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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of

STANLEY M. PARGELLIS

ENGLAND

IN THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

SIR CHARLES OMAN, K.B.E.
fellow of all souls' college,
chichele professor of modern history,
m.p. for the university of oxford, and lld. edin.
author of
*a history of england,'' " seven roman statesmen '
"Wellington's army," etc.

NEW EDITION REVISED

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W. i.
1920

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
New Edition, revised to the End ofthe Great War oJ
1914 — 1918.
COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME  'js. dd.
IN TWO PARTS, divided at the year A.D. 1603.
Each  i^s. 6d.
IN THREE DIVISIONS :
Division I., to 1307  2x. (sd.
Division II., 1507 — 1688  3^. td.
Division III., 1688— 1918  4^.
%* Koch Part and Division co?ttains a. Separate Index.
A JUNIOR HISTORY OF
ENGLAND.
Ne'W Edition, revised to the Etid of the Great War of
1914 — 191S.
Crown livo, cloth, 3^. dd.
SEVEN ROMAN STATESMEN.
'^',6 pages. JllustrateJ. Crown Svo, 6s.
WELLINGTON'S ARMY, 1809— 1814.
ofll pages. Illustrated, 'js. 6d. net.

London : EDWARD ARNOLD.

By ^3

CONTENTS.

CHAPTBB PAGB
I. The Peace of Amiens. 1801-1802 ... ... ... i
II. The Struggle with Bonaparte : (i) The Naval
War. 1803-1806 ... ... ... ... 10
III. The Struggle with Bonaparte : (2) The Conti
nental System — The Peninsular War — Waterloo.
1806-1815 ... ... ... ... ... 27
IV. From the Fall of Bonaparte to the Great Reform
Bill. 1815-1832 ... ... ... ... 53
V. From the Great Reform Bill to the Crimean
War. 1832-1853 ... ... ... ... ... 80
VI. Early Victorian England. A Survey ... 109
VII. From the Crimean War to the Death of Lord
Palmerston. 1853-1865 ... ... ... ... 127
VIII. Disraeli and Gladstone. 1865-1885 ... ... 152
IX. The Home Rule Question and Imperialism., 1886-
1899 ... ... ... ... ... ... i86
X. India and the Colonies ... ... .^ 212
XI. The South African War, 1899-1902 ... ... 259
XII. Conclusion. The Problem of Imperial Federation 284
Appendices —
Table of British Ministries of the Nineteenth Century ... 290
Population of the United Kingdom, 1801-1891 ... 292
The National Debt, 1800-1899 ••• ••• ••• 292
Foreign Sovereigns of the Nineteenth Century ... 293
Typical Budgets of the Century : 1802, 1810, 1820,
1846, 1855, 1898, 1900 ... ... ... ... 294
Index ... ... ... ... ... ... 299

MAPS AND PLANS.

Spain and Portugal, 1S08-1814 ... ... ... ... 36
Europe in 1811-1812 ... ... ... ... ... 43
Sebastopol anu its Neighbourhood ... ... ... 133
Growth of the British Empire in India ... ... 221
Growth of the British Empire in Africa ... ... 256
Theatre of the South African War of 1899-1902 ... 283

INTRODUCTION.

From the time of the venerable Bede onward all Western
historians have been accustomed to date their annals by means
of the centuries, counting forwards and backwards from that
year i a.d. which Dionysius Exiguus wrongly fixed as the
birth-date of our Lord. But it is only in comparatively modern
times that we have begun to talk and think of those centuries
as entities with individual characters and attributes. The
usage by which we speak of a "twentieth-century idea" or "a
thoroughly seventeenth-century practice " would appear strange
to a critic from the Middle Ages, whose landmarks in history
were not connected with the centuries, and who reckoned by
' indictions,' or the ' Seven Ages of the World,' or the dynasties
of his native kingdom, or the time that had elapsed since
Augustus or Charlemagne. To see how entirely artificial is
our conception of the centuries, we have only to remember
that to a Moslem the year 1920 appears as 1337-38, while
a Jew thinks of it as 5680. But during the last eight or nine
generations the world has grown so familiar with the idea of
the century as a real and natural division of time, that it is
impossible for us to disregard it when dealing with history.
The practice of reckoning by the centuries has at least one
excellent feature. It induces the historian from time to time
to take stock of the current of events and the movement of
the world during the last hundred years of the Christian era.
' Now that the nineteenth century has finally departed from
us, we begin to endeavour to formulate our general views
on its character, work, and meaning, even though its latter
years are still too close to us to allow us to view them in
accurate historical perspective.

vl INTRODUCTION.
Every generation has a point at which it places the begin
nings of what it vaguely calls contemporary history, a date
which marks the boundary between the period which has
passed away to become the exclusive property of the historian,
and the period in which our knowledge is not drawn entirely
from books. Between the days which we can actually call
our own and the time which has wholly gone from us, lies
a middle period, whose events and general character are made
real to us, not only by literature, but by the oral tradition of
the generation that has immediately preceded us. The limits
of the years known to us in this way are of course continually
receding, but at present the line of division is just approaching
the date which marks the end of the greatest war which
England ever waged. There yet linger among us rare sur
vivors who can tell us that their earliest memories are of the
rejoicings that followed the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832,
or of the accession of Queen Victoria. But the Mid- Victorian
England of the Crimean War of 1854-5, and the Indian Mutiny
of 1857-8, is still brought home to us in a way that is no
longer possible for the times of Lord Grey or Sir Robert
Peel. The Reform Bill marks the division for us denizens of
the first years of the twentieth century, and beyond it lies a
time when the conditions of life, the state of politics, the
external relations and internal movement of the country, seem
strange to us, so far do they differ from those of the England
of our own day.
In one way alone has recent experience enabled us to realize
better than our fathers were able to do the conditions of
Great Britain in the earlier years of the nineteenth century.
Like our ancestors of 1800-1815, we have just been engaged in
a desperate struggle, for existence as well as for empire, with a
near neighbour of colossal strength. We can now understand
the mentality of that England which only maintained her
successful defensive by becoming the untiring fomenter of war,
keeping the struggle against Bonaparte alive by the unending
subsidies which she continued to pour into the hands of the
military powers of Central and Eastern Europe.

INTRODUCTION. vii
We can have from our own experience some glimpse of the
feelings of our ancestors in a time when Consols went down to
60, to 50, and on one occasion to 47 ; when the Bank of
England was on one black day so near breaking that it paid
its customers in sixpences, while a Bill to suspend specie pay
ments was being rapidly run through the House of Commons ;
when, in consequence of the lavish issue of paper money,
a five-pound note was only worth ^£'3 175. lod. in hard cash;
when the nation was laxed to the last halfpenny it could bear,
and yet immense sums had to be borrowed every year to make
expenditure and receipts balance.
It is more difficult, perhaps, to familiarize our minds with a
time when Yorkshire artisans banded together to destroy all
cotton-spinning machinery ; when Birmingham mobs met to
burn the houses of gentlemen suspected of advanced Liberal
opinions ; when the farmers' prayer was for " a bloody war and
a wet harvest," and the landowner who enclosed common-land
was counted a public benefactor as well as a sharp man of
business. But side-lights from modern strikes and the troubles
of the Food Controller may help us to visualize the picture.
But however unfamiliar many of the characteristics of the
time of the great war of 1793-18 15 may appear to us, it is in
that period that we must look for the fise and development
of most of the peculiar features of modern England. Within
those twenty-three years, and as a direct consequence of the
maritime war, we finally secured our commercial supremacy,
and became the carriers of the world's merchandise. The
frantic efforts of France to strike down our trade only resulted
in creating and increasing a monopoly for us, where previously
we had been merely the most important among a number of
competitors. Equally within the compass of the years of the
war lies the great revolution in English industry which made
our country manufacturing rather than agricultural, a change
which has altered all the conditions of life in a way which we
hardly realize till we attempt to call up the details of last-
century social economy. This transformation within was con
temporaneous with a growth of the British Empire without.

viii INTRODUCTION.
unparalleled before or since. In one generation our territories
in the East Indies swelled from a single province and a few
scattered ports, to a great land dominion stretching along the
upper waters of the Ganges and Jumna, and encroaching on
to the great central tableland of the Deccan. In the two short
viceroyalties of Cornwallis and Wellesley our possessions were
doubled or even tripled in extent, and our influence rendered
paramount over almost the whole peninsula. Simultaneously
the colonies of France, Spain, and Holland fell before us, and
the British flag waved from a hundred points on the Atlantic
and Indian Oceans where it had previously been unknown.
Australia saw the beginnings of the modest settlement of New
South Wales, and in Canada the British began to preponderate
by emigration over the French provincial element, so that the
country became a colony rather than a military possession.
No less important is it that to the years of our struggle with
France belongs the formation of political parties in England,
which we can recognize as the progenitors of those of our own
days. "Whig" and "Tory" at the end of the Great War mean
something very different from "Whig" and "Tory" at its
beginning. The political creeds of the rival statesmen of 1780
often seem incomprehensible to us. Those of their successors
of 1815 show definitely the mark of the nineteenth century,
and are manifestly capable of development into their later
shapes. We may even note that the first popular use of the
word " Radical," as applied to politicians, dates from the
second decade of the period of which we are about to treat.
It is unfortunate, from the point of view of completeness, that
the boundary of the century prevents us from dealing with the
commencement of the struggle with France. Logically, we
should start in 1793, and not on the ist of January, 1801, if we
are thoroughly to understand the England of 181 5. But bound
down by the prescribed limits of our subject, we must adhere
to its strict chronology, and open our story in the year before
the Treaty of Amiens, ere even the short breathing-space of
peace in 1802-3 ^^^ broken the continuity of the great
French war.

ENGLAND IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER I.
THE PEACE OF AMIENS.
When the nineteenth century opened, on New Year's Day
1801, England was still engaged in the weary war with revolu
tionary France. The struggle had already raged
for eight years, and seemed as far from an end as .^j^j, prMce.
ever. It made little difference to its character
that the government with which the contest had to be fought
out was no longer the corrupt Directory of Barras. The
military despotism of the new First Consul, Napoleon Bona
parte, was quite as hostile to England, and infinitely more
formidable. Till he had tried his strength against her and
learnt the limitations of his power, Bonaparte was not likely
to come to terms.
Moreover, we had just ascertained that we should have to
fight him single-handed. The last of our powerful jgoiayon ^f
continental allies was now about to withdraw from Great
the struggle. Austria had already opened nego- " °'
tiations for peace with the First Consul : since the defeat of
B

2 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800) her position seemed un
tenable, and she was glad to be permitted to retire from the
war, still retaining her ill-gotten gains in Italy, the lands of
the unfortunate republic of Venice.
Bonaparte had resolved to let her off easily : not only did he
wish to have his hands free for the duel with Great Britain and
the internal reorganization of France, but he was
Jf*Lun?T^lle. jealous lest Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden,
might dictate peace at the gates of Vienna, and so
cast into the shade his own achievements at Marengo in the
previous summer. Hence came the peace of Lune'ville (Feb
ruary 9, 1 801), which took Austria out of the struggle against
Bonaparte for more than four years.
Russia, the other ally of England in the war of 1798-9,
had already made her peace with France : the eccentric Czar
P . _,. Paul had not only thrown over the British
Armed alliance, but had ranged himself on the side of
NeutraUty. Britain's enemies. Inspired by a perverse and
wrong-headed admiration for the person of the First Consul, he
had set himself to aid him by every means in his power. In
December, 1800, he had formed a League of the Baltic Powers :
Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia declared an " Armed Neu
trality " during the remainder of the struggle between England
and France. Though not nominally directed against the
former power, the "Armed Neutrality" was practically a
declaration of hostility against her, for the confederates under
took to oppose — if necessary, by force of arms — the English
doctrine that a neutral flag did not cover the goods of a
belligerent on tlie high seas. The theory that neutral ships
might be searched for contraband merchandise, whenever and
wherever they were met, was strongly held by British states
men, and had already caused much friction with Denmark and
other powers. The hot-headed Czar had followed up his
declaration of Armed Neutrality by seizing the English ships
ice-bound in Russian ports, and throwing their crews into

GREAT BRITAIN IN 1801. 3
prison — proceedings which left no doubt as to lus future
policy. In 1801, therefore, England had to face not only her old
enemy across the Channel, but the new league of the Baltic
states. The prospect was not cheering, for the Domestic
internal condition of the United Kingdom was difficulties of
anything but satisfactory. The last throes of the "^ ^
Irish rebellion had died down, and in r8oo Castlereagh had
bribed and cajoled the Parliament on St. Stephen's Green to
vote away its own legislative independence and consent to the
Union with Great Britain. But if the position in Ireland was
less desperate than it had been three years before, the general
aspect of domestic affairs was gloomy. Dearth had prevailed
all through 1800, and the rise in the price of bread had been
followed by its usual consequences of discontent and riot.
The National Debt was piling itself up at the most fearful rate
— the revenue had been in 1800 only ^^39,000,000, while the
expenditure had been _;£'63, 000,000 ; the immense difference
between the two had to be made up by borrowing. The
military enterprises of Great Britain had been uniformly un
successful, save indeed in India. The last of them, the invasion
of Holland in 1799, had been perhaps the worst managed of
the whole series. It was true that we had been as regularly
victorious at sea as we had been unfortunate on land, but even
our greatest triumphs — Camperdown, St. Vincent, and the Nile
— had been defensive rather than offensive successes. We had
prevented France and her allies from insulting our own shores,
or from gaining a mastery in the waters of the Mediterranean.
But Jervis, Duncan, and Nelson had been powerless to check
the establishment of a French domination on the mainland of
Western Europe. We had swept the mercantile marine of
France, Spain, and Holland from the seas, and appropriated
their carrying trade. Yet, since our great enemy had never
been mainly dependent on its seaborne commerce, and since

4 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH _CENTURY.
touch Bonaparte's heart, we could bring comparatively little
pressure to bear upon France. It was not till he tried his
worst against Great Britain and found that he could not hope to
deal her any seripus blow, that the First Consul evinced any
real desire for peace. Meanwhile he hoped to retain his new
conquest of Egypt, and to bring to the aid of the shattered
navies of France and Spain the fresh naval resources of the
Baltic powers.
It was not under the guidance of William Pitt, whose
unswerving hand had hitherto directed the foreign policy of
Great Britain, that the last year of the Revolu-
of^P^t* '°" tionary war was destined to be fought out.
Early in 1801 he resigned his office, on a question
which, important enough in itself, was yet but a side issue in
this time of stress and peril. While negotiating the details of
the Union with Ireland, he had pledged his word to the Irish
Catholics to introduce in the new United Parliament legislation
for the relief of their many political disabilities. This he was
preparing to do, when he found that the old king was deter
mined to put his veto on any such action. Of the many deep-
rooted prejudices of George III. none was more violent than
his dislike for Romanists, and he had contrived to persuade
himself that to give his assent to such a bill as Pitt was drafting
would involve him in a breach of his Coronation Oath, " to
defend the Protestant Church as by law established." When
informed ofthe king's resolve, Pitt resigned (February, 1801) :
his exaggerated sense of loyalty to his old master prevented
him from forcing matters to the point of actual conflict between
king and ministry. He has been much censured, both for
leaving the helm of state when the foreign danger was still
so great, and for refusing to bring stronger pressure on the
king, who, in spite of his obstinacy, might have yielded at the
actual moment of friction.
With Pitt some of his personal friends retired from office.
but the Tories still retained their hold on the government, and

THE FRENCH EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. 5
continued to carry out Pitt's policy in every detail. The new
prime minister was Henry Addington, Speaker Adjing-ton
of the House of Commons, a man of narrow prime
views and limited ability, chiefly notable for his "'"'^ "'
subservience to the crown and his utter want of originality.
Addington, and not Pitt, was the man destined to bring the great
Revolutionary war to its end, though to his predecessor must be
given the credit of devising the measures which finally brought
it to a successful conclusion.
Before leaving office Pitt had made arrangements for the
carrying out of two great expeditions, both of which were
destined to win complete success. The first was j.^^ EevD-
aimed against the new French colony in Egypt, tian expe-
An English array, concentrated in the Mediter- '"""•
ranean, was to land in the Delta and assail the French from the
Sea, crossed the desert, and struck into the valley of the Nile
south of Cairo. As it chanced, the Indian army arrived too
late to take any part in the fighting, the larger expedition
having done all the work.
The French general Menou, who had to face the attack,
chanced to be wholly incompetent. He was an eccentric and
histrionic personage, who had embraced Mohamet- j-^^ French
anism to please Bonaparte, and thought more of expelled
his poses and of his proclamations than of strategy. ''°'^ SyP*-
He divided his troops up into two bodies, so that the 20,000
English who landed at Aboukir, under Sir Ralph Abercromby,
were superior to each fraction, though far inferior in number to
the whole army of Egypt. Two fights in front of Alexandria
broke the main force of the French, though the gallant Aber
cromby fell in the moment of victory. After short sieges the
two halves of Menou's army, shut up the one in Cairo and the
other in Alexandria, laid down their arms, and all Egypt was
in our hands (March-July, 1801). Bonaparte's dream of an
Eastern empire had come to a disastrous end. This was

6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
inevitable from the first; without command of the sea such
an outlying possession could not possibly be maintained.
Not less complete was the success of the English in the
Baltic against the signatories of the declaration of Armed
Neutrality. The bitter northern winter, which
Spection*! ^^^'^ '^P *^^ Russian and Swedish ports, prevented
the early concentration of the allied fleets.
Before the ice had broken up, an English squadron had been
sent off, with orders to throw itself between the scattered
divisions of the enemy, and to destroy them in detail. Such a
plan was absolutely necessary, for if the confederate navies
could have massed themselves they might have taken the sea
with more than fifty ships of the line, and the British squadron
numbered no more than eighteen. Nelson sailed with them,
but only as second-in-command : by some inexplicable stupidity
of those in charge at the Admiralty, he had been placed under
the orders of Sir Hyde Parker, a respectable veteran destitute
of all initiative and dash. The squadron reached the Sound
on March 30, and three days later attacked Copenhagen,
while the Russians and Swedes were still wholly ignorant of
their approach.
The Danes had protected their capital and arsenal by a line
of floating batteries interspersed with ships of war. Parker
thought their front almost too formidable to be
Copenhagen, attacked, but finally gave Nelson permission to
go in with twelve ships and do his best. The
approach lay up a narrow channel between sandbanks, on
which more than one of the English ships went aground. But
Nelson forced his way up to the enemy, and engaged with them
in the most furious cannonade of the whole Revolutionary war.
No other of England's enemies fought their ships with such
splendid obstinacy as the Danes : for some time Nelson seemed
to be making so little progress that his cautious superior hun"
out signals desiring him to draw off and retire. But Nelson
tumed his blind eye to the signals, and persisted in the fight

THE TREATY OF AMIENS. 7
till the Danish floating batteries were burnt or sunk. Although
the shore forts still held out, the Prince Regent of Denmark
then yielded to Nelson's summons, and consented to suspend
his adherence to the Armed Neutrality. The British fleet was
then directed against Cronstadt, but its presence in Russian
waters turned out to be unnecessary. Ten days before the
battle of Copenhagen the Czar Paul had fallen, the victim of a
palace conspiracy. His constant petty tyranny and his mad
caprices had driven his nobles to desperation, and on the night
of March 23, 1801, he was strangled in his bedroom by a
band of his own courtiers. His son and successor, Alexander,
at once reversed his policy, released the English prisoners, and
declared that the Baltic league was at an end.
Thus the new and formidable weapon which Bonaparte had
intended to turn against Great Britain was shattered, a few
months before the last French garrison in Egypt conclusion
was driven to surrender. Foiled in both quarters, ofthe Treaty
the First Consul at last began to make genuine °f Amiens.
overtures for peace : his earlier offers had no reality in them.
Addington and his cabinet were far from realizing the bitter
hatred of England which Bonaparte nourished in his heart,
and believed that a permanent pacification with him presented
no insuperable difficulties. The negotiations, which com
menced in the summer of 1801, dragged on for many months,
and the definitive Treaty of Amiens was only signed on
March 27, 1802.
By it England acknowledged the government of the First
Consul, and accepted accomplished facts, by recognizing the
new boundaries of France and of her vassals,
the Batavian, Helvetic, and Cisalpine Republics tt^e°Treaty °'^
— new names which cloaked the identity of the
Seven United Provinces, of the Swiss Confederates, and of
Lombardy. Great Britain restored to France all her lost
colonies in the West and East Indies ; but Bonaparte — always
liberal with the property of his unfortunate allies — allowed

8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the conqueror to retain the Spanish island of Trinidad in the
West, and in the East the important Dutch settlement of
Ceylon. Charles IV. of Spain and the Batavian Republic,
however, received back the rest of the possessions of which
they had been stripped, the former recovering the island of
Minorca, the latter the Cape of Good Hope, both points of
high strategical importance which English statesmen sur
rendered with deep regret. One more among the numerous
clauses of the treaty requires mention— England had just
captured Malta, which Bonaparte, in 1798, had lawlessly seized
from the Knights of St. John without any declaration of war.
The treaty provided that this important island, the key of
the central Mediterranean, should be evacuated by the British
forces and restored to its original owners, when the Order
should have been reconstituted and remodelled. Herein lay
the germs of much future trouble.
By the Treaty of Amiens England, perhaps, gave up more
than was absolutely necessary. Her position was a very
Expediency ^t'^o'^g O"^ after the French failures in Egypt
of the Treaty and the Baltic; and it was only a genuine wish
for peace, and a misplaced confidence in the good
intentions of Bonaparte, which led the Addington ministry to
give up so many valuable conquests. England, in spite of all
her financial burdens, had still plenty of strength left in her.
The expense of the war, monstrous as it had been, was almost
made up to her by the extraordinary growth of English com
merce since 1793. The destruction of the mercantile marine
of France, Spain, and' Holland had led to an unparalleled
expansion in our trade. In 1793 the export of British manu
factures had been to the value of ;^i4,7oo,ooo; in 1801 it
had risen to ;^24,40o,ooo. Similarly, at the earlier date we
had re-exported ^^5, 400,000 of foreign and colonial goods;
in 1 80 1 the figures had tripled, and were recorded as
;^i7,ioo,ooo. The number of British ships at sea had risen
from 16,000 to 18,000, in spite of all French privateering.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA. 9
If we had failed to prevent the establishment of the French
domination on the continent of Western Europe, France had
failed quite as signally in her attempts to demolish our com
mercial and maritime supremacy. During the heat of the
war we had grasped the control of Southern India, by putting
down Bonaparte's ally, Tippoo Sultan of Mysore (1799); the
" Great Proconsul " Wellesley was, at the very moment of the
Treaty of Amiens, watching his opportunity to lay the founda
tions of British power in the central and northern regions of
Hindostan by interfering in the affairs of the Mahratta states,
a project which he was to take in hand before the year 1802
had expired.
Yet, even when all these facts are taken into consideration,
there can be no doubt that Addington and his cabinet were
fully justified in concluding peace with .France. War is such
a fearful burden, and its chances are so incalculable, that no
government which is offered an honourable and not unprofit
able peace should hesitate to accept it, merely because there
is some prospect of obtaining yet better terms at some future
date. The one mistake made was in thinking that Bonaparte
was sincerely anxious for an equitable pacification, and wished
to dwell beside us as a quiet neighbour. But the statesmen
of 1801 could not know his character as we know it after a
study of his whole career ; they were quite excusable if they
were deceived by his plausible verbiage, and allowed him
some credit for the magnificent and praiseworthy sentiments
which he professed.

( 10 )

CHAPTER II.
the struggle with BONAPARTE : (l) THE NAVAL WAR.
1803-1806.
The peace from which so much had been hoped was to
endure for no more than thirteen months. But in March,
1802, well-nigh all men on this side of the Channel believed
that the struggle with France had reached its end, and thought
that a period of rest, economy, and retrenchment had set in.
Britain was to turn to account the complete sovereignty of
the seas and the new Indian empire which she had gained,
and, by a careful development of trade and manufactures,
was to free herself from the burden of her vast national debt.
The army and navy were reduced with a haste that was to
produce much trouble ere the year was out. So great were
the expectations that were entertained of the prosperity that
was to result from the peace, that when the French ambas
sador arrived in London, his carriage was actually drawn
through the streets by the populace, and a general illumination
testified to the national joy. Great numbers of English at
once embarked on continental travel — a pleasure which had
been denied them for more than eight years, and for which
many of them were to pay dearly in 1803.
Bonaparte's objects in coming to terms with England had
been twofold. He wished for an interval of quiet in which to
prepare for that assumption of regal power which he had
already determined to carry out. But he also wished to

BONAPARTE'S ANNEXATIONS IN 1802. ii
recover the lost French colonies, and to gain time to re
build the shattered French navy, which in 1802
had been reduced to less than forty ships of the „ "i"^*'^ ^ ^
line. In a few years ^he intended to create a new
fleet, which should be able to dispute with that of Britain the
mastery of the seas. Moreover, observing the enthusiasm with
which peace was greeted in England, he fancied that our
govemment would wink at several new aggressions which he
was contemplating on the continent. Rather than renew the
war, he imagined that the weak Addington would submit to
many humiliations. In this respect he wholly misconceived
the situation ; he underrated the wariness and national pride
of his opponents to an absurd degree.
Only a few months had elapsed after the Treaty of Amiens
had been signed, when the First Consul began to take in hand
some measures which were certain to irritate p^gsh
England. In September he annexed to France annexations
Piedmont and the rest of the continental terri- ^ ranee.
tories of the King of Sardinia, though that unfortunate monarch
had given him no provocation whatever. Parma was at the
same time appropriated, though compensation was in this case
given to the dispossessed Bourbon duke. Soon after Bonaparte
sent 30,000 men into Switzerland, and overturned there a
government which was not sufficiently subservient to his
interests. When England protested against this high-handed
action, he merely replied that she had no concern with con
tinental affairs, since there was no mention of Piedmont or the
Helvetic Republic in the Treaty of Amiens. On his part he
began to declaim against our govemment because Malta had
not yet been evacuated : we had agreed to restore the island
to the Order of the Knights of St. John, but since they had not
yet been reorganized, our troops were still in possession. How
ever, actual preparations for their departure had begun when
the First Consul's action caused them to be suspended.
Even before these matters of foreign, policy had come to a

12 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
head, Bonaparte had created much ill feeling in England by
Insults to making some extraordinary demands from our
British government. He proposed that we should expel
Government ^^^^ ^^^ gj^^^^^g the princes of the old royal family
of France and certain other refugees, a request for the violation
of English hospitality which was naturally refused. He also
made an astonishing demand for the suppression of certain
English newspapers and pamphlets, wherein his conduct and
policy were being discussed with the usual freedom of political
papers. When Lord Hawkesbury made the natural reply that
in England the press was free, and that it was not our wont to
expel foreign exiles who had done nothing against our laws,
the First Consul pretended to regard himself as outrageously
insulted (August 17, 1802).
His ill-will was notably manifest in the regulations against
English trade which he maintained. He utterly refused to
Hostility to ^^S" any commercial treaty, and caused crushing
English duties to be laid on English goods, not only in
ra e. France, but throughout the territories of her
vassal republics. He also sent agents and spies all over Great
Britain and the British empire, to discover our exact military
and commercial resources. The final outbreak of wrath
against him on this side of the Channel was largely caused
by the publication of the papers of one of his agents. General
Sebastiani, which were filled with elaborate plans for putting
the French again in possession of Egypt, and for undermining
English trade in the Levant.
It was no wonder that in the winter of 1802-3 the English
ministers made up their minds that another war was probably
The British *" ^^S^^- They resolved to retain a firm hold on
ambassador Malta, and to delay the surrender of the Cape of
Good Hope, Pondicherry, and such other French
possessions as had not yet been given back. When Pariiament
met in March, the prime minister announced that the army and
navy, instead of being further reduced, would require certain

RUPTURE WITH FRANCE. 13
additions. It was the news of these measures which led
Bonaparte to show his hand: he summoned the English
ambassador. Lord Whitworth, to the Tuileries, and, in the
presence of a large assembly, delivered an angry harangue at
him. He accused the English cabinet of violating the Treaty
of Amiens with deliberate treachery, cried that they should
have war if they wanted it, " but if they are the first to draw
the sword, I shall be the last to put it back into the scabbard.
Woe to those who violate treaties ; they shall answer for the
consequences to all Europe " (March 13, 1803).
After such a scene the Addington cabinet felt that war was
inevitable ; they began hurriedly to refit our dismantled fleet,
and to re-embody our disbanded battalions. Ei,„iand
Bonaparte, on the other hand, began to move declares
troops from inland France towards the shores of ^^'^^
the Channel, and set naval preparations afoot in all his ports,
especially in the new arsenal of Antwerp. Some negotiations,
half-hearted on both sides, dragged on for nearly two months
more ; but when the First Consul insisted that we should not
only recognize the legality of his doings in Italy and Switzer
land, but also at once evacuate Malta, it was obvious that there
could be no yielding. On the 12th of May, T803, our
ambassador left Paris, and the declaration of war followed.
It is probable that at first Bonaparte had merely intended to
bully and hector the British Government into condoning his
annexations in Italy, and had assumed his aggres- gej^ure of
sive airs in the full confidence that Addington and English
his cabinet would give way. When they refused ^^^^ "^'
to yield an inch, and met his menaces with a declaration of
war, he showed all the irritation of a man deceived in his ex
pectations. His first act was a sign of blind wrath, an act un
paralleled in previous generations, though unfortunately it was to
have a complete reproduction in 1914. He seized all the
English tourists and travellers who were passing through France
for pleasure or business, and put them in confinement, as if

14 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
they had been prisoners of war. They were about 10,000 in
number, and Bonaparte actually had the cruelty to keep them
confined during the whole of the war. Even more unlucky
than the interned of Riihleben, they were ten years in bonds.
Another sign of his wrath was that he persistently continued to
accuse the British Government of hiring assassins to attempt
his life— ascribing all conspiracies against him, whether the
work of royalist fanatics or discontented republicans, to English
gold. Thus began the second half of the great French war — the
struggle with Bonaparte as opposed to the struggle against the
principles of the Revolution. The two episodes are one in so
far as they are regarded as constituting the great test-struggle
between England and France, the last serious effort made by
a foreign power to destroy cur commercial and maritime
supremacy by force of arms. Napoleon in this respect only
continued the work of the Jacobins, and the short Peace of
Amiens was a break so insignificant that we need hardly regard
it at all. Up to 1802 the game had been a drawn one, and
the adversaries had only paused for a moment to draw breath
before resuming their duel.
But the character of the struggle was profoundly modified
by the fact that from 1803 onwards we were no longer
fighting against the principles of the Revolution,
th**"ontest ^^^ against a military despot of unparalleled
between genius, who had fought his way up from the
FrMce^^ ^^ obscure position of a lieutenant of artillery to
that of the arbitrator of Europe, and had showed
his ability to direct the anarchic energy of revolutionary
France to his own ends. France under Bonaparte only
resembled France under Robespierre in the unscrupulous
vigour of her assaults on her neighbours. After having long
posed as the prophetess of licentious liberty, ske now became
the apostle of despotism ; and England, therefore, was able to
appear once more as the protectress of the liberties of Europe

BONAPARTE'S SCHEMES. 15
against a tyrant, abandoning her previous position as the
defender of order against anarchy, which she had occupied
since 1792. The Republicans had talked of freeing the
masses in England from the government of a corrupt
oligarchy : Bonaparte made no pretence of any such philan
thropic aim, and merely spoke of destroying the power and
wealth of Great Britain because she stood in his way. All
through his career it is most notable how a hatred for this
country pervades and explains all his widespread schemes.
From the day when, as a young artillery officer, he drove
our garrison out of Toulon, to the day when he saw the
broken columns of his Old Guard rolling down the hillside
of Waterloo, it was always England that stood before him
as the enemy of his schemes and the final object at which
his blows were levelled. His invasion of Egypt in 1798 had
been aimed against our Indian empire, and we had foiled
him. His policy after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens
had always before it as its ultimate end the maritime and
commercial ruin of England. He strove to accomplish it
first by open invasion and maritime war, later by the more
circuitous method of compelling all Europe to unite in the
league of the " Continental System " and join him in his boy
cotting of English trade. All his wars with Austria, Prussia,
and Russia were to a great extent indirect blows at the insular
enemy whom he could not attack on her own soil, for all the
confederacies against him were fomented and consolidated
by the application of English gold. To win the fight of
Friedland or Wagram meant to him that he could force
another state into adopting a commercial policy hostile to
England, not merely that he could seize territory or impose
vassalage on the defeated foe. The final end of all his plans
was to crush Great Britain, and the other episodes of the war
were but means to that end, only necessary because England's
continental allies must be subdued before England herself
could be touched.

i6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Bonaparte had many points in his favour while conducting
the war against Great Britain. He had all the advantages
that come from unity of purpose and despotic power. The
ministers of a constitutional state are clogged with the re
sponsibility to Parliament and the nation for all their actions.
They have to face the criticism of the opposition and the
comments of the press. Moreover, the policy of a cabinet
of ten or a dozen men must necessarily be less coherent and
self-consistent than that of a single autocrat. When each
side had formed a scheme, the ruler of France could provide
for its speedy and silent accomplishment ; while the English
expeditions were too often canvassed in parliament and
divulged by the -press before they had even left our shores.
Bonaparte was his own finance-minister and his own com
mander-in-chief; while in England the views of the economist
and the soldier were too often clashing in the cabinet, with
the result that the one spent more than he intended, though
the other was always being checked by insufficient supplies.
Several times, as we shall see, Wellington was nearly starved
out in Spain, while the ministry were positive that they were
spending too much rather than too little on his army. Nothing
of the sort could happen in France, where the same hand held
the sword and the purse-strings. Bonaparte, too, in his deal
ings with his allies, could press his demands as a master;
England had great difficulty in getting even part of her
requirements carried out by confederates who knew that they
were serving her as well as themselves, and could therefore
get what terms they liked out of her.
The great war of 1803-1814 falls into two main parts.
During the first, Bonaparte aimed at fighting England on the
seas, and his fundamental project was the actual invasion of
our shores. This period lasted for somewhat over two years,
and ended in 1805, when we stirred up against him enemies
who kept his army occupied in Central Europe, and destroyed
his fleet at Trafalgar. During the second and longer section

BONAPARTE AT BOULOGNE. 17
of the struggle, Bonaparte abandoned his invasion scheme,
frankly ceased to dispute the mastery of the seas, and strove
to wear down England by cutting off the sources of her
commercial prosperity by his " Continental System," a scheme
hopeless from the first, and entailing on him in the end the
desperate hatred, not only of the governments, but of the
peoples of every European state. He finally fell because he
had taught every patriot in every land to look upon him as
a bitter and irreconcilable personal enemy.
At the first outbreak of the new war in 1803, it would be
hard to say which of the two belligerents displayed the
greater energy. Bonaparte marched 120,000
veteran troops to the coast of the Channel, and Boulog™^ *
set every dockyard in France and Holland to
work, in order to build men-of-war to equal the English fleet
in numbers. He also constructed vast numbers of large flat-
bottomed boats, in which he intended to convey his army
across the straits under cover of his war fleet. His own
headquarters were placed at Boulogne; to right and left his
regiments lay at every port between Ostend and St. Valery.
He was thoroughly set upon trying that invasion of our island
which the Directory had abandoned as impracticable after
the defeats of Camperdown and St. Vincent. A fog, he
thought, might cover his crossing, or a gale might drive away
the British squadron which observed him, or a lucky concen
tration of his own ships might for a moment give him the
command of the Channel. But in some way or another he
was determined that the attempt should be made. His troops
were trained to get on board their flat-bottomed boats with
extraordinary speed and order, and he boasted that the whole
army could embark in France and disembark in England
within forty-eight hours — a feat wholly impossible.
On this side of the Channel the outbreak of war had roused
wild anger against Bonaparte for cheating us out of the long-
desired peace from which so much had been expected. With
c

i8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
anger was mixed a strong feeling of apprehension when the
. magnitude of the preparations at Boulogne be-
England— came known. The excitement was far greater
The volun- than that which had been felt during the critical
year 1798. While the ministers were planning
how best the military forces of the United Kingdom could
be drawn out to meet the projected attack, the nation itself
came to their aid by forming many hundreds of volunteer
corps. In a few months 347,000 volunteers were under arms,
besides 120,000 regulars and 78,000 militia. The new levies
were very raw, and insufficiently supplied with cavalry and
artillery. But their numbers were so great and their enthusiasm
so genuine, that, with the regulars to stiffen their resistance, it
cannot be doubted that they would have given a good account
of Bonaparte, if ever he had succeeded in throwing the whole
of his 150,000 men ashore in Kent and Sussex.
The spirit of the nation was displayed with equal clearness
by the demand made for the return of Pitt to the helm of the
state. Addington, whose efforts to organize the
to* office?™^ national defence were considered too slow and
ineffective, retired from office in the spring of
1804, and Pitt's advent to power was signalized by an outburst
of redoubled energy and an unsparing expenditure of public
money. Every month that Bonaparte waited before dealing his
threatened blow made the project of invasion more chimerical.
The longer the First Consul studied the problem of trans
porting his host across the straits on his light craft, the more
ModificaUon '^'*'^''^' '^ '^^^^^ '° ^PP^^""' finally, after many
of Bona- months spent in weighing the chances for and
parte's in- against the possibihty of invading England before
vasionpans. ^^ ^^^ secured control of the Channel, Bona
parte seems to have come to the very wise and pmdent
conclusion that it was too hazardous an undertaking. Instead
of placing his army on board of his transports and flat-bottomed
boats and launching them on to the narrow seas, he resolved

NAPOLEON PROCLAIMED EMPEROR. 19
to bring up his war fleet to convey them across. But to collect
his line-of-battle ships from the scattered ports where they were
being blockaded by the English squadrons was in itself a very
hazardous and diflScult task. He deferred the operation till
1804, and meanwhile took in hand a piece of domestic policy
whose conclusion the rapture of the Treaty of Amiens had
interrapted. He thought the time was ripe for the open restoration of
monarchy in France. A royalist conspiracy against his life
being detected, he took the opportunity which it
gave him to demand a higher and firmer position assumes the
in the state than that of First Consul. Acting on t'^e of
his secret orders, the French senate requested him
to assume the title of Emperor — the monarch of so large a
realm and the controller of so many vassal states was too great
(he thought) to be a mere king. Bonaparte at once accepted
the offer, which seemed to fall in with the aspirations of the
whole nation. Jacobinism was wholly dead, and there was a
real and widespread enthusiasm for the mler who had not
merely smitten the foreign enemies of France, but had restored
order within her boundaries, reorganized her finances, and
brought back to the ruined country a considerable measure of
internal prosperity (May 18, 1804). Bonaparte compelled the
Pope to come to Paris to assist in his coronation : it was a
grand if somewhat garish pageant, which went to the hearts of
the few surviving members of the old republican party, and
marked the complete ascendency of despotism in France. At
its culminating point, Bonaparte, taking the crown out of the
hands of Pius VIL, who had been intending to place it on
his head, crowned himself instead, and then placed another
diadem on the brow of his wife, Josephine Beauhamais. For
the future law ran in France in the name of the " Emperor
Napoleon," though the state was oflScially spoken of as a
republic for two or three years more, in spite of its new mon
archical form (December 2, 1804).

»o ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
In the autumn of 1804, Napoleon began to take in hand
his new scheme for concentrating a naval force in the Channel
England '° cover the passage of his army. He hoped to
declares war unite at Boulogne all the scattered French
with Spain, squadrons, and to join to them the navies of
Holland and Spain. The latter power had just been forced by
him, much against her will, to join the coalition. Charles IV.,
being summoned to supply the emperor with either ships or
money, undertook to pay France an enormous subsidy, trusting
thereby to escape an open breach with England. But the
Addington cabinet got early news of the treaty, and promptly
seized the frigates which were bringing the treasure from America
(October 5), whereupon Spain a few months later declared war
on England (December 12), and openly joined Napoleon.
This event immensely enlarged the area of naval war :
English fleets had now to watch every port of Western Europe,
The block- ^''°™ ^^^ Texel in the North Sea to Genoa in the
ade of the Mediterranean, lest some detachment ofthe enemy
a le ee . jjjjgjjt escape, and, by relieving other blockaded
squadrons, concentrate for the moment a force which should
outnumber our ships on the all-important belt of sea between
Boulogne and the Kentish coast. Everything then depended
on the untiring vigilance of our admirals, who had to keep up
an endless watch on the hostile ports, and whose weather-beaten
ships could never retire for a moment from the wearisome
blockade. Napoleon at last thought out an elaborate and ingenious •
scheme for drawing together his scattered naval strength.'
Napoleon's '^^^ initiative was to lie with Villeneuve, the
naval admiral commanding at Toulon, whose squadron
sc eme. ^^g being watched by a somewhat smaller EngUsh
fleet under the ever-watchful Nelson. He was to slip out of
his port at the first opportunity, and, evading Nelson, to make
for the Straits of Gibraltar. Picking up the Spanish ships at
Cartagena and Cadiz, where the English blockading vessels

VILLENEUVE AND NELSON. ai
were very few, he was then to strike out westward into the
Atlantic, as if intending to deal a blow at the English West
Indies. Nelson, the emperor rightly thought, would follow
them in that direction. But after reaching the Caribbean Sea,
the Franco-Spaniards were to turn suddenly back and make
a dash for Brest, where lay a large French squadron, watched
by Admiral Cornwallis and the English Channel fleet. If all
went well, Villeneuve could raise the blockade of Brest, for,
counting the ships in that port, he would have some sixty
vessels to Cornwallis's thirty-five. Nelson meanwhile would
be vainly searching the West Indian waters for the enemy who
had reached the ChanneL CornwaUis must retire or be
crushed, and the command of the narrow seas must pass for
some weeks into French hands. The invasion could then be
accomplished. Much of this scheme of the emperor's was actually carried
out. On March 29, 1805, Villeneuve ran out of Toulon in
a heavy gale, which had blown Nelson far to villeneuve
the south. He made for the Straits of Gibraltar, escapes to the
while the English admiral was vainly looking for ^^^t Indies.
him off Sicily, under the impression that he had saUed for
Egypt. Fortunately for us, the Spanish fleet was in such a
disgraceful state of disrepair and disorder, that no ships from
Cartagena and only six from Cadiz joined the enemy, and
Villeneuve had to start on his dash across the Atlantic with
only eighteen vessels instead of the thirty on which he had
counted (April 9, 1805). On the 13th of May they reached
Martinique. After staying some weeks in the West Indies,
that the knowledge of his arrival there might get abroad and
mislead Nelson, the French admiral started homeward on the
4th of June. His great opponent meanwhile had only received
full information as to the route taken by the French as late as
May 9, and started for the West just a month later than the
French, and with only eleven line-of-battle ships. He reached
Barbados on the very day that Villeneuve turned back towards

23 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Europe, vainly sought him among the islands for a few days,
and then, acting on his own unerring inspiration, turned back
ward and made sail for Europe. He was now only nine days
behind the French, though he had started with a full month
to the bad.
Meanwhile all Napoleon's elaborate plans for bringing
VUleneuve to Brest, long ere his departure from the West
transpired, were wrecked by the chances of war
action off ^^^ ^^^ activity of the English Admiralty. A
Cape Finis- fast-sailing English brig sighted the allied fleet
tcrrc moving eastward soon after it left the West
Indies. Making an extraordinarily swift passage, this Uttle
vessel brought the news to Portsmouth on the 7th of July.
Realizing its tremendous importance. Lord Barham, the First
Lord of the Admiralty, gave prompt orders that a squadron
should be sent out into the Atlantic to intercept Villeneuve.
This was done with such splendid speed that on July 23
fifteen vessels under Sir Robert Calder met the approaching
enemy just as he arrived in sight of Europe, off the Spanish
cape Finisterre. After an indecisive action, in which they
lost two ships, the alUes ran into Ferrol instead of sailing for
Brest : Calder's appearance had checkmated them.
Nelson, too, was now back in European waters ; on July 20,
three days before Calder's action, he reached Gibraltar. All
the British squadrons being now within touch of
Nelson— ^"•'^'^ Other, Bonaparte's scheme had practically
Villeneuve failed. But Villeneuve made its failure more
Cadiz. disastrous than it need have been. Having pro
cured reinforcements at Ferrol, he then moved
to Cadiz to pick up the remainder of the Spanish fleet. After
joining them, he had thirty-three ships of the line ; but outside
Cadiz lay Nelson with his own and Calder's squadrons, twenty- .
seven vessels in all. Villeneuve refused to put out, rightly
thinking that his superiority in numbers did not compensate
for the inferior quality of his crews. But nevertheless he had

BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR. 23
to fight. His master the emperor had heard with disgust and
wild anger that the fleet which was to give him the command
of the Channel had appeared at Ferrol instead of at Brest,
and had allowed itself to be turned from its goal by Calder's
less numerous squadron. In his vexation Napoleon sent his
admiral a letter taunting him with cowardice and bad seaman
ship, and informing him that a successor had been sent to
supersede him.
To vindicate his courage, the unfortunate Villeneuve deter
mined to offer battle to Nelson before he was displaced from
command. The fleets met off Cape Trafalgar,
on October 21, 1805, with the result that might J'xr^a'igar
have been expected. Nelson's vessels in two
columns burst into the midst of the ill-formed Franco-Spanish
line, and silenced or captured ship after ship by their splendid
gunnery. The allied rear and centre were annihilated before
their van could tack and come into action. Nineteen of
VUleneuve's ships, including his own, were taken, and one
blew up; only a remnant escaped into Cadiz. But Nelson
was mortally wounded by a musket-ball in the thick of the
fight. He Uved long enough to hear that the victory was
complete, but expired ere night. His work was done, for
Napoleon never again dared to send a large fleet to sea or
to risk a general engagement. Had Nelson's indomitable soul
sustained his frail body for a few more years, there would
have been little but weary blockading work for him to do.
He had effectually put an end to all Napoleon's invasion
schemes, by destroying more than half the French and Spanish
ships which were to have swept the Channel and laid open the
shores of Kent.
The turning-point of the great naval campaign of 1805 had
been Calder's indecisive action off Cape Finisterre. The
moment it had been fought and Villeneuve had turned south
ward. Napoleon had mentally given up his idea of crossing
the Dover Straits, and turned his attention to Continental

24 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
affairs. It was high time, for Pitt had been stirring up
against him a formidable coalition. The old
new co^Hion monarchies of Europe had been greatly displeased
against by Napoleon's annexations in Italy and elsewhere.
Francis II. of Austria bitteriy resented his constant
intrigues with the minor German states, and as emperor had a
special grievance against him. For in 1804 Bonaparte had
violated the territory of the empire in the most outrageous way.
He had sent a regiment of horse across the Rhine and kid
napped at night a Bourbon prince, the Duke of Enghien, whom
he then tried and shot on a false accusation of being concerned
in an assassination plot. Such a violation of intemational law
and common morality had provoked open protest from Austria
and Russia. These two powers were already negotiating for an
alliance against France, when Pitt stepped in to offer them
enormous subsidies and the active aid of the English fleet.
It was hoped that Prassia too would join the coalition ; but
the ministers of Frederick William III. pursued a mean and
double-faced policy, haggling with France and Austria at
once, and offering themselves to the highest bidder. They
finally helped neither side, but pounced on the electorate of
Hanover, with Napoleon's consent, and preserved an ambiguous
neutrality. The French autocrat was not unaware of the Austro-Russian
aUiance. When he heard of Villeneuve's failure, he dropped
for ever his cherished invasion scheme, and, sud-
Ulm and , , . , . , ,
Austerlitz— denly turning his back on the sea, declared war on
Austria sues his Continental enemies before they were ready
for him. The troops from the camp of Boulogne
were hurried across France by forced marches, and hurled into
Germany, long before the Russians were anywhere near the
field of operations. The Austrians alone had to bear the first
brant of the war; their imbecile commander. Mack, allowed
them to be surprised before they were concentrated, and was
himself captured at Ulm with nearly 40,000 men before the

AUSTERLITZ AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. 2$
war was many days old (October 20). This disaster left the
Austrians so weak that they could not even save Vienna
from the invader ; the wrecks of their army had to fall back
and join the Russians, who were only now coming on the
scene. A month later (December 2, 1805) the French and the
allies met in a decisive battle at Austerlitz, a Moravian village
eighty miles north of Vienna. Here the unskilful generalship
of the allies exposed them to a bloody defeat, which cost them
more than 30,000 men. The Austrians now cried aloud for
peace, which Napoleon only granted on very hard terms. He
took away Venice and the other Austrian lands south of the
Alps, and united them to Lombardy, so forming a " Kingdom
of Italy," of which he wore the crown. The Tyrol was given
to Bavaria, whose ralei had sided with Napoleon.
Moreover, Francis II. was forced to give up the time-honoured
title of " Holy Roman Emperor " which his ancestors had held
since 1438, and with it his place as nominal p. . , ,
suzerain of the other German states. Most of » Holy
the minor princes between the Rhine and the ^""n?",,
Elbe were forced to replace their nominal depen- xhe Confede-
dence on the Habsburg emperor by a very real Ef^io" of the
. , ^ -r^ r , 1 • Rhine.
servitude to Bonaparte. He formed them into
the " Confederation of the Rhine " under his own presidency,
and compelled them to place their armies and treasures at his
disposal (July to December, 1806).
The news of the defeat of Austerlitz is often said to have
been the death-blow of Pitt. This statement is only true in a
general way, and the theatrical last words which
. , • .,. « n 11 ..u e Death of
are put into his mouth. Roll up the map of pj^^^
Europe; we shall not want it again for twenty
years," are not authentic. But there is no doubt that he was
bitterly disappointed at the failure of the great coaUtion which
he had raised against Napoleon. His death was really due to
the long strain of anxiety during the projected invasion of
England, and to his carelessness about his health, of which he

26 ENGLAND IN TUE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
was as reckless as he was about his private fortune. He died,
a broken man, though aged no more than forty-six, on January
23, 1806. But his policy lived after him, and his successors
were to carry it out to a successful end, though only after eight
more years of desperate war.

i 27 )

CHAPTER IIL
THE STRUGGLE WITH BONAPARTE : (2) THE CONTINENTAl.
SYSTEM — THE PENINSULAR WAR — WATERLOO.
1806-1815.
With the battles of Trafalgar and Austerlitz, foUowed by the
death of Pitt, the first stage in the great straggle with the
French emperor came to an end. There was no jjapoleon's
further talk of the invasion of England, nor did second line
Bonaparte attempt any more to dispute the "'Po'^cy.
dominion of the seas. . But his mind was none the less set on
the humiliation of England, though his methods of assailing
her became more indirect. He had now in his eye the estab
lishment of a domination over the whole of Europe. The first
step towards the systematic reduction of his neighbours to
subjection was the establishment of the " Confederation of the
Rhine," whose members were from the first his slaves. The
second was the planting out of his relatives as rulers of the
smaller states of Europe. In 1806 his brother Joseph was
made King of Naples, from which the imbecile Bourbon house
were driven out, because they had dared to league themselves
with Austria during the war of 1805. A few months later came the
" crowning of his brother Lewis as King of HoUand — the Bata
vian republic being rathlessly swept away, without any option
being given to the Dutch of declaring their wishes as to the
govemment of their land. Bonaparte began to talk of himself
as the " successor of Charlemagne," an ominous saying for

28 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Germans and Spaniards, since the great Prankish empeior's
dominions had extended as far as the Elbe and the Ebro.
Meanwhile Pitt had found no competent successor in
England. No statesman commanded sufficient authority with
the people or the Parliament to take his place.
A coalition „,,,,„
ministry The result that followed was a coalition ministry.
formed in The Whig party, excluded from oflSce for more
England. , .._,,.
than twenty years, were invited to take their share
in the governance of the realm. Charles James Fox and
Sheridan took oflSce, allied to Lord Grenville, long a faithful
supporter of Pitt, and to many other Tories, among whom
Addington was numbered.
Even the way in which Bonaparte had broken the peace of
Amiens had not wholly cuied Fox of his idea that peace witb
France was possible. The invasion scheme being
t'lations with ^°''^'^' ^^ thought that the emperor might be wiUing
Napoleon. to come to terms. Accordingly, the Grenville-
Fox cabinet entered into negotiations with the
enemy in 1806. Napoleon at first used smooth words, but
the conditions on which he offered peace were humUiating,
considering that England had hitherto not only held her
own, but had swept the French fleet from the seas and
occupied a great number of French colonies. To his great
regret. Fox was compeUed to acknowledge that an honourable
T^ Li. r ^"^^ reasonable peace was not procurable. Soon
Ueath 01 e , -,. J /rt . >
Fox— after he died (September, 1806), surviving his
Break-up of great rival Pitt by less than a year. The coalition
the coalition . . . ' , .
—The Tories ministry survived him a few months, but resigned
"^ffic™*** '" March, 1807. The two elements in it were at
variance, and the Whigs made the refusal of
George III. to allow them to introduce Catholic Emancipation
their excuse for leaving oflSce. A cabinet of pure Tories
succeeded them, in which the leading spirit was Spencer
Perceval, though the premiership was nominaUy held by the
aged Duke of Portland.

NAPOLEON CONQUERS PRUSSIA. 29
Not many months after the Austrians had yielded to their
conqueror, and the Russians had retired sullenly towards the
east, the third great Continental power was
destined to feel the weight of Napoleon's sword, loaded into
The weak and selfish ministers of Prassia had declaring
stood out from the coalition of 1805, and had sold p^^""
themselves to Napoleon for the price of the
annexation of Hanover — the patrimony of the old King of
England. But no sooner was Austerlitz won and the aUies
crushed, than Napoleon began a series of systematic slights and
insults to Prussia. He considered that, by making her bargain
with him, she had sold herself to be as much his vassal as were
Holland or Bavaria. The numerous insults which he inflicted
on his ally Frederick William III. culminated in an extra
ordinary piece of bad faith. He had covenanted in 1805 that
Prussia should keep Hanover : but, negotiating with England in
1806, he calmly proposed to the English ministers to take back
that electorate and restore it to George III. as one of the terms
of peace. This came to the ears of the Prussian court, and
led to such an explosion of wrath that with great haste and
hurry Frederick William declared war on France, without
giving himself time to prepare his army or to purvey himself
allies. He hastily tried to concUiate England, whose king he
had robbed of Hanover, and to patch up an alliance with
Alexander of Russia, who was stiU eager to fight, to reverse
the verdict of Austerlitz. Both England and Russia came to
terms with the Prassians, but not in time to give her practical
assistance during the opening days of the war.
Advancing beyond the Elbe in order to overrun the lands of
the princes of the " Confederacy of the Rhine," the Prussians
found themselves suddenly assailed on the flank Battles of
by the French army, which Bonaparte had secretly Jena and
concentrated under cover of the Thuringian Auerstadt
Forest. The Prussian troops had hitherto enjoyed a very
high reputation, won in the splendid victories of Frederick the

30 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Great. But the accurate driU and stern discipline which they
inherited from him, and their undoubted courage in the field,
did not save them from a fearful disaster. Guided by aged
and incompetent generals, who had not studied Bonaparte's
methods of attack, they were caught before they could
concentrate, and defeated piecemeal at the battles of Jena and
Auerstadt (October 14, 1806). When Napoleon had once got
them on the run, he pursued them so fiercely that division after
division was outmarched, surrounded, and compelled to lay
down its arms. The king escaped with only 12,000 men, the
wreck of a host of 150,000 veterans, to join his Russian ally.
Of all the disasters which befel the powers of the Continent
when they measured themselves on the field of battle against
Bonaparte, this was the most sudden and humiliating. Only
a few weeks after the declaration of war the Prassian monarchy
was rained.
After entering Berlin in triumph, the victor pressed on to
the east to meet the Russians. His campaign against them
was far more difficult and sharply contested. In
Eylau and the first pitched battle, fought at Eylau in a
Thetrwityof bUnding Febraary snowstorm, amid frozen lakes
Tilsit— _ and pine woods, the emperor, though not beaten,
memb«-edf" faUed to drive the enemy from the field. He
retired for a space into winter quarters ; but when
the spring of 1807 came round he pushed forward again, and,
after much sharp fighting, crushed the Russians at Friedland
(June 14). The czar then asked for peace ; meeting him on
a raft on the river Niemen, the boundary of Russia and Prussia,
Napoleon concluded with him the Treaty of TUsit (July 7,
1807), The terms of this peace were far harder on Prussia,
who had been friendly with France since 1795, than on Russia,
who had thrice during the last ten years strack hard at her.
Frederick WiUiam was stripped of half his dominions, partly
to help in making a new kingdom called "Westphalia" for
Napoleon's brother Jerome, partly to erect m Poland a vassal

THE BERLIN DECREES. 31
state called the " Grand Duchy of Warsaw," destined to act as
A French outpost to the east. A crashing fine was laid on the
dismembered monarchy, and French garrisons were perma
nently established in its chief strongholds. Russia, on the
other hand, was left intact, and only compelled to sign an
agreement to follow Napoleon's policy of attacking England
by striking at her trade.
Since Villeneuve's incapacity and Nelson's vigilance had
ruined Bonaparte's invasion scheme, another set of designs
against Britain had been maturing in the ^. RgHm
emperor's mind, for her ruin was still the final and Milan
end of aU his policy, and the wars with Conti- '-'^'^¦¦^^S'
nental powers were no more than episodes in the struggle.
There was a way in which victories like Austerlitz and
Friedland could be turned to account. If all English trade
wilh the states of the Continent could be prohibited, England
— Napoleon thought — must grow poor and perish. The
enforcement of this policy begins with the " Berlin Decrees,"
issued soon after Jena, in the autumn of 1806, and was
continued by the Milan Decrees of 1807. These ordinances
were among the most ingenious devices of the emperor's fertile
brain ; but, unlike most of the others, were decidedly imprac
ticable from the first. Every one was familiar with the idea
of a naval blockade, wherein tbe power supreme at sea places
ships before the harbours of its foe and prohibits the ingress or
egress of his merchandise. But Bonaparte's idea was the
reverse of this : he would institute a land blockade — soldiers
and custom-house officers should be planted aU round the
coasts of France and France's vassals and allies, to exclude
British vessels, and so to prevent British manufactures and
colonial goods reaching the Continent. The Berlin Decrees
declared the British Isles to be in a state of blockade — we are
reminded of another decree from Berlin, issued in 191 5 by
another and a not less bitter enemy. No subject of France
or of France's vassal states was to purchase or possess any

32 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
British merchandise. No vessel of a neutral power — for
example, the United States of America — which had touched at
a British port or a port of the British colonies, was to be ad
mitted into a Continental haven. All goods of British manu
facture were to be seized, whenever and in whosesoever hands
they were found, and confiscated to the crown. These rules
were at once imposed on Holland, Italy, Spain, and Germany,
and after Tilsit Russia also was cajoled into accepting them.
In all Europe, only Turkey, Portugal, Sweden, and the small
island kingdoms of SicUy and Sardinia were not included in
their effect.
The new Tory government in England promptly took up
the challenge. By the "Orders in Council" of 1807 the whole
Th "Orders °^ ^^^ coasts of France and France's aUies were
in CouncU " declared to be in a state of strict blockade, and
of 1807. jjj yesseis — gven those under neutral flags — which
left or entered them were declared good prizes of war, unless
they could prove that since leaving home they had touched at
a British port. This was a sort of ironical parody of Bona
parte's Berlin Decrees : obviously if both parties carried out
their threats, there could be no foreign trade at aU in conti
nental Europe.
The main difference between the two sets of Decrees was
that from the first England had the power to put her edict in
Fff f fth f°''^^' ¦'^'hile Bonaparte's was a dead letter not
"Continental worth the paper on which it was written. He
System. could not force his subjects and allies to give up
the countless articles of luxury and necessity which they had
been accustomed to draw from Britain or Britain's colonies.
From the first the proscribed goods contrived to penetrate into
Europe despite his orders. They came up the Danube from
Turkey, they crept into Spain from Portugal. Smuggling
became scientific, and was practised on a gigantic scale. From
Malta, Sicily, Gibraltar, and the Channel Islands vessels laden
with contraband goods sailed every night to throw ashore their
wares in Italy and France. Napoleon never succeeded in

THE EFFECTS OF TIIE BERLIN DECREES. 33
excluding our goods, but he succeeded in making the price of
them to his unfortunate subjects or allies three or four times
the natural amount, for the smuggler's risk of capture had to be
highly remunerated. Every time that a German or Spaniard
had to pay two shUlings a pound for his sugar, or to substitute
chicory for his accustomed coffee, he was reminded that the
Continental System was the cause of his privations, and asked
himself what benefit his country was drawing from the French
alliance to compensate him for his personal inconvenience.
As the years passed by, and Napoleon's demands grew more
exorbitant, the nations chafed more and more against his
tyranny, till there followed the great final explosion of wrath in
1813. But in 1807 this was as yet far off, and the full weight
of Bonaparte's exactions was unrealized. Meanwhile the suffer
ing brought on England was comparatively insignificant : we
had still the undisturbed control ofthe Indian, Chinese, African,
and North American trade to draw on, even though our com
merce with Europe was restricted. Our ports and warehouses
were full, and though we could not readily use some of our old
markets, yet the stagnation of which Napoleon had dreamed
was far from setting in. Such were the effects of the long-
pondered scheme which the emperor had devised, a scheme
which he carried out with a ruthless disregard for the interests
of his subjects and allies, and which was to draw him first into
the costly Spanish war of 1808, and then into the disastrous
Russian war of 181 2.
One of the secret articles of the Treaty of Tilsit had formu
lated a plan of the emperor's for combining the Russian and
Danish fleets, in order to dispute the command of
the Baltic with England — a device which Czar Danish fleet
Paul had tried once before in 1801. This was ~?^P^" aitions to
easUy foUed by the second English attack on Buenos
Copenhagen (October, 1807). This was tech- Ayres^and
nically an assault on a neutral, an act which could
not be justified. But the whole Danish fleet was carried off to
D

34 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
England. This naval success, however, hardly compensated
for the failure of two other expeditions, from which much had
been expected. One was an attempt to seize the Spanish
colony of Buenos Ayres in South America, which ended in the
ignominious departure of the incompetent General Whitelock
under a convention, after half of his small army had been taken
prisoners. The other was a mismanaged expedition to Egypt,
which led to nothing, and was finally abandoned with some
discredit. The British Army was indeed at this moment
at the lowest point of its reputation. UnUke the navy, it had
faUed in most of the tasks on which it had beeu sent : only in
India had it been uniformly successful. It was not tiU our men
got leaders worthy of their merits in Wellesley and Moore that
they were able to show their real value, and prove that they
were more than equal to the boasted veterans of Napoleon.
Their chance was now close at hand.
In 1808 Bonaparte conceived the iniquitous idea of seizing
the crown of Spain, and substituting for its wretched King
Napoleon Charles IV. a monarch of his own choosing.
seizes Charles was an obedient ally, but he was so
Portugal. thoroughly incompetent that his assistance did
not count for much : the emperor imagined that a nominee of
his own would prove a more profitable helper. But the way in
which he set about the conquest of Spain was characteristically
treacherous and tortuous. He drafted a large army into the
Peninsula under the excuse that he was about to attack Portu
gal, almost the last state in Europe which had not yet accepted
the Continental System. Declaring that " the House of Braganza
had ceased to reign," he poured his forces into Portugal, whose
Prince-regent fled over seas to Brazil without attempting to
offer resistance. But while one French army under General
Junot had marched on Lisbon, large detachments foUowed
behind, and occupied, under the guise of friends, the Spanish
capital Madrid, and the fortresses of Barcelona, Pampeluna.
and San Sebastian.

NAPOLEON ATTACKS SPAIN. 35
The Spaniards suspected no harm tiU Napoleon showed his
hand by a disgraceful piece of kidnapping. King Charles IV.
and his son, Prince Ferdinand, a worthless and
useless pair, had been engaged in a bitter quarrel Tgonaparte
with each other. Bonaparte summoned them proclaimed
both to visit him at Bayonne, just across the spam
French frontier, in order that he might arbitrate
between them and heal their quarrel. They were foolish
enough to obey this insolent mandate : when they arrived,
however, he put them both in confinement, bullied them into
signing an abdication, and sent them prisoners into France.
He then took the astounding step of appointing his own brother
Joseph Bonaparte as the successor of Charles IV., and the
numerous French troops scattered through Spain everywhere
proclaimed the usurper. The populace of Madrid rose, but
was put down with ruthless severity, and Joseph made his
appearance in the capital at the head of a strong guard.
Bonaparte had believed that centuries of misgovernment and
disorganization had so broken the spirit of the Spanish nation
that his impudent and treacherous scheme could
be carried to a successful end. He was soon of^^e**"*^*
undeceived : the Spaniards, in spite of the decay Spaniards—
of their ancient power and wealth, and the incom- of ^aylen°°
petence of their ralers, still possessed a healthy
sense of national pride : they were, moreover, the most obstinate,
fanatical, and revengeful race in Europe. Though deprived of
their princes, and confronted with French garrisons treacher
ously instaUed in their fortresses, they sprang to arms in every
province. In most quarters their raw levies were easUy beaten
by the French veterans, but a series of fortunate chances
enabled the insurgents of the South to surround and capture
at Baylen an army imder General Dupont, which had forced its
way into Andalusia (July 20, 1808). This was the first serious
check which the French arms had sustained since Napoleon had
been proclaimed emperor, and it had important results. Joseph

36

ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Bonaparte and his troops had to abandon Madrid, to retire
beyond the Ebro, and to ask aid from France.

laSsi .SFcrro^''Tx.

Sl'ilA & POKTUCAL
1S03-1S14.

TyJ-o.£ti:hi,r^ Co.S^
Meanwhile a second disaster followed hard on the heels of
the battle of Baylen. The English government had sent a
small army to Portugal, under Sir Arthur Wellesley,
an officer weU known for his gallant services in
India. This force routed at Vimiero (August 21,
1808) the French troops under Junot, which had
occupied Lisbon. The defeat was so crashing
that the enemy might have been pursued and
driven into the sea without much further trouble. But Wellesley
was superseded by a senior officer. Sir Hew Dalrymple, who
arrived from England on the night of the battle. This cautious
general admitted the French to terms, and by his Convention
of Cintra (August 30, 1808), Junot's troops were allciwed to
quit Portugal with bag and baggage, and to retum to France
by sea.

The English
in Spain-
Battle of
Vimiero —
The Conven
tion of
Cintra.

BATTLE OF CORUNNA. 37
Two such checks to the French arms called Bonaparte him
self into the field. He hurried over the Pyrenees more than
200,000 of the veterans who had conquered at
Austeriitz and Jena, and buried himself upon the Spiin-Sir'"
Spaniards. The latter were as inferior in numbers John Moore's
as in discipline and military spirit : their Ul-organ- '^*™P^'S°-
ized bands were scattered in all directions, and Napoleon
. entered Madrid in triumph, and replaced his brother on the
throne (December 4, 1808). He hoped to complete the con
quest of the Peninsula by crashing the English army from
Portugal, which was now advancing towards him under Sir
John Moore — Dalrymple and Wellesley had been recalled to
answer before a court-martial for the Convention of Cintra.
The emperor moved in his troops from all sides to surround
the 25,000 English, but Moore executed an admirably timed
retreat, and drew the bulk of the French army after him into
the inhospitable mountains of Galicia.
While vainly pursuing the English, Bonaparte suddenly
received news which changed all his plans : a new war was
imminent in his rear. Austria had now had three
years in which to recover from the humiliation of leaves Spain
Austerlitz, and had completely reorganized her —Battle of
army. She was cliafing bitterly against Napoleon's
dictatorial ways and the restraints of the " Continental System."
Seeing the French busy in the Spanish war, she gladly listened
to the persuasions of the Perceval cabinet, who offered English
aid for a fresh attack on the old enemy. It was the news of this
danger in the rear which forced Bonaparte to quit Spain, taking
with him his imperial guards, but leaving the rest of his troops
behind him. Marshal Soult, to whom the pursuit of Moore
was handed over, followed the English to the sea : at Coranna
the retreating army, suddenly tumed to bay, inflicted a sharp
defeat on Soult, and embarked in safety for England (January
16, 1809). Moore fell in the moment of victory, after having
taught his followers that the French could be outmanoeuvred,

38 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTPI CENTURY.
outmarched, and beaten in the open field. His troops had
suffered much from their own indiscipline and the bitter
weather, but little from the overwhelming force of pursuers.
The Austrian war of 1809 was the most formidable straggle
in which Bonaparte had yet engaged. The enemy fought
better, and were far better managed than in 1800
E**Iine- and °^ ¦'^°S " ^^^^ ^^'^ ^^^° ^^^ advantage of the fact
Wagram— that 200,000 of the best troops of France were
Nroi^on°^ locked up in the Peninsula. The Archduke
Charles, Austria's great general, long held Napo
leon in check, and even forced him to recross the Danube
after the battle of Essling. It was not until after many months
of bitter fighting that the invaders at last gained a decisive
battle at Wagram (July 6, 1809). The fortune of war might
perhaps have been turned against the French by the help of
England ; but the Perceval cabinet most unwisely wasted a fine
army by sending it into the swamps of Holland to besiege
Flushing, and make a vain demonstration on Antwerp. Forty
thousand men, who might have overran North Germany, or
recovered Madrid, captured Flushing, but suffered so severely
from marsh-fever in the pestilential isle of Walcheren that
they had at last to be withdrawn, without having aided the
Austrians in the least. Francis 1 1., meanwhile, was forced after
Wagram to sign the peace of Schonbrann, by which he gave up
to Napoleon his whole sea-coast in Dalmatia and lUyria, part
of Poland, and — bitterest of humiliations — the hand of his
daughter Maria Louisa (October 14, 1809). To make this
marriage possible, the French emperor caUously divorced
Josephine Beauharnais, the amiable if frivolous spouse who had
shared his fortunes for fourteen years. If he hoped to bind
Austria firmly to him by the match, Bonaparte was woefully
deceived. While the Austrian war was being fought out, the French
made little progress in Spain. They were now being opposed
not only by the Spanish levies, but by a new English army

BATTLE OF TALAVERA. 39
headed by Wellesley, who had been sent back to the Peninsula
when it was recognized that he had been in no
wise responsible for the Convention of Cintra. J^l^^'f^^
The year 1809 was very glorious to the English Portugal —
arms: Wellesley first drove Marshal Soult out TalaverL
of Portugal, surprising him at Oporto, and forcing
him to flee northward with the loss of aU his guns and
baggage. Then marching into Spain, he joined a Spanish
army under General Cuesta, and defeated at Talavera (July 28,
1809) the French force which covered Madrid. He might
even have won back the capital but for the mulish obstinacy of
his colleague, and the mUitary incompetence of the Spanish
troops, who could not be trasted except behind entrenchments.
Talavera was won entirely by the 23,000 English, their allies
refusing to advance even when the battle was won. After this
heart-breaking experience Wellesley resolved never to co
operate with a Spanish army again, and to trust entirely to his
own troops.
Meanwhile the news of Talavera caused the French troops
from all parts of the Peninsula to concentrate against the little
English army, which had to beat a cautious retreat to the
Portuguese frontier. No result had been gained from the
incursion into Spain, save that the troops had learnt to look
with confidence on their leader, who received as his reward for
his two victories the tide of Wellington, under which he was to
be "SO well known.
After the peace of Schonbrann had been signed, Bonaparte
commenced to pour reinforcements into Spain, and even spoke
of going there himself " to drive the British leopard
into the sea." Ultimately, however, he sent instead „£ Torres"^*
his ablest lieutenant, Marshal Massena, with 100,000 Vedras "—
fresh troops. The arrival of these new legions gave retreat.
fresh vigour to the invaders : they overran most
of Southern and Eastem Spain, and only failed when they weie
confronted in Poitugal by the indomitable army of WeUmgtou.

40 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The year 1810 was for the English commander the most trying
period of the whole war. Massena marched against him in
overpowering strength, and aU that was in his power was to
play a slow and obstinate game of retreat, turning back on
occasion, as at the very skilfully fought battle of Bussaco (Sep
tember 2 7), to check the heads of the French columns. In
this way he led the enemy on to the gates of Lisbon, in front of
which he had erected a very elaborate system of fortifications,
the celebrated " Lines of Torres Vedras," extending in a triple
range all across the peninsula on which the Portuguese capital
stands. Massena knew nothing of the lines till his army was
brought up by running into the first of them (October, 1810).
He found them so strong that he dared not risk an attack on
them, and halted irresolute in their front. Wellington had
expected this, and had prepared for the contingency by sweep
ing the whole countryside bare of provisions, and causing the
peasantry to retire into Lisbon. Mass^na's host starved in
front of the lines for five months, vainly hoping for aid from
Spain. But Wellington had cut their line of communication
with Madrid by throwing numerous bands of Portuguese militia
across the mountain roads, and no food and very few fresh
troops came to help the invaders. When his army was almost
perishing from famine, Massena was constrained to take it back
to Spain, suffering so dreadfully by the way that he only brought
back two-thirds of the men whom he had led into Portugal
(March, 18 11).
The retreat of the French from before the lines of Torres
Vedras was the turning-point of the Peninsular War, and in
" Guerilla " *°™^ degree the turning-point of Napoleon's whole
warfare in career, for Mass^na's march to the gates of Lisbon
P*'°* marked the last and furthest point of his advance
towards the conquest of Western Europe. After this the
French were always to lose ground. The emperor kept an
enormous army in the Peninsula, but he could never wholly
master it. No single region of Spain would remain quiet

CHARACTER OF THE PENINSULAR WAR. 41
unless it was heavUy garrisoned ; the moment that troops were
withdrawn it blazed up again into insurrection. The Spanish
levies were very bad troops in the open field, and were beaten
with the utmost regularity, even if they had two men to one
against the French. But they never lost heart, in spite of their
defeats ; as was remarked at the time, " A Spanish army was
easy to beat, but very hard to destroy." It dispersed after a
lost battle, but the survivors came together again in a few
days, as self-confident and obstinate as ever. The regular
troops gave the French far less trouble than the " Guerillas " —
half armed peasantry, half robbers, who lurked in the moun
tains, refrained from attacking large bodies of men, but were
always pouncing down to capflre convoys, cut off small isolated
detachments, and harass the flanks and rear of troops on the
march. They so pervaded the country that the transmission
of news from one French army to another was a matter of
serious difficulty ; a message was never certain to get safely to
its destination unless its bearer was protected by a guard of
five hundred men. The French habitually shot every guerUlero
whom they caught, and in return the insurgents murdered every
straggler that fell into their hands. The drain on the strength
of the army of occupation caused by this lingering and bloody
war of retaliation was appalling. It was not for nothing that
Bonaparte caUed the Peninsular War " the ranning sore " that
sapped his strength.
MeanwhUe the emperor was apparently at the very zenith
of his power during the years 1 809-11. His annexations
grew more reckless and iniquitous than ever. He £3jtg„t qj
appropriated Holland, expeUing his own brother the " French
Louis Bonaparte, because he showed some regard ¦"P"'^-
for Dutch as opposed to French interests, and had ventured to
plead against the " Continental System." Soon after, he annexed
the whole German coast-line on the North Sea, and even the
south-west corner of the Baltic shore. This again was done in
the interest of the Continental System ; the Hanseatic towns

42 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
had not shown suflficient enthusiasm in carrying it out, so he
absorbed them and cut short several neighbouring principaUties.
By this last expansion the " French Empire " stretched from
Lubeck to Rome, for the pope had already been evicted from
the " Eternal City " in 1809. In addition, Bonaparte personally
raled the kingdom of Italy, and the lUyrian provinces on the
Adriatic. The Rhine Confederation, Switzerland, the Grand
Duchy of Warsaw, the French Kings of Spain and Naples
were his vassals. Prussia was occupied by his garrisons since
1806. Austria, Russia, Denmark, and Sweden were his more
or less willing allies. The English had no friends save in the
weak kingdoms of Sicily, Sardinia, and Portugal, and among
the still weaker Spanish insurgent.
Meanwhile, even in this dark time, England continued to
carry out without following the policy that Pitt had left behind
him. The conduct of affairs had passed into the
England s hands of second-rate statesmen like Perceval and
policy. Lord Liverpool, but no hesitation was shown,
though the National Debt continued to rise with appalling
rapidity, and though Napoleon seemed more invincible than
ever. The war in Spain was giving England a glimpse of
success on land, though her armies had still to act upon the
defensive, and to yield ground when the enemy came on in
overwhelming numbers. Nation and ministers alike considered
themselves irrevocably pledged to the war, and comforted
themselves with the thought that Napoleon's empire, built upon
force and fraud, and maintaining itself by a cruel oppression of
the vanquished, must ultimately fall before the simultaneous
uprising of all the peoples of Europe.
The year 1811 had seen the French in Spain checked
_ ,. , in their endeavours to resume the invasion of
Fuentes Portugal. Massdna's last approach towards its
Alb"er° *"^ frontier was stopped dead at the battle of Fuentes
D'Onoro (May 5). Eleven days later, a bloody
fight at Albuera turned back Marshal Soult, who had

Tjrd:u>.i/i^ C<i^a,

44 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
endeavoured to drive off a part of the English army that lay
further to the south, blockading the fortress of Badajoz (May
1 6). The French could advance no further, whUe Wellington,
on the other hand, was not yet strong enough to be able to
contemplate the invasion of Spain. It was expected in the
Peninsula that Napoleon himself would soon appear, to finish
the task which his lieutenants had proved unable to carry out.
But though he recalled Massdna, he neither came on the scene
himself, nor sent any appreciable reinforcements to Spain. He
already saw a new war impending over him, and had turned all
his attention to it.
Russia had not been completely crashed in 1807 : her
armies had been beaten, but only after a gallant straggle, and
o . it was frofti a sincere desire for peace, and not
and the from mere necessity, that the Czar Alexander
S°stera"*^' ^^'^ signed the Peace of Tilsit, and accepted the
Continental System. Five years' experience of
that intolerable burden had convinced him that the friend
ship of Napoleon was dearly bought by accepting it. His
realm was losing more by the complete suspension of its
foreign trade than it could lose by open war with France.
The great landed proprietors, whose timber, hemp, and wheat
had once found a ready market in England, and now could
not be sold at all, were furious that they should be rained to
please Bonaparte. Urged on by threats of a conspiracy such
as had overthrown his father Paul in 1801, Alexander yielded
to the pressure of his nobles, and broke with France.
This led to Napoleon's great invasion of Russia in 181 2 — a
grandiose scheme, doomed from the first to failure, because its
Napoleon's framer had not taken into consideration the diffi-
Russian cuities involved in moving and feeding a host of
campaign. 600,000 men in a thinly-populated land, destitute
of roads and great towns. The Russians retired before the
invaders, removing all stores of food, and causing the peasantry
to migrate along with the army. Half the horses of Bonaparte's

THE BURNING OF MOSCOW. 45
army had perished, and a third of his men had been starved or
had deserted before the enemy indulged him with a serious
battle. He defeated them at Borodino (September 7) and
entered Moscow, but only to find it deserted and empty. A
great fire destroyed the city soon after his arrival, and he was
driven to order his starving army to retreat on Lithuania to
take winter quarters. But the first frosts of November slew off
the exhausted soldiery like flies ; the Russians harassed the
melting host on his way, till it broke up in utter disorganization,
and Bonaparte finally fled to Paris to organize new forces,
leaving his lieutenants the task of bringing back the 30,000
miserable survivors of the " Grand Army," who had struggled
out from the Russian snows.
In Spain, too, 18 12 was a fatal year for the French arms.
Wellington, having received more troops from England, and
having thoroughly re-organized the Portuguese „,
,1 11-ij t.-..o. Storming of
army, resolved to make a bold push into Spain, ciudad
Early in the year he took by storm the two great Rodrigo and
.- ^. 1 , T, 1 ¦ /T Badajoz.
frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo (January,
19) and Badajoz (AprU 6), striking so swiftly that the armies
of succour could not come up in time to save them. This
rapid success was bought at the cost of many lives, for the
assaults had to be delivered before the fire of the defenders
had been subdued ; but time was all-important, and the result
justified the lavish expense of blood. Having secured the
frontier of Portugal, Wellington pressed forward into Spain,
and won the first great victory in which he assumed the
offensive, at Salamanca (July 22, 1812). By a
sudden master-stroke he crushed in the* flank of Salamanca.
Marshal Marmont, and "routed 40,000 men in
forty minutes." This victory led to the recovery of Madrid
and the flight of Joseph Bonaparte from his capital. But,
evacuating the other provinces of Spain, the French armies
massed themselves to check Wellington's further advance, and
before their superior numbers the English had to fall back

46 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
on the Portuguese frontier. All southern Spain, however,
had been cleared of the invaders, who now only held the
northem half of the Peninsula.
The next year (1813) saw the complete rain of Napoleon.
When the Russians advanced into Germany, the whole
Battle of nation rose in arms to aid them. Prussia alone,
Leipzig— Fall though she had been mutilated and robbed and
P° ^°°* oppressed with French garrisons, put 200,000
men into the field. The Emperor once more appeared at
the head of a vast army, bringing up his last reserves, huge
drafts from the army of Spain, and hundreds of thousands of
conscripts. But his troops were no longer the veterans of
Austerlitz, and his enemies fought with a fury of which he had
never before had experience. He gained a few successes in
the opening weeks of the straggle, but when his own father-in-
law, the Austrian Emperor, plunged into the struggle, the odds
became too heavy, and at the battle of Leipzig (October 16-18,
1813) he was overwhelmed by numbers, and suffered a
crashing defeat, in which more than half his army was slain
or captured. The enemy pursued him energeticaUy, gave him
no time to rally, and entered France at his heels. They had
at last learnt to tum his own methods of war against him, and
knew that a beaten foe must not be allowed time to rally.
Crossing the Rhine at midwinter, the allies pushed deep into
France. Bonaparte, with the wrecks of his army, made a
desperate resistance, but had not a shadow of a chance of
success. In spite of his skUful manoeuvring, and of the
splendid endurance of his troops, he was forced nearer and
nearer to Paris. At' last, whUe he was engaged with a mere
fraction of the allied host, the bulk of it marched past his
flank and stormed the lines in front of the French capital
(AprU 4, 1814). On the news of the faU of Paris, Napoleon's
own marshals refused to persist in the hopeless straggle, and
compelled their master to lay down his arms and abdicate. In
the rage of the moment the emperor swaUowed poison, but his

ABDICATION OF NAPOLEON. 47
constitution was too strong, and he survived to fall into the
hands of the victors. They sent him to honourable exile in
the Tuscan island of Elba, whose sovereignty was bestowed
upon him.
While the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians had entered
France from the north-east, another army of invasion had been
pouring into the southern departments. Welling
ton's campaign of 1 813 was the most glorious and vittoria—
successful of aU his achievements. In early Wellington
spring he massed his troops on the north-western pJ.J^ce.
frontier of Portugal, and marched rapidly up the
valley of the Douro. The French armies, scattered in distant
cantonments, could not unite in numbers sufficient to give him
battle till he had pushed them as far as Vittoria, at the very
foot of the Pyrenees. When they did turn to fight, he beat
them, intercepted their line of retreat, captured all their guns
and baggage — the proceeds of the six years' plunder of Spain —
and drove them headlong into France (June 21, 1813). After
having defeated a month later a last endeavour of Marshal Soult
to force his way back into the Peninsula (July 27-30, 1813)
at the battles of the Pyrenees, Wellington captured the great
frontier fortresses of San Sebastian and Pampeluna. He then
crossed into France, and spent the winter and the early spring
of 1814 in forcing Soult back over the rivers and hills of
Beam and Gascony. Just before Napoleon's fall, one division
of his army captured Bordeaux, while he himself with the main
body evicted Soult from Toulouse, after the last and one of the
bloodiest fights of the Peninsular War (April 14). When the
news of peace came, he was in full military occupation of eight
Freinch departments, and the two largest towns of Southern
France. After the fall of Paris, and the abdication of Napoleon, the
allied powers placed on the throne the representative of the
long-exiled house of Bourbon, Louis XVIII. — the best choice
perhaps That they could make, yet in itself an unsatisfactory

43 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
experiment. Louis, though not destitute of a certain shrewd-
„ , ,. ness, was elderly, and a confirmed valetudinarian;
Restoration . .' , , , ,.. . ... i_
of Louis he left the conduct of affairs to ministers whose
XVIII. unwise actions made the French complain that
"the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing"
— they behaved, in short, as if the whole Revolution and its
consequences had passed over their heads unnoticed. Mean
while the aUies met in congress at Vienna to redistribute
Europe and to make an end of the relics of the Napoleonic
regime. There were many conflicting interests, for the desires
of Prassia, Russia, and Austria crossed each other on a dozen
points, and a long period of friction was inevitable before a
settlement could be reached. But the powers commenced to
disarm, and thought nothing less probable than a new French
war. England alone was unable to disband her troops or dis
mantle her navy. She was stiU engaged in a straggle which
had broken out in i8i 2. One of the consequences
STw^.^"' °f ^^^ Continental System and the "Orders in
Council " had been to inflict grave hardships on
the trade of the United States, the one great neutral power in
the world. France and Great Britain had done them equal
damage, but it was natural that the Americans should resent
more the action of the power which lay nearer to them and
domineered over the seas. They were specially vexed at the
harsh exercise of the right of search, and the frequent impress
ment of British seamen found serving on American ships, whose
change of nationality our Government refused to recognize. To
these sources of irritation was added a notion that while
England was locked in her death-grapple with Bonaparte, it
would be easy to overrun and annex Canada. Hence it came
that the United States declared war in the summer of 181 2.
This " stab in the back,'' as the English called it, had no effect
whatever on the general course of the European war. The
small garrison of Canada, gallantly aided by the loc^ militia,

THE AMERICAN WAR OF 1812. 49
beat off every attempt to invade the great colony, and even
compeUed two small American armies to surrender. It did
not prove to be necessary to distract troops from Europe for their
aid. On the other hand, the English navy had an unpleasant
surprise when, on three separate occasions, the large and admi
rably-handled American frigates took or sunk British ships
of slightly inferior force in single combat — a thing which
no French, Spanish, or Dutch vessel had ever accomplished.
The American ships had to be hunted down by superior
numbers — a fact very galling to the pride of their opponents.
A considerable amount of damage was also done to our mer
cantile marine by American privateers. On the other hand, a
strict blockade sealed up Boston and all the other ports of the
United States, whose commerce was for the moment absolutely
annihilated. When Napoleon was at last disposed of, the
British Government began to pour Wellington's Peninsular
veterans into America. One expedition took Washington, the
capital of the United States, though another sent against
New Orleans was beaten back with fearful loss. But before
serious pressure had been applied, a peace was signed at Ghent
(December 24, 1814), which left all matters — territorial and
other — ^just as they had been before 1812. The end of Na
poleon and his Continental System had removed the cause of
war, and both parties gladly brought it to an end.
MeanwhUe, in March, 181 5, a new and unexpected crisis
had arisen in Europe. WhUe the envoys at Vienna were
engaged in parcelUng out the spoils of Napoleon, Napoleon
they received the unwelcome news that the ex- escapes from
emperor had escaped from Elba, landed in
Provence, and called his old followers to arms. The Bourbons
had made themselves so profoundly unpopular that no one
would fight for them ; whole regiments and brigades tore off
their white cockades and came to join the great adventurer.
In a few days he was at the head of 100,000 men. Louis XVIII.
fled to Flanders, and ere he had been gone more than a few
E

sc ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
hours Napoleon was again installed in the TuUeries. He
trasted that his sudden success might impose on the allies, and
that the dissensions which had divided the Congress of Vienna
might keep them from united action. But he was woefully
mistaken. Every state in Europe promptly declared war on
him. Seeing that his only chance lay in swift action. Napoleon
dashed into Belgium with all the troops he could collect, some
Battles of 130,000 men. He had then to face a Prassian
Lignyand army under Marshal Bliicher, and a composite
Quatre ras. ^^^.^^ ^^ gjjgjjgjj Hanoverians and Dutch, which
had been placed under the command of Wellington. The
Austrians and Russians were still far off. The campaign of
1815 was settled in six days. Bonaparte struck at the point
where Wellington's left joined Bliicher's right, intending to
thrast himself between them and defeat them piecemeal. His
first stroke against the Prussians was successful : he drove
Bliicher with heavy loss from his position at Ligny (June 16),
while his lieutenant Marshal Ney detained the leading divisions
of the English army by an indecisive action at Quatre Bras.
Then, leaving a force under Grouchy to pursue Bliicher, he
turned his main body against Wellington, who offered him
battle on the position of Mont St. Jean, eight miles south of
Brassels (June 18).
For seven houis Wellington held his own on his chosen
ground. Though his Dutch and Belgian troops melted from the
field, his steady English and German battalions
nfWaterioo. ^'°°<^ °^^ nobly against the pounding of the
French artillery, and the furious charges of the
emperor's numerous horse. The British squares were stiU un
broken vrhen in the afternoon the Prussian army began to
come on the field. Bliicher had evaded Grouchy, and loyally
marched to the aid of his coUeague. Seeing himself likely to
be caught between two fires, Bonaparte tried a. last desperate
stroke: he flung 5000 veterans of his Imperial Guard ou

BATTLE OF WATERLOO. 51
WeUington's right centre, hoping to break through his enemy's
line ere the Prussian pressure became intolerable. But the
deadly fire of the British infantry mowed down the advancing
columns before they could reach the head of the slope ; and
when the Guard was seen reeling to the rear, the whole French
host broke up in hopeless confusion and fled. They could not
be raUied tiU they had reached the very gates of Paris, and
Napoleon's doom was sealed. He had to abdicate a second
time as soon as the allies appeared in front of his capital, and
when he surrendered himself to the British, was despatched, not
to an honourable exile in Europe, but to the lonely island of
St. Helena, in the South Atlantic, where he had to eat out his
heart for six years in enforced idleness, and finally died of
cancer in 1821.
There was nothing to be feared from France, where the
weak rule of the restored Bourbons gave their neighbours no
trouble for some years. So Europe was able to
settle its accounts at the Congress of Vienna The Con-
srrsss of
without further disturbance. Great Britain was Vienna-
paid handsomely, but by no means lavishly, for Acquisitions
the part that she had taken in the long struggle Britain.
against the Corsican usurper. In Europe she
received two strongholds to make firm her hold on the
Mediterranean — the invaluable strategical point of Malta, and
the Ionian Islands further to the east. She also kept the
small island of Heligoland, in the North Sea, which had served
as a great smuggling depot during the Great War. In America
we retained the Dutch colony of Demerara on the Southern
Continent — the tropical region now known as British Guiana ;
in the West Indies we took from the French St. Lucia and
Tobago. In the Indian Ocean the valuable Isle of Mauritius
(Isle de France) was ceded by France, and Holland gave up
iier settlement of the Cape of Good Hope, which served as an
admirable halfway house to our Indian possessions, and has
been the nucleus of our South African empire. The English

52 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Government might have asked and obtained still more ; but it
was thought that by securing complete domination in the com
mercial and manufacturing world during the war, Britain had
gained so much that she need not be over-exacting. Valuable
colonies by the dozen were handed back to France and
Holland, with an almost extravagant liberality.
The settlement of Continental Europe concerned us com
paratively Uttle, save in one point. Holland and Belgium were
.J.. _ formed into a new " Kingdom of the Netherlands,"
settlement of which was expected to prove a firm ally of Britain
Europe. ^^^ ^ barrier against the northem extension of
France. For the rest, Austria took Venice and Lombardy;
Prussia received broad grants, on the Rhine and in Saxony.
The iniquitous partition of Poland that had disgraced the
previous century was repeated — Austria kept Galicia, Prussia
took back Posen and Danzig, while Russia absorbed the
greater part of Napoleon's " Grand Duchy of Warsaw." The
petty despots of Central and Southern Italy — the Pope, the
King of Naples, and the rest — secured an undeserved retum
to their long-lost realms. France was confined within her old
boundaries of the year 1792.

( 53 )

CHAPTER IV.
FROM THE FALL OF NAPOLEON TO THE GREAT REFORM BILL.
1815-1832.
The England which emerged from the great war of 1 793-1 81 5
was a very different country from the England of the days
before the French Revolution. In all her history Png.i__j
there had never been a period of twenty-two years after the
into which so many changes have been com- E""^^' '"^^^^
pressed. Not merely in matters political and economic, but in
all social matters — in literature, in national feeling, in everyday
thought and life — there was a profound alteration visible. For
the most part the change had been for the better : the great
war had exercised a most wholesome and sobering effect on
the national character. Few men had watched the atrocities of
the French Revolution, or lived through the long period of
suspense in 1802-1805, when foreign invasion was daily ex
pected, without taking a profound impression from those times
of storm and stress. In the eighteenth century we often hear
complaints of the want of patriotism and public spirit in Great
Britain : no such reproach could be made to the generation
which had fought through the great French war. The slack
ness and cynicism of the eighteenth century had
been completely lived down. Political morality ment in
had been enormously improved : in the latter political
years of the war Whig and Tory had learnt to
work together for the common national good despite of mere

S^ ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
party interests. In 1806-7 a Tory majority had accepted a
Whig ministry because it seemed for the moment desirable : in
the following years the better Whigs refrained from captious
opposition to the later Tory cabinets — though of course they
did not cease to criticise their measures. There were none
of the selfish and immoral combinations of cliques and groups
which used to disgrace the eighteenth century. Parliamentary
corraption of the bad old sort — the buying of members by hard
cash or gifts of sinecures — had practically disappeared. States
men suspected of a want of private integrity could no longer
come to the front.
The improved standard of political morals only reflected the
general rise in the social morality of the nation. There was a
growing feeling against drunkenness, foul language,
morality. gambUng, and open profligacy, which had been
looked upon with such a tolerant eye thirty years
before. Nothing shows it better than the deep unpopularity of
the Regent, George, Prince of Wales, who carried far into the
nineteenth century the evil manners of the eighteenth. The
contempt and dislike felt for him by the majority of the nation
would never have been felt to such an extent by the older
generation. The revival of religious earnestness, which had begun with
Wesley and the Methodists, was enormously developed by the
,. . irffluence of the war. The blasphemous antics of
In religion. ,, „ , _ 
the French Revolutionists had shocked thousands
of Englishmen into a more serious view of life, and twenty
years of national peril had put flippancy at a discount. Promi
nent men who made no secret of their earnest religious con
victions were no longer liable to be sneered at as enthusiasts or
condemned as fanatics. AU through the period the Low
Church or Evangelical party was working hard and gaining an
increasing hold on the nation. The religious indifferentism of
the eighteenth century was disappearing.
Nothing shows the general improvement of the nation better

BRITAIN IN 1815. 55
than the higher tone of its literature. To the men of 1870 the
coarse taste of the men of 1750 had become in
tolerable. Many will remember Sir Walter Scott's jfterature"
story of his friend who read over in old age the
books which had seemed amusing fifty years back, and found
that they only raised a feeling of shame and disgust. It was a
fact of a very typical sort that Scott himself was by far the
most popular poet of his own day ; men preferred his healthy,
vigorous, patriotic strains to the work of his younger contem
poraries, Byron and Shelley : though both were greater poets
than the author of Marmion and the Last Minstrel, the one
was too morbid and satanic, and the other too hysterical and
anarchic for the taste of the time.
Turning to matters of a more tangible kind, we find as great
a difference in the England of 1792 and of 1815. The popu
lation and resources of the country had grown in iju-^ease in
those twenty-two years in a measure for which population
previous history could afford no parallel. The and wealth.
distribution of the newly-gotten wealth was far less satisfactory,
and numerous social problems had grown up which were bound
to force themselves upon public attention the moment that the
stress of war was removed. In population, the United Kingdom
had increased from 14,000,000 to 19,000,000 souls, in spite of
the considerable waste of life in the foreign war and in the Irish
troubles of 1797-8.
But the rise in trade and commerce had been far more
startling. Our exports had more than doubled: in 1792 they
had stood at ;^ 2 7, 000,000; in 1815 the figures Growth of
were _;^5 8,000,000. The imports had gone up trade and
between the same years from ;^i 9,000,000 to '^'""'"S'^ce.
;/^32,ooo,ooo. Still more astounding was the rise in the
national finances. The ordinary peace revenue had produced
_;^i9,ooo,ooo in 1792 : the same heads of taxation, as opposed
to the extra war-revenue, brought in _;^45,ooo,ooo in 1815. It
was this marvellous expansion of our resources alone which

56 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
had enabled us to last out the Napoleonic straggle. If, as
generaUy happens during war, the national resources had
decayed rather than multiplied under the stress of heavy tax
ation and constant alarms, we should have been exhausted long
before Bonaparte had ran through his full career. We have
spoken already of the main factor of our prosperity, the mono
poly of the carrying trade of the world, which we had won by
our naval victories, and which our enemy's insane " Continental
System '' had done much to confirm to us. The other great
element in the growth of the wealth of Britain had been the
immense development of our internal manufactures. Even
before 1792 the development of machinery in our factories
had already begun, and we were rapidly asserting a superiority
over our neighbours. The war completed our ascendency.
While every other land in Europe was repeatedly overran by
hostile armies. Great Britain alone was free to work out her
new discoveries without interruption. Many of her industries
were notably fostered by the lavish expenditure on our army
and navy : the demand for iron and steel, cloth and cotton, for
military purposes had been enormous. Our factories had been
working for continental paymasters also : even Napoleon him
self, it is said, had been compelled to secretly procure from
Yorkshire looms the cloth for the coats of the army which took
the field in 181 3, so entirely had continental manufactures
failed him.
There was a general and very natural expectation in 181 5- 16
(as in 1919 !) that the termination of the great war would
. bring about a period of even greater expansion
discontent and commercial supremacy for Great Britain.
ri^classe"' "^^^^^ ^^'^ Prosperity " have always been linked
in men's minds. But after our own recent ex
perience we do not find it strange that the five years which
followed Waterloo were among the most troublous and un
happy periods in our domestic history. So widespread and
long-continued was the distress and unrest, that men of gloomy

DISTRESS AFTER THE WAR. 57
and pessimistic frame of mind feared that we were on the edge
of a social revolution. The causes of the misery of the years
181 6-2 1 are, however, not difficult to understand. They
affected both the agricultural and the manufacturing interests.
The war had naturally caused an enormous rise in the
prices of all agricultural produce. We had been cut off from
the corn-markets of Europe, and after 1812 from
those of America also. Moreover, the unwise diftress."'^
system of "protection," which the Tory party
consistently carried out, tended to keep corn artificiaUy dear
by the heavy import duties imposed on the supply from foreign
countries. This monopoly of the English grower of cereal
products had led to an altogether unnatural inflation of prices :
thrice between 18 10 and 18 14 the annual average value of the
quarter of wheat had risen over ioo.f. In those days the con
ception of Government food control had not been thought out.
While the town dwellers suffered from the exorbitant cost ofthe
loaf, the land-owners and farmers had gained : the rents of the
one, the profits of the other, had increased to an immoderate
degree. The poorer agricultural classes had not shared to any
great extent in this prosperity, owing to the iniquitous system
of the Poor Law, of which we shall have to speak later on.
But from 1814 onward the inflated war prices ceased, and
during the next three years the cost of wheat varied from 60^.
to 80^. the quarter, instead of from 90^. to i2o.f. This was
a terrible blow to the farmers and landlords, who had calculated
their rents and their expenditure on the higher average, as if
the war was to last for ever. The whole agricultural interest
was very hard hit, and many individuals were rained. But
the worst of the stress fell on the unfortunate labourers,
though they had not shared in the profits of the time of
inflated prices that had just ended. When the farmers were
turning off their hands and cutting down wages, the poorer
classes in the country were not compensated by the fact that
the loaf had become appreciably cheaper. There foUowed

S8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
acute distress, which ended in riots and rick-burning over large
districts of the southern and midland shires. There were
wild ramours of secret associations, of plots for a general rising
like that of the French peasants in 1789, with plunder and
massacre to follow. Most of this talk was groundless, but
there was a certain amount of fire beneath the smoke, and in
many parts the labourers were ready for mischief.
While raral England was in this unhappy state, the great
towns were also in evil case. In 1815-18 the manufacturing
Troubles in classes were suffering from their own set of
the manufac- troubles almost as much as the agricultural
turingtowns. classes. The cessation of the war had put an
end to the unnatural expansion of the industries which had
profited by our naval and military expenditure : the price of
iron, for example, fell from ^^20 to ^£8 a ton when the Govern
ment ceased to be a buyer. In many trades, too, over-specu
lation on the part of the great employers of labour led to
distress. There had been a widespread notion that the
countries of the continent would be able to absorb almost any
amount of English goods the moment that the Continental
System was removed. Our factories at once threw upon the
world such a vastly-increased output that the foreign market
was glutted: indeed, the final straggle of 181 2-14 had so
drained the resources of France, Russia, Spain, and Germany,
that they had little or no money to buy luxuries or even neces
saries. The exported goods had to be sent back or sold at an
actual loss. Hence came bankraptcies and wholesale dis
missal of operatives at home. The labour market was at the
same time affected by the disbanding of many scores of
thousands of soldiers and sailors. As many as 250,000 men
were released from service in 181 6- 17- 18, and had to find
themselves new trades at short notice. Another source of
trouble was the dying out of the old trades which had sub
sisted on hand-labour, and were being superseded by machinery.
The last generation of the workmen in these industries suffered

DEATH OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 59
bitter privations before they could or would transfer themselves
to other occupations. It was they who distinguished them
selves by the so-caUed Luddite outrages, in which gangs went
by night to destroy the machinery in the new factories which
were underselling their labour.
The, Govemment which had to face aU these difficulties,
social and economic, was unfortunately not in the least com
petent to deal with them. George III. had .. .
^/I&dncss of
fallen into his last fit of melancholy madness in the King—
18 10, and his son George, Prince of Wales, was t^® Prince
a sorry substitute for him. The father had often
been obstinate and wrong-headed, but at least he was always
honest, courageous, and a model of all the domestic virtues :
no one could help respecting the good old king, whatever he
might think of his wisdom. But the Regent was frankly dis
reputable : he tried the loyalty of England to the monarchical
system as no other ruler has done since James II. A de
bauchee and gambler, a disobedient son, a crael husband, a
heartless father, an ungrateful and treacherous friend, he was
a sore burden to the ministries which had to act in his name
and palliate his misdoings. There was a widespread hope that
his rained constitution would not carry him through many
more years, and that the succession might pass to his young
daughter, the Princess Charlotte. But she died in childbirth
in 1816, a year after her marriage to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg,
and her father was destined to prolong his worthless life for
fourteen years longer.
The cabinet which held office under the Regent was the
Tory administration of Lord Liverpool. Its chief was an
honest man and a good financier, but narrow- j^^^^.^ Liver-
minded, prejudiced, and blindly opposed to all pool's Cabi-
measures of political reform. His home secretary ^
was Addington (now Lord Sidmouth), the unsuccessful premier
of 1 80 1-4, a man even more bigoted than his chief. Foreign
affairs were in the hands of Lord Castlereagh, another high

6o ENGLANJ) IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Tory, who had done good service as a diplomatist during the
Napoleonic war, but was a reactionary, and suspected of being
too great a friend of the despotic monarchs of the continent.
Lord Liverpool's ministry acted according to the best of its
lights in dealing with the crisis of 1816-20. They cut down
expenses as far as they were able, reduced the
repressive army and navy to the lowest limit consistent with
measures of safety, and did good service by restoring the
ment. ' " currency, and replacing by a new coinage of gold
sovereigns the depreciated bank-notes which had
carried England through the war.* But thrift and honest
finance were not suflScient to deal with the national troubles :
measures of political and economic reform were urgently
needed, and these the Liverpool cabinet was determined not
to grant. They looked upon the strikes and riots that vexed
the land, not as manifestations of poverty and starvation —
which was in the main their real character — but as symptoms
of a dangerous revolutionary conspiracy against the monarchy.
The few noisy demagogues who were endeavouring to make
capital out of the national discontent, they treated as if they
were embryo Robespierres and Marats. Against the demon
strations and meetings of the distressed they employed armed
force with a wholly unnecessary harshness. In the one or two
cases where the rioters acted with violence, as at the Spa
Fields Riot in London (1816), the Derby rising (June, 1817),
and the Bonnymuir rising in Scotland (June, 1820), they made
a veiy feeble show when resolutely faced : but the Government
none the less had some dozens of them executed for treason.
A much less formidable indictment and a far milder punish
ment would have sufficed for such half-hearted revolutionaries.
The greatest of the mistakes of the ruling powers was the
* In the worst years of the war the bank-note for £^ would only buy
about £^ iSs. in gold. There had been practically no coinage of guineas
since 1797, nor of silver since 1787. The new issue of gold was made in
sovereigns, not in guineas, a great convenience in all payments.

THE CATO-STREET CONSPIRACY. 61
unhappy business at Manchester on August 16, 1819. An
orderly demonstration by an unarmed multitude was dispersed
by a cavalry charge, in w.hich some five or six people were
trodden to death, and sixty or seventy injured or wounded.
The cabinet had just so much excuse that there were a few
hot-headed demagogues who really meant mischief. The best
known was a certain Arthur Thistlewood, a bank- y. Cato-
rupt adventurer who had a small following in street Con-
London. He was a wild incendiary of the type ®P"^*"^y"
of the French Jacobins, whose language and violence he care
fully imitated. To avenge the " Manchester Massacre," he
plotted the wholesale murder of the ministers. Learning that
the whole cabinet were about to dine together on February 23,
1820, he persuaded a score of frantic desperadoes to join him
in an attempt to break into the house where they were to meet,
for the purpose of slaying them all. He was br;trayed by an
accomplice, and his band was surrounded by constables and
soldiers at their trysting-place in Cato Street, and arrested after
a bloody scuffle. Thistlewood and several of his accomplices
were very properly hung. Abhorrence for their atrocious plot
had a good deal of effect in restraining further agitation.
Just before the " Cato Street Conspiracy " had been frus
trated, the old king George III. died, and the regent ascended
the throne under the name of George IV. It was .
. . ° , . , , Accession of
assuredly not from any merit ot his that the George IV.
national troubles began soon after to die down. Need of
reforms.
The fact was that they were mainly the result of
famine and despair, and that about 1820 there was a marked
recovery in trade in the manufacturing districts, while in the
countryside the farmers and labourers had succeeded in
adapting themselves in some degree to the new scale of prices
for agricultural produce. Riots and outrages gradually sub
sided, but there remained a strong political dislike for the
Tory cabinet and its harsh and repressive measures. The
middle classes had begun to go over to the side of the Whigs,

62 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
who now, for the first time since the outbreak of the great
French war, began to find that they had a solid and powerful
backing in the nation. Men had willingly consented to put
aside all demands for constitutional change as long as the
straggle with Napoleon lasted. It was now high time that the
projects for political reform, which Pitt had sketched out
thirty years before, should be taken in hand. As Pitt's heirs
in the Tory party showed small signs of carrying them out, all
those who were anxious to see them brought forward joined
the other camp.
The chief of these burning questions was the Emancipation
of the Catholics from political disabUities — a topic which had
not been seriously raised since 1807 — and the
theVories. reform of the House of Commons, which was
growing more unrepresentative of the nation
every day. On certain other points — such as Free Trade, the
removal of the protective duties placed on foreign corn and
other commodities, the abolition of slavery in the British colo
nies, the reform of the Poor Laws — there was division in
the Tory camp : the older generation were for leaving every
thing where it was : the younger were more ready to move
on. In face of a vigorous and growing opposition, it is
astonishing how long the Liverpool cabinet succeeded in staving
off all manner of reforms : the delay was only rendered pos
sible by the fact that the House of Commons so grossly mis
represented the nation. As long as the system of "rotten
boroughs " went on, a Government supported by the majority
of borough-mongers could defy public opinion in a manner
that has long ceased to be possible.
It is a notable fact, as Ulustrating the politics of that day,
that the first checks to the policy of this rigid Tory Govern-
Georee IV "^^nt came not on any great question of reform,
and Queen but on a personal matter concerning the king.
t-aro e. George IV. had been separated for many years
from his unfortunate wife, Caroline of Branswick. Deserted by

TRIAL OF QUEEN CAROLINE. 63
her husband, she had fallen into an unwise and undignified
manner of life, wandering round the continent with a train of
disreputable foreign attendants. She was a vain, siUy, and
vulgar woman, in whom no one could have felt any interest
if she had not been so ill-treated by the man who should have
been her protector. When George III. died, she announced
her intention of returning to England in order to be crowned
along with her husband. The king looked upon her approach
with dismay, and tried to frighten her away with threats of
cutting off her income. But she came back in spite of him,
whereupon George took the invidious step of persuading Lord
Liverpool to allow a bUl for her divorce to be brought before
Parliament. His own conduct had been so disgraceful that
he should not have dared to attack his wife. With deep feel
ings of secret shame the ministers lent themselves to this
miserable scheme. A long parliamentary inquiry followed,
which led to no conclusive proofs of the queen having been
guilty of more than silly vanity and indecorum. The Whig
leaders and the mob of London took up her cause, and meet
ings and demonstrations followed in quick succession. Dis
gusted at their position, the ministers in November, 1820,
suddenly dropped their bill and let the queen go free. She
started a violent agitation against her husband, and would
have caused much trouble if she had not died suddenly in the
next year.
In modern days a ministry would resign after such a blow
to its credit as the cabinet of 1820 had sustained in the
matter of the queen's trial. Lord Liverpool and changes in
his colleagues, however, clung to ofiBce, but for the Cabinet
the future had lost the complete command over ^ol-C^-^*^'
Parliament which they had hitherto possessed, ningminis-
In 1821 the character of the ministry began to '^'
change : Addington (Lord Sidmouth), who had been mainly
responsible for the mismanagement of home affairs, resigned;
Lord Castlereagh in the next year committed suicide Id a

64 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
moment of insanity caused by overwork ; several other of the
old Tories disappeared from oflSce. To replace them Lord
Liverpool introduced younger men, who were not so entirely
reactionary in their views, and were ready to follow the teach
ing of William Pitt in his earlier days, by Unking the name of
the Tory party with the idea of domestic reform. The chief
of these were Canning, Huskisson, and Sir Robert Peel. The
first-named statesman succeeded Castlereagh as foreign secre
tary, and promptly carried out a radical change in our European
policy. Huskisson, who was a convinced free-trader, began to do
his best to get rid of the protective duties that were cramping
Huskisson English commerce and manufactures. His great
and Free principle was to reduce the import duties on all
Tra e. j.^^ materials — such as wool or sUk — which were
afterwards worked up in English factories. When once these
commodities came in unburdened by taxes, their increased
cheapness enabled our manufacturers to produce their fabrics
at a rate which defied foreign competition. Huskisson would
have got rid of the corn-duties also, but Tory prejudice foiled
him. Peel, though not yet so far advanced in his views as his two
colleagues, did admirable work as home secretary in the direc-
Peel and ^'°" °^ administrative reform, and the mitigation
Criminal of the unreasonable harshness of the criminal
aw e orm. j^^^ gy ^ barbarous survival of mediaeval prac
tice, there were still many scores of offences for which the
death-penalty was prescribed : among them were such com
paratively insignificant crimes as sheep-stealing, shop-lifting,
and coining. Peel was the first minister of the Crown who
began to cut down this dreadful list. He stiU left the gallows
as the doom of those guilty of forgery, murderous assaults,
and many other acts which are now sufiSciently punished by
penal servitude, but strack out a good many items from the
appaUing total. The rest were aU removed within fifteen years,

FOREIGN POLITICS IN 1821. 65
and murder and treason have for a long time been the only
offences for which capital punishment is retained.
Canning's work at the Foreign OflSce demands a longer
explanation. Ever since 18 15 the continent had been under
the control of the autocratic monarchs who had
put down Napoleon. They lived in dread of a lufop"" '"
recradescence of the revolutionary ideas which
had been started by the Jacobins of France, and governed
their subjects with a very tight hand, utterly refusing to listen
to any petitions for the introduction of representative govern
ment or constitutional reforms. This was all the more hard
because of the liberal promises which they had made to their
peoples, when they were rousing them in 181 2-13 to join in
the general crasade against Bonaparte and the Continental
System. The nations felt that they had been scurvily treated
by their ralers, and from Poland to Portugal the whole con
tinent was full of ferment and unrest. There were plots, con
spiracies, and agitations in every quarter, some aiming at the
overturning of autocratic government and the obtaining of a free
constitution, others more national in character, and directed
against the rathless cutting up of ancient states and peoples
which had taken place at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. In
Germany and Spain the former idea prevailed, in Italy and
Poland the latter. The Emperor of Russia con
ceived the idea of joining aU the monarchs of ^llfanc?."'^
Europe in a league against reform and liberal
ideas, and framed the celebrated " Holy Alliance " in conjunc
tion with Francis of Austria and Frederick William of Prussia.
The restored Bourbons of France, Spain, and Naples were
wholly in agreement with them.
This reactionary confederacy had dominated Europe from
1815 to 1822. Castlereagh, whUe controUing the
foreign policy of England, had refused to join cSuereagh.
the " Holy AUiance " ; but, on the other hand, he
had done nothing to hinder its work or to mark English

66 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
disapproval of its narrow and despotic principles. Continental
Liberals had always hoped for moral if not for tangible aid
from free and constitutional England, and had faUed to get it.
We had looked on while the troops of Austria invaded Italy,
and put down the new Constitution which had been unwillingly
granted by King Ferdinand of Naples (1821), and while the
armies of Louis XVIII. were being directed against the Spanish
Liberals. When Canning replaced Castlereagh at the Foreign Office
(1822), this period of passive acquiescence came to an end,
P ^__._ and English influence was used against the alliance
newforeigfn of the despots. It was too late to save Spain,
PO"cy which was overran by the French in the spring
of 1823, but Portugal was preserved from the same fate by the
' energetic threats which were made against French intervention
there. The independence of the Spanish colonies in America,
which had long been in revolt against the misgovernment of
the mother-country, was recognized. In the east of Europe,
where the Greeks had rebeUed against the Sultan after four
centuries of miserable oppression. Canning used all his influence
in their aid. Money and volunteers from England were per
mitted to make their way to the .iEgean. Among the English
" Phil-HeUenes " the most notable were the daring seaman
Lord Cochrane, and the poet Byron, who roused himself from
a life of idleness and luxury in Italy to give his aid to an
ancient people in distress. He died of fever not long after his
arrival in Greece; but his stirring poems and his excellent
example did much to strengthen the wave of feeling in Western
Europe which ultimately secured the freedom of Hellas.
Canning, meanwhile, did all that he could short of declaring
war to bring pressure on Sultan Mahmood, and to compel him
to recognize the independence of his revolted subjects. He
was prevented from going further by the uncertain attitude of
the other powers, and especially of France and Russia, who
could not make up their minds whether to regard Mahmood

DEATH OF CANNING. 67
as a legitimate monarch endeavouring to suppress Liberals,
and therefore a friend, or as a Mahometan persecutor, outside
the pale of a " Holy Alliance " of Christian kings.
In February 1827 Lord Liverpool was stricken down with
paralysis, and the king, after some hesitation, offered Canning
the vacant post of prime minister. He accepted
it, and promptly got rid of the remnant of the old pool retires'
Tories who had still clung to oflSce under his pre- ~'^^^t'> °^
decessor. Their places were fiUed with the more
enlightened members of the party. It was hoped that a period
of progress and prosperity, as marked as that of Pitt's famous
rale in 1784-92, was about to commence, for the new premier
had great schemes on foot both at home and abroad. But
Canning had hardly time to settle down into ofiSce when he
was carried off by an attack of dysentery (August 8, 1827).
His death, only five months after he had reached the position
in which he had the power to carry out his poUcy, was a most
unfortunate event both for England and for the Tory party.
His ministry continued in office for a few months under the
nominal premiership of Lord Goderich, and then broke up for
want of a master mind to keep them together.
The king, whose sympathies were all with reaction and the
older Tories, invited the Duke of Wellington to take Canning's
place. A more unfortunate appointment could vVelline-toD
not have been made : the great general proved to Prime
be a very poor politician. Personally, he had no ^™'ster.
sympathy with his predecessor's views ; he believed in keeping
things where they were in domestic poUtics. Free-trade,
Catholic emancipation, and parliamentary reform were as dis
tasteful to him as they had been to Addington or Castlereagh.
In foreign policy his rooted principle was a dislike of conti
nental Liberals; he had seen a great deal of the Spanish
reformers in 1809-13, and had imbibed a great contempt for
them and all their compeers in other lands. The duke was
thoroughly honest and upright in aU his principles and

68 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
prejudices, and he came on the scene with a splendid reputation
for loyalty and patriotism. But he had never learnt the art of
managing Parliament, of facing a determined opposition, or
keeping together a party which consisted of two sections of
divergent views. He very soon turned out of his ministry
Huskisson, and the rest of Canning's followers, replacing them
by Tories of the old reactionary breed. His first important
action in foreign policy was to abandon his predecessor's sup
port of the Greek insurgents, though England had been fully
committed to their cause.
In the summer of 1827, while Canning still lived, an
English fleet had been sent to the Levant with directions to
bring pressure to bear on the Turkish army in the
Navarkio* Peloponnesus, and force its commandant, Ibrahim
Pasha, to agree to an armistice with the Greeks.
Admiral Codrington interpreted his orders in a stringent sense,
forbade the Pasha to move, and when he continued the usual
policy of massacre sailed into Navarino Bay and blew to
pieces the large Turko-Egyptian fleet which was lying there
(October 13, 1827). He was given unstinted applause by the
English nation, but not by the prime minister, who disavowed
his action, styled the battle of Navarino "a most untoward
event," and refused to take any further action against the Porte.
Russia stepped in when Wellington withdrew : the new Czar.,
Nicholas I., sent an army across the Balkans, forced the Sultan
to recognize the independence of Greece, and paid himself by
confiscating a large slice of Turkish territory (August, 1828).
Throughout the three years during which he held ofifice
(1828-30), the " Iron Duke " did little to justify his reputation
Wellington ^'°'" firmness and steadfast purpose. ' There can
as a poll- be no doubt that his own inclination would have
ician. jjggjj J.Q avoid all manner of constitutional change,
and keep things exactly as they stood. But he showed an
unexpected faculty for yielding when he was attacked and
worried by the opposition. When his plans were defeated in

CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION GRANTED. 69
the House of Commons he did not resign, as most ministers
with a parliamentary training would have done, but retained
office, and often ended by allowing measures of which he dis
approved to become law. As has been well remarked by one
of his critics, " He treated politics as if they were mUitary cam
paigns, and when beaten out of his position did not throw up
the game, but gave way, and only retired on to another similar
position in the rear.'' This line of conduct had, to the outside
observer, every appearance of weakness, and looked like an
undignified clinging to ofiSce. The duke, however, was honestly
convinced that he was necessary to the State, and only retained
the premiership because he thought that his resignation would
open the way to revolution and civU strife.
His first retreat was carried out after a dispute on a reli
gious question. The " Test Act " and " Corporation Act,"
which obliged members of corporations and office- „ . , ,
-, , ^ , r ¦ r Repeal of the
holders under the Crown to make a profession of Test Act and
conformity to the Church of England, had long t^^ ^f^IF°'^^'
been a dead letter. Dissenters of all sorts had
been allowed to evade their provisions. Yet when it was pro
posed to abolish these relics of seventeenth-century bigotry,
the duke made a great show of resistance. The Whigs, how
ever, succeeded in passing a resolution against them in the
Commons : thereupon Wellington suddenly yielded, gave the
measure the support of the ministry, and allowed the Acts to
be repealed (1828).
His next show of weakness was even more startling. For
some years the question of Catholic Emancipation, the old
bugbear of George IIL, had been much obtraded _ .. ..
on public notice, mainly by an agitation in Ireland, Emanci-
headed by the ablest Irishman whom the century pation.
has produced. The grievance of the Irish Catholics was a
perfectly legitimate one : they had assented to the Union in
1800, because Pitt had promised that they should be given in
the United Kingdom the same rights as their Protestant fellow-

70 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,
subjects. Pitt had faUed to redeem his pledge, owing to no
fault of his own, but to the old king's obstinacy. Now that
George III. was dead, there was no reason why the promise
given in 1800 should not be fulfilled: no one could believe
that George IV. had any conscientious objection to it — unlike
his father, he had no conscience at all. Nevertheless, the Tory
party, with the exception of Canning and his friends, had
refused to take up Pitt's engagement to the Catholics. Wel
lington, himself an Anglo-Irish Protestant by birth, had been
as unbending as Liverpool or Addington.
In 1823 O'ConneU had founded a league called the " Catholic
Association," to bring pressure on the English Government.
„,^ „ It was a powerful, well-organized body, which
O'Connell , , . , . , ,
and the worked by proclamations and monster demonstra-
Catholic tions in the usual Irish style : it even collected a
Associabon. . .
kmd of impost called the " Catholic Rent," which
was paid with a good deal more regularity than the king's
taxes. Nominally suppressed by law in 1825, it was stiU in
fuU vigour in 1828. O'ConneU was a man of splendid elo
quence and ready wit, with considerable organizing power.
He was as completely the master of the Association as PameU
m later days was of the " Land League " ; but he set his face
against outrages and worked wholly by moral suasion. With
aU Ireland at his back, and the support of the Whig party
in England, he was a most formidable power. To show his
strength he had himself elected as Member of Parliament
for County Clare, though he could not of course take his
seat so long as the old laws against Catholics were stiU in
force. Confronted with this great agitation, continually harassed by
the Whigs, and opposed by the Canningite wing of his own
party, Wellington for some time refused to listen
gives \TOy° '° ^"5" proposal for Catholic Emancipation. But
suddenly, in the spring of 1829, his resistance
coUapsed; to the surprise and disgust of his own bigoted

O'CONNELL AND REPEAL. 71
foUoweis, he announced that he had become convinced that
further resistance would only lead to civil war in Ireland, and
that, rather than force matters to extremity, the ministry would
bring in a biU placing the Catholics in the same position in
matters political as members of the EstabUshed Church. Every
post in the State was thrown open to them save those of King,
Regent, Lord Chancellor, or Viceroy of Ireland. This
measure was passed by the aid of the Whigs and the Can
ningites. A great proportion of the Duke's old Tory friends
in both houses voted against it ; for the future they distrasted
Wellington, and could not be relied on to vote solidly at his
order. Nothing could have been more calculated to encourage the
duke's adversaries than this display of weakness on his part.
In Ireland O'Connell at once started another The " Re-
agitation, this time in favour of the dissolution of peal "
the Union of 1800 — " Repeal " as it was popularly **¦
styled in 1830, Home-Rule as we should caU it now. For
nearly a score of years this movement was to convulse the
sister island ; meanwhUe O'Connell himself appeared at West
minster with a foUowing of fifty Irish Catholic members ready
to make trouble for English ministries, Tory or Whig, in every
possible way.
That Wellington retained ofifice for more than a year after
he had conceded Catholic Emancipation, was only due to the
fact that in respect for his personal character and the great
things he had done for England in 1808-15, his adversaries
refrained from pressing him to extremity. All his measures in
1829-30 were weak and Ul-judged; he even abandoned our
Portuguese allies, whom Canning had saved in 1826, and
aUowed Dom Miguel, a usurper of most reactionary views, to
be estabUshed as king in their country. But the overthrow of
the ministry was deferred tUl November, 1830, before which
date there was a general change in English politics caused by
outside events.

72 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
On June 26, 1830, George IV. had died in his sixty-eighth
year, unregretted by any single class of his subjects. It was a
great boon to the nation that his successor was a
WimMi°IV.^ prince of a very different stamp.
William, Duke of Clarence, the king's next
surviving brother, who now ascended the throne under the
name of William IV., was a simple, good-hearted, genial old
man, who had served with credit in the navy, and had long
occupied the honorary post of Lord High Admiral. His
intelligence was limited, but his intentions were good, and
no one could dislike or despise him. The only thing against
liim was an eccentricity which sometimes led him into absurd
speeches and actions, and made men fear that he was tainted
with the insanity of his father, George III. Fortunately their
dread turned out to be unfounded ; he kept his head and made
an admirable constitutional king. It was of enormous benefit
to the nation as weU as the monarchy that he was not a party
man like his brother, and got on with the Whigs as well as
with the Tories. He had married late in life (18 18) and had
two daughters, but both of them died in infancy, so that the
succession to the throne now passed to his ten-year-old niece
Alexandrina Victoria, the only chUd of Edward Duke of Kent,
the fourth son of George III.
During the very week in which WUliam IV. ascended the
throne the political horizon of Europe grew overcast. The
domination of the " Holy AlUance " was suddenly
Europe m threatened by popular risings in every region of
Philippe the continent, the natural result of fifteen years
tii^F^ °^h '¦ ^^ despotic rale, during which every national and
constitutional aspiration Had been crashed by
brate force. The trouble began in Paris, where the narrow-
minded and reactionary Charles X. was expelled by a revolt
iu which the army joined the mob. France did not become a
red republic, as many had feared, but merely changed its
dynasty ; for Louis Philippe, Duke of Orleans, a very astute

THE WHIGS IN OFFICE. 73
intriguer, succeeded in putting himself at the head of the move
ment and was saluted as constitutional " King of the French " —
tlie old title, " King of France," was dropped as savouring of feu
dalism. From Paris the wave of revolution spread right and left :
there followed a vigorous rebellion in Poland against the des
potism of Czar Nicholas I., a rising of the Belgians against their
enforced union with Holland, insurrections in Spain and Por
tugal, and troubles of a less desperate sort in Germany and Italy.
In the midst of these foreign complications the Wellington
ministry at last came to an end. The death of the late king
was followed by a general election, in which
more than fifty seats in the Commons were lost ^?-"„?^ \A/eIlington 3
by the old Tory party. The fact was that the ministry-
duke's weak policy had disgusted his own sup- The Whigs
, , , i- , , return to
porters, and even the knot of borough-mongers office.
who were its firmest adherents had not exerted
themselves very ardently in his cause. In the English counties,
where popular feeling was able to express itself better than
in the boroughs, more than sixty out of the eighty-two members
returned were Whigs. When the new parliament met in
November the ministers were defeated by a majority of
twenty-nine on the first contentious topic that came up.
Wellington resigned, and the king, in due constitutional form,
sent for the head of the Whig party, and entrusted him with
the formation of a cabinet. The new Prime Minister was
Charles Earl Grey, the last survivor of the old Whig chiefs
who had fought out the long straggle with the younger Pitt.
He had been Foreign Secretary in the Grenville cabinet of
1807, but nearly all his colleagues were younger men who had
never before held ofifice. The only other members indeed of
the ministry who had any administrative experience were three
of Canning's followers, who now consented to join the Whig
party — Lords Melbourne, Palmerston, and Gooderich. Their
Lord Chancellor was Brougham, an eloquent but eccentric
orator, who had shown himself formidable in attack while

74 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Tory cabinets were in power, but proved far too flighty and
capricious as a responsible minister of the Crown.
Lord Grey was a man whom age had rendered cautious and
moderate; he succeeded in carrying out the long-needed
reforms, for which the nation had been waiting
since 1815, with the minimum of friction and
trouble. A less judicious leader might have provoked very
serious political strife, for all the elements of discord were
present in the situation. The Tory party commanded a great
majority in the House of Lords, and controlled a large and un-
scrapulous minority in the Lower House : the seats of so many
representatives of rotten boroughs were imperiUed by the
impending reform of the Commons, that they were naturally
fuU of impotent and factious wrath. Lord Grey had an
nounced, on accepting ofifice, that he intended to make Par
liamentary Reform the main feature of his administration, so
his adversaries had fair notice of his intentions.
The condition of the House of Commons, considered as a
representative body, had been growing more and more of
Necessity of * disgraceful anomaly for two hundred years.
Parliament- There had been practically no change in its con-
ary Reform, stjtmjojj gj^ce the reign of Queen Elizabeth;
scores of boroughs that had been flourishing market towns
or seaports in the middle ages had sunk into decayed villages
— some, like Gatton and Old Saram, had dwindled down to a
couple of houses. On the other hand, great industrial centres
like Leeds or Birmingham had no representative whatever.
In the shires things were almost as ridiculous — the great
counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, reckoning their in
habitants by the million, had the same two members as
Rutland. It is hard to see how the survival of the antiquated
system could have been seriously defended, save by the
landowners who dominated " rotten boroughs " of the type of
Old Saram, or the capitalists who liked to buy a seat instead
of facing troublesome masses of constituents. Pitt had

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 75
introduced a I!*;form Bill as far back as 1785, but it had been
thrown out by a factious combination of the Whigs and the
borough-mongers. Since 1792 the old Tory party had been
almost continuously in ofifice, and had always rejected any
proposals for reform : the fact was that the existing anomalous
state of affairs suited them, because the large majority of the
rotten seats were in the hands of their supporters.
Every year since 1821 some Whig leader had broached the
topic in the Commons, and every time his project had been
summarily thrown out. Public opinion had been Qj-o-wth of
getting more excited on the point at each rejec- the Reform
tion. The middle classes, which had been steadily ^Kitation.
Tory throughout the Great War, had begun to pass over whole
sale to the Whig party, under the reactionary Liverpool regime,
and the Duke of Wellington's mismanagement had finished
their conversion. It was intolerable that aU progressive legis
lation should be stopped because a few scores of borough-
mongers commanded enough votes to hold the balance in the
House of Commons. It was ludicrous that a householder in
Winchelsea or Appleby should have the privilege of choosing a
member, whUe a householder in Liverpool or Leeds should
not. The agitation which was on foot in 1816-20 was very
different from that which now prevailed in 1830-32. The
former had its roots in famine and poverty ; it had only influ
enced the labouring classes, and had been led by a few hot
headed demagogues. The latter was essentially a middle-class
movement ; its leaders were the merchants and bankers of the
great towns which were denied representation. It had the support
of the masses, who hoped that a more representative Parliament
would lead to enlightened social legislation for their benefit,
but tbe real strength of the agitation lay in the well-to-do house
holders of the towns. Hence it was comparatively orderly in
its progress ; it was only in a few places like Bristol, where
special local circumstances embittered feeling, that riot and
disorder foUowed the campaign in favour of Reform.

76 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
In March, 1831, Lord John RusseU, a scioh of the great
Whig house of the Dukes of Bedford, introduced the Reform
Bill in its first shape. It soon becarae evident
Bill passed that the ministerial majority was not large enough
in the House to carry the measure ; though the representatives
of Commons. ,,.,.., , ,
of five-sixths of the great constituencies voted for
it, the members for the rotten boroughs were so numerous and
so resolved not to sanction their own destruction, that the
second reading of the bill was only carried by one vote (302
to 301) in the fullest house that had ever met. Seeing that
they could not hope to finish the business with such a smaU
majority. Lord Grey and his colleagues offered to resign ; the
king refused to receive their resignation, but dissolved Parlia
ment instead, to give the nation its opportunity of renewing or
refusing its mandate to the Whig party. The election was
carried out in the midst of a tremendous agitation, unparalleled
in the history of the nation ; it ended, as might have been
expected, in the ministers sweeping the whole country and
obtaining a decisive majority of 136. In September the great
biU was reintroduced, and passed all its three readings in the
Commons with ease.
The resistance of the Tories had now to be transferred to
the House of Lords, in which they were omnipotent. Pitt and
Thrown out ^^^ successors had almost swamped the upper
by the House chamber by their lavish creations of peers during
° °^ ^' the last forty years. Not gauging at its full
strength the determination of the country to have the bill
passed, the Lords threw it out by a majority of 41 (October,
1831). The winter of 1831-32 was spent in furious agitation against
„. . , the House of Lords. Meeting after meeting,
Violent de- , , , ^ , , , °'
monstrations attended by scores of thousands of the members
against the of " Political Unions," " National Unions," and
Lords. Other such bodies, asserted their desire for
" The BiU, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill." The

THE CRISIS OF MAY, 1832. 77
advanced wing of the Whig party, who were just beginning to
call themselves " Radicals," began to agitate for the abolition
of hereditary titles and the destraction of the Upper House.
The results of the effervescence of popular feeling were shown
when the cabinet once more introduced their bill ; it passed
rapidly through the Commons, and after a hot debate in the
House of Lords its second reading was carried by a small
majority (April 14, 1832).
But the Whigs had not yet completed their victory. Instead
of openly throwing out the bill, the Tory peers tried another
device : they proposed to mutilate it by post
poning the clauses which disfranchised the rotten the Lords to
boroughs, without which the bill was practically mutilate the
useless. When this side blow was successful in
the Lords, Grey promptly resigned and chaUenged the opposi
tion to take over the management of affairs if they dared. The
king sent for the Duke of Wellington, and invited him to form
a Tory cabinet. For seven days the Iron Duke contemplated
the possibility of facing the angry nation, and sounded his
party as to their wUlingness to take the risk. During that
week the nation was on the brink of civil war ; many of the
more hot-headed leaders of the Whig party made preparations
for arming the members of the Reform associations and march
ing on London. Others, with greater ingenuity, organized a
run on the Bank of England, in the hope that the enemy would
not dare to face a financial as weU as a political crisis. " To
stop the duke, go for gold " was the word passed round among
the merchants of London (May 8-15, 1832).
Fortunately for the peace of the realm, Wellington shrank
from the responsibility of accepting office. He
found that it was very doubtful if the army could ^uses^°"
be trasted to act against the people. His Tory take ofSce—
friends showed a general reluctance to accept the carried!
posts in his projected cabinet. Finally, he returned
to the king and advised him to send again for Lord Grey, as

78 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
no alternative was possible. The Whig statesman would not
retum to power tUl he was granted a written promise that, if
the House of Lords persisted in its opposition to Reform, the
king would create new peers in suflficient numbers to swamp
all resistance. This threat had its effect; to prevent its
being put in force, WeUington and several scores more of
Tory peers solemnly marched out of the House when the
bill was again sent up from the Commons. In their absence
it was aUowed to pass by a considerable majority (June
4. 1832).
The detaUs of the biU demand a word of notice. It dis
franchised entirely no less than fifty-six " rotten boroughs,"
The redistri- ^'^'^^ of which had more than 2000 inhabitants.
bution of It deprived of one member each thirty smaU
^^*®" towns which had hitherto owned two representa
tives. This gave a total of 143 seats to be disposed of among
the new centres of population. London got ten of them, new
boroughs being created for Marylebone, Greenwich, Lambeth,
Finsbury, and the Tower Hamlets. Twenty-two large towns,
such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Newcastle,
received two members each. Twenty-one places of secondary
size were aUotted one each. The more populous counties
were cut up into divisions, to which sixty-five members were
given. Eight new borough members were created in Scotland ;
in Ireland (where the existing arrangements only dated back to
1800) there was hardly any need of change.
At the same time the franchise was made uniform all over
the United Kingdom ; before 1832 every borough had its own
rales. In the towns, the power to vote was given
The new , ', , ,
borough and to every householder occupying a tenement 01 the
county value of /"lO or over. In the counties the terms
franchises. granted were less liberal ; to the freeholders, who
possessed the franchise before, there were added as voters
aU copyholders and leaseholders holding lands to the annual
value of .^£^10, and tenants-at-wiU of ;^So holdings. This

DETAILS OF THE REFORM BILL. 79
arrangement left the shopkeepers masters in the towns, and
the farmers in the countryside. The artisans in the one, the
agricultural labourers in the other, were still left without the
franchise, and had to wait the one class thirty and the other
fifty years before obtaining it.

( 8o)

CHAPTER V.
FROM THE GREAT REFORM BILL TO THE CRIMEAN WAK.
1832-54.
The passage of Lord Grey's Reform Bill is the central point of
the political history of the nineteenth century. Never again
Fears ex- f°'- ^^""^ ^^^^ fifty years were men's passions to
cited by the ran so high ; the unrest caused by the Chartist
Keiorm 1. agitation in 1838-48 was a mere nothing compared
to the excitement in 1830-32. The only time in the nine
teenth century that can be compared to it, was the short period
in 1886, when Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was in the air,
and the Liberal party was bursting asunder. This later struggle
only occupied a few months, but Lord Grey's battle with the
Tories had covered nearly three years. If protracted a little
longer, it would probably have led to the abolition of the House
of Lords and many other sudden and destructive changes. To
some people the time-honoured constitution of England seemed
in danger ; they prophesied that the Radicals would sweep the
Whigs in their train, and carry universal suffrage, vote by
ballot, and the whole programme of complete democracy the
moment that the great bill had passed. There were even
persons who made wagers that the United Kingdom would
cease to be a monarchy before ten' years were out.
Nothing could have been more ill-founded than these fears ;

RESULTS OF THE REFORM BILL. 81
when once the Reform Bill was passed the poUtical horizon
grew clear, and for the next twenty years the only
really important topics in politics were matters of Its actual
social and economic reform, such as the abolition poji'tjc^
of negro slavery in the colonies, the reform of the ascendency
Poor Laws, the passing of the Factory Acts, and ^a^'^™^'^'^
the gradual introduction of complete Free Trade.
It is trae that a busy agitation for democratic changes in the
constitution was kept up by the Radicals and the " Chartists "
for many years. But the middle classes, who had gained the
control of the country by the Reform Bill, did not look with
favour or interest on these projects, and steadfastly refused to
allow them to be brought into the sphere of practical politics.
The popular movement, which had broken down the opposition
of the Tories and carried the bUl of 1832, had been supported
both by the middle classes and the labouring masses. The
former, when it was passed, got possession of the power which
they had coveted, and completely supplanted the old borough-
mongering Tory oligarchy. They had no intention of allow
ing their new importance to be taken from them and given to
the artisans and labourers ; hence they had no inclination to
Universal Suffrage or any other such device for transferring the
sovereignty of the realm to the proletariate. We may define
their position clearly enough by saying that they were Whigs,
and not Radicals ; they wished for practical reforms, and not
for a theoretical revision of the constitution. Hence there
came a split among the ranks of the great host which had
fought for reform in 1830-32 : the great majority of the leaders
and organizers, and nearly all the wealth and intelligence of
the party, were satisfied with what they had got, and settled
down into contented Whiggery. The taU of the party — the
unenfranchised masses, headed by a few demagogues — per
sisted in the cry for further constitutional changes : but though
their demands were political, their aims were really social ;
they wanted to raise the standard of comfort and prosperity a

82 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTOKV
among the labouring classes much more than to claim political
rights. If they asked for the latter, it was only in order to use
them to obtain the former, for the old delusion that peoples
can be made prosperous and happy by Act of Parliament was
omnipotent among them.
Meanwhile the main result of the Reform Bill in practical
politics was to place the Whig party in power for more than
„ forty years, with only four short breaks. Their
Supremacy . ' , , ^ , ™ •
of the Whigs reign was almost as long as that of the Tories
in Parlia- between 1784 and 1830, for between 1830 and
ment „ , , . , , . , . ,
1874 there were only eight years during which
Tory administrations held ofifice; for the remaining thirty-six
Whig cabinets of one shade or another presided over the
administration of the United Kingdom.
In foreign poUtics, the problems with which the Grey ministry
had to deal, when the Reform Bill had been passed, differed
_, , , , considerably from those of the old days of the
The state of .
Europe— " Holy Alliance " and the reign of unrestrained
Russia, Italy, despotism. The wave of revolution which had
Germany. swept over the Continent in 1830 had left many
traces behind it. In Russia, Italy, and Germany, indeed,
the old landmarks of autocracy had not been permanently
submerged, and the governments were as reactionary as ever.
But the aspect of Europe had been profoundly changed by
the fact that France had become a liberal and constitutional
France monarchy under King Louis Philippe. As a rule,
Belgiura, and France and England now found themselves taking
° ^ ¦ the same views on Continental politics ; if they
sometimes disagreed, it was because Louis Philippe was a born
intriguer and loved tortuous ways. Belgium was also established
as a new constitutional kingdom, the Dutch having given up their
attempt to hold her down when France interfered in favour of
the insurgents. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of the
English Princess Charlotte, was now king at Brussels, and main
tained a firm friendship both with England and with Fiance.

PALMERSTON'S FOREIGN POLICY. 83
In Spain King Ferdinand VII. had fallen into the hands of
the Liberals in his old age, and had changed the line of suc
cession, so as to aUow his daughter Isabella to
reign instead of his bigoted and reactionary po^lJ^J^i*'
brother Don Carlos. In Portugal a civU war was
raging, which ultimately terminated in the expulsion of the
usurper Dom Miguel and the triumph of the constitutional
Queen Maria. Her cause was successful mainly owing to
English and French support, the turning-point of the war having
been a naval battle off Cape St. Vincent, where the skill of
Admiral Napier enabled the smaU fleet of Donna Maria to
annihilate a MigueUte squadron of more than double his force.
All Western Europe was, in 1833, more or less freed from the
yoke of the alliance of the despotic monarchs, though in Spain
the straggle was to linger on for more than seven years and to
cause almost las much misery as the Peninsular War. The
last partisans of Don Carlos did not lay down their arms
tUl 1840, and the craelties perpetrated on both sides had been
worthy of Soudanese dervishes or Kurdish irregulars.
On the whole, the foreign policy of the Whig Govemment
was very successful ; the last fears of the domination of Europe
by despotism passed away, and Lord Palmerston,
the able Canningite convert who managed our Palmerston's
external relations, won a reputation for skill and foreign
. pohcy.
decision which was destined to make him the
almost inevitable Foreign Secretary of all the Whig Govern
ments of the next thirty years. He was, indeed, far the most
capable of the Whig statesmen of his generation, and a much
more notable figure than the four prime ministers under whom
he served. A bluff, hearty man, full of a genial self-confidence,
and always determined that England should have her say in
any European question that was pending, he was looked upon
by his contemporaries as the ideal exponent of a " spirited
foreign policy." We shall see that sometimes, as his opponents
sneered, " his bark was worse than his bite ; " but on the whole

84 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
he was a good servant of his country, and contrasted very
favourably as a diplomatist with his successors on the Liberal
side of the house.
But foreign affairs during the rule of the Grey cabinet were
by no means so important as home matters. The years which
Domestic foUowed the Reform Bill were full of constractive
reforms of legislation intended to make up for the arrears of
the Whigs, jj^g barren time since 1815. The most important
of the bills introduced by the Grey cabinet was that which
dealt with the Poor Laws ; but second only to this was the
one which finally did away with negro slavery in our West
Indian colonies.
The Poor Law as it stood in 1832 was the most fertile source
of misery that existed in the United Kingdom. Its unwise
Poor Law administration during the last forty years had
administra- done more to bring about social evil and political
'¦'°°* unrest than any other factor in the long list of
popular grievances. For nearly two centuries the principle
which governed the dealing of the State with pauperism had
been a wise and sound one, laid down in the Poor Law of 1601
— that a clear distinction should be drawn between
Act o? 1601. ^8^*^ ^"*^ impotent persons unable to work, and
idle and improvident ones who could work but
refused to do so. The former were entitled to relief from their
parishes ; the latter were to be compelled to apply themselves
to labour, and even to be punished if they preferred the life of
the tramp and beggar. This radical distinction drawn between
the able-bodied pauper and the unfortunate victim of old age
or disease was always kept in sight till the middle of the reign
of George III.
It was not until 1782, one of the troublous years of the old
American war, that the first step in the wrong direction was
Gilb t' A t "^^'^^' ^y ^" ^^^ °^ Pariiament (generaUy caUed
from its framer Gilbert's Act) which aUowed the
guardians of the poor in each parish to find work near his

TIIE OLD POOR-LAW. 85
house for any person out of employment, and to add to his
wages from the parish funds if he had not quite suflficient to
maintain himself. This was followed fourteen
years later by a far more disastrous piece of mis- changes ?n
placed philanthropy. In the early days of the great the Poor
French war distress was rife everywhere, and one ^^' '^'^"
of the methods taken to aUeviate it was to establish a system
of giving a regular system of " grants in aid of wages " for all
poor labourers. A sliding-scale was fixed, by which, as the
price of the loaf rose, more and more money was to be given
to distressed parishioners : the larger the family the larger was
to be the grant, in strict arithmetical progression. The idea
was to establish a minimum wage for the labourer which he
should not fail to get ; but, unfortunately, the device tended
rather to fix a maximum for him, and that a very low one.
For the farmers began at once to cut down the pay of the men
they employed, in order that they might save their own money
at the expense of the parish — every shiUing that they took off
being replaced by another which came out of the parish funds.
This, of course, had stiU further bad effects, for the labourer
who was not drawing relief-money found himself receiving less
than his neighbour who was. Very soon this compelled him
to put in his claim for a similar dole, till the vast majority of
rural population was receiving poor-relief, and the free labourer
became a rare exception.
This disastrous system, tried first in Berkshire in 1795,
gradually spread over the whole country. Its main result was
that the farmers and their landlords pocketed all the immense
profits which came from the high price of corn in the years
of the French war ; the rural poor got no share of it. More
over, the system tended to general unthrift and improvidence
among the country folk, because the sum of the dole received
by each family was in proportion to its numbers ; the more
children a man had, the more poor-relief was paid him. Hence
he wished to have as many children as possible ; though he

86 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
might not be able to maintain them himself, the parish would
feed them for him. Early and improvident marriages became
the rule rather than the exception. It wiU scarcely be credited
that this unhappy state of things was viewed at first with com
placency by English statesmen. WUliam Pitt himself once
said that " parish relief should be given as a matter of right
or honour in proportion to the number of the recipient's
children, so that a large family wUl become a blessing, not a
curse ; and those who enrich their country with a number of
children will always have a claim upon its assistance for their
support." The result of this blind philanthropy was that the population
of the rural parishes went up by leaps and bounds, quite irre
spective of any need for the existence of more hands for labour,
fill the poor-rate became an intolerable burden. Between
1795 and 1815 the annual amount of it rose from ;^2, 500,000
to _^5, 400,000. After the war was over things grew even
worse, for in the hard times of 1816-20, when prices fell and
all trade stagnated, the population kept still increasing. Cases
are quoted where parishes had to go bankrapt because the sum
needed to feed their paupers actually exceeded their whole
annual rateable value. In the year of the Reform Bill the
maximum of misery was reached, the poor-rates rising to the
sum of ;£'7, 000,000. That this reign of pauperism was artificial
was soon shown when the government took the matter in
hand. Lord Grey's Act of 1834 provided that a return should be
made to the old principle of Queen Elizabeth's law of r6oi —
Reform of ^^^^ out-door relief should only be given to the
the Poor aged and destitute. All others demanding a dole
^^^- from the parish should be only granted it if they
went into a workhouse — a hard test, but one which well dis
criminated between the idle and the reaUy distressed, since
no one wished to enter its walls unless he was compelled. The
parishes were combined in groups called " unions," in order to

THE NEW POOR-LAW OF 1834. 87
provide one large and well-appointed workhouse rather than
a number of small and inefficient ones.
The immediate result of the New Poor Law was to force the
farmers and other employers of labour to pay their men out
of their own pockets, and not to depend on throw- r h i-
ing half the expense on to the parish. Thus the the Act of
labouring poor did not really lose by the change ' 34-
in the system ; but it fell hardly on the generation which was
then in existence, since their habits and manners of thought
and life had been formed under the old law. It was impossible
to get rid of the tradition of unthrift and recklessness caused
by forty years of maladministration. On the whole the con
dition of the countryside after 1835 ''^as decidedly less happy
than it hadbeen before 1795 : prices had gone up, while wages
had not, owing mainly to the old Poor Law. Even after its
repeal they have risen very gradually, and have always been
so much lower than those obtainable in towns, that there has
been a steady drain of population from raral into urban
England. The financial results of Lord Grey's bUl were admirable.
The sum expended in poor-relief fell from the _;^7, 000,000 at
which it stood in 1832 to ;^4,7oo,ooo in 1836. And what
was far more important, the curse of pauperism was lifted from
those of the raral poor who had th-3 strength and independence
of mind to fight for themselves. They were no longer
practically compelled to live^^on charity, the most demoralizing
of all manners of life.
The second great measure of social reform associated with
the name of Lord Grey is the abolition of Negro Slavery in our
colonies. The slave trade had been put an end „. . .
^ .„ . . . „ , , The aboli-
to by the GrenviUe ministry in 1807, but the tion of
stoppage of the importation of fresh negroes did slavery in
1 jr..!. ^. ¦ .-. .- •. ir the colomcs.
not make an end of the unhappy institution itself.
Public opinion in England had been growing more and more
ashamed that it should linger on within our empire, and an active

88 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
agitation against it had been going on for many years. But
the West Indian planters refused to take the matter seriously,
and scouted several proposals made to them for the gradual
abolition of slavery, and even for its amelioration in details.
Their uncompromising opposition to change of any kind only
made their fate come upon them the more swiftly and surely.
In spite of their angry clamour, a bill was passed by which all
slaves were made free, though they were bound as apprentices
to their former owners for three years, in order to tide over the
general breaking up of social institutions which must foUow
emancipation. As was but just, the planters were given com
pensation, a sum of _;^20,ooo,ooo being voted to them in the
proportion of ^22 loj. for every man, woman, and child set
free (August i, 1834).
The emancipation of the negroes was an absolutely necessary
act of elementary morality. Nothing could justify the survival
of slavery far into the nineteenth century. But
Effects of . , ¦ . r • r .>_ • r .L
abolition on 'rom the point of view of the prosperity of the
the West West Indies, the change brought disastrous results.
The freed men were idle and disorderly; when
the fear of the lash was removed, they did not take kindly to
work. The sugar plantations of the West Indies have been
gradually rained by inefficient free labour, which cannot face
foreign competition. In the first seven years after the abolition
of slavery, the production of sugar feU off by more than a third,
and that of coffee by nearly a half. Chinese and Hindoo
coolies have been introduced to provide the plantation-labour
which the free black refuses to carry on systematically. But
no expedient has- availed to save the West India planters from
rain, which has been almost completed in our own days by
the iniquitous bounties on beet-sugar paid by France and other
continental states. It was not till the time of the Great War of
1914-18 that it ever seemed possible that prosperity could
ever return to the West India Islands.
The main trouble which the Grey cabinet endured in their

LORD GREY RESIGNS. 89
otherwise prosperous years of ofifice came from Ireland. Here
Daniel O'ConneU was hard at work with his Iceland-
agitation for the repeal of the Union : but that The tithe
proposal never came within the sphere of practical ^^'
politics, for no single person in Great Britain gave it any
support It was otherwise with a secondary matter to which
O'Connell also set his hand. The Irish Catholics had a real
grievance in that they were compeUed to pay tithe for the
support of the Protestant Church of Ireland. Over two-thirds
of the land there was hardly any Protestant population, and
the rectors and vicars had no congregations. They were
largely non-resident, as they had no duties or work in their
parishes. That the Romanists should be required to maintain
them seemed iniquitous. Flushed with their success in the
matter of Catholic Emancipation, the leaders of the peasantry
started the " Tithe War '' — a campaign against the clergy of
the State Church and all who paid them their much-grudged
dues. Outrages were frequent, and riots broke out whenever the
forcible collection of tithes was persisted in by the govern
ment. Lord Grey prepared remedial measures
to do away with the grievance, but also very ^^ct passed-
properly passed a " Coercion Act " to put down Lord Grey
the rioters and rafifians who were terrorizing the
countryside. For this he was bitterly assailed by O'Connell.
There followed unfortunate dissensions within the cabinet as
to the exact way in which the repression of violence and the
removal of grievances should be combined. Finding many of
his colleagues opposed to him. Lord Grey resigned; he was
now an old man, and too worn out to face r crisis (July, 1834)
The Whig party replaced their worthy old chief by Lord
Melbourne, one of the Canningites of 1828. But the king
thought that the Tories should be given their chance, and
invited Sir Robert Peel to form a ministry. He did so, and
dissolved parliament ; but Toryism had not recovered from

90 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the dreadful blow which had been dealt it by the Reform Bill.
In the new parliament the Whigs were in a decided majority,
and Sir Robert had to resign after having held ofifice for no
more than three months (December, i834^March, 1835).
Lord Melbourne then returned to power, bringing with him
nearly all his old colleagues who had served Lord Grey. His
The Mel- ministry lasted from 1835 to 1841, and forms
bourne one of the most uninteresting periods in the
ministry. history of the century ; there have been probably
no six years between 1800 and 1900 whose annals have been
more thoroughly forgotten. Their political history is mainly
occupied by two agitations which led to nothing, and whose
details have grown tedious — O'ConneU's " Repeal " move
ment and the " Chartist " troubles. Both seemed serious
enough at the time, but died out, and were not renewed for
another generation.
The one event of first-rate importance which occurred during
the rale of the Melbourne cabinet was the death of King
William IV. on June 20, 1837. His two daughters
of Queen had died in infancy, so that the succession devolved
Victoria— on his niece, Alexandrina Victoria, the only child
separated of his next brother, Edward Duke of Kent AU
from Eng- through King WiUiam's reign the eyes of the
nation had been eagerly fixed on this young
princess, for her life was the only one which stood between
the crown and her uncle, Ernest Duke of Cumberland, the
most unpopular and worthless of the sons of George III. It
was a great relief to the whole people to see her ascend the
throne at the age of eighteen, in health and vigour that gave
every prospect of a long reign. Hanover, where the succession
was entaUed in the male line, passed away to the Duke of
Cumberland, who made himself as much disliked there as he
had been in England. The Electorate had been united to the
English crown for 123 years; its separation was an unquali
fied benefit, for it had perpetuaUy involved Great Britain in

ACCESSION OF QUEEN VICTORIA. 91
countless problems of continental policy in which we had no
real concern.
The exemplary sovereign who now mounted the throne and
was destined to enjoy a reign unparalleled for length and
prosperity among all the annals of her prede-
cessors, was little known to her subjects in 1837. y^g queen
She had been brought up very simply — almost,
indeed, in seclusion — by her mother, Victoria of Coburg, the
Dowager-duchess of Kent, who had been determined that she
should not court any of the invidious popularity that comes to
heirs apparent who show themselves too conspicuously during
their predecessors' lifetime. But as her people came to know
her, they recognized that they were fortunate in possessing the
most blameless ruler that Great Britain has ever seen, the
pattern and model for all constitutional sovereigns that ever
wore a crown. She was conspicuously free from all the
hereditary faults of her family; simple in her tastes, straight
forward in act and speech, full of consideration for others,
always striving to act up to her conceptions of the duty of a
sovereign and a woman, she won and always retained her
subjects' esteem and loyalty.
Her personal character proved not the least among the
influences which conduced to a general rise in the morals of
EngUsh society during her reign. Married three
years after her accession to her cousin Albert of the queen
Saxe-Coburg, she gave the world an example of with Albert
perfect domestic happiness, combined with the coburg."
unremitting discharge of public duties. To those
who remeinbered the court of George IV., the change made in
a few years was astonishing. If there was ever any chance in
the first quarter of the century that the monarchy might go
down before the incoming flood of democratic ideas, the
queen's character and conduct soon averted the danger. Nor
can his meed of praise be denied to her husband, who dis
charged with rare self-restraint the difficult functions of a

92 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Prince Consort. In spite of the vague distrast with which he
was at first regarded, owing to his foreign birth, he showed
that he was able to adapt himself to EngUsh political ideas
and usages. He had his limitations— was stiff and pedantic,
but never made himself a party man or aUowed his name to be
used for party purposes.
The change of reign, therefore, had no appreciable effect on
the fortunes of the Melboume ministry. If at first a few
bigoted Tories grambled that the young queen
The ministry might become a tool in the hands of the Whigs,
nell— The"' ''^^y '^^^^ ^°°" undeceived. The main difificulties
tithe grie- of the Melboume cabinet sprang from the fact
removed '^^* '^^ majority which they commanded in the
House of Commons was very smaU, except when
it was reinforced by O'ConneU and his " tail," as the horde of
not very respectable satellites whom he brought to Westminster
was often called. At a pinch the Irish would vote with the
govemment to keep out the Tories, but in ordinary times they
preferred to worry it, in order to niake their power felt, and
to screw " Repeal, " if possible, out of the Whigs. Under these
circumstances it is not surprising that the days of the Melboume
cabinet were singularly unmarked by legislation of any kind,
good or bad. The only really important measure which was
passed was one to redeem Lord Grey's pledge of 1834 on the
matter of the Irish tithe, from which the Roman Catholic
peasantry were now wholly relieved— the payment being trans
ferred to their landlords, who were mainly members of the
Established Church.
The most marked feature of the years 1835-41 in the internal
history of England was the fraitless " Chartist " agitation.
Though it took a political shape, this movement
Charte?*^ ^ ^ ^'^® really social in its character. It was caused
by the disappointment felt by the labouring masses
at the smaU profit which they had got out of the passage of the
Reform BUl and the advent of the Wliigs to ofifice. They had

THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT. 93
vaguely believed that a millennium of prosperity would follow
the purification of the House of Commons. When disappointed
in this, they did not take warning, and reflect that the possession
of political rights does not necessarily bring happiness or
prosperity in its train. The demagogues who led them per
suaded themselves that all would go well if only further reforms
on more democratic Unes were carried out. They therefore
drew up the "People's Charter," from which their followers
became known as Chartists; it demanded six concessions
from the government : (i) universal suffrage was to replace the
;£'io household suffrage introduced in 1832 ; (2) voting was
to be by ballot; (3) members of parliament were to receive
a salary ; (4) all the existing boroughs and counties were to be
recast into electoral districts of equal population ; (5) no quali
fication of property was to be required from members of
parliament; (6) parliaments were to be annual, instead of
sitting for seven years. If all these demands had been granted
in a lump, they would not have really done anything towards
helping the Chartists to higher wages or shorter hours of work,
which were in reality the aims for which they were ready to
fight. An outspoken popular speaker put the case clearly
when he declared in 1838 that "the principle of the Charter
means that every working man in the land has the right to a
good coat, a good hat, a good dinner, no more work than wUl
keep him in health, and as much wages as will keep him in
plenty." Practically, in spite of its purely political form, the
Chartist agitation was only an earlier shape of the demand for
the " living wage " of which we hear so much to-day.
Of the six points of the Charter, the second, fourth, and fifth
have been conceded for many years ; the first, obtained by a
series of bills in 1867, 1884 and 1916, is now prog-ress of
complete. Even female suffrage, undreamed of in the Chartist
1840, now exists. No one contends that the pay- 3-g"a-"on-
ment of members during the last ten years has revolutionized
the character of parliament, and it is now universally conceded

94 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
that annual dissolutions and general elections would be an
unqualified nuisance. Yet over this programme, perfectly in
capable of producing the social benefits which were desired,
the masses of the great manufacturing towns expended a vast
amount of sound and fury between the years 1838 and 1848.
They never had any leaders of weight or note, capable of
guiding them with firmness and keeping them out of mischief.
Hence they soon turned to aimless and destructive rioting, and
thereby caused the whole middle class to rally round the
government and determine that the " Charter " should on no
account be conceded. In a riot at Birmingham in 1839, the
damage done was so wanton and malicious, that the Duke of
Wellington declared that it exceeded anything that he had seen
in the towns carried by assault during the Peninsular War. At
Newport, in Monmouthshire, a mob of five thousand Welsh
miners armed with scythes and fowling-pieces seized the town,
and had to be fired on by the soldiery. Such scenes made any
further democratic reforms impossible, and though the Chartists
kept bombarding parliament with monster petitions for the
next nine years, no government. Whig or Tory, showed the least
signs of listening to their threats. When they grew very violent
in 1848, under the influence of news of revolutions on the
Continent, 200,000 special constables appeared in the streets
of London to aid the armed forces of the crown, and the
Chartist meetings collapsed ignominiously.
The Melboume government went out in August, 1841,
and the Tory party, after eleven years of powerlessness, were
„ . . , once more in ofifice. Under their new leader,
Rcviv&I of
the Tory or Sir Robert Peel, they were a very different body
Conservative from their ancestors of the days before the Reform
party. Bill. Their wish to break with the reactionary
traditions of Addington and Castlereagh is shown by the fact
that they had now adopted the new name of " Conservatives.''
Their programme was no longer uninteUigent resistance to all
change, and while opposing the violent designs of the Chartists

SIR ROBERT PEEL. 95
.ind the Irish, they were- quite willing to adopt cautious
measures of advance in both constitutional and social legisla
tion. The party, in fact, was led by chiefs who represented the
Canningite Tories of 1828, and who were no longer divided
by any very wide gulf from their Whig opponents. It was
the same with the bulk of their adherents : the Chartists had
frightened the middle classes into the Conservative ranks by
tens of thousands. The feeble Melboume government had
entirely failed to keep together the great army which had won
the victory of the Reform Bill. Peel himself was
a commanding figure, more fitted to lead a great peeL
party than any statesman who had appeared since
the death of William Pitt. He was the son of a wealthy
Lancashire manufacturer, not one of the old ring of Tory
landholders. His enlightened views on social and economic
questions made him popular with the middle classes. In his
foreign policy he was as firm as his rival Palmerston. As a
financier and an administrator he was unrivalled in his age —
finance, indeed, had always been the weak point of the Whigs.
He was perhaps a little autocratic and impatient with the
slower and more antiquated members of his party, but no one
could have foreseen in 1841 that his rale was not tc» be a long
one, and that he was ultimately destined to break up, not to
consolidate, the Conservative party.
His firm rale kept down the Chartists, and caused the final
collapse of the " Repeal " movement in Ireland. O'Connell
had been promising his countrymen Home Rule
for many years and with most eloquent verbosity. Repeal move
but they grew tired when all his talk ended in njentin
, . rr., ¦ „ ¦ ¦ rr r r„ Parhament
nothing. The mstallation m ofifice of a Tory
government with a crushing majority in the Commons, left him
no chance of using the votes of his " taU " to any effect. He
had always set his face against insurrection and outrage, and
wben peaceful means became obviously useless to attain his
end, both he and his followers fell into a state of depression.

96 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The Peel govemment did not take his agitation too seriously .
he was arrested for treasonable language used at a monster
meeting at Tara in 1843, but the House of Lords reversed his
condemnation on a technical point, and no further proceedings
were taken against him. But his following broke up, the
majority sinking into apathy, while the minority resolved to
appeal, in the old fashion of 1798, to armed insurrection — a
method even more hopeless for gaining their end than monster
raeetings. But it was not till five years later that they made
their attempt.
Meanwhile, Peel passed many admirable laws for the benefit
ofthe working classes. His Mines Acts (1842) prohibited the
^ ^ labour of women and children underground ; his
The F&ctorv
Acts— Factory Acts (1844) restricted the employment of
Financial the young in factories, and appointed inspectors
legislation. ' ^. . . . , , ^-r ,
to see to their sanitation and safety. He also set
right the finances of the kingdom, which Lord Melbourne
had left in a very unsatisfactory state, and did much for the
introduction of Free-trade in commerce. In one year he
reduced the import duties on no less than 750 articles of daily
use, ranging from live cattle and eggs to hemp and timber.
The loss in revenue this caused he made up by imposing an
Income Tax, which he promised to abolish at an early date.
He lost office ere the time came, and his successors have never
made very serious efforts to redeem his pledge.
In foreign affairs the Peel cabinet had many troubles to
face, but came safely through most of them. The disastrous
., , ^ Afghan war,* a legacy from Lord Melbourne's
Afghan and . , , • , . , ^ 
Sikh wars— time, was brought to a not inglorious end. The
Difficulties first Sikh war, an even greater trial of our strength
with France. ¦ ^, -r^. .. r- .-, . . • , .
in the East, finally ended in complete victory.
Two quarrels with France seemed likely for a moment to end
in hostilities : both were provoked by the arrogant policy of
the ministers of Louis Philippe. In 1844 the French laid
• See chaoter on India and the Colonies.

THE SPANISH MARRIAGES. 97
violent hands on, and deported, our consul at Tahiti, in Poly
nesia. Firmly faced and threatened with war, they apologized
and paid him compensation. The second qtiarrel was more
serious : in order to extend his influence over Spain, the old
French king designed to marry one of his sons to the girl-queen
Isabella. Finding that this proposal met with general resent
ment in Europe, and especially in England, he determined to
secure his purpose in a more roundabout way. He married
his son, the Duke of Montpensier, to the queen's
sister, her natural heiress, while he bribed the Zl?!;??.^®''
' ' marriages.
Spanish court and ministry to give the hand of
their unfortunate young sovereign to her cousin Don Francisco,
a wretched weakling whom she detested (1846). He intended
that Montpensier should be the practical raler of the country
as long as Isabella Uved, and succeed to her throne when she
died. This villainous plot against a helpless girl succeeded
for the moment, but failed in the end, because Louis Philippe
lost his own kingdom in 1848, and so was not able to support
his son. It was carried out in the last months of Peel's power,
and the resenting of its successful accomplishment passed to
the Whig cabinet which followed him. Lord Palmerston broke
sharply with France, but did not press the quarrel to the point
of war. It caused, however, a final rupture with the French
king, with whom we had hitherto been on ratlier friendly
terms, and the faU of the old intriguer in 1848 was welcomed
by most Englishmen as a righteous judgment on his sins.
Peel's later years of ofifice (1845-6) were made unhappy by
a domestic calamity of appalling violence — the dreadful potato-
famine in Ireland. In other countries the complete
destruction of the potato crop by blight in two famine.'^
successive years would have caused nothing more
than serious inconvenience. But in Ireland half the nation de
pended on the root. The population had been multiplying with
appaUing rapidity; in thirty years it had risen from five to eight
millions, and this not owing to flourishing trade or manufactures, H

98 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
or to any great increase in the amount of land cultivated.
The landlords had been permitting their tenants to cut up their
farms into smaller and smaller patches, till an average holding
did not sufifice to support its occupier, who had to make up the
deficit by seeking harvest work in England during the summer.
Several miUions of people were living on these wretched patches
of ground, always on the edge of starvation, and sustained only
by their potatoes. On such an indigent population two years
of blight brought absolute famine. Before the disaster was
fully realized, thousands had perished from actual hunger, or
from the fevers and dysentery foUowing on bad and insuflficient
food. The workhouses were crammed tiU they could hold no
more, and outdoor relief did not yet exist in Ireland. Far too
late, the govemment began to establish public soup-kitchens,
and pour in food of all kinds. But it was long before reUef
could penetrate to out-of-the-way districts, and the famine was
prolonged for many months.
Sir Robert Peel, deeply impressed by the horrors of the
situation, came to the conclusion that the best remedy would
The Corn ^^ '^^ aboUtion of the protective duties on home-
Law ques- grown com, which rendered difificult in such crises
'*°°* the importation of foreign food. After much
thought, he resolved to introduce a bill providing for the
aboUtion of the Com Laws in 1849, and introducing for
the three intervening years a low scale of duties. This bold
step caused immediate division in the Tory camp; the great
landowners, who formed such a large and powerful section of
the party, were convinced that free trade in com meant the rain
of English agriculture, and many of them resolved to foUow
Peel no longer. Several of his colleagues in the cabinet re
signed, and many scores of members in the Commons announced
that they should vote against their great chiefs biU. The dis
contented faction was headed by Lord George Bentinck and
Benjamin Disraeli, who now first appeared prominently in
politics. He was the son of a Jewish man of letters, and had

PEEL ABOLISHES THE CORN-LAWS. 99
hitherto been regarded as little more than an ingenious char
latan, though his somewhat bombastic and turgid novels showed
plenty of clevemess and wit. Now, by organizing the opponents
of Peel into a solid body, he showed that he could do some-
Ching in practical politics.
The repeal of the Corn Laws was carried by Peel only with
the assistance of the votes of his opponents, the Whigs, by 337
votes to 240 — the minority including two-thirds
of the Tory party (May 16, 1846). Two months- Repeal of the
later the Protectionists took their revenge on their _Break-up
former chief by uniting with the Whigs to throw of the Con-
out a Bill intended to put down agrarian crime party.
in Ireland (July, 1846). Peel at once resigned.
His enlightened and courageous action with regard to the Corn
Laws had not only doomed him to sit in opposition for the rest
of his life, but had hopelessly broken up the Conservative party.
It was now divided into two irreconcilable sections, for Peel
could not forgive the rebels who had tumed him out of ofifice,
whUe the Protectionists looked upon him as a traitor who had
cast away one of the main planks of the party platform. Such
hard words had passed between them that they could not
easUy forgive each other. Hence it is not strange that the
Conservatives were destined never to enjoy a real parUamentary
majority again for nearly thirty years.
Meanwhile, the Whigs retumed to ofifice under Lord John
RusseU, the introducer of the Reform Bill of 1832, an adroit
party politician, full of buoyant self-confidence, Lordjohn
but not a man of any great mark or originality. Russell's
Palmerston, a much more notable figure, resumed """"^try.
his place at the Foreign Ofifice, which he was now to hold with
out any appreciable break for twenty years more, till his death
in 1865. The new government had to take over two trouble
some legacies from their predecessors, the Irish famine and
the stiU-lingering Chartist agitation.
In dealing with the former, they did not show themselves much

lOO ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
more effective than the Conservatives— there was stUl a vast
mortality from fever and dysentery in 1846, which
the eovern-**^ '"'S^'^ ^^^^ ^^^" prevented by really active
ment— Evic- measures of relief. In the following year, when
''°?^fS?.^„ tlie stress of the famine was over, the Irish land-
emigration. lords tried to free themselves from the danger of
such another disaster, by suddenly reversing their former policy
of multiplying small tenants on diminutive holdings. They
began at once to consolidate the small farms into large ones
by evicting tlieir weakest and poorest tenants. This process
was carried out in many cases with inconsiderate haste and
reckless craelty, famUies which had been brought low by the
famine being cast out on the roadside by thousands. The
greater part of them ultimately struggled across the Atlantic
to the United States. The poUcy was the correct one from
the point of view of economy, but it was worked out with inex
cusable disregard for the sufferings of the evicted.
The general indignation felt for the clearances of 1847 was
the main cause of the Irish rising of 1848. A large body of
Smith O'Connell's former followers had some years
O'Brien's before seceded from him, because they insisted
insurrection. ^^^^^ armed rebellion was justifiable, whUe he
had been all for peaceful agitation. Now they struck their
blow, and proved themselves (July, 1848) utterly unable to do
anything serious. Smith O'Brien, an enthusiastic and well-
meaning member of parliament, was their chosen leader, and
proved a most incompetent general and organizer. He
collected 2000 armed men, but his campaign ended in a
ludicrous fiasco, the "Array of the Irish Republic" being
dispersed by fifty constables after a scuflBe in a cabbage-garden
near Bonlagh, in Tipperary. Smith O'Brien and the other
chiefs were tried and condemned for high treason, but the
govemment wisely and mercifully gave them no further punish
ment than a few years' deportation to the colonies, and granted
them " tickets-of-leave " long ere their sentence was out.

THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848. 101
The end of the Chartist agitation had fallen a few weeks
before the Irish rising, and had been equally ignominious.
The London Chartists, having resolved to march g , - ..
on the Houses of Parliament and present a Chartist
"monster petition for the " six points," were for- agitation.
bidden to approach Westminster. They declared their inten
tion of forcing their way thither, but the government called out
the troops, and 200,000 special constables answered the appeal
for civil aid. Hearing of this army ready to meet them, the
Chartists very wisely, but rather tamely, went home, after sending
their vast petition to the Commons in three cabs. The fact was
that the masses had no serious intention of following the handful
of demagogues who hoped to provoke civil war. [April 10, 1848 ]
The ease with which sedition and rebellion had been crashed
in the United Kingdom in 1848, contrasted strangely with
the height to which they rose on the Continent in Rg^oiution-
the same year. The hidden fires which had once ary agitation
before flamed out in 1830 now burst forth again "* Europe.
with even greater violence, and every state except Russia was
soon in a conflagration. In Italy and Hungary the insur
rections were purely national and directed against the foreign
yoke of the House of Habsburg. In Germany and France
they were partly poUtical, partly social in character, and aimed
at a sweeping -change in the constitution in the direction of
liberalism. In Spain they were purely factious, and only rose
from the desperate strife of ambitious party leaders.
The trouble started in France, where Louis Philippe in his old
age was growing forgetful of his position as a constitutional
king, and after eighteen years of fairly successful
rale thought himself firm upon his throne. He phiUppe. ""'^
set himself to oppose an agitation for the extension
of the franchise, and by obstinately repressing all conces
sions, and putting down the meetings which the liberal party
organized, provoked widespread discontent The opposition,
which had at first been peaceable and orderly, was graduaUy

102 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
encouraged into violence by the mixture of obstinacy and vacil
lation which Louis PhiUppe displayed. On Febraary 24 riots
broke out in Paris : the king declined to allow the prompt and
stem use of force, and tried to conciliate the rioters. But
finding him so weak, they cried aloud for his deposition, and
Louis Philippe, with a feebleness strange in one who had shown
himself a good soldier on the field of battle, abdicated and
fled in disguise. His family were sent into exile after him,
and the almost bloodless insurrection ended in the creation of
a republic. A show of firmness would have averted the
revolution, for the middle classes had no desire for it, and the
army would have obeyed orders if only they had been given
at the right moment. The republicans, too, were divided
among themselves, for the moderate wing was desperately
afraid of the extremists, who were deeply imbued with
socialistic views, and wished to introduce all manner of experi
ments in the direction of state-sociaUsm. There was street-
fighting in Paris before the RepubHc was four months old, and
ere the year was out a President was put at the helm of the
state, with the avowed object of suppressing anarchy and civil
war by the use of armed force.
This " saviour of society " was most unwisely chosen ; the
man to whom France entrasted her safety was Louis Napoleon,
the nephew of Napoleon I., an adventurer who
Napoleon. ^^ already headed two hair-brained risings
against Louis Philippe on avowed imperialist
Unes. To suppose that such a personage — who loved to style
himself " the nephew of his uncle," and was the heir of the old
Bonapartist tradition — would settle down into the mere president
of a Conservative republic was absurd. Louis Napoleon from
the first set himself to get all the threads of power into his
hands, in order to make himself an autocrat at the earliest
opportunity. MeanwhUe, the French revolution of March, 1848, had set
Europe on fire. In Italy there was a general insurrection

THE ITALIAN RISING OF 1848. 103
against the Austrian yoke, headed by Charles Albert, King
of Sardinia. But the peninsula was not yet
ripe for liberty ; the insurgents in the various ;„ I'Jijyf '°"
regions were fuU of local patriotism, and many
of them dreamed of nothing but restoring the old republics of
the Middle Ages. They failed to give each other loyal aid,
and were betrayed by their princes, who saw that ItaUan liberty
would mean Italian unity and their own expulsion. The pope
and King of Naples contrived to paralyze the armies of
Southem Italy, and the Sardinians, who were left almost unaided,
proved not strong enough to expel the Austrians. After two
campaigns, Charles Albert was crashed and compelled to
abdicate (March, 1849); while the gallant but useless defence
of Venice and Rome by local patriots, who had declared in
favour of republicanism, had no effect on the general current
of the war, and only served to prolong its miseries. With
the fall of Rome (July, 1849) the straggle ended : the
City of the Popes fell, not before the Austrians, but before a
French force sent out by Louis Napoleon to
"restore order" in the Papal States. Thus the ment crushed
nominal French repubUc showed its real character ^'H Austria
by deaUng the eoup de gr&ce to the republicans of
the sister country. A Bonaparte could not be a trae lover of
liberty. The triumph of the Austrians in Italy seems most extra
ordinary, when we remember that they were at the same time
oppressed by a democratic rising in Vienna and a . .
greatnational rebellion in Hungary. The insurgents Austria and
of the capital were put down after a severe straggle Hungary
(October, 1848); but the Hungarians, under the
dictator Kossuth, raade head against the imperial armies,
inflicted several defeats on them, and drove them back into
Austria. Thereupon the Czar Nicholas of Russia, fearing that
Poland would follow Himgary's example, poured his armies
across the Carpathians to the aid of the young Emperor Francis

104 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Joseph, and crashed the insurgents by force of numbers
(August, 1849).
In Germany the troubles had been widespread, but not so
bloody as in the south and east. The King of Prassia, driven
for a moment from his capital, returned at the
movements head of an army and frightened the insurgents into
in the Ger- dispersing without loss of life (November, 1848).
The German diet at Frankfort, which met with
vague ideas of unifying the numerous states of the Fatherland
into a single empire, went to pieces without having accomplished
anything, for no two delegates agreed together in their views,
and the conservative influences were strong. An attempt had
been made to rouse national enthusiasm by an attack on Den
mark, to free the German duchies of Holstein and Schleswig,
from their vassalage to Frederick VIL, but it miscarried hope
lessly (June, 1848), and a democratic rising in South Germany
was easily suppressed. When Austria's hands were freed by the
end of the Italian and Hungarian revolts, the rest of Germany
sank back into its forraer dependence on her. An attempt to
set up Prassia in her place as head of a new German Empire
(Febraary, 1849) had come to nought, for King Frederick
William IV. refused the proffered crown, seeing that by accept
ing it he must become involved in a war with Austria, and pro
bably with Russia also, when those powers had crushed Charles
Albert and Kossuth.
Lord Palmerston had a task of no mean diflficulty when con
fronted with all the troubles of 1848-9. His own sympathy.
Attitude ^"*^ '^^* °^ ^^^ English people, lay with the
of Lord Italians and Hungarians. But it was x)bviously
a merston. ^^^ ^^^ business to interfere directly in foreign
constitutional and national straggles, in which we had no
immediate concern. Palmerston let it be known that he would
" take advantage of all opportunities to press counsels of order
and peace on the contending parties," but that he would do
nothing more. This policy laid him open to the charge of

REACTION TRIUMPHANT IN EUROPE. 105
using strong language, but not backing it up by strong action,
and he was bitterly attacked by the friends of Italy and
Hungary for giving them no more than fair words. But it is
quite certain that if he had entered on a crusade in favour of
national rights and the liberty of peoples, we should have found
ourselves engaged in war with the greater part of the govern
ments of Europe. No help would have come from France,
the other power which ought to have favoured the liberal side,
for Louis Napoleon acted always as a self-seeking autocrat, and
not as the president of a republic.
It was a hard day for the friends of liberty, when, in 1849,
the last straggles of the insurgents of Italy and Hungary were
put down by the Austrian and Russian bayonets. But the end
was not yet ; as Palmerston observed, " opinions may in the
end prove stronger than armies." Before he died in 1865, he
saw his prophecy fulfilled in part, and ere a quarter of a century
had passed, Italy was united, and Hungary autonomous.
Meanwhile Britain had passed with the minimum of friction
and trouble through the years which had been so disastrous to
the Continental states. The two lingering dangers.
Chartism and Irish rebeUion, which had remained and «mfi-'
as an incubus on men's minds for the last ten dence in
years, had been faced and found to be mere
empty terrors. Nothing more was heard of them, and it was
twenty years before the discontents of which they were the
outward sign again came to the front The political horizon
was more clear of clouds than at any previous time in the
century, and the commercial prosperity of the United Kingdom
was very marked — whether it came, as some said, from the
triumph of the free-trade principles which Peel had introduced,
or, as others maintained, from the confidence which had been
inspired in the world by England's easy and triumphant passage
through the troubles of 1848. There was a general feeUng of
buoyancy and optimism in the air, and a widespread confidence
in the future. It may appear strange to us, who remember the

lo6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
thwarted hopes of 1848-9, that English public opinion thought
that the Continent had settled down into quiet. But it is
certain that the most confident language was used conceming
the future reign of peace and goodwill araong the nations of
Europe. The success of the first great inter-
tion of iSm.' national exhibition, held in London in 1 851, was,
by a rather shallow train of thought, interpreted
as a sign of the advent of a new era, in which war was to be
abandoned as an anachronism, and the nations were to con
tend against each other only in the peaceful field of industry,
settling all their disputes by arbitration.
This foolish confidence was first shaken by the events of
December, 1851. Louis Napoleon, showing himself in his trae
The Second '^o^O'^^'^ ^^ter three years of dissembling, suddenly
empire in suppressed the French republic. He had packed
ranee. ^j^^ army and the civil service with his hired
partisans till all was ready for a coup diktat. He struck
promptly and most unscrupulously; the republican leaders
were thrown into prison, their partisans who attempted resist
ance were shot down by hundreds in the streets (December 2),
and a military dictatorship was set up. Twelve months later
the usurper declared hiraself emperor under the name of
Napoleon III. (1852).
The President's stroke for power brought about, by a ctirious
chance, the dismissal of Palmerston from ofifice. The great
. foreign minister had more than once of late years
of Napoleon drawn down rebuke on himself, for taking imper
il I. by Lord tant political steps without giving either the queen
Palmerston. , • „ , ¦ • xx u ff ^ .i
or his colleagues fair warning. Now he offended
them more bitterly than ever, by notifying to the French
arabassador his recognition of the new government, without
taking the trouble to obtain the previous sanction of the
sovereign and the ministry. His conduct was indeed deserving
of much blame, for the recognition of the new Bonapartist
rtgime was not a thing to be lightly and heedlessly granted ;

PALMERSTON DISMISSED. 107
but Palmerston was glad to see a strong government super
seding the sham republic of 1848-51, and seems to have
determined to force the hands of his colleagues.
Lord John Russell, furious at such an act of insubordination,
dismissed Palmerston from oflfice (December 19, 1851). But he
had not foreseen that he was thereby likely to
bring about his own fall. The late foreign minister Palmerston's
played on him the sarae trick that the Pro- pall of ~
tectionists had played on Peel in 1846. A few Lord John
weeks later (Febraary 16) Palraerston led a con- ministry.
siderable number of his friends and supporters
into the opposition lobby, to vote with the Conservatives
against a Militia Bill which Lord John had introduced. The
measure was rejected, and the Whig minority had to resign
(Febraary 16, 1852).
If Sir Robert Peel had still been alive, the Tories would
have had a chance of recovering their ancient power. But
that great statesman had been killed by a fall from _
, • 1. /- .: .¦ TT-ii /T o \ Death of Sir
his horse on Constitution Hill (June 29, 1850). r. Peel—
His party was stUl broken up by the feud Lord Derby's
between Free-traders and Protectionists, and the
two halves would not co-operate with each other. The queen
called on Lord Derby, the head of the latter section, to form
a ministry, which he and Disraeli (Lord George Bentinck, their
other leader, was already dead) proceeded to attempt. They
held oflfice for a few months (March to November, 1852), but
soon had to retire, as they did not at any time possess a
majority in Parliament A combination of the Whigs and the
Peelite Conservatives swept them out of power before they
had any opportunity of leaving their mark on English policy.
Their short term of ofifice, indeed, is only remembered for
Disraeli's ingenious financial schemes, whereby he for the first
time won the respect of the country, and came to be cpnsidered
as something more than an able adventurer. It is also worth
noting that while they were in power the great Duke of

108 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
WelUngton passed away (September 14), having long survived
Death of the ^'^ ^^^ other statesmen of the generation which
Duke of had fought through the Napoleonic wars and
Welhngton. j-^^^^ ^^^ ^^y (jays'which followed them. In his
later years his political errors had been forgotten, and he
enjoyed the respect and esteem of the whole nation, which
only remembered, when thinking of him, the glories of Assaye,
Salamanca, and Waterloo.

( log )

CHAPTER VI.
EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND.
1852.
When we survey the nineteenth century as a whole, the first
and foremost fact that strikes us is that its earlier half was a
time of much more rapid and sweeping change
than its second. We have now in our narrative Sl^fir^^ 2 w
passed the dividing - line between them, and of the nine-
reached the year 1852. The most cursory glance turv ^^°'
is enough to show us that the difference between
the England of 1852 and the England of 1899 was far less than
that between the England of 1801 and that of 1852. Almost
all the great movements, social, economic, and Cocial and
political, which have given the century its cha- political
racter, were well developed before the time of ""o^ements.
the Crimean War. It is much the same with literature — all
the greater writers of the century had started on , .
, . , r 1 J T ,- - Literature.
their career before that date. In matters rehgious,
the High Church movement in England — the raain feature
of the century — had been v/ell started : the
disruption of the Scottish Church into the Estab- movfments
lished and the Free Kirks had been completed.
It is the same with the great discoveries and inventions
which have changed the face of the land and .
the character of everyday life. The England of discoveries
1 801 knew not the steamboat and the railway, and inven-
the electric telegraph and Uluminating powers of

IIO ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
gas; the England of 1852 was habitually employing them all,
though it had stiU much to learn in the way of perfecting
their use.
The greatest change of aU, the transformation of the United
Kingdom from a state mainly dependent on agriculture to an
essentially manufacturing community, is also the
Growth of work of the first half of the nineteenth century.
Sri^^^d**^" We have akeady spoken of the enormous develop-
urbanpopu- ment of trade during the years of the great
txade.~ '^^ French war, but the prosperity of the landed
interest had also been very great as long as that
straggle lasted, and at its end the number of the inhabitants of
the realm more or less directly interested in agriculture was
StiU reckoned to exceed that engaged in manufactures. The
great towns contained less than twenty per cent, of the popu
lation of England, while by 1852 they counted nearly forty per
cent, and by the century's end had risen to more than half of
the total.* It was the gradual and silent change in propor
tion between the tillers of the soil and the townsmen, between
18 1 5 and 1840, that made Free Trade inevitable. When the
producers of food-stuffs had become a clear minority, it seemed
absurd that the large majority to whom cheap corn was
essential, should be taxed for their benefit. That stress of
war at sea might one day make the iraport of foreign food
precarious, and put a preraium on horae products was un
thinkable in early Victorian days. The landed aristocracy
strove long to retain for agriculture its privileged position,
and tried to cover the material benefits which protection
brought to themselves, by patriotic talk as to the necessity
for keeping England self-sufificing in her food-supply. When
it became clear that population was growing too fast for
the kingdom ever to be able to supply all its own needs, so
that some amount of foreign aid must always be called in, the
* In 1891 the purely rural "Sanitary Districts" of England had only
11,076,315 inhabitants out of a total population of 29,000,000.

INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS. tii
cry for protection had obviously become impossible and effete.
When the Derby ministry of 1852 made no open attempt to
undo Peel's Free Trade legislation, it was realized that the old
system was quite dead.
We have pointed out in an earlier chapter that the develop
ment of new mechanical inventions, and the improvement of
machinery, which gave our British manufactures steam and
their first start, mostly date from the end of the the transport
eighteenth century, and were already at work °'£°°°s.
during the years of the great French war. But the application
of steam to the transport of goods, both by water in the sea
going steam-vessel, and by land in the railway train, gave an
enormous impetus to our factories. These novelties start the
one from the second and the other from the third decade of
the century. Down to 1812, heavy goods could Difficulties
only be transported within the kingdom by road of inland
or by canal. Both methods were slow and costly, "'ansport
the former especially so; the canal system had of late been
much developed, but there are many parts of the land in
which physical conditions made the constraction of canals
impossible. In hilly districts, however favoured they might
be by mineral wealth, good water-power, or other natural
advantages, roads must be steep and difificult, and canals must
cost a prohibitive sum. It was very hard to develop, for
example, a coal-field, if it was remote from the sea and
situated in a mountainous district.
The case was the same with goods destined for foreign
markets. Only places specially favoured by their nearness
to a great harbour, or their easy accessibility by Difficulties in
canals, could readily move heavy products to the the way of
sea and place them on ship-board. When once °''^'£" '^^ ®-
stowed on the vessel, they were at the mercy of the wind and
weather : since only sailing ships existed, their time of arrival at
the foreign port was uncertain ; often it might be protracted for
months beyond the expected tirae. The time and the cost

M2 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
of transport were things which even the most experienced
merchant could not accurately calculate.
The improvement in the means of transport began slightly
earlier on sea than on land. After many experiments and half-
The first successful trials, the steamboat emerged as a
steamboats regular method of conveyance towards the end
and railways. ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ Ftench war. The eariiest paddle-
wheel steamers were employed for river-navigation alone.
Their first use was seen in America about 1807, but five years
later the Comet commenced ranning up and down the Clyde.
Steam used "^^^ possibilities of the invention were soon
for ocean grasped, and it was in a very few years applied
voyages. ^.^ ocean navigation, at first for short voyages,
but ere very long for the longest possible distances. The first
steamer crossed the Atlantic as early as 181 9, but for some
time the problem of coal-carrying bafifled the naval architect,
and steamers on an oceanic voyage were expected to eke out
their coal by using sails when the wind was favourable. It was
not until twenty years later that the problem was corapletely
solved, and the great steamship companies began to be formed :
the Royal Mail Packet Company started in 1839, the Peninsular
and Oriental and the Cunard Companies in 1840. By 1852
most of the passenger traffic and the transport of aU valuable
and perishable goods had passed under the charge of steam,
the old sailing vessels being relegated to the carrying of bulky
and cheap commodities — such as coal or timber — whose rapid
delivery made not rauch difference in their price.
Steara-navigation shortened in the most astounding way the
time required for the transport of British goods to the remotest
Resulting ^'^^^ °^ ^^^ earth. It made time a calculable
expansion of feature in commerce, instead of an element
ritish trade, absolutely incalculable. Freights could be esti
mated with an accuracy and minuteness hitherto impossible;
orders could be carried and executed at half their former cost
Hence British commerce was able to invade many new markets,

STEAM SUPERSEDES SAILS. 113
and to compete with foreign manufactures in regions whose
remoteness had once handicapped the development of trade.
The political effects of steam-navigation are another brancb
of its influence that cannot be neglected. It made the govern
raent of colonies and dependencies infinitely more
easy, by shortening the time required for the effects of
exchange of question and answer between the steam-navi-
local and the iraperial governraent. The change
had, no doubt, certain drawbacks ; it rendered the meddling
interference of the central authority in matters of petty detail
more possible, and tended to make weak officials refer every
thing home, instead of using their own initiative. These
developments, however, have only become really dangerous
since the electric telegraph, a generation later, placed White
hall in direct communication with every colonial capital.
Meanwhile, steam had done nothing but good when it placed
Calcutta at six weeks' instead of six months' distance from
London, a feat accomplished after 1845, when the Peninsular
and Oriental Company adopted the " Overland Route " by
Alexandra and Suez, organized by Captain Waghorn, and
abandoned the long voyage round the Cape of Good Hope.
It is curious to find how late steam was applied to our war
navy. Before the screw superseded the paddle-wheel, and
before armour had been invented, both the wheels Pmolovment
of the steamer and her driving-machinery were of steam in
much exposed to hostile shot and sheU. Hence ^^r-vessels.
it was held that the type was too fragUe for battle, and the old
sailing ship-of-the-line retained its place tUl the Crimean War.
Steamers, when at last introduced, were only used as tugs and
tenders, and were expected to keep to the rear when fighting
was in progress. The first sea-going steara-ship in the navy
was built as late as 1833. The first new line-of-battle ship
driven by steam was only launched in 1852; this vessel, the
Agamemnon, was fitted with the screw, which, since 1840, had
already begun to supersede the paddle-wheel. But it was not
I

114 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
till the idea of covering warships with armour was conceived
that the Admiralty finally ceased to employ the old sailing-
vessels, of the type that Nelson had loved, as the main force of
the navy.
Astounding as were the changes wrought by the invention of
steam-ships, the daily life of the world has been even more
influenced by the appearance of the raUway and
railways!* ^^ steam-locomotive. Two ideas had to be
combined for the production of this new device :
tramways, on which waggons were drawn by horses, had been
known since 1801 ; steam-locomolives, which lumbered along
the high-road like modem traction-engines, had first been seen
in 1803. The notion that the locomotive could belmade to drag
tracks along the tramway-line was the initial idea of our whole
raUway system. The experiraent was tried at first only on the
smallest scale in quarries and coal-mines. It was successful,
but attracted no great attention till 1821, when George
Stephenson, the father of railways, built the first line of any
appreciable length, to connect the two north-country towns of
Stockton and Darlington. This venture proved so successful
that, four years later, Stephenson was employed to design a
railroad to join Manchester with Liverpool. This undertaking
was completed in five years, and in September, 1830, the first
train was ran. By a deplorable chance, it kiUed Huskisson, the
great Tory champion of free trade. Engines had already im
proved so rauch, that trains of 1830 could travel at what was
then considered the dangerous and break-neck rate of thirty
miles an hour.
The first promoters of raUways had imagined that they
would be mainly employed for carrying goods ; that passenger-
Development ^^^^ would form an important branch of their
of passenger business does not seem to have occurred to them,
traffic. rpj^g earUest first-class carriages were old stage
coaches fastened down to trucks, while third-class passengers
were conveyed Lq open vans like those now employed to

DEVELOPMENT OF RAILWAYS. B15
carry cattle. It was only the enormous and unexpected influx
of travellers that led to the constraction of proper carriages
for their convenience. From the moment that the Liverpool
and Manchester railway proved a great success, lines began to
be laid all over the country. The public, which had once been
sceptical as to the whole matter, hastened to subscribe money
for every raUway scheme that could be broached, even for
those which were obviously not likely to pay. The great
period of expansion lay between 1830 and 1850, and by the
later date all the present main lines, except the " Midland "
and the " London, Chatham, and Dover," had come into exist
ence. Two great panics caused by over-speculation occurred
in 1836 and 1845, but the development ofthe national railway
system was such a genuine and such a profitable thing that
such troubles only gave it a momentary check.
Railways can go, thanks to the skill of the modern engineer,
into any comer of the earth where there is traffic sufificient to
make them pay. Hence their creation opened out numerous
comers of Great Britain which physical difificulties had hitherto
kept in seclusion and poverty. Wherever coal and iron existed,
they could now be utilized. Wherever manufactures are
produced, they can easily be conveyed to the centres of home
consumption or to the seaports which send them to foreign
lands. Not the least important side of railway extension was
that it made possible the easy transfer of labour from place to
place. Down to 1830 the population of England had not
been migratory ; men seldom moved far from the region where
they had been bom and bred. But with the sudden appearance
of means of quick and cheap locomotion, it becarae easy for
the working classes to go far afield. Even in remote country
districts the hitherto stationary rural classes began to move,
mainly in order to invade the towms, where labour was better
paid, and life more lively and bustling, if not more attractive
in other ways.
The easy intercommunication between regions hitherto kept

116 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
apart led to the combination of the workmen in various lines
Trades °^ manufacture into "Trades Unions," for the
unions and purpose of securing by united action advantages
strikes. which the individual or the men of a single district
could not wring from their employers. Such associations had
once been prohibited by Act of Parliament, and it was only in
1824 that they became legal. Their power from the first was
very great, but has not always been wisely used. Excellent
for securing the fair rise in wages during times of prosperity,
they have often tried to prevent the equally rational fall in
wages during periods of stagnation and adversity. Strikes set
on foot for such objects may rain the eraployer, but are also
bound to starve the employed, since trade cannot be carried on
at a loss. It is hopeless to endeavour to force the manufacturer
to pay more than the state of the market enables him to give.
If the strike under such circumstances is persisted in, the branch
of industry in which it occurs must fail, and it is almost certain
that the profits formerly made in it will be transferred to the
foreigner. In their earUer days Trades Unions had another
very legitimate sphere of operations, in dealing with the abuses
and oppression which prevaUed in many factories. The law
had not yet taken notice of raany evil features of the new
manufacturing system which had sprung up during the great
French war. Overcrowding, over-long hours of work, insanitary
conditions of life, careless supervision in dangerous employ
ments, were all rife. Against such criminal negligence on the
part of employers the Unions could bring pressure to bear, and
did so with the best results.
The larger araount, however, of the legislation for the reform
of factory life was due rather to the improved spirit of public
opinion than to the direct pressure of the Trades
Acts. Unions. The same humanitarian feeling which led
to the aboUtion of negro slavery, or to the reform
of the criminal laws, led men to take a legitimate interest in
the welfare of the workers in great towns. Believing that every

THE PENNY POST. 117
EngUshman was responsible for any unnecessary misery inflicted
on his poorer countrymen, philanthropists like Lord Shaftesbiiry
led the agitation for the restriction of child-labour, the inspection
of mines and factories, and the abolition of such abuses as the
payment of wages in kind instead of money. Allusion has been
made in an earlier chapter to these reforms, most of which were
carried out between the years 1830 and 1850.
Along with them may be named several other typical develop
ments of the nineteenth century, which show the general rise
in the conception of social Ufe. Capital punish- other phases
ment, which had been restricted to a comparatively of social im-
few offences since Peel began his reforms, was P''°''^"'^"''
practically abolished for all crimes save murder and treason in
1 84 1. The last execution for forgery had taken place twelve
years before, in 1829. The barbarous beheading ofthe bodies
of traitors was last seen at the execution of Thistlewood and
his gang in 1820. The detestable practice of dueUing barely
survived into the forties. Drankenness ceased to be tolerated
in polite society, and a series of Acts starting in the " thirties "
.have slowly succeeded in making it less the typical national
vice of Great Britain than it was in the early years of the
century. Brutal amusements like prize-fighting have shown a
gi-atifying tendency towards disappearance. In every case
public opinion has outran legislation, and the good effected
has been as much the result of social pressure on the individual
as of the punishments inflicted by the law.
A few words must be spared to give some account of two
inventions of no mean importance, which started early in the
reign of Victoria, and have done much to modify
the daily life of England. The first was the ^st/^""^
introduction of the penny post in 1840, after a
long agitation led by Rowland HiU, who spent several years
in convincing obstinate post-ofifice oflficials that a uniform low
rate for aU letters delivered within the kingdom would cause
gain, and not loss, to the exchequer. Down to 1840 letters were

Ii8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
charged with sums varying from ^d. to is. 8d. In that yeai
the penny rate was accepted, and by 1842 the number of letters
sent through the post had tripled itself. A few years later the
increase had grown so great that a handsome and ever-growing
profit was realized. The first penny letters were obliged to be
despatched in government envelopes covered with an elaborate
pictorial design, but after a few months the much more con
venient adhesive postage stamp was invented, and superseded
completely the older plan (1841). The electric telegraph started
as a practical scheme about three years later than the
telegraph!^*^ penny post. It was originally worked by private
corapanies, not by the government post-office. In
r843 the first line was buUt, covering the twenty mUes between
Paddington and Slough. Seven years later the network of poles
and wires covered the whole kingdom; and in 1851 the first
submarine cable was laid from Dover to Calais. It is almost
impossible for us to conceive the change made in everyday
life by the introduction of these cheap and quick methods of
coramunication. The only thing that can be said against them
is that they have killed the ancient and elegant art of descriptive
letter-writing as practised by our grandfathers.
Any account of the first half of the nineteenth century which
omitted to notice its extraordinary fertility in literature of the
highest class would be very incomplete. No
the^opening * P^"°'^ ^" English history shows such a cluster of
of the nine- great names ; none save the EUzabethan age
teenth cen- deserves to be named along with it The period
before the great French war had been a singularly
dull one ; only a few writers like Burns, Sheridan, Cowper, and
Burke had given proraise of the great outburst that was at
hand. But the generation which grew to manhood in the
stress of the straggle, or was born while it was stiU in progress,
seems to have gathered inspiration from the general stir and
tumult, inteUectual and political, of the times. Even those
whose range of topics lay among subjects which did not at

POETS OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY. 119
once reflect the spirit of the age, were none the less deeply
affected by it. In the earliest poems of Wordsworth and
Southey, written before the eighteenth century was quite run
out, we trace first a profession of faith in the principles of the
French Revolution, and a little later a recantation of the error,
as they fall into line with the prevailing national sentiment
and adopt a strongly British tone.
Sir Walter Scott, the first of the greater poets to break into
verse in the new century, was inspired not only by a romantic
affection for the picturesque side of mediaeval „
, , • , , , Scott
history, but by an ardent patriotism which led
him to sing of the events of the great war as they passed by
hira. It must be confessed that his inspiration was not usually
at its best when he dealt with such themes in the " Vision of
Don Roderic " or " Waterloo." Lord Byron and Shelley, men
of the younger generation, showed the influence of the times in
a different way. The former was so deeply bitten
by discontent for what he called the "Age of
Bronze," that he abused Wellington, and called Waterloo
"bloody and most bootless." But his protest against the
coramon national feeling of his day in this respect is only a part
of his general attitude of somewhat morbid and affected opposi
tion to the whole state of English society and politics. Posing
as a misunderstood genius and a censor of his times, Byron was
alraost bound to fall foul of the patriotism that had enabled us
to fight through the great war. It is sorae consolation to see
him in his last years doing something practical for liberty in
the Greek war, instead of raerely carping at the honest
enthusiasras of his contemporaries. Shelley, on the other
hand, was not merely* a critic of his times, but gj^^jj^
an active apostle of political and moral anarchy.
It is a thousand pities that the lot of such a poet should have
been cast in the days of the French Revolution. The most
futUe and extravagant doctrines of the French school had a
fatal attraction for his high-strang and hysterical mind, and he

120 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
lavished a wealth of splendid imagery on adorning the cheapest
revolutionary ideas. Piercing below his glorious diction, we
find the old protest against all laws, human and divine, which
formed the stock-in-trade of the foUowers of Rousseau. Shelley
was made for something better than denouncing " the crimes
and tyrannies of priests and kings." But from the day when
he was expelled from Oxford for sending his tract on " The
Logical Necessity of Atheism " to the raaster of his college,
he had an incorrigible tendency to take up every perverse idea
that was in the air. It is' thus that it came to pass that a
poet who possessed the greatest mastery over language, the
profoundest sympathy with nature, the widest range of thought,
and the raost abundant flow of beautiful iraages and ideas,
exercised no influence whatever over his own generation.
It is kindest to Byron and Shelley to reraember that the
bulk of their writings were produced in the days when Lord
Liverpool was prime minister. Toryism presented in such a
dull shape had in it enough to irritate minds less susceptible
than those of poets.
It is astounding to note how the flow of literature of the first
class which begins during the great French war continues during
the early half of the nineteenth century. Beside
writMs *^® great names which we have mentioned,
Keats and Moore in poetry, Charles Lamb and
de Quincey among essayists and descriptive writers, Sir Walter
Scott and Jane Austen among novelists, all start within a few
years of each other. The period of 1810-30 is set thick with
literary raasterpieces, and long before the survivors of the
generation which produced them had passed away, the men of
the younger age, whom we may call the early- Victorian writers,
had begun to work. Tennyson's first book of poems was
produced twenty years before the death of Wordsworth;
Dickens's earliest sketches were published only five years after
Scott's latest novel. Lord Macaulay and Carlyle overlap
Lamb and de Quincey. Thackeray, Robert Browning, Charles

THE CHURCH AND THE "EVANGELICALS."- 121
Kingsley, and John Ruskin aU produced some of their best work
before 1852.* Most of these authors of the Early-Victorian
time were destined to go on writing into the second half of the
century, but all had arrived at maturity in the early years of
Victoria's reign, and belong in their character and ideas to the
earlier and not the later period of it We shall note further on
the lamentable dwindling of the harvest of first-rate literature
in the last decades of the age.
Any account of social change in England in the first half of
the nineteenth century must take notice of the extraordinary
changes which passed over its religious Ufe during
the period. At its beginning, the only vital force movements
in the land was the Evangelical Movement, which — Evangeli-
had affected the Established Church almost as
much as the dissenting bodies. The revival of active energy,
which had commenced with Wesley in the raiddle of the last
century, had reached its height by 1800. It had induced
multitudes to leave the national Church in order to join the
new Methodist sects; but there had remained behind, within
the establishment, hundreds of clergy who carried on the
Wesleyan tradition, and at the commenceraent of the century
they were the only energetic party. But the Evangelicals were
never the majority of the clerical body ; there still survived a
considerable leaven of the spiritual apathy of earlier Georgian
times. The type of vicar who regaled his congregation with
dry moral essays by way of sermons, and who regarded all
• It may be worth while to give the dates of these authors, to show the
way in which they overlap. Scott died in 1832, Lamb in 1834, Southey in
1843, Wordsworth in 1850, de Quincey in 1859. Macaulay (1800-1859)
began to write in 1824. Dickens (1S12-70) published his " Sketches by
Boz" in 1836. Tennyson (1809-92) issued his " Poems, chiefly Lyrical,"
in 1830. Thackeray (1811-63) produced his first book in 1840, and his
great " Vanity Fair " in 1846-48. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was already
writing essays in 1822, and issued "Sartor Resartus" in 1831. Charles
Kingsley (1819-75) started his work with "The Saints' Tragedy" in 1847.
Browning (1812-89) was producing verse as early as 1833. Ruskin's
" Modern Painters " began in 1843, and was finished in 1846.

122 .ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
enthusiasm with distrast, was stiU very common. There is no
doubt that the general moral level of the clergy had gone up
in the reign of George III. Scandals were no longer frequent,
and gross neglect of duty was rare. But outside the ranks of
the Evangelicals fervour and activity were wanting. No
adequate effort had been made to cope with the difificulties
arising from the growth of the new manufacturing towns, or the
expansion of London. For the first time in English history, a
whole generation had grown up in such centres of population
which was quite out of touch of religious instraction, and was
tending towards practical heathenism.
For dealing with such a problem, organization and cor
porate action were as necessary as zeal and fervour, and want
Defects of *^^ organization was unfortunately the weak point
the Evan- of the Evangelical party. In energetic missionary
gehcal party. .^^^^ ^^ ^^^ individual hearer they were admir
able and untiring, but just because their message of conversion
was to the individual, they failed to buUd up any system of
Church work and Church life. They had, moreover, never
succeeded in getting command ofthe higher post^ in the Church,
and were much hampered by the dislike for movement of the
bishops, most of whom were still political nominees or mere
classical scholars, as in the earlier Georgian age. The Evan
gelical party were always to the front in schemes for philan
thropic and benevolent ends. They had energetically supported
the abolition of the Slave Trade and the passing of the Factory
Acis ; they had been vigorously pressing missionary enterprise
in foreign lands, and were mainly responsible for the general
rise in the raoral tone of society during the earlier decades of
the nineteenth century. But there was room in the Church for
other developments, which they had been unable or unwiUing
to supply.
The first of these was that of the " Broad Church " move
ment, which was running strongly all through the middle of
the century. Its exponents disliked the narrow scheme of

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 123
salvation and the emotional type of piety which were cha
racteristic of the Evangelical school, and wished to
raake the Church comprehensive, tolerant, mode- church^'"^^
rate, and learned. The earlier men of the Broad movement-
Church school laid more stress on the study of phi- ^^ngsteyT
losophy and logic as the basis of natural religion.
The greatest name among them is that of Archbishop Whately
(1787-1863). The later leaders devoted more time to the
historical development of dogma, the textual study of the
scriptures — sometimes carried out in a rather destractive spirit,
— and the reconciling of science and religion. They never
had much influence with the masses, to whom their message
was not directed, but largely affected the thought of the edu
cated classes. A few leaders, notably Dean Stanley, tried to
popularize Broad Church views'; the only man of real prosely
tizing spirit among them was the poet and novelist Charles
Kingsley. The enthusiasm which he displayed for all social
progress and moral reform was not characteristic of the whole
school, who were distinctly scholars rather than missionaries.
A revolt against Evangelical doctrines on very different lines
was to win far greater influence than the Broad Church school
has ever attained. This was the so-called " Oxford The * * Oxford
Movement," which started in the fourth decade Movement"
(1833-34) of the century among a knot of young
university men, of whom several of the most prorainent were
feUows of Oriel College. The inspiring thought of the new
Higl, Church school — they soon got the name of Tractarians,
from a series of tracts in which their views were set forth — was
a belief in the historic continuity of the Church. They refused
to accept the common Protestant doctrine that the Established
Church- started with Henry -VIII. and the Reformation, and
wished to assert its entire identity with the church of Augustine
and Anselm. As a logical consequence, they were ready to
accept all early and even mediaeval doctrine which was not
specially disavowed by the Anglican formularies. The Church

124 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
of England, as a Uving branch of the Catholic Church, they
thought, could not refuse to accept anything that had primitive
usage on its side. Special stress was laid by them on two
doctrines, equally repugnant to their Low Church and to theit
Broad Church contemporaries — the Real Presence in the
Sacrament and the Sacrificial Priesthood of the Clergy. Such
views had been held in the England of the seventeenth century,
but they had been almost forgotten in the eighteenth, and
sounded like a revival of popery to most men.
Enthusiastic study of the Early Fathers and of other sources
of dogma forraed part of the Tractarians' scherae of life. Their
The 1 d teaching found wide acceptance among the clergy,
of the Trae- as was natural when the new doctrine so greatly
tarians. magnified the priestly ofifice. But the fervent piety
and earnest lives of the early leaders of the movement, such as
John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Hurrell Froude, would
have attracted followers, even if there had been much less to
be said in favour of their views. All through the forties there
was bitter strife between the Tractarians and their opponents,
who openly accused them of paving the way for the submission
of the English Church to Rome. This notion was certainly
confirmed by such writings as Newman's celebrated pamphlet,
in which he proved, by a series of elaborate but unconvincing
arguments, that the "Thirty-nine Articles" were so loosely
worded that a man might hold all the more prominent Roman
doctrines and yet stay within the Anglican establishment. The
author did not convince himself, as a few years later he went
over to Rome, followed by a number of his more prominent
disciples, and died a cardinal in 1890.
But the great bulk of the High Churchmen, headed by
Keble, the model of parish priests, and Pusey, the most leamed
The Hieh °^ '^^'"^ theologians, did not break away from
Churcji the Church of their birth, but stayed within it
party. They were determined to win recognition for their
views within the Anglican communion, and fully succeeded

DISRUPTION OF THE SCOTTISH KIRK. 125
Ere the movement was thirty years old it had transforraed
the face of religious England. The High Churchmen had
from the first shown a capacity for combined action and
orderly co-operation which the Evangelical party had never
displayed. It came, no doubt, from the fact that their doctrines
laid great stress on the corporate unity of the Church, and the
duty of working in unison and setting aside personal prejudices,
while the Evangelicals had relied on individual effort, and had
never given their party any effective organization. Though
not more zealous in parochial or missionary work than their
elder rivals, the Tractarians proved far more successful. They
did admirable work in the way of stirring up neglected districts,
building new churches, putting an end to careless and slovenly
forms of worship, and raising the general standard of activity
expected from the clergy. It is by their splendid practical
work in this direction that they have raised themselves to so
high a place in the Anglican communion, for public opinion
seldom fails in the end to recognize and reward such merit.
Zeal, of course, has not always been tempered with discretion ;
but eccentricities on the part of a minority cannot blind us to
the admirable effect of the High Church movement as a whole :
it has certainly left the National Church in a condition of
greater health and activity than it has enjoyed at any time
since the reign of Queen Anne.
While the Tractarian movement had been fighting its first
battles in England, the Established Church in Scotiand had
been rent asunder by a straggle quite as fierce,
though turning on very different points (1834-43). ^'^^c™ J^j^
The question at issue north of Tweed was the of Scotland
relation between the State and the Church, taking ^^® ^''^^
shape in a dispute as to the right of presentation
to benefices. The system by which ministers were nominated
by a patron instead of chosen by the congregation seemed so
objectionable to a large section of the Scottish clergy, headed
by Dr. Chalmers, that when Parliament refused to give- the

126 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
parish a veto on the patron's choice, they seceded from the
Established Church, and formed a new denomination '¦aUed
the Free Kirk (May i8, 1843). Thus they estabUshed a com
munion free from aU State control, but only at the terrible
cost of splitting Scotland into two spiritual camps, and setting
up rival kirks and manses in every town and viUage, with a
consequent crop of bitter quarrels that endured for more than
a generation.

( 127 )

CHAPTER VIL
PROM THE CRIMEAN WAR TO THE DEATH OF LORD PAtlMERSTON.
1853-1865.
When Lord Derby's ministry was forced to resign, in December
1852, EngUsh politics presented a spectacle which has never
been exactly paralleled before or since. The
Liberals and Conservatives were each divided Coalition of
into two opposing sections, kept apart by the p^elUes— **
most effective barrier — the personal animosities Lord Aber-
of tiieir sectional chiefs. After the tricks they ^^^^n's minis-
had played on each other, Russell and Palmerston
could not easily combine, while the PeeUte and the Protectionist
Conservatives stUl looked on each other as traitors. The
PeeUtes thought of Disraeli and his friends as the betrayers
of their great dead leader ; the Protectionists retorted that the
Peelites had betrayed the old principles of their party when
they foUowed Sir Robert in his conversion to Free Trade. But
every one felt that the business of the country must somehow
be carried on, and after a prolonged deadlock a coaUtion was
patched up.
Lord John RusseU and Lord Palraerston agreed to serve
together in the sarae rainistry, but neither was to be premier.
They took the Peelites into, partnership, and gave the position
of prirae minister to Lord Aberdeen, who had been Peel's
lieutenant at the Foreign Ofifice. He was a worthy, weU-
intentioned man, and a scholar of merit, but certainly more

128 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
wanting in force and resolution than any rainister who had
taken the helm of State since the resignation of Addington in
1804. In foreign politics he was a great believer in non-inter
vention and masterly inactivity, but he was quite incapable of
resisting his more energetic colleagues when they pressed and
worried him forward into measures which he did not approve.
Several other Peelites were received into the new ministry, the
most notable of whom was WUliam Ewart Gladstone, who had
already acquired a considerable reputation as a financier, and
was now made Chancellor of the Exchequer. There had never
been any very essential divergence between the views of the
Peelites and those of the more cautious Whigs, so that the two
parties merged easily together, and in a few years the former
were absorbed into the ranks of their allies : some of them,
notoriously the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, became ere
long advanced rather than moderate members of the Liberal
party. The new ministry, combining as it did aU political sections
except the Derby-Disraeli Conservatives, seemed very powerful
GI d tone's ^"'^ likely to last for many years. It made a most
financial triuraphant entry into ofifice, starting with a con-
measures, siderable surplus and a popular budget introduced
by Gladstone, who lowered or abolished a great nuraber of
import duties, in iraitation of Peel's great measures of 1844.
But he did not carry out his old leader's pledge of abolishing
the income tax when good times had come round, and left it
fixed as a millstone around the neck of the middle classes.
Before Lord Aberdeen had been many months in power,
signs of trouble began to make themselves visible in the sphere
of foreign affairs. The difificulty arose in Turkey,
question^ ^™ where the " Eastem Question " had never ceased
to be a source of bickering between the great
powers since the old troubles of the Greek insurrection in the
twenties. The Ottoman empire had been in so many tribula
tions since those days, that there was a fixed idea in many

THE EASTERN QUESTION. 129
minds that it was at the end of its resources, and that in a
few years the sultans must vanish altogether, or at least pass
beyond the Bosphorus and abandon Constantinople and Europe.
The consummation was devoutly to be wished, but in 1854 as in
1920 no two powers were agreed on the manner in which it
was to come to pass. Meanwhile their ambassadors continued
to intrigue against each other with the Porte, as had been the
custom for the last century and more.
The Czar Nicholas I. had his own plan for the dismember
ment of the Sultan's realra, and for some time had been
cautiously approaching the ministers of other rv ¦ f
countries, to see how they would take it. In the Czar of
January, 1853, he used more definite language '^uss'^-
to the English ambassador at St. Petersburg. " We have on
our hands," he said, " a sick man — a very sick man : it will be
a great raisfortune if one of these days he should slip away
from us, before the necessary arrangements have been made."
The " necessary arrangements," as explained by the Czar in a
later interview, were that the sick man's neighbours should
have settled beforehand exactly what share of his inheritance
each of them should take. Nicholas proposed that Servia,
Roumania, and Bulgaria should pass under his own suzerainty
as dependent principalities, while England might take Egypt
and the island of Crete. The other powers, no doubt, would
be propitiated with similar slices of Turkey.
The English Governraent received these proposals, when
they were transmitted to London, in a very frigid way; they
were not prepared to stand in to the bargain, and Attit„jg ^f
wished to stave off the day of dismemberment England
Nicholas, nevertheless, went on with his scherae, France.
and while secretly pressing it carae into colUsion with another
despot, the new Emperor of the French. Napoleon III. was
at this tirae anxious to raake firm his somewhat uncertain seat
at Paris by pursuing a spirited foreign policy, and thought that
it would not suit his plans to let Russia assume the leadership K

130 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
in the East. France had for a long time claimed and exercised
a certain patronage over the Christians of the Levant, and
Napoleon did not intend that this protectorate should pass to
the Czar.
The first signs of open opposition between the two emperors
took the curious shape of a dispute as to whether Greek or
, . , Roraan CathoUc monks should be entrasted with
The key cLtid
the star— the custody of the great shrines of Palestine. It
MenchikofTs yvas humorously said at the time that the war had
its origin in a quarrel about a " key and a star " —
the former was that ofthe Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, the latter
a large ornament in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem.
But the actual cause of rupture was the embassy of Prince
Menchikoff to Constantinople ; he came with orders to demand
a formal treaty granting to Russia the protectorate over all
the Christians of the East. This raeasure roused the anger of
Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the English ambassador to the
Porte, who was a bitter opponent of Russia. He and his
French colleague encouraged the Sultan to refuse Menchikoff's
request, whereupon Czar Nicholas determined to bring pressure
on Abdul-Medjid by occupying Roumania.
When his troops crossed the Pruth into Turkish territory
(July, 1853), England found herself quite unexpectedly on the
verge of war. There followed a long straggle in
The Rus- the English cabinet between Lord Aberdeen and
the Pruth— ^^^ energetic foreign minister, Palmerston. The
England and former, while protesting his distaste for war and
th?^Turi^'." ^'^ disbelief in its approach, was gradually edged
on into making a close aUiance with the French
emperor, and sending a strong detachment of warships through
the Dardanelles up to Constantinople (October 22). A few
weeks later the Russian Black Sea squadron destroyed the
Turkish fleet at Sinope, whereupon English and French ships
passed the Bosphoras, and corapelled the Russians to take
refuge in the harbour of Sebastopol (January, 1854). From

ORIGIN OF THE CRIMEAN WAR. 131
this action to open \var was but a short step, but it was three
months before that step was taken. Driven forward by Palraer
ston, Lord Aberdeen consented to join the French eraperor
in issuing an ultimatum to the Czar, threatening hostilities
unless he evacuated the Turkish provinces which he had seized.
On his refusal, war was declared (March 27, 1854).
To have to fight for the maintenance of the corrapt despo
tism of the Sultan, in company with such a doubtful ally as
Napoleon IIL, M'as an unhappy necessity. But it p .
had to be done, since the Czar had determined to feeling in
carry out the dismemberment of Turkey without England.
the consent of the other powers. So much was his arrogant
action resented in England that the war was very popular, and
hopeful persons even thought that "our alliance with the Sultan
might regenerate Turkey, a delusion which was destined to
endure for a whole generation.
England was at the moment very far from being prepared
for active hostilities. Our army had seen no service in Europe
since Waterloo, and its organization was wholly Tir,j,i. „£
out of gear. The individual regiments were in military
good fighting trim, but they were quite un- Preparations.
accustomed to act together in large bodies, or to face the hard
ships of campaigning in a distant and thinly peopled country.
The supply services were in a hopeless state of inefficiency ;
there was practically no one who understood how to feed and
clothe an army in the field. But a considerable force, some
28,000 men in all, was hastily collected and sent to the Levant,
where they joined a French array of about the same size. The
general placed in command was Lord Raglan, a
veteran of the Peninsular War. He had been a jj^San
distinguished officer in his day, but was now sixty-
six years of age and almost past service. He possessed tact
and good judgment, but not the energy and force needed for a
commander who had to direct a combined army and to deal
with the divergent views of his French colleagues.

»32 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The alUed army was directed to land in the Crimea, for a
double purpose : a blow deUvered in this direction would
alraost certainly call back the Russian invaders of
the Crimea  Roumania to defend their own soil, and at the
Battle of same time it was desired that Sebastopol, the
refuge and arsenal of the Czar's Black Sea fleet,
should be destroyed. There was also considerable advantage
in attacking the enemy in a remote comer of his dominion,
easily accessible by sea, as he would have great difficulty in
forwarding thither reinforcements across the South Russian
steppes, where roads and railways were then equally wanting.
The Anglo-French array, rather over 50,000 strong, landed in
the Crimean peninsula, unopposed, on September 17, 1854;
three days later they met the Russians on the heights along
the river Alma. Prince Menchikoff, who was in command,
showed himself not more capable as a general than he had
been as ambassador to the Porte in the preceding year. He
failed to take full advantage of his strong ground; but his
adversaries blundered almost as much, for half the French
army was wasted in a useless turning moveraent, and did not
fire a shot. The redoubts and batteries, however, which
formed the key of the Russian position were stormed by the
English, and the prince had to retire with his forces much
shattered by the terrible musketry fire of the victors. The
EngUsh had fought with splendid audacity, but had been
miserably handled by their generals, who made themselves
responsible for a wholly unnecessary carnage among their men
by not properly combining their attacks. Lord Raglan himself
blundered into the centre of the Russian lines, where he was
unable to communicate with his subordinates, and would have
been taken prisoner if the enemy had not been culpably blind
to their advantage (September 20, 1854).
After the victory of the Alma the allies might have entered
Sebastopol without much trouble, for the demoralized Russian
army withdrew into the interior. But the French commander,

SEBASTOPOL BESIEGED.

«33

St. Arnaud, refused to press their retreat, and when the
allies quietiy sat down before Sebastopol and
made preparations for a formal siege, Menchikoff Sebastopol"^
threw his battalions once more into the fortress,
and prepared to defend it to the last. Thus began the famous
siege which was to last for no less than eleven months (October,
1854 — September, 1855), and to cost over a hundred thousand
lives. The first bombardment of the place was undertaken

SEBASTOPOL
and its Environs,
185.1-1855.

with insufficient resources, and ended in complete failure. Soon
after reinforcements began to reach the Russians, mainly
from the army which was now retiring from the Danube.
With the aid of these succours Menchikoff made two
vigorous attempts to raise the siege, each of which led to
a battle. On October 25 his field array descended on Balaclava, the
port at which the English were landing their suppUes, and

134 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
brought to action the very insufficient force — almost entirely
cavalry — which had been left to defend it. The
B3.I3.Cl 3. V3."^~
The charge ™ain advance was stopped by the heroic charge
of the Light of Scarlett's brigade of heavy dragoons, who
' broke through and hurled back thrice their
number of Russian horse. But this gallant and successful feat
of arms was followed by the disastrous " Charge of the Light
Brigade." A vague and ill-worded order sent by Lord Raglan
was perversely misinterpreted by Lord Lucan, who commanded
the English cavalry, and he proceeded to hurl the 670 sabres
of the Light Brigade at the batteries which formed the centre
of the Russian line. This mad project was executed ; though
encircled on three sides by a concentric fire from the whole
hostile army, this handful of horsemen rode forward for a mile
and a half, captured the guns, and broke up the Russian centre.
But no attempt had been made to support them with infantry,
and when their impetus was spent, these unfortunate heroes had
to cut their way back through the enemy and return foUed to
the English lines. They had lost 113 killed and 154 wounded
out of 670 men : the only wonder is that a single trooper sur
vived to tell this tale of dire mismanagement
Balaclava was nothing more than a drawn battle, for the
Russians, though they had failed to capture the port, were able
Inkerman— ''° niaintain their advanced position opposite the
"The sol- English base. Nine days afterwards Menchikoff
diers battle, ^^^^q another and a more desperate attempt to
break through the besiegers' lines. At early dawn on November
4, two heavy columns were launched against the north-eastern
comer of the allied position on the heights of Inkerman. Forty
thousand men in all took part in the attack, but the column
which debouched from the town of Sebastopol came on the
ground long before that which marched from the open country.
Favoured by a thick fog, the approach of the enemy was not
seen till they were close upon the English camp. The first
column was met by the nearest troops, and checked after

BATTLE OF INKERMAN. 13S
desperate fighting among ravines and hUlsides, where every
regiment had to wage its own battle in the blinding mist.
Presently the rest of the Russian host groped its way to the
front, and at the same time more English troops came hurrying
in from other parts of the siege lines. The second clash was
even more terrible than the first, but after many hours of hand-
to-hand fighting the assailants were again brought to a check,
and French reinforcements began to come upon the field. At
last the Russians recoiled, thoroughly beaten, and quite un
conscious that their 40,000 men had been repulsed by 9000
English, aided in the end of the fight by 7000 French. The
victory was eminently glorious to the rank and file of the
victors, for in this " soldiers' battle " no direction by the com
mander-in-chief had been given, and, indeed, the fog and
confusion rendered it alraost impossible for him to exercise
much control over the fight.
After Inkerman the siege of Sebastopol took a strange shape.
The allies were actually outnumbered by the garrison for the
winter months, and were barely able to maintain
their lines round the south side of the city. The f "^^^fopg
northern front was always open for the arrival of
reinforcements from the interior of Russia. The winter was
one of exceptional rigour, and both sides suffered the most
terrible privations. In the long marches through the snow, the
Russian armies of succour lost nearly half their numbers ere
they could get to the front The French and English, on the
other hand, encamped on the bleak and barren plateau of
the Chersonese, without any shelter save their tents, and with
barely sufficient food to keep body and soul together, were
slowly perishing from cold, dysentery, and the perpetual labour
in the trenches. The EngUsh supply services broke down
altogether, and could not even forward food to the front up
the six miles of road which separated the port of Balaclava
from the siege Unes. The men starved, even when provisions
by the shipload were being thrown ashore at the base. During

136 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
January Lord Raglan had to report that of the 24,000 men
under him only 11,000 were fit for service, while 13,000 were
in hospital. The mortality among the sick rose to a frightful
percentage, for there was not sufficient shelter for them, nor
were the simplest medical comforts available. Indeed, the
hospitals both in the Criraea and at Constantinople were in a
disgraceful state, till volunteer aid was forthcoming from England,
and Florence Nightingale and her nurses brought sorae order
into the chaos.
When the war-correspondents at the front and the private
letters of officers let the public into the secret that the army
was rapidly dying off, for want of ordinary care
in England— ^"^ vigilance on the part of the home authorities.
Lord Aber- a wUd outburst of wrath followed. The nation
was rightly dissatisfied at the way in which the
war was being conducted. Sebastopol had not fallen for want
of a little push and energy in the days following the victory on
the Alma. A fleet sent to the Baltic had failed to do anything
worthy of notice. Money was being spent with both hands,
yet the army was starving. Some of the misfortunes of the
winter of 1854-55 were, no doubt, due to the fact that the
soldiers were not accustomed to the hard life of the field, and
that the administration had no experience of war. But much
more was due to red tape, foolish formalism, and culpable
slackness at home. The scapegoats chosen by popular
clamour were the premier. Lord Aberdeen, and his war
minister, the Duke of Newcastle. They were forced to resign
their offices, though the greater part of the blame ought to
have been distributed among ignorant and obstinate sub
ordinates in the home civU service, whom the ministers had
not known how to stir up into activity. Lord Palmerston,
whose name was regarded as synonyraous with energy and
readiness to fight, replaced as prime rainister the unfortunate
disciple of Sir Robert Peel.
In the spring of 1855 the war went on for some time without

SEBASTOPOL STORMED. 137
marked success on either side. The Czar Nicholas was killed
off by the hard winter, but his young son
Alexander continued his policy. Fresh troops the siege-
continued to pour into Sebastopol, and the great Death of the
engineer Todleben so strengthened the place by Victor Ema-
building line after line of earthworks in front of Ji"^US'."^
its original front of ramparts, that the fortress
continued to increase instead of to fall off in defensive power
as the siege went on. The allies, however, did not relax their
efforts : the French emperor, whose popularity was bound up
with success in the war, forwarded large reinforcements to the
Crimea. The English Government, whose task was harder
because of the very small numbers of our standing army, con
trived to raise our expeditionary force to 40,000. In May
the Sardinian king, Victor Emanuel, joined England and
France for political reasons — he was anxious to pose as a
power of European importance, and to win the gratitude of
France. A fine division of his troops joined the besieging
array. But raatters did not come to a head at Sebastopol till
the middle of the summer. In June a new and enterprising
French commander. Marshal Pelissier, was appointed. By his
desire, a vigorous attempt to storm the place was made (June
17-18); some outworks were captured, but the main assault
failed. It was not tUl Septeraber that a bombardment of un
paralleled vehemence so shook the Russian works that a
second assault could be made. Meanwhile Lord Raglan died,
worn out by the fatigue and responsibility of a campaign which
was too hard for a man of his age (June 20, 1855).
On September 8 the final storm took place. The French,
massing 30,000 men on a single point, carried the Malakoff,
a fort which commanded the whole line of de
fence : its capture rendered further resistance on sebastopol
the part of the Russians hopeless. But the English
failed lamentably at the Redan, which had fallen to their share
in the assault. The utterly insufficient force sent against

138 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
it entered the work, but was beaten out again with much blood
shed, because no reinforcements were pushed up to its aid.
However, the faU of the Malakoff had settied the fate of
Sebastopol. That night the Russians set the place on fire
and evacuated it. Their army, however, still lay in great
strength on the north side of the harbour, and to thrast
it from the Crimea another great battle would have been
necessary. The effort was never made. The French emperor had now
obtained the success and mUitary glory which he had coveted,
and was anxious not to risk them by any more
oi^Ps^is.^^ fighting. To the great discontent of the English
nation, which was but just warming to the work,
he insisted on opening negotiations with the enemy. The
Czar was only too glad to come to terms : his troops had
suffered frightful losses, his finances were in disorder, and the
coasting traffic of the empire, both in the Baltic and the Black
Sea, had been annihilated by the raiding expeditions of English
squadrons. There followed the unsatisfactory Peace of Paris
(March, r8s6), by which Russia surrendered a small strip of
land at the Danube mouth, and undertook to maintain no war-
fleet in the Black Sea. This last promise was certain to be
maintained only so long as the alliance of France and England
kept the Czar in check. The Sultan, on the other hand, issued
many empty proclamations as to his intention to ameliorate
the lot of his Christian subjects — professions which the
Western powers were at that tirae simple enough to accept
as a genuine sign of his intention to reform the Ottoman
erapire. Thus ended England's last European war in the nineteenth
century. Much can be said against its policy : the defence of
Policv of the Turkish despotisra, as subsequent events have
Crimean conclusively proved, was not a worthy end in
^^'^' itself. We were throughout the straggle utUized
and exploited by our selfish French ally, a thing that could

RESULTS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR. 139
have been foreseen from the first. Finally, we had been forced
to conclude a peace on terms wholly inadequate to the sacrifices
we had made. The war had cost about _;^7 7,000,000, and
had added ^^33, 000,000 to the National Debt More than
20,000 British soldiers had perished — the large majority, not
by the bullets of the enemy, but sacrificed by the imbecUe
mismanagement which starved them into disease, and then
sent them to die in comfortless hospitals. Our generals had
certainly made no great reputation during the war, and the
splendid courage by which the rank and file fought their way
out of difficulties for which they were not responsible, had only
barely staved off disaster on more than one occasion. Never
theless, the war was probably necessary: it would have been
irapossible to leave Russia free to carve up Turkey at her good
pleasure; and, considering the state of tension that had been
reached in 1854, it is more than doubtful whether Nicholas
could have been stopped by mere demonstrations and diplomacy.
It is trae that in 1879 a firm attitude and a great show of naval
power kept the Russians out qf Constantinople; but in 1854
they had not suffered so many checks, nor wasted so many
lives and so much treasure, as in the later war, so that the Czar
was then rauch less liable to pressure than was his son at the
time of the Treaty of Berlin. The best, probably, that could
be said for the Crimean war was that it taught us to know
some of the worst points of our miUtary organization, and
raised the spirit of national patriotism, which had tended to
sink low during the long peace since Waterloo. It certainly
did not bring about either of the two ends for which it had
been undertaken — the reform of Turkey or the perraanent
crippling of Russia. At the raost it staved off the Eastern
Question, as a source of trouble, for some twenty years.
In home politics the main result of the war was to put Lord
Palmerston in office for the ten years that remained of his long
life. Except for a short interval in 1858-59, he held the
premiership continuously. This was the nation's mark of

140 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
gratitude for the vigour and energy with which he had conducted
Supremacy *^^ ""^^ ^^'^'' ''^^ ^^^^ °^ Lord Aberdeen and the
of Lord exposure of the administrative scandals of the
a mers on. Q^jj^g^n winter. Palraerston, though always
posing as a Whig, remained in many points trae to the traditions
of the Canningite Tories, to whom he had belonged in his youth.
He beUeved in a firm foreign policy and the protection of
British interests wherever they were endangered. He thought
that political reform had gone far enough in 1832, and had no
desire to tamper with the constitution. Small social and
economic reforms he could tolerate, but he always found
ingenious reasons for shelving the proposals of his more
ardent followers when they tried to take up again the sort of
legislation that had been predominant in the " thirties." The
Radical raembers of his party chafed furiously against his
apathetic attitude towards their projects, but till his death they
could never succeed in getting their way. The fact was that
the middle classes, in whose hands political power had lain
since the Reform Bill, were very rauch of Palmerston's way of
thinking, and had little or no wish to move on. They admired
the old statesman's bustling and occasionally boisterous foreign
policy, enjoyed his slightly cynical humour, and had every
confidence in his sterling coraraon sense.
In many ways it was fortunate that doraestic politics were in
a very quiet state between 1855 and 1865, for foreign affairs
were always in a difficult and raore than once in
tioS witlf *" ^ dangerous condition. The source of trouble was
Napoleon generally to be found in the tortuous and vacil
lating line of conduct pursued by Napoleon III.,
who was always endeavouring to fish in troubled waters, and
to maintain his difficult seat on the French throne by theatrical
triumphs of the mUitary or diplomatic sort. Though he
maintained as a rule an appearance of friendship for England,
yet we always found him a slippery ally, and were at least
once on the verge of war with him. There was always a

THE PERSIAN WAR. 141
temptation to a French military despot to think of revenging
Waterloo. Our foreign troubles after the Peace of Paris, however, were
not all due to Napoleon. The first was a short Persian war, a
sort of after-swell following in the wake of the
Crimean straggle. The Shah Nasr-ed-din, acting ^ar.^^*"^'^"
under Russian influence, had tried to conquer
Afghanistan and taken Herat. To cause him to desist, we sent
a small force to the Persian Gulf, which seized the port of
Bushire and pushed on into the country, till the Shah, whose
troops showed little capacity for war, asked for peace and
evacuated Herat (March, 1857). The little army under
Outram and Havelock, which had won this success, was
fortunately available for the suppression of the Great Indian
Mutiny in the following summer. Of that fearful convulsion
we shall have to speak in the chapter that deals with our
Colonial empire.
The second struggle in which we became involved was a
quarrel with China in 1856. The governor of Canton, acting
with the usual stupid arrogance and obstinacy of
Chinese officials, had seized a vessel flying the Xar.^*"'"^^*
English flag, and refused to apologize for his act.
This led to an expedition against Canton, and ultimately to
open war. But the troops which were sent, in 1857, for the
invasion of China had to be diverted to India, and it was not
till the Mutiny was at an end that we were able to resume our
advance. In 1858, however, a fleet and army threatened Pekin,
and after the forts of the Peiho river had been stormed, the
emperor asked for peace, and received it on promising to
make reparation, and to open several " treaty ports " to English
trade by the Treaty of Tien-Tsing. These engagements were
never carried out, and in 1859 we had again to bring pressure
on the Chinese. This time we were leagued with the French,
who had grievances of their own in the country. The Peiho
forts were again stormed, Pekin taken, and the Summer Palace

142 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
of the emperor plundered and burnt, as a punishment for the
treacherous murder of some British envoys, who had been
negotiating with the mandarins. Convinced that the "bar
barians" were too strong for them, the Chinese court then
made abject apologies, paid a fine of 8,000,000 taels of
silver, and ratified the former treaty of Tien-Tsing (October,
i860). Long before the lingering Chinese war had ended, England
had been interested in grave troubles nearer home. In
January, 1858, while the Indian Mutiny was still
Attempted • -, „ ,
murder of raging, and all our attention was concentrated
Napoleon by upon its suppression, we were suddenly brought
into collision with the French Government.
Some republican fanatics in Paris, headed by an Italian
named Orsini, had made an attempt to assassinate Napoleon
III. by hurling explosive bombs at him as he drove to the
opera. He escaped hiraself, but ten persons were killed and
over one hundred injured by the deadly machines. The
French press and people were naturally roused to fury, and
when it was found that Orsini had organized his plot and made
his bombs in London, they turned much of their anger against
England. The emperor's ambassador wrote strongly worded
despatches calling on Palmerston to give securities against the
repetition of such conspiracies, and protesting that " persons
placed beyond the pale of common rights and under the ban
of humanity " found shelter in the English capital. Far more
violent language was heard in Paris, and one famous address
offered to the eraperor by a number of French officers
besought him to let them destroy "the infamous haunt in
which machinations so infernal are planned."
These threats roused an equal anger on "this side of tli«
Channel, where it was supposed that the emperor wished to
bully the Government while our army was engaged in India,
and a strong anti-French agitation arose. Palmerston, however,
on this occasion did not go with the impulse of the moraent.

A SHORT CONSERVATIVE MINISTRY. 143
He thought that something should be done to prevent London
from becoming the centre of anarchist plots, and
brought in his "Conspiracy to Murder" bill, X,^racv'to""
which made persons convicted of planning poll- Murder" bill
tical assassinations liable to penal servitude for p^j™ *
life, even if the crime was to take place be
yond seas. The measure was reasonable enough in itself,
but so strongly was English national feeling excited at the
moraent, that Palraerston's measure was denounced as mere
truckling to France. He was beaten by a small majority in
the House of Commons, many Liberals joining the Tory oppo
sition, and had to resign office (Febraary 19, 1858).
According to the proper constitutional form, the Tories,
headed by Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli, were now invited to
form a ministry. They complied, though the ex- . -r^ -.
, /- 1 1 Lord Derby
periment was from the first hopeless, since they in office-
were in a very decided minority in the House of S'^/^^''?..,,
•'„, , -^ , , , . , Reform Bill.
Comraons. The gust of popular wrath which
had swept Palraerston from office soon blew over, and the
Conservatives had to recognize that they were only in power
as stop-gaps. Mr. Disraeli, however, by a series of ingenious
expedients, succeeded in tiding the new ministry over the
whole session of 1858. In the next year his great idea was to
bring in a Reform Bill, which would at once have the result of
showing that the Tories were not hopeless reactionaries, and of
embroiling the Liberals with the Radical wing of their party.
The latter had long been asking for such measures, and" it
seemed that the Tories could hardly be opposed for bringing
them forward. Disraeli's bill lowered the franchise in the
counties, giving all occupiers of ;^io houses the vote, but at
the same time proposed to qualify as electors all persons of
education — graduates of universities, doctors, lawyers, and
ministers of religion — ^as well as all persons who showed
evidence of thrift by having _£6o in the savings-bank. There
was a great deal to be said for these proposals, but the Liberals

144 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
chose to laugh thera out of court as " fancy franchises,^ and
when the bUl was rejected. Lord Derby had to dissolve
Parliaraent (March, 1859) and to resign, when the new
House showed itself as hostile as the last
This short Tory rainistry in 1858-59 is raainly remembered
for two useful pieces of work which it carried out. The first
The Volun- ^^^ ^^ abolition of the East India Company,
teer move- and the replacing of its administration in Hindo-
™ Stan by a new Imperial Government (August,
1858), a step which the Mutiny had made absolutely necessary.
The second was the starting of the Volunteer raovement in
the spring of 1859. This last was the result of the threatened
rupture with France in the previous year : the nation had been
terrified at the idea of being caught in an unexpected war with
an unscrupulous neighbour, when the whole array was abroad.
By a very logical and at the sarae time patriotic impulse, it
resolved to supply the much-needed army for home defence by
taking arms itself. The moraent that the scherae was broached
it was received with enthusiasra ; before the end of the year
180,000 men had been enrolled, who undertook to arm, clothe,
and train theraselves at their own expense, and to be ready to
take the field whenever there should be danger of an invasion
of the realm. The result was to give England a second Une
of defence, which counted as a serious item in the national
strength, and was the parent of the splendid " territorial ''
divisions of 19 14-18, though for some years it was not treated
with much courtesy by War Office officials, or taken very
seriously by old-fashioned members of the regular army.
When Lord Palmerston returned to office in 1859 with his
old colleagues at his back, he found hiraself face to face with
Th lta.t'aji ^ great European war. The French emperor had
war of turned off on Austria the wrath which in 1858 had
hberation. seemed to be directed against England. Posing
as the champion of the rights of nationalities, he promised his
aid to Sardinia, if she should attempt once more, as in 1848.

UNION OF ITALY. 145
to free the rest of Italy from Austrian tyranny. The great
Satdinian minister Cavour took the hint, and began to urge his
master. King Victor Emanuel, to arra. Reraonstrances by the
Austrian Government were soon followed by war, in which
France at once joined. But after beating the Austrians at
Magenta and Soiferino, and clearing them out of Lombardy,
Napoleon soon showed that he was no unselfish enthusiast,
but a mere speculator. He suddenly made peace, to the great
disgust of the Italians, ceded Lombardy to Victor Emanuel,
but paid himself by annexing to France the Sardinian province
of Savoy, the ancient home of his ally's ancestors. Three
reasons had guided the emperor to this ungenerous step : he
did not wish to drive Austria to such extremity that she could
never again be his friend, and he was somewhat afraid lest
Prussia might attack hira on the Rhine frontier whUe all his
army was locked up in Lombardy. Moreover, he did not
wish to create an Italian kingdora large enough to become
a great European power. But in this last respect his selfish
plans were foiled : deserted by France, the Italians finished
the work for themselves. A series of insurrections in 1859-60
expeUed the petty princes of Central Italy, and in the latter
year the patriot adventurer Garibaldi threw hira- Garibaldi—
self into Sicily with a handful of followers, and The king-
overturned in that island and in Naples the rule ^°'^ °^ "^'y-
of the cruel and imbecile House of Bourbon. In every state
a popular vote hailed Victor Emanuel of Sardinia as King of
United Italy; only Rome and Venice failed to fall into the
new kingdom, since they were held down, the one by French
and the other by Austrian bayonets (February, i86r).
On the progress of affairs in Italy the English cabinet and
nation looked with much satisfaction, and Garibaldi received
a splendid welcorae when he visited Great Britain
in 1862. But troubles were irapending in other j^surrectfon.
quarters which were not to end so happily. The
oppressed people of Poland raade a desperate attempt at

146 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
insurrection in 1862-63. Great sympathy was felt for them in
this country, and Lord John Russell even made intervention
in their favour with the Russian Govemment. But we were
not prepared to go to war with the Czar single-handed, and
Napoleon IIL would not listen to any further schemes in
favour of oppressed natiorialities after his experiences in Italy.
Our appeals were quietly passed over by the Russians, and
Poland was dragooned into submission.
Much the same humiliation fell upon us in another raatter
in the succeeding year (1863-64). The German inhabitants
_ of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were
TheSchlesvyig- desirous of seceding from the kingdom of Den-
Holstein mark. Count Bismarck, the unscrupulous and
iron-handed minister of the new King of Prussia,
gave them armed help, and persuaded Austria, for reasons of
national sentiment, to do the same. Against two such enemies
the unfortunate Danes could do nothing ; when their sraall
army was driven northward, they raade piteous appeals for aid
to the powers of Western Europe. England was profoundly
moved at the spectacle of the crushing of Denmark by the two
great military powers, and proffered her good offices for the
conclusion of peace. On this occasion it was hoped that
Napoleon III. might give his aid, for he was growing very
suspicious of Prussia and her prime minister. But once more
the eraperor proved a broken reed ; he had other schemes in
hand, and would not interfere to help the Danes. With great
regret Palmerston had to confess that his intervention had
come to nothing. Prussia and Austria forced Denmark to
her knees, and raade her cede not only the German districts
of Holstein and Schleswig, but some purely Danish territory.
These acquisitions the victorious powers then proceeded to
parcel out among themselves, though they had pretended to
take arms in order to enable them to attain their liberty as an
independent German principality.
Neither the PoUsh nor the Danish question had ever brought

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR. 147
England within measurable distance of war. Palmerston's
policy with regard to them, which Lord Derby xhe Ameri-
rather harshly described as " meddling and mud- can civil
dling," had never committed us to any dangerous ^^^'
step. But while these European struggles were in progress,
another and a greater war was raging across the Atlantic, in
which we were more than once nearly involved. This was the
famous War of Secession, which started in May, 1861, and
lasted till April, 1865. For many years there had been an
ever-growing bitterness between the Northern and the Southern
States of the American Union. The masses of the North were
manufacturing and protectionist; the South was ruled by an
aristocracy of planters, was wholly agricultural, and had a
strong desire for Free Trade. The natural grudges between
them took form in bitter quarrels on two points, " state rights "
and slavery. The Southern rice and cotton fields were worked
by slave-labour; in the North there was a strong abolitionist
party, which carried on a vigorous propaganda against the
"divine institution," which now only survived elsewhere in
benighted regions such as Brazil and Cuba. But though the
question of slavery was at the bottom of much of the bitterness
between North and South, the constitutional dispute about
" state rights " came rauch raore to the front at the beginning
of the struggle. The wording of the Araerican constitution
made it quite possible to hold different views as to the powers
and duties of the individual states whose alliance forraed the
Union. In the South the tendency was all in favour of local
independence ; in the North raore was thought of the central
government and the rights of majorities.
In i860 the " Democratic " party, which mainly represented
the Southern States, was defeated at the presi
dential election, and Abraham Lincoln, a "Re- Lincoln
publican," from lUinois, who was known as an elected
opponent of " state rights " and an abolitionist,
came into power in January, 1861. Seeing that the machinery

148 ENG.LAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
of govemment, which they had of late controlled, was about to
flip from their hands, the Southerners resolved on desperate
measures. In the spring that followed, eleven States seceded
from the Union and formed a new league, to which they gave
the name of the " Confederate States of North America." The
Northem majority utterly refused to recognize the legality of
the secession, and set to work at once to crush the malcontents
by force of arms. War at once broke out along the whole
frontier from Virginia to Missouri. At first the Confederates
proved fully able to maintain themselves on land, but at sea
they were utterly outmatched, for the whole regular navy
had passed into the hands of the North, which also owned
nine-tenths of the seafaring population of the States. The
Federals at once established a blockade of all the southern
ports ; at first it was intermittent and ineffective, but it grew
raore and more real, tiU at last " blockade-ranners " could only
leave or enter the harbours of the Confederates by the happiest
combinations of luck and skill.
Great Britain was affected in the most acute fashion by the
war of Secession. Not only were we accustoraed to draw great
quantities of rice and tobacco frora the South,
the war— but the Lancashire cotton industry was mainly
The cotton dependent for its raw raaterial on the Araerican
plantations. India, Egypt, and other Eastern
producers were only just comraencing to appear in the Man
chester market as serious rivals of the Western cotton-grower.
The gradual stoppage of the export of the Southern cotton
as the Federal blockade grew strict, began to cause the
most terrible distress in Lancashire, where many mills had to
close from actual want of stuff to keep their machinery going.
Skilled artisans were thrown out of work at the rate of ten
thousand a week, and the evU seemed likely to grow worse
and worse, for the war showed no signs of coming to
an end.
In 1861, when it became evident that the Confederates were

THE AFFAIR OF THE "TRENT." 149
not likely to be suppressed in a few raonths, as the Northerners
had hoped. Lord Palraerston had recognized them „ ..
T. 1,. m. • , 1 . Feeling in
as belligerents. This action greatly vexed the England-
Federals, who persisted in treating them as mere The seizure
rebels destitute of any legal rights. Public opinion
on this side of the Atlantic was rauch divided in its sympathies
during the war. To some it appeared in the simple light of
a straggle to abolish slavery, and such persons could not but
side with the North. On the other hand, many thought that the
right of secession ought not to be denied to a unanimous
people, and that the South had as good a title to free itself as
Italy had to drive out the Austrian. Others, again, disliked the
Northerners as jealous commercial rivals and bitter opponents
of free trade, and were glad to see them in difficulties. Poli
ticians, too, were to be found who thought that the balance of
power in the world would be better kept if the vast republic in
the West split asunder. On the whole, England was not
unequally divided on the question ; if anything, the balance of
sympathy was on the side of the South. But this was largely
owing to unwise action on the part of President Lincoln's
government, who did their best to irritate British susceptibilities.
In 1862 the captain of a Federal man-of-war violated the old
American theory of the immunity of neutrals, by stopping and
searching on the high seas the English mail steamer Trent, in
order to take from it two Confederate envoys who were travel
ling from Havana to Europe. The ship was voyaging between
two neutral ports, and the envoys were non-combatants, but
the United States authorities disregarded the theory America
had held in 181 2, and only surrendered Messrs. Mason and
Slidell after an acrid controversy, and when Lord Palmerston
had actually begun to hurry a considerable army into Canada.
Oddly enough Britain and the States had exchanged theories
since the last war.
The state of Lancashire,too,was well calculated to exasperate
British opinion. By the summer of 1862 the whole of the

ISO ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
cotton manufacturing district was in a state of semi-starvation,
J f ^""^ '¦^^ cotton famine grew worse in the winter
the cotton that followed. The population was only kept
famine. ^jj^g ^y lavish charity. More than ;^2, 000,000
were subscribed for their aid, besides ;^6oo,ooo contributed by
Government. The distribution was so energetically and skill
fully made that actual starvation was kept at bay, and the
death-rate of Lancashire was no worse than that of the rest of
England. But the misery suffered was acute, and it was not
till 1863 that it commenced to abate, as cotton was brought in
from new and distant sources of supply to fill the place of the
missing bales from Charleston and New Orleans.
After balancing from one side to the other during the years
1862-63, the tide of victory began to flow definitely in favour
The Alabama °^ ''^^ Federals during 1864. The South was
—End of the exhausted even by her victories, and her supplies
^^'^' of raen and money were ranning too low to
enable her to cope rauch longer with an adversary who could
draw upon double her population and four times her wealth.
In these latter years of the war, the desperate resolve of the
Confederates to strike at their victorious foe in every possible
raanner was shown by their reckless use of privateering, which
was destined to bring England into trouble, and to give the
Federals a legitimate grievance. It is, of course, illegal for
neutrals lo fit out warships for a belligerent, but Southern
agents more than once succeeded in getting ships prepared
in English dockyards, and then passed out to sea in order to
become Confederate privateers. The case of the Alabama is
the best known. This vessel was denounced to the Govern
ment by the United States minister as being a disguised war
ship, which was indeed the fact But the authorities were
unduly slow in ordering her detention. She slipped out of
Liverpool by night, got to sea, and became a terror to Northern
shipping for some two years. For the cabinet's slackness
England had soraewhat later to pay the tremendous bill of

DEATH OF PALMERSTON. 151
the Alabama claims. The American war came to an end
.\prU, 1865, with the faU of Richmond, the Confederate
capital, and the surrender of the Southern armies.
Palmerston survived to see the struggle finish, but died a
few months later (October 18, 1865) ; he had kept up his
power of work to the last, though he had reached
the ripe age of eighty-one. With his removal pahnerston
from the scene a new epoch in English politics
begins, in which foreign affairs were no longer to be so all-
important, nor domestic politics so dull as they had been
in the days of the last of the Whig prime ministers. The
tendency towards democratic reforms and general change,
which Palmerston had succeeded in stifling during his own
day, broke out strongly when he was gone.

(152)

CHAPTER VIIL
DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE.
1865-1885.
Modern politics in Great Britain may practically be said to
begin at the death of Lord Palmerston ; as long as the Liberal
The old party was stiU generalled, and to a great extent
Liberal officered, by the old Whigs, the great problems
party. which had started at the tirae of the first Reform
Bill of 1832 were not much pressed towards solution. The
governments of the last thirty years had done much in the
way of social and economic reform, but they had repeatedly
shelved the larger political and constitutional question as to
whether Great Britain was to become a deraocracy or not.
In so doing they were but following the wishes of the majority
of their constituents. The " ten-pound householders," in
whose hands political power had been deposited by the first
Reform Bill, were mainly drawn from the middle classes,' and
had no particular desire to see themselves swamped in the
electoral body by the extension of the franchise. The farraers
and shopkeepers of the United Kingdom were divided not
very unequally between the two political camps : the Whig
majority among them, which had been overwhelraing in 1832,
was much smaller in 1865, for the old prejudice against the
reactionary Toryism of Castlereagh and Lord Eldon had been
gradually forgotten, except in Scotland and Ireland, where for
fifty years an enormous preponderance of Liberal members

THE TENDENCY TO DEMOCRACY. 153
was always returned. But outside the body of electors there
still remained the great unenfranchised masses, the multitudes
which had been stirred by the Chartists in the forties, and
which were now very inadequately represented in Parliament
by the Radical wing of the Liberal party.
Political agitation generally languishes when times are
prosperous and wages high, and the internal state of the
United Kingdom had been so flourishing of late .j-j^^ „j,f„„.
that very little had been heard of the deraocratic chised
cries that had been so loud in the days of ""asses.
Chartism. But there was always below the surface a good
deal of discontent at the present distribution of political power,
and a certain survival of the old Chartist delusion that with
the franchise would come practical and personal profits to
those who were still excluded from the voting lists. Unless
we remember the existence of this widespread feeling araong
the raasses, the change in the policy of the Liberal party after
Palraerston's death appears unintelligible. Among the leading
raen of that party, and even in the cabinet itself, there were
many politicians who were convinced that soraething ought
to be done to satisfy these aspirations. They thought that
the attention of the country had been devoted far too much
of late to foreign affairs, and that widespreading measures of
internal reform, both constractive and destructive, were long
overdue. The most prorainent man among these advanced members
of the Liberal party was Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who for
the last six years had been Palraerston's Chancellor
of the Exchequer. He had originally been a cudftone."^
Peelite Tory, but had followed Lord Aberdeen in
1852, and had been absorbed with the rest of his supporters in the
Liberal ranks. Once committed to that party, he had become
a meraber of its progressive wing, and had for some tirae chafed
against the policy of stagnation or of petty administrative
reforms which Palmerston had imposed on his colleagues

154 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
during the last ten years. There can be no doubt that he was
already guided by the idea which he openly formulated many
years later — that it is the duty of a statesman to watch the
pubUc mind, and to endeavour to carry out the policy that
" the sufficient number '' dictates. Most politicians in England
have wished to impose their own convictions on their party :
the theory that the chiefs should make it their duty to ascertain
and to carry out the latent or half-expressed wishes of their
followers rather than their own, rests on the very democratic
notion that the majority raust always be in the right, and that
special political training and individual knowledge count for
little in the long run. It is doubtful whether Gladstone would
have subscribed to this wording of the idea, but his conduct
araounted to a practical carrying of it out. Put in the vaguer
forra of the aphorism that "We must trast the people," it
commended itself to him and his followers. The Liberal
watchwards in the later sixties were " Peace, Retrenchment,
and Reform" — a combination of words that would not have
sounded very pleasantly in Lord Palmerston's ear, for he was
a lover of a spirited foreign policy, a considerable spender of
money, and a confirmed doubter as to the necessity of further
political changes. He saw what was coming, and had remarked
shortly before his death that " whenever that man (Gladstone)
gets my place, we shall have strange doings.''
Gladstone's reputation in 1865 rested largely upon his very
successful Free-Trade budgets of the last seven years. In a
Gladstone's '•™® ^'^^^ *^ national prosperity (in spite of the
popular Lancashire cotton famine in 1862-63) had been
bu gets. ygj.y. great, he had been confronted with such a
flourishing revenue that he could announce a surplus every
year. This surplus he had eraployed in the raost popular way,
by using it to take off nearly all the iraport duties on food-stuffs,
such as tea and sugar, and on articles of daily consumption,
such as paper and taUow. In aU, between 1859 and 1865, he
reduced the number of articles on which duty was paid frora

GLADSTONE AND HIS BUDGETS. 155
419 to 48. Enthusiastic admiration was raised among his
party by the success of his experiraent, for the revenue seemed
to increase the raore for every itera that he reraoved frora the
list of things taxable. We can now see that the sudden growth
in national wealth, registered by this rise of receipts, was to a
large extent due partly to a successful commercial treaty with
France, partly to the removal of the United States from the
field as a commercial rival during the disastrous War of
Secession. Their shipping interest has to this day never
recovered the blow, and their carrying trade had passed
almost entirely into English hands. It is easy to say now that
it requires no extraordinary genius to deal with the series of
surpluses caused by years of exceptional prosperity, and that
there is no financial magic in the wholesale remission of taxation
on articles of consumption. To-day, indeed, the murmur is
often heard that we have cut down too far the list of dutiable
articles, and trust overmuch to the small number of comraodities,
such as wine, spirits, and tobacco, which still contribute to the
revenue when iraported. But in 1865 Gladstone's budgets
seemed the cause rather than the effect of national prosperity,
and no one ventured to doubt his financial omniscience.
Every one who paid less for his pound of tea or his newspaper
could look upon hira as a personal benefactor.
Gladstone was not, however, destined to succeed immediately
to the vacant place of premier. The veteran Lord John
Russell — now Earl Russell — still survived, and , . , ,
though he had consented to serve under Palmer- RusseU's
ston, it was not to be expected that he would ^^^o"^"" ^'"•
give way to a younger man. The Liberal party took him
as their head in November, 1865, and he held office from
that date tiU June, 1866; the rest of the ministry remained
practically unchanged. RusseU's reign was destined to be
short ; he was stUl honestly devoted to the ideas of 1832, and
brought in a Reforra Bill destined to redeem the old pledges
of the Liberal party which Palmerston had so persistently

IS6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
shelved. It was a very moderate measure, reducing the
qualification for the franchise in the counties to ;^i4, while in
the boroughs the house of f[,7 was to be substituted for the
house ol £,\o as the lowest limit of occupation conferring the
vote. It was calculated that these changes would add about
400,000 electors to the 2,000,000 already in existence, so that
the balance of power would still have remained in the hands
of the middle classes.
The Tories naturally opposed the biU, on the ground that
it was in no way superior to their own abortive measure which
Disraeli had formulated in i8t;Q. But it is more
The "Cave
of Adullam." surprising to find that a section of the Liberal
party also fought against it A number of
members who shared Palmerston's views, and had a rooted
dislike to any further advance in the direction of democracy,
declared that the bill was wholly unnecessary, and affirmed no
real principle of value. They banded theraselves into a sraaU
party of thirty or forty strong, which Gladstone in derision called
" the Cave of AduUam " — because to it, as to David of old,
fled " every one who was in distress, and every one who was
discontented." The second reading of the Reform Bill was
only passed by a majority of five in face of their opposition,
and finally the Tories and " AduUamites " succeeded in carrying
an amendment which wrecked the whole of the Government's
scheme. Lord Russell thereupon resigned (June, 1866), and
the queen sent for the Conservative leader. Lord Derby, and
invited him to form a ministry.
Once more, as in 1858, Lord Derby and his lieutenant
Benjamin Disraeli endeavoured to corapass the difficult feat of
. d D rb carrying on the government of the country without
prime a majority in the House of Commons at their
minister. back. For the AduUamites refused to coalesce
with the Conservative party, and, quite contented to have
wrecked Lord RusseU's Reform Bill, fell back again into the
Liberal ranks.

DISRAELI AND HIS VIEWS. 157
The tenure of office of the Derby-Disraeli ministry in
1866-6S forms an iraportant landraark in the history of the
Conservative party. It had now quite outlived
its old traditions : Protection, as a matter of the new
practical politics, was dead; raere opposition to Conserva-
all change, on the principle that all changes must
be for the worse, had ceased to be a necessary part of the
Tory creed since the days of Peel. Disraeli had long been
engaged in the process which he called "educating his
party" — that is, of substituting a positive programme of
measures to be carried out for a negative programrae of
measures to be resisted and staved off. He always continued
to display the greatest attachment to the old Tory principles
of loyalty to Church and Queen, and to show an almost
ostentatious care for the "landed interest," the farmers and
landowners who had long formed the backbone of his party.
But he brought to the front two ideas which had hitherto forraed
no very conspicuous part of the Conservative programrae.
The first was the conception of England as an Imperial
world-power, interested in European politics, but still more
interested in the maintenance and development
of her vast colonial and Indian empire. This is —Conserva-
the notion which friends and enemies, using the tism and the
word in very different senses, now caU "Im
perialism." The second ruling thought in Disraeli's raind was
the conviction that the Conservative party ought to step
forward as a rival to the Liberal party in commanding the
sympathies and allegiance of the masses. This aim he would
not carry out in any deraocratic spirit ; he did not intend to
ask the people to state its demands in order that he might
obsequiously carry them out. But he wished to persuade it
that the Conservatives had their own plans for social, economic,
and political reform, which were just as honest and far more
rational than those of the Liberals. Everything should be
done/r the people, if not by the people.

IS8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Each of these great ideas of Disraeli's was developed at a
period very favourable for their success. The Liberal chiefs
_ of the generation which followed Palraerston were
The "Little ,. ^. f, ,¦ ¦ c u r n,
Ene-lande " >iistinctly wanting in a fuU sense of the greatness
of the erapire. They have rather craelly been
called " Little Englanders,'' for their dislike for expansion and
their timid colonial policy. In their zeal for econoray, they
loathed the expenses which empire entails. Some of them
occasionally talked as if it was inevitable that our colonies,
when they grew strong enough, should "cut the painter" — as
the Americans had done in 1776 — and refuse to follow any
longer in the wake of the mother country. They let the army
and navy ran so low that in moments . of national danger we
found ourselves in a perilous state of weakness. An appeal to
the people against such a policy was certain of success, for the
people has always been convinced of the reality of its iraperial
Liberalism destinies. So, too, with regard to domestic
and social matters, there were many things which favoured
reform. Disraeli's appeal to the masses. The Liberals of
1865 were steeped in the orthodox political economy; they
were- ready enough to grant political reforms, or to carry out
Free Trade to its logical extreme, but raany of them shrank
from social reforms, on the ground that by interfering between
raan and man they were sapping the moral responsibility of the
individual, or meddling with the natural law of competition
which rales the world, or trying to make the state discharge
functions for which it is not naturally designed. The old
Liberal " doctrinaires " were very chary of taking in hand the
kind of domestic legislation which would appeal to the
syrapathies of the masses, so that DisraeU had a fair chance
of bidding for their support.
The Derby-Disraeli ministry chanced upon very stirring
tiraes both at home and abroad ; in the very week in which
they assumed office (June 19-26, 1866) a great European war
broke out. The greedy partners, Austria and Prassia, who

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. 159
had joined to plunder Denmark in 1864, fell out over the
distribution of the plunder. Count Bismarck, the
able and unscrupulous Prussian premier, con- between
trived to put Austria in the wrong, to induce Prussia and
Italy to attack her from the rear in order to re
cover Venice, and to fall upon her before she was prepared for
hostilities. The Italians were beaten off; but the Prassians,
largely aided by the " needle-gun " — the first breech-loading
rifle used in European war — went on from victory to victory,
till they corapletely crushed the Austrians at the battle of
Koniggratz (July 3, 1866). After a struggle of only seven
weeks, the Fimperor Francis Joseph asked for peace, and
obtained it on condition of giving up his position in Germany.
Prussia raade herself head of a new " North German Confeder
ation," and annexed Nassau, Hesse-Cassel, Frankfort, and the
kingdora of Hanover. So ended the old principality over
which the Guelfs had ruled so long, and whose fortunes had
been for more than a century (1714-1837) linked with those of
England. The Austro-Prussian war was no concern of ours,
but its consequences deeply affected us, for Prassia emerged
from it a first-rate power, which she had hardly been during the
days of the weak King Frederick William IV. (1840-1861).
But William I. and his minister Bismarck soon caused those
days of obscurity to be forgotten.
The only foreign hostilities in which England was engaged
during these years took place in Africa. A half-crazy despot,
Theodore, King of Abyssinia, seized and im- .pj^^ ^j, „.
prisoned a number of British subjects, including sinian expe-
two envoys who had been sent to conclude a °"'°°'
treaty with him. When he proved deaf to aU requests for
their release, a sraall array was sent against him from
India, under Sir Robert Napier. Hampered more by diffi
culties of roads and supplies than by the enemy, Napier
forced his way far inland to the fortress of Magdala, the
enemy's capital. The Abyssinian host was defeated by the

i6o ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
mere baggage-guard of the English force. The captives were
surrendered, and Theodore blew out his own brains when he
saw his army dispersed and his stronghold stormed (April, 1868).
Far raore important than this trifling war were the domestic
troubles of the United Kingdom in 1866-68. Ireland, which
had remained in the quiet of exhaustion since
outbreaks^" the famine of 1845 and Sraith O'Brien's fiasco in
1848, was now in one of her periodical fits of
effervescence. It was mainly due to encouragement from
America : when the Federal armies were disbanded in 1865,
thousands of Irishmen, who had gone through the civil war,
were thrown upon the world with a good mUitary training and
an ingrained hatred for England. Many of them engaged in a
scherae for raising rebellion in Ireland, whUe others undertook
to invade Canada in order to distract the attention of the
British Government. They had hopes of being able to drag
the United States into the turmoil, for the ravages of the
Alabama and her consorts were bitterly remembered across
the Atlantic. Emissaries, who crossed to Ireland, enroUed
many thousands of enthusiastic young men in the " Fenian
Brotherhood " — an association which took its strange title from
the ancient name of the tribal militia of the Celtic kingdoms
of the Dark Ages. Attempts, which fortunately failed, were
made to tamper with the Irish regiments garrisoned across
St. George's Channel. But the inevitable mismanagement,
shirking, and treachery, which have distinguished all Irish
risings, showed as clearly in 1867 as in 1848 or 1798. The
widespread plans of the Fenians ended everywhere in
ludicrous faUure. Some thousands of them crossed into
Canada, only to be easily dispersed by the loyal militia. The
United States Governraent, though it did not take adequate
pains to prevent their raids, refused to be drawn into collusion
with them. The insurrection in Ireland only burst out at one
or two isolated points, instead of spreading over the whole
country. It resulted in no more than some Ul-planned attacks

FENIAN OUTRAGES. l6i
on police-barracks, and the insurgents fled into hiding when
the troops came abroad. Some strange incidents in England
attracted as much attention as the futile rising across the water.
A large number of Liverpool Irish were implicated in a hair-
brained scheme for seizing the stores and armoury at Chester.
What they could have done if they had been successful does
not sufficiently appear; but when 1500 of them had collected
in the quiet old town, they found the police on the alert, and
heard that a battalion of the Guards was expected from
London, whereupon they mildly dispersed, save some dozens
who were unfortunate enough to be arrested. The only
exploits in which the Fenians showed any enterprise were two
murderous attempts to release imprisoned merabers of their
society. On the first occasion (September 18, 1867) tv/enty
men with revolvers waylaid a prison van escorted by seven
police, in the streets of Manchester, and took out their com
rades within, after kiUing one and wounding four of the
unarmed escort. The second attempt at rescue was still raore
reckless, and cost more lives. Some Fenian prisoners being
confined in Clerkenwell jail, a gang of desperados placed a
barrel of gunpowder against its outer wall and exploded it,
thinking that their friends might escape in the confusion. The
prisoners were not released, but in the neighbouring street four
persons were killed, and more than a hundred — mainly woraen
and children — injured (Deceraber 13, 1867). For these
murders several Fenians were hung. Those who suffered for the
Manchester crime are still honoured by anniversary services in
Ireland, under the name of the " Manchester Martyrs." Deeds
of this kind were calculated to irritate rather than to cow the
British Government. The Conservative cabinet hurried troops
into Ireland and raised special constables in England, but
these precautions were hardly necessary. It was only at a
somewhat later date that an English statesraan was found to
declare that raurderous outrages brought the Irish question
" within the sphere of practical poUtics." ¦ M

l62 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
WhUe the Fenian movement was giving trouble, Disraeli was
engaged in the difficult task of governing without a majority in
parliament. That he succeeded in doing so for
Refora'lill. *^^ ^^^' P^"^' °^ ^'"° V^^'^^ '® ^" astounding testi
mony of his dexterity. AU through 1867 he was
engaged with his Reform BUl, drawn up on the same lines as
that which he had before proposed in 1859. It differed from
Lord RusseU's scheme mainly in keeping the county franchise
high (at ;^20 instead of ;^i4), and in insisting on the " fancy
franchises " that Disraeli had sketched out in his earlier bill,
which gave the vote to all persons owning ;£;io in the savings-
bank, or ;^5o invested in the public funds, or paying ;^i of
direct taxes, or who had received a liberal education. All
those possessing these qualifications were to become electors
if they were not already on the rolls; while if they were,
they obtained a second vote in virtue of their evidence of
thrift or superior instruction.
The Conservative Reform BiU was not so successful as
Disraeli had hoped. Several members of the Government —
of whora Lord Cranborne (later the Marquis of
The " Lean
in the Dark." Salisbury) was one — resigned office because they
regarded the raeasure as a concession to demo
cracy. On the other hand, the Liberal party declared that the
bill was not sufficiently broad and far-reaching, and proceeded
to cut it about by unending amendments. Public opinion in
the large towns was already excited on the question of Reform,
and very shortly after the rainistry had taken office, the famous
riot in which the railings of Hyde Park were ,tom down (July,
1866) had reminded observers ofthe old Chartist days. Disraeli
was very anxious to show the world that Conservatives could
frame Reform Bills as successfully as their opponents, and was
resolved to make a serious bid for popularity with the masses.
Accordingly, when the Liberals began to mutilate his measure
by amendments, he did not resign, but accepted aU the
changes, affirming that they did not affect the principle of the

DISRAELI'S REFORM BILL. 163
bill. His scheme for the double vote was shorn away, his
" fancy franchises " were struck off, but he stiU went on. He
was compelled to accept the lowering of the household fran
chise to ;^5 in the towns and ^j 2 in the counties, and to give
votes to all lodgers paying _;^io a year. Thus the measure
became very democratic in forra, more so than many even
among the Whigs desired ; but Disraeli persevered, and " took
the Leap in the Dark" by bestowing the franchise on the masses.
Save the agricultural labourers in the rural districts, practically
all householders in the United Kingdom were now given the
power of becoming electors. Among the groans of tiraid Con
servatives and the scoffs of angry Liberals, who coraplained
that Disraeli had stolen the credit of granting Reforra from
them, the bill became law in August 1867.
For another session Disraeli continued to cling to office,
holding out many schemes of social and economic legislation
which he promised to put in practice. He was ^r.. Liberals
now possessed of complete control over his party, return to
for in 1868 his aged colleague Lord Derby ''^^^•
retired from politics, and there was no other member of the
cabinet who could exercise the least influence over him.
But his dexterous parliamentary tactics could not save hira.
The Liberals seized on the Irish question, and began to
clamour for remedial legislation for the sister island as a cure
for the disease of Fenianism. They began with pointing
out the Established Church of Ireland as an abuse and an
anachronism ; Gladstone carried in the Commons a resolution
demanding its disestablishraent, and, defeated on this point,
Disraeli could only resign or dissolve parliaraent He chose
the latter alternative ; the new constituencies created by the
Reform Bill of 1867 gave the Liberals a crushing majority of
120, and the Conservatives had to retire from office (Decem
ber, 1868).
Gladstone, coming into office with such a splendid majority
at his back, was able at once to take in hand all the changes

l64 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
and reforms for which he and his followers had been yearning
Gladstone during the days of Palmerston. No party ever
prime carae into power with so many pledges to fulfil,
minister. ^^^ jj^g Liberals made a conscientious attempt to
discharge them all. They had to prove that they were the real
friends of the people, and that Disraeli was a mere charlatan.
" Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform " were to reign everywhere.
The first problera taken in hand by Gladstone was that
of Ireland. He held that Irish discontent was not sentiraental
Disestablish- ^'^^ national, but caused by practical grievances —
ment of the a view which later events have proved to be
Irish Church, untenable. Then, however, the whole Liberal
party pinned its faith to the theory. The first measure taken
in hand was the disestablishment of the Protestant Episcopal
Church of Ireland. As it existed in 1869, it was certainly an
odd anomaly, for, though it claimed to be the State Church of
the island, not more than one-fifth of the population belonged
to it. In spite of the opposition of the Irish bishops and
gentry, it was deprived of its endowments and its official
status. But it retained its churches and cathedrals, and its
clergy received personal corapensation for their losses. The
effect on the Irish Church was excellent: when freed frora
State control and allowed to govem itself it showed unexpected
strength and vigour, and has been ever since a growing and
flourishing body. Nonconforraist enthusiasts who dreamed in
1868 that the Church of England might soon suffer the same
fate as the sister establishment, have long since got over their
disappointment. Having, as he hoped, done somethihg to conciUate Irish
Romanists by the Disestablishment Act, Gladstone then pro
ceeded to deal with the more difficult question
LMd^Act. °^ ^^^ ^^^^- "^^^ absolute dependence of the
poor peasantry of Ireland on landlords who were
often absentees, and sometimes careless of all duties and bent
on raising the last possible farthing of rent, was believed to be

GLADSTONE'S IRISH POLICY. 165
the most fraitful source of Irish disloyalty. By the Land Act
of 1870, Gladstone gave the tenant the right to be compensated,
if his farm was taken from him, for any improveraents he raight
have raade on his holding. He also gave him the right to sell
the "goodwiU" of his land to his successor. This raade
the tenant a kind of joint-owner with the landlord of his farm,
since he was given a valuable interest in it, often worth many
times the annual rent. The Government was also under the
idea that prosperity and quiet would be promoted by the estab
lishment of peasant proprietors. Loans at easy rates were
therefore offered to any one who wished to purchase his farm,
if the landlord could be induced to seU.
This well-intentioned measure, however, had not the effect
that might have been expected. Instead of being satisfied
with their new advantages, the peasantry imbibed Ao-rar'an
the idea that they ought to get complete possession discontent
of their farms for nothing. They wished to see a contmues.
violent end made of all " landlordism," and were not in the
least grateful for Gladstone's benevolent wishes. There was
national sentiraent as well as agrarian discontent at the bottom
of the trouble. It was very discouraging to the Liberals that
the year 1870 was so rife in murders, outrages, and riots that
a " Peace Preservation Act " had to be passed, and extra
troops sent into the country. Attempts to bribe Ireland have
always failed.
A less questionable success was gained by the Government in
their series of Acts dealing with national education. These
were, on the whole, very beneficent A bill for
the revision of endowed and grammar schools, tion Acts*^*'
passed in 1869, did a good deal for the secondary
education of the country, by bringing many well-endowed but
inefficient schools under Government inspection. But the
Elementary Education Act of 1870 was far more important It
affirmed the principle that the State was bound to provide gra
tuitous instraction for aU the children in the realm. Attendance

l66 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
was made compulsory, and wherever sufficient schools did
not exist they were buUt with public money. In the thirty
years which have elapsed since that day the proportion of
illiterate persons in Great Britain has gone down to a neglige-
able quantity.
Another admirable domestic reform of the Gladstone Govern
ment was the BaUot Act. Down to this period voting at
parliaraentary elections was open, and the poll
Art 1^2 extended over raany days. This arrangement
gave ample scope for two abuses, intimidation
and bribery, for it could be at once ascertained how every man
voted. The introduction of secret voting made intimidation
alraost impossible, and bribery very risky, since the buyer of
votes could never be certain that the recipient of his money
had actually voted for him. A distinct improveraent in the
purity and decency of elections was seen; but the old evUs
were not whoUy extirpated tiU more than ten years later, when
the imposition of heavy penalties on both briber and bribed
finaUy crashed the old scandals and abuses.
The sphere in which the Gladstone Government showed
most unhappily was that of foreign policy. Indeed, from Lord
P . Palmerston's death down to the appearance of
policy of the Lord Rosebery, the Liberals were singularly
Liberals. unfortunate in their dealings with external powers.
They were so wedded to a consistent peace policy, that it
required no ordinary provocation on the part of a foreign
state to stir them up into remonstrance, much more into
resistance. The fact was known abroad, and regularly traded
upon by our neighbours.
The most notable event in the history of Europe which
occurred during the tenure of office by the Gladstone ministry
was the Franco-German war of 1870-71. Jealous
The Franco- pf jj^g j,g^ power of Prussia, and desirous of
(jerman war. . *^ '
covering many mistakes of policy by another
successful war, Napoleon III. rashed unprepared into a

THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 167
straggle with united Germany. Bismarck had foreseen the
attack, and did what he could to precipitate it, for he was
rightly convinced that the well-organized Prussian state was
quite capable of crashing the French. His prescience was
rewarded; Napoleon III. with nearly 100,000 men were
surrounded and captured at S^dan, and when a republic re
placed the monarchial governraent in France, its efforts
proved as unavailing as those of its predecessor. Paris
surrendered after a long siege (January 28, 1871), and peace
was only granted on the condition of the cession of Alsace-
Lorraine and the payment of a vast war-inderanity. When,
after the treaty of Versailles, a wicked and senseless civil
war broke out among the vanquished, and Paris was again
beleagured and taken by French troops (March-May, 187 1),
it seemed as if France was likely to be permanently removed
from the list of great powers.
England had very properly kept out of the Franco-German
War, but some of its consequences affected her very directly.
When Napoleon III. fell, the Russian Governraent pyggja anj
formally disavowed the Black Sea Clauses of the the Treaty
treaty of 1856 which had terminated the Crimean 9' f^a^^-
War, and declared that it would build a warfleet in the Euxine
when it chose. The French emperor, the other guarantor of
the Treaty of Paris, having disappeared, England was com
pelled to take the affront mildly. It would have been mad
to make the Russian declaration a casus belli.
If the Gladstone cabinet must be held guiltless in this
matter, the same cannot be said with regard to its action in
the matter of our dispute with the United States,
which came to a head in 1871. The subject in Jrhftra^foT""
question was the claim of the Americans to be
compensated by England for all the damage done by the
Alabama and her consorts* to Federal shipping in 1863-65.
There can be no doubt Uiat the Palraerston Govemment had
* See p. 150.

i68 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
been slack and slow in the matter of detaining the Alabama,
and that the United States had a legitimate grievance against
us. But there is a long step between conceding this, and
aUowing that England should pay for aU the mischief done
by the Confederate craisers. We had certainly a far greater
cause of complaint against the States for allowing their territory
to be made the base of the two Fenian attacks on Canada.
Yet we allowed the Americans to make deraands, not only for
direct damages, but for indirect — such as the discourageraent
given to American trade and the prolongation of the War
of Secession. The Liberal cabinet took this bullying very
meekly, and suggested arbitration. A court of foreign arbi
trators sitting at Geneva (June, 1872) gave the case against
England, and bade her pay more than ^3,000,000 — a sum
so considerable that when all the Alabama claims had been
liquidated, there was still a considerable surplus left in the
hands of the American Government. A second arbitration,
The San made a little later, gave to the Americans the
Juan arbitra- island of St. Juan, off the coast of British
'¦'°"' Columbia, which had been for sorae tirae in
dispute b^ween the two powers. Gladstone was under the
impression that in submitting both questions to arbitration
we had shown a regard for abstract justice and a laudable
solicitude for peace. But public opinion in England generally
took the view that we had made an undignified submission to
threats, and had not been treated fairly in the awards.
Only one satisfactory result carae from the difficulties of
foreign policy in the years 1871-72. Convinced that if we
C d ell's ^^^ been unexpectedly drawn into war our army
military was not in a condition to do itself justice, owing
reforms. j.^ jj^g game defects that had been seen in the
Crimean war, the Government took in hand its reorganization.
The arrangements made by Mr. Cardwell, the Secretary for
War, were for the most part wise and well considered. Want
of reserves was the greatest deficiency in the existing system ;

CARDWELL'S MILITARY REFORMS. lOg
accordingly recraits were for the future to be enlisted, not for
twenty years, but for short service — seven years with the colours
and five in the reserve. Thus, when war broke out, some
60,000 or 80,000 trained men could be available to fill up the
ranks of battalions which suffered in the field. Moreover,
there was an attempt raade to localize the regiraents — battalions
linked in pairs were assigned to every region in the United
Kingdom. In theory each was to draw its recruits entirely
from its own district, and one battalion was always to be at
home and one abroad. But this systera never worked in a
quite satisfactory raanner; sorae corps have becorae closely
connected with the counties to which they were assigned —
others have not, and have failed to eUcit any local enthusiasm.
Moreover, our constant small wars rendered it impossible to
keep precisely half the army at home. It was only by the
raising of a considerable number of new battalions in 1898
that sorae approach was made to the exact carrying out of
Mr. Cardwell's scheme. A raore serious objection to the short
service scheme has been that the home-battalion of each pair
tends to becorae over-burdened with recruits. The proportion
of very young soldiers in it was often so large that its efficiency
for the field was often doubted. On the other hand, the
reserve has been a great success. Whenever called out, it has
appeared in full numbers and admirable spirit. By its means
the young battalions could certainly be brought up to proper
strength and efficiency, but at the cost of delay.
One of Mr. Cardwell's other mUitary reforms was the
abolition of an antique abuse, which nevertheless caused some
murmuring on account of the way in which it was .....
conducted. He wished to get rid of the "purchase the "pur-
system," by which officers bought every step in chase '
rank, by compensating their seniors who' were
retiring or receiving promotion. It was an intolerable anomaly
which often prevented poor and able men from rising, whUe
rich but incapable officers bought promotion over their heads.

170 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Though compensation was promised to all who had obtained
their comraissions on the old plan, yet so much opposition was
made to the " Purchase BiU," especiaUy in the House of Lords,
that Mr. Gladstone finally dropped the measure and decreed
the abolition of purchase by a Royal Warrant, on the ground
that the armed forces of the realm were subject in such matters
to the direct authority of the Crown. This was technicaUy
correct, but the act was much criticized as tending to take the
army out of the control of parliament.
The last complete year of the Gladstone ministry, 1873, was
rauch less fertile in legislation than its predecessors. It only
Fall of produced a "Judicature Act" for the consoUda-
Gladstone's tion of the courts of law, and an abortive scheme
ministry. f^j. jj^g establishment of an " Undenominational "
University in Ireland, which was wrecked by the declaration of
the Roraan Catholic bishops that they would have nothing to
do with it Early in 1874 the prime rainister dissolved
Parliament, though it was not yet six years old, to the great
surprise of both parties. He went to the country with a
declaration that, if returned again to power, he should proceed to
abolish the income tax. This declaration was more fitted to affect
the raiddle classes than the masses ; and the latter, enfranchised
in 1867, had now superseded the former as the depositaries of
political power. To his own great surprise, Mr. Gladstone was
beaten at the polls ; he was defeated partly on account of the
general dissatisfaction with his foreign policy, but probably
StUl more through the resentment of the countless class, trade,
and local interests which he harassed by his widespreading
legislation. The Conservatives carae into office with a majority
of more than fifty in February, 1874.
Disraeli had now for the first tirae a real opportunity of
showing what the new Conservatism was like. He was com
pletely master of his party, and had finished the process of
" educating " it which he had begun twenty years before. In
his six years' administration, 1874-1880, he was able to

THE SUEZ CANAL SHARES. 171
develop his policy in every direction that he chose. The two
elements that went to make it, Imperialism abroad
and cautious social reform at horae, emerge very position of
clearly in the annals of his tenure of power. If Disraeli as
. , . premier.
the former tendency seems to engross our attention
more than the latter, it is largely because the lines of his
ministry were cast in troublous days, when foreign policy
becarae all-iraportant
But the first two years of the Disraeli ministry (1874-75)
were a time of peace and quiet, notable mainly for the number
of moderate and unostentatious raeasures of social
and economic reform which the Government w^at^^ ^'*
succeeded in passing. Such were the Agricultural
Holdings BUl, by which farmers obtained compensation for
unexhausted improvements when giving up their land; the
Artisans' Dwellings Bill, which secured better housing for the
workmen in great towns ; and the Friendly Societies Act, which
did much towards securing tiie better management of the
savings of the poor.
The only striking event of this time was the interference of
DisraeU in Egypt, in the matter of the Suez Canal shares, the
first attempt of England to obtain a footing in Eneland and
that country, where French influence had hitherto Egypt— The
been predominant The whole conditions of ^"^^ Canal.
Eastern trade had been changed in 1869-70 by the con
straction of a ship-canal through the Isthraus of Suez by the
French engineer Lesseps. Its convenience attracted to the Red
Sea route a growing proportion of the commerce which had
hitherto gone to India, China, and Australia by the circuitous
voyage round the Cape of Good Hope. It also put an end to
the tiresome transhipment of goods and passengers landed at
Alexandria, which had been necessary since the Overland
Route * was adopted. Some three-fourths of the tonnage
which passed through the canal was English, and yet the
• Seep. 113.

172 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
control of the traffic was entirely in the hands of a grasping
French corapany and a thriftless and oppressive Oriental
despot. LuckUy, the reckless extravagance of the Khedive
Israail landed him in financial difficulties, and while he was
looking around for a purchaser for the 177,000 shares in the
canal which he owned, the English Government stepped in
with a prompt offer of ^^4,000,000 in ready cash. The offer,
made by telegram, was accepted, and Disraeli was able to
announce that England had become the owner of an interest
in the canal amounting to almost half its value. This
acquisition put our position in Egypt on an entirely new footing.
But it was not only a political advantage, but a splendid
financial stroke. The shares are now worth six times what
was given for them, and the interest on them is an appreciable
item. in the national revenue.
In the following year, 1876, the political horizon of Europe,
which had been fairly clear since the Franco-German war of
Insurrections ^870-71, began to grow overcast. An insur-
in the Balkan rection in Bosnia, which had been troubling the
feninsu a. Turkish Government for sorae tirae, began to grow
serious and to draw the attention of the powers to the inter
minable Eastern Question. The Sultan Abdul-Aziz had taken
no advantage of the long respite given to his realm by the
Crimean war. In spite of raany promises raade by his brother
and himself since 1854, the administration of the Ottoman
empire reraained as scandalous and oppressive as ever. The
Porte had borrowed huge sums of money from Europe, but
they had been employed, not to develop the empire, but to
gratify the Sultan's caprices, or at the best to furnish his army
with modem rifles and artiUery. The Bosnian insurrection
spread, and it was soon discovered that Russian emissaries,
sent by patriotic Slavonic societies, were sustaining it, with ot
without the fuU consent of their Government. In the summer of
1876 the princes of Serbia and Montenegro took arms to aid
the insurgents, and when the Serbian troops were reinforced by

THE BULGARIAN ATROCITIES. 173
many thousands of Russian volunteers and placed under the
command of a Russian general, it became evident that the
Czar's ministers were at the bottom of the trouble.
The first impulse of the English Government and people was
to lend support to the Sultan, despite of his notorious misrule,
in order to keep Russia out of the Balkan Benin-
sula. But any such intentions which the Con- denounces
servative cabinet may have cherished were foiled '' Bulgarian
by the barbarities of the Turks themselves.
While the Ottoman army was concentrated on the Servian
frontier, a rising broke out araong the Bulgarians. In the
absence of regular troops, the Sultan put it down by employing
hordes of Circassians and armed Mohammedan vUlagers, who
displayed the same horrible craelty which had been seen in the
Greek insurrection of 1821, and was to be exhibited again in
the Armenian massacres of 1897 and 1915. When the news
of the " Bulgarian Atrocities " reached England, Gladstone,
who had nominally retired frora politics in 1875, took the field
again to denounce the Turks, and to protest against any action
on the part of the English Government which might be held
to encourage them. His crusade was completely successful ;
public opinion was so deeply stirred, that the premier had to
appease it by declaring that Great Britain had no intention of
bolstering up the effete and corrupt Ottoman power, but must
confine herself to defending her own interests in the East
It was in no small degree owing to this turn of national feel
ing in England, that the Czar was encouraged in the next year
to declare war on Turkey (April, 1877), and sent ^j^ Ryg„-.
his armies across the Danube to "deliver their Turkish
Christian brethren from the infidel." The Otto- '"*''-
mans made a much better fight than had been expected : the
central government was weak — the reckless Abdul-Aziz had
just been murdered, and his successor, Mur.id V., was almost
an imbecUe — but the armywas courageous and well equipped.
The obstinate defence of Plevna kept the Russian troops in

174 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Europe at bay for the whole autumn, and it was only when
Plevna was starved out that the Russians burst over the
Balkans at midwinter. Driving the remnants of the Turkish
arraies before them, they drew near Constantinople. At St.
Stephano, not far from the gates of the city, they imposed on
the Sultan a treaty by which he surrendered a large territory in
Asia, and gave back the small slip at the Danube mouth which
had been ceded by Russia after the Crimean war. The
greater part of European Turkey was to be divided among
Christian states, of which a new Bulgarian principality was to
take the lion's share (March 3, 1878).
Disraeli — or rather Lord Beaconsfield, as he must be called
since his migration to the Upper House in 1877 — was de
termined not to let Russia settle the Eastern
Lord'sea- question by herself. He informed the Czar's
consfield— Government that the terms imposed on Turkey
of Berlin.* ^ ™^^ ^^ approved by a conference of all the
powers. When no attention was paid to this
demand, he sent a fleet up the Dardanelles, to the iraraediate
vicinity of Constantinople ; called out the reserves ; obtained a
grant of ^6,000,000 for war preparations frora parliaraent; and
began to move Indian troops into the Mediterranean. These
menaces brought the Czar's advisers to terms, and, rather than
face a new war, they consented that the St. Stephano treaty
should be revised. The process was carried out by delegates
of the seven great powers, meeting at Berlin under the presi
dency of Prince Bismarck (June, 1878). By the treaty of
Berlin Russia kept her own conquests, but the proposed
Bulgarian state was to be split in two, and other powers were
to take slices of Turkey for theraselves. Austria was to occupy
Bosnia, Greece was proraised Thessaly, and England received
the Isle of Cypras. In return for this grant, she undertook to
guarantee the integrity of the Sultan's remaining dominions in
Asia, and also to see that the long-promised reforms were
carried out therein.

"PEACE WITH HONOUR." i75
Lord Beaconsfield and his colleague. Lord Salisbury, came
back from BerUn claiming that they had obtained " Peace with
honour," and in the raain this was true. But the -.,..„ „r
' Criticism of
policy of the treaty lay open to rauch criticisra. Lord Bea-
We were never able to get the Turks to carry out consfield's
the projected reforras, which were much further
from fulfilment in 1914 than they were in 1878. Our
guarantee of the Turkish empire was never more than a
farce. The island of Cyprus, held on a rather undignified
tenure, proved barren and harbourless, and has never been of
any use to us as a naval or military base. Crete would have
been a far better choice. Bulgaria, so elaborately divided by
the treaty, united itself by a revolution a few years later, without
any objection from any power. On the other hand, Russia
had been humiUated by the revision of the St. Stephano terms,
and owed England a grudge which could not easily be for
gotten. These, however, were not the criticisms made on the
Berlin Conference by the British opposition in 1878 : the
points then raised by Mr. Gladstone and his friends were that
we might have joined Russia in bringing pressure on Turkey
in 1877, after the Bulgarian atrocities, and so have prevented
any war, and that it was unrighteous to offer any guarantee for
the further maintenance of the barbarous and blood-stained
Ottoman power. With the massacres of 1897 and 1915 before
us, it is difficult not to sympathize with this view. As Lord
Salisbury afterwards confessed, we had "backed the wrong horse."
The Conservatives had yet two years of power after the
Berlin Treaty was signed; they were full of unfortunate incidents,
for some of which the cabinet was responsible, whUe others
were the results of mere ill luck. In our chapter on India
and the colonies we shall have to deal with the Afghan war
of 1878-80, with its record of fighting that was not always
fortunate. It was a direct result of our quarrel with Russia,
for fear lest the Ameer should fall under Russian influence was
the originating cause of our invasion of his realm. The Zulu

176 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
war of 1878-79 had no such direct connection with European
politics ; but when the disaster of Isandula made it unpopular.
Liberal orators did not fail to point out that such misfortunes
were the result of Imperialistic greed and the maintenance of a
" forward policy " in the colonies.
But in all probabUity the Government suffered more in
public estimation from its Irish difficulties than from its foreign
policy. The parliament of 1874-80 was the first
Rule party- ^^ which the Home Rule party and its policy
Rise of of systematic obstraction came to the front.
Home Rule was practically a reversion to
O'Connell's old demand for the repeal of the Union, the
Fenian programrae of coraplete separation and the establish
ment of an Irish republic being tacitly dropped. As long
as the Horae Rulers were led by the quiet and respectable
Isaac Butt, they raade no great stir. But with the appearance
of the cynical and saturnine Charles Stuart Parnell as a party
chief, things changed. The raore violent members of the Home
Rule faction tried the policy of obstracting in Parliament all
public business, foreign and domestic, by interminable speeches,
irrelevant amendments, got-up altercations, and vexatious counts
out. Their object was that of the importunate widow in the
parable — to make themselves such a nuisance that their de
mands might be conceded out of mere weariness and disgust
Throughout the years 1877-80 they were incessantly wasting
time and driving to despair the mild and kindly Sir Stafford
Northcote, who had succeeded Lord Beaconsfield as leader of
the House of Commons. At the sarae time they kept up a
vigorous agitation against " landlordism " in the Irish country
side, which was accompanied with a ranning coraraentary of
agrarian outrages, of which they disclaimed the responsibUity.
It cannot be denied that one result of their activity was to
produce a general feeling in England that the Conservatives
had proved themselves incapable of dealing with the Irish
question.

GLADSTONE RETURNS TO POWER. 177
In March, 1880, Lord Beaconsfield dissolved his parliament,
which was now nearing its legal term of seven years. The
general election was fought with more than usual
acrimony, for the Liberals were stirred to great Beacons-
energy by Gladstone's " Midlothian speeches," field's
in which he taunted the Conservatives as the " ^ 'T'-
advocates of unjust aggression all over the world, and the
special friends of the Turk. His eloquence had no raean
effect on the contest, and the Liberals carae to the new
Parliament with a splendid majority of one hundred. It boded
Ul for them, however, that the Home Rulers had swept all
Ireland save Ulster, and appeared with nearly eighty members
when the House met in the summer of 1880.
The second Gladstone rainistry was destined to last just
five years (June, 1880, to June, 1885). It was inaugurated with
promises of the old Liberal panaceas, " Peace, Re
trenchment, and Reform," but it turned out to be ^c^o1id°"*'^
a period of wars and rumours of wars, of disaster ministry—
abroad and venomous civil strife at horae. Its „„ *"
war.
opening incident showed tliat Gladstone's external
policy might perhaps be righteous, but was certainly neither
dignified nor successful. The Government was hardly in
office before it was confronted with the revolt of the Boers
of the Transvaal, a Dutch state which Lord Beaconsfield had
annexed in 1877, to save its population from being overwhelmed
by its Zulu neighbours. In 1880, the Zulus having been long
crashed, the Boers rose in rebellion, destroyed several small
detachments, and finaUy inflicted a disgraceful defeat on the
British forces at Majuba Hill. The Government had at first
refused to treat with the insurgents, but after the first checks
Mr. Gladstone came to the conclusion that they were patriots
rightly straggling for independence, and, though large rein
forcements were just reaching Natal, granted the Boers inde
pendence under the vaguest terms of suzerainty (March, i88r).
After this South Africa became a permanent storm-centre.

178 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Even before the Transvaal disturbances were settled, Ireland
was in a state of uproar which had not been paralleled since
1867. If the Home Rule members had been
Irish discon- troublesome to the late Conservative Govern-
tent— The mpnt thev continued to make themselves doubly
"Compensa- »""-" i 1 -,•¦..¦, »«¦ /-ii j .
tion for Dis- objectionable to tiie Liberals. Mr. Gladstone
tobance" ^^^ g^-jj under the impression, which he had
imbibed in 1868, that Irish discontent could be
healed by remedial measures. With this object he brought
forward in 1880 a biU prohibiting landlords from evicting any
tenants, however bad, without paying them " corapensation for
disturbance." This measure failed to pass the House of Lords,
but in 1 88 1 another " Land BIU " was successfully
The Land carried through, creatine a Land Court, whose
Act of 1881— . . " ' ^ A . c \^
The Land commissioners were empowered to fix aU rents
League and against which protest was made. It acted in the
cnme. "^°^* stringent way, reducing rents from thirty to
fifty per cent, but Ireland showed no signs of
settling down. The peasantry had been persuaded by the
Home Rulers that if they held together and kept up a lively
agitation, the Liberal Government might be frightened into
abolishing landlords altogether, compensating them from the
public funds, and making over their estates to the tenantry.
For this end the celebrated " Land League " was started, and
soon spread over the whole country. Its leaders did not
openly advocate outrages, but they were always full of excuse
and pity for those who were detected in committing them. It
was small wonder if agrarian crime suddenly developed to an
extent unparalleled in earlier generations. Many districts of
the south and west of Ireland were under a veritable reign
of terror.
At last Mr. Forster, the courageous and well meaning
statesman to whom the secretaryship for Ireland was entrusted,
got leave to seize and imprison on suspicion ParneU and some
forty other chiefs of the Land League. Outrages redoubled

TIIE PHCENIX PARK MURDERS. 179
and from his confinement in Kilmainham jaU Parnell sanc
tioned the "No Rent Manifesto," an appeal to
the whole tenantry of Ireland to refuse to pay a '™^t*^?'Ju
farthing to their landlords till the Government Land League
should be brought to its knees. It was largely lf?f^p""T'*®
acted upon in the southern and western parts of Manifesto.''
the island. Thereupon the cabinet declared the
Land League "an iUegal association," and suppressed it
throughout the country. But the outrages only continued to
grow worse : in the fourth quarter of 1881 they rose to the
appalling figure of 732, of which eight were murders and thirty-
four attempts at murder.
Broken down by the stress of the struggle, Gladstone resolved
to take the astonishing step of releasing Parnell and the other
suspects, if they would promise to aid hira in
quieting the country. This surrender took shape " Treaty " of
in the "KUmainham treaty" of AprU, 1882, the Kilmainham
prisoners covenanting that the No-Rent Manifesto phoenix
should be withdrawn, and they would "raake ^^'"'^
exertions which would be effective in stopping
outrages and intimidation of aU kinds." Forster, the Irish
secretary, and Lord Cowper, the viceroy, at once resigned,
refusing to make bargains with sedition. To fill the former's
place Lord Frederick Cavendish took office, but only six days
afterwards he was assassinated in broad daylight in the Phoenix
Park, along with his imder-secretary Mr. Burke, by some
Dublin ruffians belonging to a society which called itself " the
Invincibles" (May 6, 1882).
Public opinion in England was deeply stirred by this dreadful
crime, which so entirely justified Forster's refusal to sanction a
policy of weakness. The Gladstone Governraent had to take
up once more a policy of coercion, and to acknowledge that
" the late arrangements raust be reconsidered and recast." So
great was the feeling stirred up against the Horae Rulers in
general, that Parnell hiraself thought it necessary to characterize

l8o ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the murders " as cowardly and unprovoked assassinations."
But he none the less opposed by all the weapons
The Crimes of obstraction the new Coercion Bills brought
ConfiMM^:! i° ^y Sir WUliara Harcourt, predicting that they
of the would lead to even worse troubles than those of
straggte. ^SS^- I" ^i^ h^ ^^^ ^''°"S '> ^'^^ " Crimes Act,"
vigorously administered by the new viceroy Lord
Spencer, had a considerable effect in keeping down out
rages. The Dublin raurderers were detected and hung, to the
great content of the nation, and several dastardly attempts to
use dynamite for explosions in England and Scotland failed
to frighten the Government, or to produce anything more
than a redoubled determination that sedition and crime
must be put down. Rampant obstruction was still kept
up by the Horae Rulers in parliament, and outrages con
tinued to occur in Ireland; but by 1884 other questions
had arisen to distract the attention of Great Britain from the
sister island.
The main question of foreign policy in the years of the wai
with the Land League was connected with Egjrpt. Since
Disraeli's purchase of the Suez Canal shares we
rebdlion ^^^ ^^^^ ^""^ ^anA upon that country, sharing
with France a sort of unauthorized control, which
in 1879 was made more formal. In that year the extrava
gant and reckless Khedive Ismail was compelled to abdicate,
and his son Tewfik was placed in power, but compeUed to
accept an English and a French minister, who were to be
irremovable, and to take charge of the whole financial
arrangements of the country. The young Khedive did not
straggle against the " Dual Control," but it roused deep dis
content among the native officials and ministers, who had
previously fleeced the country at their own sweet will. An
ambitious colonel named Arabi Pasha put himself at the head
of a movement whose watchword was " Egypt for the
Egyptians." Finding that the troops would follow him, he

CONQUEST OF EGYPT. l8t
executed a coup d'etat, seized the person of the Khedive, and
drove away the foreign ministers (AprU, 1882).
It would have been natural for England and France to com
bine, in order to restore the Dual Control and put down the
dictator. But the French Government refused
to lend any help for such a purpose, not dream- f ^"v* "^^"i
ing apparently that England would go in single- —Bombard-
handed. Mr. Gladstone seems at first to have TP"' "^ .
been in some doubt as to the policy to pursue,
but the Mediterranean squadron was ordered to Alexandria.
While it lay there a great riot broke out in the city, directed
against all Europeans, and many hundreds of Greeks, Italians,
and Levantines, with a few British subjects, were massacred
(June ir, 1882). This occurrence naturally led to hostilities :
when Arabi refused to obey Admiral Seymour's demand that he
should stop fortifying Alexandria, and dismantle its batteries,
the fleet was directed to bombard the place (July 11). The
forts were wrecked, the garrison driven out, and the English
landed and took possession of the rains of the place.
Thus began the Egyptian campaign, which Gladstone
persistently refused to call a war, maintaining that it was
only " a series of military operations," because
we were attacking, not the Khedive, the rightful xel-el-1kebir
ruler, but only his rebellious subjects. The
straggle was short, for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom it was
entrasted, managed the business with the most admirable
decision and promptitude. The Egyptians were expecting
him to debouch from Alexandria, but when his troops began to
arrive in force from England and India, he turned aside and
seized the Suez Canal, which he made his base for a march
across the desert on Cairo. Arabi hurriedly raised the lines of
Tel-el-Kebir to protect the capital ; but Wolseley came upon
them by a rapid night march, stormed them at dawn, and com
pletely scattered the Egyptian host (September 13). A day
later his cavalry seized Cairo before the enemy could rally,

i82 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
and the rebeUion collapsed. Arabi and his chief supporters
were captured and exiled to Ceylon, and the Khedive was
replaced on his throne. But an English army of occupation
reraained in Egypt, though Gladstone proraised the French and
the Sultan that they should be removed when order and good
govemment were restored — a most unwise pledge.
Circurastances, however, were too strong for the Liberal
cabinet, or the promise would probably have been fulfilled.
But even before Arabi's rise, a rebeUion had
Mah(fi— broken out in the Egyptian provinces in the
Abandon- Soudan. A fanatic from Dongola, named
Soudan.*'^^ Mohammed Ahmed, had put himself at the
head of the Arab tribes of the south, who were
groaning under the bitter oppression of their Egyptian task
masters. He proclaimed himself to be the Mahdi, the prophet
whora all Mussulraans expect to appear just before the Last
Judgment, and announced that he was the destined conqueror
of the world. His first successes caused the whole Soudan to
rally round him, and his "dervishes'' drove the Egyptian
troops into their fortresses. To stay his progress. General
Hicks was sent to Khartoum with a raw native force, hastily
raised from the wreck of Arabi's army. But as he marched
towards Kordofan Hicks was surrounded and cut to pieces
with the whole of his host (October 3, 1883). Gladstone then
determined to abandon the Soudan, believing that the dervishes
were an oppressed population struggling for a not-undeserved
freedom, and not seeing that they were desperate fanatics bent
on the conquest of the whole world, and set on slaying every
one who refused to acknowledge their Mahdi.
To withdraw the Egyptian troops from the Soudan, Charles
Gordon, a brave and pious engineer officer, who had once
govemed the country in the days of the Khedive
Khartoum. IsmaU, was sent to Khartoum. On his arrival
there he found that the rebellion had gone much
further than he had expected, and that it was impossible to

DEATH OF GENERAL GORDON. 183
carry out the Government's plan without further railitary aid.
He was driven into Khartoura and there besieged by the
Mahdists in February, 1884. At the head of his dispirited and
ill-disciplined Egyptian troops he made a gallant defence, but his
repeated demands for British bayonets were regularly refused
till it was too late. In the autumn Gladstone at last deter
mined to send an expedition to the Soudan ; but ere it started
Khartoum was in extremity. Wolseley, the victor of Tel-el-
Kebir, forced his way up the Nile and despatched a column
across the desert to relieve the city. After a most perUous
march the troops beat the dervishes at the desperate battle of
Abu- Klea (January 22, 1885), and forced their way to within a
hundred miles of Gordon's stronghold. But the time was past
for succour. On January 26 the Mahdi stormed Khartoum,
and massacred Gordon and the 11,000 men of his garrison.
On receiving this disastrous news the expeditionary force
retired on Egypt, abandoning the whole Soudan to the rebels,
who slew off the greater part of the people, and turned the
whole region into a desert
Two half-hearted attempts were raade, one before and one
after the fall of Khartoum, to attack the insurgents frora the
side of the Red Sea. But the expeditionary forces which
landed at Suakira, though they beat the dervishes at El-Teb and
Taraai (1884), and Tofrek (1885), recoiled before the difficulties
of the waterless desert which separates the coast plain from the
Nile, and accoraplished absolutely nothing.
The betrayal of Gordon — for so the tardy action of the
Governraent was generally and not unnaturally styled—
alienated from Gladstone many supporters whose
faith had survived Majuba Hill and the Kilmain- Bill and Re-
ham Treaty. For the last year of its tenure of distribution
office the Liberal cabinet was profoundly un
popular. It had profited Uttle from the one constractive
measure of its later years, the Reform Bill of 1884. This was
designed to level up the electoral body, by giving the franchise

i84 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
to the last considerable class who were stiU destitute of the
vote — the agricultural labourers of the counties. The Conser
vatives refused to allow the bill to pass, stopping it in the
House of Lords, tiU Gladstone consented to let redistribution
accompany reform ; i.e. to rearrange all the constituencies so
as to make them fairly equal in size. This idea was very
imperfecriy carried out. The democratic ideal of " one man
one vote " was now practically attained, but not that of " one
vote one value,'' for a few hundred inhabitants of a decaying
Irish town, or a depopulated Irish county, still returned the same
number of members as enormous London constituencies, such
as Chelsea or East Ham. Gladstone justified the anomaly by
the theory that the further a district was from the capital the
more did it require representation — a doctrine not likely to be
popular with Londoners. The main result of the bUl was that
the smaller boroughs which had escaped disfranchisement in
1832, now became absorbed in the surrounding country
districts. The seats gained from them mostly went to new
constituencies in the north of England.
In June, 1885, the Government was defeated, by a chance
combination of Conservatives and Home Rulers, on an unim
portant detail of the budget. Gladstone there-
oarties'in upon resigned, and Lord Salisbury, head of the
1885— Glad- Conservative party since Lord Beaconsfield's
^re^'wsh^^ death in 1881, took office. As the Liberals were
still in a considerable majority, this arrangement
was evidently a mere stop-gap. At the end of the session.
Lord Salisbury dissolved Parliament, and the first general
election after the Reform BiU of 1884 occurred. What attitude
the new constituencies would adopt was quite uncertain.
Gladstone, in a series of long and vigorous speeches in his
constituency of Midlothian, asked for a majority large enough
to enable him to keep down both Tories and Home Rulers in
case they should combine. But this was denied him : though
the Liberals swept away nearly all the county seats in the east

GENER A.L ELECTION OF 1885. 185
and centre of England, where the newly enfranchised labourers
all voted for their benefactor, yet they suffered a number of
disastrous defeats in the towns, where public opinion was
greatly excited against their weak and unlucky foreign policy.
When the House met, the Liberals had just such a raajority
over the Conservatives (330 to 251) as allowed the eighty-six
Home Rulers under Parnell to keep the balance of power in
their hands. The Irish chief had been sounding the heads of
both parties for some time, and thought that Gladstone was
likely to prove more squeezable than Lord Salisbury, though
several Conservative leaders — especially Lord Carnarvon —
seem to have given raore attention to his overtures in 1885
than was consistent with the true policy of their party. In
January, 1886, Parnell assisted the Liberals to evict Lord
Salisbury from office, and Gladstone for the third time became
prime minister. Even before he took office it began to be
noised abroad that he was in secret negotiation with the Irish,
and ready to buy their allegiance by the grant of a measure of
Home Rule. Here begins a new chapter of our domestic
history ; that one of the two great parties should make a per
manent alliance with the Obstructionists had never been deemed
possible before 1885.

( i86)

CHAPTER IX.
•IHE HOME RULE QUESTION AND IMPERIALISM.
1886-1899.
Since the days immediately preceding the Reform BiU of 1832,
the United Kingdom had never been in such a state of political
excitement as prevailed from Noveraber, 1885, to July, 1886.
It was in the forraer month that rumours began to get abroad
that the " liberal measure of local self-government," which Glad
stone had spoken of in his Midlothian speeches as desirable for
Ireland, meant Horae Rule. At raidwinter it was stated that
he had invited Parnell to confer with him on the scheme, and
to suggest guarantees for the preservation of law and peace in
Ireland when Horae Rule should have been conceded. Never
theless, many Liberals refused to believe that there was any
truth in the reports, and several of their parly leaders announced
that they stiU remained opposed to any grant of legislative
independence to Ireland.
But when the Tories had been evicted frora office in
January, 1886, and Gladstone came into po^yer, his proceedings
showed that ramour had not lied. It soon became
to'tte'Home '^'^^^'^ that the premier was drafting a Home
Rule Bill— Rule Bill, and that violent dissensions were on
dissensions. '^*'°'' *" ^^^ cabinet, since several members of it
were not prepared to foUow him in his new
departure. In March, the president of the Local Government
Board, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the best-known leader of the

THE FIRST HOME RULE BILL. 187
Radical wing of the party, resigned his office, as did Mr. George
Trevelyan, the secretary for Scotland. But the bulk of the
Liberal party were still in the dark as to the exact form which
the projected bill would take, and it was quite uncertain
whether the majority were prepared to follow the premier. All
that was known was that there were bound to be some secessions
when Gladstone's plan was set forth. MeanwhUe the Con
servatives were commencing a vigorous agitation against any
concession to Parnell, and the Irish Protestants of Ulster were
fiercely proclaiming that they would resist, even with armed
force, any attempt to place them in subjection to the Home
Rule raajority in the south and west.
On the Sth of April, the bill was at last introduced and
explained by the premier, in a speech occupying nearly four
hours. It was proposed to establish an Irish
parliament in Dublin, consisting of 309 members of thebil/.""
sitting in a single chamber ; by a device strange to
British ideas, these members were to be of two classes, 206
representing the boroughs and counties, while the remainder
were to be peers or senators of an anomalous sort, chosen for
long periods, and not liable to lose their seats at a dissolution,
The Imperial Government was to retain control over the army,
matters of external trade, the customs and excise, and foreign
policy. The rest of the affairs of Ireland were to be entrusted
to the Dublin parliament, which would have in its power the
police, the maintenance of law and justice, all matters of
internal taxation, education, and all the executive and adminis
trative parts of the governance of the realm. By an elaborate
financial scheme, Gladstone calculated that Ireland should pay
;j{^3, 244,000 a year to the Imperial exchequer as her contribu
tion to the management of the British empire ; she would have,
he thought, about _;^7, 000,000 raore for her own local purposes.
No Irish members were for the future to come to Westminster,
so that the Crown was to be the only formal link between the
two kingdoms.

i88 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The heated debates which followed lasted from the Sth of
AprU to the 7 th of June. ParneU expressed his satisfaction
with the biU, though he claimed that financially
Liberal * ^ it was a hard bargain for Ireland. It remained
Party— The to be seen whether the defection from the Liberal
rejec e . ^^^-^^^ would be large enough to compensate for
the eighty-six well-disciplined followers whom he was about to
lead into the ministerial lobby. Gradually, however, it began
to be clear that the split in the Liberal ranks was much deeper
than Gladstone had hoped. Lord Hartington and most of the
Whig section of the party were known to be alienated, and it
was also found that Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Bright were
about to be followed into opposition by a considerable
number of the Radicals. Member after member arose on the
Liberal side of the House to complain that the guarantees
given for the loyalty of Ireland were too weak ; or that no pro
tection was afforded for the minority in Ulster who disliked
Home Rule ; or that the proposed financial arrangements were
unworkable; or that the removal of the Irish members from
Westminster broke up all connection between the kingdoms ;
or, more simply, that persons with the antecedents of Parnell and
his followers could not be trasted with power. When the
crucial division on the secoiid reading of the bill was taken on
June 19, no less than ninety-three Liberals voted against the
Governraent, and the raeasure was thrown out by a majority of
thirty (341 to 3x1). Mr. Gladstone at once dissolved parlia
ment, though it was not seven raonths old, and appealed to the
country to endorse his new policy (June 25).
The general election of July, 1886, was by far the most
bitterly fought contest of the present half-century.
and^'^Gla^ ¦^^^'¦^P*'°'^ °^ °^'^ party ties araongst the Liberals
stonians" — lent it a particularly personal animosity, since
dection?^"^*' every " Unionist " of the last pariiament found
his seat attacked by a " Gladstonian." The latter
charged their former friends with disloyalty and desertion;

HOME RULE DEFEATED. 189
the former replied by taunting the majority with blind sub
servience to Gladstone, and with raaking terms with the friends
of traitors and assassins. The stake at hazard was by far the
greatest of the century ; the Unionists believed that their defeat
would mean civU war in six months, and the possible disrap-
tion of the empire. Gladstone, on the other hand, held out
the prospect of a pacified and friendly Ireland — a thing of
which no man had ever ventured to dream — and warned his
opponents that even if they won they had nothing to offer but
a policy of interrainable and hopeless coercion for the sister
island. Passions on both sides ran higher than at any other
crisis that men could remeraber, yet it was satisfactory to find
that the election itself was carried out without any of the riot
ing or the corruption that used to be so comraon in the days
before the Ballot Act.
The result was decisive; the majority of the Liberal
Unionists kept their seats — seventy-eight of them appeared
in the new parliament. On the other hand, the
Gladstonians had lost some forty or fifty seats. Defeat of the
and retained no more than 191. The Conser- _The
vatives were 316 strong, and the Pamellites 85. Liberal-
When Lord Hartington, as head of the Liberal party.
Unionists, explained that he and his friends
would not amalgamate with the Conservatives, nor take office,
but would never join in any combination with the Gladstonians
so as to imperil the position of the incoming ministry, it
became clear that a long spell of exile from office awaited the
friends of Home Rule. For most intents and purposes the
Conservatives might count on a majority of a hundred.
When Lord Salisbury took office for the second time, in
August, 1886, with such a powerful aUiance at his back
domestic politics began to quiet down with a surprising quick
ness. The tendency was raost marked in Ireland, where many
expected that the rejection of the Home Rule Bill would be
followed by riots and outrages worse than those of 1882-83.

190 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The reverse was the case ; a distinct amelioration was visible
after the fall of the Gladstone ministry, and a
Caraoai^n— Prolonged attempt made by some of the Parnel-
Mr. Arthur lite leaders to raise agrarian trouble by a scheme
fecretwyf ^'^ called " the Plan of the Campaign " was a failure.
Their idea was to repeat in a minor form the
"No Rent" edict of 1882, binding the tenantry in certain
estates to cling together and refuse to pay more rent than
they thought fit. But Mr. Arthur Balfour, the new secre
tary for Ireland, proved by far the most successful adminis
trator that had been seen across St. George's Channel for a
generation. Indeed, he was the only statesraan of modern
days who has gained rather than lost credit while holding
the unenviable post which was now allotted to him. The
wild abuse of the Parnellite members in the Commons did
not seem to worry him, and he showed an imperturbable
indifference to all their accusations and raillery. The Govern
raent aided hira by passing a Coercion Bill of a very stringent
kind (July, 1887), which, on the whole, served the end for
which it was designed, since, in spite of certain riots ending in
bloodshed — such as the " Mitchelstown massacre " of October
12 — Ireland was growing less disturbed all through 1887-88.
The systematic obstruction which the Parnellites, aided by
many Gladstonians, offered to this biU, only led to the passing
of new and much-needed reforms of procedure in the House of
Coramons, which made the useless wasting of time more
difficult. An Irish Land Bill which accompanied the Coercion
Act was less successful, pleasing neither tenants nor landlords,
and soon being forgotten.
The year 1887 is best remembered, however, for no matter of
party politics, but for the Queen's First Jubilee
TwiM-The (Ju"S ^'^),^ great ceremony held to commemo-
Imperial rate her Majesty's completion of the fiftieth
'^^^ year of her reign. A solemn service held at
Westminster Abbey was attended by aU the Royal family, and

TIIE JUBILEE OF 1887. 191
witnessed by an assembly gathered not only from the United
Kingdom, but from India and aU the colonies. Lord Beacons
field's " Imperialism " still dominated his party, and everything
was done to make the Jubilee a manifestation of the loyalty of
the whole empire. In this aspect it was most successful ; not
only did the premiers of the autonomous colonies and a party
of Indian rajahs join in the ceremony in London, but rejoic
ings and demonstrations all round the world bore witness to
the respect and love entertained for the aged sovereign in
every corner of her dominions. Both at home and abroad the
political effects of the Jubilee were admirable. They raay be
taken to mark the complete development of the Imperial idea
brought into prominence by Disraeli half a generation before.
It was in truth the interests of Greater Britain— a name just
beginning to come into vogue — rather than purely foreign
affairs, which formed the most iraportant parts of
our external politics frora this time onward. „ ?^^*^'' ,
. Britain and
Till the end of the century. Liberal and Conser- the Conti-
vative ministers alike tried to avoid entanglement "f"*^'
. ^ - , ,,¦ , .. • , Powers,
in Continental alliances, and for some time the
policy was possible.
In the seventies, while Bismarck was the dominant statesnian
in Europe, Germany, Austria, and Russia formed an alliance,
the " League of the Three Emperors," which was
the governing factor in European politics. It France^?
might have seemed natural for us to look for our position
friends in France and Italy, and for some time '
we were on excellent terms with both these powers. But
things changed after the Egyptian war of 1882 ; our occu
pation of Egypt was a bjtter blow to France, all the more so
because it was entirely her own fault that she did not become
our partner. Having refused to aid us in crushing Arabi, she
was never again able to get her foot into the Nile valley, and
for years cherished a rather unreasonable grudge against the
power which finished the business without her. The facts that

192 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
we had never formally proclaimed a protectorate over Egypt,
and that Mr. Gladstone made his unfortunate engagement to
evacuate the country " when the circumstances should permit,"
furnished a dozen French foreign ministers with opportunities
for harassing English cabinets with inquiries as to the date of
our departure, and the reasons for our delay. All reforms
which we made in Egypt, even the most simple and necessary,
formed the subject of angry diplomatic notes. The anomalous
position occupied by a state which exercised the reality of
suzerainty without its legal form, rendered such criticism only
too easy.
As long as France stood alone in Europe, and the League of
the Three Emperors still existed, her intrigues, against us in
Egypt were tiresome rather than dangerous,
The Triple Circumstances, however, gradually changed ; the
Friendship Czar Alexander II. had been assassinated by
between the Nihilists in i88r, and his son Alexander III.
France. ^^^ '^°'- ^ friend of Germany. Moreover, the old
Emperor WiUiam L, who always preserved a
kindly feeling for Russia, died in 1888, and with his decease
the influence of Bismarck, all-powerful in Germany since
1866, and in Europe since 1870, began to wane. Even
before his old raaster's death, the breach between the two
empires had been clearly marked, and Bismarck had publicly
announced that a continuance in his former policy was no
longer possible. There followed a rearrangement of the
relations of the great Continental powers, Germany and
Austria avowing that they had concluded formal treaties with
Italy, and taken her into partnership in a new "Triple
AUiance." Russia and France, thus left in isolation, were
forced by the logic of circumstances to look toward each other
for support. Their drawing together only began to be evident
about 1891-92; down to that date the Russian Government had
doubted too much the solidity of the French republic, whose
ministries were always changing, and whose very existence

THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE. 193
had seemed imperilled in 1887-88 by the intrigues of the
theatrical adventurer General Boulanger.
The position on the Continent was still further modified by
the dismissal of Prince Bismarck frora office by his restless
and iraperious sovereign, the young emperor
William IL, who refused to be dominated by the of Germany
great statesman as his grandfather had been — Dismissal
(March, 1890). Frora that time onward the °' ^'^marck.
German monarch hiraself took up the place as the mainspring
of Continental politics which the Great Chancellor so long
occupied. It was from the first feared that his ambition and
energy would lead him into stirring up trouble all over Europe.
But for many years the dreaded crisis did not come, and
Europe began to hope that the Kaiser's foible for " sabre-
clanking " and indiscreet speeches and telegrams would never
lead to war. Unhappily his many-sided megalomania increased,
and from 1900 onward wise prophets foresaw inevitable strife.
The attitude of the English cabinet, in face of the new
alliances on the Continent, was bound to be reserved. Con
sidering how we were embroiled with France in
Egypt, and how suspicious we have always been policy of the
of Russia in the East, it might seera obvious for British
England to draw near to the Triple AUiance, to
whom our fleet would be invaluable in time of war. But any
formal treaty with the three powers might possibly involve us
in struggles in which we have no interest, and causes
of friction with Gerraany were continually arising over
colonial matters, owing to the perpetual annexation in remote
corners of the earth to which both Bismarck and William II.
were prone. Hence the foreign policy of the Salisbury rainistry
in 1886-92 (like that af their successors ever since) consisted
in careful balancing and neutrality, with the final object of not
offending both groups of Continental powers at once. If we
were led into such a misfortune, it might end in their sinking
their gradges and making common cause in order to plunder
o

194 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the British Empire — a possible though not a probable con
tingency in the premier's opinion.
Meanwhile the internal policy of the Conservative ministry
was conducted on much the same lines as that of the
Beaconsfield ministry of 1874-80 — the party had
Domestic leamt its lesson, and strove to combine practical
Lord reforms and administrative efficiency at home with
Salistay's ^j^g safeguarding of the empire abroad. The
first Chancellor of the Exchequer whom Lord
Salisbury appointed. Lord Randolph ChurchiU, tried to raise
a cry for economy, and actually resigned his office because
he thought that the army and navy estimates were too high.
But his declaration found no echo among the Conservative
rank and file, and he discovered that he had committed political
suicide by his hasty action. All through the years 1886-92
the cabinet continued to produce bills for domestic reforms
of the practical kind, such as the Local Government Bill of
1888, creating the elective county councils which have worked
so well ever since their creation ; and the Free Education Act
of 1 89 1, which made the education in elementary schools
gratuitous, by stopping the deraand for the "school pence"
which parents had hitherto been obliged to pay.
ofthe E*^*^ the most successful measure carried during
National the whole tenure of office by Lord Salisbury was
undoubtedly the conversion of the National Debt
in 1888. Mr. Goschen, a Liberal Unionist who succeeded
Lord Randolph ChurchUl as Chancellor of the Exchequer,
devised a plan for offering all the holders of the " Three per
Cents. " the choice of being paid off at the full nominal value
of their bonds, or of retaining them and receiving 2f per cent.
interest instead of the former 3 down to 1903, and jJ
per cent, after that date. Very few of the fundholders asked
for their money back, and after 1889 the country was saved
^1,400,000 a year by the transaction. So far was the value
of the securities from being lowered by the diminished interest.

THE PARNELL COMMISSION. 195
that the 2f per cent's were for some years worth more than the
old " Consols," and once rose to ;!^ii4. For Chancellors of
the Exchequer the later nineteenth century was a golden age.
The Irish question, in spite of the increasing quiet across
St. George's Channel, was never long forgotten ; and the two
chief incidents by which it was kept before the
public eye were very curious. The Times news- iZ^%TJ^T^
paper, publishing a series of articles on " Parnellism and the
and Crime," ended them by printing a letter commission
purporting to have been written by Pamell hiraself
in extenuation of the Phcenix Park murders. He was made
to say that policy compelled him to denounce them, but that
"Burke got no more than his deserts." Parnell denied the
authenticity of the letter, and in August, 1888, began an action
for libel against the Times, putting his damages at ;^roo,ooo.
The Governraent resolved to appoint a special coraraission
to inquire into all the charges brought by the Times against
Parnell and his followers. The three judges who sat to try
the raatter (September, 1888 — January, 1889), found that "the
respondents did nothing to prevent crirae, and expressed
no bond, fide disapproval of it ; that they disserainated newspapers
tending to incite to sedition and the commission of crimes;
and that they entered into a conspiracy to promote, by a
system of coercion and intimidation, an agrarian agitation for
the purpose of impoverishing and expelling from the country
the Irish landlords." But they also found that the supposed
letter of Parnell on the Phoenix Park outrage was a forgery,
and acquitted him of the charge of insincerity in denouncing
it. The document had been concocted and sold to the Times
by Richard Pigott, the disreputable editor of a Home-Rule
newspaper in Dublin, who finally confessed to the forgery,
fled to Spain, and there committed suicide to escape arrest.
For having been deceived by this villain, the Times had to pay
_^5ooo to Parnell.
The Gladstonian party elected to consider the verdict of

196 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the special commission as amounting to a complete rehabili
tation of ParneU, his followers, and his methods.
The O'Shea q j^j return to the House of Comraons he
divorce suit. received an ovation from them, and was loaded
with compliments and testimonies of confidence. But it was
only for a year more that they were to have the benefit of his
company and co-operation. In 1890, to the surprise of the
whole political world, he appeared in the unenviable position
of co-respondent in the Divorce Court. The petitioner was
his friend and lieutenant Captain O'Shea. Hardly any attempt
was made by Parnell to defend the case, which presented
many discreditable incidents. The verdict was
deooTe' accordingly given against him, but it seemed
Parnell from at first that it would not make rauch difference
shin ^ in his position, as his followers showed their
usual wonderful discipline, and re-elected him
their chief. But they had reckoned without Mr. Gladstone
and the " Nonconformist conscience.'' Public opinion in
England has got beyond the stage in which a notorious
evil-liver can be accepted as leader of a great party, and the
bulk of the Liberal masses, araong whom the dissenting
element was specially strong, were profoundly grieved and
disgusted at the exposure. Gladstone, expressing their views,
issued a manifesto to the effect that "the continuance of
Mr.. Parnell in his leadership would be productive of disastrous
consequences." The threat that English support would be
entirely withdrawn from Home Rule so disturbed the Irish
party, that a majority of them carae to the conclusion that their
chief must be dethroned. There was a bitter straggle among
them, for sorae feared their autocrat, and others could not for
get his past services. But the Catholic priesthood threw its
powerful influence into the scale of morality, and a majority of
the Irish members declared Pamell deposed, and elected in his
place Mr. Justin McCarthy, an amiable literary man whose con
trol over them was not likely to resemble the iron rale of Parnell.

DISRUPTION OF THE IRISH PARTY. 197
The ex-leader, however, refused to take the verdict of the
majority, and, with those of his followers who adhered to him,
formed a new party, which appealed to the
people of Ireland against " English dictation," ^^I"!''!'^^
as exercised by Mr. Gladstone. Parnellite and Parnellites—
Anti-Parnellite candidates contested every vacant 2^*'K,°^
T . , Parnell.
Irish seat, and ParneU himself scoured every
county in the kingdom, denouncing the traitors and weaklings
who had betrayed him. The discovery that his adherents
were in a minority only spurred him on to fresh exertions,
which his health could not stand. After some open-air
meetings held in inclement autumn weather, he caught in-
flararaation of the lungs, and died in 'a few days (October 6,
1 891). Contrary to expectation, his party survived his death;
the bitterness between the two sections of Irish members was
too great to allow them to amalgaraate, and the Parnellite and
Anti-Parnellite factions remained for long years estranged.
Nine raonths after the death of Parnell, Lord Salisbury
dissolved Parliament, which had now reached its sixth year of
life. The general election of July, 1892, resembled
aU its predecessors for the last quarter of the salfsbu^""^**
century, in that the outgoing rainistry lost by it. ministry-
It seems that there is always a considerable body Parties
of electors who are discontented with any existing
Government, and vote for the opposition, whatever may be
the politics of the " Ins " and the " Outs." This " swing of the
pendulum" was clearly visible in 1892. Though it could not
be alleged that Lord Salisbury's cabinet had been conspicuously
inefficient or unsuccessful in administering the erapire, yet
numerous constituencies with an old Liberal record, which
had gone Unionist at the time of the first Home Rule BUl, now
reverted to their forraer politics. In the new Parliament there
appeared 269 Conservatives and 46 Liberal Unionists, against
274 Gladstonians and 81 Irish Home Rulers. The ParneUite
faction seeraed alraost wiped out, and kept only nine seats. It

198 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
was notable that England had a clear majority against Home
Rule (273 to 197), whUe the Gladstonian majority of 40
in the whole United Kingdom consisted entirely of Irish
raembers. Gladstone, therefore, when he took office in August, 1892,
was to a great extent in the hands of his allies frora across St.
George's Channel. He was compeUed to make
Gladstone's Home Rule the main plank of his platform, though
premiership many of his British followers had their minds set
—The on other topics, such as the disestablishment of
L.1DE1*3.I
programme. ^^^ Churches of Scotland and Wales, the abolition
of the House of Lords, teraperance legislation in
the direction of " Local Option," anti-vaccination, universal
suffrage, the payment of merabers of Parliaraent, and number
less other local or sectional ideals. A political opponent
craelly styled them " a fortuitous concourse of enthusiasts or
faddists, grouped under a banner for which they felt a very
secondary interest." But whatever were the thoughts of some
of his followers, Mr. Gladstone himself was earnestly set on
carrying his Home Rule Bill ; to guide it through Parliament,
he trusted, would be the last great work of his life. He was
now eighty-three years of age, and personal infirmities were at
last beginning to tell on his strong physique ; if Ireland was
once satisfied, he hoped to sing his JVunc Dimittis, and retire
from the wearing duties of public life.
All through the autumn of 1892 the details of the forth
coming bill were carefully kept dark, but in Febraary, 1893, it
The second ^^^ launched on the waters of debate by the aged
Home Rule premier. The measure differed considerably from
Bill the project of 1886. It proposed to constitute
an Irish parliament of two houses, not of one. The upper
house was to consist of 48 members, chosen only by persons
with a rateable holding of ;^2o or more. The lower house was
to contain 103 merabers, representing the existing parliamentary
constituencies of Ireland. Another crucial difference from the

THE SECOND HOME RULE BILL. 199
bill of 1886 was that Irish members to the number of 80 were
to be left at Westminster and to vote on all Imperial raatters,
though not on purely English or Scottish concerns. A third
was that Ireland was to pay, not a lump sum of ;^3, 200,000,
but a percentage or quota of between four and five per cent, of
the whole revenues of the three kingdoms. But the raain
points of the first Home Rule .Bill were kept : Ireland was to
manage her own internal administration, police, laws, taxation,
and education.
The bUl was debated at enormous length ; it took the whole
time between February and September to carry it through the
Commons, and this was only accomplished by
stifling debate on many of its clauses by raeans of The bill
the " closure." But there was a certain unreaUty Commoi^
in the discussion, owing to the fact that every one and rejected
knew that the real tug of war would come only i^i-jg.
when the bill had passed the Lower House and
gone up to the Lords. The third reading passed (September i,
1893) by 301 to 267. The Lords then took it in hand, and made
short work of it ; on Septeraber 8 it was rejected by a raajority
of about ten to one (419 to 41).
Two courses were now open to Gladstone. He might dissolve
Parliaraent at once and ask for the country's verdict on the
conduct of the Upper House. If a triumphant
majority were again given in his favour, the Lords yonal po'si-
would probably bow before the storm and let the tion of the
bill pass, as they had done with the Reform Bill ^ki^tr^."'*
of 1832. On the other hand, it was open to him
to reject the idea of a dissolution, and to proceed to carry other
Liberal measures such as his party might desire, undertaking to
recur to Home Rule at the first favourable opportunity. From
taking the first course he was probably deterred by the fact that
no outburst of popular feeling foUowed the rejection of the bill ;
the news was received everywhere with apathy. There was
every reason to fear that a general election might only lead to

200 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
" the back swing of the pendulum," and a reversion towards
Unionism. Accordingly Gladstone retained office, and announced that
after a very short recess he should sumraon Parliaraent to raeet
Gl d tone again in November for active legis'lative work.
remains in But great difficulties met him : the Irish were
office. discontented ; the English Radicals were split up
into cliques and coteries which pulled different ways ; the party
discipline was evidently deteriorating. All that was done in
the way of important legislation was the passage of a Parish
Councils Bill, which gave parishes the sarae power of electing
boards to settle their local affairs which the last Conservative
Government had given to the counties.
In March, 1894, the premier announced that he was com
pelled to lay down his office ; the stress of work was too much
for one whose eyesight and hearing were both
rf^G^one beginning to fail. His last speech as prime
— Lord minister had consisted of a diatribe upon the per-
oremier'^ versity ofthe House of Lords in setting itself against
the House of Commons ; and he more than hinted
that, if they continued to act as they had done on the Home
Rule question, the nation must take in hand their reform or
extinction. It was, therefore, curious that a member of the
recalcitrant house should be chosen to fill Gladstone's vacant
place. His successor was Lord Rosebery, his Foreign Secretary,
an able man in early middle age, who had won considerable
applause by his administration of our external affairs, but who
could not be called a typical Radical or an enthusiastic Home
Ruler. In many ways he was more like the Whig statesmen
ofthe eighteenth century than the Liberal poUticians of 1895,
combining considerable literary talents and a wide knowledge
of foreign affairs with a keen passion for the turf. He is the
only British premier who has ever run winners of the
Derby (1894 and 1895).
On Mr. Gladstone's retirement it became at once evident

LORD ROSEBERY'S MINISTRY. 201
that his party depended raore for its coherence and strength on
his personal ascendency and unrivalled know- „.„
. Differences
ledge of parliamentary tactics than any one had of opinion
supposed. When the veteran chief was removed, in the Liberal
and his eloquence and enthusiasra were no longer
constraining his followers to obedience, they soon began to
fall asunder. One of Lord Rosebery's first public utterances
was a declaration that so long as England, " the predominant
partner " in the United Kingdom, was clearly opposed to Home
Rule, that question raust be relegated to the future. He ex
pressed a conviction that England might be converted, but the
tirae of her conversion was not yet come. Such an announce
ment from a minister whose majority consisted entirely of Irish
Home Rulers, was not likely to help him in keeping the party
together. It was obnoxious alike to Parnellites and Anti-
Parnellites. On the other hand, many English Gladstonians
disliked Lord Rosebery's foreign policy, which was prac
tically a continuation of that of the late Conservative
cabinet, and was decidedly Imperialistic in its tendencies.
He was the first Liberal minister since Lord Palraerston
who took a strong line with our neighbours, and refused to
be bullied. Radicals, too, coraplained that the party of
progress found an inappropriate head in a meraber of an
effete and reactionary House of Lords. Some styled hira
an opportunist, and denied that he could be called a Liberal
at all.
With half his party discontented and the other half apathetic,
it was not likely that Lord Rosebery would make much of a
record in legislation. His ministry only lasted g , £¦ , j
sixteen months (March, 1894-June, 1895). The Rosebery's
cabinet introduced a good many bills ; the most ¦"'''istry.
important were a Welsh Disestablishment Act, an Irish Land
Act, and a Local Option Bill to please the temperance party.
But it did not succeed in passing any one of them, the votaries
of each measure hindering the progress of the others, because

202 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
their own was not given priority. It was felt, moreover, that
all the debates were somewhat hoUow, for when such measures
were sent up to the House of Lords, they would certainly be
rejected ; yet the Government did not seem anxious to appeal
to the country against the attitude of the Peers. Such an un
satisfactory state of affairs was bound to come to an end, and
in June, 1895, Lord Rosebery took the opportunity of a chance
division on a small mUitary matter, which had gone against the
ministry, to dissolve Parliament.
The glooray forebodings of the rainisteriaUsts were more
than fulfilled by the general election of July, 1895. It resulted
in a coraplete defeat of the Gladstonians; they
Lord Salis- reappeared in the new house with only 177
bury s second '^'^ _, .
Ministry— A Supporters instead of 260, while the Conservatives
Unionist nurabered 340, and the Liberal Unionists 71.
Even if the 70 Anti-PameUite and 12 Parnellite
Irish members were credited to the Radical party, they were
StiU in a minority of more than 150. Lord Salisbury, therefore,
resumed office with the largest majority at his back that had
ever been enjoyed by an English premier during the last two
generations. He strengthened his position by recruiting his
ministry, not only from among Conservative leaders, but from
the ranks of the Liberal Unionists. The latter no longer
refused, as they had in 1886, to amalgaraate with their allies;
in addition to Mr. Goschen, who had been taken into the last
Conservative ministry, both Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamber
lain, representing respectively the Whig and the Radical wings
of their party, received cabinet office, the one as President of
the Council, the other as Secretary for the Colonies. Several
minor posts went to their followers. Thus the second Salisbury
administration had to be styled Unionist rather than Con
servative. The main part of the annals of 1895-99 consisted of a series
of foreign complications, for none of which the Government
could be held really responsible; they on several occasions

THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES. 203
assumed a threatening aspect, and only cleared away just
in time to allow England a free hand for the
South African War. Most of the troubles arose Foreign
from the inevitable responsibilities of erapire ; the Govern-
there is no quarter of the globe in which ment—
., ^ ^ . . Armenian
there raay not appear at any moment serious massacres.
problems for a British minister. When Lord
Salisbury assumed office the chief areas of disturbance were in
the Levant The timid but fanatical Sultan Abdul-Hamid, en
raged at a weak and futile Armenian rising in Asia, permitted,
or more probably ordered, a series of horrible massacres of
Armenians in districts far remote from any focus of insurrection.
These atrocities, extending over the years 1895-97, exceeded
in horror anything that happened in Bulgaria in 1877, but long
escaped punishraent. The Russian Government considered
that it was not to its interest to interfere, as it had no wish to
encourage the Armenian nationahty. The German emperor,
who was set on establishing a strong political and trade interest
at Constantinople, was equally determined to keep matters
quiet. England was the only power which really wished to
take any steps towards bringing pressure on the Sultan, and
failed to effect anything when it was obvious that she stood
alone — France, Italy, and the United States confining them
selves to platonic expressions of disgust at the atrocities. An
attempt was made by some of the Radical party to throw odium
on Lord Salisbury for his inability to chastise Turkey, but it
was discouraged by their raore responsible chiefs, who saw
that the rainistry could not act against the will of Russia and
Germany without incurring grave risk of war.
The Arraenian question was in full development when two
other crises arose. The first was a dangerous ^, „
The Vene-
quarrel with the United States. There was a dis- zuelan
pute on foot in South America, as to the exact Boundary
boundaries of the British colony of Guiana and
the Republic of Venezuela ; the territory in question was

204 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
mainly pathless jungle, but it was beUeved to contain valuable
gold-mines. On the pretext that any acquisition of territory in
America by a European power was contrary to the " Monroe
doctrine," the theory which states that " America is for the
Americans," President Cleveland sent a raessage to his
Congress, laying down with unnecessary peremptoriness a
claira to interfere in the matter. An outburst of anti-British
feeling in the United States followed, and in the winter of
1895-96 affairs looked very threatening. Fortunately, the
English Government kept cool, and American feeling soon
calmed down, so that later in the year an amicable arbitration
on the disputed boundary was arranged. It is pleasant to
see how entirely the relations between Great Britain and the
United States have changed since then, and to recognize that
the wise and conciliatory attitude of our cabinet has had
its reward.
The Venezuelan question was at its height when trouble
broke out in South Africa, caused by Dr. Jameson's mad
and piratical raid into the Transvaal Republic
Jmpero^r""^ (December 29— January i, 1896), of which we
and Dr. shall have to speak at greater length when dealing
raid^^""'^ with the colonies. The rage with which the
German emperor's most gratuitous telegram to
President Kruger about Jameson's surrender was received in
England, contrasted strangely with the quiet way in which
Mr. Cleveland's equally unwise utterances had been taken a
few weeks earlier. Noting the trend of English public opinion,
and finding himself unlikely to be supported by other powers,
Williara II. successfully explained away his telegram, and the
war scare passed over.
As if the Arraenian, Venezuelan, and Transvaal difficulties
were not enough for one year, we were on very bad terms
with France in 1896 over the interrainable Egyptian question.
The re-conquest of the Soudan from the Khalifa, the suc
cessor of the late Mahdi, having been deterrained upon, the

FRICTION WITH FRANCE. 205
French Government intrigued to frastrate it, by preventing the
Egyptian Government frora finding money. They
were so far successful that Great Britain had to ^!?P"tes
, ,. . with France
advance ;£,5oo,ooo herself, to provide for the in Egypt,
projected expedition. In West Africa, too, there West Africa,
was continually friction with French expedi
tions, which were pouring into the Niger valley, and cutting
off our old-established colonies from their trading communica
tions with the interior. The same was the case in the far
East, where the French Government had been encroaching
on Siam, and was trying to absorb the whole country; but
finally it carae to a compromise with Great Britain, by which
both powers agreed to leave alone what reraained of that
kingdom!. The year 1897 opened not quite so unprosperously as 1896,
but there was still trouble in the air. The Armenian question
was not exhausted when an insurrection broke out
in Crete, to which the Greek Government lent between
open support. Miscalculating the strength of the Turkey and
Greece
Turkish empire, or hoping that a vigorous stroke
might set all Eastern Europe in a flame, the Greeks finaUy
declared war on the Sultan, and tried to invade Macedonia.
But the powers refused to move ; it was generally thought that
Greece had no right to open the Eastern question in such a
violent manner, and she received no aid. Her raw army was
overwhelmed by the numbers of the Turks, and fled in panic
(April, 1897), so that the king had to sue for peace in the most
humiliating fashion. The powers insisted that the terms should
not be too hard, for no one wished to encourage the Sultan,
and Greece was let off with the cession of a few mountain
passes and a fine of four miUion Turkish pounds.
This Eastern crisis having passed over without any further
developments, the inhabitants of the United Kingdom and of
the whole British Empire were able to celebrate, undisturbed
by any grave trouble from without, the Queen's " Diamond

2o6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Jubilee" on the 20th of June, 1897. The pageant of her state
T-u n . visit to St. Paul's was notable, even raore than
1 ne yueen s ....
Diamond that of 1887, as showing the unanimity and
Jubilee. loyalty of her vast colonies and possessions;
representatives from every spot where the British flag waves
being given their place in the procession.
Many may have hoped, after the Jubilee, that the short
remainder of the century might pass by without our being
troubled with any more wars or ruraours of wars.
Settlement gyt the year 1898 was destined to see us nearer
of West ¦* , , . , ^ ^
African to an open breach with a first-rate European power
dispute with jj^^jj ^g have been since the end of the struggle
in the Criraea. We have already had occasion
to aUude more than once to the restless activity of France in
thrusting her way into the neighbourhood of our possessions,
both in Africa and in the East. Early in 1898 grave trouble
was caused by her enormous annexations in the valley of the
Niger and the Congo, where for the last fifteen years she had
been building up an empire which existed raore on paper than
in reality, a dozen forts and a few movable columns of black
troops being supposed to Gallicize a region half the size of
Europe, most of whose inhabitants have never seen a French
man. After pushing in behind our colonies of the Gambia and
the Gold Coast, and cutting them off from inland expansion, the
French, in 1896-97, made an attempt to seize the Lower Niger,
in spite of a treaty dating back to 1890 which defined our
interests in that quarter. It was only after considerable
friction that an agreement was made in June, 1898, by which
the tricolour was hauled down from some of their most
advanced stations, pushed well within the British sphere of
influence : much was given up to them that might have been
rightfully withheld. But this dispute was a raere nothing to
that which occupied the later raonths of the year.
The Soudan expedition, which had started in 1896 to destroy
the power of the Khalifa and reconquer the valley of the

BATTLE OF OMDURMAN. ao?
Middle NUe, had met with uniform success from its first start.
Under the able guidance of Sir Herbert Kitchener, the com
mander of the Egyptian army, it had cleared the
dervishes out ofthe province of Dongola in 1896, expediti"n^
after the battle of Ferket In the next year the Battle of
invaders had pushed on to the line of Abu-Hamed " "">ian.
and Berber, driving the eneray before them. Ini 898 the Khalifa
was to be attacked in the heart of his empire : a considerable
body of British troops was sent up to join the Egyptians, and
in April the advanced guard of the Arab host was destroyed
at the battle of the Atbara. In August Kitchener marched on
Omdurman, the enemy's capital, and was met outside its walls
by the Khalifa at the head of the full force of his barbarous
realm, at least 50,000 fighting men. In one long day's fighting
these fanatical hordes were scattered and half exterminated ; it
is calculated that 11,000 were slain and 16,000 wounded before
their fierce charge was turned back (September r). Omdurman
and Khartoum were occupied, and the Khalifa fled into the desert.
A few days later an unpleasant surprise was reserved for
Kitchener and the British Governraent. An insignificant French
force, under Major Marchand, about one hundred
men with five officers, had pushed across Central The Fashoda
^ dispute.
Africa from the Congo, and seized Fashoda, a
point on the Nile far above Khartoum. By means of this
futile occupation the French Governraent had apparently hoped
to establish a claim to a portion of the Nile valley. Long ago,
in Lord Rosebery's time, they had been warned that any such
proceedings would be treated as an " unfriendly act," but they
had nevertheless gone on. Lord Salisbury now informed the
French foreign minister that Major Marchand must be with
drawn, and that the gravest consequences would follow if he
were not. We were, in fact, on the brink of a war with France,
for her persistent " policy of pin-pricks," pursued for the last
ten years, had rendered any further yielding impossible. Fortu
nately, the French Government faltered and made submission :

2o8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
it was not ready to fight when its internal politics were confused
by the wretched Dreyfus case, and when its ally, the Czar,
refused any prospect of help. Marchand was withdrawn, and
a treaty was signed next year (March, 1899), conceding that the
whole NUe basin falls within the English sphere of influence.
This was certainly the greatest triumph for English diplomacy
since the Berlin treaty of 1878.
The Fashoda question seemed settled, but ere the century
was out grave trouble arose in another region, the extreme
The Far East Since the war of 1895 between China and
Eastern Japan, the Chinese empire seemed to be falling to
ques ion. pieces. Our own Nvish had ahvays been to preserve,
if possible, its integrity, to favour the progress of reforms, and
meanwhile to maintain the " open door" for all foreign commerce
in all its ports. This policy was crossed by that of Russia,
Germany, and France, all strongly protectionist powers, who
wished to establish spheres of influence in China, and to
monopolize the trade of them for theraselves. Russia had
lately obtained possession, euphemistically called a " lease,'' of
the northern harbours of Ta-lien-Whan and Port Arthur, while
Germany had seized Kiau-Chau and the surrounding territory
on similar terms. To balance this we ourselves took over Wei-
Hai-Wei, which faces Port Arthur across the great northern
Gulf of Pechili, and also extorted from the Chinese Govern
ment a promise not to alienate any of Central China, the basin
of the Yang-tse-Kiang river. In the last year of the century
a rebellion, accompanied by widespread raassacres, brought
European armies to Pekin, but did not lead to any final
settlement of the problem of the Far East (see page 241).
While our foreign relations in every part of the world had
State of ^een so strained during the last few years, it was
political natural that domestic matters should be less inter-
par les. esting. The Government had carried out a certain
amount of small social reforms, and one or two measures of
somewhat greater importance. The wisdom of some of them

THE END OF THE CENTURY. 209
is not quite clear. The relaxation of the vaccination laws seems
a mere piece of pandering to popular sentiment ; and the Irish
Local Government Act of 1898 was an experiment whose
dangers were obvious, and which could only be justified by
success. Now that the horizon abroad was clearer, many
hoped that the old policy of unpretentious domestic reform,
which Lord Beaconsfield first bound up with the Conservative
programme, might be persevered in by his successors. Few
governraents certainly were given such chances as the Salisbury
adrainistration; their adversaries were not only weak, but torn by
their internal discords. Mr. Gladstone died on May 19, 1898,
after three years of retirement from politics, at the great age
of eighty-eight His name and influence had done much to
keep his party together, even after he had withdrawn from
active life. Since his death they were more divided than
ever, and seemed unable to formulate any accepted political
programme. The Irish factions were but superficially recon
ciled, though they had once more chosen a common leader in
Mr. Redmond. The Radical party, after changing its leader
twice in three years, still seemed rent by intrigues resting on
purely personal quarrels. " Home Rule," as was reported on
good Radical authority, " was dead," yet it was difficult to see
under what other banner the heterogeneous elements of the
opposition were to unite. The effect of the South African war
of 1 899-1 902 seemed likely to disintegrate them stiU more.
One section affected to regard the struggle as caused by the
faults of the Salisbury ministry, while another loyally supported
the cause of the British Empire.
Meanwhile the century drew towards its close, with domestic
politics in a far more stagnant condition than at any other
date since the days of Palmerston. Foreign affairs, after the
termination of the Fashoda incident, seemed almost equally
quiet, and there were few who foresaw that the year 1899 was
to see the comraencement of the most arduous struggle which
Britain had faced since the victory of Waterloo. p

210 ENGLAND IN TIIE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
But in the October of the last year but one of the century
there broke out the great South African War, with which we
shall deal in detail in a later chapter. Its initial disasters were
over, though a tiresome and lingering guerilla warfare was
still in progress, when on January 22, 1901, the nation and the
empire were profoundly grieved by the death of the aged and
revered sovereign under whom the last two generations of
Englishmen had grown up. Having completed the sixty-third
year of her reign, Victoria had worn the British crown for a
longer period than any of her ancestors — even than her
grandfather, George IIL, who died in the fifty-ninth year after
his accession. As the years rolled on her subjects had realized
more and more their obligations to one who had set so high
the standard of public as well as of domestic duty. Great
things had been done in her name, and our descendants will
look upon the " Victorian era " as one of the most glorious
periods in our country's annals.
As we had occasion to remark in the chapter which dealt
with early-Victorian England, the years since 1850 had not
been fraught with such sweeping changes as those of the
previous half-century. For the raost part they had been
spent in the working out of problems which had already been
formulated in the previous generation. In things material this
had notably been the case. We were still engaged in perfecting
the inventions of our grandfathers, in developing already dis
covered realms of fact or thought, rather than in winning new
ones. Only in two lines of applied science was a revolution
beginning to be evident in the last decade of the century.
Motor transport, which was fast developing — aviation, of which
the first small beginnings were visible. But in literature, in
politics and in art, the great new departures belonged to the
first half of the century ; the second did but carry them on.
In sorae channels of activity the current seemed to be running
very slowly, and in none more so than in literature. The list
of great writers at work in 1900 compared miserably with that
of 1875, and still worse with that of 1850.

THE END OF THE CENTURY. 211
In some respects, it cannot be denied, the later years of the
century proved a time of disillusion and disappointment.
Many of the ideas that inspired enthusiasm forty years before
had been tried in the balance and found wanting. The state
of foreign politics seemed heartrending to those who remem
bered the dreams of peace, liberty, and international good-will,
which sanguine prophets held out as the inevitable results that
would follow from the unification of Germany and Italy, and
the establishment of a parliamentary republic in France. By
1900 it was clear that the united Germany created by the un
scrupulous hand of Bismarck, was, under the rule of the
domineering, restless, and autolatrous William II. , becoming
the great future danger. It was in the last year of the century
that his famous naval programme, which challenged the old
supreraacy of Britain on the seas, was first formulated. How
far it was to be developed in the next few years no one then
guessed. In the internal poUtics of Italy and France, since
the one becarae united and the other republican, no idealist
could find much that was inspiring for the present, or
comforting for the future. Parliamentary government by
cliques, with constant ministerial changes, is a depressing
spectacle. Equally broken was the ideal of the elder exponents of Free
Trade, who believed that a sort of industrial Millennium was
to set in, when England frankly abandoned protection and
opened her markets to all the producers of the world. The
hopes of 1850 had been disappointed. The same kind of pity
for lost hopes coraes over us when we read the writings of well-
raeaning persons of the last generation, who were imbued with
such a blind faith in scientific discovery that they made out of
it a kind of "gospel of science," which was to settle all mental
and moral problems. We no longer imagine that new facts in
chemistry or physiology will help rauch to reform the evU ways
of the worid. The idea that material progress must necessarily
lead to moral progress has gone out of fashion.

( ai2 )

CHAPTER X.
INDIA AND THE COLONIES.

When the nineteenth century opened, the British flag was
already planted in most of the regions where it now waves.
The British ^^^ ^'^ almost every quarter our possessions were
Empire in mere streaks along the coast-Une, or islands of
1800. moderate extent. The empire which the elder
Pitt, Clive, and Warren Hastings had won for us, was but
in an early stage of development. Beyond the Atiantic,
the West Indies, with their rich sugar and coffee planta-
r ada and ^^o"^^! were by far our most important posses-
the West sion. Canada was stUl mainly French in popula-
Indies. jjpj^^ ^^^ j^Qj. jg^ijy settled beyond Toronto and
Kingston ; inland and westward there was nothing but wastes
of forest and prairie, the "great lone land," which was
not to be taken under cultivation till the second half of the
century. Then the British claim to the North-Western Territory
as far as the Arctic Circle was only marked by a score of forts
belonging to the Hudson's Bay Corapany, to which the scanty
Indian population came to barter their furs and skins. A fort
on Nootka Sound by Vancouver's Island was then the sole
sign that British colonization was about to extend as far as the
Pacific. Across that ocean Austraha was already counted as a
. , ,. British possession, but the only settleraent that it
Australia. . , , . / „ „
contained was the convict colony of Botany Bay.
It had been founded so recently as 1788, and Sydney was in

THE EMPIRE IN 1801. 213
its earliest, and not over happy, infancy. In India we were
already the masters of broad provinces, and all the three pre
sidencies were in existence. Bengal and Bahar,
the prizes of CUve's victory at Plassey (1757), were
by far the most important of the territories that obeyed the
East India Company, and Calcutta was already the greatest
port of India. But the Bombay presidency comprised hardly
anything outside the island and city which give it its name, the
old dowry of Catharine of Braganza. The Madras presidency
consisted of four or five scattered patches of territory, taken
some from the Nizam of Hyderabad, some in a recent war
(1793) from Tippoo Sultan of Mysore. Three important
native princes, the Nawabs of Oude, of the Carnatic, and of
the Deccan (the Nizam), were bound to us by soraewhat
elastic ties of dependence ; they followed our lead in politics,
and supported large bodies of British sepoys by their subsi
dies. All three had become our vassals to get protection from
dangerous neighbours in the inland. Sultan Tippoo and the
freebooters of the Mahratta confederacy. Ceylon had just
been conquered from the Dutch (1796), but tiU the Treaty of
Amiens it was quite uncertain whether the island was to
reraain permanently in our hands.
In Africa our hold was still more insignificant ; half a dozen
forts on the pestilential coast of Guinea were our only
ancient colonies. We were in railitary possession . - . ,
of the Cape of Good Hope, taken from the Dutch the Medi-
in ijg6, but this important settlement had not terranean.
been confirmed to us by any treaty. As a matter of fact,
we were about to restore it to the Dutch at the Peace of
Amiens, and our perraanent hold on it was only to begin in
1806. How Egypt was won in i8or we have related in our
first chapter. In the Mediterranean there was no spot that we
could really call our own save Gibraltar. Frora Malta we had
just evicted the French garrison, and Minorca was also in our
hands for the moment (i 798-1 802). But though occupied

214 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
by British garrisons, they were in no sense British pos
sessions. At the peace of 1802 the position was grievously changed for
the worse, owing to the reckless way in which we gave back to
Results of Bonaparte aU the points of vantage from which we
the Peace of had, with such difficulty, evicted his republican
Amiens. predecessors. Of all our conquests, only Trinidad
and Ceylon were retained. Spain recovered Minorca, France
all her West Indian possessions, Holland the Cape of
Good Hope, Surinam and Demerara, Turkey her Egyptian
Pashalik. When, therefore, the short and troubled period of peace in
1802-3 had come to an end, we had to repeat the wearisome
Enelish process of eviction that had been carried out once
reconquesta, before between 1793 and 1801. In the first three
1803-1811. years of the struggle with Bonaparte, the dread
of an invasion of England was too pressing to allow us to send
large expeditions far from our own shores. But after 1805,
the sure and steady reconquest of the outlying dependencies
of France and Holland began. The Cape was recovered in
1806 ; Curagoa and the rest of the Dutch West Indies in 1807.
Martinique, Senegal with the other French ports of West
Africa, and also French Guiana (Cayenne), fell in 1809 ;
Guadaloupe, in the West Indies, and the Isles of France and
Bourbon in the East, were taken in 1810 ; and with the capture
of the great and wealthy island of Java in i8ix. Napoleon
ceased to possess a single transmarine colony. He had him
self sold Louisiana to the United States, in order to prevent it
falling into our hands, while in Hayti (St. Doraingo), once
the most wealthy of all the French dependencies, the garrison
had been exterminated by tht insurgent negroes, who had
formed an anarchic repubUc in servile imitation of their former
republican masters.
WhUe the tricolour was being lowered from one island after
another in the Eastern seas, we were in India deeply engaged

LORD WELLESLEY IN INDIA. 215
in a straggle against French influence, if not against French
armies. One of Bonaparte's favourite dreams india— Tha
was to stir up the princes of Hindostan against conquest of
their British neighbours. While in Egypt, he ^y^o"^^-
had sent his emissaries to Tippoo, Sultan of Mysore : buoyed
up by false hopes of French aid, the reckless son of the great
Hyder Ali had committed himself to war with England. But
his arraies had been scattered, and he hiraself fell sword in
hand as he strove to defend the breach at Seringapatam from
Baird's storraers (May, 1799). About half his dominions were
annexed to the Madras presidency.
The conquest of Mysore was but the first blow which Lord
Wellesley, the able and arabitious Governor-General of India,
directed against French influence. The leading
native power in the peninsula was the Mahratta hrfiiggi _
Confederacy, a league of five great rajahs, of and the
whom four owed a nominal allegiance to the fifth, rmifedera.cv
who bore the title of Peishwa. Most of these
princes had taken into their pay French officers, who had
raised and disciplined for them many battalions of trained
Sepoys. Scindia alone, the rajah of Gwalior, possessed some
30,000 or more of such troops. Wellesley believed that there
was a great danger for the British power in the existence of
such large masses of men led by French coraraanders, and
was anxious to induce the Mahrattas to come under British
suzerainty and dismiss their foreign officers. But the rajahs,
proud of their position as the chief military power in India,
had no wish to surrender their independence.
Fortunately for WeUesley's plans, the Peishwa, Bajee Rao,
having quarrelled with his two greatest vassals, Scindia and
Holkar, fled to seek the protection of the Bombay Restoration
Government, and was induced to buy his restora- of the
tion to his throne by signing the treaty of Bassein ^^'S"''''*"
(1802). By this instrument he undertook to subordinate his
foreign poUcy to that of the British, and to pay an annual tribute

216 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
for the subvention of a body of British troops. He was
accordingly restored to his seat at Poonah by armed force ; but
his submission to the governor-general led to two wars between
the East India Company and the other Mahratta princes.
First Scindia, and his ally the rajah of Nagpore, attacked the
British; but they were unable to hold their ground. Lord
Lake, starting from Bengal, beat Scindia's northern
Battle of . T ¦ /XT il Q \ 4^1
Laswari— army at Laswan (November i, 1803), and took
Capture of Delhi, the ancient capital of India, There he
found the aged Mogul emperor. Shah Alum, who
had long been the captive of the Mahrattas, and, having rescued
him from his oppressors, proceeded to use his name to
legitimize all our doings in Hindostan. Meanwhile, Arthur
Wellesley, the governor-general's brother — the
Ass and Wellington of a later day — was operating further
Argaura— to the south. At Assaye he cut to pieces Scindia's
sub^iS. French-trained Sepoys, in the bloodiest struggle
that India had seen. Fording a deep river and
advancing on a narrow front under an overwhelming fire of
artUlery, he threw his troops upon the disciplined battalions of
the Mahratta chief. Nearly a third of the British fell, but
Scindia's host was broken and his regular troops annihilated
(September 23, 1803). A few weeks later Wellesley attacked
the rajah of Nagpore at Argaura, and inflicted upon him an
equally severe lesson (Noveraber 28, 1803). The allied princes
thereupon carae to terms, and acknowledged the British
supremacy. Scindia was compelled to surrender Delhi and the
Doab, the nucleus of our " North-West Provinces," as also
some maritime districts opposite Borabay, while the rajah of
Nagpore ceded Orissa, on the eastern coast of India, which
was incorporated with the presidency of Bengal. Immediately
after, it becarae necessary to attack Scindia's rival
f "^"j^'°° and enemy, Holkar, who tried in his turn to expel
the British from North-Western India. He was
an evasive and lightly moving enemy, who proved very difficult

INDIA IN 1805. 217
to catch, but was finally run to ground and beaten at Deeg and
Furrackabad (November, 1804).
Before Holkar was quite disposed of, Wellesley had been cora
pelled to resign the governor-generalship and to retire home,
on account of his many quarrels with his masters,
the East India Corapany (1805). They did not Lord
appreciate the greatness of his conceptions or the the^truV^
splendour of his conquests, and only thought of creator of
him as a great spender of money. It was Wellesley Empke.^"
who really built up the British Erapire in India.
Before his day we did but possess a few scattered provinces
spread along the coast. He it was who conceived the idea of
pressing aU the native states to accept " subsidiary treaties,"
and to acknowledge the suzerainty of the East India Company.
By seizing and retaining Delhi, the old iraperial city, he claimed
for his masters the supreraacy in the peninsula, which had slipped
out of the hands of the Moguls eighty years before. His un
bounded power over the native princes who were vassals of the
Corapany, was shown by his annexation of the whole of the
Carnatic in 1801, because its nawabs had drifted into bank
ruptcy and showed themselves utterly unable to administer
their broad realm. For simUar reasons, he cut short the
borders of our almost equally unsatisfactory dependent the
Nawab of Oude.
After Wellesley's work was accomplished, we can for the
first time speak of the British Empire of India ; before then
there was at most a British Empire in India, with which large
sections of the peninsula had no political connection.
The working out of Wellesley's plans was not destined to be
completed for many years. His successors. Lord
Cornwallis (1805) and Lord Minto (1807-13), ^'•pf"/"'"
made no attempt to finish the subjection of Lords Corn-
the native states, merely patching up a series ^^j^nto^"*^
of treaties which secured the integrity of our new
frontiers. Lord Minto devoted hiraself to the complete

4i8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
conquest of Napoleon's scattered colonies in the east, occu
pying Bourbon and the Isle of France in 1809, and so making
an end of the privateers who, from their base in those islands,
were wont to swoop down on the Indiamen that passed by on
their long voyage round the Cape. He also overran Java and
the Spice Islands in 18 11, sending against them the largest
expedition that had yet been fitted out in British India. Thus,
when the Congress of Vienna met in 1814, the tricolour flag
had been swept completely out of all the Eastem seas.
Nothing is more striking in the history of the Napoleonic
war than the reckless generosity with which we restored, in
1814, the greater part of their lost colonies to
Generous the new governments of France and Holland, in
Gre^ ° order that they might make a fair start in their
Britain at subjects' eyes, and not take over the administra-
of Viennaf '¦i°'^ laden with the burden of their predecessors'
sins. In our solicitude for the welfare of Louis
XVIII. and King William I., we gave back well-nigh all that
we had conquered since the beginning of the century. Malta
was retained, and the Ionian Isles, with the full consent of their
inhabitants; there was no reason why the latter should any
longer follow the fate of Venice, or the forraer be handed
back to the obsolete order of the Knights of St. John. We
also kept the French Isle of Fiance and the Dutch settieraent
at the Cape of Good Hope, as strategical points of supreme
importance covering the route to India. But all the rest was
surrendered. Java, an empire in itself, the very pearl of the
East, went back to Holland along with Cura5oa and Surinam.
To the French were restored not only their old West Indian
Islands and their insignificant possessions in India, but several
smaU colonies whose cession in 1814 would have caused no
friction, but whose existence in later times led to many un
foreseen developments. It was their restored possession ofthe
Isle of Bourbon which sent the French on their great venture
in Madagascar, seventy years later, From Gor^e, the

THE TREATY OF VIENNA. 219
pestilential settleraent on the West African coast, they have
gone out to conquer the "hinterland" of our old colonies
of Gambia and Sierra Leone. Most unnecessary of all was
the restoration of St. Pierre and the fishery rights on the
coast of Newfoundland, which have been used ever since
to hinder the natural development of that ancient depend
ency of the British Crown. All these places, insignificant
perhaps, in 1814, but of infinite importance in modern
days, Liverpool and Castlereagh gave away with reckless
indifference. Down to 1815 the story of the Napoleonic war lends to the
history of the British Empire a certain unity which disappears
after that date is passed. From the Congress of Vienna down
to the days of Lord Beaconsfield and the new Imperialism, there
are very few connecting links between the annals of our various
dependencies. The history of each group must be foUowed
out separately down to the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. India first deraands our attention. At the tirae of the Treaty
of Vienna there ruled at Calcutta a governor-general who was a
worthy successor to Wellesley, and completed the
work from which his great predecessor had been ^}^„ ¦ ^^^
so prematurely withdrawn. Francis Rawdon, Hastings in
Marquis of Hastings, one of the last surviving q^^^uI^^^
heroes of the war of American independence, was
already an old man when he went out to India in 1813, but he
ruled the land for ten years, and left his mark behind him. His
first efforts were directed against the Gurkhas, the warlike
raountain tribes of Nepaul, who were too prone to make raids
on the northern limits of Bengal. They were defeated after
much hard fighting (1814-16), and driven back into their hills;
but, since we made no effort to take away their independence,
they retained no gradge against us, and have served as
auxiliaries with great fideUty and courage in all our subsequent
wars.

220 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
After driving back the Gurkhas, Lord Hastings cleared
Central India of the Pindaris, a nuraber of companies of
mercenary adventurers, like those which infested
subjugation Mediaeval Italy, who had been for many years
of the the scourge of the Deccan. Directing expeditions
Mahrattas. . , fi. r n ..u *u -j ¦
against them from all the three presidencies,
so as to enclose them in a ring, he gradually hunted them
down, tUl their bands broke up and their leader Cheetoo fled-
alone into the jungle, there to be devoured by a tiger (1818).
The Pindari war led Hastings into a greater struggle with the
greater part of the Mahratta states. Their princes had given
the freebooters secret help, hoping to weaken the English
power by their aid. The leader in the plot was the Peishwa
Bajee Rao, "who had never ceased to regret the state of
dependence in which he had been placed by the Treaty
of Bassein, and wished to throw off his vassalage to the East
India Company. His allies were Appa Sahib, the rajah of
Nagpore, and the regents who ruled the dorainion of the
young Holkar, the rajah of Indore. But formidable as the
confederacy appeared, Hastings crushed it without rauch effort
The allies were never allowed to combine : the rajah of
Nagpore was defeated before the gates of his own capital
(Noveraber, 181 7); the arraies of Holkar were scattered at
Mahidpore (Deceraber, 1817). The Peishwa, hunted frora his
capital Poonah, was brought to bay at Ashtee (February 19,
1 8 18), and so thoroughly beaten that he came into the British
camp and surrendered himself. This war raade an end of
the Mahrattas as a danger to India; the confederacy was
dissolved, and the Peishwa's dominion annexed to the Bombay
presidency. The Nagpore rajah was deposed, the Holkar
state was shorn of a third of its territories. Not only were
Holkar and the new rajah of Nagpore compeUed to become
British vassals and to conclude subsidiary treaties with the
East India Company, but their compeers Scindia and the
Gaikwar of Baroda, though they had not been engaged in

SUBMISSION OF THE MAHRATTAS. 221
the war, were induced to follow their example. Thus the
British Empire was extended over all Western India, and ihe
only states south of the Himalayas which did not now faU

utider our domination were the Sikhs beyond the Sutiej, and
the ameers of distant Scinde.
From 1818 to 1838 India enjoyed a long interval of
comparative quiet, during which the native princes settled

222 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
down to the new state of things, whUe the governor-generals
were mainly engaged in organizing our newly
The Burmese acquired possessions. The only war of impor
tance in the period was one with the King of
Burmah (1824-26). That barbarous potentate, in utter ignor
ance of the strength of British India, indulged in vain dreams
of conquering Bengal. But when his bands crossed the
frontier they were easily routed, and an expedition, sent by
sea to Rangoon, pushed up the Irrawadi to within a few
miles of Ava, the capital of Burmah. Thereupon the king
sued for peace, and obtained it on conditions of ceding
Assam, at the foot of the Himalayas, and the long swampy
coast district of Aracan.
Events far more important than the Burmese war began
in 1838. Ever since the beginning of the century we had
looked with suspicion on the gradual advance
advan^ °^ ^^^ Russians in Central Asia. Bonaparte
towards the had twice (1800 and 1809) endeavoured to
frontier. ^'^^^ °° ^^^ Russian Government to an overland
expedition against India, a project wholly
chimerical, as long as the waste lands east of the Caspian
and the independent khanates of Turkestan interposed a
barrier of many hundred railes between the Russian bases
at Orenburg and Astrakhan and the westernmost limits of
Hindostan. But since 1809 the Russians had been pushing
steadily forward; and in 1837 they had encouraged their
ally the Shah of Persia to besiege Herat, the frontier fortress
of Afghanistan, and had begun negotiations with the Ameer
Dost Mahomed, who raled at Cabul.
The advisers of Lord Auckland, governor-general from
1835 to 1842, were unreasonably alarmed at these inte-igues,
and resolved to go forward to meet a danger which was not
yet imminent. A former raler of Afghanistan, Shah Sujah,
was Uving as an exile in India since his expulsion by Dost
Mahomed: we concluded a treaty with him (1838), by which

THE FIRST AFGHAN WAR. 223
we undertook to replace him on his throne, he, on his part,
undertaking to becorae the friend and ally of the
British Government. Our army crossed the Auckland's
Indus, traversed the Bolan Pass, occupied Can- Afghan^
dahar, and stormed the fortress of Ghuzni (1839). Restoration
Shah Sujah was placed upon the throne of his 9^^?''*^
_,: ,,„.., , Sujah.
ancestors at Cabul, and the British troops began
to withdraw towards India ; but, as some of the Afghans were
StiU up in arms, we left garrisons at Cabul and Candahar
to aid the Shah.
Any ruler maintained on his throne b"y British bayonets
is bound to be unpopular araong the wild and fanatical tribes
of Afghanistan, and Shah Sujah's subjects were Destruction
deterrained not to submit to the friend of the of the Cabul
infidels. In the winter of 1841, insurrections S^^'^o"-
broke out all over the country; the Candahar force, under
General Nott, successfully maintained itself, but a dreadful
disaster happened at Cabul. There our troops were in the
weak hands of General Elphinstone, a veteran broken down
by age and disease, who ought never to have been left in
such a responsible position. He divided his force, sending
one brigade under Sir Robert Sale to hold the fortress of
Jelalabad, which commands the main pass frora India. With
the other he intended to overawe Cabul; but the city rose
in arms, and soon he was blockaded in his cantonments.
His provisions ran short, and after much desultory fighting
he offered to evacuate the country if he Was given a free exit.
The treacherous Afghans eagerly accepted the proposal, but,
when the troops were threading their way through the snows
of the Khoord-Cabul pass, fell upon them and in a ranning
fight of three days exterminated the whole force. A single
officer. Dr. Brydon, cut his way to Jelalabad with the news
that all his comrades had perished. This was the greatest
disaster we have ever suffered in the East: one English
regiment, the 44th foot, and five regiments of sepoys, 4500

224 ENGIAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
men in aU, were absolutely annihilated; with them perished
more than 10,000 of their Hindoo carap followers.
The Indian Govemment was slow to beUeve in such an
unprecedented calamity, but when it was realized, a powerful
„ , force under General PoUock entered Afghanistan
GeneralPollock's to relieve Jelalabad. The garrison of that place,
expedition, however, had not only defended it, but had sallied
out into the open and defeated the main array of the enemy.
Pollock, picking up Sale's victorious troops on the way, marched
on Cabul, on which point Nott also pushed forward with the
Candahar brigade. The Afghans were thoroughly routed;
Cabul was taken, and its chief buUdings blown up as a retribu
tion for the treacherous massacre of Elphinstone's army. But
Shah Sujah had been assassinated long ago, and there was no
object in lingering in the barren and hostUe country; so our
armies were withdrawn, and Dost Mahomed was permitted to
resume the throne from which we had driven him (1842). For
more than thirty years successive governor-generals severely let
alone the country where we had suffered such a disaster. ¦ Lord
Auckland's " forward policy," indeed, had been wholly unjusti
fiable; he did not know the Afghans, and he had failed to
see how difficult it would have been to hold such a country
when the powerful and independent Sikh kingdom, occupying
the Punjaub, lay between us and the only direct route to
Cabul. The Afghan war was finished by Lord Ellenborough, an able
administrator, whose only fault was his tendency to issue
magniloquent proclamations in the style of the
Lord Ellen- first Napoleon (1842-45). He had a dangerous
Batt^^oF" crisis to face, as our prestige had been greatly
Meanee— shaken by the Cabul disaster, but came safely
oPs^^ad^" through it. He added to tiie Umits of British
India by annexing Scinde, whose ameers had
shown symptoms of hostility in 1843. They were subdued by
Sir Charles Napier, a veteran of the Peninsular War, who beat

THE SIKH WARS. 225
at Meanee an army of more than twelve times his own
numbers, composed of gallant tribesmen who repeatedly pushed
up to the very bayonets ofthe British troops (Febraary 17, 1843).
This was one of the most astonishing victories ever gained in
Hindostan. Two years later we found ourselves involved in a war with
the sole remaining state in In4ia which preserved its full
independence. For nearly fifty years the Punjaub Runjitsingh
hart formed a powerful kingdom under the Sikh and the Sikh
despot Runjit Singh, a man of genius, who had P°'"''^'''
formed his co-religionists into an invincible army, with which
he conquered his Mohararaedan neighbours and held down all
India north of the Sutiej. Knowing the might of Britain, he
had always kept on the most friendly terras with the East India
Company, but when he died in 1839 trouble ensued. The
proud and fanatical army which he had created would obey no
meaner masters, and Runjit Singh's successors perished, the
victims of military mutinies or palace conspiracies. Quite
contrary to the wiU of their nominal ralers, the Sikh troops
resolved to attack the British, hoping to take Delhi and
conquer the whole peninsula. They were for a moment not
far from succeeding, and if their leaders had been capable and
loyal to each other, the consequences of their adventure might
have been tremendous.
In December, 1845, they crossed the Sutiej into British
territory with 60,000 men, and found themselves confronted by
a rauch smaUer army hastily gathered together by
Lord Hardinge, the governor-general. He en- Hardinge
trusted his troops to Sir Hugh Gough, a hot- and the
headed old soldier, whose simple tactics consisted invasion.
in hurling his infantry straight at the enemy and
endeavouring to sweep them away with one desperate charge.
This sort of attack answered well enough against ordinary
Indian troops, but the Sikhs were made of sterner stuff. The
fighting with them was very desperate; no less than five
Q

226 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
pitched battles were fought between December i8, 1845, and
Febraary 10, 1846.
The cracial struggle was at Ferozeshah, where Gough's head
long courage faUed on the first day to force the Sikh lines;
B ttl s f ^^^ Sepoy battalions flinched, and his European
Ferozeshah regiments suffered the raost frightful losses. Next
andSobraon. ^^^ ^^ resumed the straggle; but the enemy,
whose losses had also been tremendous, had not the heart to
face two pitched battles on successive days, and sullenly retired.
The campaign terminated at Sobraon (February 10), when
Gough had to storra a circular entrenched position with the Sutiej
at its back. Leading his troops forward with his customary
impetuosity, he saw them driven back frora assault aftei
assault. But finally the Sikhs ungamished one front of their
works, while reinforcing the rest ; a British coluran penetrated
into the gap, and the gallant enemy were finally driven into the
Sutiej, where thousands perished when their bridge of boats
broke down. Ten days later the British array appeared in
front of Lahore, and the Sikh government asked for terms,
We recognized the young rajah Dhuleep Singh as the successor
of Runjit Singh ; but he was ordered to pay a heavy fine, to
cut his army down to 30,000 men, and to surrender the south
eastern corner of his dominions, where they reached nearest to
Delhi. But the spirit of the Sikhs was not yet broken ; they looked
upon themselves, not as beaten, but as betrayed by incompetent
generals, and were quite ready to try the fortune
Battles of ^^ f^ ^ .. r o t,
Chillian- of war once more. Only two years after Sobraon
wallah and (March, 1848), Moolraj, the governor of Mooltan,
massacred some British officers, and appealed to
the old army to take the field once more and throw off the
foreign yoke. The whole Punjaub at once blazed up into
insurrection, and the work of 1846 had to be repeated.
The British troops were once again placed under the command
of the gallant old Gough, who showed that he had learnt

SETTLEMENT OF THE PUNJAUB. 227
little from experience. After two preliminary checks, in
partial engagements, in the autumn of 1848, he brought the
main Sikh army to action at Chillianwallah. There he delivered
a frontal attack on an enemy screened by a jungle and covered
by a tremendous fire of artillery. Sorae of the British brigades
were almost blown to pieces, but the valour of the survivors
evicted the Sikhs from their lines, and ChiUianwaUah counts as a
victory (January 1 1, 1849). ^ut the war was really settled by the
decisive action of Goojerat (February 6), where for once Gough
was persuaded to allow his artillery to batter the enemy's lines
before the infantry was let loose. Shaken by the fire of eighty
heavy guns, the Sikhs broke when the attack was delivered, and
the British won the field with small loss — a great contrast to
their sufferings at Ferozeshah and Chillianwallah.
A raonth later the whole Sikh army laid down its of^the"^"'
arras, and the Punjaub was annexed (March, Punjaub by
1849). The problera of its settleraent appeared f^^ ren'J-e
likely to be so difficult that picked men were
drafted in from all the presidencies to take up the task,
their chief being the administrator Sir John Lawrence. The
work was so well done that the new province settled down into
great quiet and content, and when, eight years later, the Sepoy
mutiny broke out, we were able to enlist our old enemies of the
Sikh army by the thousand to put down the rebels of Delhi
and Oude.
The annexation of the Punjaub was carried out by Lord
Dalhousie, who as governor-general did more to extend the
limits of British territory than any of his prede- , , „ .
, , T • /• TT • TT Lord Dal-
cessors since the Marquis of Hastings. He was housie and
strongly of opinion that the government of the the native
feudatory princes was so bad, that it was for the
true interest of India that as many of them as possible should
be got rid of, and their possessions taken under direct British
rule. With this object, he refused to fall in with the prevailing
native custom by which childless ralers were aUowed to adopt

228 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
into their family any one whom they chose, and to pass on to
Annexation them their full rights of sovereignty. In this way
of Satara he declared, in 1848, that the Mahratta state of
and Nagpur. q^^^j.^^ ^ad fallen in as a lapsed fief for want of an
heir. In 1853 the much larger and raore important principality
of Nagpore was annexed on the same principle, and formed
into the " Central Provinces." Jhansi, a third Mahratta state,
was taken over for the same reason in 1854. When Bajee
Rao — the Peishwa who had been stripped of his dorainions, but
not of his title, in 1818 — died in 1853, Dalhousie refused to
allow his title to be passed on to his adopted son Dhundu Punt,
and gave him a pension instead. These acts seemed to the
Hindoos to strike at the roots of all faraily life and ancestral
custom. They could not understand the English view, by
which an adopted child is regarded as something very different
from the actual son of his benefactor. In their ideas, the
annexation of Nagpore or Jhansi was simple robbery.
Dalhousie also succeeded in shocking Mohararaedan feeling
by his seizure of Oude in 1856. The last king of that state
was an incurable spendthrift and a reckless
of Oude and oppressor of his subjects. Dalhousie, after
part of repeated warnings, declared him deposed, and
Burmah. ^, ^ ' . . r ¦ • ,., ,.
made a new province out of his wealthy but
dUapidated realm. To these enormous confiscations inside
India, he adde'd one external conquest. The king of Burmah
having molested the English merchants of Rangoon on many
occasions, Dalhousie declared war on hira in 1852, and drove
him out of Pegu and the lands at the mouth of the Irrawaddy.
They were added to Aracan, and forraed into the new province
of British Burmah.
Dalhousie was something raore than a raere annexer of
Daihousie's territory. He was a great reforraer and organizer,
internal introduced railways and telegraphs into India,
po icy. fostered the education of the natives, and en
deavoured to give them more places in the civil service than

ORIGINS OF THE SEPOY MUTINY. 229
had seemed good to his predecessors. Nevertheless, his actions
must be considered as having contributed to a very considerable
degree towards precipitating the great rebellion which broke
out soon after his departure for England in 1856.
The origins of this fearful convulsion are not hard to trace,
though the exact proportion which each cause had in pro
ducing the rising of 1857 is more difficult to
ascertain. The Mutiny was mainly a mUitary ^usesofthe
conspiracy ; it was only in Oude and a few other Condition of
districts that the population of the countryside ^^^ native
took any active part in it. For some years before
the outbreak the spirit of the native army had been steadily
deteriorating. The old notion of the invincibility of the
British arms had been shaken by the Afghan disaster of 1841,
and by the narrow escape from defeat in the Sikh carapaign of
1845-46. No tie of natural loyalty bound the Sepoys to the
government which they served ; indeed, a very large proportion
of them were born subjects of the king of Oude, and resented
his deposition. They were kept trae by their pay and im
munities, by their respect and affection for their officers, and by
their wholesorae dread of the European garrison of India. All
these motives had been shaken of late ; the Government had
been offending them by sending them on over-sea expeditions
to Burmah and China. Some of their old privileges, e,g. extra
pay for service beyond the Sutiej, had been abolished. The
tie of personal loyalty to their hierarchical superiors had been
rauch loosened; the British officers no longer spent their whole
life with their regiment, and were often transferred from corps
to corps or detached on civil employ. The comparative
easiness of obtaining leave to England since the Overland
Route had been invented, and steamships had brought India
within six weeks' voyage of London, was not without its effect.
Moreover, in 1857 the proportion of British to native troops in
India was abnormally low ; many of the regiments summoned
to Europe for the Crimean war had not been replaced, and

230 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
what white troops there were had been raainly concentrated in
the newly annexed Punjaub. Between the Sutiej and Calcutta
there were, at the moraent of the outbreak, only six British
battalions. A great mercenary army which has begun to despise its
masters, and thinks it has a grievance against thera, is ripe for
revolt. The Sepoys had been so much pampered and petted
by the Government, that they thought that it could not do
without thera. It only needed a cause and a cry to spur
thera into open rebellion.
The cause was supplied by political intriguers, largely drawn
frora the ranks of those who had suffered by
Sepoys— Daihousie's annexations. The dependants of the
The greased ex-king of Oude were a centre of discontent among
CcLrtridsreSi the Mohararaedans, and those of the ex-Peishwa
among the Mahrattas. The secret progrararae laid before
the Sepoys was the restoration of the Mogul emperor — who
still lived as a pensioner at Delhi — as the national sovereign of
India, and the restoration under his suzerainty of all the lately
annexed states. This scheme would appeal more to Mohararae
dans than Hindoos, but the revival of the Peishwaship would
not be without its effect araong the latter. The actual
cry which set the sraouldering elements of rebellion ablaze
was a foolish ramour, to the effect that the Government was
about to attempt to force Christianity on its subjects. This
was to be done, so it was averred, by defiling the soldiers.
The grease of pigs and of cattle was to be smeared on the
cartridges which were being issued to the troops for the new
rifle, with which they were being re-armed. Hindoos would
lose their caste by touching the lard of the sacred cow, and
Mohararaedans be polluted by handling the fat of the swine,
All being contarainated, the "Sircar" would invite thera to
become Christians ! This incredibly siUy tale found implicit
credence in many quarters, and seems to have provoked the
outbreak of the rebellion before its organizers were quite ready

OUTBREAK OF THE MUTINY. 231
It would seem that a general rising had been planned for the
month of May, but even before that date isolated risings
occurred. The first at Barrackpur, near Calcutta, was easily
suppressed, and the tivo regiments which took part in it were
disbanded. The Governraent had no idea that they were
dealing with a mere corner of a great conspiracy.
The serious trouble began with the revolt of the brigade at
Meerat, a great cantonment near Delhi, on May 7, 1857. The
mutineers, after shooting raany of their officers,
marched on the ancient capital, induced the Outbreak at
troops there to aid them, and miurdered many Seizure"of
scores of Europeans. They then went to Bahadur Delhi-
Shah, the aged Mogul prince, and saluted him as the Mutiny.
their monarch. He was placed on the throne of
his ancestors, and hailed as Emperor of India. The news of
the seizure of Delhi by the rebels flew round northern Hin
dostan in a raoment, and was followed by mutinies in almost
every cantonment where a native regiment lay. In most cases
their rising was accompanied by the murder of their officers
under circumstances of gross treachery and cruelty. In a few
weeks the whole of Oude, with Rohilcund and the greater part
of the North-West Provinces, were in the possession of the
insurgents. The rising spread into Bahar at one end, and into
the Central Provinces at the other. The main centres of
revolt were Lucknow, where a young relative of the old ruler
of Oude was proclaimed king, and Cawnpore, which was seized
by the would-be Peishwa Dhundu Punt, the adopted son of
Bajee Rao — a miscreant better known by the name of the
Nana Sahib. The English who escaped massacre sought
refuge in the few stations, such as Agra and Allahabad, where
there was a European regiment in possession.
The blow was so sudden and unexpected that for a raoment
the Government was paralyzed : the Punjaub, where lay the
greater part of the white troops, was separated from Calcutta
by four hundred miles of territory which had passed to the

232 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
rebels. It was from Sir John Lawrence in the Punjaub that the
first signs of movement came. After disarming
falUf Ddhi. *® Sepoys in his district, he sent a small force
of five thousand British troops against Delhi.
They forced their way to its gates, and there established them
selves, in order to attack a city garrisoned by twice their own
number of regular troops. So began a siege which lasted from
June 8 to September 20. Lawrence pushed up to aid the
besiegers all the white men he could spare, and a quantity
of new Sikh levies, raised raainly from our old enemies of 1848.
They behaved admirably, and never for a moment showed any
signs of disloyalty. On September 14 General Nicholson
stormed the city, and after six days of desperate street fighting
the rebel army broke up, and the emperor and all his family
were taken prisoners. The aged Bahadur Shah himself was
spared, but his sons and grandson were shot without a trial by
Major Hodson, the fierce cavalry leader who had followed
up and seized them.
Meanwhile, two sieges further to the south had been
engrossing the rebels of Oude. At Cawnpore General Wheeler,
with four hundred fighting men and a much larger
J"^ number of woraen and children, was beleaguered
Cavynpore . . . °
massacre by the Nana Sahib in sorae flimsy entrenchments.
—Siege of Worn out by heat and starvation, the garrison
Lucknovy. . ¦' .
yielded on terms, when they were promised a free
passage by river to Calcutta. But the treacherous prince feU
upon thera as they were getting into their boats, and slew aU
the men in cold blood (June 27). Two or three hundred
women and children were saved alive for a tirae, but when he
heard that an English force was drawing near Cawnpore, the
infaraous Mahratta had the whole of his unfortunate captives
hacked to pieces and cast into a well (July 15). A siege with
a very different result was proceeding at Lucknow, where Sir
Henry Lawrence, with a single British battalion and a great
mass of English fugitives, was being attacked by the main body

RELIEF OF LUCKNOW. 233
of the Oude rebels. Lawrence was shot early in the siege, but
his companions defended the extemporized fortifications of the
Residency for three raonths against sorae forty thousand rebels,
till relief at last carae.
It was brought by Sir Henry Havelock, who had arrived at
Calcutta with the troops returning from the Persian war,* and
was promptly sent up comitry with a mere handful
of men, to endeavour to save Cawnpore and Lucknow "
Lucknow. He arrived too late to help Wheeler's
unhappy garrison, but on September 25 cut his way through
to Lucknow, and there established himself in the midst of the
rebels, whom he was not strong enough to drive away. The
gallant defenders of the Residency were not finally relieved till
November, when Sir Colin Campbell, who had been sent out
from England with reinforceraents, came up and escorted them
away from their stronghold.
By this tirae Delhi had faUen, and England was pouring
troops by tens of thousands into Calcutta and Bombay. The
rest of the war consisted in the gradual hemming
in and hunting down of the rebels by Sir Colin ,^f^7ctmln?s"
Campbell's army. In December he defeated, —Batties of
outside Cawnpore, the troops of Scindia, who, in G^|'i||fr^'^
spite of their master's orders, had taken arms
and joined the Oude insurgents. In February, 1858, he
marched for the second time on Lucknow, and stormed palace
after palace, till, after three weeks of hard fighting, the insur
gents abandoned the place and fled into RohUcund (March
21). There they were beaten again at the battle of Bareilly
(May 7), and finaUy dispersed and fled to their homes. To
the great grief of his pursuers, the infaraous Nana Sahib escaped
the sword and the rope, and got off into the jungles of Nepaul,
where he is believed to have died of malaria a few weeks later.
The only corner where the war now lingered was around
the Mahratta towns of Gwalior and Jhansi, where the rebeUion
? See p. 141.

234 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
was headed by the Ranee of the latter place, a crael princess,
who had massacred a number of English prisoners to avenge
the annexation of her late husband's dominions in 1854. She
fell in battle, armed and fighting like a man, under the walls of
Gwalior (June 16, 1858). This was the last general engage
ment in the war, but for many raonths raore raovable colurans
were still hunting down the last scattered bands of insurgents
in Rohilcund and the Central Provinces.
Thus ended the dreadful record of the Indian Mutiny, a
struggle whose horrors moved the heart of England far more
than any other events which had happened during the last two
generations. Never have English troops fought better nor
more ruthlessly ; they were wrought up to frenzy by the trea
cherous massacre of unarmed captives and women and chUdren.
Hence it is not surprising that they seldom gave quarter, blew
captured traitors from guns, and hung at sight any one who was
convicted of having given the least help to the rebels.
One of the things which had buoyed up the Sepoys in their
rising was a prophecy that the raj of the East India Company
 was destined to last only a hundred years, count-
Abolition of . J f T,l J rr.. r
the East ing onward from Plassey and 1757. The forecast
India Y,ras actually fulfilled, though in a different sense
from what the rebels had expected, for the
Company was abolished by Act of Parliaraent in 1858^ and its
administration taken over by the Crown. Since 1833, when its
constitution had been varied at one of the periodical renewals
of its charter, it had been forced to give up its trading mono
poly and its attempts to restrict the settlement of Europeans in
India. In 1853 its distribution of patronage had been cur
tailed, and its civil service thrown open to competition. At the
time of its dissolution, therefore, it had ceased to be a raainly
mercantUe concern, and was almost wholly occupied in ad
rainistration. There was no reason why such work should not
be under the immediate control of the Crown, and in 1858 the
whole machinery of government was taken over and placed

THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR. 235
under a " Secretary of State for India " and the governor-general,
whose name was now changed to that of viceroy. The Euro
pean troops of the old Company's array became the loist to
the 109th regiraents of the British establishment, and a new
native army was organized to replace that which had ended so
disgracefully in the mutiny.
Frora 1858 to 1878 the history of India was comparatively
uneventful. A policy of " masterly inactivity " was pursued as
regards the external neighbours of the empire, and no fighting
was on foot, except for the purpose of repelling the intermittent
raids of the wild tribes of the north-west frontier and the savages
of Bhootan. The tirae was one of quiet internal development,
and agricultural improvements, railways, canals, and the pre
vention of famines were the main topics that engrossed the
attention of successive viceroys.
This period came to an end with the accession to power of
Lord Lytton (1876-80), a pupil of Lord Beaconsfield, and a
strong Imperialist. His viceroyalty opened with
the proclamation of the Queen as Empress of proclaims the
India in a great durbar held at Delhi on January Queen
1, 1877, one of the first developments of the " New ^^P''"^ °^
Imperialism." But the raost important event of
the time was the second Afghan war (1878-80). It was a
direct consequence of the political conflict of
England and ;^ussia at Constantinople after the Afghim war.
Turkish war of 1877-78. While hostUities
between the two powers seemed probable, a Russian
embassy went to Cabul and enUsted the Ameer Shere
AU as a confederate of the Czar. Lord Lytton, resolved to
stop this new development, declared war on the Afghan ruler,
and sent three expeditions across the frontier into the Ameer's
dominions. Candahar having faUen, and Sir Frederick
Roberts having stormed the Peiwar-Kotal pass and advanced
close to Cabul, the Ameer fled towards Russian territory, and
died soon after. His son and successor, Yakub Khan, at once

236 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
asked for peace, gave guarantees, and received a British envoy
as a permanent resident in his capital. But this weak prince
was totaUy unable to control his wild subjects, who rose in
arms, murdered the envoy. Sir Louis Cavagnari, and aU his
escort, and proclairaed the " holy war " (Jehad) against the
British infidels. Lord Lytton was obliged to launch his arraies
for a second tirae against Afghanistan. Roberts again marched
on Cabul, and occupied it after the battle of Charasia, but was
soon beset by a vast horde of insurgents who beleaguered him
in his camp. He drove them off, however, and was corapletely
triumphant long before reinforcements reached him from India.
But matters went worse in the south, where the pretender
Eyub Khan defeated at Maiwand the garrison of Candahar,
and forraed the siege of that city. It was saved,
Maiwand— when in very evil plight, by the rapid march of
Relief of Roberts from Cabul : in twenty-three days he
crossed the mountainous lands which separate
northern and southern Afghanistan without the loss of a man.
Falling on the besiegers, he scattered them at the battle of
Candahar (September i, 1880), and practicaUy finished the war
at a single blow. Lord Lytton would have liked to annex
much of the conquered territory, but Mr. Gladstone was now in
power at home, and the warlike viceroy was recalled. The
Liberal Government withdrew our troops, after recognizing as
ameer Abdur Rahman, a nephew of the late raler, Shere Ali.
He proved, on the whole, a good neighbour to India, aud
kept faithfully the pledges which he made in 1880.
The next important movement in our Indian Empire was on
the flank furthest from Afghanistan. The kings of Burmah had
Final always been vexatious neighbours, and in 1885
annexation we were drawn into war with Theebaw, a despot
o urmah. ^j^^ y^^^ massacred all his relatives and entered
into intrigues with France. His worthless army was scattered
with ease, and his whole dominion annexed; but the sup
pression of the brigandage (damty) which had always prevailed

THE RUSSIAN DANGER. 237
in Burmah proved a much harder business than the dethrone
ment of the king, and was not finished for several years, during
which many scores of expeditions had to be sent out against
the bandits (1885-89).
During the next ten years the troubles in India were all upon
the north-western frontier, where the slow approach of Russia
had always to be watched with a jealous eye. She had long
since put an end to the difficulties of distance, which made
any designs against our territories impossible in the earlier
part of the century. The khanate of Bokhara p j
was subdued in 1868, that of Khiva in 1873, the disputeswith
independent Turkomans of Merv in 1884, so that ^"ssia.
the Russian boundaries march with those of Afghanistan. Two
serious frontier disputes between the Ameer Abdur Rahman
and the governors of Turkestan (1885 and 1895) ended in
armed collisions, and might have led to war between England
and Russia if we had not behaved with studied moderation.
North and east of Afghanistan, on the barren waste of the
Pamirs, the Russian posts were in actual touch with tribes
subject to direct British rule.
It was our deterraination that there should be no further
encroachraent in this quarter which led to the conquest of the
raountainous Hunza and Nagar districts in 1893, q-. „
and to the occupation of Chitral. The prince and Chitral
whom we placed on the throne of the last- expeditions.
named state was murdered by his kinsmen, who raised a
rebellion against the British power. This led to the ad
mirably planned Chitral expedition of 1895, and to the
planting of considerable garrisons in that remote and high-
lying district.
It was probably the sight of this extension of our influence
into regions where it had been little known that set many of
the tribes of the north-western frontier in a ferment in 1897.
One after another the hordes along the Afghan border took
arms, and committed outrages within our boundaries. To put

238 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY,
them down, an army was drawn together larger than any that
British India had seen since the great Mutiny.
. At one time 60,000 men were in the field at once
campaign '
on the north- against the Afridis and their neighbours. After
T^^t' T expeditions had forced their way into the remotest
valleys of their ragged land, the tribes asked for
peace (1898); but even now the frontier has not completely
settled down, nor has a full military scherae for the occupation
of the passes been worked out
In comparison with these troubles on the north-west frontier,
those which have happened of late on the other flank of our
Disputes Indian Empire appear insignificant They date
with France frora the occupation of Tonquin by France in
as to Siam. ^gg^ . ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^j^^^ power had made constant
endeavours to extend itself across the Indo-Chinese peninsula,
and to occupy Siara and the Shan States north of it. But in
1896 a treaty was concluded, neutralizing what remains of
Siam, and dividing the rest of the disputed regions into a
British and French sphere of influence : since then there seeras
to have been a cessation of friction in this quarter.
The political future of India still remains the greatest
problem which lies before British statesmen. We have reduced
the country to a state of unity and good organi-
British rule zation, such as it never knew before, under the
—Material Moguls or any other power. We have covered
it with railways and canals, broken up millions of
acres of jungle, and irrigated hundreds of miles of desert. The
famines which a century ago used to march unhindered over
the land, and to sweep away tens of raillions of victims, are
now fought from their first appearance, and lead to compara
tively sraall loss of life, though in remote districts rauch
raisery must still prevail. In 1897, during the last great
dearth, as many as four and a half million persons were receiv
ing governraent relief at the same time. We have given
equal laws and justice to all ; we have abolished evil customs

THE FUTURE OF INDIA. 239
of immemorial antiquity, such as suttee and thuggism ; we have
done our best to teach our subjects self-government by giving
the cities native municipalities and trying to interest our vassal
princes in public works, sanitary and educational reform, and
such-like Western ideas.
On the material side, the work accomplished in the nine
teenth century was enormous and uniformly beneficial. In
other respects, the results of our presence in
India have not always been so encouraging ; it is Attitude of
,1 , . . . ^ , , the native
hard to root out the ancient enmities of creed and races  -The
race, and serious riots show from time to time proWem of
that the British bayonet is still needed to keep ment.
the peace. The cheap education which we have
lavished upon our subjects has not always reached the directing
classes, but has created a half-educated literary proletariate,
whose energy too often finds vent in silly and seditious
journalism. On the other hand, the old governing classes
often complain that there is no career for them under our regime.
In 1900 we were still far away from the acute development
of the Indian constitutional problem. " Indian National
Congresses" and such meetings were already in existence, but
were not taken too seriously by the powers in being at Simla.
That within twenty years a scheme would be formulated for
bestowing local parliaments on the various administrative
provinces, in which an elective Indian eleraent should pre
dominate, was the dream of very few. How the machinery
of self-government, bestowed on India by the Montagu-
Chelrasford Bill of 1919, wUl work is still a problem. That
problem was still far away when the period which we have
surveyed came to its end. The unquiet elements of to-day
were already venting their perverse criticism on all govern
mental acts — wise or unwise. The steadier elements, the
"Moderates" of 1920, were equaUy visible. Their relative
strength had yet to be tested.
Passing from India eastward in our survey of the empire

240 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
we note that in 1815, we had hardly any hold on the Indo-
. Chinese and Malay lands, merely owning a few
Settlements scattered harbours in Sumatra, the island of
—Growth of Penang, and a small strip of coast in the Malay
' peninsula, called " Province WeUesley,'' from the
great Govemor-General, who acquired it in 1800. But, in
1824, we exchanged Bantam and our other ports in Sumatra
with the Dutch for the far more eligible colony of Malacca,
dominating the straits through which all trade passes from
India to China and Japan. To this was added the island
of Singapore, ceded by a Malay rajah in the same year 1824.
The moment that this possession came into our hands it
began to develop in the most extraordinary way; Singapore,
which, when we received it, was a mere island of jungle,
is now a town of 200,000 souls, and one of the greatest
ports of the world. It has become a halfway house, not
only for commerce passing from China eastward or westward,
but also for the trade of Australia and the Dutch East
Indies. A similar greatness has come to Hong-Kong, which we
seized in 1842 after the first Chinese war; for fifty years
it was the only spot in the further East under
Hong Kong. ^ civilized European Government, and, " trade
following the flag," became the emporium of the
greater part of the Chinese empire. The opening of other
ports on the mainland, after the second Chinese war, took
away its practical monopoly, but has had no effect whatever
in diminishing the bulk of trade which passes through its
harbour. The island-city has now 250,000 inhabitants, and
has spread across the water on to the mainland, where further
concessions of land have been granted by the Chinese Govem-
_, ,. ment. The effect of the seizure of ports further
The policy ^
of the " open to the north by Germany and Russia, and of the
door. j^jg]. transference of the Russian annexations to
Japan, as also of our own "lease" of Wei-Hei-Wai (1898),

THE CHINESE REBELLION OF 1900. 241
has still to be worked out. For a moment in 1900 it
seemed as if the whole Chinese empire was about to be
violently broken up. A rising of secret societies called
" Boxers," in the neighbourhood of Pekin, led to many attacks
on foreigners and missionaries. When the Imperial Govern
ment showed itself unwilling or unable to suppress these dis
orders, a small international force was sent up from the sea
to protect the foreign legations in the capital. But when these
troops were seen, the whole countryside rose, the imperial
regiments joined the rebels, and the reinforcement which was
raarching on Pekin was cut off and forced to tum back. Not
widiout the connivance of the Chinese Governraent, .j..
the foreign quarter of Pekin was beset and be- "Boxer"
sieged, and a fierce attack made on the settle- RebeUion.
ment at Tien-Tsin. The news of these untoward events pro
duced a not unnatural explosion of rage in the West. All the
European powers joined in sending contingents to repress this
outbreak of Chinese national spirit, and the United States and
Japan co-operated with them. The besiegers of Tien-Tsin
were driven off, and then the corabined force moved on Pekin,
where (as ramour went) the foreign legations had already been
destroyed and their occupants massacred. This turned out
not to be the fact : when the international troops cut their
way to the gates of the capital, the garrison was found
still defending itself, though hard pressed. The army of
relief sacked Pekin and the imperial palace, and terms of
punishment were, imposed on the Chinese Government for its
collusion in the attack upon the foreigners. A huge indemnity
was exacted, and the capital was evacuated after due punish
ment had been inflicted on many guilty officials. While the
other powers made no territorial demands on China, the
Russians overran Manchuria, and though they did not formally
annex it, established a predominance there to the exclusion
of all other powers. Five years later Japan expelled the
Russians, and took their place. Japan was a friend, but any
R

242 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
parcelling out ofthe Chinese coast into "spheres of influence,"
by powers which beUeve in strict protection, could not be
favourable to our own trade. The policy of the " open door''
is the better for Great Britain. MeanwhUe the fall of the
Manchu dynasty, and the rise of the rather anarchic Chinese
republic, were still in the future.
Australia was in 1800 still very imperfectly known, though,
as we have already had occasion to mention, an English
P . convict settlement had been planted at Port
development Jackson some twelve years before. But even
of Australia. ^^^^^ j^ ^g^^ its shape was so little known that
the great island of Tasmania was supposed to form part
of it. As long as the region was nothing more than
a place of punishraent for those "who left their country for
their country's good," it was not likely to develop fast or
happily. But, after the peace of Vienna, the capacities of
the vast plains of Eastern Australia began to be known ; no
region so well suited for pastoral enterprises on the largest
scale exists in all the world. Free settlers provided with
some little capital began to drift in, and to plant their stations
on the broad grassy upland of New South Wales, where sheep
and cattle soon began to multiply at an astounding rate.
But for a whole generation the unsavoury
abolition of convict element continued to predominate,
the convict and to give the continent a bad name. Fortu
nately the ameliorations of the English criminal
law between 1820 and 1840, began to diminish the
depth of the stream of ruffianism which was poured into
Australia year by year, while the free colonists grew
more numerous as the opening for the sheep farraer began
to be realized. The feeling among them as to the
further importation of convicts grew so strong, that the
British Govemment diverted the raain stream from New
South Wales (1840), to newer penal settlements in Tas
mania and Western Australia. The system was not.

EARLY HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA. 243
however, finally abandoned in Tasmania tUl 1853, and in
Western Australia till 1864, though in the last years of its
existence the annual export of convicts had been very
small. Down to the middle of the century it seemed likely that
Australia would never develop into anything more than
a thinly populated pastoral country, occupied
by a community of "squatters," each owning a ^old°fields°
vast ran of many thousand acres, and employing
a few shepherds and cattle-men to tend his live stock. Wcol,
tallow, and hides, with a certain amount of timber, were
practically the sole exports of the continent. But all was
changed in 1848-51 by the discovery in Port PhUlip, the
southern region of New South Wales, of enormous deposits
of alluvial gold, richer than anything known in the old world,
and vying in wealth with those of California. There was
of course an instant rjish to the new gold-field, and the
population of the Port Phillip district went up so rapidly that
it was cut off from the parent colony, and formed into a
separate coraraunity, under the narae of Victoria, in 1851. It
has ever since remained one of the chief gold-producing
centres of the world, and more than _;^25o,ooOjOoo worth
of the precious metal has been extracted from its mines.
More than ;^4, 000,000 worth a year is still exported,
though the easy surface deposits have long been ex
hausted, and all the metal has to be crashed by ma
chinery from the solid quartz reef. Some time after the
Victorian gold-field was developed, similar fields of smaller
extent and lesser richness were found to exist in other
parts of the continent New South Wales, and the younger
colony of Queensland (created in 1859), have both an
important output and more recently (1886), simUar deposits
were discovered in Western Australia, which was till that
date the most belated and thinly peopled of the colonies of
Australia.

244 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The gold discoveries led to a great increase of the town-dwell
ing as opposed to the pastoral population of the colonies. They
also led to a great influx of population over and
town^'The above that actually engaged in the mining in-
farmers and dustry. The growth of a class of small farmers
thesquatters. j^^ ^^ ^ long-protracted straggle between them
and the "squatters" who had previously had a raonopoly of
the land. The latter held their enorraous pasture-rans by long
leases frora the Crown, which they desired to render perpetual.
Their opponents wished to cut up these vast estates, in order
that arable farms might be carved out of such parts of them as
are suited to the plough. Since the introduction of representa
tive govemment in Australia, in 1850-51, the tendency has,
of course, been to place power in the hands of the majority,
and to deprive the squatters of their ancient ascendency. But
there are many parts of the continent where
Question"'"' pasturage must always be predominant; great
tracts of the interior are so ill provided with watei
that they must always be unfitted for arable cultivation. In
the northem part of the continent, including the greater part
of the colony of Queensland, the climate is so hot that it is
unsuited for field work by Europeans. Such regions naturally
become sugar or rice plantations, which have to be worked by
the imported labour of Chinese or " Kanakas " (natives of the
South Sea Islands). But the Australian proletariate show great
jealousy of such foreign labour, and would apparentiy prefer
that the sub-tropical parts of the continent should be un
developed, rather than that a large coloured population should
grow up in them. Two of the characteristic
Democratic features of extreme democracy in a new country
legislation. ¦' .
have been very well marked in some of the
AustraUan colonies, — the tendency towards strict forms of pro
tection in commerce, and the desire to thrast aU duties and
responsibilities on the Government till State socialism is almost
in view. Legislation to prevent the accumulation of large

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. 245
properties, by heavy progressive taxation, has also been heard
of. Victoria has always been in the van in such democratic
ideas, while New South Wales has shown itself more cautious.
At the end of the century the main topic in the whole group
of Australian colonies was the dispute about Federation; all
the six colonies now existing " were in theory .j-j^g question
favourable to it, but sectional interests, of course, of Federa-
existed to make the carrying out of the scheme °'
diflicult. The jealousy between the two capital cities of New
South Wales and Victoria — Sydney and Melbourne — necessi
tated the selection of some secondary town as the centre of
federal government. There was also enough difference in the
domestic policy of several of the colonies to make an agree
ment difficult, but it was at last accomplished, though not till
the nineteenth century had run out. This was a step towards
the solution of the larger problera of Imperial Federation.
Australia had shown no indisposition to take her part in the
defence of the empire ; she already maintained a small navy ;
in 1 885 New South Wales contributed a military contingent to
one ofthe Soudan expeditions ; and in 1899-1901 every colony
sent large bodies of auxiliaries to the South African War — a
promise of their future splendid collaboration in the Great War
of 1914-18.
To the east of Australia lies the colony of New Zealand,
consisting of two large and one small island placed far out in
the Pacific, some twelve hundred miles from the jjg^
nearest point of New South Wales. Colonization Zealand—
here only began in the reign of Victoria, the first * aoris.
emigrants arriving in 1839. The history of New Zealand has
been very different from that of the Australian continent,
owing to the existence of a large and energetic native popula
tion. The aborigines of Australia, a few thousands scattered
over a vast continent were among the lowest and most
barbarous of mankind. The Maori tribes of New Zealand, on
' New South Wales (dating from 1788) originally included all the
Australian colonies. Out of it were cut Tasmania in 1825, West Australia
in 1829, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 185 1, and Queensland in 1859.

246 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the other hand, were a fierce and intelligent race, given to the
horrid practice of cannlbalisra, but in other respects by no
means an unproraising people. They were ready and able to
defend theraselves, when they considered their rights had been
infringed, and since the first settlement there have been three
wars (1843-47, 1863-64, 1869-70), in which the Maoris dis
played great courage, and considerable skiU in fortification.
Regular troops in large force had to be employed to evict
them from their stockaded " Pahs." Of late years a better
modus Vivendi has been found, and they seem contented with
their large reservations of land, their subsidies from Govern
ment, and the four seats which have been given them in the
New Zealand Parliaraent.
The islands were, at their first colonization, organized as six
provinces, each with a separate government, and were not
united into a thoroughly centralized union till 1875. Their
general character differs from that of Australia, as they are far
raore broken up by mountains, better watered, and rauch raore
temperate in climate : in the Southern island snow not un
frequently falls. There are large pastoral districts and grassy
plains, which supply the frozen meat now so comraon in
English raarkets, but also considerable mining regions and
large forest tracts. New Zealand was never dominated by
the " squatter " aristocracy which once ruled Australia, but has
always been in the hands of the smaller farmers. It is in
sentiment the most deraocratic of all the Australasian colonies,
and has gone further even than Victoria on the road towards
placing aU social enterprise, industry, and commerce under
State control.
In the Western Pacific Great Britain was, for the first three
quarters of the century, content to possess the larger part of
the trade of the numerous groups of islands, France and the
United States having much smaller interests. But the French
annexations in Tahiti and New Caledonia, and the later
appearance of the Germans in New Guinea, led to our setting

THE BRITISH IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC. 447
our mark on a good many of these coral archipelagos. The
Fiji Isles was our first annexation (1874) ; Southern
New Guinea was annexed in 1884, to cover the 2*^?'^.
1 n 1 r . ,. . . British
northern flank of Australia. At various later possessions
days the Cook, Solomon, EUice, and Santa Cruz l? *^*
Pacinc.
groups have been taken over. A complete list
of our possessions in this quarter would show many other
unfamiliar names ; none of them are of any great size or any
high importance. The main reason of their occupation was
the activity of our encroaching neighbours, and not our own
desire for more coral reefs and atolls. It was not till the
nineteenth century was over that the intrusive power of
Germany was evicted from Samoa, New Guinea, and other points
of vantage which seemed to threaten our control of the Pacific.
Our North American colonies have a very different history
from those of Australasia. In that continent no annexations
have been made nor frontiers moved since 181 5,
though there has been trouble with the United T^e North
„ , ^ . , Araerican
States on three separate occasions as to the exact colonies-
interpretation of old boundaries, where definitions "^^e Oregon
, . ,. r ... question.
were placed on paper before exact geographical
knowledge was available. The most important of thera was
the " Oregon question " of 1846, when the deliraitation of the
English and Araerican possessions on the Pacific coast was
carried out, by the siraple expedient of drawing a line along the
forty-ninth degree of latitude, from the Lake of the Woods to
the Pacific. All natural boundaries were thus overruled in the
most arbitrary way, but a fair compromise was on the whole
obtained. The internal history of these colonies has been far more
interesting than that of most of our possessions. In 18 15
Canada had just escaped the imminent danger of c^gtp „f the
being overran by the armies of the United States, colonies in
The splendid valour and loyalty of her militia had ^ ^^'
aided the small British garrison to fling back three invasions.

24$ ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
and the peace of Ghent had restored the condition of affairs
which had prevailed before the war. Our possessions consisted
of six separate colonies, each administered as a separate unit —
Upper and Lower Canada, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, as well as of the vast
and desolate Northern and North-Western territories extending
to the Pacific, which were then in the hands of the Hudson's
Bay Company. Lower Canada, an entirely French-speaking
and Catholic province, the remains of the old French colony
of " New France'' was still by far the most important member
of the group. The other settiements, the base of whose
population was composed of the exiled loyalists who left the
United States in 1783 to seek new homes, were stiU in their
infancy; in Upper Canada the inhabited zone extended no
further west than Kingston and Toronto. Each province was
governed by a ministry (" Executive Council "), and a Legis
lative CouncU of Crown nominees, with a Representative
Assembly elected by the people.
As the colonies developed, friction began to grow up between
the non-representative ministry and Upper House on the one
side, and the elective assembly on the other.
tional friction The people naturally wished to have a greater
~^^P"*^*" ' control over the executive than had been granted
rebelUon. . . , . , . f ,
m a constitution drawn up in the eighteenth
century before the growth of free colonies was understood.
The trouble was worst in Lower Canada, where the barrier
of language and national sentiment existed between the
Government and the French population of the province.
Led on by Papineau and other demagogues, the French
Canadians burst out into open rebeUion in 1836-37. But
they met no assistance from the English colonists, and were
suppressed without much difficulty by the troops and loyalist
volunteers. Their numerous sympathizers in the United States
were disappointed to see the rising collapse, and the republican
propaganda disappear.

CANADIAN POLITICS. 249
The Home Government, however, was wise enough to see
that the rebeUion in Lower Canada had a real grievance beneath
it, and sent out Lord Durham to America, in 1838, , .
to report on the advisability of changes in the Durham's
form of administration. In accordance with his "reforms.
advice, the whole constitution was recast in 1840. The two
provinces of Lower and Upper Canada were united, so as to
deprive the discontented French party of their separate
political existence. A "single parliament was instituted for their
governance, consisting of a small upper house, or " Legislative
CouncU," of Ufe members, and a larger lower house chosen
every four years by the electors. The lower house oblained a
practical control over taxation and the choice of ministers,
which it had not previously possessed. Similar modifications
were carried out in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which
provinces Lord Durhara had wished to incorporate with
Canada, but this scheme was only accomplished a quarter of
a century after his death.
Since the reforms of 1840, there has been absolutely no
constitutional trouble of any importance in Canada or the
small sister-colonies. The only miUtary incidents that they
have seen were the repulse of the Fenian invasions of 1866 and
1867,* and the suppression of the rebellions of the Indian half-
breeds of the North-West Territory in 1870 and 1884. All these
campaigns were finished almost entirely by the colonial mUitia.
The advance of all the North American colonies has been
steady and increasing ; wealth has been found in the enormous
forests of the north and the rich prairie land of the west. The
limit of population has been moving steadily towards the Pacific,
on whose shores two new settlements, Vancouver Island and
British Columbia, were incorporated in 1858 ; while in the older
lands. Upper Canada, the English-speaking province of Ontario,
has quite superseded Lower Canada, the French-speaking
province of Quebec, as the premier colony.
• See p. 160.

ZSO ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The progress of British North America was greatiy assisted
by the federation of the colonies, carried out between 1867 and
1873. The two Canadas, New Brunswick, and
"Dominion" Nova Scotia formed themselves into the new
of Canada. „ Dominion of Canada " in the first-named year ;
the North-Western Territory, once the property of the Hudson's
Bay Company, joined them in 1870, British Columbia in 1871,
and Prince Edward Island in 1873. The remote fishing colony
of Newfoundland has preferred not to cast in its lot with the
rest, though in its dealings with its French or Araerican neigh
bours * it would be greatly helped by being able to speak with
the same voice as its greater sisters. The " Dominion " is
now a federal governraent, with a governor-general, a Senate
appointed for life, and a House of Representatives. The
individual provinces still retain for local purposes their
provincial assemblies, and enjoy complete home rule under
the central government.
Since the federation, the raost important landmark in the
history of the colonies is undoubtedly the building of the
Canadian - Pacific Railway between 1881 and
Canadian- 1885. Since it was finished, the developraent of
Pacific Manitoba and the other regions of the "Great
Lone Land" has been very rapid. Seven new
provinces now exist in this once uninhabited region, with a
rapidly growing population of over 300,000 souls. They are
mainly devoted to ranching and corn-growing, unlike the
" districts further east, where the lumber trade is still the great
industry. The Canadian Pacific has an iraperial as well as a
colonial importance, since it provides a quick route to the
extreme east, passing entirely through British territory. About
1100 miles is saved in passing from Liverpool to Japan or
Northern China, if the route by Halifax, Montreal, and
Vancouver is taken rather than that by the Suez Canal and
Singapore. • See p. 219.

THE WEST INDIES. 251
Very different from the fate of Canada has been that of our
Other great group of possessions in America — that formed by
the West India Islands and British Guiana. In
the early part of the century, their sugar and indies wfd
coffee plantations, worked by slave labour, and British
exposed to no foreign competition, while pro- "'^**
tection was still in vogue, supplied the whole British Erapire
and brought imtold wealth to the planters. The first great
blow to them was the abolition of the slave trade in 1832;
the free black labour was never so regular or efficient as that
which prevailed under the unhappy old systera. But Free
Trade proved an even deadlier foe to these once flourishing
islands; the cheap .beet sugar of Gerraany and France, unfairly
fostered by governraent bounties, has underbid West Indian
sugar in our raarkets for raany years. An entire collapse in
their trade has taken place, and, though attempts have been
raade to replace the ruined industry by developing the cultiva
tion of tobacco, cocoa, and fruits, they have not been fully
successful, and our West Indian possessions are in a far less
happy position than any other part of the erapire.
We have still to deal with one great section of our colonial
possessions — those situate in Africa. In 181 5 we held no more
than scattered ports along the shores of Guinea, ^. African
at the mouth of the Garabia, in Sierra Leone, and colonies in
on the Gold Coast, together with the new '"'S-
acquisitions of Cape Colony, taken from the Dutch, and
Mauritius, annexed from France, by the Treaty of Vienna.
The stations on the Guinea coast were no more than harbours,
occupied, in spite of their deadly cUmate, in order to serve as
debouches for the very profitable trade of the valley of the
Niger. Mauritius was a tropical colony of the same sort as
Ceylon or Malacca, profitable both from its sugar plantations
and from its position as a port of caU on the way to India.
But Cape Colony had much greater possibilities before it,
being capable of illimitable extension to the north over

252 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
thousands of miles suitable for either cattle-breeding or corn-
growing. Its position only differed from that of Australia in
that the settlers were confronted with a large and warlike
population of Kaffirs, who showed no signs of dying out before
the advent of the white man, like the Australian natives.
The original settlement round Cape Town was and has
always remained Dutch, but from 1815 onward English
. settlers kept pouring into the eastern part of the
Government colony, where they are completely predominant.
and the j\. greater or less araount of friction has always
existed between the British Governraent and
the Dutch "Boers"; in 1836 a great body of these settlers
pushed northward in order to set up independent states on the
Orange river and in Natal. But they were followed up by
the power which they detested, and both of their new com
munities were annexed. A second migration, or "trek,'' of
the Boers then took place across the Vaal river, where they
founded the " Transvaal," or " South African Republic." This
was also seized for a moment by the British, but in 1852-54 we
evacuated both it and the Orange river district, which once
more organized themselves as independent states. Natal,
however, has always remained a British colony, and the Dutch
element there has for a long time not been predominant.
The curse of the South African Colonies from their very
first foundation was the incessant breaking out of Kaffir wars ;
since 181 5 there have been at least a score of
wars- them. The most important was the Zulu war
Subjection of of 1879; a series of kings of genius had built
up a military organization of great efficiency, by
which the Zulus made themselves masters of all the neighbour
ing tribes. The attitude of their raler, Cetewayo, seemed so
threatening that Sir Bartle Frere declared war on him and
invaded his dominions. But the Zulus vindicated their warlike
reputation by falling upon and annihUating a whole British
regiment and several thousand native alUes at the surprise of

THE FIRST TRANSVAAL WAR. 253
Isandula. It was not tUl large reinforceraents, undei Sir
Garnet Wolseley, had been hurried out frora England, that
Cetewayo's power was destroyed at the battle of Ulundi, and
his realra passed under British suzerainty.
Shortly before the Zulu war (1877) we annexed the Transvaal
republic, where the Boer settlers seemed in danger of being
exterminated by their black neighbours, and a
state of anarchy was setting in. The Dutch pro- war— The
tested at the time, but not rauch attention was Transvaal
, . , . .,,.„„ r 1 independent.
paid to their complaints tul, m 1880, after the
Zulus had been destroyed and the Gladstone cabinet had
susperseded that of Lord Beaconsfield, they suddenly rose in
arms, and destroyed or besieged the small British garrisons
which occupied the country. Troops hurried up from Natal
and the Cape were checked at the corabats at Laing's Neck
and the Ingogo river ; but the worst disgrace was not suffered
tiU the fight at Majuba HiU (February 27, i88r), where the
British were thrust out of the strong position they had taken,
with heavy loss, including that of their coramander. Sir Pomeroy
Colley. Mr. Gladstone thereupon made peace with the Boers,
granting thera their independence under a veiy light and
nominal admission of vassalage to Great Britain.
Soon after rich gold-mines were discovered in many parts of
the Transvaal, to which thousands of British subjects flocked;
their centre is Johannesburg, now a town of a
hundred thousand souls. The Boer government g-oid— D? °
was always carried on in a most narrow-minded J,^™eson's
and retrograde spirit; nearly all political rights
were refused to the " Uitlander " settiers by the Dutch farmers,
who were becoming a decided minority in the land which they
were themselves unable or unwiUing to develop. Constant
chafing against this misrule finaUy led to a conspiracy on the part
of the immigrants, and in December, 1895, there was a rising
at Johannesburg, to aid which Dr. Jameson, then a high official
of the British South African Company, made a most unwise

254 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
and unjustifiable incursion into the Transvaal at the head of
five hundred of his mounted police. They were defeated,
surrounded, and captured en masse by the Boers, whereupon
the Johannesburgers laid down their arms. Dr. Jaraeson's
escapade not only brought us into trouble with Gerraany,* but
made our relations with the Transvaal far more difficult than
before, as President Kruger not unnaturally persisted in believ
ing that the British authorities in South Africa, if not the Colonial
Office in London also, were at the back of Jaraeson's raid.
The South African colonies, however, were affected by other
questions beside those concerning the two Boer republics.
Down to 1884 we were the only European power
German possessing a lodgraent in the southern end of the
colonization ^ ^ . .. , , , . .r^
and the " Dark Continent, save for the decaying Portu-
w;ramblefor g^ggg colonies of Angola and Mozambique. A
slow and peaceful extension of Cape Colony
northward seemed the natural line of development. In 187 1
we annexed Griqualand West, where rich diamond mines had
just been discovered, and the town of Kimberley was growing
up. A little later Basutoland and other inland districts were
taken under our protection. But in 1884 Prince Bismarck,
then still at the height of his power, proclaimed a German
Protectorate over Damaraland, the coast district north of the
Orange River, while in 1885-90 similar claims were set up by
Germany to the maritime tract on the eastern side of Africa
north of Mozambique. This intrasion of a new colonial power
into regions which we had fondly marked out as likely to pass
into our own hands, forced England to take action, and the
" scramble for Africa " began.
The danger was that the Germans pushing inland from
both sides of the continent, might raeet in the valley of the
Zambezi, and shut out our colonies from further expansion
northward. Hence came about the establishment of the two
great Chartered Companies. The "South Africa Company,"
* See p. 204.

THE " SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA." 255
incorporated in 1889, of which CecU Rhodes was frora the
first the leading spirit, seized Matabeleland and
Mashonaland after a short war with the Matabeles, South
a warlike Zulu race who were formerly dorainant African
in the regions inland from the Transvaal and Policy of ~
Mozambique. The " Central Africa Company " Mr. Cecil
operated further to the north, and occupied the
regions beyond the Zambezi and to the west of the great lake
Nyassa. Their sphere of influence was put under forraal
British protection in 1891. Thus the southern end of Mr.
Rhodes's great " Cape Town to Cairo " scheme was successfully
put beyond the danger of German or Portuguese interference.
Other complications, however, arose further northward in
the region about Zanzibar — an Arab state with a large
undefined dorainion on the mainland opposite . .
. • 1 J- , n 1 m, ^ Britain and
the island capital of the Sultan. The Gerraan an- Germany in
nexations about Vitu and Dar-es-Salaam (1885-90) ^f-?*^ Central
devoured a great part of his nominal empire;
Mombasa and the rest were leased to a third British Chartered
Company — the " East Africa Company,'' founded in 1888.
Zanzibar itself was placed under British protection in 1890,
and an elaborate treaty with Germany delimited the spheres of
the two powers, the line being drawn at the river Umba.
The " East Africa Company " ceded its rights to the British
Government in 1895, so that this territory is now held directly
under the Crown. This protectorate extends all along the
east coast of Africa, from Mombasa to the river Juba, where it
touches on the north a sphere of Italian influence, reaching up
to the mouth of the Red Sea. Beyond this lies another patch
of British territory in Somaliland, facing Aden across the straits
of Bab-el-Mandeb, and so guarding the way to Suez.
One further annexation had been made in East Africa, as
late as 1894. In that year we assumed a pro
tectorate over the inland kingdom of Uganda and
the neighbouring regions. British missionary enterprise had for

*S6 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
many years been very vigorous in this direction, and our atten
tion had been caUed to it by the cruel persecutions of Christians
carried out by Mtesa and his son Mwanga, the despot who
murdered Bishop Hannington and his companions in 1888.

AFRICA 1902
D t T tn y ndT t y
nd B t In u n
cloM'd by .1 shaded I nc

The Uganda protectorate lies about the two great lakes of the
Victoria and Albert Nyanza, and the headwaters of the NUe.
Expeditions were after a time despatched with orders to push
northward from this region and connect our dominions with

DISPUTES WITH FRANCE IN AFRICA. 257
the middle Nile, where the British and Egyptian flags are
floating at Fashoda. If it had not been for long civil wars in
Uganda, this task would have been completed much earlier.
But the necessity for putting down Mwanga and his partisans
was followed by that for subduing a mutiny of our own Soudanese
mercenaries, and, when this was accoraplished, expeditions
pushed up the Nile, and joined the Uganda protectorate to
the British Soudan. Meanwhile a railway has been pushed up
from Mombasa to connect our inland dominions with our
headquarters at Zanzibar.
The programme sketched out by Mr. Rhodes, of drawing a
continuous chain of British protectorates from
Cape Colony to the NUe valley, had thus been Townto'^*
completed except at one point Beyond the north Cairo "
end of Lake Nyassa, German East Africa touched
the Belgian " Congo Free State," and until a right of transit
was acquired through one or other of those territories, the
" Cape Town to Cairo " route could not be used. The annexa
tion of German East Africa in 1918 finally settied this
problem. In Western Africa the power with which we have had raost
of our difficulties is not Gerraany, but France. Down to
the third quarter of the century we conducted
well-nigh the whole trade of this part of the ^^can
continent, through our settlements of the Gambia, colonies —
Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Lagos. The prance"'"*
region was too unhealthy to tempt us to essay
further conquest, and after several expeditions to chastise the
inland tribes, notably the Ashantees, we always withdrew to our
ports again. But expansion northward was forced upon us
by the French, who, starting from tiieir colonies of Senegal
and the Ivory Coast, have conquered the inland of Guinea,
or the " French Soudan," as they now caU it, so as to cut oft
our Gambia and Sierra Leone' settlements from their " hinter
land." To prevent Lagos from being treated in the same

2S8 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
way, and to keep the whole basin of the Lower Niger free
for English trade, the " Royal Niger Company " was organized
in 1885, and the coast from Lagos eastward as far as the
Caraerans was taken under British protection. The Niger
company then worked up the great stream, tUl its officials met
the French descending it from the neighbourhood of Timbuctu.
The expected collision occurred at several points, and led to
great diploraatic difficulties, which were ultiraately settled only
in 1898, by a treaty which gave the lands on the Middle Niger
to France, and those from Say to the sea, along the Lower
Niger, to England. This solid block of territory exploited by
the Niger Company was cut off frora any possibility of ex
pansion eastward by the activity of the Germans in the Caraerans
and the French on the Ubangi. Since Germany disappeared
as a rival in 1914-15, French lands now corapletely surround
our Nigerian protectorate.
One further boundary in Africa remained to be settled — that
between France and England in the regions where the basins
of the Congo and the Nile meet. We have already had to
describe the Marchand* expedition to Fashoda and its con
sequences. The last difficulty was the final deliraitation
of the French and English spheres of influence in that de
batable land. By an agreement reached in March, 1899,
we have taken over, for ourselves, or our Egyptian protegees,
Darfur, Kordofan, and the Bahr-el-Gazal ; while France was
permitted to conquer Kanem, Wadai and Baghirrai, when she
could succeed in pushing troops into those remote regions.
Thus the " scramble for Africa " ended in the annexation,
real or nominal, of the whole continent by one European
power or another. Except Abyssinia and some desert tracts
in the Eastern Sahara, south of Tripoli, there is no region
which is not occupied by one of the great colonizing states.
The boundaries now settled, however, are in many cases so
unnatural, that their modification is certain to be one of the
tasks of the twentieth century. * See p. 207.

< 2S9 )

CHAPTER XL
THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899-1902.
The deplorable " Jameson Raid " was destined to prove but
the commencement of troubles in South Africa. It was a
symptom of a racial antagonism and of rival ambitions which
were destined to lead Great Britain into the longest and most
perilous war which she had waged since Waterloo. Not even
the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 was raore dangerous to her ira
perial position and prestige.
The " Raid " had erabittered the already existing feeling of
hostility between the Dutch and the British sections of the
inhabitants of South Africa. President Kruger began at once
to import huge quantities of arms and munitions of war from
Europe, and concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with
his neighbours of the Orange Free State, whose racial sympathy
with the burghers of the Transvaal induced them to overlook
the fact that they had themselves no quarrel or disagreement
of any kind with the British Government. Nor was this all :
the Dutch majority among the inhabitants of the Cape Colony
resented the Raid almost as much as their kinsmen in the
independent republics, considering it as an attempt to deprive
their nationality of that predominance in South Africa which
they looked upon as destined to be their own. .
Active disloyalty to the British Government, which animosity in
had never for many years been absent among ^°^^^
the Dutch of the Westem Province of the colony,
began to develop into dangerous proportions. There can be

26o ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
no doubt that for several years an active propaganda was
canied on araong them, by zealots who believed that the
ultimate destiny of South Africa was to become a group of
repubUcs, owning no more than a nominal dependence on the
British crown — perhaps not even that. Public opinion grew
progressively worse, and a clear majority of the colonists of
non-English birth leaned to separatism, though many of them
were unwilling to risk Ufe or property in supporting their ideal.
The extent of this active or passive disloyalty was far from
being realized by the Home Govemment, or the English people
generally. lAore than two years, however, were to elapse between Dr.
Jameson's fiasco and the outbreak to open war with the two
Boer republics. The time was spent in fruitless negotiations,
whose futility was from the first evident. Since the failure of
the Johannesburg rising the Transvaal Governraent had, very
naturally, resolved that it would do nothing for the Uitlanders,
whom it regarded as eneraies. If allowed to become burghers
and entrasted with the franchise, they would have been nurae-
Mise-ovem- '¦°'^® enough to change the balance of power in
ment in the the internal politics of the republic. This would
Transvaal, jj^.^^ meant the faU of President Kruger and his
following, who by selling scandalous and oppressive raonopo-
lies to speculators of all kinds, and by levying illicit percentages
on all public expenditure, were accumulating large fortunes.
Determined not to quit office, the President assuraed an ultra-
patriotic position, and kept pointing out to his burghers that
any concession to the Uitlanders would mean the loss of Dutch
predominance in the Transvaal, and imminent danger that the
control of the Republic would pass into the hands of aliens.
There was so much trath in this, that the reforming party
among the Transvaal Boers found itself in a small minority,
and the President and his gang were able to continue their
corrapt and obscurantist domination.
Meanwhile the Uitlanders, finding their position growing

THE BLOEMFONTEIN CONFERENCE. 261
progressively worse since the Raid, and seeing that they were
never likely to extort any concessions from the government of
the Republic, continued their agitation, aiming more at in
fluencing public opinion at home than at moving the obdurate
heart of Krager. In April, 1899, a great petition, signed by
21,000 British subjects resident in the Transvaal, was sent to
the Queen, setting forth their unhappy condition, and begging
that an inquiry might be made into their wrongs, and solid
guarantees for good governance secured for them by the suzerain
power. It was this appeal which brought matters to a head. For
sorae time the new " High-Commissioner for South Africa,"
Sir Alfred Milner, had been exchanging fraitless notes with
the Transvaal Governraent. To secure a definite reply and
a clear issue he pressed for a personal conference with the
President. This took place at Bloerafontein, on the neutral
territory of the Orange Free State, on May 31, 1899, and the
following days. At this meeting there were two j.. „.
main questions to discuss — the exact nature of fontein
the suzerainty which Great Britain exercised over Conference.
the Transvaal since the convention of 1884, and the grievances
of the Uitlanders. It was on the latter that the conference
carae to a standstill. Sir Alfred Milner deraanded that the
British residents in the republic should have a right to obtain
the franchise after a residence of five years, and that they
should be allowed representatives in the Jiaad, the burgher
parliament. President Kruger did not give a direct negative,
but made a counter-proposal that Uitlanders who had been
seven years in the Transvaal might, on fulfiUing certain
difficult and onerous conditions, obtain the citizenship. The
number of their representatives in the Jiaad was not to
exceed five, out of a total body of thirty-one raembers. These
concessions would only be granted if the British Govemment
promised that aU future differences with the Transvaal should
be submitted to arbitration before some foreign umpire, to

262 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
be chosen by the two parties in comraon. This last clause
implied the surrender of the British suzerainty over the
republic, for evidently no state would litigate with its own
vassal before a foreign tribunal.
Neither the President nor the High Comraissioner would
give way. They proraptly parted, Milner returning to Cape
Town, where he declared that it was impossible to surrender
the British suzerainty, and that the concessions offered were
wholly illusory and inacceptable. Kruger spoke out even
raore openly at Pretoria, where he told the Raad that he had
offered as much as was possible, that Milner would not yield
an iota, and that " though he hiraself did not desire war, he
did not intend to give way an inch."
From this raoraent war was inevitable, though the British
Governraent and nation do not seera to have realized
the fact Mr. Chamberlain proposed in August that a joint
commission of British and Transvaal deputies should meet, to
discuss the point whether any modification of the terms offered
in April might serve as a basis for the enfranchisement of the
Uitlanders. No answer was returned to this offer, and mean
while much information carae frora South Africa as to the
enormous importation of cannon and military stores which was
going on. It was particularly notable that the Orange Free
State, with which we had no quarrel, was also arming in haste,
and that there were unaccountable comings and goings and
numerous secret meetings among the Dutch of the Cape
Colony. On August 26, having received no reply from Pre
toria to his offer, and knowing of the warlike stir in the two
republics, Mr. Chamberlain declared " that the sand was run
ning low in the hour-glass," and that when it was gone Great
Britain would not consider herself bound by any of the offers
raade hitherto, but intended to settle permanently the question
as to who was the dominant power in South Africa. At last,
on September 2, came the President's answer, which withdrew
his previous offers of concession, and declared that he did not

THE BOERS PREPARE FOR WAR. 263
recognize any British suzerainty over the Transvaal. This
was practicaUy a declaration of war, but the ministry in
London seem hardly to have believed in the possibihty that
the burghers might be deliberately forcing on a rapture, and
raerely replied (September 8) that it continued to regard the
Transvaal as a client state, and that it trasted that the Raad
and the President might still take into consideration the
terms which had been offered to them at the Bloerafontein
Conference. As a matter of fact, President Kruger and his advisers had
already made up their minds to fight. They had their own
views as to the mUitary aspect of the situation, and believed
that might count on turning the British out of South Africa.
They were superabundantly well armed — for every burgher there
were now five rifles in store ; more than a hundred ™-
pieces of artillery had been imported, all of them parations of
of the most raodern constraction, and raany of *"* ^^^'
the largest calibre. The fighting force of the two republics was
infinitely larger than the British garrison in South Africa. In
August we had but 6000 men on the continent, while the
burghers' levee en masse araounted to sorae 75,000 excellent
raounted infantry.* They were also reckoning on a general
rising in Cape Colony, which would give them 40,000 or 50,000
auxiliaries more. It was to arm these allies that the enormous
supply of superfluous rifles had been accumulated at Pretoria.
MeanwhUe the military authorities at London were living in
a fool's paradise. A secret report frora tiie InteUigence Depart
ment of the War Office, suppUed to the cabinet, stated the
fuU force of the two Dutch repubUcs avaUable for operations
in the field at no more than 35,000 men — not half its real
araount — and opined that the burghers would confine them
selves to purely defensive tactics. There was a general belief
* The full force of the Boers was never guessed till their final surrender
in June, 1902, when, in spite of all their losses, and of the fact that we had
already 42,000 prisoners, over 20,000 more combatants laid down their
arms.

264 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
that Krager would draw back at the last moment, and make
the required concessions. Therefore, though the South African
garrisons were slightly reinforced, no great force was sent to
their aid. Five thousand men frora India were landed in
Natal, and a few battalions frora England and the Mediter
ranean garrisons were despatched to the Cape. By the end of
September we had about 20,000 troops scattered over the
vast extent of the colonies.
On October 9, to the intense surprise of the British nation,
news came that the Transvaal Government had sent in an
ultimatum requiring that the lately arrived rein-
Ultimatum fiarcements should be withdrawn from Africa and
the other troops removed from the frontier : war
was to foUow unless a consent to these insulting terms was
granted within twenty-four hours. The British cabinet natu
rally refused to listen to this peremptory demand, and on the
next day the two Dutch republics declared war on Great
Britain (October 10).
The burghers had been mobilizing for raany days, and crossed
the frontier at once in irresistible force. There can be no
doubt that their best plan would have been to throw their main
body on to the central parts of Cape Colony, where the whole
countryside would have risen in their favour. Not more than
three or four scattered British battalions lay between them and
Cape Town, and they could have marched down to the sea
with ease, sweeping aU before them. But General Joubert, to
whom the drawing up of the Boer plan of carapaign had been
entrasted, preferred to strike at the raain British force in South
Africa, the sraaU army of 12,060 men in Natal, which had been
placed under Sir George White, who had just arrived from
India with the reinforcements. Accordingly, sorae 35,000
burghers frora both Republics crossed the Drakensburg
raountains and entered Natal, while 7000 raore beleaguered the
little town of Mafeking, the outpost of Rhodesia, and another
minor army marched on Kimberley, the city of the diamond

FIRST DAYS OF THE BOER WAR. 265
mines, in which their old enemy, Mr. Rhodes, the contriver of
the never-forgotten Jameson Raid, was known to be residing.
Only a very smaU force threatened the Cape Colony border,
where the long line of the Orange River lay undefended and
inviting the invader.
Sir George Wliite and his officers, there can be no doubt,
undervalued both the numbers and the fighting quality of the
invaders of Natal. They wisely made no attempt to defend
the northern angle of the colony, which was completely sur
rounded by the Transvaal on one side and the Orange Free
State on the other. But the little British army was aUowed to
face the oncoming host in two separate bodies, the smaller at
Dundee, the larger at Ladysraith, the main military depot of
Natal. This division of forces nearly led to a disaster : on
October 20 several Boer columns converged on the brigade of
4000 raen at Dundee ; but their junction was not well timed,
and Sir Penn Symons, the British general, attacked and routed
their first division at the bloody fight of Talana Hill, before
the rest had arrived. He fell, while leading the attack with
reckless gallantry, and his successor. General Yule, was forced
next day to make a hurried retreat on Ladysraith in order to
escape frora the other fractions of the Boer array, which were
closing round him on all sides.
Meanwhile Sir George White, finding his comraunication
with Dundee cut had sent out a force to clear the road to that
place. This expedition came on a minor Boer commando,
and annihUated it at Elandslaagte (October 21), after a short
engagement, in which a rocky hill was stormed in the most
splendid style. But more hostile colurans carae pressing in on
Ladysraith, and the victors had to withdraw in haste.
On October 30, having been joined by the brigade which
escaped from Dundee, Sir George White raarched out with his
whole available force, to attack the Transvaal army before the
Free State troops should have joined them. This led to the
battie of Lombard's Kop, an entirely unsuccessful attack on

266 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the Boer lines, which showed the British commander that the
task before him was far more dangerous than had been realized.
The advance of 1 2,000 men failed to raove the eneray, and the
army retired on Ladysraith, in great disorder, if with no great
loss of life. But a small flanking column of 1000 men, which
had gone out to hold off the Free Staters while the raain fight
was in progress, was surroimded at Nicholson's Nek, six miles
north of Ladysraith, and forced to surrender after an iU-
raanaged and not over-desperate defence.
Realizing that he was beset by very superior forces. Sir
George White had to decide between two courses. Should he,
in order to protect Central Natal, sacrifice his base and his
stores by evacuating Ladysraith, or should he hold on at that
place, where a ring of hills gave a good position for resistance,
and could easily be strengthened into a formidable stronghold ?
He chose the latter alternative, reasoning that if he stood
on the defensive at Ladysraith the whole Boer army would
probably close around him, instead of pressing on deeper
into the colony. His decision was justified by the event ;
General Joubert refused to move on into Natal while a large
British force still faced him, and invested Ladysraith with his
whole strength. The town was cut off from coraraunication
with the south on November 2, when the Boers encamped all
around it at a respectful distance, and commenced to bombard
it witb heavy artiUery brought down from Pretoria. The
garrison would have been much handicapped, by being unable
to reply to this long-range fire, if it had not fortunately received
a few naval guns on the day of the defeat of Lorabard's Kop,
with which it made shift to resist the "Long Toms" of" the
enemy. Meanwhile the colony of Natal was saved, for Joubert
did not detach any large body of men to march on Durban
and Pietermaritzburg, to protect which there were but one
battalion of British troops and a few colonial levies (less than
2000 in all) available. Small columns of Boers rode out from
their camp before Ladysraith to devastate the neighbouring

MAFEKING AND KIMBERLEY. 287
countiyside, but no serious advance toward the sea was made.
Thus things remained till, in the end of November, large
British reinforcements began to land at Durban, and to push
up into the interior.
Meanwhile the remaining energy of the burghers had been
absorbed in the sieges, or rather blockades, of Mafeking and
Kimberley. Both places might have been " rashed " by a
deterrained attack, if their besiegers had been wiUing to risk
it, for they were straggling open towns, protected by no more
than hasty earthworks, and mainly garrisoned by armed
civilians. In Kimberley there were but 500 British regulars.
In Mafeking Colonel Baden-Powell had a few squadrons of
Rhodesian and Bechuanaland mounted police, with which
he worried and vexed a besieging force of six times his own
strength in the raost enterprising way. While these futUe
blockades continued, the eneray made no attempt to use the
open door into Cape Colony, where whole districts were ready
to rise in arms and join them whenever the first commando
should cross the Orange River.
When the Declaration of War by the two Boer republics had
been received in England, orders were given for the despatch
to the Cape of a complete army corps — some 40,000 men —
and it was believed that this force, in conjunction with the
troops already in South Africa, would suffice to finish the war.
There was still a coraplete misconception of the numbers and
fighting powers of the enemy, one of whose strangest signs
was the despatch to our loyal colonists, when they offered
aid, of an official telegram to the effect that " infantry would
be preferred " for a campaign in which the eneray consisted
entirely of lightly moving mounted riflemen ! The comraand of
the reinforcements was given to General Sir Redvers Buller,
a veteran of the Zulu and Soudan wars, who had never before
been placed in a position of independent comraand.
On arriving at Cape Town Buller learnt of the disasters in
Natal, and of the sieges of Kimberley and Mafeking, whose

268 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
position was believed to be far more perUous than was actually
the case. He had originally intended to advance into the
Orange Free State, as the best way of drawing off the enemy
from their offensive movements to the defence of their own
homes. But on receiving the news of the investment of Lady-
smith he reconsidered the situation, and resolved that it was
more important to relieve Sir George White's garrison and
Kimberley. The main Boer army being in Natal, Buller
determined to break up his army. corps, and went with about
one-half of it to succour Ladysraith, while he sent Lord
Methuen with about 10,000 men to rescue Kimberley, and
detached General Gatacre with a few battalions to protect the
central parts of Cape Colony, and deal with the incipient
rebellion therein.
Then followed a week of disasters : Lord Methuen, marching
on Kimberley, defeated the Boer force which was covering the
siege of that place at Belmont (November 23), Graspan
(November 25), and with more difficulty at Modder River
(November 28). In such case the victory was won at heavy
loss, for the enemy pursued evasive tactics, making off the
moraent that the British closed, after subjecting the advancing
troops to a devastating fire tiU the last moment when retreat
remained open. Lord Methuen was only fifteen raUes from
Kiraberley, when the force which he had driven back made
another stand, having been reinforced by the greater part of
the besiegers of Mafeking, who had come down under General
Cronje to aid the defeated commandos. The united force
stood at bay behind the carefully fortified lines of Magersfon
tein, in which Lord Methuen resolved to attack them. Bemg
almost wholly destitute of cavalry, the British general had no
chance of turning the Boer position, and was forced to assail
it from the front. This he did by a night attack on December
II : the results were disastrous : the splendid Highland brigade,
which was to deliver the assault, miscalculated the distance
they had to advance in the darkness, and blundered in. a solid

MAGERSFONTEIN AND COLENSO. 269
mass upon the Boer trenches, before they knew that they were
in touch with the enemy. Crushed by an overwhelraing fire
at short range, poured into battalions still heaped in heavy
colurans, the Plighlanders lost nearly half their officers and a
fourth of their men in a few minutes. The survivors lost their
impetus, lay down in front of the eneray's lines, and then,
after twelve hours of passive endurance under a deadly rain of
bullets and a raidsuramer sun, reeled back at midday and
abandoned tiie fight. The British loss was just under 1000
men; that ofthe Boers about 250. This defeat reduced Lord
Methuen to the defensive : he entrenched himself in face of the
hostUe position, and waited for reinforcements.
Meanwhile, early in November, the enemy had at last sent
commandos to cross the Orange River into Cape Colony, and
their arrival led to a general rebellion in the districts of Aliwal,
Burghersdorp, and Colesberg. General Gatacre, who had been
placed in command of this region, pushed forward to attack
them the moment that he could collect a few battalions. But
by a fatal mixture of bad management and bad luck his
atterapt to surprise the main rebel force at Stormberg ended
in a disaster almost as great as that of Magersfontein. Missing
their way, the British blundered at dawn into an irapossible
position below the enemy's carap, were beaten off, and lost
100 kUled and wounded and nearly 600 prisoners. Gatacre,
with the wrecks of his force, fell back southward : fortunately
the Boers, for reasons best known to theraselves, made no
atterapt to improve their victory ; and the British, here as on
the road to Kimberley, were able to maintain a defensive
position and wait for reinforcements. Yet a large section of
Cape Colony had been lost, and the rebellion spread east and
west with small hindrance.
But the worst disaster of the " black week " that lay between
December 9 and December 1 6, 1899, was yet to come. General
Buller had collected some 18,000 men for the reUef of Lady-
smith, and advanced with them to the line of the river Tugela.

270 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Behind this rapid and almost impassable stream the enemy
had ranged the covering force which was to protect the siege.
They had covered the steep hillsides above the water with
trenches and batteries, and occupied the comraanding hill of
Hlangwane, on the further side, to protect their flank. Only
sorae 6000 men were ranged in front of Buller, for the Boer
leaders were set on holding the main body of their army round
Ladysraith, to keep the garrison completely blockaded. To
dislodge the enemy from the Tugela position. Sir Redvers
BuUer fought the battle of Colenso, perhaps the most faultily
planned and ill-conceived operation which a British general
has ever conducted. The troops were hurled, in direct frontal
attack, against a river line fordable at only two or three points,
and commanded by a complete systera of entrenchments.
When the leading brigades struggled down to the stream, they
could not find the fords, and were forced to retire without
being able even to deliver an attack on the Boer lines. Ten
guns, which had been recklessly ran out into the skirmishing
line, had all their teams and gunners shot down, and were
abandoned to the enemy. General Buller then heliographed
to the garrison of Ladysraith a suggestion that they might sur
render, and sent horae to the cabinet a report that it was im
possible to relieve Sir George miite. In reply, he was very
properly directed to attack again. It would have been far
better to have withdrawn at once a comraander who had to
atterapt a task which he conceived to be too hard for him.
No raan does his best when essaying to perform that which he
believes to be impossible. But the govemment gave Buller
another chance.
The news of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso arriving
one immediately after the other caused the most intense disraay
in England. It had been firraly believed that, though some
sraall operations raight raiscarry, the main army in Natal under
Buller would sweep all before it. The awakening to the truth
was rade and humiliating, but the cabinet and the nation

THE CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS. 271
faced the situation with obstinate endurance, and not the least
panic was shown. If 80,000 raen had not sufficed to maintain
the war, double that number should be sent out. Accordingly
the reraaining battalions in England were mobilized, troops
were drawn in from remote garrisons — where militia replaced
them — and a call was made for volunteers both in Great Britain
and in the colonies. It had at last been realized that mounted
men were wanted in enorraous nurabers ; an appeal was, there
fore, made for 10,000 " yeomanry," to be composed of men
who could both ride and shoot. The response brought in a
rauchjarger number, who did admirable service as mounted
infantry throughout the rest of the war. The colonies were
equally prompt in their response, and gave far more than had
been thought possible. Australia and New Zealand contributed,
during the next two years, no less than 22,000 raounted raen,
Canada 6000, the South African loyalists 12,000, and even
regions with a very small European population like Ceylon
and Burmah sent smaU contingents. The greater part of the
railitia of Great Britain volunteered for garrison service in
Africa or the Mediterranean, and every line regiraent received
a reinforceraent of one service corapany from the volunteer
battalions affiliated to it. But it was not for some raonths that
all these new organizations could be utilized, and meanwhile
the war had to be prosecuted with such resources as were at
hand. The charge of the whole campaign was now made over to
Lord Roberts, the hero of the Cabul-Candahar march of
1880. He was now weU advanced in years, but stiU fit for
service ; and the fact that his only son had fallen at Colenso,
in a vam atterapt to save the abandoned guns, did not raake
hira the less inclined to accept the responsible position now
offered to him. He sailed at a few days' notice, taking with
him as chief of the staff Lord Kitchener, the victor of Omdur
man. They arrived at Cape Town on January 10, 1900, and
set to work at once to organize, with the aid of Lord Methuen's

272 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
troops and many newly arrived reinforcements, a new army for
the clearing of Cape Colony and the invasion of the two repub
lics. Buller was left in comraand in Natal alone, where he was
to incur yet further raisfortunes.
While Lord Roberts' army was being collected along the
Une of the railway from Cape Town to Kimberley, the
rebellion in the central parts of the colony was spreading, some
commandos from the Orange Free State having pressed in to
the help of the insurgents. Their advance westward towards
the all-iraportant railway line was kept back with considerable
skill by General French, in the district around Colesberg. In
the outlying corners of the seat of war, the Boers raade no
adequate attempt to push the sieges of either Kimberley or
Mafeking, contenting themselves with ineffective bombard
ments. But affairs in Natal were far more stirring. On January 6,
the burghers delivered a desperate assault on the southern side
of Sir George White's entrenchments round Ladysraith, and
were driven back with loss after eleven hours of heavy fighting.
A fortnight later, however, this British success was obscured
by new disasters. On January i8 General Buller resumed his
endeavours to break through the Boer covering army. March
ing up the Tugela for fifteen railes, he crossed it above the
original lines of the eneray, and advanced on Ladysraith from
the west. The extreme slowness of his approach allowed the
burghers to mass in his front, and there foUowed three days'
fighting, culminating in the capture and subsequent loss of
Spion Kop, a commanding hill above the Tugela which forraed
the southern flank defence of the eneray's new position
(January 24).
Disheartened by the heavy losses suffered in the repulse
frora Spion Kop, Buller withdrew his troops frora their position
beyond the Tugela, and made another attempt to break through
the Boer lines at Vaalkrantz, lower down the river, a few miles
nearer to Colenso. But though a crossing was effected, the

BULLER'S LATER BATTLES. 273
assailants had only penetrated into a sort of amphitheatre,
dominated on three sides by the enemy's position. It seemed
hazardous to push forward into such dangerous ground, and
Buller for the third time drew back and retired from the
Tugela (Febraary 7). After resting eight days he once more
renewed his attempt, this tirae with better success. Going
eastward, he storraed Hlangwane Hill, the Boer's outlying
position south of the Tugela (Febraary 18), and when this was
his own, found that he could outflank and command the
Colenso entrenchments which had been so fatal to him in
December. The river was again crossed, and though a direct
frontal attack from Colenso failed (February 23), yet a flank
ing moveraent four days later was successful. The eneray's
line was at last broken, behind Pieters' Hill, after protracted
fighting, which showed that BuUer's much-tried army had
gained rather than lost in morale from its repeated repulses.
Once raore, as in raany an earUer British battle, the rank and
file had fought their coraraander out of his difficulties, and
presented him with a victory which he can hardly be said to
have earned. The Boers broke up frora before Ladysraith the
moraent that their lines were pierced, and fled northward in
disorder (Febraary 28). There was no pursuit, though BuUer's
cavalry were intact, and burning to go forward. The starving
garrison, rescued only at the last raoment, when they had
alraost eaten their last horse and their last bag of raealy-flour,
was too exhausted to engage in the chase which should have
faUen to the part of the relieving army. Thus the Boers, to
their own surprise, got away with all their waggons and guns.
It is probable that their self-confidence had been shaken
during the last days of the fighting by the fact that they had
heard that Lord Roberts had invaded the Free State, some of
whose commandos had already been withdrawn from before
Ladysmith to oppose his conquering march. But they did
not yield till they had been fought down by BuUer's obstinate
host. It is fortunate that they did not expend the energy
I

274 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
which they displayed against the relieving array on assaults
upon the eraaciated Ladysraith garrison : by the later days of
Febraary Sir George White's troops could hardly lift their
rifles or march a mile. A second assault as violent as that
which failed on January 6 would almost certainly have carried
the besiegers into the town. But at this time of the war the
Boers did not shine in offensive operations.
While Buller was straggling in the valley of the Tugela,
Lord Roberts had at last changed the whole aspect of the war
by his operations in the west. Having collected some 35,000
raen between the Modder and the Orange rivers, in front of
Cronje and the Boer army which held the^Magersfontein Unes,
he did not make a frontal assault, but starting on February 12,
1900, suddenly strack eastward into the Orange Free State,
and turned the enemy's position by a wide circular sweep over
the veldt Meanwhile, General French and the cavalry dashed
at Kimberley, and got there by piercing the lines of the invest
ing force. Surprised by this movement — for the British had
hitherto stuck close to the railway, and raade no flanking
raarches — Cronje and his army abandoned the siege of
Kimberley, evacuated their fortifications, and tried to retire
eastward towards Bloerafontein. This move took them right
across the front of the advancing British force. Several of the
Boer columns got away, including that which had charge of
their siege artUlery. But Cronje himself with 4000 men was
intercepted at Paardeberg, and surrounded by several British
divisions. He entrenched hiraself in the bed of the Modder
river, and held out for ten days against several furious assaults
and a heavy bombardment But on Febraary 27, the nine
teenth anniversary of Majuba, he was forced to surrender,
after a very creditable resistance.
Lord Roberts then swung his main body eastwards, and
marched on Bloerafontein, the capital of the Orange Free
State. To oppose him the enemy raUied the coraraandos
which had escaped the fate of Cronje on their retreat from

VICTORIES OF LORD ROBERTS. 275
Magersfontein, brought up the bands which had been invading
Cape Colony in the direction of Colesberg, and detached raost
of the Free Staters who were engaged in the siege of Ladysmith.
They thus got together some 10,000 or 12,000 men, but these
were not enough to check Lord Roberts, who in a long series
of sharp skirmishes drove thera before hira (March 7 to 11),
and finally occupied Bloerafontein. In all this fighting it was
clear that a new system of tactics was in use for the British
array : there were no more costly frontal attacks, and the
eneray was always moved by threatening his flank, a movement
to which he was keenly sensitive. The main difficulties which
Lord Roberts found were that he was still insufficiently provided
with mounted men — the new Yeomanry and the Colonials were
only just beginning to arrive — and that the food question was
very serious. Owing to difficulties of transport across the bare,
thinly peopled veldt, the army had been on half rations for
several days before entering Bloerafontein.
The capture of the Free State capital involved several
advantages. The enemy had withdrawn from Cape Colony,
where the rebels mostly submitted, and railway comraunication
with Cape Town was easily re-established. A certain nuraber
of Free State burghers laid down their arms, and deep
depression prevailed among the enemy for some weeks. If a
prompt and unceasing advance on Pretoria could have been
managed, Uttle resistance would have been met with. But a
halt was absolutely necessary, in order to rest the half-starved
men and to coUect supplies, and meanwhile the burghers began
to recover their mo7-ale, and Christian De Wet, with the
commandos in the south-eastern angle of the Free State, did
much mischief among the outlying British troops to the right
' of Bloerafontein.* Lord Roberts had to chose between
clearing out the districts of the south-east, a matter which
would have taken much time, and resuming his march on
* Theie were " untoward incidents " at Sannah's Post on March 31, and
tt Reddersburg on April 4.

276 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Pretoria, while leaving active enemies on his flank. He
resolved to go straight on, holding that the moral advantage
of seizing the Transvaal capital at an early date compensated
for the strategic drawback of leaving enemies behind him.
Accordingly, in the end of April, the British army marched
from Bloerafontein on a broad front, moving on both sides of
the raain railway line to Pretoria. This wide extension enabled
thera to outflank the eneray on every occasion when he offered
to fight ; and during the raonth of May, Lord Roberts success
fully forced every position which the burghers tried to hold,
crossed the Vaal, and occupied Johannesburg (May 31). Four
days raore took him to Pretoria, where he liberated 4000
British prisoners. President Kruger fled, after " commandeer
ing" all the gold in the banks of Johannesburg and of the
capital, though it was private property.
While Lord Roberts was urging his victorious career through
the two republics, a detached column from Kiraberley under
Colonel Mahon raade a forced raarch through Bechuanaland
and relieved Mafeking, after defeating the besiegers (May 7).
They found that Baden-Powell and his garrison had held their
own for eight months with coraplete success. Six days before
relief came they had not only beaten off the one daring attempt
which the Boers made to break into the stronghold, but had
captured over 100 men of the assaulting force, including their
commandant. With the faU of Pretoria there was a confident expectation
that the war would come to an end. But the burghers, though
beaten back and dispersed, had never been " cornered " or
suffered severe loss. Only a small proportion of tiiem laid
down their arms, and the British found that they comraanded
no raore than the towns which they had seized, and the
railway by which they had advanced. The holding of this
long line of communication (it is 400 miles from the Orange
I iver to Pretoria) swallowed up the greater part of the army ;
and meanwhile the Orange Free State burghers, under De Wet,

KRUGER FLIES TO EUROPE. 277
were continually derailing trains and cutting off smaU posts,
for it was irapossible to guard every mije of the rail in such
force as to make raids irapossible. Encouraged by these
sraaU successes, the enemy showed no signs of demoralization,
in spite of the fall of Pretoria. The proclaraations by which
Lord Roberts declared the Free State and the Transvaal
annexed to the British erapire had little effect outside the
places occupied by his garrisons.
It was not till two raonths and raore after the capture of
Pretoria that the British army was able to raove on once again.
The intervening tirae had been devoted to scouring the
countryside in the Free State, in order to raake an end of the
bands which preyed upon the line of coraraunication. One
large force under Prinsloo, more than 4000 strong, was sur
rounded and captured on July 31, but enough raen stUl
hung about, under De Wet and other leaders, to make the
protection of the railway between Bloerafontein and Pretoria
a most onerous task.
On August 20, however, when spring was coming round,
Lord Roberts marched eastward towards Machadodorp, where
Kruger had set up a temporary centre of government in a
railway carriage on the Lorenzo-Marquez line. Buller moved
up from Natal to assist in the driving of the eneray over the
Portuguese frontier. There was heavy fighting about Belfast
and Bergendaal, and then the Boer array broke up. A few
were captured, about 1000 fled into Portuguese territory, and
were there interned, but the rest dissolved into sraaU bands,
and dispersed themselves about the Eastern Transvaal. Presi
dent Krager retired to Lorenzo-Marquez, and there took ship
for Holland with his treasure. For two years more he abode
there in safety, sending continual messages to his burghers to
bid them fight to the last and refuse aU terms of surrender.
With the break up of the main Transvaal army, and the
flight of Krager to Europe, the war passed into a new phase.
The enemy, having no longer a general base of operations or

278 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
an effective central government, made no further attempt tc
defend any fixed block of territory, but dispersed and adopted
guerilla tactics. These served thera so well that it was to be
a full year and eight months before they were finally subdued.
Meanwhile the new phase of the war came as a disagreeable
surprise to England. In the last raonths of 1900 sorae troops,
e,g. the Household Cavalry and the City Iraperial Volunteers,
had been sent horae, and Lord Roberts hiraself followed in
December, after giving over the coramand to Lord Kitchener,
who had hitherto acted as the chief of his staff. There was
a general idea that the war was well-nigh over, and that the
prolongation of the straggle would last for weeks rather than
months : certainly it was expected to come to an end when the
cold weather began in March, 1901.
The opening of the new century, however, was destined to
bring with it grievous disappointment There were still 50,000
Boers in arms, and since their main army had dispersed, they
had returned each to his own district Scores of roving bands
were now let loose, each of which devoted itself to harassing
the British garrisons in its own region. On the other hand,
the invaders had no longer any tangible objective at which to
strike : the enemy had no more towns to defend, he had lost
or destroyed most of his guns, and had abandoned the use of
heavy transport. If a large force marched against a Boer
commando it scattered, and sought safety in dispersion. On
the other hand, a dozen commandos, riding in from districts a
hundred miles apart, would often combine against an isolated
garrison or a slowly moving convoy, and concentrate 3000 or
5000 men for its destruction. After the faU of Pretoria the
British troops had spread out over the whole of the Central
Transvaal and the greater part of the Orange River Colony.
But it is impossible, even with 200,000 raen — thri total force
of Lord Roberts' army — to occupy, in a mUitary sense, a
tenitory as large as France and Germany put together ; theie
are 450,000 square miles in the Cape Colony, the Orange

GUERILLA WARFARE. 279
River, the Transvaal, and Northern Natal. The result of the
dispersion of the army in small bodies was that so many
detachments were cut up, so many convoys captured, that
Lord Kitchener found himself obliged to draw in many outlying
posts, and to concentrate his troops in larger masses at the
more important points. Much territory that had been regarded
as pacified, especially in the Orange River Colony, passed
back into the hands of the enemy, who was thus encouraged
to beUeve that the British attack was slackening, and that the
fortune of war had begun to turn. Again and again expe
ditions were sent out against the regions where the commandos
lay thickest, but if they were strong enough the Boers retired
before them, dispersed, and met again when the column had
passed by. A district was far from being subdued even when
half a dozen expeditions had marched through it from end
to end.
Seeing that the enemy were living on the countryside with
ease, and using every farm as a basis of operations, the British
at first tried a policy of destroying all s-jttlements which were
serving as a guerilla centre. But this expedient had an odious
aspect, and did not prove of any great use, while it exaspe
rated the eneray. Moreover, it gave occasion to much malevo
lent criticism on the part of the eneraies of the Governraent
in England, who assumed a humanitarian attitude, and taunted
the cabinet with using " methods of barbarism." At the sarae
time the press of the continent teemed with disgusting lies,
imputing the most awful misconduct to the British army, and
there were even Englishmen who believed, or pretended to
believe, in these inventions. The farm-burning experiment was
followed by another plan — that of coUecting the famUies of the
burghers in " Concentration Camps," in order to prevent them
from aiding and feeding their relatives in arms. This plan
was more effective, and was in itself humane and justifiable.
But it served as another excuse for the criticism of the enemies
of the Government : there was, during the middle months of

28o ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
19CI, a high infant mortality in the camps, caused partly by
bad weather, partly by the insanitary habits of the interned
multitude, and partly by an unfortunate epidemic of measles.
This enabled the domestic malcontents of Britain to accuse
the cabinet and the authorities in South Africa of criminal
negligence and callousness, whUe the foreign press expanded
the charge into a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Boer
race by starvation, disease, and ill-usage.
Meanwhile the war dragged on in a way that was far from
satisfactory. It is trae that a daring attempt of De Wet,
the most active of the guerilla chiefs, to invade Cape Colony
was checked and turned back. But though he himself was
forced to retreat in haste across the Orange river with the loss
of his guns and many raen, yet detachments left behind by
him, aided by local rebels, gave much trouble. They were
especially vexatious in the north-west of the Colony, where no
raUways exist and pursuit was especially difficult Some sraaU
coraraandos even reached the coast not far north of Cape
Town, and had to be hunted off by an eraergency force sent
out from that place. The rebellion in Cape Colony indeed
was never fully suppressed till the end of the war, a few
hundred lurking refugees maintaining themselves in desert
tracts or mountain fastnesses till the general surrender.
There was no way of bringing the sporadic guerilla warfare
to an end except that of attrition — the wearing down of the
enemy's nurabers by continual hostUities. But to reach them
there was need for raany more mounted men. Accordingly
Lord Kitchener applied to the home authorities for as many
horsemen as could be provided. They were sent hira in
enorraous numbers : a second appeal to the nation for
yeoraanry produced 16,000 men, though some of them (it is
said) were not such satisfactory recraits as the first yeoraanry
contingent which had gone out in 1900. The colonies sent
many thousand raounted rifles to add to their first contribution.
A number of new local irregular corps were raised in South

"DRIVES" AND BLOCKHOUSES. 281
Africa. Later on Lord Kitchener even turned his horse
artillerymen into mounted infantry, bidding them leave their
guns, which were no longer much needed, and take to the rifle.
In these ways more than 80,000 mounted men were at last
provided, and it became possible to follow the Boers at their
own pace, though they still showed a wonderful capacity for
evading capture.
The last stage of the war only began when Lord Kitchener
began to try the tedious and costiy device of ranning lines of
fortified blockhouses across the main theatres of the activity of
the guerillas. These were garrisoned by infantry, and connected
by barbed wire fences sufficient to check rapid flight These
lines having been established, the mounted men were sent out
to conduct " drives," i.e. many columns spread theraselves out
on a long front and swept the whole countryside for a length of
'thirty or forty miles, till they thrast the commandos lurking in
the surrounded area against a line of blockhouses, where the
infantry brought up and stopped the fugitives.
Many " drives " were not very successful, for the enemy
displayed an astounding power of evasion, slipping between
colurans, or cutting their way through in the intervals of the
blockhouses. But other raids produced their 300 or 500 or
700 captures, and the nuraber of Boer prisoners in St. Helena,
Bermuda, Ceylon, and India grew apace, till nearly 40,000 in
all were accounted for. By the end of 1901 the spirits of the
burghers, obstinate as they were, began to fail. It was clear
that even guerilla tactics would not serve them for ever.
England was sending out an incessant supply of raounted raen
— for many months the average number of horses despatched
to South Africa was 10,000 a month — while their own numbers
were ever dwindUng.
The first sign of discouragement was an abortive negotiation
set on foot by Louis Botha, the Transvaal commander-in-chief,
in the autumn of 1901. It carae to nothing, but showed
that some of the enemy were beginning to waver. All through

282 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
the end of the year and the early spring of 1902 the " drives"
went on, and the burgher force dwindled. Yet they were still
active, and succeeded in inflicting several severe blows on
minor British colurans. Delarey, the guerUla chief in the
South-Westem Transvaal, was our raost obstinate opponent in
this period of the war, and the last success which the enemy
won was that in which he cut up a force of 1500 men under
Lord Methuen in April, 1902, near Klerksdorp. But this
bold stroke caused such a number of columns to be concentrated
against hira, that his coraraando was hunted down and scattered
not mjmy days after its last victory.
At last the process of incessant attrition had subdued the
obstinate courage of the Boers, and in May, 1902, they made
serious overtures for peace. Their leaders from all parts of
the seat of war raet at Vereeniging on the Vaal, and having
agreed that further resistance was hopeless, asked for peace.
At first their demands were preposterously high, but when they
found that Lord Kitchener and Lord Milner were deterrained
to dictate the terms of the pacification, and would give in
neither to haggling nor to bluster, they listened to reason.
Liberal conditions were granted them : there was to be no
war indemnity imposed, no one was to be prosecuted for any
acts done during the continuance of hostilities, save for viola
tion of the usages of civilized war : a sum of _;^3,ooo,ooo was
set aside to rebuild and restock the devastated farms. On
the other hand, the burghers swore allegiance of Edward VIL,
and laid down all their arms, save a certain number of rifles
which were to be allowed them for protection against the
natives. They tried to beg for a grant of indemnity for their
comrades the Cape Colony rebels, but this was stemly refused.
It was announced that the rank and file of the disloyalists
should be disfranchised for life, and the leaders tried and
punished according to the laws of their colony.
The Vereeniging assembly having accepted these terms,
the surrenders at once began. To the surprise of the British,

THE BOERS SURRENDER.

283

21,000 combatants came in and laid down their weapons — a
number which proved that the force in arms against us was far
larger than had been guessed; nearly 100,000 men had been
in the field. For tiiere were 42,000 prisoners already accounted
for, there were over 10,000 able-bodied men in the Concen
tration Camps— sorae of whom had actuaUy taken arms for us
in the last months of the war— several thousands, including
many foreign mercenaries, had escaped to Portuguese or

German soil, many Cape rebels had surrendered long ago, and
about 1 0,000 men in all had fallen.
The burghers welcomed the end of the war with a heartiness
which surprised their conquerors, and showed little of the
rancour which had been expected from them. Under wise
and conciliatory administration they becarae useful and trust
worthy citizens of the British Empire, and were granted self-
government within a shorter time than any statesman had
believed possible in 1902.

{ 284 )

CHAPTER XII.
CONCLUSION — THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIAL FEDERATION.
The South African war served to bring out both the strong
and the weak points, not only of the British army, but of the
British Empire — the sarae that were to be displayed on a
larger scale in 1 914. It showed, on the one hand, our dangers
and our liraitations. We were not well prepared for a war of
^ny magnitude : the army was weak both in the mounted
arm and in the provision of heavy artillery. Though we
ultimately placed more than 250,000 men in the field, it was
only by dint of calling into existence all manner of new and
untried organizations. The regular army, unaided by the help
volunteered from home and the colonies, would not have
Lessons of sufficed for the task set it. There was terrible
the South incapacity displayed by more than one of those
ncan vyar. ^^^ ^^^^ placed in high comraand in South Africa
during the first months of the straggle. There was also gross
miscalculation at horae : it will not soon be forgotten that our
Intelligence Department estimated the available force of the
enemy at no more than 35,000 men, or that our mUitary
authorities asked the Colonial Govemments to send infantry
rather than cavalry to a war in which the mounted arm turned
out to be all-important There was material provided for
grave misgivings for the future, when we listened to the
universal howl of hatred raised on the Continent, which vented
itself in disgraceful lies and libels against the cabinet, the
army, and the nation.
On the other hand, the war had served to reassure us on

LESSONS OF THE BOER WAR 285
many points whereon doubt was possible before the crisis began.
VVe discovered that our available armed force for a distant
expedition was not the 80,000 men, the two solitary army
corps, which railitary experts had put down as the utraost
possible lirait of our power. Thrice that force was provided :
twenty times as much could have been had for the asking, if it
had been required, as it was in 1914-18. The nation showed
an admirable spirit : the disasters of the early months of the
war afflicted but did not disraay it : the successes of the later
stages did not lead to over-confidence. The only thing that
could be criticized was the curious outbreak of silly exuberant
horseplay on " Mafeking night "—the evening when the news
came that Baden-Powell's long defence of his distant fortress
had reached a successful end. This was but a hysterical
display of relief at the feeling that the period of disasters was
over. Nothing of the kind followed the much more important
news of the fall of Pretoria, or the final surrender of the Boers
in May, 1902. It was a most reassuring sign that the nation
paid no attention to the desperate attempts that were raade,
for raere party purposes, to get up an agitation against the
Government. They were raet with blank silence, and only
reflected discredit on their initiators. When we thought on the
domestic troubles that would have followed, in most other
European countries, on such disasters as those with which the
war opened, we could see clearly enough that the old obstinate
endurance of the British race had not disappeared. If anything
could be more cheering than this, it was the liberal and tolerant
attitude shown at the end of the war, when the whole nation
agreed that the eneray should be given the most honourable terms
consistent with safety, and raust be conciliated rather than crushed.
Yet there was one phenomenon even more important and
encouraging than this— the splendid loyalty with .j.^ colonies
which the colonies rallied round the mother- and the
country in the moraent of danger. Much had ^^'
been hoped from them, but they gave more : a contribution of

286 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
40,000 men of the best fighting material, granted for an im
perial war in which it might have been pleaded that they were
not directly concerned. This simple fact disposed of many of
the doubts that had been raised during the last twenty years as
to the solidity and cohesion of the Erapire. Would Canada,
it was asked but a few years ago, be prepared to co-operate
in a war waged for Australian ends? Would Australia show
any interest in the straggle to keep the " open door " in China ?
The answer now is that they most certainly would : on any
real imperial question the enthusiastic support of the colonies
raay be counted upon. In the spirit of national solidarity
each member of the great British family made its feUows'
quarrels its own . The splendid future of 1 9 1 4 might be foreseen,
This brings us to the topic which was being most pondered
over as the twentieth century began — the practicability of
Iraperial Federation. In 1902 as in 1920 the Crown was the
only formal tie between the many colonies and possessions
The oroble °^^^ which the Union Jack floats. Was a closer
of Imperial union desirable and practicable ? Might we look
Federation, foj-^yju-d to a firra and well-compacted league of
all the British lands, forming a state that would exercise a
controlling force over the destinies of the whole world ?
Sentiment was undoubtedly in favour of Imperial Federation :
racial patriotism and the great meraories of a coraraon past
tell in favour of union in the majority of the colonies no less
than in the mother-country. But there are many practical
difficulties in the way. Supposing that Federation were an
accomplished fact, and a parliament of the whole British world
assembled, would Great Britain allow herself to be outvoted
and her policy changed by a corabination of her daughter-
states? Or, again, would not individual members of the
Difficulties of '"^D^s bs prone to show an unbending and aggres-
foreig-n sive spirit in their dealings with foreign powers,
policy. because they reckoned on being supported by the
whole force of the Empire in their own petty quarrels ? Would

IMPERIAL FFDERATION. 287
it be easy to hold in particularist ambitions, and to maintain
a single policy for the whole Empire ? It was perfectly possible
that such doubts would prove to be unnecessary, and that in
a spirit of mutual dependence each meraber of the Federation
would agree to give and take. The example of the United
States, whose foreign policy has seldom been hampered by
internal differences of opinion between the various states, is
not discouraging. But history moves slowly : the problera of
1902 reraains unsolved still in 1920.
A much more serious objection turned upon the matter of
Free Trade and Protection. All British commercial policy
since the days of Peel has been conducted on free-trade lines ;
they undoubtedly suited a great manufacturing country, which
at the same time owned the carrying trade of half
the worid. One of the great English political ^ifeSttes^'
parties, and an iraportant section ofthe other, was
committed to a continuance of that policy. On the other hand,
most ofthe colonies are furiously protectionist in sentiment, and
tax the goods of the mother-country no less than those of the
foreigner. Federation would certainly be followed by a com
mercial union, by which the colonies would undertake to give
the products of Britain a preferential tariff. Canada set the
example in the excellent agreement raade in 1898. But in
return they ask that Britain should abandon her hard-and-fast
line of Free Trade, and impose duties on foreign goods, so as
to give her daughter-states an advantage over the alien. It was
not tiU 191 9 that Great Britain began to go some way in this
direction, seeing the enormous political benefits that would
ensue. But it will certainly be a great wrench to her to reverse
the commercial policy of fifty years, and to revert to economic
ideas that have been long discredited.
India supplies a third set of difficulties in the way of
federation. It is hard to see how she can be The Indian
fitted into the scheme. No doubt the colonies difficulty.
might be given their fair share in her administration, as long

288 ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
as the present condition of affairs continues. But if India is
to be trusted with a greater measure of self-government than
she enjoyed in the nineteenth century, it is clear that her
250,000,000 inhabitants must weigh very heavily in the federa
tion. If taken into full partnership, she might swamp the rest
of the Empire.
In spite of all such difficulties — and there are dozens more
which might be urged, turning on various financial, railitary,
and administrative points^there seems to be no really insuper
able barrier to the carrying out of the great scheme. The
examples ofthe Canadian federation, which has worked so well
for fifty years,, and of the Australian and African
Prospects of federations, accomplished more recently, are de
cidedly encouraging for the larger scheme. The
matter must, to a very large extent, be settled by sentiment ; to
thrust union on recalcitrant members would be fatal. The pro
gress towards federation must inevitably be slow, and preceded
by many half-measures and partial agreements. These were,
indeed, already coming into existence ; facts like the splendid
aid granted by all the colonies for the South African war, the
Australian " auxiliary squadron," the commercial treaty with
Canada in 1898, the inter-colonial agreements between Canada
and Australia, and Canada and the West Indies, were all steps
towards the great end. Most important of all, perhaps, is the
ever-growing rapidity of communications by sea and land ; the
barriers of distance are the most forraidable hindrances to
union, but they are being quickly removed. An achievement
like the Canadian-Pacific Railway not merely develops a new
province, but helps to bind the whole Empire together.
British Columbia is, for all practical purposes, as near to
London now as Malta was in 1815. As communications grow
easier, the consciousness of common origin and interests raust
grow stronger, and the inter-dependence of the raother-country
and the colonies be better reaUzed by both parties. Mutual
ignorance was really the reason why, earlier in the century.

CONCLUSIONS. 289
Great Britain sometimes seemed an unsympathetic parent, or
her colonists discontented children. We are now long past
the tirae when Canada and Australia seemed so far off and so
unimportant that English statesraen talked lightly of the day
when they would, in the natural course of things, " cut the
painter," and leave Great Britain alone as a sraall raanufacturing
island in the North Atlantic. Difficulties there still are,
proceeding some frora the local patriotisms and jealousies of
the colonies, others from the impracticability of the mother-
country. They must not be undervalued. It is conceivable,
even now after the great common experience of all the British
peoples in 1914-18, that various sections of them might drift
asunder. The disaster seems unlikely, yet the eye of the
pessimist might detect ugly possibilities in several quarters.
That the optimist is the wiser prophet is probably the fact :
whether any definite scheme of federation will ever be formu
lated, or whether the " Britains overseas " are to be united by
nothing more formal than the common flag and common
institutions, and to live in an " entente " rather than a formal
constitutional union, only time, the wisest of counsellors, can
show.

APPENDIX.

MINISTRIES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Date.

Mar. 7, iSoi
May 12, 1804
Feb. II, 1806
Mar. 31, 1807
Dec. 2, 1809
June 9, 1812

April 24, 1827
Sept. 25, 1827
Jan. 25, 1828
Nov. 22, 1830
July 18, 1834

Poli tics.

ToryTory
WhigToryToryTory ToryTory ToryWhigWhig

Prime Minister.

H. Addington
William Pitt
Lord Grenville
Duke of Portland
Spencer Perceval
Lord Liverpool
George Canning
Lord Goderich
Duke of Wellington
Lord Grey
Lord Melboume

Lord Chancellor.

Lord Eldon
Lord Eldon
Lord Erskine
Lord Eldon
Lord Eldon
Lord Eldon
Lord Lyndhurst
Lord Lyndhurst
Lord Lyndhurst
Lord Brougham
Lord Brougham

Home Secretary.

Lord Pelham
C. Yorke {1803)
Lord Hawkesbury
Lord Spencer
Lord Hawkesbury
R. Ryder
Lord Sidmouth
(Addington)
Sir Robert Peel
(1822)
Sturges-Bourne
Lord Lansdowne
Lord Lansdowne
Sir Robert Peel
Lord Melboume
Lord Duncannon

Foreign Secretary.

Lord Hawkesbury
Lord Harrowby
Lord Mulgrave
Charles James Fox
Lord Grey (1806)
George Canning
Lord Bathurst
Lord Wellesley
Lord Castlereagh
George Canning
(1822)
Lord Dudley
Lord Dudley
Lord Dudley
Lord Aberdeen
Lord Palmerston
Lord Palmerston

Cliancellor of the
Exchequer.

A gap while Wellington and Peel Vainly tried to construct a ministry, Dec. i834-ApriI. 1835.

H. Addington
William Pitt
Lord Henry Petty
Spencer Perceval
Spencer Perceval
N. Vansittart
F. Robinson (Lord
Goderich)
George Canning
J. C. Herries
Henry Goulbum
Lord Althorpe
Lord Althorpe

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292 APPENDIX.

POPULATION OF THE UNITED KINGDOM.
Scotland. Ireland.* Total.
1,608,402 S.3i9,867(?) 15,720,805
1,805,864 6,000,000 (?) 17,970,120
2,091,521 6,801,827 20,893,584
2,364.385 7,767,401 24,048,584
2,620,184 8,175,124 26,709,456
2,880,742 6,552,385 27,368,736
3,062,294 5,798,967 28,927,485
3,360,018 5-412,377 31.484,661
3.735,573 5,174.836 34,884,848
4,025,647 4.704,750 37,732,922
4,472,000 4,456,546 41,454,621
• No accurate Irish figures can be given for 1801 or 1811.

England and
Wales.

I80I

.. 8,892,536

I8II

.. 10,164,256

I82I

12,000,236

I83I

.. 13,896,797

I84I

.. 15,914,148

I85I

.. 17.927.609

I86I .

20,066,224

I87I .

22,712,266

I88I .

•• 25,974,439

1891

.. 29,002,525

I90I ... 32,526,075

THE NATIONAL DEBT.

In 1792, at commencement of French Revolutionary War 239,663,421
In 1802, at Peace of Amiens ... ... ... ... 537,653,008
In 1815, after Waterloo ... ... ... ... 861,039,049
In 1837, at accession of Victoria ... ... ... 761,422,570
In 1854, before Crimean War ... ... ... ... 769,082,549
In 1857, at end of Crimean War ... ... ... 808,108,722
In 1898 ... ... ... ... ... ... 644,909,847
On March 31, 1901 ._ ... ... ... ... 705,723,878

APPENDIX.

293

FOREIGN SOVEREIGNS OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

FRANCE.

Bonaparte, '¦ First Consul"
Bonaparte as Emperor
Napoleon I 
Louis XVIII 
Napoleon restored March-
Louis XVIII. restored ...
Charles X. ... 
Louis Philippe 
Second Republic 

1799-1804 1804-1814i8i4-i8r5
-June 1815
1815-1824 1824-18301830-18481848-1852

Napoleon III.
Third Republic
A. Thiers,

... 1852-1870
Sept. 4, 1870
President 1871-1873

Marshal Mac-Mahon
J. Grfevy
M. F. Carnot
J. Casimir Perrier
Felix Faure
E. Loubet

1873-1879 1879-18871887-1894
1894-1895 1895-1899 1899- 1906

Paul 
Alexander I.
Nicholas I. ...

RUSSIA.

1796-1801 1801-18251825-1855

Alexander II.
Alexander III.
Nicholas IL

1855-1881 1881-18941894-1917

PRU SSIA-GERM AN Y.

Frederick-William III. ... 1797-1840
Frederick-WiUiam IV. ... 1840-1860
William 1  1860-1888
Elected German Emperor 1871

Frederick, Emperor
William II., Emperor

18S8
1888- 1918

AUSTRIA.

Francis II., " Holy Roman
Emperor"  1793-1805
Francis II., Emperor of
Austria  1805-1835

Ferdinand ...
Francis-Joseph

1835-1848 1848-1916

SPAIN.

Charles IV.  1788-1808
Ferdinand VII. {dejure) ¦. ^^^
Joseph Bonaparte [de facto) j
Ferdinand VII. restored ... 1814-1833
IsabeUa  1833-1868

First Republic V..
Amadeus of Savoy
Second Republic ...
Alphonso XII. ...
Alphonso XIII. ...

1868-1870
1870-18731873-18751875-188S i886-

294

APPENDIX.

TYPICAL BUDGETS.

BUDGET OF 1801-2, LAST OF THE
REVOLUTIONARY WAR.

Income.

8,758,184

Expenditure

£

Customs 

National debt and

Excise 

1 1.573.427

sinking fund

25,346,689

Irish receipts (customs

Navy 

17.258,135

and excise not yet

Army and ordnance

20,084,813

amalgamated with

Civil list and civil ser

British) 
2,350.509
vices 
3.615,386
Stamps 
3,249,122
Miscellaneous
«'."77.9i7
Land and assessed
taxes 
4,648,078
Income tax 
5.804,515
Post-office 
1.250,725
Loans 
36,145,059
Miscellaneous
1,461,509
^75.241.128
Total ... i
Total ... ,
^77,482,940
A ruinous budget; besides the ;^36, 145,059 raised by issuing new
Government stock, the gteaterpart of the ;£ii, 177,917 "miscellaneous "in
the expenditure column is to be accounted for by the paying off of an
adverse balance of exchequer bills from 1801 . There still remains a deficit
of two millions ! There are no loans to foreign powers, as Austria has
withdrawn from the war.
BUDGET OF 1810. NAPOLEONIC WAR IN PROGRESS.
Income.
£
13,816,218
Expenditure
£
Customs 
National debt and
Excise 
25,350,990
sinking fund
33,433,828
Stamps 
5,546,082
Navy 
20,058,412
Land and assessed
Army and ordnance ...
23.188,631
taxes 
8,011,205
Civil list and civil
Income tax 
13,492,215
services 
1.S33.140
Post-ofiSce 
1,471,746
Loans to foreign
L«ans 
15,690,826
powers 
2,050,082
Miscellaneous
1,968,618
Miscellaneous
S.079.547
Total ... 85,347,900 I Total ...' 85,343,640
The amount borrowed by loan this year, and that lent to foreign powers,
are both below the average.
APPENDIX.

295

BUDGET OF 1820. AFTER THE GREAT PEACE.

Income.

Customs 
Excise 
Stamps 
Land and assessed

£
11,475,259
28,941,629 6.853,986

taxes 
Post-office 
Borrowed from the
sinking fund
Miscellaneous

8,192,301 1,621,326
13.833.783 1,867,308

Total

72,785.592

Expenditure.
National debt and
sinking fund
Navy ...
Army and ordnance...
Civil list and civil
services
Loans to foreign
powers
Miscellaneous Total ...

49.339,773 S.943.879
10,281,702 2,268,940 48.464
4.479,992
72,362,750

The customs dues have been cut down, the income tax abolished, the
expenditure on army and navy halved. The burden of the national debt
remains enormous. The cross-entries in both columns as to the sinking
fund should be regarded as cancelling each other.

SIR ROBERT PEEL'S LAST BUDGET, 1846.

Income.

£
22,612,708

Expenditure.
Interest on national

Customs 

Excise 

15,563,084

debt, etc  27,656,555

Stamps 

7,895,628

Navy  7,803,464

Land and assessed

Army and ordnance ... 9,061,233

taxes 

4.479.944

Civil list and civil

Income tax 

5.656,528

services  2,736,806

Post-office 

2,004,007

Miscellaneous ... 7,903,533

Miscellaneous

1.489.505
;^S9, 701,404

Total ...

Total ... ;^5S. 161,591

The income tax has been reintroduced by Peel. The expenditure on
the national debt is largely reduced by the abandonment of the old
" sinking fund." A surplus of ^4,000,000 reaUzed.

296

APPENDIX.

A CRIMEAN WAR BUDGET, 1855.

Income.
Customs  21,991,675

Expenditure.
Interest on national

Excise  17,042,295

debt, etc  27,864,533

Stamps  7.159.539

Navy  14,490,105

Land and assessed

Army and ordnance 13,831,601

taxes  3,225,121

Civil list and civil

Income tax  10,922,266

services  7,706,721

Post-office  2,635,336

Miscellaneous ... 5,242,026

Miscellaneous ... 1, 115,335

Total ... ;^64,09l,567

Total ... ;e69, 134,986

A deficit of ;^5,ooo,ooo to be made up by borrowing, in spite of a
heavily increased income tax, raised from "jd. to is. ^. on the £. The
war has swelled the naval and military expenses by ;^lo,ooo,ooo.

A MODERN BUDGET, 1898.

Income.

Expenditure.

£

£

Customs 

21,798,000

Interest on national

Excise 

28,300,000

debt, etc  25,000,000

Stamps (including

Navy  20,852,000
death duties, etc.)
18,750,000
Army  I9.330.ooo
Land and assessed
Civil list and civil
taxes 
2,430,000
services  22,818,003
Income tax 
i7,25o-,ooo
Miscellaneous ... 14,935.991
Post-office 
12,170,000
Telegraphs 
3,OIQ,O0O
MisceUaneous
2,986,004
Total ... ;fio6,694,oo4
Total ... ;fio2,935,994
Customs, owing to huge remissions of taxation since i860, remain low.
" Stamps " are enormously increased, largely owing to new death-duties.
The Post-office brings in almost five times its yield of 1855. Telegraphs,
now a Govemment monopoly, are a new heading. Income tax, at 8rf.
in the pound, yields half as much again as it did at is. ^d. in 1855. Civil
service expenditure has increased at an even greater rate than military
and naval. Thc national debt shrinks every year.
APPENDIX.

297

THE LAST BUDGET OF THE CENTURY. THE SOUTH
AFRICAN WAR IN PROGRESS.

Income.

£
26,262,000
33,100,00020,805,000

Expenditure.
Interest on national
debt, etc  19,835,488
Navy  29,520,000
Army  91,710,000
Civil list and civil

Customs 
Excise 
Stamps (including
death duties, etc.)...
Land and assessed

taxes 
Income tax 
Post-office 

2,475,000
26,920,000 13,800,000

service
Miscellaneous

... 24,969,108
... 17,557,668

Telegraphs 
Miscellaneous

3,450,000 3,572,684
130,384,684

Total

Total ... £,

- ^^183,592,264

A deficit of ;^S3,ooo,ooo, caused by the African war, remains to be made
np by borrowing. It will be noted that ;f 24,000,000 of new taxation has
been imposed, the income tax having been raised from %d. in 1899 to 1/.
in 1900-01, and additional customs and excise duties having been imposed.
The army expenditure has been more than quadrupled by the war.

INDEX.

Abdul-Aziz, Sultan of Turkey, 172
Abdul-Hamid, Sultan of Turkey,
massacres of, 303 ; his war with
Greece, 205
Abdur'Rahman, ameer of Cabul, 236,
237
Abercromby, Sir Ralph, his victory in
Egypt, 5
Aberdeen, Lord, joins the Whigs,
127 ; engages in Crimean war, 129 ;
resigns office, 136
Abu-Klea, battle of, 183
Abyssinian war, the, 159, 160
Addington, Henry, prime minister, 4 ;
makes peace of Amiens, 9 ; resigns
office, 18 ; joins Grenville ministry,
28 ; home secretary, 59 ; retires
from poUtics, 63
Afghan war, the first, 123, 124 ; the
second, 235, 236
Africa, South, the English in, 51,
250-255 ; the Boer war in, 259-283
Africa, Westem, colonies of, 250 ;
history of, 257 ; struggle with the
French in, 257
Alaiama, cs^eofthe, 150; arbitration
conceming, 167
Albert of Coburg, Prince Consort, 91
Albuera, battle of, 4a
Alexander I. of Russia, 7 ; his wars
with Napoleon, 24, 30, 44
Alexander II. of Russia, his war with
England, 137; invades Turkey,
173 ; death of, iga

Alexander III. of Russia, his policy,
192
Alexandria, battle of, 5 ; bombard
ment of, 181
Alma, battle of the, 132
America. See United States
American colonies, history of Ihe,
246-250
Amiens, peace of, 7
Arabi Pasha, rebellion of, 180, 181
Armed Neutrality, the, 2, 6
Armenian atrocities, the, 203
Assaye, battle of, 216
Auckland, Lord, Governor-General of
India, 222
Austerlitz, battle of, 25
Austraha, British settlement in, 212 ;
history of, 241-244
Austria, her wars with Napoleon, 24,
38, 46 ; Italian wars of, 103, 145 ;
Prussian war of, 159
Atbara, battle f f the, 207
Badajoz, siege of, 45
Baden-Powell, General, bis defence
of Mafeking, 267, 276
Balaclava, battle of, 134
Balfour, Arthur, Irish secretary, igo
Bareilly, battle of, 233
Baylen, capitulation of, 35
Beaconsfield, Lord. See Disraeli
Bentinck, Lord George, leader of
Protectionists, 98, 107
Berlm, decrees, 31 ; treaty of, 174

300

INDEX.

Bismarck, Prince, Prussian minister,
attacks Denmark, 146 ; crushes
Austria, 159 ; attacks France, 167 ;
his foreign policy, 159, 167, 174 ;
his colonial poUcy, 253 ; driven
from office, 192
Bloemfontein, conference at, 261 ;
capture of, 275
Bliicher, Marshal, commands the
Prussians at Waterloo, 50
Bonaparte, Jerome, King of West
phalia, 30
Bonaparte, Joseph, King of Naples,
27 ; King of Spain, 35
Bonaparte, Louis, King of Holland,
27 ; abdicates, 41
Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, See
Napoleon III.
Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I.
Borodino, battle of, 45
Botha, Louis, Boer leader, 281
Boulogne, Napoleon at, 17
British Central Africa, 255
British Columbia, colony of, 248
British East Africa Company, 255
British Guiana, annexed, 51 ; its boun
dary disputes, 203
British South Africa Company, 255
Broad Church party, the, 123
Brougham, Henry, Lord Chancellor,
73
Browning, Robert, 119
Bulgarian atrocities, the, 173
Buller, Sir Redvers, his operations in
South Africa, 367-273
Burmah, first war with, 222 ; second
war with, 228 ; annexation of, 236
Busaco, battle of, 40
Byron, George, Lord, 66, 119
Cabul, British disaster at, 223 ;
taken by General Roberts, 236
Calder, Admiral, defeats Villeneuve,
22
Canada, mvaded by Americans, 48 ;
Fenian raids in, 160 ; history of,
247, 248 ; dominion of, 249
Candahar, seized by British, 223 ;
second conquest of, 234 ; battle of,
23s

Canning, George, 64 ; his foreign
pohcy, 66 ; prime minister, 67
Cape Colony, annexed by Britain,
213 ; subsequent history of, 251, 252
Carlyle, Thomas, historian, 120, 121
Carnatic, annexed by Wellesley, 216
Caroline, Queen, her troubles, 62, 63
Castlereagh, Lord, reactioneuy policy
of, 59, 60 ; death of, 63
Catholic Emcmcipation BiU. See
Emancipation, Catholic
Cato Street conspiracy, 61
Cavagnari, Sir Louis, murdered al
Cabul, 236
Cavendish, Lord Frederick, murder
of, 179
Cavour, Sardinian minister, 145
Cawnpore, massacre of, 232 ; battle
of, 233
Central African Company, the, 255
Chamberlain, Joseph, opposes Home
Rule, 186, 188 ; joins the Unionist
ministry, 202; his diplomacy in
South Africa, 262
Charasia, battle of, 236
Charles Albert, King of Sardinia, hia
war with Austria, 103
Charles IV. of Spain, deposed by
Napoleon, 35
Charles X. of France, deposed, 72
Charlotte, Princess, marriage and
death of, 59
Chartist movement, the, 93, loi
ChiUianwaUah, battle of, 226
China, first war with, 240 ; second
war with, 141 ; later developments
in, 240; "Boxer" rebeUion in,
241
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 194
Ciudad Rodrigo, storm of, 45
Clarence, WiUiam, duke aS. See
WiUiam IV.
ClerkenweU Explosion, the, 161
Cleveland, Grover, American presi
dent, 204
Clyde, CoUn CampbeU, Lord, sup
presses Indian Mutiny, 233
Codrington, Admiral, at Navarino, 68
Colenso, battle of, 269-270
Confederation of the Rhine, 25

INDEX.

301

Conservative," rise of the party-
name, 94
Consols, converted by Goschen, 194
" Conspiracy to Murder" BiU, the, 143
Continental system, 31, 32
Convention of Cintra, 36
Copenhagen, battle of, 6 ; seized by
British, 33
Corporations Act, the, repealed, 69
Cotton Famine, the, 148
Council, the " Orders in," of 1807,
32
Cronje, Boer general, wins the battle
of Magersfontein, 269 ; captured at
Paardeberg, 274
Crimea, invasion of the, 132-138
Cumberland, Ernest, Duke of. King
of Hanover, 90
Cyprus, annexed by Beaconsfield, 174,
I7S
DALHODSIE, Lord, Governor-General
of India, 227, 228
Delarey, General, opposes the British,
282
Delhi, taken by British, 216; seized
during Mutiny, 232
Denmark, wars of England with, 6,
33 ; wars of, with Prussia, 146
Derby, Edward Stanley, Earl of,
prime minister in 1852, 107 ; in
1858, 143 ; in 1866, 155
Devonshire, Duke of. See Hartington
De Wet, Christian, Boer general,
275, 280
Disraeli, Benjamin, Eari of Beacons
field, leads the Protectionists, 98,
99 ; chancellor of the exchequer,
107, 143 ; prime minister, 163 ; his
Reform Bill, 162 ; second ministry
of, 170 ; at Congress of Berlin, 174 ;
loses office, 177
Dundee [Talana HiU], battle of, 265
Eastern Question, the, 128, 130
East India Company, the, abolished,
144. 234
Education Acts, the, 165, 194
Egypt, French expelled from, 5 ;
EngHsh interference in, 171, 180;

conquered by Lord Wolseley, 181.
See also Soudan
Elba, Napoleon in, 47, 49
EUenborough, Lord, Governor-General
of India, 224, 225
Emancipation, Catholic, Pitt's scheme
for, 4 ; urged by the Whigs, 28 ;
granted by WeUington, 70
Eylau, battle of, 30
Factory Acts, the, 96, 116
Fashoda, the French at, 208
Fenians, the, 160, 161
Ferdinand VII. of Spain, kidnapped
by Napoleon, 35 ; liis reign, 83
Ferozeshah, battle of, 226
Forster, William, Irish secretary, 178
Fox, Charles James, takes office, 28 ;
dies, 28
France. See -under names of kings
and statesmen
Francis II., Emperor, his wars with
t Napoleon, 24, 25, 37, 38, 46
Francis Joseph, Emperor, suppresses
Hungarian revolt, 103; his war
with France, 144 ; his war with
Prussia, 159
Frederick William III. of Prussia, his
wars with Napoleon, 29, 30, 46, 50
Frederick WiUiam IV. of Prussia, his
dealings with the Revolution, 104
Free Kirk, the, of Scotland, 125, 126
Free Trade, advocated by Huskisson,
64 ; by Peel, 98
Friedland, battle of, 30
Fuentes d'Onoro, battle of, 42
Garibaldi, conquers Naples, 145
Gaslight, invention of, 109
George III. vetoes Catholic Emanci
pation, 4, 28 ; madness of, 59 ;
death of, 61
George IV., his regency, 59 ; accession
of, 61 ; quarrels of with Queen
CaroUne, 63 ; dies, 72
Germany, empire of, 167; See Bis
marck, WiUiam I., WiUiam II. ;
colonies of, 253, 254
Ghuznee, stormed by the British,
223

3W

INDEX.

Gladstone, WiUiam E., chancellor of
the exchequer, 128 ; his character,
153 ; his budgets, 154 ; prime
minister, 164 ; disestablishes Irish
Church, 164 ; his Irish poUey, 165 ;
his foreign poUcy, 166, 167; loses
office, 170; denounces Bulgarian
atrocities, 173; returns to office,
177 ; his second ministry, 178-184 ;
introduces Home Rule, 187;
defeated, 189 ; his third ministry,
198 ; retires, 200 ; dies, 209
Goderich, Lord, prime minister, 67
Gordon, Charles, General, his defence
of Khartoum, and death, 182,
183
Goschen, G., chanceUor of the ex
chequer, converts consols, 194
Gough, Hugh, Lord, fights the Sikhs,
225, 226
Greek war of independence, 65, 68 ;
war with Turkey, 1897, 205
GrenviUe, Williara, Lord, prime
minister, 28
Grey, Charles, Lord, leader of Whigs,
73 ; introduces Reform Bill, 74 ;
carries Reform Bill, 78 ; his Poor
Law, 86 ; abolishes slavery, 88 ;
retires, 89
Griqualand annexed, 253
Grouchy, marshal, in Waterloo cam
paign, 50
Guzerat, battle of, 226
Gwalior, battle of, 234
Hanover, electorate of, annexed by
Prussians, 24 ; taken by Napoleon,
30; separated from England, go;
annexed by Bismarck, 159
Hardinge, Lord, governor-general,
225
Hartington, Marquis of, opposes
Home Rule, 188 ; joins Unionist
government, 202
Hastings, Marquis of, Governor-
General of India, 219, 220
Havelock, General, in Persia, 141 ; at
Lucknow, 233
High Church party, the, 123, 125
Hohenlinden, battle of, a

Holkar, Jeswunt Rao, wars of, with
British, 216
Holland, English campaigns in, 3 ;
given to Louis Bonaparte, 27 ;
annexed by Napoleon, 41 ; restored
to House of Orange, 52 ; separated
from Belgium, 73
Holy Alliance, the, 65
Home Rule in Ireland, advocated by
Parnell, 176, 179, '185 ; first BiU
for, 187 ; second Bill for, 198
Hundred Days, the, 49-51
Huskisson, WiUiam, president of the
Board of Trade, his commercial
policy, 64; dismissed by WeUing
ton, 63; kiUed, 114
Hyde Park riots, the, 163
Imperial federation, ils progress,
258-260
Income Tax, origin of, 96
India, conquests of Wellesley in, 215-
217 ; conquests of Marquis of
Hastings in, 219, 220 ; Lord Auck
land's wars in, 222, 223; Cabul
disaster, 223 ; Sikh wars, 225-227 ;
Mutiny, 229-234 ; East India Com
pany abolished, 234; second
Afghan war, 235-237 ; later con
quests, 237, 238 ; state of the
Empire, 238, 239
Inkerman, battle of, 134
Ionian Islands, the, ceded to Britain, 51
Ireland, union with England, 3;
O'ConneU's agitation in, 70 ; Catho
lic Emancipation conceded, 71 ;
Reform BUl for, 78; the Tithe
war, 89 ; end of " Repeal " in, 95 ;
the Potato Famine, 98 ; Smith
O'Brien's rising, 100; the Fenians,
160, 161 ; Church of, disestablished,
163 ; Gladstone's Land Act, 164 ;
Pamell and Home Rule, 176 ; agi
tation in, 178 ; the Phoenix Park
murders, 179; Gladstone adopts
Home Rule, 186 ; first Home Rule
BiU rejected, 188 ; the Plan of Cam
paign, 190 ; Parnell Commission,
195 ; fall of Parnell, 196 ; second
Home Rule BiU rejected, 19S

INDEX.

303

Isandula, battle of, 253
Ismail, Khedive of Egypt, 172, 180
Italy, annexations of Bonaparte in,
II, 42; partition of, in 1815, 52;
war of 1848 in, 103 ; war of 1859
in, 144 ; united by Victor Emanuel,
145 ; war of 1866 in, 159 ; joins the
Triple Alliance, 192
Jameson, Dr. , his raid, 204, 252, 253
Java, conquered by British, 218 ; re
stored to HoUand, 218
Jellalabad, siege of, 223, 224
Jena, battle of, 30
Johannesburg, troubles at, 252, 253
Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain.
See Bonaparte
Josephine, Empress, divorce of, 38
Joubert, General, Boer leader in
Natal, 266
Jubilee, the Queen's, the first, 190;
the second, 206
Kaffir wars, the, 251
Kent, Edward, Duke of, father of
Queen Victoria, 72
Khalifa, the, defeated by Kitchener,
204, 207
Khartoum, siege and fall of, 183
Khedive. See Ismail and Tewfik
Kilmainham Treaty, 179
Kimberley, siege of, by the Boers,
267 ; relieved, 274
Kitchener, Herbert, Lord, his vic
tories in the Soudan, 207 ; pacifies
South Africa, 281, 282
Kruger, Paul, President of Transvaal,
204, 253, 261 ; declares war on
Great Britain, 264 ; ffies to Europe,
277
Ladysmith, siege of, 266, 272, 273
Lake, Gerald, Lord, his victories in
India, 216
Land League, the, in Ireland, 178,
179
Lawrence, Sir Henry, killed at Luck
now, 233
Lawrence, Sir John, organizes Pun
jaub, 227, 233

Leipzig, battle of, 46
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg marries
Princess Charlotte, 59 ; King of
Belgium, 82
Ligny, battle of, 50
Lincoln, Abraham, President of the
United States, 147
Literature, history of English, 118,
121, 210
Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, Earl of,
prime minister, 42 ; his policy, 59,
60 ; takes Canning into partnership,
63 ; retires, 67
London, riots in, 60 ; Reform BiU in,
78 ; Chartists in, loi ; Hyde Park
riots, 162
Louis XVIII., restoration of, 48;
expeUed by Bonaparte, 50; restored,
53 ; attacks Spain, 66
Louis Napoleon. See Napoleon III
Louis Philippe, king of the French,
72, 82 ; disputes of England with,
96, 97 : dethroned, loi, 102
Lucknow, besieged, 232 ; relieved by
Havelock, 233
Luddite riots, the, 59
LuneviUe, peace of, 2
Mafeking, siege of, 267, 276
Magdala, storm of, 159
Mahdi, the, rise of, 182 ; wars with,
183
Mahidpore, battle of, 220
Mahmoud, Sultan, 66
Mahrattas, subdued by Wellesley,
215, 216 ; crushed by Hastings, 220
Maiwand, battle of, 236
Majuba Hill, battle of, 252
Malacca, ceded to England, 240
Malta, captured by British, 8 ; dis
putes concerning, with Bonaparte,
II
Manchester Massacre, the, 61
Maori wars, the, 244, 245
Marchand, Major, at Fashoda, 208
Marmont, Marshal, defeated at Sala
manca, 45
Massena, Marshal, in Portugal, 39, 40
Mauritius, conquered by England, 214
Meanee, battle of, 225

304

INDEX.

Methuen, Lord, his campaign in
South Africa, 268, 269, 282
Menou, General, conquered in Egypt,
S
MUner, Alfred, Lord, his rule in
South Africa, 261, 262
Minorca, restored to Spain, 8
Moore, Sir John, at Corunna, 37
Moscow, burning of, 45
Mysore, crashed by Wellesley, 9, 213
Nana Sahib commits massacre of
Cawnpore, 231, 232
Napier, Sir Charles, conquers Scinde,
224
Napier, Robert, Lord, of Magdala,
conquers Abyssinia, 159
Napoleon I., his schemes against
England, 2; makes peace of Amiens,
7 ; renews war with Britain, 12, 13 ;
his invasion scheme, 17 ; crowned
emperor, 19; defeats Austria and
Russia, 24, 25 ; crushes Prussia,
26 ; institutes the Continental Sys
tem, 38 ; invades Spain, 35, 36 ; the
Wagram campaign, 38 ; his later
annexations, 41 ; invades Russia,
44 ; beaten at Leipzig, 46 ; sent to
Elba, 47 ; retums from exile, 49 ;
crashed at Waterloo, 51
Napoleon III. , President ofthe French
RepubUc, 102; makes himself em
peror, 106 ; joins in Crimean war,
130; attempts to assassinate him,
142 ; his Italian campaign, 145 ;
crushed by Germany, 167
Navarino, battle of, 68
Nelson, Horatio, Lord, wins battle of
Copenhagen, 6 ; blockades Toulon,
20 ; his first campaign, 21, 22 ; dies
victorious at Trafalgar, 23
Nepaul war, the, 219
New Orleans, battle of, 49
New South Wales, colony of, 212 ;
later history of, 241, 243
New Zealand, colonization of, 244,
24s
Niger Company, the, 257
Nizam, the, a. vassal of the British,
313

Nova Scotia, colony of, 247, 349
O'Brien, Smith, his rebeUion, 100
O'Connell, Daniel, leads agitation in
Ireland, 70, 71, 89, 92, 95
Omdurman, battle of, 207
Orders in CouncU, the, of 1807, 33
Oregon question, the, 246
Orsini question, the, 142, 143
Oude, annexed, 228 ; the mutiny in,
231
Oxford Movement, the, 123
Palmerston, Henry Temple, Lord,
joins Lord Grey's cabinet, 73 ; his
foreign policy, 83, 104 ; recognizes
Napoleon III., 106 ; dismissed
from office, 107 ; returns to office,
127 ; becomes premier, 136 ; his
domestic poUcy, 140; defeated on
Orsini question, 143; returns to
office, 144 ; his last ministry,
145-149 ; dies, 151
Paris, taken by the aUies in 1814, 46 ;
taken by Wellington, 51 ; revolu
tions in, 72, loi, 106 ; peace of, 138 ;
surrenders to Prussians, 167
ParneU, Charles Stewart, leads Home
Rule party, 176 ; organizes Land
League, 178 ; makes Kilmainham
Treaty, 179 ; his negotiations with
Gladstone, 186; tried by Special
Comraission, 195 ; his fall and
death, 197
Paul, Czar of Russia, allied to
Napoleon, 2 ; raurdered, 7
Peel, Sir Robert, horae secretary,
64; leads Tory party, 89, 90;
prime minister, 95 ; his legislation,
96 ; repeals Corn Laws, 98 ; loses
office, 99 ; death of, 107
Pekin, siege of the Legations in, 241
Peninsular War, the 34-47
Penny Post, the, 117
Perceval, Spencer, prime minister,
28, 42
Persian war, the, 141
Piggott, Richard, his forgeries, 195
Pitt, WilUam, retires from office, 4 ;
returns to power, 18 ; death of, 35

INDEX.

305

Poland, insurrections In, 73, 145
Poor Law, the, reformed, 85-87
Portland, WiHiam Bentinck, duke of,
prime minister, 28
Portugal, invaded by Junot, 34 ; freed
by British, 36. See Peninsular war j
civU wars in, 66, 83
Protectionists, the, 99
Prussia, wars of with Napoleon, 29,
46, 50 ; revolution in, 104 ; directed
by Bismarck, 146, 159, 167. See
also Germany, empire of
Punjaub, the Sikhs in, 225 ; British
wars in, 225-227
Pusey, Dr. Edward, 124
Pyrenees, battles of the, 47
Quatre-Bras, battle of, 50
Quebec, province of, 247, 248
Queensland, colony of, 242, 243
Raglan, Lord, commands in the
Crimea, 131-137
Railways, development of, in Britain,
114. 115
Rangoon, taken by the British, 228
Reform Bill, the, of 1832, introduced
by Lord John Russell, 74 ; rejected
by the Lords, 76 ; passed, 77, 78
 the, of 1866, 162
 the, of 1884, 183
Repeal agitation in Ireland, 71, 89,
92. 9S
Rhodes, Cecil, his annexations in
South Africa, 255, 256
Roberts, Frederick, Lord, victories of,
in Afghanistan, 235, 236; defeats
the Boers, 274-277
Rosebery, Lord, prime minister, 200,
201
Rotten boroughs, the, aboUshed, 74,
73
Runjit Singh, his rule in the Punjaub,
225
Russell, Lord John, introduces Re
form Bill, 76 ; his first ministry,
99 ; quarrel with Palraerston, 106 ;
loses office, 107 ; serves under Lord
Aberdeen, 127 ; second rainistry of,
155 ; retires from poljlics, 156

Russia, joins the Armed Neutrality, 2 ;
reconciled to Britain, 7 ; her wars
with Bonaparte, 24, 25, 30, 46 ;
wars of, with Turkey, 68, 130, 173 ;
interference of, in Hungary, 103 ;
war of, with England, 131-138 ; at
Treaty of Berlin, 174 ; advance of,
in Asia, 222, 235, 237 ; her alliance
with France, 192 ; advance of, in
China, 208, 209, 241
St. Helena, Napoleon at, 51
St. Lucia, ceded to Britain, 51
Salamanca, battle of, 45
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Marquis of,
opposes Reform Bill, 162 ; at Con
ference of Berlin, 174 ; prime
minister, 189 ; his foreign policy,
191-193 ; his domestic policy, 194 ;
loses otTice, 197 ; second ministry
of, 202-210
Sardinia, dealings of Napoleon with,
II ; attacks Austria in 1848, 103 ;
joins in Crimean war, 137 ; uuites
Italy, 14s
Schleswig-Holstein question, the, 104,
146
Scinde, conquered by Sir "Charles
Napier, 224
Scindia, war of, with Wellesley, 315,
316 ; vassal to Britain, 220
Scott, Sir Walter, 55, 119
Sebastopol, siege of, 133-136
Sedan, battle of, 167
Sepoy Mutiny, the, 229-231
Seringapatam, storming of, 215
Shaftesbury, Anthony, earl of, philan
thropist, 117
Shah Sujah, 223, 224
Shelley, P. B., poet, 119
Shere Ali, his warwith the British, 235
Siam, disputes with France over, 205,
238
Sikhs, rise of the, 225 ; first war of,
with Britain, 226 ; second war of,
227
Singapore, foundation of, 240
Slavery, aboUshed in colonies, 87, 88
Sobraon, battle of, 226
Soudan campaigns, the, 182, 207
X

3o6

INDEX.

Soult, Marshal, defeated at Corunna,
37 ; at Albuera, 42 ; in the Pyrenees,
47
South African colonies, history of the,
250-254. 258-283
Spa Fields riot, the, 60
Spion Kop, combat of, 272
Spain, alUed with Bonaparte, 20 ;
invaUded by Bonaparte, 34, 35 ;
Peninsular war in, 35-47 ; civil war
in, 66 ; Carlist war in, 83 ; intrigues
of Louis Philippe in, 97
Steamships, introduction of, 113
Stormberg, combat of, 269
Straits Settlements, the, 240
Talavera, battle of, 39
Tasmania, colonization of, 242
Telegraph, introduction of the, 118
Tel-el-Kebir, battle of, 181
Tenant-right in Ireland, 165
Tennyson, Alfred, 120
Theodore, King of Abyssinia, 159
Thistlewood, Arthur, conspiracy of,
61
Tilsit, treaty of, 30
Times newspaper, its htigation with
ParneU, 195
Tippoo Sultan, wars with, 215
Tithe Act, the Irish, 89
Torres Vedras, lines of, 39
Toulouse, battle of, 47
Tractarian movement, the, 124
Trades Unions, history of, 116
Trafalgar, battle of, 23
Transvaal, the, settled by Boers, 251 ;
war of, with Britain, 252 ; Jameson's
raid on, 253 ; declares war on
Britain, 264 ; annexed, 277
Trent, case of the, 149
Trinidad ceded to England, 8
Uganda, annexed, 256
Uitlanders, grievances of the, 352,
253
Ulm, capitulation of, 24
Union with Ireland, the, 3
Unionist party, the, 188, 189
United States, war of 1812 with, 48,
49 ; civU war in the, 147, 148 ; the

Ahabama claims of, 167 ; inter
ference of, in Venezuela, 203
Venezuela, disputes with, 203, 204
Vereeniging, pacification of, 282
Victor Emanuel, King, joins in Cri
mean war, 137 ; unites Italy, 145 ;
his last war with Austria, 159
Victoria, Queen, accession of, 90 ;
her marriage, 91 ; her first jubilee,
190 ; her second jubilee, 206 ; her
death, 210
Victoria, colony of, 242 ; goldfields
of, 243
Vienna, congress of, 48, 49
VUleneuve, Admiral, defeated by
Nelson, 21-23
Vimiero, battle of, 36
Vittoria, battle of, 47
Vitu, ceded to England, 255
Volunteer movement, the, 144
Wagram, battle of, 38
Walcheren expedition, the, 38
Waterloo, battle of, 50, 51
Wellesley, Richard, Marquis of, hia
government in India, 213-217
WeUington, Arthur WeUesley, Duke
of, wins battle of Assaye, 216 ;
commands in Portugal, 36 ; vic
torious at Talavera, 39 ; repels
Massena, 40 ; victorious at Sala
manca, 45 ; invades France, 47 i
wins Waterloo, 50 ; prime minister,
67 ; his political failures, 68, 69 ;
retires from office, 73 ; suffers Re
form BiU to pass, 78 ; dies, 108
West Austraha, colony of, 242
West Indian colonies, the, 87, 83,
212, 250
White, Sir George, commands in
Natal, 264 ; his defence of Lady
smith, 265, 266, 272-274
WiUiam I. of Germany, his victories
in France, 167 ; his friendship for
Russia, 192
WiUiam II., Eraperor of Germany,
dismisses Bismarck, 193 ; his an '
nexations in Africa, 255

William IV., accession of, 72; his
dealings with Reform Bill, 77;
death, 90
Wolseley, Lord, conquers the Zulus,
252 ; conquers Egypt, 181 ; in the
Soudan, 183

INDEX. 307
Wordsworth, WiUiam, poet, 119, 121
Yot;NG Ireland party, the, 100

Zanzibar, annexation of, 255
Zulu war, thot 251

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