CHANGES GOOD AND EVIL.
With the death of Lord Palmerston in 1865, a sort of truce in the
strife of parties, which his supremacy had secured, came to an end.
That supremacy had been imperilled for a moment when the Government
declined to make an armed intervention in the struggle between
Denmark and the German Powers in 1864. Such an intervention would
have been very popular with the English people, who could hardly know
that "all Germany would rise as one man" to repel it if it were
risked. But the English Premier's rare command of his audience in
Parliament enabled him to overcome even this difficulty; and the
gigantic series of contests on the Continent which resulted in the
consolidation of the German empire, the complete liberation of Italy,
the overthrow of Imperialism in France and of the temporal power of
the Pope even in Rome itself, went on its way without our
interference also, which would hardly have been the case had we
intermeddled in the ill-understood contention between Denmark and its
adversaries as to the Schleswig-Holstein succession.
[Illustration: Sir Robert Napier.]
That strange crime, the murder of President Lincoln, in America just
when the long contest between North and South had ended and the cause
of true freedom had triumphed, was actually fruitful of good as
regarded this country and the United States. A cry of horror went up
from all England at the news of that "most accursed assassination,"
which seemed at the moment to brand the losing cause, whose partisan
was guilty of it, with the very mark of Cain. Expressions of sympathy
with the outraged country and of admiring regret for its murdered
head were lavished by every respectable organ of opinion; while the
Queen, by writing in personal sympathy, as one widow to another, to
the bereaved wife of Lincoln, made herself, as she has often done,
the mouthpiece of her people's best feeling. Again and again has it
been manifested that America and England are in more cordial
relations with each other since the tremendous civil war than before
it. It is no matter of statecraft, but a better understanding between
two great English-speaking peoples, drawn into closer fellowship by
far more easy communication than of old.
A little war with Ashantee, not too successful, a difficulty with
Japan, some more serious troubles with New Zealand, exhaust the list
of the warlike enterprises of England in the last years of
Palmerston. In a year or two after his death we were engaged in a
brief and entirely successful campaign against the barbaric King
Theodore of Abyssinia, "a compound of savage virtue and more than
savage ambition and cruelty," who, imagining himself wronged and
slighted by England, had seized a number of British subjects, held
them in hard captivity, and treated them with such capricious cruelty
as made it very manifest that their lives were not worth an hour's
purchase. It fell to the Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, Premier on the
resignation of his colleague Lord Derby, who had displaced Earl
Russell in that office, to bring this strange potentate to reason by
force of arms. Under Sir Robert Napier's management the work was done
with remarkable precision; no English life was lost; and but few of
our soldiers were wounded; Magdala, the mountain eyrie of King
Theodore, was stormed and destroyed, and the captives, having been
surrendered under dread of the British arms, were restored to freedom
and safety. The honour of our land, imperilled by the oppression of
our subjects was triumphantly vindicated; other good was not
achieved. Theodore, unwilling to survive defeat, was found dead by
his own hand when Magdala was carried, and he was afterwards
succeeded on the Abyssinian throne by a chief who had more than all
his predecessor's vices and none of his virtues. For this
well-managed campaign Sir Robert Napier was raised to the peerage as
Lord Napier of Magdala. The swift success, the brilliant promptitude,
of his achievement are almost painful to recall to-day, in face of
another enterprise for the rescue of a British subject, conducted by
a commander not less able and resolute, at the head of troops as
daring and as enthusiastic, which was turned into a conspicuous
failure by unhappy delayings on the part of the civil authorities, in
the fatal winter of 1884-5.
[Illustration: Mr. Gladstone.]
Turning our eyes from foreign matters to the internal affairs of the
United Kingdom, we see two great leaders, Mr. Disraeli and Mr.
Gladstone--whose "long Parliamentary duel" had begun early in the
fifties of this century--outbidding each other by turns for the
public favour, and each in his different way ministering to the
popular craving for reform. With Mr. Disraeli's first appearance as
leader of the house of Commons, this rivalry entered on its most
noticeable stage; it only really ceased with the life of the
brilliant, versatile, and daring _litterateur_ and statesman who died
as Earl Beaconsfield, not very long after his last tenure of office
expired in 1880. In 1867 Mr. Disraeli, as Leader of the Lower House,
carried a measure for the reform of the franchise in England, and the
year following similar measures with regard to Ireland and Scotland.
In 1869 it was Mr. Gladstone's turn, and he introduced and carried
two remarkable Bills--one for the disestablishment of the Irish
Church, and one for the amendment of land tenure in Ireland, the
latter passing into law in August, 1870. It had long been felt as a
bitter grievance by the mass of Irishmen that the Church established
in their country should be one which did not command the allegiance
of one-sixth of its people and though opinion in England was sharply
divided as to the question of Irish disestablishment, the majority of
Englishmen undoubtedly considered the grievance to be something more
than a sentimental one, and deserving of removal. Another startling
measure of reform was the abolition of purchase in the army, carried
in the face of a reluctant House of Lords by means of a sudden
exercise of royal prerogative under advice of the Government; the
Premier announcing "that as the system of purchase was the creation
of royal regulation, he had advised the Queen to take the decisive
step of cancelling the royal warrant which made purchase legal"--a
step which, however singular, was undoubtedly legal, as was proved by
abundant evidence.
A measure which may not improbably prove to have affected the
fortunes of this country more extensively than any of those already
enumerated was the Education Bill introduced by Mr. Forster in 1870,
and designed to secure public elementary education for even the
humblest classes throughout England and Wales. Hitherto the teaching
of the destitute poor had been largely left to private charity or
piety, and in the crowded towns it had been much neglected, with the
great exception of the work done in Ragged Schools--those gallant
efforts made by unpaid Christian zeal to cope with the multitudinous
ignorance and misery of our overgrown cities. It was very slowly that
the national conscience was aroused to the peril and sin of allowing
the masses to grow up in heathen ignorance; but at last the English
State shook off its sluggish indifference to the instruction of its
poor, and became as active as it had been supine. Mr. Forster's Bill
is the measure which indicates this turning of the tide. We do not
propose now to discuss the provisions of this Act, which were sharply
canvassed at the time, and which certainly have not worked without
friction; but we may say that the stimulus then given to educational
activity, if judged by subsequent results, must be acknowledged to
have been advantageous. The system of schools under the charge of
various religious bodies, which existed before the Education Act, has
not been superseded; that indeed would have been a deep misfortune,
for it is more needed than ever; the masses of the population have
been, to an appreciable extent, reached and instructed; and we shall
not much err in connecting as cause and effect the wider instruction
with the diminution of pauperism and crime which the statistics of
recent years reveal.
The same member who honoured himself and benefited his country by
this great effort to promote the advance of the "angel Knowledge"
also introduced, in 1871, the Ballot Bill, designed to do away with
all the violence and corruption that had long disgraced Parliamentary
elections in this free land, and that showed no symptom of a tendency
to reform themselves. The new system of secret voting which was now
adopted has required, it is true, to be further purified by the
recent Corrupt Practices Bill and its stringent provisions; but no
one, whose memory is long enough to recall the tumultuous and
discreditable scenes attendant on elections under the old system,
will be inclined to deny that much that was flagrantly disgraceful as
well as dishonest has been swept away by the reforming energy of our
own day.
It is to the same period, made memorable by these internal reforms,
that we have to refer the final settlement of the long-standing
controversy between Great Britain and the United States as to the
_Alabama_ claims. We have already referred to these claims and the
peaceful though very costly manner of their adjustment. That the
award on the whole should go against us was not very grateful to the
English people; but when the natural irritation of the hour had time
to subside, the substantial justice of the decision was little
disputed. While England was thus busied in strengthening her walls
and making straight her ways, her great neighbour and rival was
passing through a very furnace of misery. The colossal-seeming
Empire, whose head was rather of strangely mingled Corinthian metal
than of fine gold, and whose iron feet were mixed with miry clay, was
tottering to its overthrow, and fell in the wild days of 1870 with a
world-awakening crash. Again it was a dispute concerning the throne
of Spain which precipitated the fall of a French sovereign. It would
seem as if interference with the affairs of its Southern neighbour
was ever to be ominous of evil to France. The first great Napoleon
had had to rue such interference; it had been disastrous to Louis
Philippe; now Louis Napoleon, making the candidature of Leopold of
Hohenzollern for the Spanish crown a pretext for war with Prussia,
forced on the strife which was to dethrone himself, to cast down his
dynasty, and to despoil France of two fair provinces, Alsace and
Lorraine, once taken from Germany, now reconquered for United
Germany. With that strife, which resulted in the exaltation of the
Prussian King, our Princess Royal's father-in-law, as German Emperor,
England had absolutely nothing to do, except to pity the fallen and
help the suffering as far as in her lay; but it awakened profoundest
interest, especially while the long siege of Paris dragged on through
the hard winter of 1870-71; hardly yet is the interest of the subject
exhausted.
A certain fleeting effect was produced in England by the erection of
a New Republic in France in place of the fallen Empire, while the
family of the defeated ruler--rejected by his realm more for lack of
success than for his bad government--escaped to the safety of this
country from the angry hatred of their own. A few people here began
to talk republicanism in public, and to commend the "logical
superiority" of that mode of government, oblivious of the fact that
practical Britain prefers a system, however illogical, that actually
works well, to the most beautifully reasoned but untested paper
theory. But the wild excesses of the Commune in Paris, outdoing in
horror the sufferings of the siege, quickly produced the same effect
here that was wrought in the last century by the French Reign of
Terror, and English republicanism relapsed into the dormant state
from which it had only just awakened. The dangerous illness that
attacked the Prince of Wales in the last days of 1871, calling forth
such keen anxiety throughout the land that it seemed as if thousands
of families had a son lying in imminent peril of death, showed at
once that the nation was yet loyal to the core. True prayers were
everywhere offered up in sympathy with the mother, the sister, the
wife, who watched at the bedside of the heir to the throne; and when,
on the very anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, the life that
had seemed ebbing away turned to flow upward again; a sort of sob of
relief rose from the heart of the people, who rejoiced to be able, at
a later day, to share with their Queen her solemn act of thanksgiving
for mercy shown, as she went with her restored son, her son's wife,
and her son's sons, to worship and give praise in the great cathedral
of St. Paul's.
Princess Alice, who had shared and softened the grief of her mother
ten years before, had been again at her side during all the
protracted anxiety of this winter, and had helped to nurse her
brother. The Princess's experience of nursing had been terribly
increased during the awful wars, when she had been incessantly busied
in hospital organisation and work, suffering from the sight of
suffering as a sensitive nature must, but ever toiling to lighten it;
and she had come with her children to recover a little strength in
her mother's Highland home. Thus it was that she was found at
Sandringham when her brother's illness declared itself, "fulfilling
the same priceless offices" of affection as in her maiden days, and
endearing herself the more to the English people, who grieved for her
when, in the ensuing year, a mournful accident robbed her of one
darling child, and who felt it like a personal domestic loss when in
1878 the beautiful life ended. Other royal marriages have from time
to time awakened public interest, and one, celebrated between the
Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne, heir of the dukedom of
Argyll, had just preceded the illness of the Prince and was regarded
with much more attention because no British subject since the days of
George II's legislation as to royal alliances had been deemed worthy
of such honour. But not even the more outwardly splendid match
between the Queen's sailor son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and the
daughter of the Czar Alexander, could eclipse in popularity the quiet
marriage, overclouded with sorrow, and the tranquil, hard-working
life of the good and gifted lady who was to die the martyr of her
true motherly and wifely devotion.
[Illustration: Lord Beaconsfield.]
[Illustration: Lord Salisbury.]
From these glimpses of the joys and troubles affecting the household
that is cherished in the heart of England, we return to the more
stormy records of our public doings. A sort of link between the two
exists in the long and very successful tour which the Prince of
Wales, some time after his restoration to health, made of the vast
Indian dominions of the crown. Extensive travels and wide
acquaintance with the great world to which Britain is bound by a
thousand ties have entered largely into the royal scheme of education
for the future King. No princes of England in former days have seen
so much of other lands as the sons of Queen Victoria; and this
particular journey is understood to have had an excellent political
effect.
Mr. Gladstone's five years' lease of power, which had been signalised
by so many important changes, came to an end in 1874, just before the
time when Sir Garnet Wolseley, sent to bring the savage King of
Ashantee to reason, returned successful to England, having snatched a
complete victory "out of the very jaws of approaching sun and fever"
on the pestilent West Coast of Africa in the early days of 1874. The
last Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, who now assumed office, was marked by
several noticeable events: the proclamation of the Queen as "Empress
of India," in formal definite recognition of the new relation between
little England and the gigantic, many-peopled realm which through
strange adventure has come directly under our Sovereign's sway; the
Russo-Turkish war, following on the evil doings in Turkey known as
the "Bulgarian atrocities," and terminating in a peace signed at
Berlin, with which the English Premier, now known as Lord
Beaconsfield, had very much to do; and the acquisition by England of
the 176,000 shares in the Suez Canal originally held by the Khedive
of Egypt--a transaction to which France, also largely interested in
the Canal, was a consenting party. To this period belong the
distressful Afghan and Zulu wars, the latter unhappily memorable by
the tragic fate that befell the young son of Louis Napoleon, a
volunteer serving with the English army. Deep sympathy was felt for
his imperial mother, widowed since 1873, and now bereaved of her only
child; and by none was her sorrow more keenly realised than by the
Queen, who herself had to mourn the loss of the beloved Princess
Alice, the first of her children to follow her father into the silent
land. The death of the Prince Louis Napoleon at the hands of savage
Zulus was severely felt by the still strong Bonapartism of France;
but Englishmen, remembering the early melancholy death of the heir of
the first Napoleon, were struck by the fatal coincidence, while they
could honestly deplore the premature extinction of so much youth,
gallantry, and hope-fulness, cast away in our own ill-starred
quarrel.
An agitation distinctly humanitarian and domestic had been going on
during the early years of this Ministry, which resulted in the
passing of the Merchant Shipping Bill, intended to remedy the many
wrongs to which our merchant seamen were subject, a measure almost
entirely procured by the fervent human sympathy and resoluteness of
one member of Parliament, Samuel Plimsoll; and other measures
belonging to this period, and designed to benefit the toilers of the
land principally, were initiated by the energy of the Home Secretary,
Mr. Cross. But neither the imposing foreign action of Lord
Beaconsfield's Government, nor the domestic improvements wrought
during its period of power, could maintain it in public favour. There
was great and growing distress in the country; depression of trade,
severe winters, sunless summers, all produced suffering, and
suffering discontent. An appeal to the country, made in the spring of
1880, shifted the Parliamentary majority from the Conservative to the
Liberal side. Lord Beaconsfield resigned, and Mr. Gladstone returned
to power.
The history of the Gladstone Ministry does not come well within the
scope of this work. Certain very memorable events must be touched
upon; there are dark chapters of our national story, stains and blots
on our great name, which force themselves upon us. But to follow the
Government through its years of struggle with the ever-growing bulk
of Irish difficulty, and to track it through its various enactments
designed still further to improve the condition of the English
people, would require a small volume to itself. England still
remembers the thrill, half fury, half anguish, which ran through her
at the tidings that the new Chief Secretary for Ireland, charged with
a message of peace and conciliation, had been stabbed to death within
twenty-four hours of his landing on that unhappy shore. She cannot
forego the deep instinctive feeling--so generally manifested at the
time of Lincoln's murder--that the lawless spilling of life for any
cause dishonours and discredits that cause; nor have various
subsequent efforts made to terrorise public opinion here been
differently judged.
But it was a far more cruel shock that was inflicted through the
series of ill-advised proceedings that brought about the great
disaster of Khartoum. Before we deal with these, we must glance at
the African and Afghan troubles, again breaking out and again
quieted, the first by a peace with the Boers of the Transvaal that
awakened violent discussion not yet at an end, and the second, after
some successes of the British arms, by a judicious arrangement
designed to secure the neutrality of Afghanistan, interposed by
nature as a strong, all but insurmountable, barrier between India and
Central Asia. These transactions, the theme of sharp contention at
the time, were cast into the shade by events in which we were
concerned in Egypt, our newly acquired interests in the Suez Canal
making that country far more important to us than of yore. Its
condition was very wretched, its government at once feeble and
oppressive, and, despite the joint influence which France and England
had acquired in Egyptian councils, an armed rebellion broke out,
under the leadership of Arabi Pasha. France declining to act in this
emergency, the troops and fleet of England put down this revolt
single-handed; and in their successes the Queen's third son, Arthur,
Duke of Connaught, took his part, under the orders of Sir Garnet
(afterwards Lord) Wolseley. There were again rejoicings in Balmoral,
where the Queen, with her soldierly son's young wife beside her, was
preparing to receive another bride--Princess Helen of Waldeck, just
wedded to our youngest Prince, Leopold, Duke of Albany.
But this gleam of brightness was destined to be followed by darker
disaster far than that which seemed averted for the moment. A
mightier rebellion was arising in the Soudan, a vast tract of country
annexed by the ambition of Ismail, the former Khedive of Egypt, to be
ill governed by his officials and ravaged by the slave-trade. These
evils were checked for a few years by the strong hand of Charles
George Gordon, already famous through his achievements in China, and
invested with unlimited power by Ismail; but, that potentate being
overthrown, the great Englishman left his thankless post, no longer
tenable by him. Then it seemed that chaos had come again; and a bold
and keen, though probably hypocritical, dervish, self-styled the
_Mahdi_, or Mohammedan Messiah, was able to kindle new flames of
revolt, which burned with the quenchless fury of Oriental fanaticism.
His Arab and negro soldiers made short work of the poor Egyptian
fellaheen sent to fight them, though these were under the command of
Englishmen. The army led by Hicks Pasha utterly vanished in the
deserts, as that of Cambyses did of old. The army under Baker Pasha
did not, indeed, disappear in the same mysterious manner, but it too
was routed with great slaughter.
The English Government, willing to avoid the vast task of crushing
the revolt, had counselled the abandonment of the Soudan, and the
Khedive's Ministers reluctantly acquiesced. But there were Egyptian
garrisons scattered throughout the Soudan which must not be abandoned
with the country. Above all, there was Khartoum, an important town at
the junction of the Blue and the White Nile, with a large European
settlement and an Egyptian garrison, all in pressing danger, loyal as
yet, but full of just apprehension. These troops, these officials,
these women and children, who only occupied their perilous position
through the action of the Khedive's Government, had a right to
protection--a right acknowledged by Her Majesty's Ministers; but they
wished to avoid hostilities. General Graham, left in command on the
Red Sea littoral, was allowed to take action against the Mahdi's
lieutenant who was threatening Suakim, and who was driven back with
heavy loss; but he might not follow up the victory.
[Illustration: General Gordon.]
The English Government hoped to withdraw the garrisons in safety,
without force of arms. They had been for some time urging on the
Khedive that the marvellous influence which Gordon was known to have
acquired in his old province should now be utilised, and that to
_him_ should be entrusted the herculean task of tranquillising the
Soudan, by reinstating its ancient dynasties of tribal chiefs and
withdrawing all Egyptian and European troops and officials. Their
plan was at last accepted; then Gordon, hitherto unacquainted, like
the public at large, with the Government designs, was informed of
them and invited to carry them out. He consented; and, with the
chivalric promptitude which essentially belonged to his character, he
departed the same night on his perilous errand. Passing through
Cairo, he received plenary powers from the Khedive, and went on
almost alone to Khartoum, where he was received with an overflowing
enthusiasm. But, with all his eager haste, he was too late to bring
about the desired results by peaceful means. "He should have come a
year ago," muttered his native well-wishers. Week after week and
month after month, his position in Khartoum became more perilous;
the Mahdi's power waxed greater, and his hordes drew round the city,
which long defied them, while garrison after garrison fell into their
hands elsewhere. It was in vain that General Gordon urged the
despatch of British troops, a few hundred of whom would at one time
have sufficed to turn the tide, and insure success in his enterprise.
They were still withheld; and he would not secure his own safety by
deserting the people whom his presence had induced to stand out
against the impostor and his hosts. The city endured a long, cruel
siege, and fell at last, reduced by hunger and treachery, just as a
tardily despatched British force was making its way to relieve it--a
force commanded by Lord Wolseley, who half a year before had been
protesting against the "indelible disgrace" of leaving Gordon to his
fate. He was not able even to bury his friend and comrade, slain by
the fanatic enemy when they broke into the city in the early morning
of January 26th, 1885.
[Illustration: Duke of Albany. _From a Photograph by A. BASSANO, Bond
Street, W._]
"I have done my best for the honour of our country," were the parting
words of the dead hero. His country felt itself profoundly
dishonoured by the manner in which it had lost this its famous son--a
man distinguished at once by commanding ability, unsullied honour,
heroic valour; a man full of tenderest beneficence towards his
fellows, and of utter devotion to his God; "the grandest figure,"
said an American admirer, "that has crossed the disc of this planet
for centuries." Him England had fatally delayed to help, withheld by
the dread of costly and cruel warfare; and then just failed to save
him by a war enormously costly and cruelly fatal indeed. A general
lamentation, blent with cries of anger, rose up from the land. Her
Majesty shared the common sorrow, as her messages of sympathy to the
surviving relations of Gordon testified. Various charitable
institutions, modelled on the lines which he had followed in his work
among the poor, rose to keep his memory green; and thus the objects
of his Christlike care during his life are now profiting by the
world-famous manner of his death. But there is still a deep feeling
that even time itself can hardly efface the stain that has been left
on our national fame. An English expedition, well commanded, full of
ardour and daring, sent to accomplish a specific object, and failing
in that object; its commander, entirely guiltless of blame, having to
abandon the scene of his triumphs to a savage, fanatic foe as was now
the case--this was evil enough; but that our beloved countryman, a
true knight without fear and without reproach, should have been
betrayed to desertion and death through his own magnanimity and our
sluggishness, added a rankling, poisonous sense of shame to our
humiliation. That the same year saw further electoral privileges
extended to the humble classes in England, beyond what even the last
Reform Bill had conferred, which might prove of advantage afterwards,
but was an imperfect consolation at the time. Another grief fell upon
the Queen in this year in the early death of Leopold, Duke of Albany,
a Prince whose intellectual gifts were nearly allied to those of his
father, but on whom lifelong delicacy of health had enforced a life
of comparative quietude. His widowed bride and infant children have
ever since been cared for tenderly by his royal mother.
[Illustration: Duchess of Albany. _From a Photograph by A. BASSANO,
Bond Street, W._]