and follies in Egypt, and though they were always unpopular with the
Liberal Party out of doors, it was curious to observe that the position
of the Government in the House of Commons was stronger at the end of
1882 than it was at the beginning. That this was so was due, I think, in
part to the fact that for the moment we were victorious in Egypt,[37]
and in part to admiration for the vigour with which Lord Spencer was
fighting the murderous conspiracy in Ireland. The Government enjoyed the
dangerous praise of the Opposition; obstruction collapsed; and some new
Rules of Procedure were carried by overwhelming majorities. Here let me
interpolate an anecdote. Mr. M---- L---- was a barrister, an obsequious
supporter of the Government, and, as was generally surmised, on the
lookout for preferment. Mr. Philip Callan, M.P. for County Louth, was
speaking on an amendment to one of the new Rules, and Mr. M---- L----
thrice tried to call him to order on the ground of irrelevancy. Each
time, the Chairman of Committee ruled that, though the Honourable Member
for Louth was certainly taking a wide sweep, he was not out of order.
Rising the third time from the seat Callan said: "I may as well take the
opportunity of giving notice that I propose to move the insertion of a
new Standing Order, which will read as follows: 'Any Hon. Member who
three times unsuccessfully calls another Hon. Member to order, shall be
ineligible for a County Court Judgeship.'" Mr. M---- L---- looked coy,
and everyone else shouted with glee.
The Session of 1883 opened very quietly. The speech from the Throne
extolled the success of the Ministerial policy in Ireland and Egypt, and
promised a series of useful but not exciting measures. Meanwhile the
more active Members of the Liberal Party, among whom I presumed to
reckon myself, began to agitate for more substantial reforms. We had
entered on the fourth Session of the Parliament. A noble majority was
beginning to decline, and we felt that there was no time to lose if we
were to secure the ends which we desired. Knowing that I felt keenly on
these subjects, Mr. T. H. S. Escott, then Editor of the _Fortnightly_,
asked me to write an article for his Review, and in that article I spoke
my mind about the Agricultural Labourers' Suffrage, the Game Laws, the
reform of the City of London, and an English Land Bill. "The action of
the Peers," I said, "under Lord Salisbury's guidance will probably force
on the question of a Second Chamber, and those who flatter themselves
that the Liberal Party will shrink from discussing it will be grievously
disillusioned. Disestablishment, begun in Ireland, will inevitably work
round, by Scotland, to England. And who is to preside over these
changes?"
I returned to the charge in the June number of the _Nineteenth Century_,
and urged my points more strongly. I pleaded for social reform, and for
"a Free Church in a Free State." I crossed swords with a noble Lord who
had pronounced dogmatically that "A Second Chamber is absolutely
necessary." I gave my reasons for thinking that now-a-days there is very
little danger of hasty and ill-considered legislation, and I pointed out
that, when this danger disappears, the reason for a Second Chamber
disappears with it. "But," I said, "granting, for the sake of argument,
that something of this danger still survives, would it not be fully met
by limiting the power of the Lords to a Veto for a year on a measure
passed by the Commons?"
These articles, coupled with my speeches in the House and in my
constituency, gave dire offence to the Whigs; and I was chastened with
rebukes which, if not weighty, were at any rate ponderous. "Not this
way," wrote the _St. James's Gazette_, in a humorous apostrophe, "not
this way, O Junior Member for Aylesbury, lies the road to the Treasury
Bench," and so, indeed, it seemed. But, on returning from an evening
party at Sir Matthew Ridley's, on the 5th of June, 1883, I found a
letter from Mr. Gladstone, offering me the post of Parliamentary
Secretary to the Local Government Board. One sentence of that letter I
may be allowed to quote:
"Your name, and the recollections it suggests, add much to the
satisfaction which, independently of relationship, I should have felt in
submitting to you this request." It was like Gladstone's courtesy to
call his offer a "request."
Thus I became harnessed to the machine of Government, and my friends,
inside the House and out of it, were extremely kind about the
appointment. Nearly everyone who wrote to congratulate me used the same
image: "You have now set your foot on the bottom rung of the ladder."
But my staunch friend George Trevelyan handled the matter more
poetically, in the following stanza:
"As long as a plank can float, or a bolt can hold together,
When the sea is smooth as glass, or the waves run mountains high,
In the brightest of summer skies, or the blackest of dirty weather,
Wherever the ship swims, there swim I."
The part of "the ship" to which I was now fastened was certainly not the
most exalted or exciting of the public offices. The estimation in which
it was held in official circles is aptly illustrated by a pleasantry of
that eminent Civil Servant, Sir Algernon West. When the Revised Version
of the New Testament appeared, Gladstone asked Sir Algernon (who had
begun life in the Treasury), if he thought it as good as the Authorized
Version. "Certainly not," was the reply. "It is so painfully lacking in
dignity." Gladstone, always delighted to hear an innovation censured
(unless he himself had made it), asked for an illustration. "Well," said
West, "look at the Second Chapter of St. Luke. _There went out a decree
from Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed._ Now that always
struck me as a sublime conception--a tax levied on the whole world by a
stroke of the pen--an act worthy of an Imperial Treasury. But I turn to
the Revised Version, and what do I read? _That all the world should be
enrolled_--a census--the sort of thing the Local Government Board could
do. That instance, to my mind, settles the question between Old and
New."
But in the office thus contemned by the Paladins of the Treasury, there
was plenty of interesting though little-observed work. In the autumn of
1883 I undertook, in conjunction with the President of the Board, a
mission of enquiry into the worst slums in London. There is no need to
recapitulate here all the horrors we encountered, for they can be read
in the evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Housing of the
Poor which was appointed in the following year; but one incident made a
peculiar impression on my mind. The Sanitary Officer reported some
underground dwellings in Spitalfields as being perhaps the worst
specimens of human habitation which we should find, and he offered to be
my guide. I entered a cellar-like room in a basement, which, till one's
eyes got used to the dimness, seemed pitch-dark. I felt, rather than
saw, the presence of a woman, and, when we began to talk, I discerned by
her voice that she was not a Londoner. "No, sir," she replied, "I come
from Wantage, in Berkshire." Having always heard of Wantage as a kind of
Earthly Paradise, where the Church, the Sisterhood, and the "Great
House" combined to produce the millennium, I said, involuntarily, "How
you must wish to be back there!" "Back at Wantage!" exclaimed the Lady
of the Cellar. "No, indeed, sir. This is a poor place, but it's better
than Wantage." It was instructive to find this love of freedom, and
resentment of interference, in the bowels of the earth of Spitalfields.
An incident which helps to illustrate Gladstone's personal ascendancy
belongs to this period. Those were the days of agitation for and
against a Channel Tunnel, eagerly promoted by speculative tunnel-makers,
and resolutely opposed by Mr. Chamberlain, then President of the Board
of Trade. Gladstone, when asked if he was for or against the Tunnel,
said very characteristically, "I am not so much in favour of the Tunnel,
as opposed to the opponents of it"; and this of course meant that he was
really in favour of it. About this time I met him at dinner, and after
the ladies had gone, I think we were eight men round the table.
Gladstone began praising the Tunnel; one of the hearers echoed him, and
the rest of us were silent. Looking round triumphantly, Gladstone said,
"Ah, this is capital! Here we are--eight sensible men--and all in favour
of the Tunnel." Knowing that several of us were against the Tunnel, I
challenged a division and collected the votes. Excepting Gladstone and
his echo, we all were anti-tunnelites, and yet none of us would have had
the hardihood to say so.
In this year--1883--Gladstone's Government had regained some portion of
the popularity and success which they had lost; but when the year ran
out, their success was palpably on the wane, and their popularity of
course waned with it. The endless contradictions and perplexities,
crimes and follies, of our Egyptian policy became too obvious to be
concealed or palliated, and at the beginning of 1884 the Government
resolved on their crowning and fatal blunder. On the 18th of January,
Lord Hartington (Secretary of State for War), Lord Granville, Lord
Northbrook, and Sir Charles Dilke had an interview with General Gordon,
and determined that he should be sent to evacuate the Soudan. Gladstone
assented, and Gordon started that evening on his ill-starred errand. In
view of subsequent events, it is worth recording that there were some
Liberals who, from the moment they heard of it, condemned the
undertaking. The dithyrambics of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ drew from
William Cory[38] the following protest:
"January 21, 1884.
"It's really ludicrous--the P. M. G. professing a clearly
suprarational faith in an elderly Engineer, saying that he will
cook the goose if no one interferes with him ... as if he could go
to Suakim, 'summon' a barbarous potentate, make him supply his
escort to Khartoum, and, when at Khartoum, issue edicts right and
left; as if he could act without subaltern officers, money, stores,
gold, etc.; as if he were an _homme drapeau_, and had an old army
out there ready to troop round him, as the French veterans round
Bonaparte at Fréjus."
In Parliament, the principal work of 1884 was to extend the
Parliamentary Franchise to the Agricultural Labourer. A Tory Member said
in debate that the labourers were no more fit to have the franchise than
the beasts they tended; and Lord Goschen, who had remained outside the
Cabinet of 1880 sooner than be party to giving them the vote, used to
say to the end of his life that, if the Union were ever destroyed, it
would be by the agricultural labourers. I, however, who had lived among
them all my life and knew that they were at least as fit for political
responsibility as the artisans, threw myself with ardour into the
advocacy of their cause. (By the way, my speech of the Second Reading of
the Franchise Bill was answered by the present Speaker[39] in his maiden
speech.) All through the summer the battle raged. The Lords did not
refuse to pass the Bill, but said that, before they passed it, they must
see the accompanying scheme of Redistribution. It was not a very
unreasonable demand, but Gladstone denounced it as an unheard-of
usurpation. We all took our cue from him, and vowed that we would smash
the House of Lords into atoms before we consented to this insolent
claim. Throughout the Parliamentary recess, the voices of protest
resounded from every Liberal platform, and even so lethargic a
politician as Lord Hartington harangued a huge gathering in the Park at
Chatsworth. Everything wore the appearance of a constitutional crisis.
Queen Victoria, as we now know, was seriously perturbed, and did her
utmost to avert a rupture between Lords and Commons. But still we
persisted in our outcry. The Lords must pass the Franchise Bill without
conditions, and when it was law, we would discuss Redistribution. A new
Session began on 23rd of October. The Franchise Bill was brought in
again, passed, and sent up to the Lords. At first the Lords seemed
resolved to insist on their terms; then they wavered; and then again
they hardened their hearts. Lord Salisbury reported that they would not
let the Franchise Bill through till they got the Redistribution Bill
from the Commons. Meanwhile, all sorts of mysterious negotiations were
going on between the "moderate" men on both sides; and it was known that
Gladstone dared not dissolve on the old franchise, as he was sure to be
beaten in the Boroughs. His only hope was in the agricultural
labourers. Then, acting under pressure which is not known but can be
easily guessed, he suddenly announced, on the 17th of November, that he
was prepared to introduce the Redistribution Bill before the Lords went
into Committee on the Franchise Bill. It was the point for which the
Tories had been contending all along, and by conceding it, Gladstone
made an absolute surrender. All the sound and fury of the last six
months had been expended in protesting that we could never do what now
we meekly did. It was the beginning of troubles which have lasted to
this day. The House of Lords learned the welcome lesson that, when the
Liberal Party railed, they only had to sit still; and the lesson learnt
in 1884 was applied in each succeeding crisis down to August 1911. It
has always been to me an amazing instance of Gladstone's powers of
self-deception that to the end of his life he spoke of this pernicious
surrender as a signal victory.
Early in 1885, it became my duty to receive at the Local Government
Board a deputation of the Unemployed, who then were beginning to agitate
the habitual calm of the well-fed and the easy-going. It was a curious
experience. The deputation consisted of respectable-looking and
apparently earnest men, some of whom spoke the language of _Alton
Locke_, while others talked in a more modern strain of dynamite, Secret
Societies, and "a life for a life." The most conspicuous figure in the
deputation was an engineer called John Burns,[40] and those who are
interested in political development may find something to their mind in
the report of the deputation in _The Times_ of February 17th, 1885.
There they will read that, after leaving Whitehall, the crowd adjourned
to the Embankment, where the following resolution was carried, and
despatched to the President of the Local Government Board:
"That this meeting of the unemployed, having heard the answer given
by the Local Government Board to their deputation, considers the
refusal to start public works to be a sentence of death on
thousands of those out of work, and the recommendation to bring
pressure to bear on the local bodies to be a direct incitement to
violence; further, it will hold Mr. G. W. E. Russell and the
members of the Government, individually and collectively, guilty of
the murder of those who may die in the next few weeks, and whose
lives would have been saved had the suggestion of the deputation
been acted on.
(Signed) JOHN BURNS, _Engineer_.
JOHN E. WILLIAMS, _Labourer_.
WILLIAM HENRY, _Foreman_.
JAMES MACDONALD, _Tailor_."
The threats with which the leaders of the Unemployed regaled us derived
a pleasing actuality from the fact that on the 24th of January
simultaneous explosions had occurred at the Tower and in the House of
Commons. I did not see the destruction at the Tower, but I went straight
across from my office to the House of Commons, and saw a curious
object-lesson in scientific Fenianism. In Westminster Hall there was a
hole in the pavement six feet wide, and another in the roof. I had
scarcely done examining these phenomena when another crash shook the
whole building, and we found that an infernal machine had been exploded
in the House of Commons, tearing the doors off their hinges, wrecking
the galleries, and smashing the Treasury Bench into matchwood. The
French Ambassador, M. Waddington, entered the House with me, and for a
while stood silent and amazed. At length he said, "There's no other
country in the world where this could happen." Certainly it must be
admitted that at that moment our detective organization was not at its
best.
However, neither mock-heroics nor actual outrage could obscure the fact
that during the spring of 1885 there Was an immense amount of
unemployment, and consequent suffering, among the unskilled labourers. I
suggested that we should issue from the Local Government Board a
Circular Letter to all the Local Authorities in London, asking them, not
to invent work, but to push forward works which, owing to the rapid
extension of London into the suburbs, were becoming absolutely
necessary. But the President of the Board, a bond slave of Political
Economy, would not sanction even this very mild departure from the
precepts of the Dismal Science. The distress was peculiarly acute at the
Docks, where work is precarious and uncertain in the highest degree.
Some well-meaning people at the West End instituted a plan of "Free
Breakfasts" to be served at the Dock-Gates to men who had failed to
obtain employment for the day. On one of these occasions--and very
pathetic they were--I was the host, and the _Saturday Review_ treated me
to some not unkindly ridicule.
Child of the Whigs whose name you flout,
Slip of the tree you fain would fell;
Your colleagues own, I cannot doubt,
Your plan, George Russell, likes them well,
"What will regain," you heard them cry,
"That popular praise we once enjoyed?"
And instant was your smart reply,
"Free Breakfasts to the Unemployed."
And then, after six more verses of rhythmical chaff, this prophetic
stanza:
And howsoe'er profusely flow
The tea and coffee round the board,
The hospitality you show
Shall nowise lack its due reward.
For soon, I trust, our turn 'twill be,
With joy by no regret alloyed,
To give the present Ministry
A Breakfast for the Unemployed.
The Parliamentary work of 1885 was Redistribution. The principles had
been settled in secret conclave by the leaders on both sides; but the
details were exhaustively discussed in the House of Commons. By this
time we had become inured to Tory votes of censure on our Egyptian
policy, and had always contrived to escape by the skin of our teeth;
but we were in a disturbed and uneasy condition. We knew--for there was
an incessant leakage of official secrets--that the Cabinet was rent by
acute dissensions. The Whiggish section was in favour of renewing the
Irish Crimes Act. The Radicals wished to let it expire, and proposed to
conciliate Ireland by a scheme of National Councils. Between the middle
of April and the middle of May, nine members of the Cabinet, for one
cause or another, contemplated resignation. After one of these disputes
Gladstone said to a friend: "A very fair Cabinet to-day--only three
resignations." Six months later, after his Government had fallen, he
wrote: "A Cabinet does not exist out of office, and no one in his senses
could covenant to call _the late Cabinet_ together." The solution of
these difficulties came unexpectedly. The Budget introduced by Hugh
Childers on the 30th of April proposed to meet a deficit by additional
duties on beer and spirits; and was therefore extremely unpopular.
Silently and skilfully, the Tories, the Irish, and the disaffected
Liberals laid their plans. On Sunday, June 7th, Lord Henry Lennox--a
leading Tory--told me at luncheon that we were to be turned out on the
following day, and so, sure enough, we were, on an amendment to the
Budget moved by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.[41] It was thought at the time
that the Liberal wirepullers welcomed this defeat, as a way out of
difficulties. Certainly no strenuous efforts were made to avert it. The
scene in the House when the fatal figures were announced has been often
described, and in my mind's eye I see clearly the image of Lord Randolph
Churchill, dancing a kind of triumphant hornpipe on the bench which for
five momentous years had been the seat of the Fourth Party. On the 24th
of June Lord Salisbury became Prime Minister for the first time.
The break-up of the Government revealed to all the world the fact that
the Liberal Party was cleft in twain. The Whig section was led by Lord
Hartington, and the Radical section by Mr. Chamberlain. Gladstone did
his best to mediate between the two, and so to present an unbroken front
to the common foe. But the parting of the ways soon became painfully
apparent. The fall of the Government involved, of course, the return of
Lord Spencer from Ireland, and some of his friends resolved, after the
manner of admiring Englishmen, to give him a public dinner. The current
phrase was that we were to "Dine Spencer for coercing the Irish." As he
had done that thoroughly for the space of three years, and, at the risk
of his own life, had destroyed a treasonable and murderous conspiracy,
he was well entitled to all the honours which we could give him. So it
was arranged that the dinner was to take place at the Westminster Palace
Hotel on the 24th of July. Shortly before the day arrived, Mr.
Chamberlain said to me: "I think you had better not attend that dinner
to Spencer. I am not going, nor is D----. Certainly Spencer has done his
duty, and shown capital pluck; but I hope we should all have done the
same, and there's no reason to mark it by a dinner. And, after all,
coercion is not a nice business for Liberals, though we may be forced
into it." However, as I had greatly admired Lord Spencer's
administration, and as his family and mine had been politically
associated for a century, I made a point of attending, and a capital
evening we had. There was an enthusiastic and representative company of
two hundred Liberals. Lord Hartington presided, and extolled Lord
Spencer to the skies; and Lord Spencer justified the Crimes Act by
saying that, when it was passed, there was an organization of thirty
thousand Fenians, aided by branches in Scotland and England, and by
funds from America, defying the law of the land in Ireland. Not a word
in all this about Home Rule, or the Union of Hearts, but we cheered it
to the echo, little dreaming what the next six months had in store for
us.
Though I was thoroughly in favour of resolute dealing with murder and
outrage, I was also--and this was a combination which sorely puzzled
_The Spectator_--an enthusiastic Radical, and specially keen on the side
of social reform. My views on domestic politics were substantially the
same as those set forth with extraordinary vigour and effect in a long
series of speeches by Mr. Chamberlain, who was now unmuzzled, and was
making the fullest use of his freedom. He was then at the very zenith of
his powers, and the scheme of political and social reform which he
expounded is still, in my opinion, the best compendium of Radical
politics; but it tended in the direction of what old-fashioned people
called Socialism, and this was to Gladstone an abomination. One day, to
my consternation, he asked me if it was true that Socialism had made
some way among the younger Liberals, of whom I was then one.
Endeavouring to parry a question which must have revealed my own guilt,
I feebly asked if by Socialism my venerable Leader meant the practice of
taking private property for public uses, or the performance by the State
of what ought to be left to the individual; whereupon he replied, with
startling emphasis: "I mean both, but I reserve my worst Billingsgate
for the attack on private property."
On the 18th of September Gladstone issued his Address to the Electors of
Midlothian--an exceedingly long-winded document, which seemed to commit
the Liberal Party to nothing in particular. _Verbosa et grandis
epistola_, said Mr. John Morley. "An old man's manifesto," wrote the
_Pall Mall_. By contrast with this colourless but authoritative
document, Mr. Chamberlain's scheme became known as "The Unauthorized
Programme," and of that programme I was a zealous promoter.
As soon as the Franchise Bill and the Redistribution Bill had passed
into law, it was arranged that the dissolution should take place in
November. The whole autumn was given up to electioneering. The
newly-enfranchised labourers seemed friendly to the Liberal cause, but
our bewildered candidates saw that their leaders were divided into two
sections--one might almost say, two camps. This was a condition of
things which boded disaster to the Liberal Party; but Gladstone never
realized that Chamberlain was a power which it was madness to alienate.