxation of a long peace. We had learned some 
 severe lessons from it; and not unnaturally there were im- 
 patient spirits who chafed at the idea of England's having 
 no opportunity of putting these lessons to account. It was 
 but a mere chance that prevented us from accomplishing 
 the capture of the Redan, despite the very serious disadvan- 
 
522 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 tages with which we were hampered in our enterprise, as 
 compared with our allies and their simultaneous operation. 
 With just a little better generalship the Redan would have 
 been taken; as it was, even with the generalship that we 
 had, the next attempt would not have been likely to fail. 
 But the Russians abandoned Sebastopol, and our principal 
 ally was even more anxious for peace than the enemy ; and 
 we had no choice but to accept the situation. The war had 
 never been popular in France. It had never had even that 
 amount of popularity which the French people accorded to 
 their Emperor's later enterprise, the campaign against Aus- 
 tria. Louis Napoleon had had all he wanted. He had 
 been received into the society of European sovereigns, and 
 he had made what the French public were taught to consid- 
 er a brilliant campaign. It is surprising to any one who 
 looks calmly back now on the history of the Crimean War 
 to find what an extravagant amount of credit the French 
 army obtained by its share in the operations. Even in this 
 country it was at the time an almost universal opinion that 
 the French succeeded in everything they tried; that their 
 system was perfect ; that their tactics were beyond improve- 
 ment; that they were a contrast to us in every respect. 
 Much of this absurd delusion was no doubt the result of a 
 condition of things amonjj us which no reasonable English- 
 
 O O 
 
 man would exchange for all the imaginary triumphs that a 
 court historiographer ever celebrated. It was due to the 
 fact that our system was open to the criticism of every pen 
 that chose to assail it. Not a spot in our military organi- 
 zation escaped detection and exposure. Every detail was 
 keenly criticised ; every weakness was laid open to public 
 observation. We invited all the world to see where we 
 were failing, and what were the causes of our failure. Our 
 journals did the work for the military system of England 
 that Matthew Arnold says Goethe did for the political and 
 social systems of Europe struck its finger upon the weak 
 places, " and said thou ailest here and there." While the 
 official and officious journals of the French empire were 
 sounding paeans to the honor of the Emperor and his suc- 
 cesses, to his generals, his officers, his commissariat, his trans- 
 port service, his soldiers, his camp, pioneers, and all, our lead- 
 ing papers of all shades of politics were only occupied in 
 
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR. 523 
 
 pointing out defects, and blaming those who did not instant- 
 ly remedy them. Unpatriotic conduct, it may be said. Ay, 
 truly, if the conduct of the doctor be unfriendly when he 
 tells that we have the symptoms of failing health, and warns 
 us to take some measures for rest and renovation. Some of 
 the criticisms of the English press were undoubtedly inaccu- 
 rate and rash. But their general effect was bracing, health- 
 ful, successful. Their immediate result was that which has 
 already been indicated to leave the English army at the 
 close of the campaign far better able to undertake prolonged 
 and serious operations of war than it had been at any time 
 during the campaign's continuance. For the effect of the 
 French system on the French army we should have to come 
 down a little later in history, and study the workings of Im- 
 perialism as they displayed themselves in the confidence, the 
 surprises, and the collapse of 1870. 
 
 Still, there was a feeling of disappointment in this country 
 at the close of the war. This was partly due to dissatisfac- 
 tion with the manner in which we had carried on the cam- 
 paign, and partly to distrust of its political results. Our 
 soldiers had done splendidly; but our generals and our sys- 
 tem had done poorly indeed. Only one first-class reputation 
 of a military order had come out of the war, and that was 
 by the common consent of the world awarded to a Russian 
 to General Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol. No 
 new name was made on our side or on that of the French; 
 and some promising or traditional reputations were shatter- 
 ed. The political results of the war were to many minds 
 equally unsatisfying. We had gone into the enterprise for 
 two things to restrain the aggressive and aggrandizing 
 spirit of Russia, and to secure the integrity and indepen- 
 dence of Turkey as a Power capable of upholding herself with 
 credit among the States of Europe. Events which happen- 
 ed more than twenty years later will have to be studied be- 
 fore any one can form a satisfactory opinion as to the degree 
 of success which attended each of these objects. For the 
 present, it is enough to say that there was not among 
 thoughtful minds at the time a very strong conviction of 
 success either way. Lord Aberdeen had been modest in his 
 estimate of what the war would do. He had never had any 
 heart in it, and he was not disposed to exaggerate its be- 
 
524 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 neficent possibilities. He estimated that it might perhaps 
 secure peace in the East of Europe for some twenty -five 
 years. His modest expectation was prophetic. Indeed, it a 
 little overshot the mark. Twenty-two years after the close 
 of the Crimean campaign Russia and Turkey were at war 
 asrain. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 TUB LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 
 
 THE close of the Crimean War is a great landmark in the 
 reign of Queen Victoria. This, therefore, is a convenient 
 opportunity to cast a glance back upon the literary achieve- 
 ments of a period so markedly divided in political interest 
 from any that went before it. The reign of Queen Victoria 
 is the first in which the constitutional and Parliamentary 
 system of government came fairly and completely into rec- 
 ognition. It is also the reign which had the good fortune 
 to witness the great modern development in all that relates 
 to practical invention, and more especially in the application 
 of science to the work of making communication rapid be- 
 tween men. On land and ocean, in air and under the sen, 
 the history of rapid travel and rapid interchange of message 
 coincides with that of the present reign. Such a reign 
 ought to have a distinctive literature. So, in truth, it has. 
 Of course it is somewhat bold to predict long and distinct 
 renown for contemporaries or contemporary schools. But 
 it may, perhaps, be assumed without any undue amount of 
 speculative venturesomeness that the age of Queen Victoria 
 will stand out in history as the period of a literature as dis- 
 tinct from others as the age of Elizabeth or Anne ; although 
 not, perhaps, equal in greatness to the latter, and far indeed 
 below the former. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign 
 a great race of literary men had come to a close. It is cu- 
 rious to note how sharply and completely the literature of 
 Victoria separates itself from that of the era whose heroes 
 were Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. Before Queen Vic- 
 toria came to the throne, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats 
 were dead. Wordsworth lived, indeed, for many years after; 
 so did Southcy and Moore; and Savage Landor died much 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 525 
 
 later still. But Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Landor 
 had completed their literary work before Victoria came to 
 the throne. Not one of them added a cubit or an inch to 
 his intellectual stature from that time ; some of them even 
 did work which distinctly proved that their day was done. 
 A new and fresh breath was soon after breathed into litera- 
 ture. Nothing, perhaps, is more remarkable about the bet- 
 ter literature of the age of Queen Victoria than its complete 
 severance from the leadership of that which had gone before 
 it, and its evidence of a fresh and genuine inspiration. It is 
 a somewhat curious fact, too, very convenient for the pur- 
 poses of this history, that the literature of Queen Victoria's 
 time thus far divides itself clearly enough into two parts. 
 The poets, novelists, and historians who were making their 
 fame with the beginning of the reign had done all their best 
 work and made their mark before these later years, and were 
 followed by a new and different school, drawing inspiration 
 from wholly different sources, and challenging comparison 
 as antagonists rather than disciples. 
 
 We speak now only of literature. In science the most re- 
 markable developments were reserved for the later years of 
 the reign. We use the words "remarkable developments" 
 in the historical rather than in the scientific sense. It 
 would be hardly possible to overrate the benefits conferred 
 upon science and the world by some of the scientific men 
 who made the best part of their fame in the earlier years of 
 the reign. Some great names at once start to the memory. 
 We think of Brewster, the experimental philosopher, who 
 combined in so extraordinary a degree the strictest severi- 
 ty of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy 
 and imagination which lent picturesqueness to all his illus- 
 trations, and invested his later writings especially with an in- 
 definable charm. We think of Michael Faraday, the chem- 
 ist and electrician, who knew so well how to reconcile the 
 boldest researches into the heights and deeps of science with 
 the sincerest spirit of faith and devotion ; the memory of 
 whose delightful improvisations on the science he loved to 
 expound must remain forever with all who had the privilege 
 of hearing the unrivalled lecturer deliver his annual dis- 
 courses at the Royal Institution. It is not likely that the 
 name of Sir John Herschel, a gifted member of a gifted fam- 
 
526 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ily, would be forgotten by any one taking even the hastiest 
 glance at the science of our time a family of whom it may 
 truly be said, as the German prose-poet says of his dream- 
 ing hero, that their eyes were among the stars and their 
 souls in the blue ether. Richard Owen's is, in another field 
 of knowledge, a great renown. Owen has been called the 
 Cuvier of England and the Newton of natural history, and 
 there cannot be any doubt that his researches and discov- 
 eries as an anatomist and palaeontologist have marked a dis- 
 tinct era in the development of the study to which he de- 
 voted himself. Hugh Miller, the author of " The Old Red 
 Sandstone " and " The Testimony of the Rocks," the devotee 
 and unfortunately the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought 
 a fresh and brilliant literary abilit)'-, almost as untutored 
 and spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman, Rob- 
 ert Burns, to bear on the exposition of the studies to which 
 he literally sacrificed his life. If, therefore, we say that the 
 later period of Queen Victoria's reign is more remarkable in 
 science than the former, it is not because we would assert 
 that the men of this later day contributed in richer measure 
 to the development of human knowledge, and especially of 
 practical science, than those of the earlier time ; but it was 
 in the later period that the scientific controversies sprang 
 up, and the school arose which will be, in the historian's 
 sense, most closely associated with the epoch. The value 
 of the labors of men like Owen and Faraday and Brewster 
 is often to be appreciated thoroughly by scientific students 
 alone. What they have done is to be recorded in the his- 
 tory of science rather than in the general and popular his- 
 tory of a day. But the school of scientific thought which 
 Darwin founded, and in which Huxley and Tyndall taught, 
 is the subject of a controversy which may be set down as 
 memorable in the history of the world. All science and all 
 common life accepted with gratitude and without contest 
 the contributions made to our knowledge by Faraday and 
 Brewster; but the theories of Darwin divided the scientific 
 world, the religious world, and indeed all society, into two 
 hostile camps, and so became an event in history which the 
 historian can no more pass over than, in telling of the growth 
 of the United States, he could omit any mention of the 
 great Civil War. Even in dealing with the growth of sci- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 527 
 
 ence, it is on the story of battles that the attention of the 
 outer world must, to the end of time, be turned with the 
 keenest interest. This is, one might almost think, a scien- 
 tific law in itself, with which it would be waste of time to 
 quarrel. 
 
 The earlier part of the reign was richer in literary genius 
 than the later has thus far been. Of course the dividing line 
 which we draw is loosely drawn, and may sometimes appear 
 to be capricious. Some of those who won their fame in the 
 earlier part continued active workers, in certain instances 
 steadily adding to their celebrity, through the succeeding 
 years. The figure of Thomas Carlyle is familiar still to all 
 who live in the neighborhood of Chelsea. It was late in the 
 reign of Victoria that Stuart Mill came out for the first time 
 on a public platform in London, after a life divided between 
 official work and the most various reading and study; a life 
 divided, too, between the seclusion of Blackheath and the 
 more poetic seclusion of Avignon, among the nightingales 
 Avhose song was afterward so sweet to his dying ears. He 
 came, strange and shy, into a world which knew him only in 
 his books, and to which the gentle and grave demeanor of 
 the shrinking and worn recluse seemed out of keeping with 
 the fearless brain and heart which his career as a thinker 
 proved him to have. The reign had run for forty years when 
 Harriet Martineau was taken from that beautiful and ro- 
 mantic home in the bosom of the Lake country to Avhich her 
 celebrity had drawn so many famous visitors for so long a 
 time. The renown of Dickens began with the reign, and his 
 death was sadly premature when he died in his quaint and 
 charming home at Gad's Hill, in the country of Falstaff and 
 Prince Hal, some thirty-three years after. Mrs. Browning 
 passed away very prematurely; but it might welLbe con- 
 tended that the fame, or at least the popularity, of Robert 
 Browning belongs to this later part of the reign, even though 
 his greatest work belongs to the earlier. The author of the 
 most brilliant and vivid book of travel known in our modern 
 English, "Eothen," made a sudden renown in the earlier part 
 of the reign, and achieved a new and a different sort of re- 
 pute as the historian of the Crimean War during the later 
 part. Still, if we take the close of the Crimean War as an 
 event dividing the reign thus far into two parts, we shall 
 
528 A HISTORY OF OUK OWN TIMES. 
 
 find that there does seem a tolerably clear division between 
 the literature of the two periods. We have, therefore, put 
 in this first part of our history the men and women who had 
 distinctly made their mark in these former years, and who 
 would have been famous if from that time out they had done 
 nothing more. It is with this division borne in mind that 
 we describe the reign as more remarkable in the literature 
 of the earlier and in the science of these later years. It is 
 not rash to say that, although poets, historians, and novel- 
 ists of celebrity came afterward, and may come yet, the lit- 
 erature of our time gave its measure, as the French phrase 
 is, in that earlier period. 
 
 Alike in its earlier passages and in its later the reign is 
 rich in historical labors. The names of Grote, Macaulay, 
 and Carlyle occur at once to the mind when we survey the 
 former period. Mr. Grote's history of Greece is, indeed, a 
 monumental piece of work. It has all that patience and ex- 
 haustive care which principally mark the German historians, 
 and it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally 
 in the representatives of what Carlyle has called the Dryas- 
 dust school. Grote threw himself completely into the life 
 and the politics of Athens. It Was said of him with some 
 truth that he entered so thoroughly into all the political 
 life of Greece as to become now and then the partisan of 
 this or that public man. His own practical acquaintance 
 with politics was undoubtedly of great service to him. We 
 have all grown somewhat tired of hearing the words of 
 Gibbon quoted in which he tells us that "the discipline and 
 evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion 
 of the phalanx and the legion ; and the captain of the Hamp- 
 shire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been use- 
 less to the historian of the Roman Empire." Assuredly the 
 practical knowledge of politics which Grote acquired during 
 the nine or ten years of his Parliamentary career Avas of 
 much service to the historian of Greece. It has been said, 
 indeed, of him that he never could quite keep from regard- 
 ing the struggles of parties in Athens as exactly illustrating 
 the principles disputed between the Liberals and the Tories 
 in England. It does not seem to us, however, that his polit- 
 ical career affected his historical studies in any way but by 
 throwing greater vitality and nervousness into his descrip- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGK FIRST SURVEY. 529 
 
 tions of Athenian controversies. The difference between a 
 man who has mingled anywhere in the active life of politics, 
 and one who only knows that life from books and the talk 
 of others, is specially likely to show itself in such a study as 
 Grote's history. His political training enabled Grote to see 
 in the statesmen and soldiers of the Greek peoples men, 
 and not trees, walking. It taught him how to make the dry 
 'bones live. Mr. Grote began life as what would have been 
 called in later years a Philosophical Radical. He was a 
 close friend of Stuart Mill, although he did not always agree 
 with Mill in his opinions. During his Parliamentary career 
 he devoted himself, for the most part, to the advocacy of the 
 system of vote by ballot. He brought forward a motion on 
 the subject every session, as Mr. Charles Villiers did at one 
 time for the repeal of the Corn-laws. He only gave up the 
 House of Commons in order that he might be free to com- 
 plete his great history. He did not retain all his radical 
 opinions to the end of his life so thoroughly as Mill did, but 
 owned with a certain regret that in many ways his views 
 had undergone modification, and that he grew less and less 
 ardent for political change, less hopeful, we may suppose, of 
 the amount of good to be done for human happiness and 
 virtue by the spread and movement of what are now called 
 advanced opinions. It must be owned that it takes a very 
 vigorous and elastic mind to enable a man to resist the 
 growth of that natural and physical tendency toward con- 
 servatism or reaction which comes with advancing years. 
 It is as well for society, on the whole, that this should be so, 
 and that the elders, as a rule, should form themselves into a 
 guard to challenge very pertinaciously all the eager claims 
 and demands for change made by hopeful and restless youth. 
 No one would more readily have admitted the advantage 
 that may come from this common law of life than Grote's 
 friend, Mill ; although Mill remained to the close of his ca- 
 reer as full of hope in the movement of liberal opinions as 
 he had been in his boyhood ; still, to quote from some noble 
 words of Schiller, " reverencing as a man the dreams of his 
 youth." In his later years Grote withdrew from all connec- 
 tion with active political controversy, and was, indeed, curi- 
 ously ignorant of the very bearings of some of the greatest 
 questions around the settlement of which the passions and 
 I. 23 
 
530 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 interests of another hemisphere were brought into fierce and 
 vast dispute. 
 
 We have already had occasion more than once to speak 
 of Macaulay, the great Parliamentary debater and states- 
 man. It is the less necessary *to say much of him as a 
 historian; for Macaulay will be remembered rather as a 
 man who could do many things brilliantly than as the au- 
 thor of a history. Yet Macaulay's "History of England," 
 whatever its defects, is surely entitled to rank as a great 
 work. We do not know whether grave scholars will regard 
 it as to the honor of the book or the reverse, that it was by 
 far the most popular historical essay ever produced by an 
 Englishman. The successive volumes of Macaulay's "His- 
 tory of England" were run after as the Waverley Novels 
 might have been at the zenith of their author's fame. Liv- 
 ing England talked for the time of nothing but Macaulay's 
 " England." Certainly history had never before in our 
 country been treated in a style so well calculated to ren- 
 der it at once popular, fascinating, and fashionable. Every 
 chapter glittered with vivid and highly colored description. 
 On almost -every page was found some sentence of glowing 
 eloquence or gleaming antithesis, which at once lent itself 
 to citation and repetition. Not one word of it could have 
 failed to convey its meaning. The whole stood out in an 
 atmosphere clear, bright, and incapable of misty illusion as 
 that of a Swiss lake in summer. No shade or faint haze 
 of a doubt appeared anywhere. The admirer of Macaulay 
 had all the comfort in his studies that a votary of the Ro- 
 man Catholic Church may have. He had an infallible guide. 
 He had no need to vex himself with doubt, speculation, or 
 even conjecture. This absolute certainty about everything 
 was, beyond question, one great source of Macaulay's popu- 
 larity. That resolute conviction which readers of a more 
 intellectual class are especially inclined to distrust has the 
 same charm for the ordinary reader that it has for children, 
 Avho never care to hear any story if they suppose the nar- 
 rator does not know all about it in such a way as to render 
 question or contradiction impossible. But although this 
 was one of the causes of Macaulay's popularity, it was not 
 the most substantial cause. The brilliancy of his style, the 
 variety and aptness of his illustrations, and the animated 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 531 
 
 manner in which lie contrived to set his ideas of men, places, 
 and events before the reader these were among the sources 
 of success to which his admirers must look with the greatest 
 satisfaction. It is of late somewhat the fashion to disparage 
 Macaulay. He was a popular idol so long that in the natu- 
 ral course of things it has come to him to have his title to 
 worship, or even to faith, very generally questioned. To 
 be unreasonably admired by one generation is to incur the 
 certainty of being unreasonably disparaged by the next. The 
 tendency of late is to assume that because Macaulay was 
 brilliant he must necessarily be superficial. But Macaulay 
 was not superficial. He Avas dogmatic ; he was full of prej- 
 udice ; he was in all respects a better advocate than judge; 
 he was wanting in the calm, impartial balancing faculty 
 which a historian of the highest class ought to have; but 
 he was not superficial. No man could make out a better 
 and stronger case for any side of a controversy which he 
 was led to espouse. He was not good at drawing or explain- 
 ing complex characters. He loved, indeed, to picture con- 
 tradictory and paradoxical characters. Nothing delighted 
 him more than to throw off an animated description of some 
 great person, who having been shown in the first instance 
 to possess one set of qualities in extreme prominence, was 
 then shown to have a set of exactly antagonistic qualities in 
 quite equal prominence. This was not describing a complex 
 character. It was merely embodying a paradox. It was to 
 " solder close," as Timon of Athens says, " impossibilities and 
 make them kiss." There was something too much of trick 
 about this, although it was often done with so much power 
 as to bewilder the better judgment of the calmest reader. 
 But where Macaulay happened to be right in his view of a 
 man or an event, he made his convictions clear with an im- 
 pressiveness and a brilliancy such as no modern writer has 
 surpassed. The world owes him something for having pro- 
 tested by precept and example against the absurd notion 
 that the " dignity of history " required of historians to be 
 grave, pompous, and dull. He was not a Gibbon, but he 
 wrote with all Gibbon's delight in the picturesqueness of a 
 subject, and Gibbon's resolve to fascinate as well as to in- 
 struct his readers. Macaulay's history tries too much to be 
 a historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style 
 
532 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated 
 in Macaulay's sparkling pages. But it is something to know 
 that their splendid qualities are far more conspicuous still 
 than their defects. Perhaps very recent readers of history, 
 too, may feel disposed to be grateful to Macaulay for having 
 written without any profound philosophical theory to ex- 
 pound. He told history like a story. He warmed up as he 
 went along, and grew enamored, as a rornancist does, of this 
 character and angry with that other. No doubt he fre- 
 quently thus did harm to the trustworthiness of his narra- 
 tive where it had to deal with disputed questions, although 
 lie probably enhanced the charms of his animated style. But 
 he did not set out with a mission to expound some theory 
 as to a race or a tendency, and therefore pledged beforehand 
 to bend all facts of the physical, the political, and the moral 
 world to the duty of bearing witness for him, and proclaim- 
 ing the truth of his message to mankind. 
 
 Macaulay was not exactly what the Germans would call 
 a many-sided man. He never was anything but the one 
 Macaulay in all he did or attempted. But he did a great 
 many things well. Nothing that he ever attempted was 
 done badly. He was as successful in the composition of a 
 pretty valentine for a little girl as he was in his history, his 
 essays, his "Lays of Ancient Rome," and his Parliamentary 
 speeches. In everything he attempted he went very near to 
 that success which true genius achieves. In everything he 
 just fell short of that achievement. But he so nearly at- 
 tained it that the reader who takes np one of Macaulay's 
 books or speeches for the first time is almost sure to believe, 
 under the influence of the instant impression, that the genu- 
 \ie inspiration is there. Macaulay is understood to have for 
 a long time thought of writing a romance. If he had done 
 so, we may feel sure that many intelligent readers would 
 have believed, on the first perusal of it, that it was almost 
 on a level with Scott, and only as the first impression gradu- 
 ally faded, and they came to read it over again, have found 
 out that Macaulay was not a Scott in fiction any more than 
 he was a Burke in eloquence or a Gibbon in history. He 
 filled for a long time a larger space in the public mind than 
 any other literary man in England, and his style greatly af- 
 fected literary men. But his influence did not pierce deeply 
 
LITERATURE OF THE KEIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 533 
 
 down into public feeling and thought as that of one or tjvo 
 other men of the same period undoubtedly did, and does still. 
 He did not impress the very soul of English feeling as Mr. 
 Carlylc, for example, has done. 
 
 No influence suffused the age from first to last more strong- 
 ly than that of Thomas Carlyle. England's very way of 
 thinking was at one time profoundly affected by Carlyle. 
 He introduced the English people to the great German au- 
 thors, very much as Lessing had introduced the Germans to 
 Shakspeare and the old English ballads. Carlyle wrote in 
 a style which was so little like that ordinarily accepted as 
 English, that the best thing to be said for it was that it was 
 not exactly German. At one time it appeared to be so com- 
 pletely moulded on that of Jean Paul Richter, that not a few 
 persons doubted whether the new-comer really had any ideas 
 of his own. But Carlyle soon proved that he could think 
 for himself; and he very often proved it by thinking wrong. 
 There was in him a strong, deep vein of the poetic. Long 
 after he had evidently settled down to be a writer of prose 
 and nothing else, it still seemed to many that his true sphere 
 was poetry. The grim seriousness which he had taken from 
 his Scottish birth and belongings was made hardly less grim 
 by the irony which continually gleamed or scowled through 
 it. Truth and force were the deities of Carlyle's especial 
 worship. "The eternal verities " sat on the top of his Olym- 
 pus. To act out the truth in life, and make others act it out, 
 would require some force more strong, ubiquitous, and pene- 
 trating than we can well obtain from the slow deliberations 
 of an ordinary Parliament, with its debates and divisions and 
 everlasting formulas. Therefore, to enforce his eternal veri- 
 ties, Carlyle always preached up and yearned for the strong 
 man, the poem in action, whom the world in our day had not 
 found, and perhaps could not appreciate. If this man were 
 found, it would be his duty and his privilege to drill us all as 
 in some vast camp, and compel us to do the right thing to his 
 dictation. It cannot be doubted that this preaching of the di- 
 vine right offeree had a serious and sometimes a very detri- 
 mental effect upon the public opinion of England. It degener- 
 ated often into affectation, alike with the teacher and the dis- 
 ciples. But the influence of Carlyle in preaching earnestness 
 and truth, in art and letters and everything else, had a healthy 
 
534 A HISTORY OP OUIl OWN TIMES. 
 
 and very remarkable effect entirely outside the regions of 
 the moralist, who in this country at least lias always taught 
 the same lesson. It is not probable that individual men 
 were made much more truthful in England by Carlyle's glo- 
 rification of the eternal verities than they would have been 
 without it. But his influence on letters and art was pecul- 
 iar, and was not evanescent. Carlyle is distinctly the found- 
 er of a school of history and a school of art. In the mean 
 while we may regard him simply as a great author, and treat 
 his books as literary studies, and not as gospels. Thus re- 
 garded, we shall find that he writes in a style which every 
 sober critic would feel bound to condemn, but which nev- 
 ertheless the soberest critic is forced continually, despite of 
 himself and his rules, to admire. For out of the strano-c iar- 
 
 n d 
 
 gon which he seems to have deliberately adopted, Carlyle 
 has undoubtedly constructed a wonderfully expressive me- 
 dium in which to speak his words of remonstrance and ad- 
 monition. It is a mannerism, but. a mannerism into which 
 a great deal of the individuality of the man seems to have 
 entered. It is not wholly affectation or superficiality. Car- 
 lyle's own soul seems to speak out in it more freely and 
 strenuously than it would in the ordinary English of socie- 
 ty and literature. No tongue, says Richter, is eloquent save 
 in its own language; and this strange language which he 
 
 ^ O * O O O 
 
 has made for himself does really appear to be the native 
 tongue of Carlyle's powerful and melancholy eloquence. 
 Carlyle is endowed with a marvellous power of depicting 
 stormy scenes and rugged, daring natures. At times strange, 
 wild, piercing notes of the pathetic are heard through his 
 strenuous and fierce bursts of eloquence, like the wail of a 
 clarion thrilling between the blasts of a storm. His history 
 of the French Revolution is history read by lightning. Of 
 this remarkable book John Stuart Mill supplied the princi- 
 pal material ; for Mill at one time thought of writing a his- 
 tory of the Revolution himself, but, giving up the idea, placed 
 the materials he had collected at the service of Carlyle. Car- 
 lyle used the materials in his own way. He is indebted to 
 no one for his method of making up his history. With all 
 its defects, the book is one of the very finest our age has 
 produced. Its characters stand out like portraits by Rem- 
 brandt. Its crowds live and move. The picture of Mira- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 535 
 
 beau is worthy of the hand of the great German poet who 
 gave us Wallenstein. But Carlyle's style has introduced 
 into this country a thoroughly false method of writing his- 
 tory. It is a method which has little regard for the " dry 
 light " which Bacon approved. It works under the varying 
 glare of colored lights. Its purpose is to express scorn of 
 one set of ideas and men, and admiration of another. Given 
 the man we admire, then all his doings and ways must be 
 admirable; and the historian proceeds to work this princi- 
 ple out. Carlyle's Mirabeau is as truly a creature of ro- 
 mance as the Monte Christo of Dumas. This way of go- 
 ing to work became even more apparent, as the mannerisms 
 became more incessant, in Carlyle's later writings in the 
 " Frederick the Great," for example. The reader dares not 
 trust such history. It is of little value as an instructor in 
 the lessons of the times and events it deals with. It only 
 tells us what Carlyle thought of the times and the events, 
 and the men who were the chief actors in them. Nor does 
 Carlyle bequeath many new ideas to the world which he 
 stirred by his stormy eloquence. That falsehood cannot pre- 
 vail over truth in the end, nor simulacra do the work of re- 
 alities, is not, after all, a lesson which earth can be said to 
 have waited for up to the nineteenth century and the com- 
 ing of Carlyle ; and yet it would be hard to point to any 
 other philosophical outcome of Mr. Carlyle's teaching. His 
 value is in his eloquence, his power, his passion, and pathos; 
 his stirring and life-like pictures of human character, whether 
 faithful to the historical originals or not; and the vein of 
 poetry which runs through all his best writings, and some- 
 times makes even the least sympathetic reader believe that 
 he has to do with a genuine poet. 
 
 In strongest contrast to the influence of Carlyle may be 
 set the influence of Mill. Except where the professed teach- 
 ers of religious creeds are concerned, there can be fcmnd no 
 other man in the reign of Victoria who had anything like the 
 influence over English thought that Mill and Carlyle pos- 
 sessed. Mill was a devoted believer in the possibilities of 
 human nature and of liberty. If Rousseau was the apostle 
 of affliction, Mill was surely the apostle of freedom. He be- 
 lieved that human society might be brought to something 
 not far removed from perfection by the influence of educa- 
 
536* A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 tiou and of freedom acting on the best impulses and disci- 
 plining the emotions of men and women. Mill was a strange 
 blending of political economist and sentimentalist. It was 
 not altogether in humorous exaggeration that somebody said 
 he was Adam Smith and Petrarch in one. The curious se- 
 clusion in which he was brought up by his father, the won- 
 derful discipline of study to which in his very infancy he 
 was subjected, would have made something strange and 
 striking out of a commonplace nature; and Mill was in any 
 case a man of genius. There was an antique simplicity and 
 purity about his life which removed him altogether from the 
 ways of ordinary society. But the defect of his teaching as 
 an ethical guide was that he made too little allowance for 
 the influence of ordinary society. He always seemed to act 
 on the principle that with true education and noble example 
 the most commonplace men could be persuaded to act like 
 heroes, and to act like heroes always. The great service 
 which he rendered to the world in his "Political Economy" 
 and his "System of Logic" is of course independent of his 
 controverted theories and teachings. These works would, 
 if they were all he had written, place him in the very front 
 rank of English thinkers and instructors. But these only 
 represent half of his influence on the public opinion of his 
 time. His faith in the principle of human liberty led him to 
 originate the movement for what is called the emancipation 
 of women. Opinions will doubtless long differ as to the ad- 
 vantages of the movement, but there can be no possible dif- 
 ference of judgment as to the power and fascination of Mill's 
 advocacy and the influence he exercised. He did not suc- 
 ceed, in his admirable essay " On Liberty," in establishing 
 the rule. or principle by which men may decide between the 
 right of free expression of opinion and the right of authority 
 to ordain silence. Probably no precise boundary line can 
 ever be drawn; and in this, as in so much else, law-makers 
 and peoples must be content with a compromise. But Mill's 
 is at least a noble plea for the fullest possible liberty of ut- 
 terance; and he has probably carried the argument as far as 
 it ever can be carried. There never was a more lucid and 
 candid reasoner. The most difficult and abstruse questions 
 became clear by the light of his luminous exposition. Some- 
 thing, too, of human interest and sympathy became infused 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 537 
 
 into the most seemingly arid discussions of political econ- 
 omy by the virtue of his emotional and half poetic nature. 
 It was well said of him that he reconciled political economy 
 with human feeling. His style was clear as light. Mill, said 
 one of his critics, lives in light. Sometimes his language 
 rose to a noble and dignified eloquence; here and there are 
 passages of a grave, keen irony. Into the questions of relig- 
 ious belief which arise in connection with his works it is no 
 part of our business to enter; but it may be remarked that 
 his latest writings seem to show that his views were under- 
 going much modification in his closing years. His oppo- 
 nents would have allowed as readily as his supporters that 
 no man could have been more sincerely inspired with a de- 
 sire to arrive at the truth ; and that none could be more res- 
 olute to follow the course which his conscience told him to 
 be right. He carried this resolute principle into his warm- 
 est controversies, and it was often remarked that he usually 
 began by stating the case of the adversary better than the 
 adversary could have done it for himself. Applying to his 
 own character the same truthful method of inquiry which he 
 applied to others, Mill has given a very accurate description 
 of one, at least, of the qualities by which he was able to ac- 
 complish so much. He tells us in his Autobiography that 
 he had from an early period considered that the most useful 
 part he could take in the domain of thought was that of an 
 interpreter of original thinkers, and mediator between them 
 and the public. "I had always a humble opinion of my own 
 powers as an original thinker, except in abstract science 
 (logic, metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of political 
 economy and politics), but thought myself much superior to 
 most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn 
 from everybody; as I found hardly any one who made such 
 a point of examining what was said in defence of all opin- 
 ions, however new or however old, in the conviction that 
 even if they were errors there might be a substratum of truth 
 underneath them, and that in any case the discovery of what 
 it was that made them plausible would be a benefit to 
 truth." This was not assuredly Mill's greatest merit, but it 
 was, perhaps, his most peculiar quality. He was an original 
 thinker, despite his own sincere disclaimer; but he founded 
 no new system. He could be trusted to examine and ex- 
 
 23* 
 
588 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 pound any system with the most perfect fairness and can- 
 dor; and, even where it was least in harmony with his own 
 ideas, to do the fullest justice to every one of its claims. 
 
 Harriet Martineau's career as a woman of letters and a 
 teacher began, indeed, before the reign of Queen Victoria, but 
 it was carried on almost without interruption during nearly 
 forty years of the reign. She was political economist, novel- 
 ist, historian, biographer, and journalist; and in no path did 
 she fail to make her mark. Few women could have turned 
 to the occupations of a political writer under greater phys- 
 ical disadvantages; and no man in this line of life, however 
 well furnished by nature with physical and intellectual qual- 
 ifications for success, could have done better work. She 
 wrote some exquisite little stories, and one or two novels of 
 more ambitious character. It is praise enough to give them 
 when we say that, although fiction certainly was not work 
 for which she was most especially qualified, yet what she 
 did seems to be destined to live and hold a place in our lit- 
 erature. She was, so far as we know, the only Englishwom- 
 an who ever achieved distinct and great success as a writer 
 of leading articles for a daily newspaper. Her strong preju- 
 dices and dislikes prevent her from being always regarded 
 as a trustworthy historian. Her "History of the Thirty 
 Years' Peace" for it may be regarded as wholly hers, al- 
 though Charles Knight began it is a work full of vigorous 
 thought and clear description, with here and there passages 
 of genuine eloquence. But it is marred in its effect as a 
 trustworthy narrative by the manner in which the authoress 
 yields here and there to inveterate and wholesale dislikes; 
 and sometimes, though not so often or so markedly, to an 
 overwrought hero-worship. Miss Martineau had, to a great 
 extent, an essentially masculine mind. She was often re- 
 proached with being nnfeminine; and assuredly she would 
 have been surprised to hear that there was anything woman- 
 ish in her way of criticising public events and men. Yet in 
 reading her "History" one is sometimes amused to find that 
 that partisanship which is commonly set down as a specially 
 feminine quality affects her estimate of a statesman. Hers 
 is not by any means the Carlylean way of starting with a 
 theory and finding all virtue and glory in the man who 
 seems to embody it, and all baseness and stupidity in his 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 539 
 
 opponents. But when she takes a dislike to a particular 
 individual, she seems to assume that where he Avas wrong 
 lie must have been wrong of set malign purpose, and that 
 where he chanced to be in the right it was in mistake, and 
 in despite of his own greater inclination to be in the wrong. 
 It is fortunate that these dislikes are not many, and also 
 that they soon show themselves, and therefore cease to be 
 seriously misleading. In all other respects the book well 
 deserves careful study. The life of the woman is a study 
 still more deeply interesting. Others of her sex there were 
 of greater genius, even in her own time; but no English- 
 woman ever followed with such perseverance and success a 
 career of literary and political labor. 
 
 "The blue-peter has long been flying at my foremast, and, 
 now that I am in my ninety-second j'ear, I must soon expect 
 the signal for sailing." In this quaint and cheery way Mary 
 Somerville, many years after the period at which we have 
 now arrived in this work, described her condition and her 
 quiet waiting for death. No one surely could have better 
 earned the right to die by the labors of a long life devoted 
 to the education and the improvement of her kind. Mary 
 Somerville has probably no rival among women as a scientif- 
 ic scholar. Her summary of Laplace's "Mecanique Celeste," 
 her treatise on the "Connection of the Physical Sciences," 
 and her "Physical Geography," would suffice to place any 
 student, man or woman, in the foremost rank of scientific ex- 
 pounders. The "Physical Geography" is the only one of 
 Mrs. Somerville's remarkable works which was published in 
 the reign of Queen Victoria; but the publication of the oth- 
 er two preceded the opening of the reign by so short a time, 
 and her career and her fame so entirely belong to the Vic- 
 torian period, that, even if the "Physical Geography" had 
 never been published, she must be included in this history. 
 "I was intensely ambitious," Mrs. Somerville says of herself 
 in her earlier days, " to excel in something, for I felt in my 
 own breast that women were capable of taking a higher 
 place in creation than that assigned to them in my early 
 days, which was very low." It is not exaggeration to say 
 that Mrs. Somerville distinctly raised the world's 'estimate 
 of woman's capacity for the severest and the loftiest scien- 
 tific pursuits. She possessed the most extraordinary power 
 
540 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of concentration, amounting to an entire absorption in the 
 subject which she happened to be studying, to the exclusion 
 of all disturbing sights and sounds. She had in a supreme 
 degree that which Carlyle calls the first quality of genius, 
 an immense capacity for taking trouble. She had also, hap- 
 pily for herself, an immense capacity for finding enjoyment 
 in almost everything: in new places, people, and thoughts; 
 in the old familiar scenes and friends and associations. Hers 
 was a noble, calm, fully-rounded life. She worked as stead- 
 fastly and as eagerly in her scientific studies as Harriet Mar- 
 tineau did with her economics and her politics; but she had 
 a more cheery, less sensitive, less eager and impatient nature 
 than Harriet Martineau. She was able to pursue her most 
 intricate calculations after she had passed her ninetieth year; 
 and one of her chief regrets in dying was that she should 
 not " live to see the distance of the earth from the sun de- 
 termined by the transit of Venus, and the source of the most 
 renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will immortalize 
 the name of Dr. Livingstone." 
 
 The paths of the two poets who first sprang into fame in 
 the present reign are strangely remote from each other. 
 Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning are as unlike in style and 
 choice of subject, and indeed in the whole spirit of their 
 poetry, ns Wordsworth and Byron. Mr. Tennyson deals 
 with incident and picturesque form, and graceful legend, 
 and with so much of doubt and thought and yearning mel- 
 ancholy as would belong to a refined and cultured intellect 
 under no greater stress or strain than the ordinary chances 
 of life among educated Englishmen might be expected to 
 impose. He has revived with great success the old Arthu- 
 rian legends, and made them a part of the living literature of 
 England. But the knights and ladies whom he paints are 
 refined, graceful, noble, without roughness, without wild or, 
 at all events, complex and distracting passions. It may per- 
 haps be said that Tennyson has taken for his province all 
 the beauty, all the nobleness, all the feeling that lie near to 
 or on the surface of life and of nature. His object might 
 seem to be that which Lessing declared the true object of 
 all art, "to delight ;" but it is to delight in a somewhat nar- 
 rower sense than was the meaning of Lessing. Beauty, mel- 
 ancholy, and repose arc the elements of Tennyson's poetry. 
 
LITERATUKE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 541 
 
 There is no storm, no conflict, no complication. Mr. Brown- 
 ing, on the other hand, delights in perplexed problems of 
 character and life in studying the effects of strange con- 
 trasting forces of passion coming into play under peculiar 
 and distracting conditions. All that lies beneath the sur- 
 face ; all that is out of the common track of emotion ; all 
 that is possible, that is poetically conceivable, but that the 
 outer air and the daily walks of life never sec, this is what 
 specially attracts Mr. Browning. In Tennyson a knight of 
 King Arthur's mythical court has the emotions of a pol- 
 ished English gentleman of our day, and nothing more. Mr. 
 Browning would prefer, in treating of a polished English 
 gentleman of our day, to exhibit him under some conditions 
 which should draw out in him all the strange elementary 
 passions and complications of emotion that lie far down i:i 
 deeps below the surface of the best ordered civilization. 
 The tendency of the one poet is naturally to fall now and 
 then into the sweetly insipid; of the other, to wander away 
 into the tangled regions of the grotesque. It is, perhaps, 
 only natural that under such conditions the one poet should 
 be profoundly concerned for beauty of form, and the latter 
 almost absolutely indifferent to it. No poet has more fin- 
 ished beauty of style and exquisite charm of melody than 
 Tennyson. None certainly can be more often wanting in 
 grace of form and delight of soft sound than Mr. Browning. 
 There are many passages and even many poems of Brown- 
 ing which show that the poet could be melodious if he 
 would ; but he seems sometimes as if he took a positive de- 
 light in perplexing the reader's ear with harsh, untuneful 
 sounds. Mr. Browning commonly allows the study of the 
 purely psychological to absorb too much of his moods and 
 of his genius. It has a fascination for him which he is seem- 
 ingly unable to resist. He makes of his poems too often 
 mere searchings into strange deeps of human character and 
 human error. He seldom abandons himself altogether to 
 the inspiration of the poet; he hardly ever deserves the defi- 
 nition of the minstrel given in Goethe's ballad who " sings 
 but as the song-bird sings." Moreover, Mr. Browning has 
 an almost morbid taste for the grotesque ; he is not unfre- 
 quently a sort of poetic Callot. It has to be added that Mr. 
 Browning is seldom easy to understand, and that there are 
 
542 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 times when he is only to be understood at the expense of as 
 much thought and study as one might give to a controvert- 
 ed passage in an ancient author. This is a defect of art, and 
 a very serious defect. The more devoted of Mr. Browning's 
 admirers will tell us, no doubt, that the poet is not bound to 
 supply us with brains as well as poetry, and that if we can- 
 not understand what he says it is the fault simply of our 
 stupidity. But an ordinary man who finds that he can un- 
 derstand Shakspeare and Milton, Dryden and Wordsworth, 
 Byron and Keats without any trouble, may surely be ex- 
 cused if he does not set down his difficulty about some of 
 Browning's poems wholly to the account of his own dulness. 
 It may well be doubted whether there is any idea so subtle 
 that if the poet can actually realize it in his own mind clear- 
 ly for himself, the English language will not be found capa- 
 ble of expressing it with sufficient clearness. The language 
 has been made to do this for the most refined reasonings of 
 philosophical schools, for transcendentalists and utilitarians, 
 for psychologists and metaphysicians. No intelligent per- 
 son feels any difficulty in understanding what Mill, or Her- 
 bert Spencer, or Huxley means; and it can hardly be said 
 that the ideas Mr. Browning desires to convey to his readers 
 are more difficult of exposition, than some of those which 
 the authors we name have contrived to set out with a white 
 light of clearness all round them. The plain truth is that 
 Mr. Browning is a great poet, in spite of some of the worst 
 defects that ever stood between a poet and popularity. He 
 is a great poet by virtue of his commanding genius, his fear- 
 less imagination, his penetrating pathos. He strikes an iron 
 harp-string. In certain of his moods his poetry is like that 
 of the terrible lyre in the weird old Scottish ballad, the lyre 
 that was made of the murdered maiden's breastbone, and 
 which told its fearful story in tones "that would melt a 
 heart of stone." In strength and depth of passion and 
 pathos, in wild humor, in emotion of every kind, Mr. Brown- 
 ing is much superior to Mr. Tennyson. The poet-laureate 
 is the completer man. Mr. Tennyson is, beyond doubt, the 
 most complete of the poets of Queen Victoria's time. No 
 one else has the same combination of melody, beauty of 
 description, culture, and intellectual power. He has sweet- 
 ness and strength in exquisite combination. If a just balance 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 543 
 
 of poetic powers were to be the crown of a poet, then un- 
 doubtedly Mr. Tennyson must be proclaimed the greatest 
 English poet of our time. The reader's estimate of Brown- 
 ing and Tennyson will probably be decided by his predilec- 
 tion for the higher effort or for the more perfect art. Brown- 
 ing's is surely the higher aim in poetic art; but of the art 
 which he essays Tennyson is by far the completer master. 
 Tennyson has, undoubtedly, thrown away much of his sweet- 
 ness and his exquisite grace of form on mere triflings and 
 pretty conceits; and perhaps as a retribution those poems 
 of his which are most familiar in the popular mouth are just 
 those which least do justice to his genuine strength and in- 
 tellect. The cheap sentiment of " Lady Clara Vere de Vere," 
 the yet cheaper pathos of" The May Queen," are in the minds 
 of thousands the choicest representation of the genius of the 
 poet who wrote "In Memoriam" and the "Morte d' Arthur." 
 Mr. Browning, on the other hand, has chosen to court the 
 approval of his time on terms of such disadvantage as an 
 orator might who insisted in addressing an assemblage in 
 some tongue which they but imperfectly understood. It is 
 the fault of Mr. Browning himself if he has for his only au- 
 dience and admirers men and women of culture, and misses 
 altogether that broad public audience to which most poets 
 have chosen to sing, and which all true poets, one would 
 think, must desire to reach with their song. It is, on the 
 other hand, assuredly Mr. Tennyson's fault if he has by his 
 too frequent condescension to the drawing-room, and even 
 the young ladies' school, made men and women of cult- 
 ure forget for the moment his best things, and credit him 
 with no higher gift than that of singing "virginibus pueris- 
 que." One quality ought to be mentioned as common to 
 these two poets who have so little else in common. They 
 are both absolutely faithful to nature and truth in their 
 pictures of the earth and its scenes and seasons. Almost all 
 the great poets of the past age, even including Wordsworth 
 himself, were now and then content to generalize nature ; to 
 take some things for granted ; to use their memory, or the 
 eyes of others, rather than their own eyes, Avhen they had to 
 describe changes on leaf, or sky, or water. It is the charac- 
 teristic of Tennyson and Browning that they deal with nat- 
 ure in a spirit of the most faithful loyalty. Not the branch 
 
544 . A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 of a tree, nor the cry of a bird, nor the shifting colors on sea 
 or sky will be found described on their pages otherwise than 
 as the eye sees for itself at the season of which the poet tells. 
 In reading Tennyson's description of woodland and forest 
 scenes one might almost fancy that he can catch the exact 
 peculiarities of sound in the rustling and moaning of each 
 separate tree. In some of Mr. Browning's pictures of Italian 
 scenery every detail is so perfect that many a one journey- 
 ing along an Italian road and watching the little mouse- 
 colored cattle as they drink at the stream, may for the mo- 
 ment almost feel uncertain whether he is looking on a page 
 of living reality or recalling to memory a page from the 
 author of "The Ring and the Book." The poets seem to 
 have returned to the fresh simplicity of a far-distant age of 
 poetry, when a man described exactly what he saw, and was 
 put to describing it because he saw it. In most of the in- 
 termediate times a poet describes because some other poet 
 lias described before, and has said that in nature there are 
 such and such beautiful things which every true poet must 
 see, and is bound to acknowledge accordingly in his verse. 
 
 These two are the greatest of our poets in the earlier part 
 of the reign ; indeed, in the reign early or late so far. But 
 there are other poets also of whom we must take account. 
 Mrs. Browning has often been described as the greatest poet- 
 ess of whom we know anything since Sappho. This descrip- 
 tion, however, seems to carry with it a much higher degree 
 of praise than it really bears. It has to be remembered that 
 there is no great poetess of whom we know anything from 
 the time of Sappho to that of Mrs. Browning. In England 
 we have hardly had any woman but Mrs. Browning alone 
 who really deserves to rank with poets. She takes a place 
 altogether different from that of any Mrs. Hemans, or such 
 singer of sweet, mild, and innocent note. Mrs. Browning 
 would rank bighly among poets without any allowance be- 
 ing claimed for her sex. But estimated in this way, which 
 assuredly she would have chosen for herself, she can hardly 
 be admitted to stand with the foremost even of our modern 
 day. She is one of the most sympathetic of poets. She 
 speaks to the hearts of numbers of readers who think Ten- 
 nyson all too sweet, smooth, and trivial, and Robert Brown- 
 ing harsh and rugged. She speaks especially to the emo- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 545 
 
 tional in woman. In all moods when men or women are 
 distracted by the bewildering conditions of life, when they 
 feel themselves alternately dazzled by its possibilities and 
 baffled by its limitations, the poems of Elizabeth Browning 
 ought to find sympathetic ears. But the poems are not the 
 highest which merely appeal to our own moods and echo our 
 own plaints ; and there was not much of creative genius in 
 Mrs. Browning. Her poems are often but a prolonged sob ; 
 a burst of almost hysterical remonstrance or entreaty. It 
 must be owned, however, that the egotism of emotion has 
 seldom found such exquisite form of outpouring as in her 
 so-called "Sonnets from the Portuguese ;" and that what the 
 phraseology of a school would call the emotion of" altruism " 
 has rarely been given forth in tones of such piercing pathos 
 as in "The Cry of the Children." 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold's reputation was made before this 
 earlier period had closed. He is a maker of such exquisite 
 and thoughtful verse that it is hard sometimes to question 
 his title to be considered a genuine poet. On the other hand, 
 it is likely that the very grace and culture and thoughtful- 
 ness of his style inspire in many the first doubt of his claim 
 to the name of poet. Where the art is evident and elabo- 
 rate, we are all too apt to assume that it is all art and not 
 genius. Mr. Arnold is a sort of miniature Goethe ; AVC do 
 not know that his most ardent admirers could demand a 
 higher praise for him, while it is probable that the descrip- 
 tion will suggest exactly the intellectual peculiarities which 
 lead so many to deny him a place with the really inspired 
 singers of his day. Of the three men whom we have named, 
 we should be inclined to say that Mr. Arnold made the very 
 most of his powers, and Mr. Browning the very least. Mr. 
 Arnold is a critic as well as a poet : there are many who rel- 
 ish him more in the critic than in the poet. In literary crit- 
 icism his judgment is refined, and his aims are always high 
 if his range be not very wide; in politics and theology he is 
 somewhat apt to be at once fastidious and fantastic. 
 
 The "Song of the Shirt" would give Thomas Hood a tech- 
 nical right, if he had none other, to be classed as a poet of 
 the reign of Queen Victoria. The "Song of the Shirt" was 
 published in Punch when the reign was well on ; and after 
 it appeared " The Bridge of Sighs ;" and no two of Hood's 
 
546 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 poems have done more to make him famous. He M r as a 
 genuine, though not a great poet, in whom humor was most 
 properly to be defined as Thackeray has defined it the 
 blending of love and wit. The " Song of the Shirt " and the 
 "Bridge of Sighs" made themselves a kind of monumental 
 place in English sympathies. The "Plea of the Midsummer 
 Fairies " was written several years before. It alone would 
 have made for its author a reputation. The ballad of " Fail- 
 Inez" is almost perfect in its way. The name of Sir Hen- 
 ry Taylor must be included with the poets of this reign, al- 
 though his best work was done before the reign began. In 
 his work, clear, strong intelligence prevails more than the 
 emotional and the sensuous. He makes himself a poet by 
 virtue of intellect and artistic judgment; for there really 
 do seem some examples of a poet being made and not born. 
 We can hardly bring Procter among the Victorian poets. 
 Macaulay's ringing verses are rather the splendid and suc- 
 cessful tours de force of a clever man, than the genuine lyr- 
 ics of a poet. Arthur Clough was a man of rare promise, 
 whose lamp was extinguished all too soon. Philip James 
 Bailey startled the world by his " Festus," and for a time 
 made people believe that a great new poet was coming; but 
 the impression did not last, and Bailey proved to be little 
 more than the comet of a season. A spasmodic school which 
 sprang up after the success of "Festus," and which was led 
 by a brilliant young Scotchman, Alexander Smith, passed 
 away in a spasm as it came, and is now almost forgotten. 
 " Orion," an epic poem by Richard H. Home, made a very 
 distinct mark upon the time. Home proved himself to be 
 a sort of Landor manque or perhaps a connecting link be- 
 tween the style of Landor and that of Browning. The ear- 
 lier part of the reign was rich in singers; but the names and 
 careers of most of them would serve rather to show that the 
 poetic spirit was abroad, and that it sought expression in 
 all manner of forms, than that there were many poets to dis- 
 pute the place with Tennyson and Browning. It is not nec- 
 essary here to record a list of mere names. The air was fill- 
 ed with the voices of minor singers. It was pleasant to lis- 
 ten to their piping, and the general effect may well be com- 
 mended ; but it is not necessary that the names of all the 
 performers in an orchestra should be recorded for the sup- 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN". FIRST SURVEY. 547 
 
 posed gratification of a posterity which assuredly would 
 never stop to read the list. 
 
 Thirty- six years have passed away since Mr. Ruskin 
 leaped into the literary arena, Avith a spring as bold and 
 startling as that of Kean on the Kemble- haunted stage. 
 The little volume, so modest in its appearance and self-suffi- 
 cient in its tone, which the author defiantly flung down like 
 a gage of battle before the world, was entitled, " Modern 
 Painters: their superiority in the art of Landscape -paint- 
 ing to all the Ancient Masters; by a Graduate of Oxford." 
 It was a challenge to established beliefs and prejudices; and 
 the challenge was delivered in the tone of one who felt con- 
 fident that he could make good his words against any and 
 all opponents. If there was one thing that more than an- 
 other seemed to have been fixed and rooted in the English 
 mind, it was that Claude and one or two others of the old 
 masters possessed the secret of landscape-painting. When, 
 therefore, a bold young dogmatist involved in one common 
 denunciation " Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Ruys- 
 dael,Paul Potter, Canaletto, and the various Van-somethings 
 and Koek-somethings, more especially and malignantly those 
 who have libelled the sea," it was no wonder that affronted 
 authority raised its indignant voice and thundered at him. 
 Affronted authority, however, gained little by its thunder. 
 The young Oxford Graduate possessed, along with genius 
 and profound conviction, an imperturbable and magnificent 
 self-conceit against which the surges of angry criticism 
 dashed themselves in vain. Mr. Ruskin sprang into literary 
 life simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner. 
 But as he went on with his task he found, or at least he 
 convinced himself, that the vindication of the great land- 
 scape-painter was essentially a vindication of all true art. 
 Still further proceeding with his self-imposed task, he per- 
 suaded himself that the cause of true art was identical with 
 the cause of truth, and that truth, from Ruskin's point of 
 view, enclosed in the same rules and principles all the mor- 
 als, all the science, industry, and daily business of life. 
 There fore, from an art-critic he became a moralist, a political 
 economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher anything, 
 everything that human intelligence can impel a man to be. 
 All that he has written since his first appeal to the public 
 
548 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 has been inspired by this conviction that an appreciation 
 of the truth in art reveals to him who has it the truth in 
 everything. This belief has been the source of Air. Raskin's 
 greatest successes, and of his most complete and ludicrous 
 i'ailures. It has made him the admiration of the world one 
 week, and the object of its placid pity or broad laughter the 
 next. A being who could be Joan of Arc to-day and Vol- 
 taire's Pucelle to-morrow, would hardly exhibit a stronger 
 psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr. Ruskin 
 sometimes illustrates. But in order to do him justice, and 
 not to regard him as a mere erratic utterer of eloquent con- 
 tradictions, poured out on the impulse of each moment's 
 new freak of fancy, we must always bear in mind the funda- 
 mental faith of the man. Extravagant as this or that doc- 
 trine may be, outrageous as to-day's contradiction of yester- 
 day's assertion may sound, yet the whole career is consist- 
 ent with its essential principles and beliefs. It may be fair- 
 ly questioned whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities 
 but his eloquence and his true, honest love of nature. As a 
 man to stand up before a society of which one part was 
 fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and 
 greedy, and preach to it of Nature's immortal beauty, and 
 of the true way to do her reverence, Ruskin has and had a 
 position of genuine dignity. This ought to be enough for 
 the work and for the praise of any man. But the restless- 
 ness of Ruskin's temperament, combined with the extraordi- 
 nary self-sufficiency which contributed so much to his suc- 
 cess where he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually 
 intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor, and enter- 
 prises which he had no capacity to conduct. Seldom has a 
 man contradicted himself so often, so recklessly, and so com- 
 placently as Mr. Ruskin. It is venturesome to call him a 
 great critic even in art, for he seldom expresses any opin- 
 ion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He is 
 a great writer, as Rousseau was fresh, eloquent, audacious, 
 writing out of the fulness of the present mood, and heedless 
 how far the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yes- 
 terday. But as Rousseau was always faithful to his idea 
 of truth, so Ruskin is always faithful to Nature. When all 
 his errors, and paradoxes, and contradictions shall have been 
 utterly forgotten, this will remain to his praise. No man 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 549 
 
 since Wordsworth's brightest days did half so much to teach 
 his countrymen, and those who speak his language, how to 
 appreciate and honor that silent Nature " which never did 
 betray the heart that loved her." 
 
 In fiction as well as in poetry there are two great names 
 to be compared or contrasted when we turn to the litera- 
 ture of the earlier part of the reign. In the very year of 
 Queen Victoria's accession appeared the "Pickwick Papers," 
 the work of the author who the year before had published 
 the "Sketches by Boz." The public soon recognized the 
 fact that a new and wonderfully original force had come 
 into literature. The success of Charles Dickens is absolute- 
 ly unequalled in the history of English fiction. At the sea- 
 son of his highest popularity Sir Walter Scott was not so 
 popular an author. But that happened to Dickens which 
 did not happen to Scott. When Dickens was at his zenith, 
 and when it might have been thought that any manner of ri- 
 valry with him was impossible, a literary man who was no 
 longer young, who had been working with but moderate suc- 
 cess for many years in light literature, suddenly took to writ- 
 ing novels, and almost in a moment stepped up to a level 
 with the author of " Pickwick." During the remainder of 
 their careers the two men stood as nearly as possible on the 
 panic level. Dickens always remained by far the more pop- 
 ular of the two; but, on the other hand, it may be safely 
 paid that the opinion of the literary world in general was 
 inclined to favor Thackeray. From the time of the publi- 
 cation of "Vanity Fair" the two were always put side by 
 side for comparison or contrast. They have been some- 
 times likened to Fielding and Smollett, but no comparison 
 could be more misleading or less happy. Smollett stands on 
 a level distinctly and considerably below that of Fielding; 
 but Dickens cannot be said to stand thus beneath Thack- 
 eray. If the comparison were to hold at all, Thackeray 
 must be compared to Fielding, for Fielding is not in the 
 least like Dickens ; but then it must be allowed that Smol- 
 lett wants many of the higher qualities of the author of 
 "David Copperfield." It is natural that men should com- 
 pare Dickens and Thackeray ; but the two will be found 
 to be curiously unlike when once a certain superficial re- 
 semblance censes to impress the mind. Their, ways of treat- 
 
550 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ing a subject were not only dissimilar but were absolutely 
 in contrast. They started, to begin with, under the influ- 
 ence of a totally different philosophy of life, if that is to be 
 called a philosophy which was probably only the result of 
 peculiarity of temperament in each case. Dickens set out 
 on the literary theory that in life everything is better than 
 it looks; Thackeray with the impression that it is worse. 
 In the one case there was somewhat too much of a mechan- 
 ical interpretation of everything for the best in the best 
 possible world ; in the other the savor of cynicism was at 
 times a little annoying. As each writer went on, the pecu- 
 liarity became more and more of a mannerism. But the 
 writings of Dickens were far more deeply influenced by his 
 peculiarities of feeling or philosophy than those of Thacke- 
 ray. A large share of the admiration which is popularly 
 given to Dickens is, undoubtedly, a tribute to what people 
 consider his cheerful view of life. In that, too, he is espe- 
 cially English. In this country the artistic theory of France 
 and other Continental nations, borrowed from the esthetic 
 principles of Greece, Avhich accords the palm to the artistic 
 treatment rather than to the subject, or the purpose, or the 
 way of looking at things, has found hardly any broad and 
 general acceptation. The popularity of Dickens was, there- 
 fore, in great measure due to the fact that he set forth life 
 in cheerful lights and colors. He had, of course, gifts of far 
 higher artistic value; he could describe anything that he saw 
 with a fidelity which Balzac could not have surpassed; and, 
 like Balzac, he had a way of inspiring inanimate objects with 
 a mystery and motive of their own, which gave them often a 
 weird and fascinating individuality. But it must be owned 
 that if Dickens's peculiar "philosophy" were effaced from his 
 works, the fame of the author would remain a very different 
 thing from what it is at the present moment. On the other 
 hand, it would be possible to cut out of Thackeray all his 
 little cynical, melancholy sentences, and reduce his novels to 
 bare descriptions of life and character, without affecting, in 
 any sensible degree,his influence on the reader or his position 
 in literature. Thackeray had a marvellously keen apprecia- 
 tion of human motive and character within certain limits. 
 If Dickens could draw an old quaint house or an odd family 
 interior as faithfully and yet as picturesquely as Balzac, so, 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 551 
 
 on the other hand, not Balzac himself could analyze and il- 
 lustrate the weaknesses and foibles of certain types of char- 
 acter with greater subtlety of judgment and force of exposi- 
 tion than Thackeray. Dickens had little or no knowledge 
 of human character, and evidently cared, very little about 
 the study. His stories are fairy tales made credible by the 
 masterly realism with which he described all the surround- 
 ings and accessaries, the costumes and the ways of his men 
 and women. While we are reading of a man whose odd pe- 
 culiarities strike us with a sense of reality as if we had ob- 
 served them for ourselves many a time, while we see him 
 surrounded by streets and houses which seem to us rather 
 more real and a hundred times more interesting than those 
 through which we pass every day, we are not likely to ob- 
 serve very quickly, or to take much heed of the fact when 
 we do observe it, that the man acts on various important 
 occasions of his life as only people in fairy stories ever do 
 act. Thackeray, on the other hand, cared little for descrip- 
 tions of externals. Pie left his readers to construct for them- 
 selves the greater part of the surroundings of his person- 
 ages from his description of the characters of the personages 
 themselves. He made us acquainted with the man or wom- 
 an in his chapters as if we had known him or her all our 
 life; and knowing Pendennis or Becky Sharp, we had no 
 difficulty in constructing the surroundings of either for our- 
 selves. Thus it will be seen that these two eminent authors 
 had not only different ideas about life, but absolutely con- 
 trasting principles of art. One worked from the externals 
 inward; the other realized the unseen, and left the externals 
 to grow of themselves. Three great peculiarities, however, 
 they shared. Each lived and wrote of and for London. 
 Dickens created for art the London of the middle and poor- 
 er classes ; Thackeray did the same for the London of the 
 upper class, and for those who strive to imitate their ways. 
 Neither ever even attempted to describe a man kept con- 
 stantly above and beyond the atmosphere of mere egotism 
 by some sustaining greatness or even intensity of purpose. 
 In Dickens, as in Thackeray, the emotions described are 
 those of conventional life merely. This is not to be said in 
 disparagement of either artist. It is rather a tribute to an 
 artist's knowledge of his own capacity and sphere of work 
 
552 A HISTOKY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 that he only attempts to draw what he thoroughly under- 
 stands. But it is proper to remark of Dickens and of Thack- 
 eray, as of Balzac, that the life they described was, after all, 
 but the life of a coterie or a quarter, and that there existed 
 side by side with their field of work a whole world of emo- 
 tion, aspiration, struggle, defeat, and triumph, of which their 
 brightest pages do not give a single suggestion. This is 
 the more curious to observe because of the third peculiarity 
 which Dickens and Thackeray had in common a love for 
 the purely ideal and romantic in fiction. There are many 
 critics who hold that Dickens in "Barnaby Rudge" and the 
 "Tale of Two Cities," Thackeray in "Esmond," exhibited 
 powers which vindicated for their possessors a very rare in- 
 fusion of that higher poetic spirit which might have made 
 of both something greater than the painters of the manners 
 of a day and a class. But to paint the manners of a day 
 and a class as Dickens and Thackeray have done is to de- 
 serve fame and the gratitude of posterity. The age of Vic- 
 toria may claim in this respect an equality, at least, with 
 that of the reign which produced Fielding and Smollett; 
 for if there are some who would demand for Fielding a 
 higher place, on the whole, than can be given either to Dick- 
 ens or to Thackeray, there are not many, on the other hand, 
 who would not say that either Dickens or Thackeray is dis- 
 tinctly superior to Smollett. The age must claim a high 
 place in art which could in one department alone produce 
 two such competitors. Their effect upon their time was 
 something marvellous. People talked Dickens or thought 
 Thackeray. 
 
 Passion, it will be seen, counted for little in the works of 
 Dickens and Thackeray. Dickens, indeed, could draw a con- 
 ventionally or dramatically wicked man with much power 
 and impressiveness ; and Thackeray could suggest certain 
 forms of vice with wonderful delicacy and yet vividness. 
 But the passions which are common to all human natures in 
 their elementary moods made but little play in the novels 
 of either writer. Both were, in this respect, for all their 
 originality and genius in other ways, highly and even ex- 
 clusively conventional. There was apparently a sort of 
 understanding in the mind of each indeed Thackeray has 
 admitted as much in his preface to "Pendennis" that men 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 553 
 
 and women were not to be drawn as men and women are 
 known to be, but with certain reserves to suit conventional 
 etiquette. It is somewhat curious that the one only novel 
 writer who during the period we are now considering came 
 into any real rivalry with them, was one who depended on 
 passion altogether for her material and her success. The 
 novels of a young woman, Charlotte Bronte, compelled all 
 English society into a recognition not alone of their own 
 sterling power and genius, but also of the fact that profound 
 and passionate emotion was still the stuff out of which great 
 fiction could be constructed. "Exultations, agonies, and 
 love, and man's unconquerable mind," were taken by Char- 
 lotte Bronte as the matter out of which her art was to pro- 
 duce its triumphs. The novels which made her fame, "Jane 
 Eyre " and " Villette," are positively aflame with passion 
 and pain. They have little variety. They make hardly any 
 pretence to accurate drawing of ordinary men and women 
 in ordinary life, or, at all events, under ordinary conditions. 
 The authoress had little of the gift of the mere story-teller ; 
 and her own peculiar powers were exerted sometimes with 
 indifferent success. The familiar on whom she depended 
 for her inspiration would not always come at call. She had 
 little genuine relish for beauty, except the beauty of a 
 weird melancholy and of decay. But when she touched the 
 chord of elementary human emotion with her best skill, 
 then it was impossible for her audience not to feel that 
 they were under the spell of a power rare, indeed, in our 
 well-ordered days. The absolute sincerity of the author's 
 expression of feeling lent it great part of its strength and 
 charm. Nothing was ever said by her because it seemed to 
 society the right sort of thing to say. She told a friend that 
 she felt sure that " Jane Eyre " would have an effect on read- 
 ers in general because it had so great an effect on herself. 
 It would be possible to argue that the great strength of the 
 books lay in their sincerity alone ; that Charlotte Bronte 
 was not so much a woman of extraordinary genius as a wom- 
 an who looked her own feelings fairly in the face, and paint- 
 ed them as she saw them. But the capacity to do this would 
 surely be something which we could not better describe than 
 by the word genius. Charlotte Bronte was far from be- 
 ing an artist of fulfilled power. She is rather to be regard- 
 I. 24 
 
554 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 ed as one who gave evidence of extraordinary gifts, which 
 might with time and care, and under happier artistic aus- 
 pices, have been turned to such account as would have made 
 for her a fame with the very chiefs of her tribe. She died 
 at an age hardly more mature than that at which Thackeray 
 won his first distinct literary success; much earlier than the 
 age at which some of our greatest novelists brought forth 
 their first completed novels. But she left a very deep im- 
 pression on her time, and the time that has come and is com- 
 ing after her. No other hand in the age of Queen Victoria 
 lias dealt with human emotion so powerfully and so truthful- 
 ly. Hers are not cheerful novels. A cold, gray, mournful 
 atmosphere hangs over them. One might imagine that the 
 shadow of an early death is forecast on them. They love to 
 linger among the glooms of nature, to haunt her darkling 
 wintry twilights, to study her stormy sunsets, to link man's 
 destiny and his hopes, fears, and passions somehow with the 
 glare and gloom of storm and darkness, and to read the sym- 
 bols of his fate, as the foredoomed and passion-wasted An- 
 tony did, in the cloud-masses that are " black vesper's pa- 
 geants." The supernatural had a constant vague charm for 
 Charlotte Bronte, as the painful had. Man was to her a being 
 torn between passionate love and the more ignoble impulses 
 and ambitions and common-day occupations of life. Woman 
 was a being of equal passion, still more sternly and cruelly 
 doomed to repression and renunciation. It was a strange 
 fact that in the midst of the splendid material successes 
 and the quietly triumphant intellectual progress of this most 
 prosperous and well-ordered age, when even in its poetry 
 and its romance passion was systematically toned down and 
 put in thrall to good taste and propriety, this young writer 
 should have suddenly come out with her books all thrilling 
 with emotion, and all protesting in the strongest practical 
 manner against the theory that the loves and hates of men 
 and women had been tamed by the process of civilization. 
 Perhaps the very novelty of the apparition was, in great 
 measure, a part of its success. Charlotte Bronte did not, in- 
 deed, influence the general public, or even the literai-y pub- 
 lic., to anything like the same extent that Thackeray and 
 Dickens did. She appeared and passed away almost in a 
 moment. As Miss Martineau said of her, she stole like a 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 555 
 shadow into literature, and then became a shadow again. 
 
 ' O 
 
 But she struck very deeply into the heart of the time. If 
 her writings were only, as has been said of them, a cry of 
 pain, yet they were such a cry as, once heard, lingers and 
 echoes in the mind forever after. Godwin declared that he 
 would write in "Caleb Williams" a book which would leave 
 no man who read it the same that he was before. Some- 
 thing not unlike this might be said of "Jane Eyre." No one 
 who read it was exactly the same that he had been before 
 he opened its weird and wonderful pages. 
 
 No man could well have made more of his gifts than Lord 
 Lytton. Before the coming up of Dickens and Thackeray 
 he stood above all living English novelists. Perhaps this 
 is rather to the reproach of the English fiction of the day 
 than to the renown of Lord Lytton. But even after Dick- 
 ens and Thackeray and Charlotte. Bronte, and later and not 
 less powerful and original writers had appeared in the same 
 field, he still held a place of great mark in literature. That 
 he was not a man of genius is, perhaps, conclusively proved 
 by the fact that he was able so readily to change his style 
 to suit the tastes of each day. He began by writing of fops 
 and roues of a time now almost forgotten ; then he made 
 heroes of highwaymen and murderers; afterward he tried 
 the philosophic and mildly didactic style ; then he turned to 
 mysticism and spiritualism ; later still he wrote of the French 
 Second Empire. Whatever he tried to do he did well. Be- 
 sides his novels, he wrote plays and poems ; and his plays 
 are among the very few modern productions which manage 
 to keep the stage. He played, too, and with much success, 
 at being a statesman and an orator. Not Demosthenes him- 
 self had such difficulties of articulation to contend against 
 in the beginning; and Demosthenes conquered his difficul- 
 ties, while some of those in the way of Lord Lytton proved 
 unconquerable. Yet Lord Lytton did somehow contrive to 
 become a great speaker, and to seem occasionally like a 
 great orator in the House of Commons. He was at the very 
 least a superb phrase-maker; and he could turn to account 
 every scrap of knowledge in literature, art, or science which 
 he happened to possess. His success in the House of Com- 
 mons was exactly like his success in romance and the drama. 
 He threw himself into competition with men of far higher 
 
556 A HISTOKY OF OUll OWN TIMES. 
 
 original gifts, and he made so good a show of contesting 
 with them that in the minds of many the victory was not 
 clearly with his antagonists. There was always, for exam- 
 ple, a considerable class, even among educated persons, who 
 maintained that Lytton was, in his way, quite the peer of 
 Thackeray and Dickens. His plays, or some of them, ob- 
 tained a popularity only second to those of Shakspeare; and 
 although nobody cared to read them, yet people were al- 
 ways found to go and look at them. When Lytton went 
 into the House of Commons for the second time he found 
 audiences which were occasionally tempted to regard him 
 as the rival of Gladstone and Bright. Not a few persons 
 saw in all this only a sort of superb charlatanerie ; and in- 
 deed it is certain that no man ever made and kept a genu- 
 ine success in so many different fields as those in which Lord 
 Lytton tried and seemed to succeed. But he had splendid 
 qualities; he had everything short of genius. He had in- 
 domitable patience, inexhaustible power of self-culture, and 
 a capacity for assimilating the floating ideas of the hour 
 which supplied the place of originality. He borrowed from 
 the poet the knack of poetical expression, and from the dram- 
 atist the trick of construction ; from the Byronic time its 
 professed scorn for the false gods of the world ; and from 
 the more modern period of popular science and sham mys- 
 ticism its extremes of materialism and magic ; and of these 
 and various other borrowings he made up an article which 
 no one else could have constructed out of the same materi- 
 als. He was not a great author; but he was a great litera- 
 ry man. Mr. Disraeli's novels belong in some measure to 
 the school of'Pelham" and "Godolphin." But it should 
 be said that Mr. Disraeli's "Vivian Grey" was published be- 
 fore "Pelham" made its appearance. In all that belongs to 
 political life Mr. Disraeli's novels are far superior to those of 
 Lord Lytton. We have nothing in our literature to com- 
 pare with some of the best of Mr. Disraeli's novels for light 
 political satire, and for easy, accurate characterization of po- 
 litical cliques and personages. But all else in Disraeli's nov- 
 els is sham. The sentiment, the poetry, the philosophy all 
 these are sham. They have not half the appearance of re- 
 ality about them that Lytton has contrived to give to his 
 efforts of the same kind. In one at least of Disraeli's latest 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 557 
 
 novels the political sketches and satirizing became sham 
 also. 
 
 "Alton Locke" was published nearly thirty years ago. 
 Then Charles Kingsley became to most boys in Great Brit- 
 ain who read books at all a sort of living embodiment of 
 chivalry, liberty, and a revolt against the established order 
 of class-oppression in so many spheres of our society. For 
 a long time he continued to be the chosen hero of young 
 men with the youthful spirit of revolt in them, with dreams 
 of Republics and ideas about the equality of man. Later on 
 he commanded other admiration for other qualities, for the 
 championship of slave systems, of oppression, and the iron 
 reign of mere force. But though Charles Kingsley always 
 held a high place somewhere in popular estimation, he is not 
 to be rated very highly as an author. He described glowing 
 scenery admirably, and he rang the changes vigorously on 
 his two or three ideas the muscular Englishman, the glory 
 of the Elizabethan discoveries, and so on. He was a scholar, 
 and he wrote verses which sometimes one is on the point of 
 mistaking for poetry, so much of the poet's feeling have they 
 in them. He did a great many things very cleverly. Per- 
 haps if he had done less he might have done better. Human 
 capacity is limited. It is not given to mortal to be a great 
 preacher, a great philosopher, a great scholar, a great poet, a 
 great historian, a great novelist, and an indefatigable country 
 parson. Charles Kingsley never seems to have made up his 
 mind for which of these callings to go in especially; and be- 
 ing, with all his versatility, not at all many-sided, but strictly 
 one-sided and almost one-ideaed, the result was, that while 
 touching success at many points he absolutely mastered it 
 at none. Since his novel "Westward Ho !" he never add- 
 ed anything substantial to his reputation. All this acknowl- 
 edged, however, it must still be owned that failing in this, 
 that, and the other attempt, and never achieving any real and 
 enduring success, Charles Kingsley was an influence and a 
 man of mark in the Victorian Age. 
 
 Perhaps a word ought to be said of the rattling romances 
 of Irish electioneering, love-making, and fighting, which set 
 people reading "Charles O'Malley" and "JackHinton," even 
 when "Pickwick" was still a novelty. Charles Lever had 
 wonderful animal spirits and a broad, bright humor. He was 
 
558 A HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. 
 
 quite genuine in his way. He afterward changed his style 
 completely, and with much success ; and will be found in 
 the later part of the period holding just the same relative 
 place as in the earlier, just behind the foremost men, but in 
 manner so different that he might be a new writer who had 
 never read a line of the roistering adventures of Light Dra- 
 
 o 
 
 goons which were popular when Charles Lever first gave 
 them to the world. There was nothing great about Lever, 
 but the literature of the Victorian period would not be quite 
 all that we know it without him. There were many other 
 popular novelists during the period we have passed over, 
 some in their day more popular than either Thackeray or 
 Charlotte Bronte. Many of us can remember, without being 
 too much ashamed of the fact, that there were early days 
 when Mr. James and his cavaliers and his chivalric advent- 
 ures gave nearly as much delight as Walter Scott could have 
 given to the youth of a preceding generation. But Walter 
 Scott is with us still, young and old, and poor James is gone. 
 His once famous solitary horseman has ridden away into 
 actual solitude, and the shades of night have gathered over 
 his heroic form. 
 
 The founding of Punch drew together a host of clever 
 young writers, some of whom made a really deep mark on 
 the literature of their time, and the combined influence of 
 whom in this artistic and literary undertaking was, on the 
 whole, decidedly healthy. Thackeray was by far the great- 
 est of the regular contributors to Punch in its earlier days. 
 But "The Song of the Shirt " appeared in its pages, and 
 some of the brightest of Douglas Jerrold's writings made 
 their appearance there. Punch was a thoroughly English 
 production. It had little or nothing in common with the 
 comic periodicals of Paris. It ignored absolutely and of set 
 purpose the whole class of subjects which make up three- 
 fourths of the stock in trade of a French satirist. The es- 
 capades of husbands and the infidelities of wives form the 
 theme of by far the greater number of the humorous sketch- 
 es with pen or pencil in Parisian comicalities. Punch kept 
 altogether aloof from such unsavory subjects. It had an 
 advantage, of course, which was habitually denied to the 
 French papers ; it had unlimited freedom of political satire 
 and caricature. Politics and the more trivial troubles and 
 
LITERATURE OF THE REIGN. FIRST SURVEY. 559 
 
 trials of social life gave subjects to Punch. The inequali- 
 ties of class, and the struggles of ambitious and vain persons 
 to get into circles higher than their own, or at least to imi- 
 tate their manners these supplied for Punch the place of 
 the class of topics on which French papers relied when they 
 had to deal with the domestic life of the nation. Punch 
 started by being somewhat fiercely radical, but gradually 
 toned away into a sort of intelligent and respectable Con- 
 servatism. Its artistic sketches were from first to last ad- 
 mirable. Some men of true genius wrought for it with the 
 pencil as others did. with the pen. Doyle, Leech, and Ten- 
 niel were men of whom any school of art might well be 
 proud. A remarkable sobriety of style was apparent in all 
 their humors. Of later years caricature has had absolutely 
 no place in the illustrations to Punch. The satire is quiet, 
 delicate, and no doubt superficial. It is a satire of manners, 
 dress, and social ways altogether. There is justice in the 
 criticism that of late, more especially, the pages of Punch 
 give no idea whatever of the emotions of the English people. 
 There is no suggestion of grievance, of bitterness, of passion, 
 or pain. It is all made up of the pleasures and annoyances 
 of the kind of life which is enclosed in a garden party. But 
 it must be said that Punch has thus always succeeded in 
 maintaining a good, open, convenient, neutral ground, where 
 young men and maidens, girls and boys, elderly politicians 
 and staid matrons, law, trade, science, all sects and creeds, 
 may safely and pleasantly mingle. It is not so, to be sure, 
 that great satire is wrought. A Swift or a Juvenal is not 
 thus to be brought out. But a votary of the present would 
 have his answer simple and conclusive : "We live in the age 
 of Punch; we do not live in the age of Juvenal or Swift. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 GAYLORD