Before the battle was over, he was torn away from the scene by a painful

bereavement. Mrs. Gladstone was at Hagley nursing her beloved sister,

Lady Lyttelton. He wrote to his wife in the fiercest hours of the fight

(11 Carlton House Terrace, Aug. 15): 'I read too plainly in your letter

of yesterday that your heart is heavy, and mine too is heavy along with

yours. I have been in many minds about my duty to-day; and I am all but

ready to break the bands even of the high obligations that have kept me

here with reference to the marriage bill. You have only to speak the

word by telegraph or otherwise, showing that I can help to give any of

the support you need, and I come to you. As matters stand I am wanted in

the House to-day, and am wanted for the Divorce bill again on Monday.'

Before Monday came, Lady Lyttelton was no more. Four days after her

death, Mr. Gladstone wrote to Mr. Arthur Gordon from Hagley:--

The loss suffered here is a dreadful one, but it is borne in the

way which robs death and all evil of its sting. My deceased

sister-in-law was so united with my wife; they so drew from their

very earliest years, and not less since marriage than before it,

their breath so to speak in common, that the relation I bore to her

conveys little even of what I have lost; but that again is little

compared to my wife's bereavement; and far above all to that of

Lyttelton, who now stands lonely among his twelve children. But the

retrospect from first to last is singularly bright and pure. She

seemed to be one of those rare spirits who do not need affliction

to draw them to their Lord, and from first to last there was scarce

a shade of it in her life. When she was told she was to die, her

pulse did not change; the last communion appeared wholly to sever

her from the world, but she smiled upon her husband within a minute

of the time when the spirit fled.

FOOTNOTES:

[357] See above pp. 525-8.

[358] Phillimore's Diary.

[359] The reader will find a candid statement of the controversy in

Northcote, _Financial Policy_, pp. 306-329.

[360] _Ars Poetica_, 32-5.

[361] Malmesbury, _Memoirs_, ii. pp. 56-7. See above, p. 536.

[362] See above, p. 225.

[363] It is a striking indication of the tenacity of custom against

logic that in France, though civil marriage was made not merely

permissive, as with us, but compulsory in 1792, divorce was banished

from French law from 1816 down to 1884.

[364] July 1857. Reprinted in _Gleanings_, vi. p. 47.

[365] House of Commons, June 20, 1849.

[366] _Ibid._, July 20, 1869. See also _Gleanings_, vi. p. 50.

[367] It may be said that the exaction of damages comes to the same

thing.

[368] In republishing in 1878 his article from the _Quarterly_

(_Gleanings_, vi. p. 106), he says his arguments have been too sadly

illustrated by the mischievous effects of the measure. The judicial

statistics, however, hardly support this view, that petitions for

divorce were constantly increasing, and at an accelerating rate of

progression. In England the proportion of divorce petitions to marriages

and the proportion of divorce decrees to population are both of them

lower than they were a few years ago. Mr. Gladstone used to desire the

prohibition of publicity in these proceedings, until he learned the

strong view of the president of the Court that the hideous glare of this

publicity acts probably as no inconsiderable deterrent.

CHAPTER IX

THE SECOND DERBY GOVERNMENT

(_1858_)

Extravagance and exaggeration of ideas are not the essential

characteristic of either political party in this country. Both of

them are composed in the main of men with English hearts and

English feelings. Each of them comprises within itself far greater

diversities of political principles and tendencies, than can be

noted as dividing the more moderate portion of the one from the

more moderate portion of the other.... But while the great English

parties differ no more in their general outlines than by a somewhat

varied distribution of the same elements in each, they are liable

to be favourably or unfavourably affected and their essential

characteristics unduly exaggerated, by circumstances of the order

that would be termed accidental.--GLADSTONE.

The turn of the political wheel is constantly producing strange results,

but none has ever been more strikingly dramatic than when, on February

20, Bright and Milner Gibson, who had been ignominiously thrown out at

Manchester the year before, had the satisfaction of walking to the table

of the House of Commons as victorious tellers in the division on the

Conspiracy to Murder bill that overthrew Lord Palmerston. A plot to slay

the French Emperor had been organised by a band of Italian refugees in

London. The bombs were manufactured in England. Orsini's design

miscarried, but feeling in France was greatly excited, and the French

government formally drew attention at St. James's to the fact that

bodies of assassins abused our right of asylum. They hinted further that

the amity of the crown called for stronger law. Palmerston very sensibly

did not answer the French despatch, but introduced a bill with new

powers against conspiracy. He in an instant became the most unpopular

man in the country, and the idol of the year before was now hooted in

the Park.

LORD PALMERSTON DEFEATED

Mr. Gladstone was at first doubtful, but soon made up his mind. To Mrs.

Gladstone he writes (Feb. 17):--

As respects the Conspiracy bill, you may depend upon our having

plenty of fight; the result is doubtful; but if the bill gets into

the House of Lords it will pass. Lord Aberdeen is strong against

it. From him I went to-day to Lord Lyndhurst, and I found Lord

Brougham with him. A most interesting conversation followed with

these two wonderful old men at 80 and 86 (coming next birthday)

respectively, both in the fullest possession of their faculties,

Brougham vehement, impulsive, full of gesticulation, and not a

little rambling, the other calm and clear as a deep pool upon rock.

Lord Lyndhurst is decidedly against the bill, Brougham somewhat

inclines to it; being, as Lord Lyndhurst says, half a Frenchman.

[Lord Lyndhurst expounded the matter in a most luminous way from

his point of view. Brougham went into raptures and used these

words: 'I tell you what, Lyndhurst, I wish I could make an exchange

with you. I would give you some of my walking power, and you should

give me some of your brains.' I have often told the story with this

brief commentary, that the compliment was the highest I have ever

known to be paid by one human being to another.][369]

The debate showed a curious inversion of the parts usually played by

eminent men. Palmerston vainly explained that he was doing no more than

international comity required, and doing no worse than placing the

foreign refugee on the same footing in respect of certain offences as

the British subject. Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 19), on the other hand, 'as one

who has perhaps too often made it his business to call attention to the

failings of his countrymen,' contended that if national honour was not

henceforth to be a shadow and a name, it was the paramount, absolute,

and imperative duty of Her Majesty's ministers to protest against the

imputation upon us of favour for assassination, 'a plant which is

congenial neither to our soil nor to the climate in which we live.'[370]

One of the truest things said in the debate was Disraeli's incidental

observation that 'the House should remember that in ninety-nine cases

out of a hundred, when there is a quarrel between two states, it is

generally occasioned by some blunder of a ministry.' Mr. Disraeli

perhaps consoled himself by the pithy saying of Baron Brunnow, that if

no one made any blunders, there would be no politics. The blood of the

_civis Romanus_, however, was up, and Palmerston, defeated by a majority

of nineteen, at once resigned.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH LORD DERBY

Lord Derby, whose heart had failed him three years earlier, now formed

his second administration, and made one more attempt to bring Mr.

Gladstone over to the conservative ranks. Lord Lansdowne had told the

Queen that no other government was possible, and an hour after he had

kissed hands the new prime minister applied to Mr. Gladstone. The

decisions taken by him in answer to this and another application three

months later, mark one more of the curious turning points in his career

and in the fate of his party.

_Feb. 20, 1858._--Dined at Herbert's with Graham. We sat till 12½,

but did not talk quite through the crisis. Palmerston has resigned.

He is down. I must now cease to denounce him. 21.--St. James's

morning, and holy communion. Westminster Abbey in evening, when I

sat by Sir George Grey. From St. James's I went to Lord Aberdeen's.

There Derby's letter reached me. We sent for Herbert and I wrote an

answer. Graham arrived and heard it; with slight modifications it

went. The case though grave was not doubtful. Made two copies and

went off before 6 with S. Herbert. We separated for the evening

with the fervent wish that in public life we might never part.

Two or three letters exhibit the situation:--

_Lord Derby to Mr. Gladstone._

_St. James's Square, Feb. 21, 1858._--In consequence of the adverse

vote of the other night, in which you took so prominent and

distinguished a part, the government, as you know, has resigned;

and I have been entrusted by the Queen with the difficult task,

which I have felt it my duty not to decline, of forming an

administration. In doing so, I am very desirous, if possible, of

obtaining the co-operation of men of eminence, who are not at this

moment fettered by other ties, and whose principles are not

incompatible with my own. Believing that you stand in this

position, it would afford me very great satisfaction if I could

obtain your valuable aid in forming my proposed cabinet; and if I

should be so fortunate as to do so, I am sure there would be on all

hands a sincere desire to consult your wishes, as far as possible,

as to the distribution of offices. I would willingly include Sidney

Herbert in this offer; but I fear he is too intimately associated

with John Russell to make it possible for him to accept.

_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Derby._

10 _Great George Street, Feb. 21, 1851._--I am very sensible of the

importance of the vote taken on Friday; and I should deeply lament

to see the House of Commons trampled on in consequence of that

vote. The honour of the House is materially involved in giving it

full effect. It would therefore be my first wish to aid, if

possible, in such a task; and remembering the years when we were

colleagues, I may be permitted to say that there is nothing in the

fact of your being the head of a ministry, which would avail to

deter me from forming part of it.

Among the first questions I have had to put to myself, in

consequence of the offer which you have conveyed in such friendly

and flattering terms, has been the question whether it would be in

my power by accepting it, either alone or in concert with others,

to render you material service. After the long years during which

we have been separated, there would be various matters of public

interest requiring to be noticed between us; but the question I

have mentioned is a needful preliminary. Upon the best

consideration which the moment allows, I think it plain that alone,

as I must be, I could not render you service worth your having. The

dissolution of last year excluded from parliament men with whom I

had sympathies; and it in some degree affected the position of

those political friends with whom I have now for many years been

united through evil and (much more rarely) through good report.

Those who lament the rupture of old traditions may well desire the

reconstitution of a party; but the reconstitution of a party can

only be effected, if at all, by the return of the old influences to

their places, and not by the junction of an isolated person. The

difficulty is even enhanced in my case by the fact that in your

party, reduced as it is at the present moment in numbers, there is

a small but active and not unimportant section who avowedly regard

me as the representative of the most dangerous ideas. I should

thus, unfortunately, be to you a source of weakness in the heart of

your own adherents, while I should bring you no party or group of

friends to make up for their defection or discontent.

For the reasons which I have thus stated or glanced at, my reply to

your letter must be in the negative.

I must, however, add that a government formed by you at this time

will, in my opinion, have strong claims upon me, and upon any one

situated as I am, for favourable presumptions, and in the absence

of conscientious difference on important questions, for support. I

have had an opportunity of seeing Lord Aberdeen and Sidney Herbert;

and they fully concur in the sentiments I have just expressed.

LETTER FROM MR. BRIGHT

Mr. Gladstone had no close personal or political ties with the

Manchester men at this moment, but we may well believe that a sagacious

letter from Mr. Bright made its mark upon his meditations:--

_Mr. Bright to Mr. Gladstone._

_Reform Club, Feb. 21, '58._--Coming down Park Lane just now, I met

a leading lawyer of Lord Derby's party, who will doubtless be in

office with him if he succeeds in forming a government. He told me

that Lord Derby and his friends were expecting to be able to induce

you to join them.

Will you forgive me if I write to you on this matter? I say nothing

but in the most friendly spirit, and I have some confidence that

you will not misinterpret what I am doing. Lord Derby has only

about one-third of the House of Commons with him--and it is

impossible by any management, or by any dissolution, to convert

this minority into a majority. His minority in the House is greater

and more powerful than it is in the country--and any appeal to the

country, now or hereafter, must, I think, leave him in no better

position than that in which he now finds himself. The whole liberal

party in the country dislike him, and they dislike his former

leader in the Commons; and notoriously his own party in the

country, and in the House, have not much confidence in him. There

is no party in the country to rally round him, as Peel was

supported in 1841. A Derby government can only exist upon

forbearance, and will only last till it is convenient for us and

the whigs to overthrow it. Lord Palmerston may give it his support

for a time, but he can give it little more than his own vote and

speeches, for the liberal constituencies will not forgive their

members if they support it. If you join Lord Derby, you link your

fortunes with a constant minority, and with a party in the country

which is every day lessening in numbers and in power. If you remain

on our side of the House, you are with the majority, and no

government can be formed without you. You have many friends there,

and some who would grieve much to see you leave them--and I know

nothing that can prevent your being prime minister before you

approach the age of every other member of the House who has or can

have any claim to that high office.

If you agree rather with the men opposite than with those among

whom you have been sitting of late, I have nothing to say. I am

sure you will follow where 'the right' leads, if you only discover

it, and I am not hoping or wishing to keep you from the right. I

think I am not mistaken in the opinion I have formed of the

direction in which your views have for some years been tending. You

know well enough the direction in which the opinions of the country

are tending. The minority which invites you to join it, if honest,

must go or wish to go, in an opposite direction, and it cannot

therefore govern the country. Will you unite yourself with what

must be, from the beginning, an inevitable failure?

Don't be offended, if, by writing this, I seem to believe you will

join Lord Derby. I don't believe it--but I can imagine your seeing

the matter from a point of view very different to mine--and I feel

a strong wish just to say to you what is passing in my mind. You

will not be the less able to decide on your proper course. If I

thought this letter would annoy you, I would not send it. I think

you will take it in the spirit in which it is written. No one knows

that I am writing it, and I write it from no idea of personal

advantage to myself, but with a view to yours, and to the interests

of the country. I may be mistaken, but think I am not. Don't think

it necessary to reply to this. I only ask you to read it, and to

forgive me the intrusion upon you--and further to believe that I am

yours, with much respect.

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Bright._

_10 Great George Street, Feb. 22, '58._--Your letter can only bear

one construction, that of an act of peculiar kindness which ought

not to be readily forgotten. For any one in whom I might be

interested I should earnestly desire, upon his entering public

life, that, if possible, he might with a good conscience end in the

party where he began, or else that he might have broad and definite

grounds for quitting it. When neither of these advantages appears

to be certainly within command, there remains a strong and

paramount consolation in seeking, as we best can, the truth and the

public interests; and I think it a marked instance of liberality,

that you should give me credit for keeping this object in my view.

My seeking, however, has not on the present occasion been very

difficult. The opinions, such as they are, that I hold on many

questions of government and administration are strongly held; and

although I set a value, and a high value, upon the power which

office gives, I earnestly hope never to be tempted by its exterior

allurements, unless they are accompanied with the reasonable

prospect of giving effect to some at least of those opinions and

with some adequate opening for public good. On the present

occasion I have not seen such a prospect; and before I received

your letter yesterday afternoon I had made my choice.

This ended the first scene of the short fifth act. The new government

was wholly conservative.

II

UNEASINESS OF FRIENDS

Throughout the whole of this period, Mr. Gladstone's political friends

were uneasy about him. 'He writes and says and does too much,' Graham

had told Lord Aberdeen (Dec. 1856), and a year and a half later the same

correspondent notices a restless anxiety for a change of position,

though at Gladstone's age and with his abilities he could not wonder at

it. Mr. Gladstone was now approaching fifty; Graham was nearer seventy

than sixty; and Aberdeen drawing on to seventy-five. One of the most

eminent of his friends confessed that he was 'amazed at a man of

Gladstone's high moral sense of feeling being able to _bear_ with Dizzy.

I can only account for it on the supposition, which I suppose to be the

true one, that personal dislike and distrust of Palmerston is the one

absorbing feeling with him.... I see no good ground for the violent

personal prejudice which is the sole ruling motive of Gladstone's and

Graham's course--especially when the alternative is such a man as

Dizzy.' Then comes some angry language about that enigmatic personage

which at this cooling distance of time need not here be transcribed. At

the end of 1856 Lord Aberdeen told Mr. Gladstone that his position in

the House was 'very peculiar.' 'With an admitted superiority of

character and intellectual power above any other member, I fear that you

do not really possess the sympathy of the House at large, while you have

incurred the strong dislike of a considerable portion of Lord Derby's

followers.'

Things grew worse rather than better. Even friendly journalists in the

spring of 1858 wrote of him as 'the most signal example that the present

time affords of the man of speculation misplaced and lost in the

labyrinth of practical politics.' They call him the chief orator and the

weakest man in the House of Commons. He has exhibited at every stage

traces of an unhappy incoherence which is making him a mere bedouin of

parliament, a noble being full of spirit and power, but not to be tamed

into the ordinary ways of civil life. His sympathies hover in hopeless

inconsistency between love for righteous national action, good

government, freedom, social and commercial reform, and a hankering after

a strong, unassailable executive in the old obstructive tory sense. He

protests against unfair dealing with the popular voice in the

Principalities on the Danube, but when the popular voice on the Thames

demands higher honours for General Havelock he resists it with the

doctrine that the executive should be wholly free to distribute honours

as it pleases. He is loudly indignant against the supersession of

parliament by diplomacy, but when a motion is made directly pointing to

the rightful influence of the House over foreign affairs, he neither

speaks nor votes. Is it not clear beyond dispute that his cannot be the

will to direct, nor the wisdom to guide the party of progress out of

which the materials for the government of this country will have to be

chosen?[371]

In organs supposed to be inspired by Disraeli, Mr. Gladstone's fate is

pronounced in different terms, but with equal decision. In phrases that

must surely have fallen from the very lips of the oracle itself, the

public was told that 'cerebral natures, men of mere intellect without

moral passion, are quite unsuited for governing mankind.' The days of

the mere dialectician are over, and the rulers of Christendom are no

longer selected from the serfs of Aristotle. Without the emotions that

soar and thrill and enkindle, no man can attain 'a grand moral vision.'

When Mr. Gladstone aims at philosophy, he only reaches casuistry. He

reasons like one of the sons of Ignatius Loyola. What their Society is

to the Jesuit, his own individualism is to Mr. Gladstone. He supports

his own interests as much from intellectual zeal as from self-love. A

shrewd observer is quoted: 'looking on Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney

Herbert sitting side by side, the former with his rather saturnine face

and straight black hair, and the latter eminently handsome, with his

bright, cold smile and subtlety of aspect, I have often thought that I

was beholding the Jesuit of the closet really devout, and the Jesuit of

the world, ambitious, artful, and always on the watch for making his

rapier thrusts.' Mr. Gladstone, in a word, is extremely eminent, but

strangely eccentric, 'a Simeon Stylites among the statesmen of his

time.'[372]

RENEWED PROPOSAL OF OFFICE

In May an important vacancy occurred in the ministerial ranks by Lord

Ellenborough's resignation of the presidency of the board of control.

This became the occasion of a renewed proposal to Mr. Gladstone. He

tells the story in a memorandum prepared (May 22) for submission to

Aberdeen and Graham, whom Lord Derby urged him to consult.

_Memorandum by Mr. Gladstone submitted to Lord Aberdeen and Sir

James Graham. May 22, '58._

_Secret._--Last week after Mr. Cardwell's notice but before the

debate began, Mr. Walpole, after previously sounding Sir William

Heathcote to a similar effect, called me aside in the lobby of the

House of Commons and inquired whether I could be induced to take

office. I replied that I thought that question put by him of his

own motion--as he had described it--was one that I could hardly

answer. It seemed plain, I said, that the actual situation was one

so entirely belonging to the government as it stood, that they must

plainly work through it unchanged; that the head of the government

was the only person who could make a proposal or put a question

about taking office in it; I added, however, that my general views

were the same as in February.

This morning I had a note from Walpole asking for an appointment;

and he called on me at four o'clock accordingly. He stated that he

came by authority of Lord Derby to offer me the board of control

or, if I preferred it, the colonial office. That he had told Lord

Derby I should, he thought, be likely to raise difficulties on two

points: first, the separation from those who have been my friends

in public life; secondly, the leadership of the House of Commons. I

here interrupted him to say it must be in his option to speak or to

be silent on the latter of these subjects; it was one which had

never been entertained or opened by me in connection with this

subject, since the former of the two points had offered an absolute

preliminary bar to the acceptance of office. He, however, explained

himself as follows, that Mr. Disraeli had stated his willingness to

surrender the leadership to Sir James Graham, if he were disposed

to join the government; but that the expressions he had used in his

speech of Thursday[373] (apparently those with respect to parties

in the House and to office), seemed to put it beyond the right of

the government to make any proposal to him. He at the same time

spoke in the highest terms not only of the speech, but of the

position in which he thought it placed Sir James Graham; and he

left me to infer that there would have been, but for the cause

named, a desire to obtain his co-operation as leader of the House

of Commons. With respect to the proposal as one the acceptance of

which would separate me from my friends, he hoped it was not so. It

was one made to me alone, the immediate vacancy being a single one;

but the spirit in which it was made was a desire that it should be

taken to signify the wish of the government progressively to extend

its basis, as far as it could be effected compatibly with

consistency in its opinions. He added that judging from the past he

hoped he might assume that there was no active opposition to the

government on the part of my friends, naming Lord Aberdeen, Sir

James Graham, and the Duke of Newcastle.

I told him with respect to the leadership that I thought it

handsome on the part of Mr. Disraeli to offer to waive it on behalf

of Sir James Graham; that it was a subject which did not enter into

my decision for the reason I had stated; and I hinted also that it

was one on which I could never negotiate or make stipulations. It

was true, I said, I had no broad differences of principle from the

party opposite; on the whole perhaps I differed more from Lord

Palmerston than from almost any one, and this was more on account

of his temper and views of public conduct, than of any political

opinions. Nay more, it would be hard to show broad differences of

public principle between the government and the bench opposite.

RENEWED PROPOSAL OF OFFICE

I said, however, that in my view the proposal which he had made to

me could not be entertained. I felt the personal misfortune and

public inconvenience of being thrown out of party connection; but a

man at the bottom of the well must not try to get out, however

disagreeable his position, until a rope or a ladder is put down to

him. In this case my clear opinion was that by joining the

government I should shock the public sentiment and should make no

essential, no important, change in their position.

I expressed much regret that accidental causes had kept back from

my view at the critical moment the real extent of Lord Derby's

proposals in February; that I answered him then as an individual

with respect to myself individually.... I could not separate from

those with whom I had been acting all my life long, in concert with

whom all the habits of my mind and my views of public affairs had

been formed, to go into what might justly be called a cabinet of

strangers, since it contained no man to whom I had ever been a

colleague, with the single exception of Lord Derby, and that twelve

or fourteen years ago.

While I did not conceive that public feeling would or ought to

approve this separation, on the other hand I felt that my

individual junction would and could draw no material accession of

strength to the cabinet. He made the marked admission that if my

acceptance must be without the _approval_ of friends, that must

undoubtedly be an element of great weight in the case. This showed

clearly that Lord Derby was looking to me in the first place, and

then to others beyond me. He did not, however, found upon this any

request, and he took my answer as an absolute refusal. His tone

was, I need not say, very cordial; and I think I have stated all

that was material in the conversation, except that he signified

they were under the belief that Herbert entertained strong personal

feelings towards Disraeli.

Returning home, however, at seven this evening I found a note from

Walpole expressing Lord Derby's wish in the following words: 'That

before you finally decide on refusing to accept the offer he has

made either of the colonies or of the India board he wishes you

would consult Sir James Graham and Lord Aberdeen.' In order to meet

this wish, I have put down the foregoing statement.

Lord Aberdeen agreed with Mr. Gladstone that on the whole the balance

inclined to _no_.

Graham, in an admirable letter, truly worthy of a wise, affectionate,

and faithful friend, said, 'My judgment is, on this occasion, balanced

like your own.' He ran through the catalogue of Mr. Gladstone's most

intimate political friends; the result was that he stood alone. Fixed

party ties and active official duties would conduce to his present

happiness and his future fame. He might form an intimate alliance with

Lord Derby with perfect honour. His natural affinities were strong, and

his 'honest liberal tendencies' would soon leaven the whole lump and

bring it into conformity with the shape and body of the times. As for

the leadership in the Commons, Graham had once thought that for

Gladstone to sit on the treasury bench with Disraeli for his leader

would be humiliation and dishonour. Later events had qualified this

opinion. Of course, the abdication of Disraeli could not be made a

condition precedent, but the concession would somehow be made, and in

the Commons pre-eminence would be Gladstone's, be the conditions what

they might. In fine, time was wearing fast away, Gladstone had reached

the utmost vigour of his powers, and present opportunities were not to

be neglected in vain expectation of better.

III

LETTER FROM MR. DISRAELI

Before this letter of Graham's arrived, an unexpected thing happened,

and Mr. Disraeli himself advanced to the front of the stage. His

communication, which opens and closes without the usual epistolary

forms, just as it is reproduced here, marks a curious episode, and sheds

a strange light on that perplexing figure:--

_Mr. Disraeli to Mr. Gladstone._

_Confidential._

I think it of such paramount importance to the public interests,

that you should assume at this time a commanding position in the

administration of affairs, that I feel it a solemn duty to lay

before you some facts, that you may not decide under a

misapprehension.

Our mutual relations have formed the great difficulty in

accomplishing a result, which I have always anxiously desired.

Listen, without prejudice, to this brief narrative.

In 1850, when the balanced state of parties in the House of Commons

indicated the future, I endeavoured, through the medium of the late

Lord Londonderry, and for some time not without hope, to induce Sir

James Graham to accept the post of leader of the conservative

party, which I thought would remove all difficulties.

When he finally declined this office, I endeavoured to throw the

game into your hands, and your conduct then, however unintentional,

assisted me in my views.

The precipitate ministry of 1852 baffled all this. Could we have

postponed it another year, all might have been right.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding my having been forced publicly into

the chief place in the Commons, and all that occurred in

consequence, I was still constant to my purpose, and in 1855

suggested that the leadership of the House should be offered to

Lord Palmerston, entirely with the view of consulting your feelings

and facilitating your position.

Some short time back, when the power of dissolution was certain,

and the consequences of it such as, in my opinion, would be highly

favourable to the conservative party, I again confidentially sought

Sir James Graham, and implored him to avail himself of the

favourable conjuncture, accept the post of leader in the H. of C,

and allow both of us to serve under him.

He was more than kind to me, and fully entered into the state of

affairs, but he told me his course was run, and that he had not

strength or spirit for such an enterprise.

Thus you see, for more than eight years, instead of thrusting

myself into the foremost place, I have been, at all times, actively

prepared to make every sacrifice of self for the public good,

which I have ever thought identical with your accepting office in

a conservative government.

Don't you think the time has come when you might deign to be

magnanimous?

Mr. Canning was superior to Lord Castlereagh in capacity, in

acquirements, in eloquence, but he joined Lord C. when Lord C. was

Lord Liverpool's lieutenant, when the state of the tory party

rendered it necessary. That was an enduring, and, on the whole, not

an unsatisfactory connection, and it certainly terminated very

gloriously for Mr. Canning.

I may be removed from the scene, or I may wish to be removed from

the scene.

Every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than

ourselves, that disposes of all this.

The conjuncture is very critical, and if prudently yet boldly

managed, may rally this country. To be inactive now is, on your

part, a great responsibility. If you join Lord Derby's cabinet, you

will meet there some warm personal friends; all its members are

your admirers. You may place me in neither category, but in that, I

assure you, you have ever been sadly mistaken. The vacant post is,

at this season, the most commanding in the commonwealth; if it were

not, whatever office you filled, your shining qualities would

always render you supreme; and if party necessities retain me

formally in the chief post, the sincere and delicate respect which

I should always offer you, and the unbounded confidence, which on

my part, if you choose you could command, would prevent your

feeling my position as anything but a form.

Think of all this in a kindly spirit. These are hurried lines, but

they are heartfelt. I was in the country yesterday, and must return

there to-day for a county dinner. My direction is Langley Park,

Slough. But on Wednesday evening I shall be in town.--B. DISRAELI.

_Grosvenor Gate_, _May_ 25, 1858.

None of us, I believe, were ever able to persuade Mr. Gladstone to do

justice to Disraeli's novels,--the spirit of whim in them, the ironic

solemnity, the historical paradoxes, the fantastic glitter of dubious

gems, the grace of high comedy, all in union with a social vision that

often pierced deep below the surface. In the comparative stiffness of

Mr. Gladstone's reply on this occasion, I seem to hear the same accents

of guarded reprobation:--

_Mr. Gladstone to Mr. Disraeli._

11 _Carlton House Terrace_, _May_ 25, '58.--MY DEAR SIR,--The

letter you have been so kind as to address to me will enable me, I

trust, to remove from your mind some impressions with which you

will not be sorry to part.

You have given me a narrative of your conduct since 1850 with

reference to your position as leader of your party. But I have

never thought your retention of that office matter of reproach to

you, and on Saturday last I acknowledged to Mr. Walpole the

handsomeness of your conduct in offering to resign it to Sir James

Graham.

You consider that the relations between yourself and me have proved

the main difficulty in the way of certain political arrangements.

Will you allow me to assure you that I have never in my life taken

a decision which turned upon those relations.

You assure me that I have ever been mistaken in failing to place

you among my friends or admirers. Again I pray you to let me say

that I have never known you penurious in admiration towards any one

who had the slightest claim to it, and that at no period of my

life, not even during the limited one when we were in sharp

political conflict, have I either felt any enmity towards you, or

believed that you felt any towards me.

At the present moment I am awaiting counsel which at Lord Derby's

wish I have sought. But the difficulties which he wishes me to find

means of overcoming, are broader than you may have supposed. Were I

at this time to join any government I could not do it in virtue of

party connections. I must consider then what are the conditions

which make harmonious and effective co-operation in cabinet

possible--how largely old habits enter into them--what connections

can be formed with public approval--and what change would be

requisite in the constitution of the present government, in order

to make any change worth a trial.

I state these points fearlessly and without reserve, for you have

yourself well reminded me that there is a Power beyond us that

disposes of what we are and do, and I find the limits of choice in

public life to be very narrow.--I remain, etc.

THE SECOND DERBY GOVERNMENT

The next day Mr. Gladstone received Graham's letter already described.

The interpretation that he put upon it was that although Graham appeared

to lean in favour of acceptance, 'yet the counsel was indecisive.' On

ordinary construction, though the counsellor said that this was a case

in which only the man himself could decide, yet he also said that

acceptance would be for the public good. 'Your affirmative advice, had

it even been more positive, was not approval, nor was Lord Aberdeen's.

On the contrary it would have been like the orders to Balaam, that he

should go with the messengers of Balak, when notwithstanding the

command, the act was recorded against him.' We may be quite sure that

when a man draws all these distinctions, between affirmative advice,

positive advice, approval, he is going to act without any advice at all,

as Mr. Gladstone was in so grave a case bound to do. He declined to

join.

_Mr. Gladstone to Lord Derby._

_Private._

_11 C.H. Terrace, May 26, '58._--I have this morning received

Sir James Graham's reply, and I have seen Lord Aberdeen before and

since. Their counsel has been given in no narrow or unfriendly

spirit. It is, however, indecisive, and leaves upon me the

responsibility which they would have been glad if it had been in

their power to remove. I must therefore adhere to the reply which I

gave to Mr. Walpole on Saturday; for I have not seen, and I do not

see, a prospect of public advantage or of material accession to

your strength, from my entering your government single-handed.

Had it been in your power to raise fully the question whether those

who were formerly your colleagues, could again be brought into

political relation with you, I should individually have thought it

to be for the public good that, under the present circumstances of

the country, such a scheme should be considered deliberately and in

a favourable spirit. But I neither know that this is in your power,

nor can I feel very sanguine hopes that the obstacles in the way of

this proposal on the part of those whom it would embrace, could be

surmounted. Lord Aberdeen is the person who could best give a

dispassionate and weighty opinion on that subject. For me the

question, confined as it is to myself, is a narrow one, and I am

bound to say that I arrive without doubt at the result.

REFUSAL

'I hope and trust,' said Graham, when he knew what Mr. Gladstone had

done, 'that you have decided rightly; my judgment inclined the other

way. I should be sorry if your letter to Lord Derby led him to make any

more extended proposal. It could not possibly succeed, as matters now

stand; and the abortive attempt would be injurious to him. The

reconstruction of the fossil remains of the old Peel party is a hopeless

task. No human power can now reanimate it with the breath of life; it is

decomposed into atoms and will be remembered only as a happy accident,

while it lasted.'[374]

IV

SUEZ CANAL

In one remarkable debate of this summer the solitary statesman descended

from his pillar. Now was the time of the memorable scheme for the

construction of the Suez Canal, that first emanated from the French

group of Saint Simonian visionaries in the earlier half of the century.

Their dream had taken shape in the fertile and persevering genius of

Lesseps, and was at this time the battle-ground of engineers, statesmen,

and diplomatists in every country in Europe. For fifteen years the

British government had used all their influence at Constantinople to

prevent the Sultan from sanctioning the project. In June a motion of

protest was made in the House of Commons. Lord Palmerston persisted that

the scheme was the greatest bubble that ever was imposed upon the

credulity and simplicity of the people of this country; the public

meetings on its behalf were got up by a pack of foreign projectors;

traffic by the railway would always beat traffic by steamer through the

canal; it would be a step towards the dismemberment of the Turkish

empire; it would tend to dismember our own empire by opening a passage

between the Mediterranean and the Indian ocean, which would be at the

command of other nations and not at ours. Away, then, with such a

sacrifice of the interest of Great Britain to philanthropic schemes and

philosophic reveries! So much for the sound practical man. Mr. Gladstone

followed. Don't let us, he said, have governments and ex-governments

coming down to instruct us here on bubble schemes. As a commercial

project, let the Suez Canal stand or fall upon commercial grounds. With

close reasoning, he argued against the proposition that the canal would

tend to sever Turkey from Egypt. As to possible danger to our own

interests, was it not a canal that would fall within the control of the

strongest maritime power in Europe? And what could that power be but

ourselves? Finally, what could be more unwise than to present ourselves

to the world as the opponents of a scheme on the face of it beneficial

to mankind, on no better ground than remote and contingent danger to

interests of our own, with the alleged interest of Turkey merely thrust

hypocritically in for the purpose of justifying a policy purely

narrow-minded and wholly selfish? The majority against the motion was

large, as it was in the case of the seven cardinals against Galileo.

Still the canal was made, with some very considerable consequences that

were not foreseen either by those who favoured it or those who mocked it

as a bubble. M. de Lesseps wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Constantinople

that the clearness of his speech had enabled him to use it with good

effect in his negotiations with the Porte. 'Your eloquent words, the

authority of your name, and the consideration that attaches to your

character, have already contributed much and will contribute more still

to hinder the darkening and complication of a question of itself

perfectly clear and simple, and to avoid the troubling of the relations

between two countries of which it is the natural mission to hold aloft

_together_ the flag of modern civilisation.'

Mr. Gladstone took an active interest in the various measures--some of

them extremely singular--proposed by Mr. Disraeli for the transfer of

the government of India from the Company to the crown. Writing early in

the year to Sir James Graham he argued that their object should be

steadily and vigorously to resist all attempts at creating a monster

military and civil patronage, and to insist upon a real check on the

Indian minister. He had much conversation with Mr. Bright--not then an

intimate acquaintance--on the difficulty of the problem to govern a

people by a people. The two agreed strongly as to one prominent

possibility of mischief: they both distrusted the discretion confided to

the Indian minister in the use of the Indian army. Mr. Gladstone set a

mark upon the bill by carrying a clause to provide that the Indian army

should not be employed beyond the frontiers of India without the

permission of parliament. This clause he privately hoped would 'afford a

standing-ground from which a control might be exercised on future

Palmerstons.'

FOOTNOTES:

[369] The portion within brackets is from a letter of Mr. Gladstone's to

Lady Lyndhurst, Aug. 31, 1883, and he continues: 'I have often compared

Lord Lyndhurst in my own mind with the five other lord chancellors who

since his time have been my colleagues in cabinet: much to the

disadvantage in certain respects of some of them. Once I remember in the

Peel cabinet the conversation happened to touch some man (there are

such) who was too fond of making difficulties. Peel said to your

husband, "That is not your way, Lyndhurst." Of all the intellects I have

ever known, his, I think, worked with the least friction.'

[370] 'Happily for the reputation of the House, but unhappily for the

ministry, the debate assumed once more, with Gladstone's eloquence, a

statesmanlike character. The foremost speaker of the House showed

himself worthy of his reputation ... much as there was to lament in the

too radical tone of his often finespun argumentation. His thundering

periods were received with thundering echoes of applause.'--Vitzthum,

_St. Petersburg and London_, i. p. 273.

[371] See _Spectator_, May 8, 1858.

[372] _Press_, April 7, 1858.

[373] I wish to state that it is by the courtesy of hon. gentlemen that

I occupy a seat on this (the ministerial) side of the House, although I

am no adherent of Her Majesty's government. By no engagement, express or

implied, am I their supporter. On the contrary, my sympathies and

opinions are with the liberal party sitting on the opposite side of the

House, and from recent kind communications I have resumed those habits

of friendly intercourse and confidential communication with my noble

friend (Lord John Russell) which formerly existed between us.--_May_ 20,

1858.

[374] 'I wish,' said Mr. Disraeli to Bishop Wilberforce in 1862, 'you

could have induced Gladstone to join Lord Derby's government when Lord

Ellenborough resigned in 1858. It was not my fault that he did not: I

almost went on my knees to him.'--_Life_, iii. p. 70.

Vitzthum reports a conversation with Mr. Disraeli in January 1858, of a

different tenor: 'We are at all times ready,' he said, 'to take back

this deserter, but only if he surrenders unconditionally.'--Vitzthum, i.

p. 269.

CHAPTER X

THE IONIAN ISLANDS

(_1858-1859_)

The world is now taking an immense interest in Greek affairs, and

does not seem to know why. But there are very good reasons for it.

Greece is a centre of life, and the only possible centre for the

Archipelago, and its immediate neighbourhood. But it is vain to

think of it as a centre from which light and warmth can proceed,

until it has attained to a tolerable organisation, political and

economical. I believe in the capacity of the people to receive the

boon.--GLADSTONE (1862).

PROPOSAL FROM BULWER

At the beginning of October, while on a visit to Lord Aberdeen at Haddo,

Mr. Gladstone was amazed by a letter from the secretary of state for the

colonies--one of the two famous writers of romance then in Lord Derby's

cabinet--which opened to him the question of undertaking a special

mission to the Ionian islands. This, said Bulwer Lytton, would be to

render to the crown a service that no other could do so well, and that

might not inharmoniously blend with his general fame as scholar and

statesman. 'To reconcile a race that speaks the Greek language to the

science of practical liberty seemed to me a task that might be a noble

episode in your career.' The origin of an invitation so singular is

explained by Phillimore:--

_November_ 2nd, 1858.--Lord Carnarvon (then under-secretary at the

colonial office) sent an earnest letter to me to come to the C.O.

and advise with Rogers and himself as to drawing the commission. I

met Bulwer Lytton there, overflowing with civility. The offer to

Gladstone had arisen as I expected from Lord C., and he had told B.

L. the conversation which he (C.) and I had together in the summer,

in which I told Lord C. that I thought Gladstone would accept a

mission extraordinary to Naples.... I risked without authority

from G. this communication. Lord C. bore it in mind, and from this

suggestion of mine sprang in fact this offer. So Lord C. said to

me.

Lord Malmesbury very sensibly observed that to send Mr. Gladstone to

Naples was out of the question, in view of his famous letters to Lord

Aberdeen. To the new proposal Mr. Gladstone replied that his first

impulse on any call from a minister of the crown to see him on public

business, would be to place himself at the minister's disposal. The

interview did not occur for a week or two. Papers were sent from the

colonial office to Hawarden, long letters followed from the secretary of

state, and Mr. Gladstone took time to consider. The constitution of the

Ionian islands had long been working uneasily, and what the colonial

secretary invited him to undertake was an inquiry on the spot into our

relations there, and into long-standing embarrassments that seemed to be

rapidly coming to a head. Sir John Young, then lord high commissioner of

the Ionian islands, had been with him at Eton and at Oxford, besides

being a Peelite colleague in parliament, and Mr. Gladstone was not

inclined to be the instrument of indicating disparagement of his friend.

Then, moreover, he was in favour of 'a very liberal policy' in regard to

the Ionian islands, and possibly the cabinet did not agree to a very

liberal policy. As for personal interest and convenience, he was not

disposed to raise any difficulty in such a case.

The Peelite colleagues whose advice he sought were all, with the single

exception of the Duke of Newcastle, more or less unconditionally

adverse. Lord Aberdeen (October 8) admitted that Mr. Gladstone's name,

acquirements, and conciliatory character might operate powerfully on the

Ionians; still many of them were false and artful, and the best of them

little better than children. 'It is clear,' he said, 'that Bulwer has

sought to allure you with vague declarations and the attractions of

Homeric propensities.... I doubt if Homer will be a _cheval de bataille_

sufficiently strong to carry you safely through the intricacies of this

enterprise.' The sagacious Graham also warned him that little credit

would be gained by success, while failure would be attended by serious

inconveniences: in any case to quell 'a storm in a teapot' was no

occupation worthy of his powers and position. Sidney Herbert was strong

that governments were getting more and more into the bad habit of

delegating their own business to other people; he doubted success, and

expressed his hearty wish that we could be quit of the protectorate

altogether, and could hand the islands bodily over to Greece, to which

by blood, language, religion, and geography they belonged.

I have said that these adverse views were almost unqualified, and such

qualification as existed was rather remarkable. 'The only part of the

affair I should regard with real pleasure,' wrote Lord Aberdeen, 'would

be the means it might afford you of drawing closer to the government,

and of naturally establishing yourself in a more suitable position; for

in spite of Homer and Ulysses, your Ionian work will by no means be

_tanti_ in itself.' Graham took the same point: 'An approximation to the

government may be fairly sought or admitted by you. But this should take

place on higher grounds.' Thus, though he was now in fact unconsciously

on the eve of his formal entry into a liberal cabinet, expectations

still survived that he might re-join his old party.

As might have been expected, the wanderings of Ulysses and the geography

of Homer prevailed in Mr. Gladstone's mind over the counsels of

parliamentary Nestors. Besides the ancient heroes, there was the

fascination of the orthodox church, so peculiar and so irresistible for

the anglican school to which Mr. Gladstone belonged. Nor must we leave

out of account the passion for public business so often allied with the

student's temperament; the desire of the politician out of work for

something definite to do; Mr. Gladstone's keen relish at all times for

any foreign travel that came in his way; finally, and perhaps strongest

of all, the fact that his wife's health had been much shaken by the

death of her sister, Lady Lyttelton, and the doctors were advising

change of scene, novel interests, and a southern climate. His decision

was very early a foregone conclusion. So his doubting friends could

only wish him good fortune. Graham said, 'If your hand be destined to

lay the foundation of a Greek empire on the ruins of the Ottoman, no

hand can be more worthy, no work more glorious. _Recidiva manu posuissem

Pergama_ was a noble aspiration;[375] with you it may be realised.'

MISSION ACCEPTED

He hastened to enlist the services as secretary to his commission of Mr.

Lacaita, whose friendship he had first made seven years before, as we

have seen, amid the sinister tribunals and squalid dungeons of Naples.

For dealings with the Greco-Italian population of the islands he seemed

the very man. 'As regards Greek,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to him, 'you are

one of the few persons to whom one gives credit for knowing everything,

and I assumed on this ground that you had a knowledge of ancient Greek,

such as would enable you easily to acquire the _kind_ of acquaintance

with the modern form, such as is, I presume, desirable. That is my own

predicament; with the additional disadvantage of our barbarous English

pronunciation.' Accompanied by Mrs. Gladstone and their eldest daughter,

and with Mr. Arthur Gordon, the son of Lord Aberdeen, and now, after

long service to the state, known as Lord Stanmore, for private

secretary, Mr. Gladstone left England on November 8, 1858, and he

returned to it on the 8th of March 1859.

II

THE IONIAN CASE

The Ionian case was this. By a treaty made at Paris in November 1815,

between Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, the seven

islands--scattered along the coast from Epiros to the extreme south of

the Morea--were constituted into a single free and independent state

under the name of the United States of the Ionian Islands, and this

state was placed under the immediate and exclusive protection of Great

Britain. The Powers only thought of keeping the islands out of more

dubious hands, and cared little or not at all about conferring any

advantage upon either us or the Ionians. The States were to regulate

their own internal organisation, and Great Britain was 'to employ a

particular solicitude with regard to the legislation and general

administration of those states,' and was to appoint a lord high

commissioner to reside there with all necessary powers and authorities.

The Duke of Wellington foretold that it would prove 'a tough and

unprofitable job,' and so in truth it did. A constitutional charter in

1817 formed a system of government that soon became despotic enough to

satisfy Metternich himself. The scheme has been justly described as a

singularly clever piece of work, appearing to give much while in fact

giving nothing at all. It contained a decorous collection of chapters,

sections, and articles imposing enough in their outer aspect, but in

actual operation the whole of them reducible to a single clause enabling

the high commissioner to do whatever he pleased.

This rough but not ill-natured despotism lasted for little more than

thirty years, and then in 1849, under the influence of the great

upheaval of 1848, it was changed into a system of more popular and

democratic build. The old Venetians, when for a couple of centuries they

were masters in this region, laid it down that the islanders must be

kept with their teeth drawn and their claws clipped. Bread and the

stick, said Father Paul, that is what they want. This view prevailed at

the colonial office, and maxims of Father Paul Sarpi's sort,

incongruously combined with a paper constitution, worked as ill as

possible. Mr. Gladstone always applied to the new system of 1849 Charles

Buller's figure, of first lighting the fire and then stopping up the

chimney. The stick may be wholesome, and local self-government may be

wholesome, but in combination or rapid alternation they are apt to work

nothing but mischief either in Ionian or any other islands. Sir Charles

Napier--the Napier of Scinde--who had been Resident in Cephalonia thirty

years before, in Byron's closing days, describes the richer classes as

lively and agreeable; the women as having both beauty and wit, but of

little education; the poor as hardy, industrious, and intelligent--all

full of pleasant humour and vivacity, with a striking resemblance, says

Napier, to his countrymen, the Irish. The upper class was mainly Italian

in origin, and willingly threw all the responsibility for affairs on the

British government. The official class, more numerous in proportion to

population than in any country in Europe, scrambled for the petty

salaries of paltry posts allotted by popular election. Since 1849 they

had increased by twenty-five per cent., and were now one in a hundred of

the inhabitants. The clergy in a passive way took part with the

demagogues. Men of ability and sense were not wanting, but being

unorganised, discouraged, and saturated with distrust, they made no

effort to stem the jobbery, corruption, waste, going on around them.

Roads, piers, aqueducts, and other monuments of the British protectorate

reared before 1849, were falling to pieces. Taxes were indifferently

collected. Transgressors of local law went unpunished. In ten years the

deficit in the revenue had amounted to nearly £100,000, or two-thirds of

a year's income. The cultivators of the soil figured in official reports

as naturally well affected, and only wishing to grow their currants and

their olives in peace and quietness. But they were extremely poor, and

they were ignorant and superstitious, and being all these things it was

inevitable that they should nurse discontent with their government.

Whoever wanted their votes knew that the way to get them was to denounce

the Englishman as [Greek: heterodoxos kai xenos], heretic, alien, and tyrant.

There was a senate of six members, chosen by the high commissioner from

the assembly. The forty-two members of the assembly met below galleries

that held a thousand persons, and nothing made their seats and salaries

so safe as round declamations from the floor to the audience above, on

the greatness of the Hellenic race and the need for union with the Greek

kingdom. The municipal officer in charge of education used to set as a

copy for the children, a prayer that panhellenic concord might drive the

Turks out of Greece and the English out of the seven islands.

Cephalonia exceeded the rest of the group both in population and in

vehemence of character, while Zante came first of all in the industry

and liveliness of its people.[376] These two islands were the main

scene and source of difficulty. In Cephalonia nine years before the date

with which we are now dealing, an agrarian rising had occurred more like

a bad whiteboy outrage than a national rebellion, and it was suppressed

with cruel rigour by the high commissioner of the day. Twenty-two people

had been hanged, three hundred or more had been flogged, most of them

without any species of judicial investigation. The fire-raisings and

destruction of houses and vineyards were of a fierce brutality to match.

These Ionian atrocities were the proceedings with which Prince

Schwarzenberg had taunted Lord Aberdeen by way of rejoinder to Mr.

Gladstone's letters on barbarous misgovernment in Naples, and the

feelings that they had roused were still smouldering. Half a dozen

newspapers existed, all of them vehemently and irreconcilably unionist,

though all controlled by members of the legislative assembly who had

taken an oath at the beginning of each parliament to respect and

maintain the constitutional rights of the protecting sovereign. The

liberty of unlicensed printing, however, had been subject to a pretty

stringent check. By virtue of what was styled a power of high police,

the lord high commissioner was able at his own will and pleasure to tear

away from home, occupation, and livelihood anybody that he chose, and

the high police found its commonest objects in the editors of

newspapers. An obnoxious leading article was not infrequently followed

by deportation to some small and barren rock, inhabited by a handful of

fishermen. Not Cherubim and Seraphim, said Mr. Gladstone, could work

such a system. A British corporal with all the patronage in his hands,

said another observer, would get on better than the greatest and wisest

statesman since Pericles, if he had not the patronage. It was little

wonder that a distracted lord high commissioner, to adopt the similes of

the florid secretary of state, should one day send home a picture like

Salvator's Massacre of the Innocents, or Michel Angelo's Last Judgment,

and the next day recall the swains of Albano at repose in the landscapes

of Claude; should one day advise his chiefs to wash their hands of the

Ionians, and on the morrow should hint that perhaps the best thing

would be by a bold _coup d'état_ to sweep away the constitution.[377]

III

THE STOLEN DESPATCH

Immediately after Mr. Gladstone had started, what the secretary of state

described as the most serious misfortune conceivable happened. A

despatch was stolen from the pigeon-holes of the colonial office, and a

morning paper printed it. It had been written home some eighteen months

before by Sir John Young, and in it he advised his government, with the

assent of the contracting powers, to hand over either the whole of the

seven islands to Greece, or else at least the five southern islands,

while transforming Corfu and its little satellite of Paxo into a British

colony. It was true that a few days later he had written a private

letter, wholly withdrawing this advice and substituting for it the exact

opposite, the suppression namely of such freedom as the islanders

possessed. This second fact the public did not know, nor would the

knowledge of it have made any difference. The published despatch stood

on record, and say what they would, the startling impression could not

be effaced. Well might Lytton call it an inconceivable misfortune. It

made Austria uneasy, it perturbed France, and it irritated Russia, all

of them seeing in Mr. Gladstone's mission a first step towards the

policy recommended in the despatch. In the breasts of the islanders it

kindled intense excitement, and diversified a chronic disorder by a

sharp access of fever. It made Young's position desperate, though he was

slow to see it, and practically it brought the business of the high

commissioner extraordinary to nought before it had even begun.

He learned the disaster, for disaster it was, at Vienna, and appears to

have faced it with the same rigorous firmness and self-command that some

of us have beheld at untoward moments long after. The ambassador told

him that he ought to see the Austrian minister. With Count Buol he had a

long interview accordingly, and assured him that his mission had no

concern with any question of Ionian annexation whether partial or total.

Count Buol on his part disclaimed all aggressive tendencies in respect

of Turkey, and stated emphatically that the views and conduct of Austria

in her Eastern policy were in the strictest sense conservative.

Embarking at Trieste on the warship _Terrible_, Nov. 21, and after a

delightful voyage down the Adriatic, five days after leaving Vienna

(Nov. 24th) Mr. Gladstone found himself at Corfu--the famous island of

which he had read such memorable things in Thucydides and Xenophon, the

harbour where the Athenians had fitted out the expedition to Syracuse,

so disastrous to Greek democracy; where the young Octavian had rallied

his fleet before the battle of Actium, so critical for the foundation of

the empire of the Cæsars; and whence Don John had sallied forth for the

victory of Lepanto, so fatal to the conquering might of the Ottoman

Turks. It was from Corfu that the brothers Bandiera had started on their

tragic enterprise for the deliverance of Italy fourteen years before.

Mr. Gladstone landed under a salute of seventeen guns, and was received

with all ceremony and honour by the lord high commissioner and his

officers.

ARRIVAL AT CORFU

He was not long in discovering what mischief the stolen despatch had

done, and may well have suspected from the first in his inner mind that

his efforts to undo it would bear little fruit. The morning after his

arrival the ten members for Corfu came to him in a body with a petition

to the Queen denouncing the plan of making their island a British

colony, and praying for union with Greece. The municipality followed

suit in the evening. The whole sequel was in keeping. Mr. Gladstone with

Young's approval made a speech to the senate, in which he threw over the

despatch, severed his mission wholly from any purpose or object in the

way of annexation, and dwelt much upon a circular addressed by the

foreign office in London to all its ministers abroad disclaiming any

designs of that kind. He held levees, he called upon the archbishop, he

received senators and representatives, and everywhere he held the same

emphatic language. He soon saw enough to convince him of the harm done

to British credit and influence by the severities in Cephalonia; by the

small regard and frequent contempt shown by many Englishmen for the

religion of the people for whose government they were responsible; by

the diatribes in the London press against the Ionians as brigands,

pirates, and barbarians; and by the absence in high commissioners and

others 'of tact, good sense, and good feeling in the sense in which it

is least common in England, the sense namely in which it includes a

disposition to enter into and up to a certain point sympathise with,

those who differ with us in race, language, and creed.' Perhaps his

penetrating eye early discovered to him that forty years of bad rule had

so embittered feeling, that even without the stolen despatch, he had

little chance.

He made a cruise round the islands. His visit shook him a good deal with

respect to two of the points--Corfu and Ithaca--on which it has been

customary to dwell as proving Homer's precise local knowledge. The rain

poured in torrents for most of the time, but it cleared up for a space

to reveal the loveliness of Ithaca. In the island of Ulysses and

Penelope he danced at a ball given in his honour. In Cephalonia he was

received by a tumultuous mob of a thousand persons, whom neither the

drenching rains nor the unexpected manner of his approach across the

hills could baffle. They greeted him with incessant cries for union with

Greece, thrust disaffected papers into his carriage, and here and there

indulged in cries of [Greek: katô ê prostasia], down with the protectorate,

down with the tyranny of fifty years. This exceptional disrespect he

ascribed to what he leniently called the history of Cephalonia, meaning

the savage dose of martial law nine years before. He justly took it for

a marked symbol of the state of excitement at which under various

influences the popular mind had arrived. Age and infirmity prevented the

archbishop from coming to offer his respects, so after his levee Mr.

Gladstone with his suite repaired to the archbishop. 'We found him,'

says Mr. Gordon, 'seated on a sofa dressed in his most gorgeous robes of

gold and purple, over which flowed down a long white beard.... Behind

him stood a little court of black-robed, black-bearded, black-capped,

dark-faced priests. He is eighty-six years old, and his manners and

appearance were dignified in the extreme. Speaking slowly and distinctly

he began to tell Gladstone that the sole wish of Cephalonia was to be

united to Greece, and there was something very exciting and affecting in

the tremulous tones of the old man saying over and over again, "_questa

infelice isola, questa isola infelice_," as the tears streamed down his

cheeks and long silvery beard. It was like a scene in a play.'

At Zante (Dec. 15), the surface was smoother. A concourse of several

thousands awaited him; Greek flags were flying on all sides in the

strong morning sea-breeze; the town bands played Greek national tunes;

the bells were all ringing; the harbour was covered with boats full of

gaily dressed people; and the air resounded with loud shouts [Greek: zêtô ho

philellên Gladstôn, zêtô hê henôsis meta tês Hellados], Long live

Gladstone the Philhellene, hurrah for union with Greece.

Every room and passage in the residency, Mr. Gordon writes to Lord

Aberdeen, was already thronged.... Upstairs the excitement was

great, and as soon as Gladstone had taken his place, in swept

Gerasimus the bishop (followed by scores of swarthy priests in

their picturesque black robes) and tendered to him the petition for

union. But before he could deliver it, Gladstone stopped him and

addressed to him and to the assembly a speech in excellent Italian.

Never did I hear his beautiful voice ring out more clear or more

thrillingly than when he said, '_Ecco l' inganno_.'... It was a

scene not to be forgotten. The priests, with eye and hand and

gesture, expressed in lively pantomime to each other the effect

produced by each sentence, in what we should think a most

exaggerated way, like a chorus on the stage, but the effect was

most picturesque.

VISITS ATHENS

He attended a banquet one night, went to the theatre the next, where he

was greeted with lusty zetos, and at midnight embarked on the

_Terrible_ on his way to Athens. His stay in the immortal city only

lasted for three or four days, and I find no record of his impressions.

They were probably those of most travellers educated enough to feel the

spell of the Violet Crown. Illusions as to the eternal summer with which

poets have blessed the Isles of Greece vanished as they found deep snow

in the streets, icicles on the Acropolis, and snow-balling in the

Parthenon. He had a reception only a shade less cordial than if he were

Demosthenes come back. He dined with King Otho, and went to a _Te Deum_

in honour of the Queen's birthday. Finlay, the learned man who had more

of the true spirit of history than most historians then alive, took him

to a meeting of the legislature; he beheld some of the survivors of the

war of independence, and made friends with one valiant lover of freedom,

the veteran General Church. Though, thanks to the generosity of an

Englishman, they had a university of their own at Corfu, the Ionians

preferred to send their sons to Athens, and the Athenian students

immediately presented a memorial to Mr. Gladstone with the usual prayer

for union with the Hellenic kingdom. On the special object of his visit,

he came away from Athens with the impression that opinion in Greece was

much divided on the question of immediate union with the Ionian islands.

In truth his position had been a false one. Everybody was profoundly

deferential, but nobody was quite sure whether he had come to pave the

way for union, or to invite the Athenian government to check it, and

when Rangabé, the foreign minister, found him without credentials or

instructions, and staved off all discussion, Mr. Gladstone must have

felt that though he had seen one of the two or three most wondrous

historic sites on the globe, that was all.

IN ALBANIA

Of a jaunt to wilder scenes a letter of Mr. Arthur Gordon's gives a

pleasant glimpse:--

You will like an account of an expedition the whole party made

yesterday to Albania to pay a visit to an old lady, a great

proprietress, who lives in a large ruinous castle at a place called

Filates. She is about the greatest personage in these regions, and

it was thought that the lord high commissioner should pay her a

visit if he wished to see Albania.... It was a lovely morning, and

breakfast was laid on the balcony of the private apartments looking

over the garden and commanding the loveliest of views across the

strait. Gladstone was in the highest spirits, full of talk and

_romping boyishly_. After breakfast the L.H.C.'s barge and the

cutters of the _Terrible_ conveyed us on board the pretty little

gunboat.

We reached Sayada in about two hours, and were received on landing

by the governor of the province, who had ridden down from Filates

to meet us. We went to the house of the English vice-consul, whilst

the long train of horses was preparing to start, but after a few

minutes' stay there Gladstone became irrepressibly restless, and

insisted on setting off to walk--I of course walked too. The old

steward also went with us, and a guard of eight white-kilted

palikari on foot. The rest of the party rode, and from a slight

hill which we soon reached, it was very pretty to look back at the

long procession starting from Sayada and proceeding along the

narrow causeway running parallel to our path, the figures

silhouetted against the sea. Filates is about 12 miles from Sayada,

perhaps more, the path is rugged and mountainous, and commands some

fine views. Our palikari guards fired off their long Afghan-looking

guns in every direction, greatly to Gladstone's annoyance, but

there was no stopping them.

Scouts on the hills gave warning of our approach, and at the

entrance to Filates we were met by the whole population. First the

Valideh's retainers, then the elders, then the moolahs in their

great green turbans, the Christian community, and finally, on the

top of the hill, the Valideh's little grandson, gorgeously dressed,

and attended by his tutor and a number of black slaves. The little

boy salaamed to Gladstone with much grace and self-possession, and

then conducted us to the castle, in front of which all the

townsfolk who were not engaged in receiving us were congregated in

picturesque groups on the smooth grassy lawns and under the great

plane trees. The castle is a large ruinous enclosure of walls and

towers, with buildings of all sorts and ages within. The Valideh

herself, attired in green silk and a fur pelisse, her train held by

two negro female slaves, received us at the head of the stairs and

ushered us into a large room with a divan round three sides of it.

Sweetmeats and water and pipes and coffee were brought as usual,

some of the cups and their filigree stands very handsome. We went

out to see the town, preceded by a tall black slave in a gorgeous

blue velvet jacket, with a great silver stick in his hand. Under

his guidance we visited the khans, the bazaar, and the mosque; not

only were we allowed to enter the mosque with our shoes on, but on

Gladstone expressing a wish to hear the call to prayer, the muezzin

was sent up to the top of the minaret to call the azan two hours

before the proper time. The sight of the green-turbaned imam crying

the azan for a Frank was most singular, and the endless variety of

costume displayed by the crowds who thronged the verandahs which

surround the mosque was most picturesque. The gateway of the castle

too was a picturesque scene. Retainers and guards, slaves and

soldiers, and even women, were lounging about, and a beautiful tame

little pet roedeer played with the pretty children in bright

coloured dresses, clustering under the cavernous archway.

We had dinner in another large room. I counted thirty-two dishes,

or I may say courses, for each dish at a Turkish dinner is brought

in separately, and it is rude not to eat of all! The most

picturesque part of the dinner, and most unusual, was the way the

room was lighted. Eight tall, grand Albanians stood like statues

behind us, each holding a candle. It reminded me of the

torch-bearers who won the laird his bet in the _Legend of

Montrose_.

After dinner there was a long and somewhat tedious interval of

smoking and story-telling in the dark, and we called upon Lacaita

to recite Italian poetry, which he did with much effect, pouring

out sonnet after sonnet of Petrarch, including that which my father

thinks the most beautiful in the Italian language, that which has

in it the 'Campeggiar del angelico riso.' This showed me how easy

it was to fall into the habits of a country. Gladstone is as

unoriental as any man well can be, yet his calling on Lacaita to

recite was really just the same thing that every Pasha does after

dinner, when he orders his tale-teller to repeat a story. The

ladies meanwhile were packed off to the harem for the night, Lady

Bowen acting as their interpreter. My L.H.C., his two

secretaries, his three aide-de-camps, Captains Blomfield and

Clanricarde, and the vice-consul, all slept in the same room, and

that not a large one, and we were packed tight on the floor, under

quilts of Brusa silk and gold, tucked up round us by gorgeous

Albanians. Gladstone amused himself with speculating whether or no

we were in contravention of the provisions of Lord Shaftesbury's

lodging-house act!

After a month of cloudless sunshine it took it into its head to

rain this night of all nights in the year, and rain as it only does

in these regions. Gladstone and I walked down again despite of

wind, rain, and mud, and our palikari guard--to keep up their

spirits, I suppose--chanted wild choruses all the way. We nearly

got stuck altogether in the muddy flat near Sayada, and got on

board the _Osprey_ wet through, my hands so chilled I could hardly

steer the boat. Of course we had far outwalked the riding party, so

we had to wait. What a breakfast we ate! that is those of us who

could eat, for the passage was rough and Gladstone and the ladies

flat on their backs and very sorry for themselves.

Mr. Gladstone's comment in his diary is brief: 'The whole impression is

saddening; it is all indolence, decay, stagnation; the image of God

seems as if it were nowhere. But there is much of wild and picturesque.'

The English in the island, both civil and military, adopted the tone of

unfriendly journals in London, and the garrison went so far as not even

to invite Mr. Gladstone to mess, a compliment never omitted before. The

Ionians, on the other hand, like people in most other badly governed

countries did not show in the noblest colours. There were petitions,

letters, memorials, as to which Mr. Gladstone mildly notes that he has

to 'lament a spirit of exaggeration and obvious errors of fact.' There

was a stream of demands from hosts of Spiridiones, Christodulos,

Euphrosunes, for government employ, and the memorial survives, attested

by bishop and clergy, of a man with a daughter to marry, who being too

poor to find a dowry 'had decided on reverting to your Excellency's

well-known philhellenism, and with tears in his eyes besought that your

Excellency,' et cetera.

CORRESPONDENCE WITH BULWER

One incident was much disliked at home, as having the fearsome flavour

of the Puseyite. It had been customary at levees for the lord high

commissioner to bow to everybody, but also to shake hands with the

bishops and sundry other high persons. Mr. Gladstone stooped and

actually kissed the bishop's hand. Sir Edward Lytton inquired if the

story were true, as a question might be asked in parliament. It is true,

said Mr. Gladstone (February 7), but 'I hope Sir E. L. will not in his

consideration for me entangle himself in such a matter, but as he knows

nothing now, will continue to know nothing, and will say that the

subject did not enter into his instructions, and that he presumes I

shall be at home in two or three more weeks to answer for all my

misdeeds.'[378]

The secretary of state and his potent emissary--the radical who had

turned tory and the tory who was on the verge of formally turning

liberal--got on excellently together. Though he was not exact in

business, the minister's despatches and letters show shrewdness, good

sense, and right feeling, with a copious garnish of flummery. Demagogy,

he says to Mr. Gladstone, will continue to be a trade and the most

fascinating of all trades, because animated by personal vanity, and its

venality disguised even to the demagogue himself by the love of country,

by which it may be really accompanied. The Ionian constitution should

certainly be mended, for 'my convictions tell me that there is nothing

so impracticable as the Unreal.' He comforts his commissioner by the

reminder that a population after all has one great human heart, and a

great human heart is that which chiefly exalts the Man of Genius over

the mere Man of Talent, so that when a Man of Genius with practical

experience of the principles of sound government comes face to face with

a people whose interest it is to be governed well, the chances are that

they will understand each other.

IV

Mr. Gladstone applied himself with the utmost gravity to the affairs of

a pygmy state with a total population under 250,000. His imagination did

its work. While you seem, he said most truly, to be dealing only with a

few specks scarcely visible on the map of Europe, you are engaged in

solving a problem as delicate and difficult as if it arose on a far more

conspicuous stage. The people he found to be eminently gifted by nature

with that subtlety which is apt to degenerate into sophistry, and prone

to be both rather light-minded and extremely suspicious. The permanent

officials in Downing Street, with less polite analysis, had been

accustomed to regard the islanders more bluntly as a 'pack of scamps.'

This was what had done the mischief. The material condition of the

cultivators was in some respects not bad, but Mr. Gladstone laid down a

profound and solid principle when he said that 'no method of dealing

with a civilised community can be satisfactory which does not make

provision for its political action as well as its social state.'[379]

The idea of political reform had for a time made head against the idea

of union with the Greek kingdom, but for some years past the whole

stream of popular tendency and feeling set strongly towards union, and

disdained contentment with anything else. Mankind turn naturally to the

solutions that seem the simplest. Mr. Gladstone condemned the existing

system as bad for us and bad for them. Circumstances made it impossible

for him to suggest amendment by throwing the burden bodily off our

shoulders, and at that time he undoubtedly regarded union with Greece as

in itself undesirable for the Ionians. Circumstances and his own love of

freedom made it equally impossible to recommend the violent suppression

of the constitution. The only course left open was to turn the mockery

of free government into a reality, and this operation he proposed to

carry out with a bold hand. The details of this enlargement of popular

rights and privileges, and the accompanying financial purgation, do not

now concern us. Whether the case either demanded or permitted

originality in the way of construction I need not discuss. The

manufacture of a constitution is always the easiest thing in the world.

The question is whether the people concerned will work it, and in spite

of that buoyant optimism which never in any circumstances deserted him

in respect of whatever business he might have in hand, Mr. Gladstone

must have doubted whether his islanders would ever pretend to accept

what they did not seek, as a substitute for what they did seek but were

not allowed to have. Before anybody knew the scope of his plan, the six

newspapers flew to arms with a vivacity that, whether it was Italian or

was Greek, was in either case a fatal sign of the public temper. What,

they cried, did the treaty of 1815 mean by describing the Ionian state

as free and independent? What was a protectorate, and what the rights of

the protector? Was there no difference between a protector and a

sovereign? What could be more arrogant and absurd than that the

protector, who was not sovereign, should talk about 'conceding' reforms

to a free and independent state? All these questions were in themselves

not very easy to answer, but what was a more serious obstacle than the

argumentative puzzles of partisans was a want of moral and political

courage; was the sycophancy of one class, and the greediness of

others.[380]

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM

Closely connected with the recommendations of constitutional reform was

the question by whom the necessary communications with the assembly were

to be conducted. Sir John Young was obviously impossible, though he was

not at once brought to face the fact. Mr. Gladstone upon this made to

the colonial secretary (December 27) an offer that if he had already

determined on Young's recall, and if he thought reform would stand a

better chance if introduced by Mr. Gladstone himself, he was willing to

serve as lord high commissioner for the very limited time that might be

necessary. We may be sure that the government lost not an hour in making

up their minds on a plan that went still further both in the way of

bringing Mr. Gladstone into still closer connection with them, and

towards relieving themselves of a responsibility which they never from

the first had any business to devolve upon Mr. Gladstone or anybody

else. The answer came by telegraph (January 11), 'The Queen accepts.

Your commission is being made out.'

All other embarrassments were now infinitely aggravated by the sudden

discovery from the lawyers that acceptance of the new office not only

vacated the seat in parliament, but also rendered Mr. Gladstone

incapable of election until he had ceased to hold the office. 'This, I

must confess,' he told Sir Edward, 'is a great blow. The difficulty and

the detriment are serious' (January 17). If some enemy on the meeting of

the House in February should choose to move the writ for the vacant seat

at Oxford, the election would necessarily take place at a date too early

for the completion of the business at Corfu, and Mr. Gladstone still at

work as high commissioner would still therefore be ineligible. Nobody

was ever by constitution more averse than Mr. Gladstone to turning

backward, and in this case he felt himself especially bound to go

forward not only by the logic of the Ionian situation at the moment, but

for the reason which was also characteristic of him, that the Queen in

approving his appointment (January 7) had described his conduct as both

patriotic and most opportune, and therefore he thought there would be

unspeakable shabbiness in turning round upon her by a hurried

withdrawal. The Oxford entanglement thus became almost desperate.

Resolved not to disturb the settled order of proceeding with his

assembly, Mr. Gladstone with a thoroughly characteristic union of

ingenuity and tenacity tried various ways of extrication. To complete

the mortifications of the position, the telegraph broke down.

QUESTION OF THE OXFORD SEAT

The scrape was nearly as harassing to his friends at home as to

himself. Politicians above all men can never safely count on the charity

that thinketh no evil. Lord John Russell told Lord Aberdeen that it was

clear that Gladstone was staying away to avoid a discussion on the

coming Reform bill. There was a violent attack upon him in the _Times_

(January 13) as having supplanted Young. The writers of leading articles

looked up Greek history from the days of the visit of Ulysses to

Alcinous downwards, and they mocked his respect for the countrymen of

Miltiades, and his reverence for the church of Chrysostom and

Athanasius. The satirists of the cleverest journal of the day admitted

his greatness, the brilliance and originality of his finance, the

incomparable splendour of his eloquence, and a courage equal to any

undertaking, that quailed before no opposition and suffered no abatement

in defeat, and they only marvelled the more that a statesman of the

first rank should accept at the hands of an insidious rival a fifth-rate

mission--insidious rival not named but easy to identify. The fact that

Mr. Gladstone had hired a house at Corfu was the foundation of a

transcendent story that Mr. Disraeli wished to make him the king of the

Ionian islands. 'I hardly think it needful to assure you,' Mr. Gladstone

told Lytton, 'that I have never attached the smallest weight to any of

the insinuations which it seems people have thought worth while to

launch at some member or members of your government with respect to my

mission.' Though Mr. Gladstone was never by any means unconscious of the

hum and buzz of paltriness and malice that often surrounds conspicuous

public men, nobody was ever more regally indifferent. Graham predicted

that though Gladstone would always be the first man in the House of

Commons, he would not again be what he was before the Ionian business.

They all thought that he would be attacked on his return. '_Ah_,' said

Aberdeen, '_but he is terrible in the rebound_.'

After much perplexity and running to and fro in London, it was arranged

between the secretary of state and Mr. Gladstone's friends, including

Phillimore principally, and then Northcote and M. Bernard, that a course

of proceeding should be followed, which Mr. Gladstone when he knew it

thought unfortunate. A new commission naming a successor was issued, and

Mr. Gladstone then became _ipso facto_ liberated. Sir Henry Storks was

the officer chosen, and as soon as his commission was formally received

by him, he was to execute a warrant under which he deputed all powers to

Mr. Gladstone until his arrival. Whether Mr. Gladstone was lord high

commissioner when he came to propose his reform is a moot point. So

intricate was the puzzle that the under-secretary addressed a letter to

Mr. Gladstone by his name and not by the style of his official dignity,

because he could not be at all sure what that official dignity really

was. What is certain is that Mr. Gladstone, though it was never his way

to quarrel with other people's action taken in good faith on his behalf,

did not perceive the necessity for proceeding so rapidly to the

appointment of his successor, and thought it decidedly injurious to such

chances as his reforms might have possessed.[381]

The assembly that had been convoked by Sir John Young for an

extraordinary session (January 25), at once showed that its labours

would bear no fruit. Mr. Gladstone as lord high commissioner opened the

session with a message that they had met to consider proposals for

reform which he desired to lay before them as soon as possible. The game

began with the passing of a resolution that it was the single and

unanimous _will_ ([Greek: thelêsis]) of the Ionian people that the seven

islands should be united to Greece. Mr. Gladstone fought like a lion for

scholar's authority to treat the word as only meaning wish or

disposition, and he took for touchstone the question whether men could

speak of the [Greek: thelêsis] of the Almighty; the word in the Lord's

Prayer was found to be [Greek: thelêma]. As Finlay truly says, it would

have been much more to the point to accept the word as it was meant by

those who used it. As to that no mistake was possible. Some say that he

ought plainly to have told them they had violated the constitution, to

have dissolved them, and above all to have stopped their pay. Instead of

this he informed them that they must put their wishes into the shape of

a petition to the Queen. The idea was seized with alacrity (January 29).

Oligarchs and demagogues were equally pleased to fall in with it, the

former because they hoped it would throw their rivals into deeper

discredit with their common master, the latter because they knew it

would endear them to their constituents.

OPENING OF THE IONIAN SESSION

The Corfiotes received the declaration of the assembly and the address

to the Queen with enthusiasm. Great crowds followed the members to their

homes with joyous acclamations, all the bells of the town were set

ringing, there was a grand illumination for two nights, and the

archbishop ordered a _Te Deum_. Neither te-deums nor prayers melted the

heart of the British cabinet, aware of the truth impressed at the time

on Mr. Gladstone by Lytton, that neither the English public nor the

English parliament likes any policy that '_gives anything up_.' The

Queen was advised to reply that she could neither consent to abandon the

obligations she had undertaken, nor could permit any application from

the islands to other Powers in furtherance of any similar design.

Then at last came the grand plan for constitutional reconstruction. Mr.

Gladstone after first stating the reply of the Queen, read an eloquent

address to the assembly (February 4) in Italian, adjuring them to reject

all attempts to evade by any indirect devices the duty of pronouncing a

clear and intelligible judgment on the propositions now laid before

them. His appeal was useless, and it was received exactly as plans for

assimilating Irish administration to English used to be. The

nationalists knew that reform would be a difficulty the more in the way

of separation, the retrogrades knew it would be a spoke in the wheel of

their own jobbery. Mr. Gladstone professed extreme and truly

characteristic astonishment in respect of the address to the Queen, that

they should regard the permission to ask as identical with the promise

to grant, and the right to petition as equivalent to the right to

demand. If the affair had been less practically vexatious, we can

imagine the Socratic satisfaction with which Mr. Gladstone would have

revelled in pressing all these and many other distinctions on those who

boasted of being Socrates' fellow-countrymen.

From day to day anxiously did Mr. Gladstone watch what he called the

dodges of the assembly. Abundant reason as there was to complain of the

conduct of the Ionians in all these proceedings, it is well to record

the existence of a number of sincere patriots and enlightened men like

the two brothers Themistocles, Napoleon Zambelli, and Sir Peter Braila,

afterwards Greek minister in London. This small band of royal adherents

gave Mr. Gladstone all the help they could in preparing his scheme of

reform, and after the scheme was launched, they strained every nerve to

induce the assembly to assent to it in spite of the pressure from the

people. Their efforts were necessarily unavailing. The great majority,

composed as usual of the friends of England who trembled for their own

jobs, joining hands with the demagogues, was hostile to the changes

proposed, and only flinched from a peremptory vote from doubt as to its

reception among the people. Promptitude and force were not to be

expected in either way from men in such a frame of mind. 'On a

preliminary debate,' Mr. Gladstone wrote mournfully to Phillimore,

'without any motion whatever, one man has spoken for nearly the whole of

two days.' Strong language about the proposals as cheating and

fraudulent was freely used, but nothing that in Mr. Gladstone's view

justified one of those high-handed prorogations after the manner of the

Stuarts, that had been the usual expedient in quarrels between the high

commissioner and a recalcitrant assembly. These doings had brought

English rule over the islands to a level in the opinion of Southern

Europe with Austrian rule at Venice and the reign of the cardinals in

the pontifical states.

PROCEEDINGS IN ASSEMBLY

Sir Henry Storks arrived on the 16th of February, and the same day the

assembly which before had been working for delay, in a great hurry gave

a vote against the proposals, which, though in form preliminary, was in

substance decisive; there were only seven dissentients. Mr. Gladstone

sums up the case in a private letter to Sidney Herbert.

_Corfu, 17th Feb. 1859._--This decision is not convenient for me

personally, nor for the government at home; but as a whole I cannot

regret it so far as England is concerned. I think the proposals

give here almost for the first time a perfectly honourable and

tenable position in the face of the islands. The first set of

manoeuvres was directed to preventing them from being made; and that

made me really uneasy. The only point of real importance was to get

them out.... Do not hamper yourself in this affair with me. Let me

sink or swim. I have been labouring for truth and justice, and am

sufficiently happy in the consciousness of it, to be little

distressed either with the prospect of blame, or with the more

serious question whether I acted rightly or wrongly in putting

myself in the place of L.H.C. to propose these reforms,--a step

which has of course been much damaged by the early nomination of

Sir H. Storks, done out of mere consideration for me in another

point of view. Lytton's conduct throughout has been such that I

could have expected no more from the oldest and most confiding

friend.

To Lytton himself he writes (Feb. 7, 1859):--

I sincerely wish that I could have repaid your generous confidence

and admirable support with recommendations suited to the immediate

convenience of your government. But in sending me, you grappled

with a difficulty which you might have postponed, and I could not

but do the same. Whether it was right that I should come, I do not

feel very certain. Yet (stolen despatch and all) I do not regret

it. For my feelings are those you have so admirably described; and

I really do not know for what it is that political life is worth

the living, if it be not for an opportunity of endeavouring to

redeem in the face of the world the character of our country

wherever, it matters not on how small a scale, that character has

been compromised.

Language like this, as sincere as it was lofty, supplies the true test

by which to judge Mr. Gladstone's conduct both in the Ionian transaction

and many another. From the point of personal and selfish interest any

simpleton might see that he made a mistake, but measured by his own

standard of public virtue, how is he to be blamed, how is he not to be

applauded, for undertaking a mission that, but for an unforeseen

accident, might have redounded to the honour and the credit of the

British power?

V

On February 19 he quitted the scene of so many anxieties and such

strenuous effort as we have seen. The _Terrible_ fell into a strong

north-easter in the Adriatic, and took thirty-six hours to Pola. There

they sought shelter and got across with a smooth sea to Venice on the

23rd. He saw the Austrian archduke whom he found kind, intelligent,

earnest, pleasing. At Turin a few days later (March 23), he had an

interview with Cavour, for whom at that moment the crowning scenes of

his great career were just opening. 'At Vicenza,' the diary records

(Feb. 28), 'we had cavalry and artillery at the station about to march;

more cavalry on the road with a van and pickets, some with drawn swords;

at Verona regiments in review; at Milan pickets in the streets; as I

write I hear the tread of horse patrolling the streets. Dark omens!' The

war with Austria was close at hand.

I may as well in a few sentences finally close the Ionian chapter,

though the consummation was not immediate. Mr. Gladstone, while he was

for the moment bitten by the notion of ceding the southern islands to

Greece, was no more touched by the nationalist aspirations of the

Ionians than he had been by nationalism and unification in Italy in

1851. Just as in Italy he clung to constitutional reforms in the

particular provinces and states as the key to regeneration, so here he

leaned upon the moderates who, while professing strong nationalist

feeling, did not believe that the time for its realisation had arrived.

A debate was raised in the House of Commons in the spring of 1861, by an

Irish member. The Irish catholics twitted Mr. Gladstone with flying the

flag of nationality in Italy, and trampling on it in the Ionian islands.

He in reply twitted them with crying up nationality for the Greeks, and

running it down when it told against the pope. In the Italian case Lord

John Russell had (1860) set up the broad doctrine that a people are the

only true judges who should be their rulers--a proposition that was at

once seized and much used by the Dandolos, Lombardos, Cavalieratos and

the rest at Corfu. Scarcely anybody pretended that England had any

separate or selfish interest of her own. 'It is in my view,' said Mr.

Gladstone, 'entirely a matter of that kind of interest only, which, is

in one sense the highest interest of all--namely the interest which is

inherent in her character and duty, and her exact and regular fulfilment

of obligations which she has contracted with Europe.'[382]

LATER FORTUNES OF THE ISLANDS

But he held the opinion that it would be nothing less than a crime

against the safety of Europe, as connected with the state and course of

the Eastern question, if England were at this moment to surrender the

protectorate; for if you should surrender the protectorate, what were

you to say to Candia, Thessaly, Albania, and other communities of Greek

stock still under Turkish rule? Then there was a military question.

Large sums of British money had been flung away on fortifications,[383]

and people talked of Corfu as they talked in later years about Cyprus,

as a needed supplement to the strength of Gibraltar and Malta, and

indispensable to our Mediterranean power. People listened agape to

demonstrations that the Ionian islands were midway between England and

the Persian Gulf; that they were two-thirds of the way to the Red Sea;

that they blocked up the mouth of the Adriatic; Constantinople, Smyrna,

Alexandria, Naples, formed a belt of great towns around them; they were

central to Asia, Europe, and Africa. And so forth in the alarmist's

well-worn currency.

Lord Palmerston in 1850 had declared in his highest style that Corfu was

a very important position for Mediterranean interests in the event of a

war, and it would be great folly to give it up. A year later he repeated

that though he should not object to the annexation of the southern

islands to Greece, Corfu was too important a military and naval post

ever to be abandoned by us.[384] As Lord Palmerston changed, so did Mr.

Gladstone change. 'Without a good head for Greece, I should not like to

see the Ionian protectorate surrendered; with it, I should be well

pleased for one to be responsible for giving it up.' Among many other

wonderful suggestions was one that he should himself become that 'good

head.' 'The first mention,' he wrote to a correspondent in parliament

(Jan. 21, 1863), 'of my candidature in Greece some time ago made me

laugh very heartily, for though I do love the country and never laughed

at anything else in connection with it before, yet the seeing my own

name, which in my person was never meant to carry a title of any kind,

placed in juxtaposition with that particular idea, made me give way.'

Meanwhile it is safe to conjecture, for the period with which in this

chapter we are immediately concerned, that in conceiving and drawing up

his Ionian scheme, close contact with liberal doctrines as to free

institutions and popular government must have quickened Mr. Gladstone's

progress in liberal doctrines in our own affairs at home. In 1863[385]

Lord Palmerston himself, in spite of that national aversion to anything

like giving up, of which he was himself the most formidable

representative, cheerfully handed the Ionians over to their kinsfolk, if

kinsfolk they truly were, upon the mainland.[386]

FOOTNOTES:

[375] Virg. _Aen._ iv. 344.

[376] See Sir C. Napier's _The Colonies: treating of their value

generally and of the Ionian Islands in particular._

[377] _Parliamentary Papers, relative to the mission of the Right Hon.

W. E. Gladstone to the Ionian Islands in 1858._ Presented in 1861.

Finlay's _History of Greece_, vii. p. 305, etc. _Letters by Lord Charles

Fitzroy, etc., showing the anomalous political and financial Position of

the Ionian Islands._ (Ridgway, 1850.) _Le Gouvernement des Iles

Ioniennes._ Lettre à Lord John Russell, par Francois Lenormant. (Paris,

Amyot, 1861.) _The Ionian Islands in relation to Greece._ By John Dunn

Gardner, Esqr., 1859. _Four years in the Ionian Islands._ By

Whittingham. Pamphlet by S. G. Potter, D.D. See also _Gleanings_, iv. p.

287.

[378] This and his alleged attendance at mass, and compliance with

sundry other rites, were often heard of in later times, and even so late

as 1879 Mr. Gladstone was subjected to some rude baiting from doctors of

divinity and others.

[379] Finlay, _History of Greece_, vii. p. 306, blames both Bulwer and

Mr. Gladstone because they 'directed their attention to the means of

applying sound theories of government to a state of things where a

change in the social relations of the inhabitants and modifications in

the tenure and rights of property were the real evils that required

remedy, and over these the British government could exercise very little

influence if opposed by the Ionian representatives.' But is not this to

say that the real remedy was unattainable without political reform?

[380] May 7, 1861. _Hans._ 3rd Ser. 162, p. 1687. The salaries of the

deputies struck him as especially excessive, and on the same occasion he

let fall the _obiter dictum_; 'For my part I trust that of all the

changes that may in the course of generations be made in the

constitution of this country, the very last and latest will be the

payment of members of this House.'

[381] On Feb. 7, the secretary of the treasury moved the writ, and the

next day the vice-chancellor notified that there would be an election,

Mr. Gladstone having 'vacated his seat by accepting the office of lord

high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, which he no longer holds.' He

was re-elected (Feb. 12) without opposition.

[382] Mr. Gladstone, May 7, 1861.--_Hans._ Third Ser. 162. p. 1687.

[383] Napier in his _Memoir on the Roads of Cephalonia_ (p. 45) tells

how Maitland had a notion of building a fort on that island, and on his

boat one day asked the commanding engineer how much it would cost. The

engineer talked about £100,000. 'Upon this Sir Thomas turned round in

the boat, with a long and loud whistle. After this whistle I thought it

best to let at least a year pass without again mentioning the subject.'

[384] Ashley, ii. pp. 184, 186.

[385] _Dec. 8, 1862._--Cabinet. Resolution to surrender the Ionian

protectorate. Only Lord W[estbury] opposing.

[386] Mr. Gladstone sent home and revised afterwards three elaborate

reports on the mischiefs of Ionian government and the constitutional

remedies proper for them. They were printed for the use of the cabinet,

though whether these fifty large pages, amounting to about a quarter of

this volume, received much attention from that body, may without

_scandalum magnatum_ be doubted, nor do the reports appear to have been

laid before parliament. The Italian war was then creating an agitation

in Europe upon nationality, as to which the people of the Ionian islands

were sensitively alive, and the reports would have supplied a good deal

of fuel. There was a separate fourth report upon the suppression of

disorder in Cephalonia in 1848, which everybody afterwards agreed that

it was not expedient to publish. It still exists in the archives of the

colonial office.

CHAPTER XI

JUNCTION WITH THE LIBERALS

(_1859_)

Conviction, in spite of early associations and long-cherished

preposessions--strong conviction, and an overpowering sense of the

public interests operating for many, many years before full effect

was given to it, placed me in the ranks of the liberal

party.--GLADSTONE (Ormskirk, 1867).

When Mr. Gladstone returned to England in March 1859, he found the

conservatives with much ineffectual industry, some misplaced ingenuity,

and many misgivings and divisions, trying their hands at parliamentary

reform. Their infringement of what passed for a liberal patent was not

turning out well. Convulsions in the cabinet, murmurs in the lobbies,

resistance from the opposite benches, all showed that a ministry

existing on sufferance would not at that stage be allowed to settle the

question. In this contest Mr. Gladstone did not actively join. Speaking

from the ministerial side of the House, he made a fervid defence of

nomination boroughs as the nurseries of statesmen, but he voted with

ministers against a whig amendment. His desire, he said, was to settle

the question as soon as possible, always, however, on the foundation of

trust in the people, that 'sound and satisfactory basis on which for

several years past legislation had been proceeding.' The hostile

amendment was carried against ministers by statesmen irreconcilably at

variance with one another, alike in principle and object. The majority

of thirty-nine was very large for those days, and it was decisive.

Though the parliament was little more than a couple of years old, yet in

face of the desperate confusion among leaders, parties, and groups, and

upon the plea that reform had not been formally submitted as an issue to

the country, Lord Derby felt justified in dissolving. Mr. Gladstone held

the Oxford seat without opposition. The constituencies displayed an

extension of the same essentially conservative feeling that had given

Lord Palmerston the victory two years before. Once more the real

question lay not so much between measures as men; not so much between

democratic change and conservative moderation, as between Palmerston and

Russell on the one hand, and Derby and Disraeli on the other. The

government at the election improved their position by some thirty votes.

This was not enough to outnumber the phalanx of their various opponents

combined, but was it possible that the phalanx should combine? Mr.

Gladstone, who spoke of the dissolution as being a most improper as well

as a most important measure, alike in domestic and in foreign bearings,

told Acland that he would not be surprised if the government were to

attempt some reconstruction on a broad basis before the new parliament

met. This course was not adopted.

CRITICAL MOMENTS

The chances of turning out the government were matters of infinite

computation among the leaders. The liberal whip after the election gave

his own party a majority of fifteen, but the treasury whip, on the other

hand, was equally confident of a majority of ten. Still all was

admittedly uncertain. The prime perplexity was whether if a new

administration could be formed, Lord Palmerston or Lord John should be

at its head. Everybody agreed that it would be both impossible and wrong

to depose the tories until it was certain that the liberals were united

enough to mount into their seat, and no government could last unless it

comprehended both the old prime ministers. Could not one of them carry

the prize of the premiership into the Lords, and leave to the other the

consolation stake of leadership in the Commons? Lord Palmerston, who

took the crisis with a veteran's good-humoured coolness, told his

intimates that he at any rate would not go up to the Lords, for he could

not trust John Russell in the other House. With a view, however, to

ministerial efficiency, he was anxious to keep Russell in the Commons,

as with him and Gladstone they would make a strong treasury bench. But

was it certain that Gladstone would join? On this there was endless

gossip. One story ran that Mrs. Gladstone had told somebody that her

husband wished bygones to be bygones, was all for a strong government,

and was ready to join in forming one. Then the personage to whom this

was said upset the inference by declaring there was nothing in the

conversation incompatible with a Derby junction. Sir Charles Wood says

in his journal:--

_May 22._--Saw Mrs. Gladstone, who did not seem to contemplate a

junction with Palmerston but rather that he should join Derby. I

stated the impossibility of that, and that the strongest government

possible under present circumstances would be by such a union as

took place under Aberdeen. To effect this, all people must pull the

same and not different ways as of late years. I said that I blamed

her husband for quitting, and ever since he quitted, Palmerston's

government in 1855, as well as Lord John; that in the quarrel

between Lord John and Gladstone the former had behaved ill, and the

latter well.

_May 27._--Gladstone dined here.... He would vote a condemnation of

the dissolution, and is afraid of the foreign affairs at so

critical a moment being left in the hands of Malmesbury; says that

we, the opposition, are not only justified but called upon by the

challenge in the Queen's speech on the dissolution, to test the

strength of parties; but that he is himself in a different

position, that he would vote a condemnation of the dissolution, but

hesitates as to no confidence.

Sir Robert Phillimore[387] gives us other glimpses during this month:--

_May 18._--Long interview with Gladstone. He entered most fully and

without any reserve into his views on the state of political

parties and on the duties of a statesman at this juncture. Thought

the only chance of a strong government was an engrafting of

Palmerston upon Lord Derby, dethroning Disraeli from the leadership

of the House of Commons, arranging for a moderate Reform bill,

placing the foreign office in other hands, but not in Disraeli's.

He dwelt much upon this. Foreign politics seemed to have the chief

place in his mind.

_May 31._--Gladstone has seen Palmerston, and said he will not vote

against Lord Derby in support of Lord John's supposed motion. The

government Gladstone thinks desirable is a fusion of Palmerston and

his followers with Lord Derby, which implies, of course, weeding

out half at least of the present cabinet. Gladstone will have to

vote with government and speak against the cabinet, and violently

he will be abused.

_June 1._--Dined with Gladstone. He is much harassed and distressed

at his position relative to the government and opposition. Spoke

strongly against Lord Malmesbury. Said if the proposal is to

censure the dissolution, he must agree with it, but he will vote

against a want of confidence.