PEEL'S GOVERNMENT
(_1842-1844_)
In many of the most important rules of public policy Sir R. Peel's
government surpassed generally the governments which have succeeded
it, whether liberal or conservative. Among them I would mention
purity in patronage, financial strictness, loyal adherence to the
principle of public economy, jealous regard to the rights of
parliament, a single eye to the public interest, strong aversion to
extension of territorial responsibilities and a frank admission of
the rights of foreign countries as equal to those of their
own.--MR. GLADSTONE (1880).[151]
Of the four or five most memorable administrations of the century, the
great conservative government of Sir Robert Peel was undoubtedly one. It
laid the groundwork of our solid commercial policy, it established our
railway system, it settled the currency, and, by no means least, it gave
us a good national character in Europe as lovers of moderation, equity,
and peace. Little as most members of the new cabinet saw it, their
advent definitely marked the rising dawn of an economic era. If you had
to constitute new societies, Peel said to Croker, then you might on
moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, and you
might like an agricultural population better than a manufacturing; as it
was, the national lot was cast, and statesmen were powerless to turn
back the tide. The food of the people, their clothing, the raw material
for their industry, their education, the conditions under which women
and children were suffered to toil, markets for the products of loom and
forge and furnace and mechanic's shop,--these were slowly making their
way into the central field of political vision, and taking the place of
fantastic follies about foreign dynasties and the balance of power as
the true business of the British statesman. On the eve of entering
parliament (September 17, 1832), Mr. Gladstone recounts some articles of
his creed at the time to his friend Gaskell, and to modern eyes a
curious list it is. The first place is given to his views on the
relative merits of Pedro, Miguel, Donna Maria, in respect of the throne
of Portugal. The second goes to Poland. The third to the affairs of
Lombardy. Free trade comes last. This was still the lingering fashion of
the moment, and it died hard.
The new ministry contained an unusual number of men of mark and
capacity, and they were destined to form a striking group. At their head
was a statesman whose fame grows more impressive with time, not the
author or inspirer of large creative ideas, but with what is at any rate
next best--a mind open and accessible to those ideas, and endowed with
such gifts of skill, vigilance, caution, and courage as were needed for
the government of a community rapidly passing into a new stage of its
social growth. One day in February 1842, he sent for Mr. Gladstone on
some occasion of business. Peel happened not to be well, and in the
course of the conversation his doctor called. Sir James Graham who had
come in, said to his junior in Peel's absence with the physician, 'The
pressure upon him is immense. We never had a minister who was so truly a
first minister as he is. He makes himself felt in every department, and
is really cognisant of the affairs of each. Lord Grey could not master
such an amount of business. Canning could not do it. Now he is an actual
minister, and is indeed _capax imperii_.' Next to Peel as parliamentary
leaders stood Graham himself and Stanley. They had both of them sat in
the cabinet of Lord Grey, and now found themselves the colleagues of the
bitterest foes of Grey's administration. As we have seen, Mr. Gladstone
pronounces Graham to have known more about economic subjects than all
the rest of the government put together. Such things had hitherto been
left to men below the first rank in the hierarchy of public office, like
Huskisson. Pedro and Miguel held the field.
END OF HIS PROTECTIONIST STAGE
Mr. Gladstone's own position is described in an autobiographic fragment
of his last years:--
When I entered parliament in 1832, the great controversy between
protection or artificial restraint and free trade, of which Cobden
was the leading figure, did not enter into the popular
controversies of the day, and was still in the hands of the
philosophers. My father was an active and effective local
politician, and the protectionism which I inherited from him and
from all my youthful associations was qualified by a thorough
acceptance of the important preliminary measures of Mr. Huskisson,
of whom he was the first among the local supporters. Moreover, for
the first six years or so of my parliamentary life free trade was
in no way a party question, and it only became strictly such in
1841 at, and somewhat before, the general election, when the whig
government, _in extremis_, proposed a fixed duty upon corn. My mind
was in regard to it a sheet of white paper, but I accepted the
established conditions in _the lump_, and could hardly do
otherwise. In 1833 only, the question was debated in the House of
Commons, and the speech of the mover against the corn laws made me
uncomfortable. But the reply of Sir James Graham restored my peace
of mind. I followed the others with a languid interest. Yet I
remember being struck with the essential unsoundness of the
argument of Mr. Villiers. It was this. Under the present corn law
our trade, on which we depend, is doomed, for our manufacturers
cannot possibly contend with the manufacturers of the continent if
they have to pay wages regulated by the protection price of food,
while their rivals pay according to the natural or free trade
price. The answer was obvious. 'Thank you. We quite understand you.
Your object is to get down the wages of your workpeople.' It was
Cobden who really set the argument on its legs; and it is futile to
compare any other man with him as the father of our system of free
trade.
I had in 1840 to dabble in this question, and on the wrong side of
it[152].... The matter passed from my mind, full of churches and
church matters, in which I was now gradually acquiring knowledge.
In 1841 the necessities of the whig government led to a further
development of the great controversy; but I interfered only in the
colonial part of it in connection with the colonies and the slave
trade to Porto Rico and Brazil. We West Indians were now great
philanthropists! When Sir Robert Peel assumed the government he had
become deeply committed to protection, which in the last two or
three years had become the subject of a commanding controversy. I
suppose that at Newark I followed suit, but I have no records. On
the change of government Peel, with much judgment, offered me the
vice-presidentship of the board of trade. On sound principles of
party discipline, I took the office at once; and having taken it I
set to work with all my might as a worker. In a very short time I
came to form a low estimate of the knowledge and information of
Lord Ripon; and of the cabinet Sir James Graham, I think, knew
most. And now the stones of which my protectionism was built up
began to get uncomfortably loose. When we came to the question of
the tariff, we were all nearly on a par in ignorance, and we had a
very bad adviser in Macgregor, secretary to the board of trade. But
I had the advantage of being able to apply myself with an undivided
attention. My assumption of office at the board of trade was
followed by hard, steady, and honest work; and every day so spent
beat like a battering ram on the unsure fabric of my official
protectionism. By the end of the year I was far gone in the
opposite sense. I had to speak much on these questions in the
session of 1842, but it was always done with great moderation.
II
PEEL'S SLOW CONVERSION
The case on the accession of the new ministers was difficult. Peel
himself has drawn the picture. By incompetent finance, by reckless
colonial expenditure, by solving political difficulties through gifts or
promises of cash from the British treasury, by war and foreign relations
hovering on the verge of war and necessitating extended preparations,
the whigs had brought the national resources into an embarrassment that
was extreme. The accumulated deficits of five years had become a heavy
incubus, and the deficit of 1842-3 was likely to be not less than two
and a half millions more. Commerce and manufactures were languishing.
Distress was terrible. Poor-rates were mounting, and grants-in-aid
would extend impoverishment from the factory districts to the rural.
'Judge then,' said Peel, 'whether we can with safety retrograde in
manufactures.'[153]
So grave a crisis could only be met by daring remedies. With the highest
courage, moral courage no less than political, Peel resolved to ask
parliament to let him raise four or five millions a year by income-tax,
in order to lower the duties on the great articles of consumption, and
by reforming the tariff both to relieve trade, and to stimulate and
replenish the reciprocal flow of export and import. That he at this
time, or perhaps in truth at any time, had acquired complete mastery of
those deeper principles and wider aspects of free trade of which Adam
Smith had been the great exponent--principles afterwards enforced by the
genius of Cobden with such admirable still, persistency, and patriotic
spirit--there was nothing to show. Such a scheme had no originality in
it. Huskisson, and men of less conspicuous name, had ten years earlier
urged the necessity of a new general system of taxation, based upon
remission of duty on raw materials and on articles of consumption, and
upon the imposition of an income-tax. The famous report of the committee
on import duties of 1840, often rightly called the charter of free
trade, and of which Peel, not much to his credit, had at this moment not
read a word,[154] laid the foundations of the great policy of tariff
reform with which the names of Peel and Gladstone are associated in
history. The policy advocated in 1830 in the admirable treatise of Sir
Henry Parnell is exactly the policy of Peel in 1842, as he acknowledged.
After all it is an idle quarrel between the closet strategist and the
victorious commander; between the man who first discerns some great
truth of government, and the man who gets the thing, or even a part of
the thing, actually done.
PEEL'S GOVERNMENT
Mr. Gladstone has left on record some particulars of his own share as
subordinate minister not in the cabinet, in this first invasion upon
the old tory corn law of 1827. Peel from the beginning appreciated the
powers of his keen and zealous lieutenant, and even in the autumn of
1841 he had taken him into confidential counsel.[155] Besides a letter
of observations on the general scheme of commercial freedom, Mr.
Gladstone prepared for the prime minister a special paper on the corn
laws.
The ordinary business of the department soon fell into my hands to
transact with the secretaries, one of them Macgregor, a
loose-minded free trader, and the other Lefevre, a clear and
scientific one. In that autumn I became possessed with the desire
to relax the corn law, which formed, I believe, the chief subject
of my meditations. Hence followed an important consequence. Very
slow in acquiring relative and secondary knowledge and honestly
absorbed in my work, I simply thought on and on as to what was
right and fair under the circumstances.
In January 1842, as the session approached, they came to close quarters.
The details of all the mysteries of protectionist iniquity we may well
spare ourselves. Peel, feeling the pulse of his agricultural folk,
thought it would never do to give them less than a ten-shilling duty,
when the price of wheat was at sixty-two shillings the quarter; while
Mr. Gladstone thought a twelve-shilling duty at a price of sixty far too
low a relief to the consumer. His eyes were beginning to be opened.
_Feb. 2._--I placed in Sir R. Peel's hands a long paper on the corn
law in the month of November, which, on wishing to refer to it, he
could not find; and he requested me to write out afresh my argument
upon the value of a rest or dead level, and the part of the scale
of price at which it should arrive; this I did.
On Monday I wrote another paper arguing for a rest between 60/ and
70/ or thereabouts; and yesterday a third intended to show that the
present law has been in practice _fully_ equivalent to a
prohibition up to 70/. Lord Ripon then told me the cabinet had
adopted Peel's scale as it originally stood--and seemed to doubt
whether _any_ alteration could be made. On his announcing the
adoption, I said in a marked manner, '_I am very sorry for
it_'--believing that it would be virtual prohibition up to 65/ or
66/ and often beyond, to the minimum; and not being able, in spite
of all the good which the government is about to do with respect to
commerce, to make up my mind to support such a protection. I see,
from conversations with them to-day, that Lord Ripon, Peel, and
Graham, are all aware the protection is greater than is necessary.
MR. GLADSTONE'S RAPID ADVANCE
This mood soon carried the vice-president terribly far. On Feb. 5 he met
most of the members of the cabinet at Peel's house. He argued his point
that the scale would operate as virtual protection up to seventy
shillings, and in a private interview with Peel afterwards hinted at
retirement. Peel declared himself so taken by surprise that he hardly
knew what to say; 'he was thunderstruck;' and he told his young
colleague that 'the retirement of a person holding his office, on this
question, immediately before his introducing it, would endanger the
existence of the administration, and that he much doubted whether in
such a case he could bring it on.'
I fear Peel was much annoyed and displeased, for he would not give
me a word of help or of favourable supposition as to my own motives
and belief. He used nothing like an angry or unkind word, but the
negative character of the conversation had a chilling effect on my
mind. I came home sick at heart in the evening and told all to
Catherine, my lips being to every one else, as I said to Sir R.
Peel, absolutely sealed.
'He might have gained me more easily, I think,' Mr. Gladstone wrote
years afterwards, 'by a more open and supple method of
expostulation. But he was not skilful, I think, in the management
of personal or sectional dilemmas, as he showed later on with
respect to two important questions, the Factory acts and the crisis
on the sugar duties in 1844.' This sharp and unnecessary corner
safely turned, Mr. Gladstone learned the lesson how to admire a
great master overcoming a legislator's difficulties.
I have been much struck (he wrote, Feb. 26) throughout the private
discussions connected with, the new project of a corn law, by the
tenacity with which Sir Robert Peel, firstly by adhering in every
point to the old arrangements where it seemed at all possible, and
since the announcement of the plan to parliament, by steadily
resisting changes in any part of the resolutions, has narrowed the
ground and reduced in number the points of attack, and thus made
his measure practicable in the face of popular excitement and a
strong opposition. Until we were actually in the midst of the
struggle, I did not appreciate the extraordinary sagacity of his
parliamentary instinct in this particular. He said yesterday to
Lord Ripon and to me, 'Among ourselves, in this room, I have no
hesitation in saying, that if I had not had to look to other than
abstract considerations, I would have proposed a lower protection.
But it would have done no good to push the matter so far as to
drive Knatchbull out of the cabinet after the Duke of Buckingham,
nor could I hope to pass a measure with greater reductions through
the House of Lords.'
When Lord John Russell proposed an amendment substituting an
eight-shilling duty for a sliding scale, Peel asked Mr. Gladstone to
reply to him. 'This I did (Feb. 14, 1842),' he says, 'and with my whole
heart, for I did not yet fully understand the vicious operation of the
sliding scale on the corn trade, and it is hard to see how an
eight-shilling duty could even then have been maintained.'
III
THE NEW POLICY
The three centres of operations were the corn bill, then the bill
imposing the income-tax, and finally the reform of the duties upon seven
hundred and fifty out of the twelve hundred articles that swelled the
tariff. The corn bill was the most delicate, the tariff the most
laborious, the income-tax the boldest, the most fraught alike with peril
for the hour and with consequences of pith and moment for the future. It
is hardly possible for us to realise the general horror in which this
hated impost was then enveloped. The fact of Brougham procuring the
destruction of all the public books and papers in which its odious
accounts were recorded, only illustrates the intensity of the common
sentiment against the dire hydra evoked by Mr. Pitt for the destruction
of the regicide power of France, and sent back again to its gruesome
limbo after the ruin of Napoleon. From 1842 until 1874 the question of
the income-tax was the vexing enigma of public finance.
It was upon Mr. Gladstone that the burden of the immense achievement of
the new tariff fell, and the toil was huge. He used afterwards to say
that he had been concerned in four revisions of the tariff, in 1842,
1845, 1853, and 1860, and that the first of them cost six times as much
trouble as the other three put together. He spoke one hundred and
twenty-nine times during the session. He had only once sat on a
committee of trade, and had only once spoken on a purely trade question
during the nine years of his parliamentary life. All his habits of
thought and action had been cast in a different mould. It is ordinarily
assumed that he was a born financier, endowed besides with a gift of
idealism and the fine training of a scholar. As matter of fact, it was
the other way; he was a man of high practical and moral imagination,
with an understanding made accurate by strength of grasp and
incomparable power of rapid and concentrated apprehension, yoked to
finance only by force of circumstance--a man who would have made a
shining and effective figure in whatever path of great public affairs,
whether ecclesiastical or secular, duty might have called for his
exertions.
It is curious that the first measure of commercial policy in this
session should have been a measure of protection in the shape of a bill
introduced by the board of trade, imposing a duty on corn, wheat, and
flour brought from the United States into Canada.[156] But this was only
a detail, though a singular one, in a policy that was in fact a
continuance of the relaxation of the commercial system of the colonies
which had been begun in 1822 and 1825 by Robinson and Huskisson. In his
present employment Mr. Gladstone was called upon to handle a mass of
questions that were both of extreme complexity in themselves, and also
involved collision with trade interests always easily alarmed,
irritated, and even exasperated. With merchants and manufacturers,
importers and exporters, brokers and bankers, with all the serried hosts
of British trade, with the laws and circumstances of international
commerce, he was every day brought into close, detailed, and responsible
contact:--Whether the duty on straw bonnets should go by weight or by
number; what was the difference between boot-fronts at six shillings per
dozen pairs and a 15 per cent. duty _ad valorem_; how to distinguish the
regulus of tin from mere ore, and how to fix the duty on copper ore so
as not to injure the smelter; how to find an adjustment between the
liquorice manufacturers of London and the liquorice growers of
Pontefract; what was the special case for muscatels as distinct from
other raisins; whether 110 pounds of ship biscuits would be a fair
deposit for taking out of bond 100 pounds of wheat if not kiln-dried, or
96 pounds if kiln-dried; whether there ought to be uniformity between
hides and skins. He applies to Cornewall Lewis, then a poor-law
commissioner, not on the astronomy of the ancients or the truth of early
Roman history, but to find out for a certain series of years past the
contract price of meat in workhouses. He listens to the grievances of
the lath-renders; of the coopers who complain that casks will come in
too cheap; of the coal-whippers, and the frame-work knitters; and he
examines the hard predicament of the sawyers, who hold government
answerable both for the fatal competition of machinery and the
displacement of wood by iron. 'These deputations,' he says, 'were
invaluable to me, for by constant close questioning I learned the nature
of their trades, and armed with this admission to their interior, made
careful notes and became able to defend in debate the propositions of
the tariff and to show that the respective businesses would be carried
on and not ruined as they said. I have ever since said that deputations
are most admirable aids for the transaction of public business, provided
the receiver of them is allowed to fix the occasion and the stage at
which they appear.'
PEEL TO JOHN GLADSTONE
Among the deputations of this period Mr. Gladstone always recalled one
from Lancashire, as the occasion on which he first saw Mr. Bright:--
The deputation was received not by me but by Lord Ripon, in the
large room at the board of trade, I being present. A long line of
fifteen or twenty gentlemen occupied benches running down and at
the end of the room, and presented a formidable appearance. All
that I remember, however, is the figure of a person in black or
dark Quaker costume, seemingly the youngest of the band. Eagerly he
sat a little forward on the bench and intervened in the discussion.
I was greatly struck with him. He seemed to me rather fierce, but
very strong and very earnest. I need hardly say this was John
Bright. A year or two after he made his appearance in
parliament.[157]
The best testimony to Mr. Gladstone's share in this arduous task is
supplied in a letter written by the prime minister himself to John
Gladstone, and that he should have taken the trouble to write it shows,
moreover, that though Peel may have been a 'bad horse to go up to in the
stable,' his reserve easily melted away in recognition of difficult duty
well done:--
_Sir Robert Peel to John Gladstone._
_Whitehall, June 16, 1842._--You probably have heard that we have
concluded the discussions (the preliminary discussions at least) on
the subject of the tariff. I cannot resist the temptation, if it be
only for the satisfaction of my own feelings, of congratulating you
most warmly and sincerely, on the distinction which your son has
acquired, by the manner in which he has conducted himself
throughout those discussions and all others since his appointment
to office. At no time in the annals of parliament has there been
exhibited a more admirable combination of ability, extensive
knowledge, temper, and discretion. Your paternal feelings must be
gratified in the highest degree by the success which has naturally
and justly followed the intellectual exertions of your son, and you
must be supremely happy as a father in the reflection that the
capacity to make such exertions is combined in his case with such
purity of heart and integrity of conduct.
More than fifty years later in offering to a severe opponent magnanimous
congratulations in debate on his son's successful maiden speech, Mr.
Gladstone said he knew how refreshing to a father's heart such good
promise must ever be. And in his own instance Peel's generous and
considerate letter naturally drew from John Gladstone a worthy and
feeling response:--
_John Gladstone to Sir R. Peel._
_June 17._--The receipt last evening of your kind letter of
yesterday filled my eyes with tears of gratitude to Almighty God,
for having given me a son whose conduct in the discharge of his
public duties has received the full approbation of one, who of all
men, is so well qualified to form a correct judgment of his merits.
Permit me to offer you my most sincere thanks for this truly
acceptable testimonial, which I shall carefully preserve. William
is the youngest of my four sons; in the conduct of all of them, I
have the greatest cause for thankfulness, for neither have ever
caused me a pang. He excels his brothers in talent, but not so in
soundness of principles, habits of usefulness, or integrity of
purpose. My eldest, as you are aware, has again, and in a most
satisfactory manner, got into parliament. To have the third also
again there, whilst the services of naval men, circumstanced as he
is, who seek unsuccessfully for employment, are not required, we
are desirous to effect, and wait for a favourable opportunity to
accomplish. Whenever we may succeed, I shall consider my cup to be
filled, for the second is honourably and usefully engaged as a
merchant in Liverpool, occupying the situation I held there for so
many years.
It was while they were in office that Peel wrote from Windsor to beg Mr.
Gladstone to sit for his portrait to Lucas, the same artist who had
already painted Graham for him. 'I shall be very glad of this addition
to the gallery of the eminent men of my own time.'
ENTRY INTO THE CABINET
It was evident that Mr. Gladstone's admission to the cabinet could not
be long deferred, and in the spring of the following year, the head of
the government made him the coveted communication:--
_Whitehall, May 13, 1843._
MY DEAR GLADSTONE,--I have proposed to the Queen that Lord Ripon
should succeed my lamented friend and colleague, Lord Fitzgerald,
as president of the board of control. I, at the same time,
requested her Majesty's permission (and it was most readily
conceded) to propose to you the office of president of the board of
trade, with a seat in the cabinet. If it were not for the occasion
of the vacancy I should have had unmixed satisfaction in thus
availing myself of the earliest opportunity that has occurred since
the formation of the government, of giving a wider scope to your
ability to render public service, and of strengthening that
government by inviting your aid as a minister of the crown. For
myself personally, and I can answer also for every other member of
the government, the prospect of your accession to the cabinet is
very gratifying to our feelings.--Believe me, my dear Gladstone,
with sincere esteem and regard, most truly yours,
ROBERT PEEL.
At two to-day (May 13), Mr. Gladstone records, I went to Sir R.
Peel's on the subject of his letter. I began by thanking him for
the indulgent manner in which he had excused my errors, and more
than appreciated any services I might have rendered, and for the
offer he had made and the manner of it. I said that I went to the
board of trade without knowledge or relish, but had been very happy
there; found quite enough to occupy my mind, enough responsibility
for my own strength, and had no desire to move onwards, but should
be perfectly satisfied with any arrangement which he might make as
to Lord Ripon's successor. He spoke most warmly of service
received, said he could not be governed by any personal
considerations, and this which he proposed was obviously the right
arrangement. I then stated the substance of what I had put in my
memorandum, first on the opium question, to which his answer was,
that the immediate power and responsibility lay with the East India
Company; he did not express agreement with my view of the
cultivation of the drug, but said it was a minor subject as
compared with other imperial interests constantly brought under
discussion; intimated that the Duke of Wellington had surrendered
his opinion (I think) upon the boundary question; and he referred
to the change in his own views, and said that in future he
questioned whether he could undertake the defence of the corn laws
on principle. His words were addressed to a sympathising hearer. My
speeches in the House had already excited dissatisfaction if not
dismay.
Then came something about the preservation of the two bishoprics in
North Wales.[158] To Mr. Gladstone's surprise, Peel reckoned this a more
serious matter, as it involved a practical course. After much had been
said on the topic, Mr. Gladstone asked for a day or two to consider the
question. 'I have to consider with God's help by Monday whether to enter
the cabinet or to retire altogether: at least such is probably the
second alternative.' He wished to consult Hope and Manning, and they,
upon discussion, urged that the point was too narrow on which to join
issue with the government. This brought him round. 'I well remember,' he
says of this early case of compromise, 'that I pleaded against them that
I should be viewed as a traitor, and they observed to me in reply that I
must be prepared for that if necessary, that (and indeed I now feel) in
these times the very wisest and most effective servants of any cause
must necessarily fall so far short of the popular sentiment of its
friends, as to be liable constantly to incur mistrust and even abuse.
But patience and the power of character overcome all these difficulties.
I am certain that Hope and Manning in 1843 were not my tempters but
rather my good angels.'[159]
Peel had been in parliament as long, and almost as long in office, as
Mr. Gladstone had lived, but experience of public life enlarges the man
of high mind, and Peel, while perhaps he wondered at his junior's bad
sense of proportion, was the last man to laugh at force of sincerity
and conscience. Men of the other sort, as he knew, were always to be had
for the asking. 'He spoke again of the satisfaction of his colleagues,
and even said he did not recollect former instances of a single vacancy
in a cabinet, on which there was an entire concurrence. I repeated what
I had said of his and their most indulgent judgment and took occasion
distinctly to apologise for my blunder, and the consequent embarrassment
which I caused to him in Feb. 1842, on the corn scale.'[160]
PARLIAMENTARY SUCCESS
His parliamentary success had been extraordinary. From the first his
gifts of reasoning and eloquence had pleased the House; his union of
sincerity and force had attracted it as sincerity and force never fail
to do; and his industry and acuteness, his steady growth in political
stature, substance, and acquisition, had gained for him the confidence
of the austerest of leaders. He had reached a seat in the cabinet before
he was thirty-four, and after little more than ten years of
parliamentary life. Canning was thirty-seven before he won the same
eminence, and he had been thirteen years in the House; while Peel had
the cabinet within reach when he was four-and-thirty, and had been in
the House almost thirteen years, of which six had been passed in the
arduous post of Irish secretary. Mr. Gladstone had shown that he had in
him the qualities that make a minister and a speaker of the first class,
though he had shown also the perilous quality of a spirit of minute
scruple. He had not yet displayed those formidable powers of contention
and attack, that were before long to resemble some tremendous
projectile, describing a path the law of whose curves and deviations, as
they watched its journey through the air in wonder and anxiety for the
shattering impact, men found it impossible to calculate.
Mr. Gladstone's brief notes of his first and second cabinets are worth
transcribing: the judicious reader will have little difficulty in
guessing the topic for deliberation; it figured in the latest of his
cabinets as in the earliest, as well as in most of those that
intervened. '_May 15._--My first cabinet. On Irish repeal meetings. No
fear of breach of the peace, grounded on reasons. Therefore no case for
interference. (The duke, however, was for issuing a proclamation.) _May
20._--Second [cabinet] Repeal. Constabulary tainted.' It would be safe to
say of any half dozen consecutive meetings of the Queen's servants,
taken at random during the reign, that Ireland would be certain to crop
up. Still, protection was the burning question. From one cause or
another, said Mr. Gladstone looking back to these times, 'my reputation
among the conservatives on the question of protection oozed away with
rapidity. It died with the year 1842, and early in 1843 a duke, I think
the Duke of Richmond, speaking in the House of Lords, described some
renegade proceeding as a proceeding conducted under the banner of the
vice-president of the board of trade.' He was not always as careful as
Peel, and sometimes came near to a scrape.
In my speech, on Lord Howick's motion (Mar. 10, 1843) I was
supposed to play with the question, and prepare the way for a
departure from the corn law of last year, and I am sensible that I
so far lost my head, as not to put well together the various, and,
if taken separately, conflicting considerations which affect the
question.... It so happens that I spoke under the influence of a
new and most sincere conviction, having reference to the recent
circumstances of commercial legislation abroad, to the effect that
it would not be wise to displace British labour for the sake of
cheap corn, without the counteracting and sustaining provisions
which exchange, not distorted by tariffs all but prohibitory, would
supply.... This, it is clear, is a slippery position for a man who
does not think firmly in the midst of ambiguous and adverse
cheering, and I did my work most imperfectly, but I do think
honestly. Sir R. Peel's manner, by negative signs, showed that he
thought either my ground insecure or my expressions dangerous.
AN ARTIFICIAL SITUATION
The situation was essentially artificial. There was little secret of the
surrender of protection as a principle. In introducing the proposals for
the reform of the customs tariff, Peel made the gentlemen around him
shiver by openly declaring that on the general principle of free trade
there was no difference of opinion; that all agreed in the rule that we
should buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; that even if
the foreigner were foolish enough not to follow suit, it was still for
the interest of this country to buy as cheap as we could, whether other
countries will buy from us or no.[161] Even important cabinet colleagues
found this too strong doctrine for them.
'On Tuesday night,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'Peel opened the tariff anew,
and laid down, in a manner which drew great cheering from the
opposition, the doctrine of purchasing in the cheapest market. Stanley
said to me afterwards, "Peel laid that down a great deal too broadly."
Last night he (Lord S.) sat down angry with himself, and turned to me
and said, "It does not signify, I _cannot_ speak on these subjects; I
quite lost my head." I merely answered that no one but himself would
have discovered it.' Yet it was able men, apt to lose their heads in
economics, whom Peel had to carry along with him. 'On another night,'
says Mr. Gladstone, 'I thought Sir R. Peel appeared in an attitude of
conspicuous intellectual greatness, and on comparing notes next day with
Sir J. Graham at the palace, I found he was similarly impressed. Sheil
delivered a very effective rhetorical speech. Lord Stanley had taken a
few notes and was to follow him. Sheil was winding up just as the clock
touched twelve. Lord Stanley said to Peel, "It is twelve, shall I follow
him? I think not." Peel said, "I do not think it will do to let this go
unanswered." He had been quite without the idea of speaking that night.
Sheil sat down, and peals of cheering followed. Stanley seemed to
hesitate a good deal, and at last said, as it were to himself, "No, I
won't, it's too late." In the meantime the adjournment had been moved;
but when Peel saw there was no one in the breach, he rose. The cheers
were still, a little spitefully, prolonged from the other side. He had
an immense subject, a disturbed House, a successful speech, an entire
absence of notice to contend against; but he began with power, gathered
power as he went on, handled every point in his usual mode of balanced
thought and language, and was evidently conscious at the close, of what
no one could deny, that he had made a deep impression on the House.'
IV
Mr. Gladstone kept pretty closely in step with his leader. From Sir
Robert he slowly learned lessons of circumspection that may not seem
congenial to his temperament, though for that matter we should remember
all through that his temperament was double. He was of opinion, as he
told the House of Commons, that a sliding-scale, a fixed duty, and free
trade were all three open to serious objection. He regarded the defects
of the existing law as greatly exaggerated, and he refused to admit that
the defects of the law, whatever they might be, were fatal to every law
with a sliding-scale. He wished to relieve the consumer, to steady the
trade, to augment foreign commerce, and the demand for labour connected
with commerce. On the other hand he desired to keep clear of the
countervailing evils of disturbing either vast capitals invested in
land, or the immense masses of labour employed in agriculture.[162] He
noted with some complacency, that during the great controversy of 1846
and following years, he never saw any parliamentary speech of his own
quoted in proof of the inconsistency of the Peelites. Here are a couple
of entries from Lord Broughton's diary for 1844:--'_June 17._ Brougham
said "Gladstone was a d----d fellow, a prig, and did much mischief to
the government," alluding to his speech about keeping sugar duties.
_June 27._ Gladstone made a decided agricultural protection speech, and
was lauded therefor by Miles--so the rebels were returning to their
allegiance.' Gladstone's arguments, somebody said, were in favour of
free trade, and his parentheses were in favour of protection.
Well might the whole position be called as slippery a one as ever
occurred in British politics. It was by the principles of free trade
that Peel and his lieutenant justified tariff-reform; and they
indirectly sapped protection in general by dwelling on the mischiefs of
minor forms of protection in particular. They assured the country
gentlemen that the sacred principle of a scale was as tenderly cherished
in the new plan as in the old; on the other hand they could assure the
leaguers and the doubters that the structure of the two scales was
widely different. We cannot wonder that honest tories who stuck to the
old doctrine, not always rejected even by Huskisson, that a country
ought not to be dependent on foreign supply, were mystified and amazed
as they listened to the two rival parties disputing to which of them
belonged the credit of originating a policy that each of them had so
short a time before so scornfully denounced. The only difference was the
difference between yesterday and the day before yesterday. The whigs,
with their fixed duty, were just as open as the conservatives with their
sliding-scale to the taunts of the Manchester school, when they
decorated economics by high _a priori_ declaration that the free
importation of corn was not a subject for the deliberations of the
senate, but a natural and inalienable law of the Creator. Rapid was the
conversion. Even Lord Palmerston, of all people in the world, denounced
the arrogance and presumptuous folly of dealers in restrictive duties
'setting up their miserable legislation instead of the great standing
laws of nature.' Mr. Disraeli, still warmly on the side of the minister,
flashed upon his uneasy friends around him a reminder of the true
pedigree of the dogmas of free trade. Was it not Mr. Pitt who first
promulgated them in 1787, who saw that the loss of the market of the
American colonies made it necessary by lowering duties to look round for
new markets on the continent of Europe? And was it not Fox, Burke,
Sheridan, and the minor whig luminaries, who opposed him, while not a
single member of his own government in the House of Lords was willing or
able to defend him? But even reminiscences of Mr. Pitt, and oracular
descriptions of Lord Shelburne as the most remarkable man of his age,
brought little comfort to men sincerely convinced with fear and
trembling that free corn would destroy rent, close their mansions and
their parks, break up their lives, and beggar the country. They
remembered also one or two chapters of history nearer to their own
time. They knew that Lord John had a right to revive the unforgotten
contrast between Peel's rejection of so-called protestant securities in
1817 and 1825, and the total surrender of emancipation in 1829. Natural
forebodings darkened their souls that protectionism would soon share the
fate of protestantism, and that capitulation to Cobden was doomed to
follow the old scandal of capitulation to O'Connell. They felt that
there was something much more dreadful than the mere sting of a
parliamentary recrimination, in the contrast between the corn bill of
1842 and Peel's panegyrics in '39, '40, and '41 on the very system which
that bill now shattered. On the other side some could not forget that in
1840 the whig prime minister, the head of a party still even at the
eleventh hour unregenerated by Manchester, predicted a violent struggle
as the result of the Manchester policy, stirring society to its
foundations, kindling bitter animosities not easy to quench, and
creating convulsions as fierce as those of the Reform bill.
A situation so precarious and so unedifying was sure to lead to strange
results in the relations of parties and leaders. In July 1843 the
Speaker told Hobhouse that Peel had lost all following and authority;
all but votes. Hobhouse meeting a tory friend told him that Sir Robert
had got nothing but his majority. 'He won't have that long,' the tory
replied. 'Who will make sacrifices for such a fellow? They call me a
_frondeur_, but there are many such. Peel thinks he can govern by
Fremantle and a little clique, but it will not do. The first election
that comes, out he must go.' Melbourne, only half in jest, was reported
to talk of begging Peel to give him timely notice, lest the Queen might
take him by surprise. On one occasion Hobhouse wished a secondary
minister to tell Sir Robert how much he admired a certain speech. 'I!'
exclaimed the minister; 'he would kick me away if I dared to speak to
him.' 'A man,' Hobhouse observes, 'who will not take a civil truth from
a subaltern is but a sulky fellow after all; there is no true dignity or
pride in such reserve.' Oddly enough, Lord John was complaining just as
loudly about the same time of his own want of hold upon his party.
The tariff operations of 1842 worked no swift social miracle. General
stagnation still prevailed. Capital was a drug in the market, but food
was comparatively cheap.[163] Stocks were light, and there was very
little false credit. In spite of all these favouring conditions, Mr.
Gladstone (March 20, 1843) had to report to his chief that 'the deadness
of foreign demand keeps our commerce in a state of prolonged paralysis.'
Cobden had not even yet convinced them that the true way to quicken
foreign demand was to open the ports to that foreign supply, with which
they paid us for what they bought from us. Mr. Gladstone saw no further
than the desire of making specific arrangement with other countries for
reciprocal reductions of import duties.
In one of his autobiographic notes (1897) Mr. Gladstone describes the
short and sharp parliamentary crisis in 1844 brought about by the
question of the sugar duties, but this may perhaps be relegated to an
appendix.[164]
V
From 1841 to 1844 Mr. Gladstone's department was engaged in other
matters lying beyond the main stream of effort. 'We were anxiously and
eagerly endeavouring to make tariff treaties with many foreign
countries. Austria, I think, may have been included, but I recollect
especially France, Prussia, Portugal, and I believe Spain. And the state
of our tariff, even after the law of 1842, was then such as to supply us
with plenty of material for liberal offers. Notwithstanding this, we
failed in every case. I doubt whether we advanced the cause of free
trade by a single inch.'
The question of the prohibition against the export of machinery came
before him. The custom-house authorities pronounced it ineffective, and
recommended its removal. A parliamentary committee in 1841 had reported
in favour of entire freedom. The machine makers, of course, were active,
and the general manufacturers of the country, excepting the Nottingham
lace makers and the flax-spinners of the north of Ireland, had become
neutral. Only a very limited portion of the trade was any longer subject
to restriction, and Mr. Gladstone, after due consultation with superior
ministers, proposed a bill for removing the prohibition altogether.[165]
He also brought in a bill (April 1844) for the regulation of companies.
It was when he was president of the board of trade that the first
Telegraph Act was passed. 'I was well aware,' he wrote, 'of the
advantage of taking them into the hands of the government, but I was
engaged in a plan which contemplated the ultimate acquisition of the
railways by the public, and which was much opposed by the railway
companies, so that to have attempted taking the telegraphs would have
been hopeless. The bill was passed, but the executive machinery two
years afterwards broke down.'
RAILWAYS
Questions that do not fall within the contentions of party usually cut a
meagre figure on the page of the historian, and the railway policy of
this decade is one of those questions. It was settled without much
careful deliberation or foresight, and may be said in the main to have
shaped itself. At the time when Mr. Gladstone presided over the
department of trade, an immense extension of the railway system was seen
to be certain, and we may now smile at what then seemed the striking
novelty of such a prospect. Mr. Gladstone proposed a select committee on
the subject, guided its deliberations, drew its reports, and framed the
bill that was founded upon them. He dwelt upon the favour now beginning
to be shown to the new roads by the owners of land through which they
were to pass, so different from the stubborn resistance that had for
long been offered; upon the cheapened cost of construction; upon the
growing disposition to employ redundant capital in making railways,
instead of running the risks that had made foreign investment so
disastrous. It was not long, indeed, before this very disposition led to
a mania that was even more widely disastrous than any foreign investment
had been since the days of the South Sea bubble. Meanwhile, Mr.
Gladstone's Railway Act of 1844, besides a number of working regulations
for the day, laid down two principles of the widest range: reserving to
the state the full right of intervention in the concerns of the railway
companies, and giving to the state the option to purchase a line at the
end of a certain term at twenty-five years' purchase of the divisible
profits.[166]
It was during these years of labour under Peel that he first acquired
principles of administrative and parliamentary practice that afterwards
stood him in good stead: on no account to try to deal with a question
before it is ripe; never to go the length of submitting a difference
between two departments to the prime minister before the case is
exhausted and complete; never to press a proposal forward beyond the
particular stage at which it has arrived. Pure commonplaces if we will,
but they are not all of them easy to learn. We cannot forget that Peel
and Mr. Gladstone were in the strict line of political succession. They
were alike in social origin and academic antecedents. They started from
the same point of view as to the great organs of national life, the
monarchy, the territorial peerage and the commons, the church, the
universities. They showed the same clear knowledge that it was not by
its decorative parts, or what Burke styled 'solemn plausibilities,' that
the community derived its strength; but that it rested for its real
foundations on its manufactures, its commerce, and its credit. Even in
the lesser things, in reading Sir Robert Peel's letters, those who in
later years served under Mr. Gladstone can recognise the school to which
he went for the methods, the habits of mind, the practices of business,
and even the phrases which he employed when his own time came to assume
the direction of public affairs, the surmounting of administrative
difficulties, the piloting of complex measures, and the handling of
troublesome persons.
FOOTNOTES:
[151] Undated fragment of letter to the Queen. See Appendix.
[152] See above, p. 232.
[153] Parker, ii. pp. 499, 529, 533.
[154] _Ibid._, p. 509. Before the end of the session (Aug. 10, 1842) he
had learned enough to do more justice to Hume and the committee.
[155] The editor of Sir Robert Peel's papers was allowed to print three
or four of Mr. Gladstone's letters to his chief at this interesting
date. The reader will find the correspondence in Parker, ii. pp.
497-517, 519, 520.
[156] In 1843 a bill was passed lowering the duty on Canadian corn
imported into England, and Mr. Gladstone says in a memo, of 1851: 'In
1843 I pleaded strongly for the admission of all the colonies to the
privilege then granted to Canada.'
[157] Bright was elected for Durham in July 1843.
[158] The question of the Welsh bishoprics was one of a certain
magnitude in its day. The union of Bangor and St. Asaph had been
provided for by parliament in 1836, with a view to form a new see at
Manchester. The measure was passed with the general assent of the
episcopal bench and the church at large. But sentiment soon changed, and
a hostile cry was raised before the death of the Bishop of St. Asaph,
when its provisions would come into force. On his death in 1846 the whig
ministry gave way and the sees remained separate.
[159] Mr. Gladstone to Lord Lyttelton, Dec. 30, 1845.
[160] See above, p. 253.
[161] _Hansard_, May 10, 1842.
[162] _Hansard_, February 14, 1842.
[163] The average price of wheat per quarter in 1841 was 64 shillings,
in 1842, 57 shillings, and in 1843, 50 shillings, a lower average than
for any year until 1849.
[164] See Appendix.
[165] See Speech, Aug. 10, 1843.
[166] Wordsworth wrote (Oct. 15,1844) to implore him to direct special
attention to the desecrating project of a railway from Kendal to the
head of Windermere, and enclosed a sonnet. The sixth line, by the way,
is a variant from the version in the books: 'And must he too his old
delights disown.'--Knight's _Wordsworth_ (1896 edition), viii. 166.