II

'Some days before the day appointed for my statement,' says Mr.

Gladstone, 'I recited the leading particulars to my able and intelligent

friend Cardwell, not in the cabinet but then holding office as president

of the board of trade. He was so bewildered and astounded at the bigness

of the scheme, that I began to ask myself, Have I a right to ask my

colleagues to follow me amidst all these rocks and shoals? In

consequence I performed a drastic operation upon the plan, and next day

I carried to Lord Aberdeen a reduced and mutilated scheme which might be

deemed by some politicians to be weaker but safer. I put to Lord

Aberdeen the question I had put to myself, and stated my readiness, if

he should think it called for, to make this sacrifice to the probable

inclinations of my colleagues. But he boldly and wisely said, "I take it

upon myself to ask you to bring your original and whole plan before the

cabinet." I thought this an ample warrant.'

THE BUDGET IN CABINET

At last, after Mr. Gladstone had spent an hour at the palace in

explaining his scheme to the Prince Consort, the budget was opened to

the cabinet (April 9) in a speech of three hours--an achievement, I

should suppose, unparalleled in that line, for a cabinet consists of men

each with pretty absorbing pre-occupations of his own. The exposition

was 'as ingenious,' Lord Aberdeen told Prince Albert, 'as clear, and for

the most part as convincing, as anything I have ever heard.'

'Gladstone,' said Lord Aberdeen later (1856) 'does not weigh well

against one another different arguments, each of which has a real

foundation. But he is unrivalled in his power of proving that a specious

argument has no real foundation. On the Succession bill the whole

cabinet was against him. He delivered to us much the same speech as he

made in the House of Commons. At its close we were all convinced.'[286]

Differences that might easily become serious speedily arose upon details

in the minds of two or three of them, and for some days the prime

minister regarded the undertaking as not only difficult but perilous.

Sir Charles Wood, in cabinet (April 11), strongly disapproved of the

extension of income-tax to Ireland, and to the lowering of the exemption

line. On Ireland the plan would lay more than half a million of new

taxation, whereas much of the relief, such as soap and assessed taxes,

would not touch her.[287] Palmerston thought it a great plan, perfectly

just, and admirably put together, only it opened too many points of

attack, and it could never be carried: Disraeli was on the watch, the

Irish would join him, so would the radicals, while the succession duty,

to which Palmerston individually had great objection, would estrange

many conservatives. Lord John Russell perceived difficulties, but he did

not see an alternative. Graham then fell in, disliked the twofold

extension of the income-tax, and thought they should only take away half

the soap-tax. Lord Lansdowne (a great Irish landlord) agreed with him.

Mr. Gladstone told them that he was willing to propose whatever the

cabinet might decide on, except one thing, namely, the breaking up of

the basis of the income-tax: that he could not be a party to; he should

regard it as a high political offence. With this reservation he should

follow their judgment, but he strongly adhered to his whole plan. Lord

Aberdeen said, 'You must take care your proposals are not unpopular

ones.' Mr. Gladstone replied that it was after applying the test of

popularity, that he was convinced the budget would be damaged beforehand

by some of the small changes that had been suggested.

At the end of a long and interesting discussion, there stood for the

whole budget Lord John, Newcastle, Clarendon, Molesworth, Gladstone,

with Argyll and Aberdeen more or less favourable; for dropping the two

extensions of income-tax and keeping half the soap duty, Lansdowne,

Graham, Wood; more or less leaning towards them, Palmerston and

Granville. They agreed to meet again the next day (April 12), when they

got into the open sea. Wood stuck to his text. Lansdowne suggested that

an increased spirit duty and an income-tax for Ireland together would be

something like a breach of faith. Palmerston thought they would be

beaten, but he would accept the budget provided they were not to be

bound to dissolve or resign upon such a point as to the two extensions

of the income-tax. Lord John said that if they were beaten on

differentiating the tax, they would have to dissolve. Palmerston

expressed his individual opinion in favour of a distinction for

precarious incomes, and would act in that sense if he were out of the

government; as it was, he assented. Argyll created a diversion by

suggesting the abandonment of the Irish spirit duty. Mr. Gladstone

admitted that he thought the spirit duty the weakest point of the plan,

though warrantable and tenable on the whole. At last, after further

patient and searching discussion, the cabinet finding that the suggested

amendments cut against one another, were for adopting the entire budget,

the dissentients being Lansdowne, Graham, Wood, and Herbert. Graham was

full of ill auguries, but said he would assent and assist. Wood looked

grave, and murmured that he must take time.

CABINET MISGIVINGS

In the course of these preliminaries Lord John Russell had gone to

Graham, very uneasy about the income-tax. Graham, though habitually

desponding, bade him be of good cheer. Their opponents, he said, were in

numbers strong; but the budget would be excellent to dissolve upon, and

Lord John admitted that they would gain forty seats.

They agreed, however, in Graham's language, that it would never do to

play their trump card until the state of the game actually required it.

Lord John confessed that he was no judge of figures,--somewhat of a

weakness in a critic of a budget,--and Graham comforted him by the reply

that he was at any rate the best judge living of House of Commons

tactics.

The position of the government in the House of Commons was notoriously

weak. The majority that had brought them into existence was excessively

narrow. It had been well known from the first that if any of the

accidents of a session should happen to draw the tories, the Irish, and

the radicals into one lobby, ministers would find themselves in a

minority. Small defeats occurred. The budget was only four days off. Mr.

Gladstone enters in his diary: 'Spoke against Gibson; beaten by 200-169.

Our third time this week. Very stiff work this. Ellice said dissolution

would be the end of it; we agreed in the House to a cabinet to-morrow.

Herbert and Cardwell, to whom I spoke, inclined to dissolve.' Next day

(April 15), the cabinet met in a flutter, for the same tactics might

well be repeated, whenever Mr. Disraeli should think the chances good.

Lord John adverted to the hostility of the radicals as exhibited in the

tone of the debate, and hinted the opinion that they must take in a reef

or two. Mr. Gladstone doubted whether the budget could live in that

House, whatever form it might assume; but even with such perils he

should look upon the whole budget as less unsafe than a partial

contraction. Graham took the same view of the disposition of parliament:

keen opposition; lukewarm support; the necessity of a greater party

sympathy and connection to enable them to surmount the difficulties of a

most unusual and hazardous operation. But he did not appear to lean to

dissolution, and the older members of the cabinet generally declared

themselves against it. 'In the end we went back to the position that we

must have a budget on Monday, but Clarendon, Herbert, and Palmerston

joined the chorus of those who said the measure was too sharp upon

Ireland. The idea was then started whether we should go the length of

the entire remission of the consolidated annuities[288] and impose the

income-tax at sevenpence, with the augmented spirit duty. This view

found favour generally; and I felt that some excess in the mere

sacrifice of money was no great matter compared with the advantage of so

great an approximation to equal taxation.' Then, 'speaking with great

deference,' Gladstone repeated his belief once more that the entire

budget was safer than a contracted one, both for the House and the

country, and his conviction that if they proposed it, the name and fame

of the government at any rate would stand well. 'Wood seemed still to

hang back, but the rest of the cabinet now appeared well satisfied, and

we parted, each resolved and certainly more likely to stand or fall by

the budget as a whole than we seemed to be on Wednesday.'

III

The decisive cabinet was on Saturday, April 16. It was finally settled

that the budget should be proposed as it stood, with its essential

features unaltered. On Sunday, the chancellor of the exchequer went as

usual twice to church, and read the _Paradiso_; 'but I was obliged,' he

says, with an accent of contrition, 'to give several hours to my

figures.' Monday brought the critical moment. 'April 18. Wrote minutes.

Read Shakespeare at night. This day was devoted to working up my papers

and figures for the evening. Then drove and walked with C. [Mrs.

Gladstone]. Went at 4½ to the House. Spoke 4¾ hours in detailing the

financial measures, and my strength stood out well, thank God. Many kind

congratulations afterwards. Herberts and Wortleys came home with us and

had soup and negus.'

LAID BEFORE PARLIAMENT

The proceeding that figures here so simply was, in fact, one of the

great parliamentary performances of the century. Lord Aberdeen wrote to

Prince Albert that 'the display of power was wonderful; it was agreed in

all quarters that there had been nothing like the speech for many years,

and that under the impression of his commanding eloquence the reception

of the budget had been most favourable.' Lord John told the Queen the

speech was one of the ablest ever made in the House of Commons. 'Mr.

Pitt, in the days of his glory, might have been more imposing, but he

could not have been more persuasive.' Lord Aberdeen heard from Windsor

the next day: 'The Queen must write a line to Lord Aberdeen to say how

delighted she is at the great success of Mr. Gladstone's speech last

night.... We have every reason to be sanguine now, which is a great

relief to the Queen.' Prince Albert used the same language to Mr.

Gladstone: 'I cannot resist writing you a line in order to congratulate

you on the success of your speech of yesterday. I have just completed a

close and careful perusal of it and should certainly have cheered had I

a seat in the House. I hear from all sides that the budget has been well

received. Trusting that your Christian humility will not allow you to be

dangerously elated, I cannot help sending for your perusal the report

which Lord John Russell sent to the Queen, feeling sure that it will

give you pleasure, such approbation being the best reward a public man

can have.'

On the cardinal question of the fortunes of the ministry its effect was

decisive. The prime minister wrote to Mr. Gladstone himself (April 19):

'While everybody is congratulating _me_ on the wonderful impression

produced in the House of Commons last night, it seems only reasonable

that I should have a word of congratulation for _you_. You will believe

how much more sincerely I rejoice on your account than on my own,

although most assuredly, if the existence of my government shall be

prolonged, it will be your work.' To Madame de Lieven Aberdeen said that

Gladstone had given a strength and lustre to the administration which it

could not have derived from anything else. No testimony was more

agreeable to Mr. Gladstone than a letter from Lady Peel. 'I know the

recollections,' he replied, 'with which you must have written, and

therefore I will not scruple to say that as I was inspired by the

thought of treading, however unequally, in the steps of my great teacher

and master in public affairs, so it was one of my keenest anxieties not

to do dishonour to his memory, or injustice to the patriotic policy with

which his name is forever associated.'[289]

POWER OF THE PERFORMANCE

Greville makes a true point when he says that the budget speech 'has

raised Gladstone to a great political elevation, and what is of far

greater consequence than the measure itself, has given the country

assurance of a _man_ equal to great political necessities and fit to

lead parties and direct governments.'[290] Mr. Gladstone had made many

speeches that were in a high degree interesting, ingenious, attractive,

forcible. He now showed that besides and apart from all this, he was the

possessor of qualities without which no amount of rhetorician's glitter

commands the House of Commons for a single hour after the fireworks have

ceased to blaze. He showed that he had precise perception, positive and

constructive purpose, and a powerful will. In 1851, he had on two

occasions exhibited the highest competency as a critic of the budget of

Sir Charles Wood. On the memorable night in the previous December, when

he had torn Mr. Disraeli's budget to pieces, he had proved how

terrifying he could be in exposure and assault. He now triumphantly met

the test that he had triumphantly applied to his predecessor, and

presented a command of even more imposing resources in the task of

responsible construction than he had displayed in irresponsible

criticism. The speech was saturated with fact; the horizons were large;

and the opening of each in the long series of topics, from Mr. Pitt and

the great war, down to the unsuspected connection between the repeal of

the soap-tax and the extinction of the slave trade in Africa, was

exalted and spacious. The arguments throughout were close, persuasive,

exhaustive; the moral appeal was in the only tone worthy of a great

minister addressing a governing assembly--a masculine invocation of

their intellectual and political courage. This is the intrepid way in

which a strong parliament and a strong nation like to see public

difficulties handled, and they now welcomed the appearance of a new

minister, who rejected what he called narrow and flimsy expedients, of

which so much had been seen in the last half dozen years; who was not

afraid to make a stand against heedless men with hearts apparently set

on drying up one source of revenue after another; who did not shrink

from sconcing the powerful landed phalanx like other people; and who at

the same time boldly used and manfully defended the most unpopular of

all the public imposts. In politics the spectacle of sheer courage is

often quite as good in its influence and effect as the best of logic. It

was so here. While proposing that the income-tax should come to an end

in seven years, he yet produced the most comprehensive analysis and the

boldest vindication of the structure of the tax as it stood. His manner

was plain, often almost conversational, but his elaborate examination of

the principles of an income-tax remains to this day a master example of

accurate reasoning thrown into delightful form. He admitted all the

objections to it: the inquisition that it entailed, the frauds to which

it led, the sense in the public mind of its injustice in laying the same

rate upon the holder of idle and secured public funds, upon the

industrious trader, upon the precarious earnings of the professional

man. It was these disadvantages that made him plan the extinction of the

tax at the end of a definite period, when the salutary remissions of

other burdens now proposed would have had time to bring forth their

fruits. As was said by a later chancellor of the exchequer, this speech

not only won 'universal applause from his audience at the time, but

changed the convictions of a large part of the nation, and turned, at

least for several years, a current of popular opinion which had seemed

too powerful for any minister to resist.'[291]

The succession duty brought Mr. Gladstone into the first conflict of his

life with the House of Lords. That land should be made to pay like other

forms of property Was a proposition denounced as essentially

impracticable, oppressive, unjust, cowardly, and absurd. It was called

_ex post facto_ legislation. It was one of the most obnoxious,

detestable, and odious measures ever proposed. Its author was a vulture

soaring over society, waiting for the rich harvest that death would pour

into his treasury. Lord Derby invoked him as a phoenix chancellor, in

whom Mr. Pitt rose from his ashes with double lustre, for Mr. Gladstone

had ventured where Pitt had failed. He admitted that nothing short of

the chancellor's extraordinary skill and dexterity could have carried

proposals so evil through the House of Commons.[292] Meanwhile the

public counted up their gains: a remission on tea, good for twenty

shillings a year in an ordinary household; a fall in the washing bill; a

boon of a couple of pounds for the man who insured his life for five

hundred; an easy saving of ten pounds a year in the assessed taxes, and

so forth,--the whole performance ending with 'a dissolving view of the

decline and fall' of the hated income-tax.

SUCCESSION DUTY AND REDEMPTION

The financial proceedings of this year included a proposal for the

redemption of South Sea stock and an attempted operation on the national

debt, by the creation of new stocks bearing a lower rate of interest,

two options of conversion being given to the holders of old stock. The

idea of the creation of a two-and-half-per-cent. stock, said Mr.

Gladstone in later years, though in those days novel, was very

favourably received.[293]

I produced my plan. Disraeli offered it a malignant opposition. He

made a demand for time; the one demand that ought not to have been

made. In proposals of this kind, it is allowed to be altogether

improper. In 1844 Mr. Goulburn was permitted, I think, to carry

through with great expedition his plan for a large reduction of

interest. When Mr. Goschen produced his still larger and much more

important measure, we, the opposition, did our best to expedite

the decision. There are no complications requiring time on such an

occasion. It is a matter of aye or no. But when time is allowed the

chapter of accidents allows an opponent to hope that a situation

known to be unusually happy will deteriorate. Of this contingency

Disraeli took his chance. Time as it happened was in his favour. It

was no question of the substance of the plan, but a moderate change

in the political barometer, which reduced to two or three millions

a subscription which at the right moment would probably have been

twenty or thirty.[294]

In a letter to W. R. Farquhar (March 8, 1861) he makes further remarks,

which are introspective and autobiographic:--

Looking back now upon those of my proceedings in 1853 which related

to interest upon exchequer bills and to the reduction of interest

on the public debt, I think that there was nothing in the proposals

themselves which might not have taken full and quick effect, if

they had been made at a time which I may best describe as the time

that precedes high-water with respect to abundance of money and

security of the market. As respects exchequer bills, I am decidedly

of opinion that the rates of premium current for some years before

'53 were wholly incompatible with a sound state of things: and the

fluctuations then were even greater than since. Still I think that

I committed an error from want of sufficient quickness in

discerning the signs of the times, for we were upon the very eve of

an altered state of things, and any alteration of a kind at all

serious was enough to make the period unfit for those grave

operations. It is far from being the first or only time when I have

had reason to lament my own deficiency in the faculty of rapid and

comprehensive observation. I failed to see that high-water was just

past; and that although the tide had not perceptibly fallen, yet it

was going to fall. The truth likewise is this (to go a step further

in my confessions) that almost all my experience in money affairs

had been of a most difficult and trying kind, under circumstances

which admitted of no choice but obliged me to sail always very

near the wind, and this induced a habit of more daring navigation

than I could now altogether approve. Nor will I excuse myself by

saying that others were deceived like me, for none of them were in

a condition to have precisely my responsibility.

Another note contributes a further point of explanation: 'I have always

imagined that this fault was due to my experience in the affairs of the

Hawarden and Oak Farm estates, where it was an incessant course of

sailing near the wind, and there was really no other hope.'

INCOME-TAX

Seven years later Mr. Gladstone, once more chancellor of the exchequer,

again produced a budget. Semi-ironic cheers met his semi-ironic

expression of an expectation that he would be asked the question: what

had become of the calculations of 1853? The succession duty proved a

woeful disappointment, and instead of producing two million pounds,

produced only six hundred thousand. A similar but greater

disappointment, we must recollect, owing mainly to a singular

miscalculation as to the income-tax, had marked Peel's memorable budget

of 1842, which landed him in a deficiency of nearly two and a quarter

millions, instead of a surplus of half a million.[295] Of the

disappointment in his own case, Mr. Gladstone when the time came

propounded an explanation, only moderately conclusive. I need not

discuss it, for as everybody knows, the effective reason why the

income-tax could not be removed was the heavy charge created by the

Crimean war. What is more to the point in estimating the finance of

1853, is its effect in enabling us to meet the strain of the war. It was

this finance that, continuing the work begun by Peel, made the country

in 1859 richer by more than sixteen per cent, than it had been in 1853.

It was this finance, that by clinching the open questions that enveloped

the income-tax, and setting it upon a defensible foundation while it

lasted, bore us through the struggle. Unluckily, in demonstrating the

perils of meddling with the structure of the tax, in showing its power

and simplicity, the chancellor was at the same time providing the

easiest means, if not also the most direct incentive, to that policy of

expenditure--it rose from fifty to seventy millions between 1853 and

1859--which was one of the most fatal obstacles to the foremost aims of

his political life. It was twenty years from now, as my readers will

see, before the effort, now foreshadowed, to exclude the income-tax from

the ordinary sources of national revenue, reached its dramatic close.

FOOTNOTES:

[284] A curious parliamentary incident occurred. The original proposal

was to reduce the duty from eighteen-pence to sixpence. A motion to

repeal it altogether was rejected by ten. Then a motion was made to

substitute zero for sixpence in the clause. The Speaker ruled that this

reversal of the previous vote was not out of order, and it was carried

by nine.

[285] Some may place first the Act of 1833 making real estate liable for

simple contract debts.

[286] Mrs. Simpson's _Many Memories_, p. 237.

[287] For paper on Irish income-tax, see Appendix.

[288] Loans made to Ireland for various purposes.

[289] Cavour, as Costi's letters show, took an eager interest in Mr.

Gladstone's budget speech.

[290] Greville, Third Series, i. p. 59.

[291] Northcote, _Twenty Years of Financial Policy_, p. 185.

[292] Mr. Gladstone received valuable aid from Bethell, the

solicitor-general. On leaving, office in 1855 he wrote to Bethell:

'After having had to try your patience more than once in circumstances

of real difficulty, I have found your kindness inexhaustible, and your

aid invaluable, so that I really can ill tell on which of the two I look

back with the greater pleasure. The memory of the Succession Duty bill

is to me something like what Inkermann may be to a private of the

Guards: you were the sergeant from whom I got my drill and whose hand

and voice carried me through.'

[293] The city articles of the time justify this statement.

[294] Gladstone Memo., 1897. See also Appendix.

[295] It may be said, however, that Peel was right about the yield of

the income-tax, and only overlooked the fact that it would not all be

collected, within the year.

CHAPTER III

THE CRIMEAN WAR

(_1853-1854_)

He [Burke] maintained that the attempt to bring the Turkish empire

into the consideration of the balance of power in Europe was

extremely new, and contrary to all former political systems. He

pointed out in strong terms the danger and impolity of our

espousing the Ottoman cause.--BURKE (1791).

After the session Mr. Gladstone had gone on a visit to Dunrobin, and

there he was laid up with illness for many days. It was the end of

September before he was able to travel south. At Dingwall they presented

him (Sept. 27) with the freedom of that ancient burgh. He spoke of

himself as having completed the twenty-first year of his political life,

and as being almost the youngest of those veteran statesmen who occupied

the chief places in the counsels of the Queen. At Inverness the same

evening, he told them that in commercial legislation he had reaped where

others had sown; that he had enjoyed the privilege of taking a humble

but laborious part in realising those principles of free trade which, in

the near future, would bring, in the train of increased intercourse and

augmented wealth, that closer social and moral union of the nations of

the earth which men all so fervently desire, and which must in the

fulness of time lessen the frequency of strife and war. Yet even while

the hopeful words were falling from the speaker's lips, he might have

heard, not in far distance but close at hand, the trumpets and drums,

the heavy rumbling of the cannon, and all the clangour of a world in

arms.

II

OTTOMANS AND THE WEST

One of the central and perennial interests of Mr. Gladstone's life was

that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting

interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths, that is veiled under

the easy name of the Eastern question. The root of the Eastern question,

as everybody almost too well knows, is the presence of the Ottoman Turks

in Europe, their possession of Constantinople,--that incomparable centre

of imperial power standing in Europe but facing Asia,--and their

sovereignty as Mahometan masters over Christian races. In one of the few

picturesque passages of his eloquence Mr. Gladstone once described the

position of these races. 'They were like a shelving beach that

restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, is beaten by the waves; it

is laid desolate; it produces nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing save a

mass of shingle, of rock, of almost useless sea-weed. But it is a fence

behind which the cultivated earth can spread, and escape the incoming

tide, and such was the resistance of Bulgarians, of Servians, and of

Greeks. It was that resistance which left Europe to claim the enjoyment

of her own religion and to develop her institutions and her laws.' This

secular strife between Ottoman and Christian gradually became a struggle

among Christian powers of northern and western Europe, to turn

tormenting questions in the east to the advantage of rival ambitions of

their own. At a certain epoch in the eighteenth century Russia first

seized her place among the Powers. By the end of the century she had

pushed her force into the west by the dismemberment of Poland; she had

made her way to the southern shores of the Black Sea; and while still

the most barbaric of all the states, she had made good a vague claim to

exercise the guardianship of civilisation on behalf of the Christian

races and the Orthodox church. This claim it was that led at varying

intervals of time, and with many diversities of place, plea, and colour,

to crisis after crisis springing up within the Turkish empire, but

henceforth all of them apt to spread with dangerous contagion to

governments beyond Ottoman limits.

England, unlike France, had no systematic tradition upon this

complicated struggle. When war began between Russia and the Porte in

1771, we supported Russia and helped her to obtain an establishment in

the Black Sea. Towards the end of 1782 when Catherine by a sort of

royal syllogism, as Fox called it, took the Crimea into her own hands,

the whig cabinet of the hour did not think it necessary to lend Turkey

their support, though France and Spain proposed a combination to resist.

Then came Pitt. The statesman whose qualities of greatness so profoundly

impressed his contemporaries has usually been praised as a minister

devoted to peace, and only driven by the French Revolution into the long

war. His preparations in 1791 for a war with Russia on behalf of the

Turk are a serious deduction from this estimate. Happily the alarms of

the Baltic trade, and the vigorous reasoning of Fox, produced such an

effect upon opinion, that Pitt was driven, on peril of the overthrow of

his government, to find the best expedient he could to bring the

business to an end without extremities. In 1853 the country was less

fortunate than it had been in 1791.

A Russian diplomatist made a homely comparison of the Eastern question

to the gout; now its attack is in the foot, now in the hand; but all is

safe if only it does not fly to a vital part. In 1852 the Eastern

question showed signs of flying to the heart, and a catastrophe was

sure. A dispute between Greek and Latin religious as to the custody of

the holy places at Jerusalem, followed by the diplomatic rivalries of

their respective patrons, Russia and France, produced a crisis that was

at first of no extraordinary pattern. The quarrel between two packs of

monks about a key and a silver star was a trivial symbol of the vast

rivalry of centuries between powerful churches, between great states,

between heterogeneous races. The dispute about the holy places was

adjusted, but was immediately followed by a claim from the Czar for

recognition by treaty of his rights as protector of the Sultan's

Christian subjects. This claim the Sultan, with encouragement from the

British ambassador, rejected, and the Czar marched troops into the

Danubian provinces, to hold them in pledge until the required concession

should be made to his high protective claims. This issue was no good

cause for a general conflagration. Unfortunately many combustibles

happened to lie about the world at that time, and craft,

misunderstanding, dupery, autocratic pride, democratic hurry, combined

to spread the blaze.

DIPLOMATIC RIVALRIES

The story is still fresh. With the detailed history of the diplomacy

that preceded the outbreak of war between England, France, and Turkey on

the one part and Russia on the other, we have here happily only the

smallest concern. The large question, as it presented itself to Mr.

Gladstone's mind in later years, and as it presents itself now to the

historic student, had hardly then emerged to the view of the statesmen

of the western Powers. Would the success of Russian designs at that day

mean anything better than the transfer of the miserable Christian races

to the yoke of a new master?[296] Or was the repulse of these designs

necessary to secure to the Christian races--who, by the by, were not

particularly good friends to one another--the power of governing

themselves without any master, either Russian or Turk? To this question,

so decisive as it is in judging the policy of the Crimean war, it is not

quite easy even now for the historian--who has many other things to

think of than has the contemporary politician--to give a confident

answer.

Nicholas was not without advisers who warned him that the break-up of

Turkey by force of Russian arms might be to the deliverer a loss and not

a gain. Brunnow, then Russian ambassador at St. James's, said to his

sovereign: 'The war in its results would cause to spring out of the

ruins of Turkey all kinds of new states, as ungrateful to us as Greece

has been, as troublesome as the Danubian Principalities have been, and

an order of things where our influence will be more sharply combated,

resisted, restrained, by the rivalries of France, England, Austria, than

it has ever been under the Ottoman. War cannot turn to our direct

advantage. We shall shed our blood and spend our treasure in order that

King Otho may gain Thessaly; that the English may take more islands at

their own convenience; that the French too may get their share; and that

the Ottoman empire may be transformed into independent states, which

for us will only become either burdensome clients or hostile

neighbours.' If this forecast was right, then to resist Russia was at

once to prevent her from embarrassing and weakening herself, and to lock

up the Christians in their cruel prison-house for a quarter of a century

longer. If sagacious calculation in such a vein as this were the

mainspring of the world, history would be stripped of many a crimson

page. But far-sighted calculation can no longer be ascribed to the

actors in this tragedy of errors--to Nicholas or Napoleon, to Aberdeen

or Palmerston, or to any other of them excepting Cavour and the Turk.

In England both people and ministers have been wont to change their

minds upon the Eastern question. In the war between Russia and Turkey in

1828, during the last stage of the struggle for Greek independence,

Russia as Greek champion against the Turk had the English populace on

her side; Palmerston was warmly with her, regarding even her advance to

Constantinople with indifference; and Aberdeen was reproached as a

Turkish sympathiser. Now we shall see the parts inverted,--England and

Palmerston ardent Turks, and Aberdeen falling into disgrace (unjustly

enough) as Russian. Before we have done with Mr. Gladstone, the popular

wheel will be found to make another and yet another revolution.

III

THE BRITISH CABINET

When Kinglake's first two volumes of his history of the Crimean war

appeared (1863), Mr. Gladstone wrote to a friend (May 14): 'Kinglake is

fit to be a brilliant popular author, but quite unfit to be a historian.

His book is too bad to live, and too good to die. As to the matter most

directly within my cognisance, he is not only not too true, but so

entirely void of resemblance to the truth, that one asks what was really

the original of his picture.'[297] A little earlier he had written to

Sir John Acton: 'I was not the important person in the negotiation

before the war that Mr. Kinglake seems to suppose; and with him every

supposition becomes an axiom and a dogma.' All the papers from various

sources to which I have had access show that Mr. Gladstone, as he has

just said, had no special share in the various resolutions taken in the

decisive period that ended with the abandonment of the Vienna note in

the early autumn of 1853. He has himself told us that through the whole

of this critical stage Lord Clarendon, then in charge of foreign

affairs, was the centre of a distinct set of communications, first, with

the prime minister, next, with Lord John Russell as leader in the

Commons, and third, with Lord Palmerston, whose long and active career

at the foreign office had given him special weight in that department.

The cabinet as a body was a machine incapable of being worked by

anything like daily and sometimes hourly consultations of this kind,

'the upshot of which would only become known on the more important

occasions to the ministers at large, especially to those among them

charged with the most laborious departments.'[298] This was not at all

said by way of exculpating Mr. Gladstone from his full share of

responsibility for the war, for of that he never at any time showed the

least wish or intention to clear himself, but rather the contrary. As

matter of fact, it was the four statesmen just named who were in

effective control of proceedings until the breakdown of the Vienna note,

and the despatch of the British and French squadrons through the

Dardanelles in October, opened the second stage of the diplomatic

campaign, and led directly if not rapidly to its fatal climax.

We have little more than a few glimpses of Mr. Gladstone's participation

in the counsels of the eventful months that preceded the outbreak of the

war. To Mrs. Gladstone he writes (October 4): 'I can hardly at this

moment write about anything else than the Turkish declaration of war.

This is a most serious event, and at once raises the question, Are we

to go into it? The cabinet meets on Friday, and you must not be

surprised at anything that may happen. The weather may be smooth; it

also may be _very rough_.' First the smooth weather came. 'October 7. We

have had our cabinet, three hours and a half; all there but Graham and

Molesworth,[299] who would both have been strongly for peace. We shall

have another to-morrow, to look over our results in writing. Some

startling things were said and proposed, but I think that as far as

government is concerned, all will probably keep straight at this

juncture, and as to war I hope we shall not be involved in it, even if

it goes on between Russia and Turkey, which is not quite certain.'

Aberdeen himself thought the aspect of this cabinet of the 7th on the

whole very good, Gladstone arguing strongly against a proposal of

Palmerston's that England should enter into an engagement with Turkey to

furnish her with naval assistance. Most of the cabinet were for peace.

Lord John was warlike, but subdued in tone. Palmerston urged his views

'perseveringly but not disagreeably.' The final instruction was a

compromise, bringing the fleet to Constantinople, but limiting its

employment to operations of a strictly defensive character. This was one

of those peculiar compromises that in their sequel contain surrender.

The step soon showed how critical it was. Well indeed might Lord

Aberdeen tell the Queen that it would obviously every day become more

and more difficult to draw the line between defensive and offensive,

between an auxiliary and a principal. So much simpler is a distinction

in words than in things. Still, he was able to assure her that, though

grounds of difference existed, the discussions of the cabinet of the 8th

were carried on amicably and in good humour. With straightforward common

sense the Queen pressed the prime minister for his own deliberate

counsel on the spirit and ultimate tendency of the policy that he would

recommend her to approve. In fact, Lord Aberdeen had no deliberate

counsel to proffer. Speedily the weather roughened.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER

Four days later (October 12) the minister repeated that, while elements

of wide difference existed, still the appearance of that day was more

favourable and tended to mutual agreement. At this cabinet Mr. Gladstone

was not present, having gone on an expedition to Manchester, the first

of the many triumphal visits of his life to the great industrial centres

of the nation. 'Nothing,' he wrote to Lord Aberdeen, 'could have gone

off better. Yesterday (October 11), I had to make a visit to the

Exchange, which was crammed and most cordial. This morning we had first

the "inauguration" of the Peel statue, in the presence of an enormous

audience--misnamed so, inasmuch as but a portion of them could hear; and

then a meeting in the Town Hall, where there were addresses and speeches

made, to which I had to reply. I found the feeling of the assemblage so

friendly that I said more on the war question than I had intended, but I

sincerely hope I did not transgress the limits you would think it wise

for me to observe. The existence of a peace and a war party was evident,

from alternate manifestations, but I think the former feeling was

decidedly the stronger, and at any rate I should say without the

smallest doubt that the feeling of the whole meeting as a mass was

unequivocally favourable to the course that the government have

pursued.'

'Your Manchester speech,' Lord Aberdeen wrote to him in reply, 'has

produced a great and, I hope, a very beneficial effect upon the public

mind, and it has much promoted the cause of peace.' This result was

extremely doubtful. The language of the Manchester speech is cloudy, but

what it comes to is this. It recognises the duty of maintaining the

integrity and independence of the Ottoman empire. Independence, however,

in this case, says Mr. Gladstone, designates a sovereignty full of

anomaly, of misery, of difficulty, and it has been subject every few

years since we were born to European discussion and interference; we

cannot forget the political solecism of Mahometans exercising despotic

rule over twelve millions of our fellow Christians; into the questions

growing out of this political solecism we are not now entering; what we

see to-day is something different; it is the necessity for regulating

the distribution of power in Europe; the absorption of power by one of

the great potentates of Europe, which would follow the fall of the

Ottoman rule, would be dangerous to the peace of the world, and it is

the duty of England, at whatever cost, to set itself against such a

result.

This was Mr. Gladstone's first public entry upon one of the most

passionate of all the objects of his concern for forty years to come. He

hears the desolate cry, then but faint, for the succour of the oppressed

Christians. He looks to European interference to terminate the hateful

solecism. He resists the interference single-handed of the northern

invader. It was intolerable that Russia should be allowed to work her

will upon Turkey as an outlawed state.[300] In other words, the

partition of Turkey was not to follow the partition of Poland. What we

shortly call the Crimean war was to Mr. Gladstone the vindication of the

public law of Europe against a wanton disturber. This was a

characteristic example of his insistent search for a broad sentiment and

a comprehensive moral principle. The principle in its present

application had not really much life in it; the formula was narrow, as

other invasions of public law within the next dozen years were to show.

But the clear-cut issues of history only disclose themselves in the long

result of Time. It was the diplomatic labyrinth of the passing hour

through which the statesmen of the coalition had to thread their way.

The disastrous end was what Mr. Disraeli christened the coalition war.

'The first year of the coalition government,' Lord Aberdeen wrote to Mr.

Gladstone, 'was eminently prosperous, and this was chiefly owing to your

own personal exertions, and to the boldness, ability, and success of

your financial measures. Our second year, if not specially brilliant,

might still have proved greatly advantageous to the country, had we

possessed the courage to resist popular clamour and to avoid war; but

this calamity aggravated all other causes of disunion and led to our

dissolution.'[301]

IV

ENGLAND SLOWLY DRAWN IN

On November 4, Clarendon wrote to Lord Aberdeen that they were now in an

anomalous and painful position, and he had arrived at the conviction

that it might have been avoided by firm language and a more decided

course five months ago. 'Russia would then, as she is now, have been

ready to come to terms, and we should have exercised a control over the

Turks that is now not to be obtained.' Nobody, I suppose, doubts to-day

that if firmer language had been used in June to Sultan and Czar alike,

the catastrophe of war would probably have been avoided, as Lord

Clarendon here remorsefully reflects. However that may have been, this

pregnant and ominous avowal disclosed the truth that the British cabinet

were no longer their own masters; that they had in a great degree, even

at this early time, lost all that freedom of action which they

constantly proclaimed it the rule of their policy to maintain, and which

for a few months longer some of them at least strove very hard but all

in vain to recover.

The Turks were driving at war whilst we were labouring for peace, and

both by diplomatic action and by sending the fleet to protect Turkish

territory against Russian attack, we had become auxiliaries and turned

the weaker of the two contending powers into the stronger. A few months

afterwards Mr. Gladstone found a classic parallel for the Turkish

alliance. 'When Aeneas escaped from the flames of Troy he had an ally.

That ally was his father Anchises, and the part which Aeneas performed

in the alliance was to carry his ally upon his back.' But the discovery

came too late, nor was the Turk the only ally. Against the remonstrances

of our ambassador the Sultan declared war upon Russia, and proceeded to

acts of war, well knowing that England and France in what they believed

to be interests of their own would see him through it. If the Sultan and

his ulemas and his pashas were one intractable factor, the French

Emperor was another. 'We have just as much to apprehend,' Graham wrote

(Oct. 27), 'from the active intervention of our ally as from the open

hostility of our enemy.' Behind the decorous curtain of European

concert Napoleon III. was busily weaving scheme after scheme of his own

to fix his unsteady diadem upon his brow, to plant his dynasty among the

great thrones of western Europe, and to pay off some old scores of

personal indignity put upon him by the Czar.

The Czar fell into all the mistakes that a man could. Emperor by divine

right, he had done his best to sting the self-esteem of the

revolutionary emperor in Paris. By his language to the British

ambassador about dividing the inheritance of the sick man, he had

quickened the suspicions of the English cabinet. It is true the sick man

will die, said Lord John Russell, but it may not be for twenty, fifty,

or a hundred years to come; when William III. and Louis XIV. signed

their treaty for the partition of the Spanish monarchy, they first made

sure that the death of the king was close at hand. Then the choice as

agent at Constantinople of the arrogant and unskilful Menschikoff proved

a dire misfortune. Finally, the Czar was fatally misled by his own

ambassador in London. Brunnow reported that all the English liberals and

economists were convinced that the notion of Turkish reform was absurd;

that Aberdeen had told him in accents of contempt and anger, 'I hate the

Turks'; and that English views generally as to Russian aggression and

Turkish interests had been sensibly modified. All this was not untrue,

but it was not true enough to bear the inference that was drawn from it

at St. Petersburg. The deception was disastrous, and Brunnow was never

forgiven for it.[302]

LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE

Another obstacle to a pacific solution, perhaps most formidable of them

all, was Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at

Constantinople. Animated by a vehement antipathy to Russia, possessing

almost sovereign ascendency at the Porte, believing that the Turk might

never meet a happier chance of having the battle out with his adversary

once for all, and justly confident that a policy of war would find

hearty backers in the London cabinet--in him the government had an

agent who while seeming to follow instructions in the narrow letter

baffled them in their spirit. In the autumn of 1853 Lord Aberdeen wrote

to Graham, 'I fear I must renounce the sanguine view I have hitherto

taken of the Eastern question; for nothing can be more alarming than the

present prospect. I thought that we should have been able to conquer

Stratford, but I begin to fear that the reverse will be the case, and

that he will succeed in defeating us. Although at our wit's end,

Clarendon and I are still labouring in the cause of peace; but really to

contend at once with the pride of the Emperor, the fanaticism of the

Turks, and the dishonesty of Stratford is almost a hopeless

attempt.'[303] This description, when he saw it nearly forty years

later, seems to have struck Mr. Gladstone as harsh. Though he agreed

that the passage could hardly be omitted, he confessed his surprise that

Lord Aberdeen should have applied the word dishonesty to Lord Stratford.

He suggested the addition of a note that should recognise the general

character of Lord Stratford, and should point out that prejudice and

passion, by their blinding powers, often produce in the mind effects

like those proper to dishonesty.[304] Perhaps we may find this a hard

saying. Doubtless when he comes to praise and blame, the political

historian must make due allowance for his actors; and charity is the

grandest of illuminants. Still hard truth stands first, and amiable

analysis of the psychology of a diplomatic agent who lets loose a flood

of mischief on mankind is by no means what interests us most about him.

Why not call things by their right names?[305]

In his private letters (November) Stratford boldly exhibited his desire

for war, and declared that 'the war, to be successful, must be a very

comprehensive war on the part of England and France.' Well might the

Queen say to the prime minister that it had become a serious question

whether they were justified in allowing Lord Stratford any longer to

remain in a situation that enabled him to frustrate all the efforts of

his government for peace. Yet here, as many another time in these

devious manoeuvres, that fearful dilemma interposed--inseparable in its

many forms from all collective action whether in cabinet or party; so

fit to test to the very uttermost all the moral fortitude, all the

wisdom of a minister, his sense of proportion, his strength of will, his

prudent pliancy of judgment, his power of balance, his sure perception

of the ruling fact. The dilemma here is patent. To recall Lord Stratford

would be to lose Lord Palmerston and Lord John; to lose them would be to

break up the government; to break up the government would be to sunder

the slender thread on which the chances of peace were hanging.[306] The

thought, in short, of the high-minded Aberdeen striving against hope to

play a steadfast and pacific part in a scene so sinister, among actors

of such equivocal or crooked purpose, recalls nothing so much as the

memorable picture long ago of Maria Theresa beset and baffled by her

Kaunitzes and Thuguts, Catherines, Josephs, great Fredericks, Grand

Turks, and wringing her hands over the consummation of an iniquitous

policy to which the perversity of man and circumstance had driven her.

As the proceedings in the cabinet dragged on through the winter, new

projects were mooted. The ground was shifted to what Lord Stratford had

called a comprehensive war upon Russia. Some of the cabinet began to aim

at a transformation of the policy. It was suggested that the moment

should be seized to obtain not merely the observance by Russia of her

treaty obligations to Turkey, but a revision and modification of the

treaties in Turkish interests. This is the well-known way in which, ever

since the world called civilised began, the area of conflict is widened.

If one plea is eluded or is satisfied, another is found; and so the

peacemakers are at each step checkmated by the warmakers. The Powers of

central Europe were immovable, with motives, interests, designs, each of

their own. Austria had reasons of irresistible force for keeping peace

with Russia. A single victory of Russia in Austrian Poland would enable

her to march direct upon Vienna. Austria had no secure alliance with

Prussia; on the contrary, her German rival opposed her on this question,

and was incessantly canvassing the smaller states against her in respect

to it. The French Emperor was said to be revolving a plan for bribing

Austria out of Northern Italy by the gift of Moldavia and Wallachia. All

was intricate and tortuous. The view in Downing Street soon expanded to

this, that it would be a shame to England and to France unless the Czar

were made not only to abandon his demands, and to evacuate the

Principalities, but also to renounce some of the stipulations in former

treaties on which his present arrogant pretensions had been formed. In

the future, the guarantees for the Christian races should be sought in a

treaty not between Sultan and Czar, but between the Sultan and the five

Powers.

BRITISH OPINION

Men in the cabinet and men out of it, some with ardour, others with

acquiescence, approved of war for different reasons, interchangeable in

controversial value and cumulative in effect. Some believed, and more

pretended to believe, that Turkey abounded in the elements and energies

of self-reform, and insisted that she should have the chance. Others

were moved by vague general sympathy with a weak power assailed by a

strong one, and that one, moreover, the same tyrannous strength that

held an iron heel on the neck of prostrate Poland; that only a few years

before had despatched her legions to help Austria against the rising for

freedom and national right in Hungary; that urged intolerable demands

upon the Sultan for the surrender of the Hungarian refugees. Others

again counted the power of Russia already exorbitant, and saw in its

extension peril to Europe, and mischief to the interests of England.

Russia on the Danube, they said, means Russia on the Indus. Russia at

Constantinople would mean a complete revolution in the balance of power

in the Mediterranean, and to an alarmed vision, a Russia that had only

crossed the Pruth was as menacing as if her Cossacks were already

encamped in permanence upon the shores of the Bosphorus.

Along with the anxieties of the Eastern question, ministers were divided

upon the subject of parliamentary reform. Some, including the prime

minister, went with Lord John Russell in desiring to push a Reform bill.

Others, especially Palmerston, were strongly adverse. Mr. Gladstone

mainly followed the head of the government, but he was still a

conservative, and still member for a tory constituency, and he followed

his leader rather mechanically and without enthusiasm. Lord Palmerston

was suspected by some of his colleagues of raising the war-cry in hopes

of drowning the demand for reform. In the middle of December (1853) he

resigned upon reform,[307] but nine days later he withdrew his

resignation and returned. In the interval news of the Russian attack on

the Turkish fleet at Sinope (November 30) had arrived--an attack

justified by precedent and the rule of war. But public feeling in

England had risen to fever; the French Emperor in exacting and

peremptory language had declared that if England did not take joint

action with him in the Black Sea, he would either act alone or else

bring his fleet home. The British cabinet yielded, and came to the

cardinal decision (Dec. 22) to enter the Black Sea. 'I was rather

stunned,' Gladstone wrote to Sidney Herbert next day, 'by yesterday's

cabinet. I have scarcely got my breath again. I told Lord Aberdeen that

I had had wishes that Palmerston were back again on account of the

Eastern question.'

Here is a glimpse of this time:--

_Nov. 23, '53._--Cabinet. Reform discussed largely, amicably, and

satisfactorily on the whole. _Dec. 16._--Hawarden. Off at 9 A.M.

Astounded by a note from A. Gordon. [Palmerston had resigned the

day before.] After dinner went to the admiralty, 10½-1½, where Lord

Aberdeen, Newcastle, Graham, and I went over the late events and

went over the course for to-morrow's cabinet. _Dec. 21._--Called on

Lord Palmerston, and sat an hour. 22.--Cabinet, 2-7½, on Eastern

Question. Palmerston and reform. A day of no small matter for

reflection. _Jan. 4, 1854._--To Windsor. I was the only guest, and

thus was promoted to sit by the Queen at dinner. She was most

gracious, and above all so thoroughly natural.

THE DECISION OF DECEMBER 22

On the decision of Dec. 22, Sir Charles Wood says:--

We had then a long discussion on the question of occupying the

Black Sea, as proposed by France, and it seemed to me to be such a

tissue of confusions that I advocated the simple course of doing

so. Gladstone could not be persuaded to agree to this, in spite of

a strong argument of Newcastle's. Gladstone's objection being to

our being hampered by any engagement. His scheme was that our

occupying the Black Sea was to be made dependent, in the first

place, on the Turks having acceded to the Vienna proposals, or at

any rate to their agreeing to be bound by any basis of peace on

which the English and French governments agreed. Newcastle and I

said we thought this would bind us much more to the Turks than if

we occupied the Black Sea as part of our own measures, adopted for

our own purposes, and without any engagement to the Turks, under

which we should be if they accepted our conditions. Gladstone said

he could be no party to unconditional occupation; so it ended in

our telling France that we would occupy the Black Sea, that is,

prevent the passage of any ships or munitions of war by the

Russians, but that we trusted she would join us in enforcing the

above condition on the Turks. If they agreed, then we were to

occupy the Black Sea; if they did not, we were to reconsider the

question, and then determine what to do. Clarendon saw Walewski,

who was quite satisfied.

By the middle of February war was certain. Mr. Gladstone wrote an

account of a conversation that he had at this time with Lord Aberdeen:--

_Feb. 22._--Lord Aberdeen sent for me to-day and informed me that

Lord Palmerston had been with him to say that he had made up his

mind to vote for putting off (without entering into the question of

its merits) the consideration of the Reform bill for the present

year. [Conversation on Reform.][308]

He then asked me whether I did not think that he might himself

withdraw from office when we came to the declaration of war. All

along he had been acting against his feelings, but still

defensively. He did not think that he could regard the offensive in

the same light, and was disposed to retire. I said that a

defensive war might involve offensive operations, and that a

declaration of war placed the case on no new ground of principle.

It did not make the quarrel, but merely announced it, notifying to

the world (of itself justifiable) a certain state of facts which

would have arrived. He said all wars were called or pretended to be

defensive. I said that if the war was untruly so called, then our

position was false; but that the war did not become less defensive

from our declaring it, or from our entering upon offensive

operations. To retire therefore upon such a declaration, would be

to retire upon no ground warrantable and conceivable by reason. It

would not be standing on a principle, whereas any man would require

a distinct principle to justify him in giving up at this moment the

service of the crown. He asked: How could he bring himself to fight

for the Turks? I said we were not fighting for the Turks, but we

were warning Russia off the forbidden ground. That if, indeed, we

undertook to put down the Christians under Turkish rule by force,

then we should be fighting for the Turks; but to this I for one

could be no party. He said if I saw a way for him to get out, he

hoped I would mention it to him. I replied that my own views of war

so much agreed with his, and I felt such a horror of bloodshed,

that I had thought the matter over incessantly for myself. We

stand, I said, upon the ground that the Emperor has invaded

countries not his own, inflicted wrong on Turkey, and what I feel

much more, most cruel wrong on the wretched inhabitants of the

Principalities; that war had ensued and was raging with all its

horrors; that we had procured for the Emperor an offer of

honourable terms of peace which he had refused; that we were not

going to extend the conflagration (but I had to correct myself as

to the Baltic), but to apply more power for its extinction, and

this I hoped in conjunction with all the great Powers of Europe.

That I, for one, could not shoulder the musket against the

Christian subjects of the Sultan, and must there take my stand.

(Not even, I had already told him, if he agreed to such a course,

could I bind myself to follow him in it.) He said Granville and

Wood had spoken to him in the same sense. I added that S. Herbert

and Graham probably would adhere; perhaps Argyll and Molesworth,

and even others might be added.

LORD ABERDEEN'S MISGIVINGS

Ellice had been with him and told him that J. Russell and

Palmerston were preparing to contend for his place. Ellice himself,

deprecating Lord Aberdeen's retirement, anticipated that if it took

place Lord Palmerston would get the best of it, and drive Lord John

out of the field by means of his war popularity, though Lord John

had made the speech of Friday to put himself up in this point of

view with the country.

In consequence of what I had said to him about Newcastle, he

[Aberdeen] had watched him, and had told the Queen to look to him

as her minister at some period or other; which, though afraid of

him (as well as of me) about Church matters, she was prepared to

do. I said I had not changed my opinion of Newcastle as he had done

of Lord John Russell, but I had been disappointed and pained at the

recent course of his opinions about the matter of the war. At my

house last Wednesday he [Newcastle] declared openly for putting

down by force the Christians of European Turkey. Yes, Lord Aberdeen

replied; but he thought him the description of man who would

discharge well the duties of that office. In this I agree.[309]

A few days later (March 3) Lord John Russell, by way of appeasing

Aberdeen's incessant self-reproach, told him that the only course that

could have prevented war would have been to counsel the Turks to

acquiesce, and not to allow the British fleet to quit Malta. 'But that

was a course,' Lord John continued, 'to which Lansdowne, Palmerston,

Clarendon, Newcastle, and I would not have consented; so that you would

only have broken up your government if you had insisted upon it.' Then

the speaker added his belief that the Czar, even after the Turk's

acquiescence and submission, if we could have secured so much, would

have given the Sultan six months' respite, and no more. None of these

arguments ever eased the mind of Lord Aberdeen. Even in his last

interview with the departing ambassador of the Czar, he told him how

bitterly he regretted, first, the original despatch of the fleet from

Malta to Besika Bay (July 1853); and second that he had not sent Lord

Granville to St. Petersburg immediately on the failure of Menschikoff at

Constantinople (May 1853), in order to carry on personal negotiations

with the Emperor.[310]

An ultimatum demanding the evacuation of the Principalities was

despatched to St. Petersburg by England and France, the Czar kept a

haughty silence, and at the end of March war was declared. In the event

the Principalities were evacuated a couple of months later, but the

state of war continued. On September 14, English, French, and Turkish

troops disembarked on the shores of the Crimea, and on the 20th of the

month was fought the battle of the Alma. 'I cannot help repeating to

you,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Palmerston (Oct. 4, 1854), 'which I

hope you will forgive, the thanks I offered at an earlier period, for

the manner in which you urged--when we were amidst many temptations to

far more embarrassing and less effective proceedings--the duty of

concentrating our strokes upon the heart and centre of the war at

Sebastopol.'[311] In the same month Bright wrote the solid, wise, and

noble letter that brought him so much obloquy then, and stands as one of

the memorials of his fame now.[312] Mr. Gladstone wrote to his brother

Robertson upon it:--

_Nov. 7, 1854._--I thought Bright's letter both an able and a manly

one, and though I cannot go his lengths, I respect and sympathise

with the spirit in which it originated. I think he should draw a

distinction between petty meddlings of our own, or interferences

for selfish purposes, and an operation like this which really is in

support of the public law of Europe. I agree with him in some of

the retrospective part of his letter.

Then came the dark days of the Crimean winter.

DID THE CABINET DRIFT?

In his very deliberate vindication of the policy of the Crimean war

composed in 1887, Mr. Gladstone warmly denies either that the ship of

state drifted instead of being steered, or that the cabinet was in

continual conflict with itself at successive stages of the

negotiation.[313] He had witnessed, he declares, much more of sharp or

warm argument in every other of the seven cabinets to which he

belonged.[314] In 1881 he said to the present writer: 'As a member of

the Aberdeen cabinet I never can admit that divided opinions in that

cabinet led to hesitating action, or brought on the war. I do not mean

that all were always and on all points of the same mind. But I have

known much sharper divisions in a cabinet that has worked a great

question honourably and energetically, and I should confidently say,

whether the negotiations were well or ill conducted, that considering

their great difficulty they were worked with little and not much

conflict. It must be borne in mind that Lord Aberdeen subsequently

developed opinions that were widely severed from those that had guided

us, but these never appeared in the cabinet or at the time.' Still he

admits that this practical harmony could much less truly be affirmed of

the four ministers especially concerned with foreign affairs;[315] that

is to say, of the only ministers whose discussions mattered. It is

certainly impossible to contend that Aberdeen was not in pretty

continual conflict, strong and marked though not heated, with these

three main coadjutors. Whether it be true to say that the cabinet

drifted, depends on the precise meaning of a word. It is undoubtedly

true that it steered a course bringing the ship into waters that the

captain most eagerly wished to avoid, and each tack carried it farther

away from the expected haven. Winds and waves were too many for them. We

may perhaps agree with Mr. Gladstone that as it was feeling rather than

argument that raised the Crimean war into popularity, so it is feeling

and not argument that has plunged it into the 'abyss of odium.' When we

come to a period twenty years after this war was over, we shall see that

Mr. Gladstone found out how little had time changed the public temper,

how little had events taught their lesson.

FOOTNOTES:

[296] In 1772 Burke had said that he did not wish well to Turkey, for

any people but the Turks, situated as they are, would have been

cultivated in three hundred years; yet they grow more gross in the very

native soil of civility and refinement. But he did not expect to live to

see the Turkish barbarian civilised by the Russian.--_Corr._ i. p. 402.

[297] To Mrs. Gladstone, Jan. 3, 1863: 'In the evenings I have leisure.

Much of it I have been spending in reading Kinglake's book, which

touches very nearly, and not agreeably or justly, the character of Lord

Aberdeen and his government. I am afraid Newcastle blabbed on what took

place, and that his blabbing was much coloured with egotism. Clarendon,

I hear, is very angry with the book, and Lewis too, but Lewis is not a

party concerned.'

[298] _Eng. Hist. Rev._ No. vi. p. 289.

[299] 'Molesworth in the cabinet,' said Lord Aberdeen later, 'was a

failure. Until the war he was a mere cipher. When the war had broken out

and was popular he became outrageously warlike.'--Mrs. Simpson's _Many

Memories_, p. 264; see also Cobden's _Speeches_, ii. p. 28.

[300] _Eng. Hist. Rev. No._ vi. p. 290.

[301] March 17, 1856.

[302] See Martens' _Recueil des Traités_, etc., published by the Russian

foreign office, 1898, vol. xii., containing many graphic particulars of

these events.

[303] Stanmore, _Earl of Aberdeen_, pp. 270-1.

[304] To Sir A. Gordon, Aug. 31, 1892.

[305] See Stanmore, p. 253.

[306] This is clearly worked out by Lord Stanmore, p. 254, etc.

[307] Ashley's _Life of Palmerston_, ii. p. 270.

[308] See Appendix.

[309] Lord Blachford in his _Letters_ says of Newcastle (p. 225): 'An

honest and honourable man, a thorough gentleman in all his feelings and

ways, and considerate of all about him. He respected other people's

position, but was sensible of his own; and his familiarity, friendly

enough, was not such as invited response. It was said of him that he did

not remember his rank unless you forgot it. In political administration

he was painstaking, clear-headed, and just. But his abilities were

moderate, and he did not see how far they were from being sufficient for

the management of great affairs, which, however, he was always ambitious

of handling.' See also Selborne's _Memorials_, ii. pp. 257-8.

[310] Martens.

[311] The equivocal honour of originality seems to belong to the French,

but they had allowed the plan to slumber.--De La Gorce, _Hist. du second

Empire_, i. pp. 231-3.

[312] It is given in _Speeches_, i. p. 529. Oct. 29, 1854.

[313] _Eng. Hist. Rev._ April 1887. This article was submitted to the

Duke of Argyll and Lord Granville for correction before publication.

[314] The cabinet of 1892 was his eighth.

[315] Aberdeen, Russell, Palmerston, Clarendon.

CHAPTER IV

OXFORD REFORM--OPEN CIVIL SERVICE

(_1854_)

To rear up minds with aspirations and faculties above the herd,

capable of leading on their countrymen to greater achievements in

virtue, intelligence, and social well-being; to do this, and

likewise so to educate the leisured classes of the community

generally, that they may participate as far as possible in the

qualities of these superior spirits, and be prepared to appreciate

them, and follow in their steps--these are purposes requiring

institutions of education placed above dependence on the immediate

pleasure of that very multitude whom they are designed to elevate.

These are the ends for which endowed universities are desirable;

they are those which all endowed universities profess to aim at;

and great is their disgrace, if, having undertaken this task, and

claiming credit for fulfilling it, they leave it unfulfilled.--J.

S. MILL.

The last waves of the tide of reform that had been flowing for a score

of years, now at length reached the two ancient universities. The

Tractarian revival with all its intense pre-occupations had given the

antique Oxford a respite, but the hour struck, and the final effort of

the expiring whigs in their closing days of power was the summons to

Oxford and Cambridge to set their houses in order. Oxford had been

turned into the battle-field on which contending parties in the church

had at her expense fought for mastery. The result was curious. The

nature of the theological struggle, by quickening mind within the

university, had roused new forces; the antagonism between anglo-catholic

and puritan helped, as it had done two centuries before, to breed the

latitudinarian; a rising school in the sphere of thought and criticism

rapidly made themselves an active party in the sphere of affairs; and

Mr. Gladstone found himself forced to do the work of the very

liberalism which his own theological leaders and allies had first

organised themselves to beat down and extinguish.

FIRST OXFORD COMMISSION

In 1850 Lord John Russell, worked upon by a persevering minority in

Oxford, startled the House of Commons, delighted the liberals, and

angered and dismayed the authorities of the powerful corporations thus

impugned, by the announcement of a commission under the crown to inquire

into their discipline, state, and revenues, and to report whether any

action by crown and parliament could further promote the interests of

religion and sound learning in these venerable shrines. This was the

first step in a long journey towards the nationalisation of the

universities, and the disestablishment of the church of England in what

seemed the best fortified of all her strongholds.

After elaborate correspondence with both liberal and tory sections in

Oxford, Mr. Gladstone rose in his place and denounced the proposed

commission as probably against the law, and certainly odious in the eye

of the constitution. He undertook to tear in tatters the various modern

precedents advanced by the government for their purpose; scouted the

alleged visitorial power of the crown; insisted that it would blight

future munificence; argued that defective instruction with freedom and

self-government would, in the choice of evils, be better than the most

perfect mechanism secured by parliamentary interference; admitted that

what the universities had done for learning was perhaps less than it

might have been, but they had done as much as answered the circumstances

and exigencies of the country. When we looked at the lawyers, the

divines, the statesmen of England, even if some might judge them

inferior in mere scholastic and technical acquirements, why need we be

ashamed of the cradles in which they were mainly nurtured? He closed

with a triumphant and moving reference to Peel (dead a fortnight

before), the most distinguished son of Oxford in the present century,

and beyond all other men the high representative and the true type of

the genius of the British House of Commons.[316] In truth no worse case

was ever more strongly argued, and fortunately the speech is to be

recorded as the last manifesto, on a high theme and on a broad scale, of

that toryism from which this wonderful pilgrim had started on his

shining progress. It is just to add that the party in Oxford who

resisted the commission was also the party most opposed to Mr.

Gladstone, and further that the view of the crown having no right to

issue such a commission _in invitos_ was shared with him by Sir Robert

Peel.[317] Of this debate, Arthur Stanley (a strong supporter of the

measure), tells us: 'The ministerial speeches were very feeble....

Gladstone's was very powerful; he said, in the most effective manner,

anything which could be said against the commission. His allusion to

Peel was very touching, and the House responded to it by profound and

sympathetic silence.... Heywood's closing speech was happily drowned in

the roar of "Divide," so that nothing could be heard save the name of

"Cardinal Wolsey" thrice repeated.'[318] The final division was taken on

the question of the adjournment, when the government had a majority of

22. (July 18, 1850.)

II

REPORT OF THE COMMISSION

In Oxford the party of 'organised torpor' did not yield without a

struggle. They were clamorous on the sanctity of property; contemptuous

of the doctrine of the rights of parliament over national domains; and

protestant collegians subsisting on ancient Roman catholic endowments

edified the world on the iniquity of setting aside the pious founder.

They submitted an elaborate case to the most eminent counsel of the day,

and counsel advised that the commission was not constitutional, not

legal, and not such as the members of the university were bound to obey.

The question of duty apart from legal obligation the lawyers did not

answer, but they suggested that a petition might be addressed to the

crown, praying that the instrument might be cancelled. The petition was

duly prepared, and duly made no difference. Many of the academic

authorities were recalcitrant, but this made no difference either, nor

did the Bishop of Exeter's hot declaration that the proceeding had 'no

parallel since the fatal attempt of King James II. to subject the

colleges to his unhallowed control.' The commissioners, of whom Tait and

Jeune seem to have been the leading spirits, with Stanley and Mr.

Goldwin Smith for secretaries, conducted their operations with tact,

good sense, and zeal. At the end of two years (April 1852) the inquiry

was completed and the report made public--one of the high landmarks in

the history of our modern English life and growth. 'When you consider,'

Stanley said to Jowett, 'the den of lions through which the raw material

had to be dragged, much will be excused. In fact the great work was to

finish it at all. There is a harsh, unfriendly tone about the whole

which ought, under better circumstances, to have been avoided, but which

may, perhaps, have the advantage of propitiating the radicals.'[319]

Mr. Gladstone thought it one of the ablest productions submitted in his

recollection to parliament, but the proposals of change too manifold and

complicated. The evidence he found more moderate and less sweeping in

tone than the report, but it only deepened his conviction of the

necessity of important and, above all, early changes. He did not cease

urging his friends at Oxford to make use of this golden opportunity for

reforming the university from within, and warning them that delay would

be dearly purchased.[320] 'Gladstone's connection with Oxford,' said Sir

George Lewis, 'is now exercising a singular influence upon the politics

of the university. Most of his high church supporters stick to him, and

(insomuch as it is difficult to struggle against the current) he is

liberalising them, instead of their torifying him. He is giving them a

push forwards instead of their giving him a pull backwards.'[321]

The originators of the commission were no longer in office, but things

had gone too far for their successors to burke what had been done.[322]

The Derby government put into the Queen's speech, in November (1852), a

paragraph informing parliament that the universities had been invited to

examine the recommendations of the report. After a year's time had been

given them to consider, it became the duty of the Aberdeen government to

frame a bill. The charge fell upon Mr. Gladstone as member for Oxford,

and in the late autumn of 1853 he set to work. In none of the

enterprises of his life was he more industrious or energetic. Before the

middle of December he forwarded to Lord John Russell what he called a

rude draft, but the rude draft contained the kernel of the plan that was

ultimately carried, with a suggestion even of the names of the

commissioners to whom operations were to be confided. 'It is marvellous

to me,' wrote Dr. Jeune to him (Dec. 21, 1853), 'how you can give

attention so minute to university affairs at such a crisis. Do great

things become to great men from the force of habit, what their ordinary

cares are to ordinary persons?' As he began, so he advanced, listening

to everybody, arguing with everybody, flexible, persistent, clear,

practical, fervid, unconquerable. 'I fear,' Lord John Russell wrote to

him (March 27), 'my mind is exclusively occupied with the war and the

Reform bill, and yours with university reform.' Perhaps, unluckily for

the country, this was true. 'My whole heart is in the Oxford bill,' Mr.

Gladstone writes (March 29); 'it is my consolation under the pain with

which I view the character my office [the exchequer] is assuming under

the circumstances of war.' 'Gladstone has been surprising everybody

here,' writes a conspicuous high churchman from Oxford, 'by the ubiquity

of his correspondence. Three-fourths of the colleges have been in

communication with him, on various parts of the bill more or less

affecting themselves. He answers everybody by return of post, fully and

at length, quite entering into their case, and showing the greatest

acquaintance with it.'[323] 'As one of your burgesses,' he told them, 'I

stand upon the line that divides Oxford from the outer world, and as a

sentinel I cry out to tell what I see from that position.' What he saw

was that if this bill were thrown out, no other half so favourable would

ever again be brought in.

THE BILL FRAMED

The scheme accepted by the cabinet was in essentials Mr. Gladstone's

own. Jowett at the earliest stage sent him a comprehensive plan, and

soon after, saw Lord John (Jan. 6). 'I must own,' writes the latter to

Gladstone, 'I was much struck by the clearness and completeness of his

views.' The difference between Jowett's plan and Mr. Gladstone's was on

the highly important point of machinery. Jowett, who all his life had a

weakness for getting and keeping authority into his own hands, or the

hands of those whom he could influence, contended that after parliament

had settled principles, Oxford itself could be trusted to settle details

far better than a little body of great personages from outside,

unacquainted with special wants and special interests. Mr. Gladstone, on

the other hand, invented the idea of an executive commission with

statutory powers. The two plans were printed and circulated, and the

balance of opinion in the cabinet went decisively for Mr. Gladstone's

scheme. The discussion between him and Jowett, ranging over the whole

field of the bill, was maintained until its actual production, in many

interviews and much correspondence. In drawing the clauses Mr. Gladstone

received the help of Bethell, the solicitor-general, at whose suggestion

Phillimore and Thring were called in for further aid in what was

undoubtedly a task of exceptional difficulty. The process brought into

clearer light the truth discerned by Mr. Gladstone from the first, that

the enormous number of diverse institutions that had grown up in Oxford

made resort to what he called sub-legislation inevitable; that is to

say, they were too complex for parliament, and could only be dealt with

by delegation to executive act.

It is untrue to say that Oxford as a place of education had no influence

on the mind of the country; it had immense influence, but that influence

was exactly what it ought not to have been. Instead of stimulating it

checked, instead of expanding it stereotyped. Even for the church it

had failed to bring unity, for it was from Oxford that the opinions had

sprung that seemed to be rending the church in twain. The regeneration

introduced by this momentous measure has been overlaid by the strata of

subsequent reforms. Enough to say that the objects obtained were the

deposition of the fossils and drones, and a renovated constitution on

the representative principle for the governing body; the wakening of a

huge mass of sleeping endowments; the bestowal of college emoluments

only on excellence tested by competition, and associated with active

duties; the reorganisation or re-creation of professorial teaching; the

removal of local preferences and restrictions. Beyond these aspects of

reform, Mr. Gladstone was eager for the proposed right to establish

private halls, as a change calculated to extend the numbers and strength

of the university, and as settling the much disputed question, whether

the scale of living could not be reduced, and university education

brought within reach of classes of moderate means. These hopes proved to

be exaggerated, but they illustrate his constant and lifelong interest

in the widest possible diffusion of all good things in the world from

university training down to a Cook's tour.

Mr. Gladstone seems to have pressed his draftsmen hard, as he sometimes

did. Bethell returning to him 'the _disjecta membra_ of this unfortunate

bill,' tells him that he is too deeply attached to him to care for a few

marks of impatience, and adds, 'write a few kind words to Phillimore,

for he really loves you and feels this matter deeply.' Oxford, scene of

so many agitations for a score of years past, was once more seized with

consternation, stupefaction, enthusiasm. A few private copies of the

draft were sent down from London for criticism. On the vice-chancellor

it left 'an impression of sorrow and sad anticipations'; it opened

deplorable prospects for the university, for the church, for religion,

for righteousness. The dean of Christ Church thought it not merely

inexpedient, but unjust and tyrannical. Jowett, on the other hand, was

convinced that it must satisfy all reasonable reformers, and added

emphatically in writing to Mr. Gladstone, 'It is to yourself and Lord

John that the university will be indebted for the greatest boon that it

has ever received.' After the introduction of the bill by Lord John

Russell, the obscurantists made a final effort to call down one of their

old pelting hailstorms. A petition against the bill was submitted to

convocation; happily it passed by a majority of no more than two.

SECOND READING

At length the blessed day of the second reading came. The ever zealous

Arthur Stanley was present. 'A superb speech from Gladstone,' he

records, 'in which, for the first time, all the arguments from our

report were worked up in the most effective manner. He vainly

endeavoured to reconcile his present with his former position. But, with

this exception, I listened to his speech with the greatest delight....

To behold one's old enemies slaughtered before one's face with the most

irresistible weapons was quite intoxicating. One great charm of his

speaking is its exceeding good-humour. There is great vehemence but no

bitterness.'[324] An excellent criticism of many, perhaps most, of his

speeches.

'It must ever be borne in mind,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord John at the

outset, 'with respect to our old universities that history, law, and

usage with them form such a manifold, diversified, and complex mass,

that it is not one subject but a world of subjects that we have to deal

with in approaching them.' And he pointed out that if any clever lawyer

such as Butt or Cairns were employed to oppose the bill systematically,

debate would run to such lengths as to make it hopeless. This was a

point of view that Mr. Gladstone's more exacting and abstract critics

now, and many another time, forgot: they forgot that, whatever else you

may say of a bill, after all it is a thing that is to be carried through

parliament. Everybody had views of his own. A characteristic

illustration of Mr. Gladstone's temper in the arduous work of practical

legislation to which so much of the energies of his life was devoted, is

worth giving here from a letter of this date to Burgon of Oriel. Nobody

answers better to the rare combination, in Bacon's words, of a 'glorious

nature that doth put life into business, with a solid and sober nature

that hath as much of the ballast as of the sail':--

Sometimes it may be necessary in dealing with a very ancient

institution to make terms, as it were, between such an institution

and the actual spirit of the age. This may be in certain

circumstances a necessary, but it can never be a satisfactory,

process. It is driving a bargain, and somewhat of a wretched

bargain. But I really do not find or feel that this is the case now

before us. In that case, my view, right or wrong, is this: that

Oxford is far behind her duties or capabilities, not because her

working men work so little, but because so large a proportion of

her children do not work at all, so large a proportion of her

resources remains practically dormant, and her present constitution

is so ill-adapted to developing her real but latent powers. What I

therefore anticipate is not the weakening of her distinctive

principles, not the diminution of her labour, already great, that

she discharges for the church and for the land, but a great

expansion, a great invigoration, a great increase of her numbers, a

still greater increase of her moral force, and of her hold upon the

heart and mind of the country.

ADMISSION OF DISSENTERS

Pusey seems to have talked of the university as ruined and overthrown by

a parricidal hand; Oxford would be lost to the church; she would have to

take refuge in colleges away from the university. Oxford had now

received its death-blow from Mr. Gladstone and the government to which

he belonged, and he could no longer support at election times the worker

of such evil, and must return to that inactivity in things political,

from which only love and confidence for Mr. Gladstone had roused him.

'Personally,' the good man adds, 'I must always love you.' To Pusey, and

to all who poured reproach upon him from this side, Mr. Gladstone

replied with inexhaustible patience. He never denied that parliamentary

intervention was an evil, but he submitted to it in order to avert

greater evil. 'If the church of England has not strength enough to keep

upright, this will soon appear in the troubles of emancipated Oxford: if

she has, it will come out to the joy of us all in the immensely

augmented energy and power of the university for good. If Germanism and

Arnoldism are now to carry the day at Oxford (I mean supposing the bill

is carried into law), they will carry it fairly; let them win and wear

her (God forbid, however); but if she has a heart true to the faith her

hand will be stronger ten times over than it has been heretofore, in

doing battle.... Nor am I saddened by the pamphlet of a certain Mr. ----

which I have been reading to-day. It has more violence than venom, and

also much more violence than strength. I often feel how hard it is on

divines to be accused of treachery and baseness, because they do not,

like _us_, get it every day and so become case-hardened against it.'

In parliament the craft laboured heavily in cross-seas. 'I have never

known,' says its pilot, 'a measure so foolishly discussed in committee.'

Nor was oil cast upon the waters by its friends. By the end of May Mr.

Gladstone and Lord John saw that they must take in canvas. At this point

a new storm broke. It was impossible that a measure on such a subject

could fail to awaken the ever ready quarrel between the two camps into

which the English establishment, for so many generations, has so

unhappily divided the life of the nation. From the first, the protestant

dissenters had been extremely sore at the absence from the bill of any

provision for their admission to the remodelled university. Bright, the

most illustrious of them, told the House of Commons that he did not care

whether so pusillanimous and tinkering an affair as this was passed or

not. Dissenters, he said with scorn, are expected always to manifest too

much of those inestimable qualities which are spoken of in the Epistle

to the Corinthians: 'To hope all things, to believe all things, and to

endure all things.'

More discredit than he deserved fell upon Mr. Gladstone for this

obnoxious defect. In announcing the commission of inquiry four years

before, Lord John as prime minister had expressly said that the

improvement of the universities should be treated as a subject by

itself, and that the admission of dissenters ought to be reserved for

future and separate consideration. Writing to Mr. Gladstone (Jan. 1854)

he said, 'I do not want to stir the question in this bill,' but he

would support a proposal in a separate bill by which the halls might be

the means of admitting dissenters. Mr. Gladstone himself professed to

take no strong line either way; but in a parliamentary case of this kind

to take no line is not materially different from a line in effect

unfriendly. Arthur Stanley pressed him as hard as he could. 'Justice to

the university,' said Mr. Gladstone in reply, 'demands that it should be

allowed to consider the question for itself.... Indeed, while I believe

that the admission of dissenters without the breaking up of the

religious teaching and the government of the university would be a great

good, I am also of opinion that to give effect to that measure by

forcible intervention of parliament would be a great evil. Whether it is

an evil that must some day or other be encountered, the time has not

yet, I think, arrived for determining.' The letter concludes with a

remark of curious bearing upon the temper of that age. 'The very words,'

he says to Stanley, 'which you have let fall upon your paper--"Roman

catholics"--used in this connection, were enough to burn it through and

through, considering we have _a parliament which, were the measure of

1829 not law at this moment, would I think probably refuse to make it

law_.' There is no reason to think this an erroneous view. Perhaps it

would not be extravagant even to-day.

What Mr. Gladstone called 'the evil of parliamentary interference' did

not tarry, and on the report stage of the bill, a clause removing the

theological test at matriculation was carried (June 22) against the

government by ninety-one. The size of the majority and the diversified

material of which it was composed left the government no option but to

yield. 'Parliament having now unhappily determined to legislate upon the

subject,' Mr. Gladstone writes to the provost of Oriel, 'it seems to me,

I may add it seems to my colleagues, best for the interests of the

university that we should now make some endeavour to settle the whole

question and so preclude, if we can, any pretext for renewed agitation.'

'The basis of that settlement,' he went on in a formula which he

tenaciously reiterated to all his correspondents, and which is a

landmark in the long history of his dealing with the question, 'should

be that the whole teaching and governing function in the university and

in the colleges, halls, and private halls, should be retained, as now,

in the church of England, but that everything outside the governing and

teaching functions, whether in the way of degrees, honours, or

emoluments, should be left open.' The new clause he described as 'one of

those incomplete arrangements that seem to suit the practical habits of

this country, and which by taking the edge off a matter of complaint,

are often found virtually to dispose of it for a length of time.' In the

end the church of England test was removed, not only on admission to the

university, but from the bachelor's degree. Tests in other forms

remained, as we shall in good time perceive. 'We have proceeded,' Mr.

Gladstone wrote, 'in the full belief that the means of applying a church

test to fellowships in colleges are clear and ample.' So they were, and

so remained, until seventeen years later in the life of an

administration of his own the obnoxious fetter was struck off.

MR. DISRAELI ON THE BILL

The debates did not close without at least one characteristic

masterpiece from Mr. Disraeli. He had not taken a division on the second

reading, but he executed with entire gravity all the regulation

manoeuvres of opposition, and his appearance on the page of Hansard

relieves a dull discussion. If government, he asked, could defer a

reform of the constitution (referring to the withdrawal of Lord John's

bill) why should they hurry to reform the universities? The talk about

the erudite professors of Germany as so superior to Oxford was nonsense.

The great men of Germany became professors only because they could not

become members of parliament. 'We, on the contrary, are a nation of

action, and you may depend upon it, that though you may give an Oxford

professor two thousand a year instead of two hundred, still ambition in

England will look to public life and to the House of Commons, and not to

professors' chairs.' The moment the revolution of 1848 gave the German

professors a chance, see how they rushed into political conventions and

grasped administrative offices. Again, the principle of the bill was the

laying of an unhallowed hand upon the ark of the universities, and wore

in effect the hideous aspect of the never-to-be-forgotten appropriation

clause. If he were asked whether he would rather have Oxford free with

all its imperfections, or an Oxford without imperfections but under the

control of the government, he would reply, 'Give me Oxford free and

independent, with all its anomalies and imperfections.' An excellently

worded but amusingly irrelevant passage about Voltaire and Rousseau, and

the land that was enlightened by the one and inflamed by the other,

brought the curious performance to a solemn close. High fantastic

trifling of this sort, though it may divert a later generation to whose

legislative bills it can do no harm, helps to explain the deep disfavour

with which Disraeli was regarded by his severe and strenuous opponent.

'The admiration of posterity,' Dr. Jeune wrote to Mr. Gladstone, 'would

be greatly increased if men hereafter could know what wisdom, what

firmness, what temper, what labour your success has required.' More than

this, it was notorious that Mr. Gladstone was bravely risking his seat.

This side of the matter Jeune made plain to him. 'Had I foreseen in

1847,' replied Mr. Gladstone (_Broadstairs_, Aug. 26, 1854), 'that

church controversies which I then hoped were on the decline, were really

about to assume a fiercer glare and a wider range than they had done

before, I should not have been presumptuous enough to face the

contingencies of such a seat at such a time.' As things stood he was

bound to hold on. With dauntless confidence that never failed him, he

was convinced that no long time would suffice to scatter the bugbears,

and the bill would be nothing but a source of strength to any one

standing in reputed connection with it. To Dr. Jeune when the battle was

over he expresses 'his warm sense of the great encouragement and solid

advantage which at every stage he had derived from his singularly ready

and able help.' To Jowett and Goldwin Smith he acknowledged a hardly

lower degree of obligation. The last twenty years, wrote a shrewd and

expert sage in 1866, 'have seen more improvement in the temper and

teaching of Oxford than the three centuries since the Reformation. This

has undoubtedly been vastly promoted by the Reform bill of 1854, or at

least by one enactment in it, the abolition of close fellowships, which

has done more for us than all the other enactments of the measure put

together.'[325] 'The indirect effects,' says the same writer in words of

pregnant praise, 'in stimulating the spirit of improvement among us,

have been no less important than the specific reforms enacted by

it.'[326]

III

ANOTHER FAR-REACHING CHANGE

Another of the most far-reaching changes of this era of reform affected

the civil service. J. S. Mill, then himself an official at the India

House, did not hesitate 'to hail the plan of throwing open the civil

service to competition as one of the greatest improvements in public

affairs ever proposed by a government.' On the system then reigning,

civil employment under the crown was in all the offices the result of

patronage, though in some, and those not the more important of them,

nominees were partially tested by qualifying examination and periods of

probation. The eminent men who held what were called the staff

appointments in the service--the Merivales, Taylors, Farrers--were

introduced from without, with the obvious implication that either the

civil service trained up within its own ranks a poor breed, or else that

the meritorious men were discouraged and kept back by the sight of

prizes falling to outsiders. Mr. Gladstone was not slow to point out

that the existing system if it brought eminent men in, had driven men

like Manning and Spedding out. What patronage meant is forcibly

described in a private memorandum of a leading reformer, preserved by

Mr. Gladstone among his papers on this subject. 'The existing corps of

civil servants,' says the writer, 'do not like the new plan, because the

introduction of well-educated, active men, will force them to bestir

themselves, and because they cannot hope to get their own ill-educated

sons appointed under the new system. _The old established political

families habitually batten on the public patronage_--their sons

legitimate and illegitimate, their relatives and dependents of every

degree, are provided for by the score. Besides the adventuring

disreputable class of members of parliament, who make God knows what use

of the patronage, a large number of borough members are mainly dependent

upon it for their seats. What, for instance, are the members to do who

have been sent down by the patronage secretary to contest boroughs in

the interest of the government, and who are pledged twenty deep to their

constituents?'

The foreign office had undergone, some years before, a thorough

reconstruction by Lord Palmerston, who, though very cool to

constitutional reform, was assiduous and exacting in the forms of public

business, not least so in the vital matter of a strong, plain, bold

handwriting. Revision had been attempted in various departments before

Mr. Gladstone went to the exchequer, and a spirit of improvement was in

the air. Lowe, beginning his official career as one of the secretaries

of the board of control, had procured the insertion in the India bill of

1853 of a provision throwing open the great service of India to

competition for all British-born subjects, and he was a vigorous

advocate of a general extension of the principle.[327] It was the

conditions common to all the public establishments that called for

revision, and the foundations for reform were laid in a report by

Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr.

Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised

to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British

constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be

through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for

conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. The

effect of such a change has been enormous not only on the efficiency of

the service, but on the education of the country, and by a thousand

indirect influences, raising and strengthening the social feeling for

the immortal maxim that the career should be open to the talents. The

lazy doctrine that men are much of a muchness gave way to a higher

respect for merit and to more effectual standards of competency.

OLD SYSTEM AND NEW

The reform was not achieved without a battle. The whole case was argued

by Mr. Gladstone in a letter to Lord John Russell of incomparable

trenchancy and force, one of the best specimens of the writer at his

best, and only not worth reproducing here, because the case has long

been finished.[328] Lord John (Jan. 20) wrote to him curtly in reply, 'I

hope no change will be made, and I certainly must protest against it.'

In reply to even a second assault, he remained quite unconvinced. At

present, he said, the Queen appointed the ministers, and the ministers

the subordinates; in future the board of examiners would be in the place

of the Queen. Our institutions would be as nearly republican as

possible, and the new spirit of the public offices would not be loyalty

but republicanism! As one of Lord John's kindred spirits declared, 'The

more the civil service is recruited from the lower classes, the less

will it be sought after by the higher, until at last the aristocracy

will be altogether dissociated from the permanent civil service of the

country.' How could the country go on with a democratic civil service by

the side of an aristocratic legislature?[329] This was just the spirit

that Mr. Gladstone loathed. To Graham he wrote (Jan. 3, 1854), 'I do not

want any pledges as to details; what I seek is your countenance and

favour in an endeavour to introduce to the cabinet a proposal that we

should give our sanction to the principle that in every case where a

satisfactory test of a defined and palpable nature can be furnished, the

public service shall be laid open to personal merit.... This is _my_

contribution to parliamentary reform.' On January 26 (1854) the cabinet

was chiefly occupied by Mr. Gladstone's proposition, and after a long

discussion his plan was adopted. When reformers more ardent than

accurate insisted in later years that it was the aristocracy who kept

patronage, Mr. Gladstone reminded the House, 'No cabinet could have been

more aristocratically composed than that over which Lord Aberdeen

presided. I myself was the only one of fifteen noblemen and gentlemen

who composed it, who could not fairly be said to belong to that class.'

Yet it was this cabinet that conceived and matured a plan for the

surrender of all its patronage. There for the moment, in spite of all

his vigour and resolution, the reform was arrested. Time did not change

him. In November he wrote to Trevelyan: 'My own opinions are more and

more in favour of the plan of competition. I do not mean that they can

be more in its favour as a principle, than they were when I invited you

and Northcote to write the report which has lit up the flame; but more

and more do the incidental evils seem curable and the difficulties

removable.' As the Crimean war went on, the usual cry for administrative

reform was raised, and Mr. Gladstone never made a more terse, pithy, and

incontrovertible speech than his defence for an open civil service in

the summer of 1855.[330]

For this branch of reform, too, the inspiration had proceeded from

Oxford. Two of the foremost champions of the change had been

Temple--afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury--and Jowett. The latter was

described by Mr. Gladstone to Graham as being 'as handy a workman as you

shall readily find,' and in the beginning of 1855 he proposed to these

two reformers that they should take the salaried office of examiners

under the civil service scheme. Much of his confident expectation of

good, he told them, was built upon their co-operation. In all his

proceedings on this subject, Mr. Gladstone showed in strong light in how

unique a degree he combined a profound democratic instinct with the

spirit of good government; the instinct of popular equality along with

the scientific spirit of the enlightened bureaucrat.

FOOTNOTES:

[316] July 18, 1850.

[317] Letter to Bishop Davidson, June 11, 1891.

[318] _Life_, i. p. 420.

[319] _Life of Stanley_, i. p. 432.

[320] Letters to Graham, July 30, 1852, and Dr. Haddan, Aug. 14 and

Sept. 29, 1852.

[321] _Letters_, March 26, 1853, p. 261.

[322] Interesting particulars of this memorable commission are to be

found in the _Life of Archbishop Tait_, i. pp. 156-170.

[323] Mozley, _Letters_, p. 220. Mr. Gladstone preserved 560 letters and

documents relating to the preparation and passing of the Oxford

University bill. Among them are 350 copies of his own letters written

between Dec. 1853 and Dec. 1854, and 170 letters received by him during

the same period.

[324] _Life_, i. p. 434.

[325] _Academical Organisation._ By Mark Pattison, p. 24.

[326] The following speeches made by Mr. Gladstone on the Oxford bill

were deemed by him of sufficient importance to be included in the

projected edition of his collected speeches: On the introduction of the

bill, March 19 (1854); on the second reading, April 7; during the

committee stage, April 27, June 1, 22, 23, and July 27.

[327] _Life of Lord Sherbrooke_, pp. 421-2.

[328] For an extract see Appendix.

[329] Romilly, quoted by Layard, June 15th, 1855.

[330] He made three speeches on the subject at this period; June 15th

and July 10th, 1855, and April 24th, 1856. The first was on Layard's

motion for reform, which was rejected by 359 to 46.

CHAPTER V

WAR FINANCE--TAX OR LOAN

(_1854_)

The expenses of a war are the moral check which it has pleased the

Almighty to impose upon the ambition and lust of conquest, that are

inherent in so many nations. There is pomp and circumstance, there

is glory and excitement about war, which, notwithstanding the

miseries it entails, invests it with charms in the eyes of the

community, and tends to blind men to those evils to a fearful and

dangerous degree. The necessity of meeting from year to year the

expenditure which it entails is a salutary and wholesome check,

making them feel what they are about, and making them measure the

cost of the benefit upon which they may calculate.--GLADSTONE.

The finance of 1854 offered nothing more original or ingenious than

bluntly doubling the income tax (from seven pence to fourteen pence),

and raising the duties on spirits, sugar, and malt. The draught was

administered in two doses, first in a provisional budget for half a year

(March 6), next in a completed scheme two months later. During the

interval the chancellor of the exchequer was exposed to much criticism

alike from city experts and plain men. The plans of 1853 had, in the

main, proved a remarkable success, but they were not without weak

points. Reductions in the duties of customs, excise, and stamps had all

been followed by increase in their proceeds. But the succession duty

brought in no more than a fraction of the estimated sum--the only time,

Mr. Gladstone observes, in which he knew the excellent department

concerned to have fallen into such an error. The proposal for conversion

proved, under circumstances already described, to have no attraction for

the fundholder. The operation on the South Sea stock was worse than a

failure, for it made the exchequer, in order to pay off eight millions

at par, raise a larger sum at three and a half per cent., and at three

per cent. in a stock standing at 87.[331] All this brought loudish

complaints from the money market. The men at the clubs talked of the

discredit into which Gladstone had fallen as a financier, and even

persons not unfriendly to him spoke of him as rash, obstinate, and

injudicious. He was declared to have destroyed his prestige and

overthrown his authority.[332]

POWERFUL SELF-DEFENCE

This roused all the slumbering warrior in him, and when the time came

(May 8), in a speech three and a half hours long, he threw his

detractors into a depth of confusion that might have satisfied the

Psalmist himself. Peremptorily he brushed aside the apology of his

assailants for not challenging him by a direct vote of want of

confidence, that such a vote would be awkward in a time of war. On the

contrary, he said, a case so momentous as the case of war is the very

reason why you should show boldly whether you have confidence in our

management of your finances or not; if you disapprove, the sooner I know

it the better. Then he dashed into a close and elaborate defence in

detail, under all the heads of attack,--his manner of dealing with the

unfunded debt, his abortive scheme of conversion, his mode of charging

deficiency bills. This astonishing mass of dry and difficult matter was

impressed in full significance upon the House, not only by the orator's

own buoyant and energetic interest in the performance, but by the sense

which he awoke in his hearers, that to exercise their attention and

judgment upon the case before them was a binding debt imperatively due

to themselves and to the country, by men owning the high responsibility

of their station. This was the way in which he at all times strove to

stir the self-respect of the House of Commons. Not sparing his critics a

point or an argument, he drove his case clean home with a vigour that

made it seem as if the study of Augustine and Dante and the Fathers

were after all the best training for an intimate and triumphant mastery

of the proper amount of gold to be kept at the bank, the right interest

on an exchequer bond and an exchequer bill, and all the arcana of the

public accounts.[333] Even where their case had something in it, he

showed that they had taken the wrong points. Nor did he leave out the

spice of the sarcasm that the House loves. A peer had reproached him for

the amount of his deficiency bills. This peer had once himself for four

years been chancellor of the exchequer. 'My deficiency bills,' cried Mr.

Gladstone, 'reached three millions and a half. How much were the bills

of the chancellor whom this figure shocks? In his first year they were

four millions and a half, in the second almost the same, in the third

more than five and a quarter, in the fourth nearly five millions and a

half.' Disraeli and others pretended that they had foreseen the failure

of the conversion. Mr. Gladstone proved that, as matter of recorded

fact, they had done nothing of the sort. 'This is the way in which

mythical history arises. An event happens without attracting much

notice; subsequently it excites interest; then people look back upon the

time now passed, and see things not as they are or were, but through the

haze of distance--they see them as they wish them to have been, and what

they wish them to have been, they believe that they were.'

For this budget no genius, only courage, was needed; but Mr. Gladstone

advanced in connection with it a doctrine that raised great questions,

moral, political, and economic, and again illustrated that

characteristic of his mind which always made some broad general

principle a necessity of action. All through 1854, and in a sense very

often since, parliament was agitated by Mr. Gladstone's bold proposition

that the cost of war should be met by taxation at the time, and not by

loans to be paid back by another generation. He did not advance his

abstract doctrine without qualification. This, in truth, Mr. Gladstone

hardly ever did, and it was one of the reasons why he acquired a bad

name for sophistry and worse. Men fastened on the general principle, set

out in all its breadth and with much emphasis; they overlooked the

lurking qualification; and then were furiously provoked at having been

taken in. 'I do not know,' he wrote some years later to Northcote,

'where you find that I laid down any general maxim that all war supplies

were to be raised by taxes.... I said in my speech of May 8, revised for

Hansard, it was the duty and policy of the country to make _in the first

instance_ a great effort from its own resources.' The discussions of the

time, however, seem to have turned on the unqualified construction.

While professing his veneration and respect for the memory of Pitt, he

opened in all its breadth the question raised by Pitt's policy of loan,

loan, loan. The economic answer is open to more dispute than he then

appeared to suppose, but it was the political and moral reasons for

meeting the demands of war by tax and not by loan that coloured his

economic view. The passage in which he set forth the grounds for his

opinion has become a classic place in parliamentary discussion, but it

is only too likely for a long time to come to bear reproducing, and I

have taken it as a motto for this chapter. His condemnation of loans,

absolutely if not relatively, was emphatic. 'The system of raising funds

necessary for wars by loan practises wholesale, systematic, and

continual deception upon the people. The people do not really know what

they are doing. The consequences are adjourned into a far future.' I may

as well here complete or correct this language by a further quotation

from the letter to Northcote to which I have already referred. He is

writing in 1862 on Northcote's book on _Twenty Years of Finance_. 'I

cannot refrain,' he says, 'from paying you a sincere compliment, first

on the skill with which you have composed an eminently readable work on

a dry subject; and secondly, on the tact founded in good feeling and the

love of truth with which you have handled your materials throughout.' He

then remarks on various points in the book, and among the rest on

this:--

LETTERS TO NORTHCOTE

Allow me also to say that I think in your comparison of the effect

of taxes and loans you have looked (p. 262) too much to the effect

on labour at the moment. Capital and labour are in permanent

competition for the division of the fruits of production. When in

years of war say twenty millions annually are provided by loan say

for three, five, or ten years, then two consequences follow.

1. An immense factitious stimulus is given to labour at the

time--and thus much more labour is brought into the market.

2. When that stimulus is withdrawn an augmented quantity of labour

is left to compete in the market with a greatly diminished quantity

of capital.

Here is the story of the _misery_ of great masses of the English

people after 1815, or at the least a material part of that story.

I hold by the doctrine that war loans are in many ways a great

evil: but I admit their necessity, and in fact the budget of 1855

was handed over by me to Sir George Lewis, and underwent in his

hands little alteration unless such as, with the growing demands of

the war, I should myself have had to make in it, _i.e._ some, not

very considerable, enlargement.

Writing a second letter to Northcote a few days later (August 11, 1862),

he goes a little deeper into the subject:--

The general question of loans _v._ taxes for war purposes is one of

the utmost interest, but one that I have never seen worked out in

print. But assuming as _data_ the established principles of our

financial system, and by no means denying the necessity of loans, I

have not the least doubt that it is for the interest of labour, as

opposed to capital, that as large a share as possible of war

expenditure should be defrayed from taxes. When war breaks out the

wages of labour on the whole have a tendency to rise, and the

labour of the country is well able to bear some augmentation of

taxes. The sums added to the public expenditure are likely at the

outset, and for some time, to be larger than the sums withdrawn

from commerce. When war ends, on the contrary, a great mass of

persons are dismissed from public employment, and, flooding the

labour market, reduce the rate of wages. But again, when war comes,

it is quite certain that a large share of the war taxes will be

laid upon property: and that, in war, property will bear a larger

share of our total taxation than in peace. From this it seems to

follow at once that, up to the point at which endurance is

practicable, payment by war-taxes rather than by taxes in peace is

for the interest of the people at large. I am not one of those who

think that our system of taxation, taken as a whole, is an

over-liberal one towards them. These observations are mere

contributions to a discussion, and by no means pretend to dispose

of the question.

II

DISPUTE WITH THE BANK