In the autumn of 1850 the people of this country were frightened out of

their senses by a document from the Vatican, dividing England into

dioceses bearing territorial titles and appointing Cardinal Wiseman to

be Archbishop of Westminster. The uproar was tremendous. Lord John

Russell cast fuel upon the flame in a perverse letter to the Bishop of

Durham (Nov. 4, 1850). In this unhappy document he accepted the

description of the aggression of the pope upon our protestantism as

insolent and insidious, declared his indignation to be greater even than

his alarm, and even his alarm at the aggressions of a foreign sovereign

to be less than at the conduct of unworthy sons of the church of England

within her own gates. He wound up by declaring that the great mass of

the nation looked with contempt upon the mummeries of superstition.

Justified indeed was Bright's stern rebuke to a prime minister of the

Queen who thus allowed himself to offend and to indict eight millions of

his countrymen, recklessly to create fresh discords between the Irish

and English nations, and to perpetuate animosities that the last

five-and-twenty years had done so much to assuage. Having thus

precipitately committed himself, the minister was forced to legislate.

'I suspect,' wrote Mr. Gladstone to his great friend, Sir Walter James,

'John Russell has more rocks and breakers ahead than he reckoned upon

when he dipped his pen in gall to smite first the pope, but most those

who not being papists are such traitors and fools as really to mean

something when they say, "I believe in one Holy Catholic Church."' There

was some division of opinion in the cabinet,[259] but a bill was

settled, and the temper of the times may be gauged by the fact that

leave to introduce it was given by the overwhelming majority of 395

votes to 63.

In his own language, Mr. Gladstone lamented and disapproved of the

pope's proceeding extremely, and had taken care to say so in parliament

two and a half years before, when 'Lord John Russell, if he had chosen,

could have stopped it; but the government and the press were alike

silent at that period.'[260] His attitude is succinctly described in a

letter to Greswell, his Oxford chairman, in 1852: 'Do not let it be

asserted without contradiction that I ever felt or counselled

indifference in regard to the division of England into Romish dioceses.

So far is this from being the truth that shortly after I was elected,

_when the government were encouraging the pope to proceed_, and when

there was yet time to stop the measure (which I deplore sincerely) by

amicable means, I took the opportunity in the House (as did Sir R.

Inglis, I _think_ a little later), of trying to draw attention to it.

But it was nobody's game then, and the subject fell to the ground.

Amicable prevention I desired; spiritual and ecclesiastical resistance I

heartily approved; but while I say this, I cannot recede from one inch

of the ground I took in opposing the bill, and I would far rather quit

parliament for ever than not have voted against so pernicious a

measure.'

Other matters, as we have seen, brought on a ministerial crisis, the

bill was stopped, and after the crisis was over the measure came to

life again with changes making it still more futile for its ends. The

Peelites while, like Mr. Bright, 'despising and loathing' the language

of the Vatican and the Flaminian Gate, had all of them without concert

taken this outburst of prejudice and passion at its right value, and all

resolved to resist legislation. How, they asked, could you tolerate the

Roman catholic religion, if you would not tolerate its tenet of the

ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope; and what sort of toleration of

such a tenet would that be, which forbade the pope to name ecclesiastics

to exercise the spiritual authority exercised in any other voluntary

episcopal church, Scottish, colonial, or another? Why was it more of a

usurpation for the pope to make a new Archbishop of Westminster, than to

administer London by the old form of vicars apostolic? Was not the

action of the pope, after all, a secondary consideration, and the frenzy

really and in essence an explosion of popular wrath against the

Puseyites? What was to be thought of a prime minister who, at such risk

to the public peace, tried to turn the ferment to account for the sake

of strengthening his tottering government? To all this there was no

rational reply; and even the editor of a powerful newspaper that every

morning blew up the coals, admitted to Greville that 'he thought the

whole thing humbug and a pack of nonsense!'[261]

GREAT SPEECH AGAINST THE BILL

The debate on the second reading was marked by a little brutality and

much sanctimony. Mr. Gladstone (March 25, 1851) spoke to a House

practically almost solid against him. Yet his superb resources as an

orator, his transparent depth of conviction, the unmistakeable proofs

that his whole heart was in the matter, mastered his audience and made

the best of them in their hearts ashamed. He talked of Boniface VIII.

and Honorius IX.; he pursued a long and close historical demonstration

of the earnest desire of the lay catholics of this country for diocesan

bishops as against vicars apostolic; he moved among bulls and rescripts,

briefs and pastorals and canon law, with as much ease as if he had been

arguing about taxes and tariffs. Through it all the House watched and

listened in enchantment, as to a magnificent tragedian playing a noble

part in a foreign tongue. They did not apprehend every point, nor were

they converted, but they felt a man with the orator's quality of taking

fire and kindling fire at a moral idea. They felt his command of the

whole stock of fact and of principle belonging to his topics, as with

the air and the power of a heroic master he cleared the way before him

towards his purpose. Along with complete grasp of details, went grasp of

some of the most important truths in the policy of a modern state. He

clearly perceived the very relevant fact, so often overlooked by

advocates of the free church in a free state, that 'there is no

religious body in the world where religious offices do not in a certain

degree conjoin with temporal incidents.' But this did not affect the

power of his stroke, as he insisted on respect for the frontier--no

scientific frontier--between temporal and spiritual. 'You speak of the

progress of the Roman catholic religion, and you pretend to meet that

progress by a measure false in principle as it is ludicrous in extent.

You must meet the progress of that spiritual system by the progress of

another; you can never do it by penal enactments. Here, once for all, I

enter my most solemn, earnest, and deliberate protest against all

attempts to meet the spiritual dangers of our church by temporal

legislation of a penal character.' The whole speech is in all its

elements and aspects one of the great orator's three or four most

conspicuous masterpieces, and the reader would not forgive me if I

failed to transcribe its resplendent close. He went back to a passage of

Lord John Russell's on the Maynooth bill of 1845. 'I never heard,' said

Mr. Gladstone, 'a more impressive passage delivered by any statesman at

any time in this House.'

The noble lord referred to some beautiful and touching lines of

Virgil, which the house will not regret to hear:--

'Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis

Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro,

Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pila;

Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes,

Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris.'[262]

And he said, upon those scenes where battles have been fought, the

hand of nature effaces the traces of the wrath of man, and the

cultivator of the soil in following times finds the rusted arms,

and looks upon them with calm and joy, as the memorials of

forgotten strife, and as quickening his sense of the blessings of

his peaceful occupation. The noble lord went on to say, in

reference to the powerful opposition then offered to the bill for

the endowment of Maynooth, that it seems as if upon the questions

of religious freedom, our strife is never to cease, and our arms

are never to rust. Would any man, who heard the noble lord deliver

these impressive sentiments, have believed not only that the strife

with respect to religious liberty was to be revived with a greater

degree of acerbity, in the year 1851, but that the noble lord

himself was to be a main agent in its revival--that his was to be

the head that was to wear the helmet, and his the hand that was to

grasp the spear? My conviction is, that this great subject of

religious freedom is not to be dealt with, as one of the ordinary

matters in which you may, with safety or with honour, do to-day and

undo to-morrow. This great people, whom we have the honour to

represent, moves slowly in politics and legislation; but, although

it moves slowly, it moves steadily. The principle of religious

freedom, its adaptation to our modern state, and its compatibility

with ancient institutions, was a principle which you did not adopt

in haste. It was a principle well tried in struggle and conflict.

It was a principle which gained the assent of one public man after

another. It was a principle which ultimately triumphed, after you

had spent upon it half a century of agonising struggle. And now

what are you going to do? You have arrived at the division of the

century. Are you going to repeat Penelope's process, but without

the purpose of Penelope? Are you going to spend the decay and the

dusk of the nineteenth century in undoing the great work which with

so much pain and difficulty your greatest men have been achieving

during its daybreak and its youth? Surely not. Oh, recollect the

functions you have to perform in the face of the world. Recollect

that Europe and the whole of the civilised world look to England at

this moment not less, no, but even more than ever they looked to

her before, as the mistress and guide of nations, in regard to the

great work of civil legislation. And what is it they chiefly admire

in England? It is not the rapidity with which you form

constitutions and broach abstract theories. On the contrary; they

know that nothing is so distasteful to you as abstract theories,

and that you are proverbial for resisting what is new until you are

well assured by gradual effort, by progressive trials, and

beneficial tendency. But they know that when you make a step

forward you keep it. They know that there is reality and honesty,

strength and substance, about your proceedings. They know that you

are not a monarchy to-day, a republic to-morrow, and a military

despotism the day after. They know that you have been happily

preserved from irrational vicissitudes that have marked the career

of the greatest and noblest among the neighbouring nations. Your

fathers and yourselves have earned this brilliant character for

England. Do not forfeit it. Do not allow it to be tarnished or

impaired. Show, I beseech you--have the courage to show the pope of

Rome, and his cardinals, and his church, that England too, as well

as Rome, has her _semper eadem_; and that when she has once adopted

some great principle of legislation, which is destined to influence

the national character, to draw the dividing lines of her policy

for ages to come, and to affect the whole nature of her influence

and her standing among the nations of the world--show that when she

has done this slowly, and done it deliberately, she has done it

once for all; and that she will then no more retrace her steps than

the river that bathes this giant city can flow back upon its

source. The character of England is in our hands. Let us feel the

responsibility that belongs to us, and let us rely on it; if to-day

we make this step backwards, it is one which hereafter we shall

have to retrace with pain. We cannot change the profound and

resistless tendencies of the age towards religious liberty. It is

our business to guide and to control their application; do this you

may, but to endeavour to turn them backwards is the sport of

children, done by the hands of men, and every effort you may make

in that direction will recoil upon you in disaster and disgrace.

The noble lord appealed to gentlemen who sit behind me, in the

names of Hampden and Pym. I have great reverence for these in one

portion at least of their political career, because they were men

energetically engaged in resisting oppression. But I would rather

have heard Hampden and Pym quoted on any other subject than one

which relates to the mode of legislation or the policy to be

adopted with our Roman catholic fellow-citizens, because, if there

was one blot on their escutcheon, if there was one painful--I would

almost say odious--feature in the character of the party among whom

they were the most distinguished chiefs, it was the bitter and

ferocious intolerance which in them became the more powerful

because it was directed against the Roman catholics alone. I would

appeal in other names to gentlemen who sit on this side of the

House. If Hampden and Pym were friends of freedom, so were

Clarendon and Newcastle, so were the gentlemen who sustained the

principles of loyalty.... They were not always seeking to tighten

the chains and deepen the brand. Their disposition was to relax the

severity of the law, and attract the affections of their Roman

catholic fellow-subjects to the constitution by treating them as

brethren.... We are a minority insignificant in point of numbers.

We are more insignificant still, because we are but knots and

groups of two or three, we have no power of cohesion, no ordinary

bond of union. What is it that binds us together against you, but

the conviction that we have on our side the principle of

justice--the conviction that we shall soon have on our side the

strength of public opinion (_oh, oh!_). I am sure I have not wished

to say a syllable that would wound the feelings of any man, and if

in the warmth of argument such expressions should have escaped me,

I wish them unsaid. But above all we are sustained by the sense of

justice which we feel belongs to the cause we are defending; and we

are, I trust, well determined to follow that bright star of

justice, beaming from the heavens, whithersoever it may lead.

All this was of no avail, just as the same arguments and temper on two

other occasions of the same eternal theme in his life,[263] were to be

of no avail. Disraeli spoke strongly against the line taken by the

Peelites. The second reading was carried by 438 against 95, one-third

even of this minority being Irish catholics, and the rest mainly

Peelites, 'a limited but accomplished school,' as Disraeli styled them.

Hume asked Mr. Gladstone for his speech for publication to circulate

among the dissenters who, he said, know nothing about religious

liberty. It was something, however, to find Mr. Gladstone, the greatest

living churchman, and Bright, the greatest living nonconformist, voting

in the same lobby. The fight was stiff, and was kept up until the end of

the summer. The weapon that had been forged in this blazing furnace by

these clumsy armourers proved blunt and worthless; the law was from the

first a dead letter, and it was struck out of the statute book in 1871

in Mr. Gladstone's own administration.[264]

III

FALL OF THE RUSSELL GOVERNMENT

In the autumn (1851) a committee of the whig cabinet, now reinforced by

the admission for the first time of Lord Granville, was named to prepare

a reform bill. Palmerston, no friend to reform, fell into restive

courses that finally upset the coach. The cabinet, early in November,

settled that he should not receive Kossuth, and he complied; but he

received a public deputation and an address complimenting him for his

exertions on Kossuth's behalf. The court at this proceeding took lively

offence, and the Queen requested the prime minister to ascertain the

opinion of the cabinet upon it. Such an appeal by the sovereign from the

minister to the cabinet was felt by them to be unconstitutional, and

though they did not conceal from Palmerston their general

dissatisfaction, they declined to adopt any resolution. Before the year

ended Palmerston persisted in taking an unauthorised line of his own

upon Napoleon's _coup d'état_ (this time for once not on the side of

freedom against despotism), and Lord John closed a correspondence

between them by telling him that he could not advise the Queen to leave

the seals of the foreign department any longer in his hands. This

dismissal of Palmerston introduced a new element of disruption and

confusion, for the fallen minister had plenty of friends. Lord Lansdowne

was very uneasy about reform, and talked ominously about preferring to

be a supporter rather than a member of the government; and whig

dissensions, though less acute in type, threatened a perplexity as sharp

in the way of a stable administration, as the discords among

conservatives.

Lord John (Jan. 14, 1852) next asked his cabinet whether an offer should

be made to Graham. A long discussion followed; whether Graham alone

would do them any good; whether the Peelites, considering themselves as

a party, might join, but would not consent to be absorbed; whether an

offer to them was to be a persistent attempt in good faith or only a

device to mend the parliamentary case, if the offer were made and

refused. Two or three of the whig ministers, true to the church

traditions of the caste, made great difficulties about the Puseyite

notions of Newcastle and Mr. Gladstone. 'Gladstone,' writes one of them,

'is a Jesuit, and more Peelite than I believe was Peel himself.' In the

end Lord John Russell and his men met parliament without any new

support. Their tottering life was short, and it was an amendment moved

by Palmerston (Feb. 20) on a clause in a militia bill, that slit the

thread. The hostile majority was only eleven, but other perils lay

pretty thick in front. The ministers resigned, and Lord Stanley, who had

now become Earl of Derby, had no choice but to give his followers their

chance. The experiment that seemed so impossible when Bentinck first

tried it, of forming a new third party in the state, seemed up to this

point to have prospered, and the protectionists had a definite

existence. The ministers were nearly all new to public office, and

seventeen of them were for the first time sworn of the privy council in

a single day. One jest was that the cabinet consisted of three men and a

half--Derby, Disraeli, St. Leonards, and a worthy fractional personage

at the admiralty.

Sending to his wife at Hawarden a provisional list (Feb. 23), Mr.

Gladstone doubts the way in which the offices were distributed:--'It is

not good, as compared I mean with what it should have been. Disraeli

could not have been worse placed than at the exchequer. Henley could

not have been worse than at the board of trade. T. Baring, who would

have been their best chancellor of the exchequer, seems to have

declined. Herries would have been much better than Disraeli for that

particular place. I suppose Lord Malmesbury is temporary foreign

secretary, to hold the place for S. Canning. What does not appear on the

face of the case is, who is to lead the House of Commons, and about that

everybody seems to be in the dark....'

IV

FIRST DERBY ADMINISTRATION

The first Derby administration, thus formed and covering the year 1852,

marks a highly interesting stage in Mr. Gladstone's career. 'The key to

my position,' as he afterwards said, 'was that my opinions went one way,

my lingering sympathies the other.' His opinions looked towards

liberalism, his sympathies drew him to his first party. It was the

Peelites who had now been thrown into the case of a dubious third party.

At the end of February Mr. Gladstone sought Lord Aberdeen, looking 'to

his weight, his prudence, and his kindliness of disposition as the main

anchor of their section. His tone has usually been, during the last few

years, that of anxiety to reunite the fragments and reconstruct the

conservative party, but yesterday, particularly at the commencement of

our conversation, he seemed to lean the other way; spoke kindly of Lord

Derby and wished that _he_ could be extricated from the company with

which he is associated; said that though called a despot all his life,

he himself had always been, and was now, friendly to a liberal policy.

He did not, however, like the reform question in Lord John's hands; but

he considered, I thought (and if so he differed from me), that on church

questions we all might co-operate with him securely.' Mr. Gladstone, on

the contrary, insisted that their duty plainly was to hold themselves

clear and free from whig and Derbyite alike, so as to be prepared to

take whatever of three courses might, after the defeat of protectionist

proposals, seem most honourable--whether conservative reconstruction, or

liberal conjunction, or Peelism single-handed. The last he described as

their least natural position; for, he urged, they might be 'liberal in

the sense of Peel, working out a liberal policy through the medium of

the conservative party.' To that procrastinating view Mr. Gladstone

stood tenaciously, and his course now is one of the multitudinous

illustrations of his constant abhorrence of premature committal, and the

taking of a second step before the first.

After Aberdeen he approached Graham, who proceeded to use language that

seemed to point to his virtual return to his old friends of the liberal

party, for the reader will not forget the striking circumstance that the

new head of a conservative government, and the most trusted of the

cabinet colleagues of Peel, had both of them begun official life in the

reform ministry of Lord Grey. Graham said he had a very high opinion of

Lord Derby's talents and character, and that Lord J. Russell had

committed many errors, but that looking at the two as they stood, he

thought that the opinions of Lord Derby as a whole were more dangerous

to the country than those of Lord John. Mr. Gladstone said it did not

appear to him that the question lay between these two; but Graham's

reception of this remark implied a contrary opinion.

Lincoln, now Duke of Newcastle, he found obdurate in another direction,

speaking with great asperity against Lord Derby and his party; he would

make no vows as to junction, not even that he would not join Disraeli;

but he thought this government must be opposed and overthrown; then

those who led the charge against it would reap the reward; if the

Peelites did not place themselves in a prominent position, others would.

They had a further conversation. The duke told him that Beresford, the

whip, had sent out orders to tory newspapers to run them down; that the

same worthy had said 'The Peelites, let them go to hell.' Mr. Gladstone

replied that Beresford's language was not a good test of the feelings of

his party, and that his violence and that of other people was stimulated

by what they imagined or heard of the Peelites. Newcastle persisted in

his disbelief in the government. 'During this conversation, held on a

sofa at the Carlton, we were rather warm; and I said to him, "It

appears to me that you do not believe this party to be composed even of

men of honour or of gentlemen."... He clung to the idea that we were

hereafter to form a party of our own, containing all the good elements

of both parties. To which I replied, the country cannot be governed by a

third or middle party unless it be for a time only, and on the whole I

thought a liberal policy would be worked out with greater security to

the country through the medium of the conservative party, and I thought

a position like Peel's on the liberal side of that party preferable,

comparing all advantages and disadvantages, to the conservative side of

the liberal party. And when he spoke of the tories as the obstructive

body I said not all of them--for instance Mr. Pitt, Mr. Canning, Mr.

Huskisson, and in some degree Lord Londonderry and Lord Liverpool.'

FOUR SHADES OF PEELITES

The upshot of all these discussions was the discovery that there were at

least four distinct shades among the Peelites. 'Newcastle stands nearly

alone, if not quite, in the rather high-flown idea that we are to create

and lead a great, virtuous, powerful intelligent party, neither the

actual conservative nor the actual liberal party but a new one. Apart

from these witcheries, Graham was ready to take his place in the liberal

ranks; Cardwell, Fitzroy and Oswald would I think have gone with him, as

F. Peel and Sir C. Douglas went before him. But this section has been

arrested, not thoroughly amalgamated, owing to Graham. Thirdly, there

are the great bulk of the Peelites from Goulburn downwards, more or less

undisguisedly anticipating junction with Lord Derby, and avowing that

free trade is their only point of difference. Lastly myself, and I think

I am with Lord Aberdeen and S. Herbert, who have nearly the same desire,

but feel that the matter is too crude, too difficult and important for

anticipating any conclusion, and that our clear line of duty is

independence, until the question of protection shall be settled.' (March

28, 1852.)

The personal composition of this section deserves a sentence. In 1835,

during Peel's short government, the whig phalanx opposed to it in the

House of Commons consisted of John Russell and seven others.[265] Of

these eight all were alive in 1851, seven of them in the then existing

cabinet; six of the eight still in the Commons. On the other hand,

Peel's cabinet began its career thus manned in the Commons--Peel,

Stanley, Graham, Hardinge, Knatchbull, Goulburn. Of these only the last

remained in his old position. Peel and Knatchbull were dead; Stanley in

the Lords and separated; Graham isolated; Hardinge in the Lords and by

way of having retired. Nor was the band very large even as recruited. Of

ex-cabinet ministers there were but three commoners; Goulburn, Herbert,

Gladstone. And of others who had held important offices there were only

available, Clerk, Cardwell, Sir J. Young, H. Corry. The Lords

contributed Aberdeen, Newcastle, Canning,[266] St. Germains and the Duke

of Argyll. Such, as counted off by Mr. Gladstone, was the Peelite staff.

Graham in April made his own position definitely liberal, or 'whig and

something more,' in so pronounced a way as to cut him off from the

Gladstonian subdivision or main body of the Peelites. Mr. Gladstone read

the speech in which this departure was taken, 'with discomfort and

surprise.' He instantly went to read to Lord Aberdeen some of the more

pungent passages; one or two consultations were held with Newcastle and

Goulburn; and all agreed that Graham's words were decisive. 'I mentioned

that some of them were coming to 5 Carlton Gardens in the course of the

afternoon (April 20); and my first wish was that now Lord Aberdeen

himself would go and tell them how we stood upon Graham's speech. To

this they were all opposed; and they seemed to feel that as we had had

no meeting yet, it would seem ungracious and unkind to an old friend to

hold one by way of ovation over his departure. It was therefore agreed

that I should acquaint Young it was their wish that he should tell any

one who might come, that we, who were there present, looked upon our

political connection with Graham as dissolved by the Carlisle

speech.'[267]

ATTITUDE OF GRAHAM

The temporary parting from Graham was conducted with a degree of good

feeling that is a pattern for such occasions in politics. In writing to

Mr. Gladstone (Mar. 29, 1852), and speaking of his colleagues in Peel's

government, Graham says, 'I have always felt that my age and position

were different from theirs: that the habits and connections of my early

political life, though broken, gave to me a bias, which to them was not

congenial; and since the death of our great master and friend, I have

always feared that the time might arrive when we must separate. You

intimate the decision that party connection must no longer subsist

between us. I submit to your decision with regret; but at parting I hope

that you will retain towards me some feelings of esteem and regard, such

as I can never cease to entertain towards you; and though political

friendships are often short-lived, having known each other well, we

shall continue, I trust, to maintain kindly relations. It is a pleasure

to me to remember that we have no cause of complaint against each

other.' 'I have to thank you,' Mr. Gladstone replies, 'for the unvarying

kindness of many years, to acknowledge all the advantages I have derived

from communication with you, to accept and re-echo cordially your

expressions of good will, and to convey the fervent hope that no act or

word of mine may ever tend to impair these sentiments in my own mind or

yours.'

When the others had withdrawn, Aberdeen told Mr. Gladstone that Lord

John had been to call upon him the day before for the first time, and he

believed that the visit had special reference to Mr. Gladstone himself.

'The tenor of his conversation,' Mr. Gladstone reports, 'was that my

opinions were quite as liberal as his; that in regard to the colonies I

went beyond him; that my Naples pamphlets could have been called

revolutionary if he had written them; and in regard to church matters he

saw no reason why there should not be joint action, for he was cordially

disposed to maintain the church of England, and so, he believed, was I.'

Lord John, however, we may be sure was the last man not to know how many

another element, besides agreement in opinion, decides relations of

party. Personal sympathies and antipathies, hosts of indirect affinities

having apparently little to do with the main trunk of the school or the

faction, hosts of motives only half disclosed, or not disclosed at all

even to him in whom they are at work--all these intrude in the

composition and management of parties whether religious or political.

Grave discussions turned on new nicknames. The tories had greatly gained

by calling themselves conservatives after 1832. The name of whig had

some associations that were only less unpopular in the country than the

name of tory. It was pointed out that many people would on no account

join the whigs, who yet would join a government of which Russells,

Greys, Howards, Cavendishes, Villierses, were members. On the other hand

Graham declared that Paley's maxim about religion was just as true in

politics--that men often change their creed, but not so often the name

of their sect. And as to the suggestion, constantly made at all times in

our politics for the benefit of waverers, of the name of

liberal-conservative, Lord John caustically observed that whig has the

convenience of expressing in one syllable what liberal-conservative

expresses in seven, and whiggism in two syllables what conservative

progress expresses in six.

MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS GROUP

Connected with all this arose a geographical question--in what quarter

of the House were the Peelites to sit? Hitherto the two wings of the

broken tory party, protectionist and Peelite, had sat together on the

opposition benches. The change of administration in 1852 sent the

protectionists over to the Speaker's right, and brought the whigs to the

natural place of opposition on his left. The Peelite leaders therefore

had no other choice than to take their seats below the gangway, but on

which side? Such a question is always graver than to the heedless

outsider it may seem, and the Peelite discussions upon it were both

copious and vehement.[268] Graham at once resolved on sharing the front

opposition bench with the whigs: he repeated that his own case was

different from the others, because he had once been a whig himself.

Herbert, who acted pretty strictly with Mr. Gladstone all this year,

argued that they only held aloof from the new ministers on one question,

and therefore that they ought not to sit opposite to them as

adversaries, but should sit below the gangway on the ministerial side.

Newcastle intimated dissent from both, looking to the formation of his

virtuous and enlightened third party, but where they should sit in the

meantime he did not seem to know. Mr. Gladstone expressed from the first

a decided opinion in favour of going below the gangway on the opposition

side. What they ought to desire was the promotion of a government

conservative in its personal composition and traditions, as soon as the

crisis of protection should be over. Taking a seat, he said, is an

external sign and pledge that ought to follow upon full conviction of

the thing it was understood to betoken; and to sit on the front

opposition bench would indicate division from the conservative

government as a party, while in fact they were not divided from them as

a party, but only on a single question. In the end, Graham sat above the

opposition gangway next to Lord John Russell and Cardwell. The Peelite

body as a whole determined on giving the new government what is called a

fair trial. 'Mr. Sidney Herbert and I,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'took pains

to bring them together, in the recognised modes. They sat on the

opposition side, but below the gangway, full, or about forty strong; and

Sir James Graham, I recollect, once complimented me on the excellent

appearance they had presented to him as he passed them in walking up the

House.' Considerable uneasiness was felt among some of them at finding

themselves neighbours on the benches to Cobden and Bright and Hume and

their friends on the one hand, and 'the Irish Brass Band' on the other.

It depended entirely on the Peelites whether the new government should

be permitted to conduct the business of the session (subject to

conditions or otherwise), or whether they should be open to an instant

attack as the enemies of free trade. The effect of such attack must have

been defeat, followed by dissolution forthwith, and by the ejection of

the Derby government in June (as happened in 1859) instead of in

December. The tactics of giving the ministers a fair trial prevailed and

were faithfully adhered to, Graham and Cardwell taking their own course.

As the result of this and other conditions, for ten months ministers,

greatly outnumbered, were maintained in power by the deliberate and

united action of about forty Peelites.

Lord Derby had opened his administration with a pledge, as the Peelites

understood, to confine himself during the session to business already

open and advanced, or of an urgent character. When Mr. Disraeli gave

notice of a bill to dispose of four seats which were vacant, this was

regarded by them as a manner of opening new and important issues, and

not within the definition that had been the condition of their

provisional support.[269] 'Lord John Russell came and said to me,' says

Mr. Gladstone, '"What will you do?" I admitted we were bound to act;

and, joining the liberals, we threw over the proposal by a large

majority. This was the only occasion of conflict that arose; and it was

provoked, as we thought, by the government itself.'

FOOTNOTES:

[256] 'He had told the Queen that he thought all the offices might be

filled in a respectable manner from among the members of the Peel

administration. On a subsequent day both Herbert and Cardwell made out

from his conversation what I did not clearly catch, namely that Lord

Aberdeen himself would have acted on the Queen's wish, and that Graham

had either suggested the difficulty altogether, or at any rate got it

put forward into its position.' Gladstone Memo., April 22, 1851.

[257] Memorandum, dated Fasque, April 22, 1851.

[258] Memorandum, Sept. 9, 1897.

[259] _Grey Papers._

[260] To Phillimore, Nov. 26, 1850.

[261] Greville, Part II, vol. iii. p. 369.

[262] _Georgics_, i. 493-7. 'Aye, and time will come when the husbandman

with bent ploughshare upturning the clods, shall find all corroded by

rusty scurf the Roman pikeheads; shall strike with heavy rake on empty

helms, and gaze in wonder on giant bones cast from their broken graves.'

[263] Affirmation bill (1883) and Religious Disabilities Removal bill

(1891).

[264] One of the most illustrious of the European liberals of the

century wrote to Senior:--

Ce que vous me dites que le bill contre les titres ecclésiastiques ne

mènera à rien, me paraît vraisemblable, grâce aux moeurs du pays. Mais

pourquoi faire des lois pires que les moeurs? C'est le contraire qui

devait être. Je vous avoue que j'ai été de coeur et d'esprit avec ceux

qui comme Lord Aberdeen et M. Gladstone, se sont opposés au nom de la

liberté et du principe même de la réforme, à ces atteintes à la fois

vaines et dangereuses que le bill a portées au moins en théorie à

l'indépendance de conscience. Où se réfugiera la liberté religieuse, si

on la chasse de l'Angleterre?--Tocqueville, _Corr._ iii. p. 274.

[265] Namely Palmerston, Spring-Rice, F. Baring, Charles Wood, Hobhouse,

Labouchere, Lord Howick.

[266] This, of course, was Charles John Earl Canning, third son of

Canning the prime minister, Mr. Gladstone's contemporary at Eton and

Christ Church, and known to history as governor-general of India in the

Mutiny. Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, was

cousin of George Canning.

[267] Graham spoke of himself as a tried reformer and as a member of the

liberal party, and as glad to find himself the ally of so faithful a

liberal and reformer as his fellow-candidate. He would not exactly

pledge himself to support the ballot, but he admitted it was a hard

question, and said he was not so blind that practical experience might

not convince him that he was wrong. (Mar. 26, 1852.)

[268] The same question greatly exercised Mr. Gladstone's mind in 1886,

for the same reason, that he again hoped for the reunion of a divided

party.

[269] This was a bill to assign the four disfranchised seats for Sudbury

and St. Albans to the West Riding of Yorkshire and the southern division

of Lancashire. Mr. Gladstone carried the order of the day by a majority

of 86 against the government.

CHAPTER VIII

END OF PROTECTION

(_1852_)

It is not too much to ask that now at least, after so much waste of

public time, after ministries overturned and parties disorganised,

the question of free trade should be placed high and dry on the

shore whither the tide of political party strife could no longer

reach it.--GLADSTONE.

The parliament was now dissolved (July 1) to decide a great question.

The repeal of the corn law, the ultimate equalisation of the sugar

duties, the repeal of the navigation laws, had been the three great free

trade measures of the last half-dozen years, and the issue before the

electors in 1852 was whether this policy was sound or unsound. Lord

Derby might have faced it boldly by announcing a moderate protection for

corn and for colonial sugar. Or he might have openly told the country

that he had changed his mind, as Peel had changed his mind about the

catholic question and about free trade, and as Mr. Disraeli was to

change his mind upon franchise in 1867, and Mr. Gladstone upon the Irish

church in 1868. Instead of this, all was equivocation. The Derbyite, as

was well said, was protectionist in a county, neutral in a small town,

free trader in a large one. He was for Maynooth in Ireland, and against

it in Scotland. Mr. Disraeli did his best to mystify the agricultural

elector by phrases about set-offs and compensations and relief of

burdens, 'seeming to loom in the future.' He rang the changes on

mysterious new principles of taxation, but what they were to be, he did

not disclose. The great change since 1846 was that the working-class had

become strenuous free traders. They had in earlier times never been

really convinced when Cobden and Bright assured them that no fall in

wages would follow the promised fall in the price of food. It was the

experience of six years that convinced them. England alone had gone

unhurt and unsinged through the fiery furnace of 1848, and nobody

doubted that the stability of her institutions and the unity of her

people were due to the repeal of bad laws, believed to raise the price

of bread to the toilers in order to raise rents for territorial idlers.

AGAIN ELECTED FOR OXFORD

Long before the dissolution, it was certain that Mr. Gladstone would

have to fight for his seat. His letter to the Scotch bishop (see above,

p. 384), his vote for the Jews, his tenacity and vehemence in resisting

the bill against the pope,--the two last exhibitions in open defiance of

solemn resolutions of the university convocation itself,--had alienated

some friends and inflamed all his enemies. Half a score of the Heads

induced Dr. Marsham, the warden of Merton, to come out. In private

qualities the warden was one of the most excellent of men, and the

accident of his opposition to Mr. Gladstone is no reason why we should

recall transient electioneering railleries against a forgotten worthy.

The political addresses of his friends depict him. They applaud his

sound and manly consistency of principle and his sober attachment to the

reformed church of England, and they dwell with zest on the goodness of

his heart. The issue, as they put it, was simple: 'At a time when the

stability of the protestant succession, the authority of a protestant

Queen, and even the Christianity of the national character, have been

rudely assailed by Rome on one side, and on the other by democratic

associations directed against the union of the Christian church with the

British constitution--at such a time, it becomes a protestant

university, from which emanates a continuous stream of instruction on

all ecclesiastical and Christian questions over the whole empire, to

manifest the importance which it attaches to protestant truth, by the

selection of a _Protestant Representative_.' The teaching residents

were, as always, decisively for Gladstone, and nearly all the fellows of

Merton voted against their own warden. In one respect this was

remarkable, for Mr. Gladstone had in 1850 (July 18) resisted the

proposal for that commission of inquiry into the universities which the

Oxford liberals had much at heart, and it would not have been

surprising if they had held aloof from a candidate who had told the

House of Commons that 'after all, science was but a small part of the

business of education,'--a proposition that in one sense may be true,

but applied to unreformed Oxford was the reverse of true. The

non-residents were diligently and rather unscrupulously worked upon, and

they made a formidable set of discordant elements. The evangelicals

disliked Mr. Gladstone. The plain high-and-dry men distrusted him as

what they called a sophist. Even some of the anglo-catholic men began to

regard as a bad friend 'to the holy apostolic church of these realms,

the author of the new theory of religious liberty' in the Scotch letter.

They reproachfully insisted that had he headed a party in the House of

Commons defending the church, not upon latitudinarian theories of

religious liberty, not upon vague hints of a disaffected movement of the

non-juring sort, still less upon romanising principles, but on the

principles of the constitution, royal supremacy included, then the

church would have escaped the worst that had befallen her since 1846.

The minister would never have dared to force Hampden into the seat of a

bishop. The privy council would never have reversed the court of arches

in the Gorham case. The claim of the clergy to meet in convocation would

never have been refused. The committee of council would have treated

education very differently.[270] All came right in the end, however, and

Mr. Gladstone was re-elected (July 14), receiving 260 votes fewer than

Sir Robert Inglis, but 350 more than the warden of Merton.[271] We have

to remember that he was not returned as a liberal.

II

The leaders of the sections out of office, when the general election was

over, at once fetched forth line and plummet to take their soundings.

'The next few months,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 20),

'are, I apprehend, the crisis of _our_ fate, and will show whether we

are equal or unequal to playing out with prudence, honour, and

resolution _the drama or trilogy that has been on the stage since

1841_.' He still regarded the situation as something like a reproduction

of the position of the previous March. The precise number of the

ministerialists could not be ascertained until tested by a motion in the

House. They had gained rather more than was expected, and some put them

as high as 320, others as low as 290. What was undoubted was that Lord

Derby was left in a minority, and that the support of the Peelites might

any hour turn it into a majority. Notwithstanding a loss or two in the

recent elections, that party still numbered not far short of 40, and Mr.

Gladstone was naturally desirous of retaining it in connection with

himself. Most of the group were disposed rather to support a

conservative government than not, unless such a government were to do,

or propose, something open to strong and definite objection. At the same

time what he described as the difficulty of keeping Peelism for ever so

short a space upon its legs, was as obvious to him as to everybody else.

'It will be an impossible parliament,' Graham said to Mr. Gladstone

(July 15), 'parties will be found too nicely balanced to render a new

line of policy practicable without a fresh appeal to the electors.'

Before a fresh appeal to the electors took place, the impossible

parliament had tumbled into a great war.

THE NEW PARLIAMENT

When the newly chosen members met in November, Mr. Disraeli told the

House of Commons that 'there was no question in the minds of ministers

with respect to the result of that election: there was no doubt that

there was not only not a preponderating majority in favour of a change

in the laws [free trade] passed in the last few years, or even of

modifying them in any degree; but that on the contrary there was a

decisive opinion on the part of the country that that settlement should

not be disturbed.' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Aberdeen (July 30) that

he thought the government absolutely chained to Mr. Disraeli's next

budget, and 'I, for one, am not prepared to accept him as a financial

organ, or to be responsible for what he may propose in his present

capacity.' Each successive speech made by Mr. Disraeli at Aylesbury he

found 'more quackish in its flavour than its predecessor.' Yet action on

his own part was unavoidably hampered by Oxford. 'Were I either of

opinion,' he told Lord Aberdeen (Aug. 5), 'that Lord John Russell ought

to succeed Lord Derby, or prepared without any further development of

the plans of the government to take my stand as one of the party opposed

to them, the first step which, as a man of honour, I ought to adopt,

should be to resign my seat.' 'I do not mean hereby,' he adds in words

that were soon to derive forcible significance from the march of events,

'that I am unconditionally committed against any alliance or fusion, but

that any such alliance or fusion, to be lawful for me, must grow out of

some failure of the government in carrying on public affairs, or a

disapproval of its measures when they shall have been proposed.' He

still, in spite of all the misdeeds of ministers during the elections,

could not think so ill of them as did Lord Aberdeen.

'Protection and religious liberty,' he wrote to Lord Aberdeen (Aug.

5),'are the subjects on which my main complaints would turn; shuffling

as to the former, trading on bigotry as to the latter. The shifting and

shuffling that I complain of have been due partly to a miserably false

position and the giddy prominence of inferior men; partly to the (surely

not unexpected) unscrupulousness and second motives of Mr. Disraeli, at

once the necessity of Lord Derby and his curse. I do not mean that this

justifies what has been said and done; I only think it brings the case

within the common limits of political misconduct. As for religious

bigotry,' he continues, 'I condemn the proceedings of the present

government; yet much less strongly than the unheard-of course pursued by

Lord John Russell in 1850-1, the person to whom I am now invited to

transfer my confidence.' Even on the superficial conversion of the

Derbyites to free trade, Mr. Gladstone found a _tu quoque_ against the

whigs. 'It is, when strictly judged, an act of public immorality to form

and lead an opposition on a certain plea, to succeed, and then in office

to abandon it.... But in this view, the conduct of the present

administration is the counterpart and copy of that of the whigs

themselves in 1835, who ran Sir Robert Peel to ground upon the

appropriation clause, worked it just while it suited them, and then cast

it to the winds; to say nothing of their conduct on the Irish

Assassination bill of 1846.'

This letter was forwarded by Aberdeen to Lord John Russell. Lord John

had the peculiar temperament that is hard to agitate, but easy to

nettle. So polemical a reading of former whig pranks nettled him

considerably. Why, he asked, should he not say just as reasonably that

Mr. Gladstone held up the whigs to odium in 1841 for stripping the

farmer of adequate protection; worked the corn law of 1842 as long as it

suited him; and then turned round and cast the corn law to the winds? If

he gave credit to Mr. Gladstone for being sincere in 1841, 1842, and

1846, why should not Mr. Gladstone give the same credit to him? As to

the principle of appropriation, he and Althorp had opposed four of their

colleagues in the Grey cabinet; how could he concede to Peel what he had

refused to them? As for the Irish bill on which he had turned Peel out,

it was one of the worst of all coercion bills; Peel with 117 followers

evidently could not carry on the government; and what sense could there

have been in voting for a bad bill, in order to retain in office an

impossible ministry? This smart apologia of Lord John's was hardly even

plausible, much less did it cover the ground. The charge against the

whigs is not that they took up appropriation, but that having taken it

up they dropped it for the sake of office. Nor was it a charge that they

resisted an Irish coercion bill, but that having supported it on the

first reading ('worst of all coercion bills' as it was, even in the eyes

of men who had passed the reckless act of 1833), they voted against it

when they found that both Bentinck and the Manchester men were going to

do the same, thus enabling them to turn Peel out.

CONFUSIONS OF PARTY

Sharp sallies into the past, however, did not ease the present. It was

an extraordinary situation only to be described in negatives. A majority

could not be found to beat the government upon a vote of want of

confidence. Nobody knew who could take their places. Lord John Russell

as head of a government was impossible, for his maladroit handling of

papal aggression had alienated the Irish; his dealings with Palmerston

had offended one powerful section of the English whigs; the Scottish

whigs hated him as too much managed by the lights of the free church;

and the radicals proscribed him as the chief of a patrician clique. Yet

though he was impossible, he sometimes used language to the effect that

for him to take any place save the first would be a personal degradation

that would lower him to the level of Sidmouth or Goderich. Lord

Palmerston represented the moderate centre of the liberal party. Even

now he enjoyed a growing personal favour out of doors, not at all

impaired by the bad terms on which he was known to be with the court,

for the court was not at that date so popular an institution as it

became by and by. Among other schemes of ingenious persons at this

confused and broken time was a combination under Palmerston or Lansdowne

of aristocratic whigs, a great contingent of Derbyites, and the

Peelites; and before the elections it was true that Lord Derby had made

overtures to these two eminent men. A Lansdowne combination lingered

long in the mind of Lord Palmerston himself, who wished for the

restoration of a whig government, but resented the idea of serving under

its late head. Some dreamed that Palmerston and Disraeli might form a

government on the basis of resistance to parliamentary reform. Strange

rumours were even afloat that Mr. Gladstone's communications with

Palmerston before he left London at the election had been intimate and

frequent. 'I cannot make Gladstone out,' said Lord Malmesbury, 'he seems

to me a dark horse.'

In the closing days of the autumn (September 12) Graham interpreted some

obscure language of Mr. Gladstone's as meaning that if protection were

renounced, as it might be, if Palmerston joined Derby and the government

were reconstructed, and if Disraeli ceased to be leader, then his own

relations with the government would be changed. Gladstone was so uneasy

in his present position, so nice in the equipoise of his opinions that

he wished to be, as he said, 'on the liberal side of the conservative

party, rather than on the conservative side of the liberal party.' A

little earlier than this, Lord Aberdeen and Graham agreed in thinking

(August) that 'Disraeli's leadership was the great cause of Gladstone's

reluctance to have anything to do with the government; ... that even if

this should be removed, it would not be very easy for him to enter into

partnership with them.' Mr. Gladstone himself now and always denied that

the lead in the Commons or other personal question had anything to do

with the balance of his opinions at the present and later moments. Those

who know most of public life are best aware how great is the need in the

case of public men for charitable construction of their motives and

intent. Yet it would surely have been straining charity to the point of

dishonour if, within two years of Peel's death, any of those who had

been attached to him as master and as friend, either Mr. Gladstone or

anybody else, could have looked without reprobation and aversion on the

idea of cabinet intimacy with the bitterest and least sincere of all

Peel's assailants.

III

OPENING SKIRMISHES

Mr. Gladstone repaired to London some weeks before the new session, and

though he was not in a position to open direct relations with the

government, he expressed to Lord Hardinge, with a view to its

communication to Lord Derby, his strong opinion that the House of

Commons would, and should, require from ministers a frank and explicit

adoption of free trade through the address, and secondly, the immediate

production of their financial measures. Lord Derby told Hardinge at

Windsor that he thought that neither expectation was far wrong. When the

Peelites met at Lord Aberdeen's to discuss tactics, they were secretly

dissatisfied with the paragraphs about free trade.

Mr. Disraeli had laid down at the election the sonorous maxim, that no

statesman can disregard with impunity the genius of the epoch in which

he lives. And he now after the election averred that the genius of the

age was in favour of free exchange. Still it was pleasanter to swallow

the dose with as little public observation as possible. 'What would have

been said,' cried Lord Derby in fervid remonstrance, 'if shortly after

catholic emancipation and the reform bill had been admitted as

settlements, their friends had come down and insisted not only that the

Houses of parliament should consent to act on the new policy they had

adopted, but should expressly recant their opinion in favour of the

policy that had formerly prevailed? What would the friends of Sir R.

Peel have said in 1835 if, when he assumed the government and when the

new parliament assembled, he had been called upon to declare that the

reform bill was wise, just, and necessary?' The original free traders

were not disposed to connive at Derbyite operations any more than were

the whigs. Notice was at once given by Mr. Villiers of a motion

virtually assailing the ministers, by asserting the doctrine of free

trade in terms they could not adopt. 'Now,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'we came

to a case in which the liberals did that which had been done by the

government in the case of the Four Seats bill; that is to say, they

raised an issue which placed us against them. Lord Palmerston moved the

amendment which defeated the attack, but he did this at the express

request of S. Herbert and mine, and we carried the amendment to him at

his house. He did not recommend any particular plan of action, and he

willingly acquiesced in and adopted ours.' He said he would convey it to

Disraeli, 'with whom,' he said, 'I have had communications from time to

time.'

In the debate (Nov. 26) upon the two rival amendments--that of Mr.

Villiers, which the ministers could not accept, and that of Palmerston,

which they could--Sidney Herbert paid off some old scores in a speech

full of fire and jubilation; Mr. Gladstone, on the other hand, was

elaborately pacific. He earnestly deprecated the language of severity

and exasperation, or anything that would tend to embitter party warfare.

His illustrious leader Peel, he said, did indeed look for his revenge;

but for what revenge did he look? Assuredly not for stinging speeches,

assuredly not for motions made in favour of his policy, if they carried

pain and degradation to the minds of honourable men. Were they not

celebrating the obsequies of an obnoxious policy? Let them cherish no

desire to trample on those who had fought manfully and been defeated

fairly. Rather let them rejoice in the great public good that had been

achieved; let them take courage from the attainment of that good, for

the performance of their public duty in future. All this was inspired by

the strong hope of conservative reunion. 'Nervous excitement kept me

very wakeful after speaking,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'the first time for

many years.' (_Diary._)

Villiers's motion was rejected by 336 to 256, the Peelites and Graham

voting with ministers in the majority. The Peelite amendment in

moderated terms, for which Palmerston stood sponsor, was then carried

against the radicals by 468 to 53. For the moment the government was

saved.

This evening, Mr. Gladstone writes on the next day, Nov. 27, I went

to Lady Derby's evening party, where Lord Derby took me a little

aside and said he must take the opportunity of thanking me for the

tone of my speech last night, which he thought tended to place the

discussion on its right footing. It was evident from his manner,

and Lady Derby's too, that they were highly pleased with the issue

of it. I simply made my acknowledgments in terms of the common

kind, upon which he went on to ask me what in my view was to happen

next? The great object, he said, was to get rid of all personal

questions, and to consider how all those men who were united in

their general views of government might combine together to carry

on with effect. For himself he felt both uncertain and indifferent;

he might be able to carry on the government or he might not; but

the question lay beyond that, by what combination or arrangement of

a satisfactory nature, in the event of his displacement, the

administration of public affairs could be conducted.

To this I replied, that it seemed to me that _our_ situation

(meaning that of Herbert, Goulburn, and others, with myself) in

relation to his government remained much as it was in March and

April last.... We have to expect your budget, and the production of

that is the next step. He replied that he much desired to see

whether there was a possibility of any _rapprochement_, and seemed

to glance at personal considerations as likely perhaps to stand in

the way [Disraeli, presumably]. I said in reply, that no doubt

there were many difficulties of a personal nature to be faced in

conceiving of any ministerial combination when we looked at the

present House of Commons: many men of power and eminence, but great

difficulties arising from various causes, present and past

relations, incompatibilities, peculiar defects of character, or

failure in bringing them into harmony. I said that, as to relations

of parties, circumstances were often stronger than the human will;

that we must wait for their guiding, and follow it.... He said,

rather decidedly, that he assented to the truth of this doctrine.

He added, 'I think Sidney said more last night than he intended,

did he not?' I answered, 'You mean as to one particular expression

or sentence?' He rejoined, 'Yes.'[272] I said, 'I have had no

conversation with him on it, but I think it very probable that he

grew warm and went beyond his intention at that point; at the same

time, I think I ought to observe to you that I am confident that

expression was occasioned by one particular preceding speech in the

debate.' He gave a significant assent, and seemed to express no

surprise.

IV

MR. DISRAELI'S PROPOSALS

The respite for ministers was short. The long day of shadowy promises

and delusive dreams was over; and the oracular expounder of mysteries

was at last gripped by the hard realities of the taxes. Whigs and

Peelites, men who had been at the exchequer and men who hoped to be,

were all ready at last to stalk down their crafty quarry. Without delay

Disraeli presented his budget (Dec. 3). As a private member in

opposition he had brought forward many financial proposals, but it now

turned out that none of them was fit for real use. With a serene

audacity that accounts for some of Mr. Gladstone's repulsion, he told

the House that he had greater subjects to consider 'than the triumph of

obsolete opinions.' His proposals dazzled for a day, and then were seen

to be a scheme of illusory compensations and dislocated expedients. He

took off half of the malt-tax and half of the hop duty, and in stages

reduced the tea duty from two shillings and twopence to one shilling.

More important, he broke up the old frame of the income-tax by a

variation of its rates, and as for the house-tax, he doubled its rate

and extended its area. In one of his fragmentary notes, Mr. Gladstone

says:--

Having run away from protection, as it was plain from the first

they would do, they had little to offer the land, but that little

their minority was ready to accept. It was a measure essentially

bad to repeal half the malt duty. But the flagrantly vicious

element in Disraeli's budget was his proposal to reduce the

income-tax on schedule D. to fivepence in the pound, leaving the

other schedules at sevenpence. This was no compensation to the

land; but, inasmuch as to exempt one is to tax another, it was a

distinct addition to the burdens borne by the holders of visible

property. It was on Disraeli's part a most daring bid for the

support of the liberal majority, for we all knew quite well that

the current opinion of the whigs and liberals was in favour of this

scheme; which, on the other hand, was disapproved by sound

financiers. The authority of Pitt and Peel, and then my own study

of the subject, made me believe that it was impracticable, and

probably meant the disruption of the tax, with confusion in

finance, as an immediate sequitur. What angered me was that

Disraeli had never examined the question. And I afterwards found

that he had not even made known his intentions to the board of

inland revenue. The gravity of the question thus raised made me

feel that the day was come to eject the government.

ATTACK ON THE BUDGET

It was upon the increase of the house-tax that the great battle was

finally staked. Mr. Gladstone's letters to his wife at Hawarden bring

the rapid and excited scenes vividly before us.

_6 Carlton Gardens, Dec. 3, 1852._--I write from H. of C. at 4½

just expecting the budget. All seem to look for startling and

dangerous proposals. You will read them in the papers of to-morrow,

be they what they may. If there is anything outrageous, we may

protest at once; but I do not expect any extended debate

to-night.... The rush for places in the H. of C. is immense.

_Monday, Dec. 6._--On Saturday, in the early part of the day, I had

a return, perhaps caused by the damp relaxing weather, of the

neuralgic pain in my face, and in the afternoon a long sitting at

Lord Aberdeen's about the budget, during which strange to say my

pain disappeared, but which kept me past the ordinary post hour.

These were the causes of your having no letter. The said budget

will give rise to serious difficulties. It is plain enough that

when its author announced something looming in the distance, he did

not mean this plan but something more extensive. Even his reduced

scheme, however, includes fundamental faults of principle which it

is impossible to overlook or compound with. The first day of

serious debate on it will be Friday next, and a vote will be taken

either then or on Monday.

_Dec. 8._--Be sure to read Lord Derby's speech on Monday. His

reference to the cause of his quarrel with Lord George Bentinck was

most striking, and is interpreted as a rap at Disraeli.[273] I have

had a long sit with Lord Aberdeen to-day talking over

possibilities. The government, I believe, talk confidently about

the decision on the house-tax, but I should doubt whether they are

right. Meantime I am convinced that Disraeli's is the least

conservative budget I have ever known.

_Dec. 14._--I need hardly say the vision of going down to-morrow

has been dissolved. It has been arranged that I am not to speak

until the close of the debate; and it is considered almost certain

to go on till Monday. Ministers have become much less confident,

but I understand that some, I know not how many, of Lord John's men

are not to be relied on. Whether they win or not (I expect the

latter, but my opinion is _naught_) they cannot carry this

house-tax nor their budget. But the mischief of the proposals they

have launched will not die with them.

_Dec. 15._--I write in great haste. Though it is Wednesday, I have

been down at the House almost all day to unravel a device of

Disraeli's about the manner in which the question is to be put, by

which he means to catch votes; and _I think_ after full

consultation with Mahon and Wilson Patten, that this will be

accomplished. The debate may close to-morrow night. I am sorry to

say I have a long speech fermenting in me, and I feel as a loaf

might in the oven. The government, it is thought, are likely to be

beaten.

_Dec. 16._--I have been engaged in the House till close on post

time. Disraeli trying to wriggle out of the question, and get it

put upon words without meaning, to enable more to vote as they

please, _i.e._ his men or those favourably inclined to him. But he

is beaten in this point, and we have now the right question before

us. It is not now quite certain whether we shall divide to-night; I

hope we may, for it is weary work sitting with a speech fermenting

inside one.[274]

_Dec. 18._--I have never gone through so exciting a passage of

parliamentary life. The intense efforts which we made to obtain,

and the government to escape, a definite issue, were like a fox

chase, and prepared us all for excitement. I came home at seven,

dined, read for a quarter of an hour, and actually contrived (only

think) to sleep in the fur cloak for another quarter of an hour;

got back to the House at nine. Disraeli rose at 10.20 [Dec. 16],

and from that moment, of course, I was on tenterhooks, except when

his superlative acting and brilliant oratory from time to time

absorbed me and made me quite _forget_ that I had to follow him. He

spoke until one. His speech as a whole was grand; I think the most

powerful I ever heard from him. At the same time it was disgraced

by shameless personalities and otherwise; I had therefore to begin

by attacking him for these. There was a question whether it would

not be too late, but when I heard his personalities I felt there

was no choice but to go on. My great object was to show the

conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering

them, and this I have the happiness of believing that in some

degree I effected; for while among some there was great heat and a

disposition to interrupt me when they could, I could _see_ in the

faces and demeanour of others quite other feelings expressed. But

it was a most difficult operation, and altogether it might have

been better effected. The House has not I think been so much

excited for years. The power of his speech, and the importance of

the issue, combined with the lateness of the hour, which always

operates, were the causes. My brain was strung very high, and has

not yet quite got back to calm, but I slept well last night. On

Thursday night [_i.e._ Friday morning] after two hours of sleep, I

awoke, and remembered a gross omission I had made, which worked

upon me so that I could not rest any more. And still, of course,

the time is an anxious one, and I wake with the consciousness of

it, but I am very well and really not unquiet. When I came home

from the House, I thought it would be good for me to be mortified.

Next morning I opened the _Times_, which I thought _you_ would buy,

and _was_ mortified when I saw it did not contain my speech but a

mangled abbreviation. Such is human nature, at least mine. But in

the _Times_ of to-day you will see a very curious article

descriptive of the last scene of the debate. It has evidently been

written by a man who must have seen what occurred, or been informed

by those who did see. He by no means says too much in praise of

Disraeli's speech. I am told he is much stung by what I said. I am

very sorry it fell to me to say it; God knows I have no wish to

give him pain; and really with my deep sense of his gifts I would

only pray they might be well used.

THE TWO ANTAGONISTS

The writer in the _Times_ to whom the victorious orator here refers

describes how, 'like two of Sir Walter Scott's champions, these

redoubtable antagonists gathered up all their force for the final

struggle, and encountered each other in mid-career; how, rather equal

than like, each side viewed the struggle of their chosen athletes, as if

to prognosticate from the war of words the fortunes of two parties so

nicely balanced and marshalled in apparently equal array. Mr. Disraeli's

speech,' he says, 'was in every respect worthy of his oratorical

reputation. The retorts were pointed and bitter, the hits telling, the

sarcasm keen, the argument in many places cogent, in all ingenious, and

in some convincing. The merits were counterbalanced by no less glaring

defects of tone, temper, and feeling. In some passages invective was

pushed to the limit of virulence, and in others, meant no doubt to

relieve them by contrast, the coarser stimulants to laughter were very

freely applied. Occasionally whole sentences were delivered with an

artificial voice and a tone of studied and sardonic bitterness,

peculiarly painful to the audience, and tending greatly to diminish the

effect of this great intellectual and physical effort. The speech of Mr.

Gladstone was in marked contrast. It was characterised throughout by the

most earnest sincerity. It was pitched in a high tone of moral

feeling--now rising to indignation, now sinking to remonstrance--which

was sustained throughout without flagging and without effort. The

language was less ambitious, less studied, but more natural and flowing

than that of Mr. Disraeli; and though commencing in a tone of stern

rebuke, it ended in words of almost pathetic expostulation.... That

power of persuasion which seems entirely denied to his antagonist, Mr.

Gladstone possesses to great perfection, and to judge by the

countenances of his hearers, those powers were very successfully

exerted. He had, besides, the immense advantage resulting from the tone

of moral superiority which he assumed and successfully maintained, and

which conciliated to him the goodwill of his audience in a degree never

attained by the most brilliant sallies of his adversary, and when he

concluded the House might well feel proud of him and of themselves.'

A violent thunderstorm raged during the debate, but the excited senators

neither noticed the flashes of lightning nor heard a tremendous shock of

thunder. A little before four o'clock in the morning (Dec. 17), the

division was taken, and ministers were beaten by nineteen (305 to 286).

'There was an immense crowd,' says Macaulay, 'a deafening cheer when

Hayter took the right hand of the row of tellers, and a still louder

cheer when the numbers were read.'[275]

DEFEAT OF GOVERNMENT

A small incident occurred a few nights later to show that it was indeed

high time to abate the passions of these six years and more. A

politician of secondary rank had been accused of bribery at Derby, and a

band of tory friends thought the moment opportune to give him a banquet

at the Carlton. Mr. Gladstone in another room was harmlessly reading the

paper. Presently in came the revellers, began to use insulting language,

and finally vowed that he ought to be pitched headlong out of the window

into the Reform. Mr. Gladstone made some courteous reply, but as the

reporter truly says, courtesy to gentry in this humour was the casting

of pearls before swine. Eventually they ordered candles in another room,

and left him to himself.[276] 'You will perhaps,' he wrote to his wife,

'see an account of a row at the Carlton in which I have taken no harm.'

The affair indeed was trivial, but it illustrates a well-known and

striking reflection of Cornewall Lewis upon the assault perpetrated on

Sumner in the Senate at Washington by Brooks. 'That outrage,' he said,

'is no proof of brutal manners or low morality in Americans; it is the

first blow in a civil war.... If Peel had proposed a law not only

reducing rents, but annihilating them, instead of being attacked by a

man of words like Disraeli, he would have been attacked with physical

arguments by some man of blows.'[277]

In point of numbers the stroke given to protection was not tremendous,

but as the history of half a century has shown, it was adequate and

sufficient, and Lord Derby at once resigned. He did not take his defeat

well. 'Strange to say,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to his wife, 'Lord Derby has

been making a most petulant and intemperate speech in the House of Lords

on his resignation; such that Newcastle was obliged to rise after him

and contradict the charge of combination; while nothing could be better

in temper, feeling, and judgment than Disraeli's farewell.' Derby

angrily divided the combination that had overthrown him into, first,

various gradations of liberalism from 'high aristocratic and exclusive

whigs down to the extremest radical theorists'; second, Irish

ultramontanes; and lastly, a party of some thirty or thirty-five

gentlemen 'of great personal worth, of great eminence and

respectability, possessing considerable official experience and a large

amount of talent--who once professed, and I believe do still profess,

conservative opinions.'

Mr. Disraeli, on the contrary, with infinite polish and grace asked

pardon for the flying words of debate, and drew easy forgiveness from

the member whom a few hours before he had mocked as 'a weird sibyl'; the

other member whom he would not say he greatly respected, but whom he

greatly regarded; and the third member whom he bade learn that petulance

is not sarcasm, and insolence is not invective. Lord John Russell

congratulated him on the ability and the gallantry with which he had

conducted the struggle, and so the curtain fell. The result, as the

great newspaper put it with journalistic freedom, was 'not merely the

victory of a battle, but of a war; not a reverse, but a conquest. The

vanquished have no principles which they dare to assert, no leaders whom

they can venture to trust.'

FOOTNOTES:

[270] Charles Wordsworth, _Letter to Mr. Gladstone_, 1852, p. 50.

[271] Inglis, 1368; Gladstone, 1108; Marsham, 758.

[272] I suppose this refers to a passage about Mr. Disraeli:--'For my

part I acquit the chancellor of the exchequer, so far as his own

convictions are concerned, of the charge of having ever been a

protectionist. I never for one moment thought he believed in the least

degree in protection. I do not accuse him of having forgotten what he

said or what he believed in those years. I only accuse him of having

forgotten now what he then wished it to appear that he believed.' The

same speech contains a whimsical reason why the Jews make no converts,

which the taste of our more democratic House would certainly not

tolerate.

[273] 'The only serious misunderstanding I ever had with my noble and

lamented friend Lord George Bentinck, which I am happy to say was

thoroughly removed before his untimely death--was upon a full and frank

expression of my opinion that nothing could be more unfitting nor more

impolitic than to load with terms of vituperation those from whom we are

compelled conscientiously to differ' (_Dec. 6_).

[274] 'We had a preliminary debate to have the whole resolution put,

instead of the preamble only, which was ultimately agreed to, and placed

the question more fairly before the public, Disraeli making the

extraordinary declaration that though the proposal was for doubling the

house-tax, nobody was bound by that vote to do so. It was an attempt at

a shuffle in order to catch votes from his own people, and to a certain

extent it succeeded.'--_Halifax Papers_, 1852.

[275] Trevelyan, ii. p. 331.

[276] _Times_, Dec. 23, 1852.

[277] _Letters_, p. 315.

Book IV

_1853-1859_

CHAPTER I

THE COALITION

(_1853_)

The materials necessary for a sound judgment of facts are not found

in the success or failure of undertakings; exact knowledge of the

situation that has provoked them forms no inconsiderable element of

history.--METTERNICH.

England was unconsciously on the eve of a violent break in the peace

that had been her fortunate lot for nearly forty years. To the situation

that preceded this signal event, a judicious reader may well give his

attention. Some of the particulars may seem trivial. In countries

governed by party, what those out of the actualities of the fray reckon

trivial often count for much, and in the life of a man destined to be a

conspicuous party leader, to pass them by would be to leave out real

influences.

The first experiment in providing the country with a tory government had

failed. That alliance between whig and Peelite which Lord John the year

before had been unable to effect, had become imperative, and at least a

second experiment was to be tried. The initial question was who should

be head of the new government. In August, Lord Aberdeen had written to

Mr. Gladstone in anticipation of the Derbyite defeat: 'If high character

and ability only were required, _you_ would be the person; but I am

aware that for the present at least this would not be practicable.

Whether it would be possible for Newcastle or me to undertake the

concern is more than I can say.' Other good reasons apart, it is easy

to see that Mr. Gladstone's attitude in things ecclesiastical put him

out of court, and though he had made a conspicuous mark not only, as

Lord Aberdeen said, by character and ability but by liberality of view

especially in the region of colonial reform, still he had as yet had no

good opportunity for showing an independent capacity for handling great

affairs.

Not any less impossible was Lord John. Shortly before the occasion

arose, a whig intimate told him plainly that reconstruction on the basis

of his old government was out of the question. 'Lord John's answer was a

frank acceptance of that opinion; and he was understood to say that the

composition of the next government must be mainly from the ranks of the

Peelites; he evidently looked forward to being a member of it, but not

the head. When various persons were named as possible heads, Lord

Aberdeen was distinctly approved, Graham was distinctly rejected,

Newcastle was mentioned without any distinct opinion expressed. We

[Aberdeen and Gladstone] were both alike at a loss to know whether Lord

John had changed his mind, or had all along since his resignation been

acting with this view. All his proceedings certainly seem to require an

opposite construction, and to contemplate his own leadership.'[278]

Lord Palmerston was determined not to serve again under a minister who

had with his own hand turned him out of office, and of whose unfitness

for the first post he was at the moment profoundly convinced. He told a

Peelite friend that Lord John's love of popularity would always lead him

into scrapes, and that his way of suddenly announcing new policies

(Durham letter and Edinburgh letter) without consulting colleagues,

could not be acquiesced in. Besides the hostility of Palmerston and his

friends, any government with the writer of the Durham letter at its head

must have the hostility of the Irishmen to encounter. The liberal

attitude of the Peelites on the still smouldering question of papal

aggression gave Aberdeen a hold on the Irish such as nobody else could

have.

A HARASSED WEEK

Another man of great eminence in the whig party might have taken the

helm, but Lord Lansdowne was seventy-two, and was supposed to have

formally retired from office for ever. The leader of the Peelites

visited the patrician whig at Lansdowne House, and each begged the other

to undertake the uncoveted post. Lord Aberdeen gave a slow assent.

Previously understanding from Lord John that he would join, Aberdeen

accepted the Queen's commission to form a government. He had a harassed

week. At first the sun shone. 'Lord John consents,' wrote Mr. Gladstone

to his wife at Hawarden, 'and has behaved very well. Palmerston refuses,

which is a serious blow. To-morrow I think we shall get to detailed

arrangements, about which I do not expect extraordinary difficulty. But

I suppose Palmerston is looking to become the leader of a Derby

opposition; and without him, or rather with him between us and the

conservatives, I cannot but say the game will be a very difficult one to

play. It is uncertain whether I shall be chancellor of the exchequer or

secretary for the colonies; one of the two I think certainly; and the

exchequer will certainly come to Graham or me.'

Within a few hours angry squalls all but capsized the boat. Lord John at

first had sought consolation in an orthodox historical parallel--the

case of Mr. Fox, though at the head of the largest party, leading the

Commons under Lord Grenville as head of the government. Why should he,

then, refuse a position that Fox had accepted? But friends, often in his

case the most mischievous of advisers, reminded him what sort of place

he would hold in a cabinet in which the chief posts were filled by men

not of his own party. Lord John himself thought, from memories of Bishop

Hampden and other ecclesiastical proceedings, that Mr. Gladstone would

be his sharpest opponent. Then as the days passed, he found deposition

from first place to second more bitter than he had expected. Historic

and literary consolation can seldom be a sure sedative against the

stings of political ambition. He changed his mind every twelve hours,

and made infinite difficulties. When these were with much travail

appeased, difficulties were made on behalf of others. The sacred caste

and their adherents were up in arms, and a bitter cry arose that all

the good things were going to the Peelites, only the leavings to the

whigs. Lord John doubtless remembered what Fox had said when the

ministry of All the Talents was made,--'We are three in a bed.' Disraeli

now remarked sardonically, 'The cake is too small.' To realise the

scramble, the reader may think of the venerable carp that date from

Henry iv. and Sully, struggling for bread in the fish-ponds of the

palace of Fontainebleau. The whigs of this time were men of intellectual

refinement; they had a genuine regard for good government, and a decent

faith in reform; but when we chide the selfishness of machine

politicians hunting office in modern democracy, let us console ourselves

by recalling the rapacity of our oligarchies. 'It is melancholy,' muses

Sir James Graham this Christmas in his journal, 'to see how little

fitness for office is regarded on all sides, and how much the public

employments are treated as booty to be divided among successful

combatants.'

From that point of view, the whig case was strong. 'Of 330 members of

the House of Commons,' wrote Lord John to Aberdeen, '270 are whig and

radical, thirty are Irish brigade, thirty are Peelites. To this party of

thirty you propose to give seven seats in cabinet, to the whigs and

radicals five, to Lord Palmerston one.' In the end there were six whigs,

as many Peelites, and one radical. The case of four important offices

out of the cabinet was just as heartrending: three were to go to the

thirty Peelites, and one to the two hundred and seventy just persons. 'I

am afraid,' cried Lord John, 'that the liberal party will never stand

this, and that the storm will overwhelm me.' Whig pride was deeply

revolted at subjection to a prime minister whom in their drawing-rooms

they mocked as an old tory. In the Aberdeen cabinet, says Mr. Gladstone,

'it may be thought that the whigs, whose party was to supply five-sixths

or seven-eighths of our supporters, had less than their due share of

power. It should, however, be borne in mind that they had at this

juncture in some degree the character of an used up, and so far a

discredited, party. Without doubt they were sufferers from their

ill-conceived and mischievous Ecclesiastical Titles Act. Whereas we,

the Peelites had been for six and a half years out of office, and had

upon us the gloss of freshness.'

CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

Lord Palmerston refused to join the coalition, on the honourable ground

that for many years he and Aberdeen had stood at the antipodes to one

another in the momentous department of foreign affairs. In fact he

looked in another direction. If the Aberdeen-Russell coalition broke

down, either before they began the journey or very soon after, Lord

Derby might come back with a reconstructed team, with Palmerston leading

in the Commons a centre party that should include the Peelites. He was

believed to have something of this kind in view when he consented to

move the amendment brought to him by Gladstone and Herbert in November,

and he was bitterly disappointed at the new alliance of that eminent

pair with Lord John. With the tories he was on excellent terms. Pall

Mall was alive with tales of the anger and disgust of the Derbyites

against Mr. Disraeli, who had caused them first to throw over their

principles and then to lose their places. The county constituencies and

many conservative boroughs were truly reported to be sick of the man who

had promised marvels as 'looming in the future,' and then like a bad

jockey had brought the horse upon its knees. Speculative minds cannot

but be tempted to muse upon the difference that the supersession by Lord

Palmerston of this extraordinary genius at that moment might have made,

both to the career of Disraeli himself, and to the nation of which he

one day became for a space the supreme ruler. Cobden and Bright let it

be understood that they were not candidates for office. 'Our day has not

come yet,' Bright said to Graham, and the representative of the radicals

in the cabinet was Sir William Molesworth. In their newspaper the

radicals wrote rather stiffly and jealously. In the end Lord Palmerston

changed his mind and joined.

It was three days before the post of the exchequer was filled. Mr.

Gladstone in his daily letter to Hawarden writes: 'At headquarters I

understand they say, "Mr. G. destroyed the budget, so he ought to make a

new one." However we are trying to press Graham into that service.' The

next day it was settled. From Osborne a letter had come to Lord

Aberdeen: 'The Queen hopes it may be possible to give the chancellorship

of the exchequer to Mr. Gladstone, and to secure the continuance of Lord

St. Leonards as chancellor.'[279] Notwithstanding the royal wish, 'we

pressed it,' says Mr. Gladstone, 'on Graham, but he refused point

blank.' Graham, as we know, was the best economist in the administration

of Peel, and Mr. Gladstone's frequent references to him in later times

on points of pure finance show the value set upon his capacity in this

department. His constitutional dislike of high responsibility perhaps

intervened. Mr. Gladstone himself would cheerfully have returned to the

colonial office, but the whigs suspected the excesses of his colonial

liberalism, and felt sure that he would sow the tares of anglicanism in

these virgin fields. So before Christmas day came, Mr. Gladstone

accepted what was soon in influence the second post in the

government,[280] and became chancellor of the exchequer.

Say what they would, the parliamentary majority was unstable as water.

His own analysis of the House of Commons gave 270 British liberals, not

very compact, and the radical wing of them certain to make occasions of

combination against the government, especially in finance. The only

other party avowing themselves general supporters of the government were

the forty Peelites--for at that figure he estimated them. The ministry,

therefore, were in a minority, and a portion even of that minority not

always to be depended on. The remainder of the House he divided into

forty Irish brigaders, bent on mischief; from fifty to eighty

conservatives, not likely to join in any factious vote, and not

ill-disposed to the government, but not to be counted on either for

attendance or confidence; finally, the Derby opposition, from 200 to

250, ready to follow Mr. Disraeli into any combination for turning out

the government. 'It thus appears, if we strike out the fifty

conservatives faintly favourable, that we have a government with 310

supporters, liable on occasions, which frequently arise, to heavy

deductions; with an opposition of 290 (Derbyites and brigaders), most of

them ready to go all lengths. Such a government cannot be said to

possess the confidence of the House of Commons in the full

constitutional sense.'

EARLY POSITION OF THE MINISTRY

The general course seemed smooth. Palmerston had gone to the harmless

department of home affairs. The international airs were still. But a

cabinet finally composed of six Peelites, six whigs, and a radical, was

evidently open to countless internal hazards. 'We shall all look

strangely at each other,' one of them said, 'when we first meet in

cabinet.' Graham describes them as a powerful team that would need good

driving. 'There are some odd tempers and queer ways among them; but on

the whole they are gentlemen, and they have a perfect gentleman at their

head, who is honest and direct, and who will not brook insincerity in

others.' The head of the new government described it to a friend as 'a

great experiment, hitherto unattempted, and of which the success must be

considered doubtful, but in the meantime the public had regarded it with

singular favour.' To the King of the Belgians, Aberdeen wrote: 'England

will occupy her true position in Europe as the constant advocate of

moderation and peace'; and to Guizot, that 'the position which we

desired so see England occupy among the nations of Europe, was to act

the part of a moderator, and by reconciling differences and removing

misunderstandings to preserve harmony and peace.'

I have seen no more concise analysis of the early position of the

coalition government than that by one of the ablest and most experienced

members of the whig party, not himself a candidate for office:--

'It is strong,' Sir Francis Baring wrote to his son, 'in personal

talent; none that I can remember stronger, though the head of the

government is untried. It is strong in one point of view: as to

public feeling. The country, I believe, wanted a moderate liberal

government, and a fusion of liberal conservatives and moderate

liberals. It is weak in the feelings of the component parts:

Palmerston is degraded, Gladstone will struggle for power, Lord

John cannot be comfortable. It is weak in the discordant

antecedents of the cabinet; they must all make some sacrifices and

work uncomfortably. It is weak in the support. I do not mean the

numbers, but the class of supporters. The Peelites are forty; they

will have the liberals on the one side and the conservatives on the

other. The whigs of the cabinet will be anxious to satisfy the

former; the Peelites (Gladstone especially) the other. They are

weak in their church views. The protestants look on those who voted

against the Aggression bill with distrust; the evangelicals on

Gladstone and S. Herbert with dislike. I don't pretend to be a

prophet, but it is always well to put down what you expect and to

compare these expectations with results. My conjecture is that

Gladstone will, before long, leave the government or that he will

break it up.'[281]

Long afterwards Mr. Gladstone himself said this of the coalition:--

I must say of this cabinet of Lord Aberdeen's that in its

deliberations it never exhibited the marks of its dual origin. Sir

W. Molesworth, its radical member, seemed to be practically rather

nearer in colour to the Peelites than to the whigs. There were some

few idiosyncrasies without doubt. Lord Palmerston, who was home

secretary, had in him some tendencies which might have been

troublesome, but for a long time were not so. It is, for instance,

a complete error to suppose that he asked the cabinet to treat the

occupation of the Principalities as a _casus belli_. Lord Russell

shook the position of Lord Aberdeen by action most capricious and

unhappy. But with the general course of affairs this had no

connection; and even in the complex and tortuous movements of the

Eastern negotiations, the cabinet never fell into two camps. That

question and the war were fatal to it. In itself I hardly ever saw

a cabinet with greater promise of endurance.

II

OPPOSITION AT OXFORD

Acceptance of office vacated the Oxford seat, and the day after

Christmas a thunderbolt fell upon the new chancellor of the exchequer

from his friend, the militant archdeacon of Taunton. 'I wish to use few

words,' Denison wrote, 'where every word I write is so bitterly

distressing to me, and must be little less so, I cannot doubt, to

yourself and to many others whom I respect and love. I have to state to

you, as one of your constituents, that from this time I can place no

confidence in you as representative of the university of Oxford, or as a

public man.' Mr. Gladstone's protestations that church patronage would

be as safe in Lord Aberdeen's hands as in Lord Derby's; that his own

past history dispensed with the necessity of producing other assurances

of his own fidelity; that his assumption of office could not shake

it--all these were vain in face of the staring and flagrant fact that he

would henceforth be the intimate and partner in council of Lord John

Russell, the latitudinarian, the erastian, the appropriationist, the

despoiler; and worse still, of Molesworth, sometimes denounced as a

Socinian, sometimes as editor of the atheist Hobbes, but in either case

no fit person to dispense the church patronage of the duchy of

Lancaster. Only a degree less shocking was the thought of the power of

filling bishoprics and deaneries by a prime minister himself a

presbyterian. No guarantee that the member for Oxford might have taken

against aggression upon the church, or for the concession of her just

claims, was worth a feather when weighed against the mere act of a

coalition so deadly as this.

It was an awkward fact for Mr. Gladstone's canvassers that Lord Derby

had stated that his defeat was the result of a concert or combination

between the Peelites and other political parties. Mr. Gladstone himself

saw no reason why this should cause much soreness among his Oxford

supporters. 'No doubt,' he said, 'they will remember that I avowed

before and during the last election a wish to find the policy and

measures of the government such as would justify me in giving them my

support. That wish I sincerely entertained. But the main question was

whether the concert or combination alleged to have taken place for the

purpose of ejecting Lord Derby's government from office was fact or

fiction. I have not the slightest hesitation in stating to you that it

is a fiction. Evidence for the only presumption in its favour was

this--that we voted against the budget of Mr. Disraeli in strict

conformity with every principle of finance we had professed through our

political lives and with the policy of former finance ministers from the

time of Mr. Pitt, against the "new principles" and "new policies" which

Mr. Disraeli declared at Aylesbury his intention to submit to the House

of Commons--a pledge which I admit that he completely redeemed.'[282]

All this was true enough, but what people saw was that the first fruits

of the victory were a coalition with the whigs, who by voting with

Villiers had from the first shown their predetermination against

ministers. As Northcote humorously said, Mary Stuart could never get

over the presumption which her marriage with Bothwell immediately raised

as to the nature of her previous connection with him. It is hard to deny

that, as the world goes, the Oxford tories clerical and lay might think

they had a case. Lord Derby was the tory minister, and Mr. Gladstone had

been a chief instrument in turning him out. That was the one salient

fact, and the political flock is often apt to see a thing with a more

single eye than their shepherds.

A candidate was found in Mr. Perceval, son of the tory prime minister

who had met a tragic death forty years before. The country clergy were

plied with instigations and solicitations, public and private. No

absurdity was too monstrous to set afloat. Mr. Gladstone had seceded to

the episcopal church of Scotland. He had long ceased to be a

communicant. He was on close and intimate terms with Cardinal Wiseman.

He had incited the pope to persecute protestants at Florence. In this

vein a flight of angry articles and circulars descended on every

parsonage where there was an Oxford master of arts with his name still

on the university books. At the beginning the enemy by a rush were in a

majority, but they were speedily beaten out of it. At the end of six

days, in spite of frenzied efforts, no more than 1330 votes out of a

constituency of 3600 had been recorded. Still the indomitable men

insisted on the legal right of keeping the poll open for fifteen days,

and learned persons even gloomily hinted that the time might be extended

to forty days. In the end (Jan. 20) Mr. Gladstone had 1022 votes against

Perceval's 898, or a narrow majority of 124. The tory press justly

consoled themselves by calculating that such a majority was only six per

cent. of the votes polled, but they were very angry with the failure of

the protestant electors in doing their patriotic duty against 'the

pro-romanist candidate.' The organ of the Peelites, on the other hand,

was delighted at the first verdict thus gained from the most influential

constituency in Great Britain, in favour of the new experiment of

conservative-liberalism and wise and rational progress. Graham said, and

truly, that 'though Gladstone's defeat at that precise juncture would

have been a misfortune, yet for his own sake hereafter, emancipation

from the thraldom of that constituency would be a blessing. It is a

millstone under which even Peel would have sunk.'

Was Mr. Gladstone right in his early notion of himself as a slow moving

mind? Would it be true to say that, compared with Pitt, for instance, he

ripened slowly? Or can we accurately describe him as having in any

department of life, thought, knowledge, feeling, been precocious?

Perhaps not. To speak of slowness in a man of such magical rapidity of

intellectual apprehension would be indeed a paradox, but we have seen

already how when he is walking in the middle path of his years, there is

a sense in which he was slow in character and motion. Slowness explains

some qualities in his literary and oratorical form, which was often, and

especially up to our present period, vague, ambiguous, and obscure. The

careless and the uncharitable set all down to sophistry. Better

observers perceived that his seeming mystifications were in fact the

result of a really embarrassed judgment. They pointed out that where the

way was clear, as in free trade, colonial government, dissenters'

chapels, Jewish disabilities, catholic bishoprics, nobody could run more

straight, at higher speed, or with more powerful stride. They began to

say that in spite of Russells, Palmerstons, Grahams, Mr. Gladstone,

after all, was the least unlikely of them 'to turn out a thoroughgoing

man of the people.' These anticipations of democracy there is no sign

that Mr. Gladstone himself, in the smallest degree, shared. The

newspapers, meanwhile, were all but unanimous in declaring that 'if

experience, talent, industry, and virtue, are the attributes required

for the government of this empire,' then the coalition government would

be one of the best that England had ever seen.

III

Mr. Gladstone's dislike and distrust of the intrusion not only of the

rude secular arm, but of anything temporal into the sphere of spiritual

things, had been marked enough in the old days of battle at Oxford

between the tractarians and the heads, though it was less manifest in

the Gorham case. In 1853 he found occasion for an honourable exhibition

of the same strong feeling. Maurice had got into trouble with the

authorities at King's College by essays in which he was taken to hold

that the eternity of the future torment of the wicked is a superstition

not warranted by the Thirty-nine Articles. A movement followed in the

council of the college to oust Maurice from his professorial chair. Mr.

Gladstone took great pains to avert the stroke, and here is the story as

he told it to his brother-in-law, Lord Lyttelton:--

_To Lord Lyttelton._

_Oct. 29, 1853._--I remained in town last Thursday in order to

attend the council of K.C., and as far as I could, to see fair

play. I was afraid of a very precipitous proceeding, and I regret

to say my fears have been verified. The motion carried was the

Bishop of London's, but I am bound to say he was quite willing to

have waived it for another course, and the proceeding is due to a

body of laymen chiefly lords. The motion carried is to the effect

that the statements on certain points contained in Maurice's last

essay are of a dangerous character, and that his connection with

the theology of the school ought not to continue. I moved as an

amendment that the bishop be requested to appoint competent

theologians who should personally examine how far the statements

of Mr. Maurice were conformable to or at variance with the three

creeds and the formularies of the church of England, and should

make a report upon them, and that the bishop should be requested to

communicate with the council. For myself I find in different parts

of what Maurice has written things that I cannot, and I am quite

certain the council had not been able to, reconcile. This

consideration alone seemed to me to show that they were not in a

condition to proceed with a definite judgment. I do not feel

sufficiently certain what his view as a whole may be, even if I

were otherwise competent to judge whether it is within or beyond

the latitude allowed by the church in this matter. And

independently of all this I thought that even decency demanded of

the council, acting perforce in a judicial capacity, that they

should let the accused person know in the most distinct terms for

_what_ he was dismissed, and should show that they had dismissed

him, if at all, only after using greater pains to ascertain that

his opinions were in real contrariety to some article of the faith.

I also cherished the hope, founded on certain parts of what he has

said, that his friends might be able in the meantime to arrange

some _formula concordiæ_ which might avert the scandal and mischief

of the dismissal. Sir J. Patteson, Sir B. Brodie, and Mr. Green

supported the amendment, but the majority went the other way, and

much was I grieved at it. I am not inclined to abate the dogmatic

profession of the church--on the contrary, nothing would induce me

to surrender the smallest fraction of it; but while jealous of its

infraction in any particular, I am not less jealous of the

obtrusion of any private or local opinion into the region of dogma;

and above all I hold that there should be as much rigour in a trial

of this kind, irrespective of the high character and distinguished

powers of the person charged in this particular case, as if he were

indicted for murder.[283]

DEFENCE OF MAURICE

Long afterwards, when the alleged heretic was dead, Mr. Gladstone wrote

of him to Mr. Macmillan (April 11, 1884): 'Maurice is indeed a spiritual

splendour, to borrow the phrase of Dante about St. Dominic. His

intellectual constitution had long been, and still is, to me a good

deal of an enigma. When I remember what is said and thought of him, and

by whom, I feel that this must be greatly my own fault.' Some years

after the affair at King's College, Maurice was appointed to Vere

Street, and the attack upon him was renewed. Mr. Gladstone was one of

those who signed an address of recognition and congratulation.

FOOTNOTES:

[278] Memo, by Mr. Gladstone of a conversation with Aberdeen.

[279] The practical impossibility of retaining this learned man, the

Derbyite chancellor, upon the coalition woolsack, is an illustration of

the tenacity of the modern party system.

[280] It was not until the rise of Mr. Gladstone that a chancellor of

the exchequer, not being prime minister, stood at this high level.

[281] From the Baring papers, for which I am indebted to the kindness of

Lord Northbrook.

[282] _Times_, December 23, 1852.

[283] See _Life of Maurice_, ii. p. 195; _Life of Wilberforce_, ii. pp.

208-218. See also Mr. Gladstone's letter to Bishop Hampden, 1856, above

p. 168.

CHAPTER II

THE TRIUMPH OF 1853

(_1853_)

We have not sought to evade the difficulties of our position.... We

have not attempted to counteract them by narrow or flimsy

expedients.... We have proposed plans which will go some way

towards closing up many vexed financial questions.... While we have

sought to do justice to intelligence and skill as compared with

property--while we have sought to do justice to the great labouring

community by further extending their relief from indirect taxation,

we have not been guided by any desire to set one class against

another.--GLADSTONE (1853).

Mr. Gladstone began this year, so important both to himself and to the

country, with what he described as a short but active and pleasant visit

to Oxford. He stayed at Christ Church with Dr. Jacobson, of whom it was

observed that he always looked as if on the point of saying something

extremely piercing and shrewd, only it never came. He paid many calls,

dined at Oriel, had a luncheon and made a speech in the hall at Balliol;

passed busy days and brisk evenings, and filled up whatever spare

moments he could find or manufacture, with treasury papers, books on

taxation, consolidated annuities, and public accounts, alternating with

dips into Lamennais--the bold and passionate French mystic, fallen angel

of his church, most moving of all the spiritual tragedies of that day of

heroic idealists.

On February 3 he moved into the house of the chancellor of the exchequer

in that best known of all streets which is not a street, where he was

destined to pass some two and twenty of the forty-one years of the

public life that lay before him. He had a correspondence with Mr.

Disraeli, his predecessor, on the valuation of the furniture in the

official house. There was question, also, of the robe that passes down

under some law of exchange from one chancellor to another on an

apparently unsettled footing. The tone on this high concern was not

wholly amicable. Mr. Gladstone notes especially in his diary that he

wrote a draft of one of his letters on a Sunday, as being, I suppose,

the day most favourable to self-control; while Mr. Disraeli at last

suggests that Mr. Gladstone should really consult Sir Charles Wood, 'who

is at least a man of the world.' Such are the angers of celestial minds.

At an early cabinet (Feb. 5) he began the battle that lasted in various

shapes all the rest of his life. It was on a question of reducing the

force in the Pacific. 'Lord Aberdeen, Granville, Molesworth, and I were

for it. We failed.' What was the case for this particular retrenchment I

do not know, nor does it matter. Fiercer engagements, and many of them,

were to follow. Meanwhile he bent all the energies of his mind to the

other front of financial questions--to raising money rather than

expending it, and with unwearied industry applied himself to solve the

problem of redistributing the burdens and improving the machinery of

taxation.

For many years circumstances had given to finance a lively and

commanding place in popular interest. The protracted discussion on the

corn law, conducted not only in senate and cabinet, but in country

market-places and thronged exchanges, in the farmer's ordinary and at

huge gatherings in all the large towns in the kingdom, had agitated

every class in the community. The battle between free trade and

protection, ending in a revolution of our commercial system, had

awakened men to the enormous truth, as to which they are always so soon

ready to relapse into slumber, that budgets are not merely affairs of

arithmetic, but in a thousand ways go to the root of the prosperity of

individuals, the relations of classes, and the strength of kingdoms. The

finance of the whigs in the years after the Reform bill had not only

bewildered parliament, but had filled merchants, bankers, shipowners,

manufacturers, shopkeepers, and the whole array of general taxpayers

with perplexity and dismay. Peel recovered a financial equilibrium and

restored public confidence, but Peel was gone. The whigs who followed

him after 1846 had once more laboured under an unlucky star in this

vital sphere of national affairs. They performed the unexampled feat of

bringing forward four budgets in a single year, the first of them

introduced by Lord John Russell himself as prime minister. By 1851

floundering had reached a climax. Finance had thus discredited one

historical party; it had broken up the other. It was finance that

overthrew weak governments and hindered the possibility of a strong one.

FISCAL CONFUSION

Mr. Disraeli, the most unsparing of all the assailants of Peel, tried

his own hand in 1852. To have the genius and the patience of a great

partisan chief is one gift, and this he had; to grasp the complex

material interests of a vast diversified society like the United Kingdom

demands powers of a different order. The defeat of Mr. Disraeli's budget

at the end of 1852 seemed to complete the circle of fiscal confusion.

Every source of public income was the object of assault. Every indirect

tax was to be reduced or swept away, and yet no two men appeared to

agree upon the principles of the direct taxes that were to take their

place. The window duty, the paper duty, the tax on advertisements, the

malt-tax, the stamp on marine insurances, were all to vanish, but even

the most zealous reformers were powerless to fill the void. The

order-book of the House of Commons was loaded with motions about the

income-tax, and an important committee sat in 1851 to consider all the

questions connected with the possibility of its readjustment and

amendment. They could not even frame a report. The belief that it was

essentially unjust to impose the tax at one and the same rate upon

permanent and temporary incomes, prevailed in the great mass, especially

of the liberal party. Discussions arose all through this period,

descending not only to the elementary principles of taxation, but, as

Mr. Gladstone said, almost to the first principles of civilised society

itself. Party distraction, ministerial embarrassment, adjournment after

adjournment of a decision upon fundamental maxims of national

taxation--such was the bewildered scene. At last a statesman appeared,

a financier almost by accident (for, as we have seen, it was by no

special choice of his own that Mr. Gladstone went to the exchequer), but

a financier endowed with a practical imagination of the highest class,

with a combination of the spirit of vigorous analysis and the spirit of

vigorous system, with the habit of unflagging toil, and above all, with

the gift of indomitable courage. If anybody suggested the reappointment

of Hume's committee, the idea was wisely dismissed. It was evidently, as

Graham said, the duty of the executive government to lead the way and to

guide public opinion in a matter of this crucial importance. It seemed

impossible and unworthy to avoid a frank declaration about the

income-tax. He was strongly of opinion (March 15) that a larger measure

would be carried with greater certainty and ease than simple renewal;

and that a combination of income-tax, gradually diminishing to a fixed

term of extinction, with reduction of the interest of debt, and a review

of the probate and legacy duties, afforded the best ground for a

financial arrangement both successful and creditable. It was strong

ideas of this kind that encouraged Mr. Gladstone to build on a broad

foundation.

The nature of his proceedings he set out in one of the most interesting

of his political memoranda:--

The liberals were, to all appearance, pledged to the reconstruction

of the tax by their opinions, and the tories by their party

following. The small fraction of Peelites could probably be relied

upon the other way, and some few individuals with financial

knowledge and experience. The mission of the new government was

described by Lord Aberdeen in the House of Lords as a financial

mission, and the stress of it thus lay upon a person, very

ill-prepared. My opinions were with Peel; but under such

circumstances it was my duty to make a close and searching

investigation into the whole nature of the tax, and make up my mind

whether there was any means of accepting or compounding with the

existing state of opinion. I went to work, and laboured very hard.

When I had entered gravely upon my financial studies, I one day had

occasion--I know not what--to go into the city and to call upon

Mr. Samuel Gurney, to whom experience and character had given a

high position there. He asked me with interest about my

preparations for my budget; and he said, 'One thing I will venture

to urge, whatever your plan is,--let it be simple.' I was a man

much disposed to defer to authority, and I attached weight to this

advice. But as I went further and further into my subject, I became

more and more convinced that, as an honest steward, I had no option

but to propose the renewal of the tax in its uniform shape. I

constructed much elaborate argument in support of my proposition,

which I knew it would be difficult to answer. But I also knew that

no amount of unassisted argument would suffice to overcome the

obstacles in my way, and that this could only be done by large

compensations in my accompanying propositions. So I was led

legitimately on, and on, until I had framed the most complicated

scheme ever submitted to parliament.

THE FABRIC PLANNED

Truly has it been said that there is something repulsive to human nature

in the simple reproduction of defunct budgets. Certainly if anything can

be more odious than a living tax, it is a dead one. It is as much as is

consonant to biography to give an outline of the plan that was gradually

wrought out in Mr. Gladstone's mind during the first three laborious

months of 1853, and to mark the extraordinarily far-reaching and

comprehensive character of the earliest of his thirteen budgets. Its

initial boldness lay in the adoption of the unusual course of estimating

the national income roughly for a long period of seven years, and

assuming that expenditure would remain tolerably steady for the whole of

that period. Just as no provident man in private life settles his

establishment on the basis of one year or two years only, so Mr.

Gladstone abandoned hand-to-mouth, and took long views. 'I ought, no

doubt,' he said afterwards, 'to have pointed out explicitly that a great

disturbance and increase of our expenditure would baffle my reckonings.'

Meanwhile, the fabric was planned on strong foundations and admirable

lines. The simplification of the tariff of duties of customs, begun by

Peel eleven years before, was carried forward almost to completion.

Nearly one hundred and forty duties were extinguished, and nearly one

hundred and fifty were lowered. The tea duty was to be reduced in stages

extending over three years from over two shillings to one shilling. In

the department of excise, the high and injurious duty on soap, which

brought into the exchequer over eleven hundred thousand pounds annually,

was swept entirely away. In the same department, by raising the duties

on spirits manufactured in Ireland nearer to the level of England and

Scotland, a step was taken towards identity of taxation in the three

kingdoms--by no means an unequivocal good. Miscellaneous provisions and

minor aspects of the scheme need not detain us; but a great reform of

rate and scale in the system of the assessed taxes, the reduction of the

duty on the beneficent practice of life insurance from half-a-crown to

sixpence on the hundred pounds, and the substitution of a uniform

receipt stamp, were no contemptible contributions to the comfort and

well-being of the community. Advertisements in newspapers became free of

duty.[284]

KEYSTONE OF THE BUDGET

The keystone of the budget in Mr. Gladstone's conception was the

position to be assigned in it to the income-tax. This he determined to

renew for a period of seven years,--for two years at sevenpence in the

pound, for two years more at sixpence, and for the last three at

fivepence. By that time he hoped that parliament would be able to

dispense with it. Meanwhile it was to be extended to Ireland, in

compensation for the remission of a debt owed by Ireland to the British

treasury of between four and five millions. It was to be extended, also,

at a reduced rate of fivepence, to incomes between a hundred and fifty

and a hundred pounds--the former having hitherto been the line of total

exemption. From the retention of the income-tax as a portion of the

permanent and ordinary finance of the country the chancellor of the

exchequer was wholly and strongly averse, and so he remained for more

than twenty years to come. In order, however, to meet a common and a

just objection, that under this impost intelligence, enterprise, and

skill paid too much and property paid too little, he resolved upon a

bold step. He proposed that the legacy duty, hitherto confined to

personal property passing on death, either by will or by inheritance and

not by settlement, should henceforth be extended to real property, and

to both descriptions of property passing by settlement, whether real or

personal. In a word, the legacy duty was to extend to all successions

whatever. This was the proposal that in many senses cut deepest. It was

the first rudimentary breach in the ramparts of the territorial system,

unless, indeed, we count as first the abolition of the corn law.[285]

Mr. Gladstone eagerly disclaimed any intention of accelerating by the

pressure of fiscal enactment changes in the tenure of landed property,

and the letters which the reader has already seen (pp. 345-9) show the

high social value that he invariably set upon the maintenance of the old

landed order. The succession duty, as we shall find, for the time

disappointed his expectations, for he counted on two millions, and in

fact it yielded little more than half of one. But it secured for its

author the lasting resentment of a powerful class.

Such was the scheme that Mr. Gladstone now worked out in many weeks of

toil that would have been slavish, were it not that toil is never

slavish when illuminated by a strenuous purpose. When by and by the

result had made him the hero of a glorious hour, he wrote to Lord

Aberdeen (April 19): 'I had the deepest anxiety with regard to you, as

our chief, lest by faults of my own I should aggravate the cares and

difficulties into which I had at least helped to bring you; and the

novelty of our political relations with many of our colleagues, together

with the fact that I had been myself slow, and even reluctant, to the

formation of a new connection, filled me with an almost feverish desire

to do no injustice to that connection now that it was formed; and to

redeem the pledge you generously gave on my behalf, that there would be

no want of cordiality and zeal in the discharge of any duties which it

might fall to me to perform on behalf of such a government as was then

in your contemplation.'

Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours a day he toiled at his desk. Treasury

officials and trade experts, soap deputations and post-horse

deputations, representatives of tobacco and representatives of the West

India interest, flocked to Downing Street day by day all through March.

If he went into the city to dine with the Lord Mayor, the lamentable

hole thus made in his evening was repaired by working till four in the

morning upon customs reform, Australian mints, budget plans of all

kinds. It is characteristic that even this mountain load of concentrated

and exacting labour did not prevent him from giving a Latin lesson every

day to his second boy.