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TEN ENGLISHMEN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

By James Richard Joy

1902

To
My Daughter
Helen
With Her Father's Love

PREFACE

The object of this work is to set forth with as much clearness as possible the more important facts in the history of England in the nineteenth century. We have chosen to do this through the medium of biography, in the belief that the lives of a few representative men would present better opportunities for interesting and effective treatment than an historical narrative, which must have been encumbered by a mass of detail not capable of effective disposition within the limited space at our command. An introductory chapter serves to give a general view of the course of events and to show the relations of the men and movements which are afterward presented in more detail.

With but one exception our "Ten Englishmen" are men in public life, political or military. Artists, authors, preachers, and scholars were purposely left out of the account, because they are to receive prominence in other parts of the course for which this volume was written. The exception was made in the case of George Stephenson, because the revolution in transportation, due to his improvement of the locomotive engine, has had such a powerful influence upon the industrial development of the nation.

In bringing these great personages before the reader our intention has been quite as much historical as biographical. Each name is linked with some conspicuous problem in statesmanship, and the endeavor has been to set forth the work as well as the workman. It is hoped that the library notes appended to each chapter will be of assistance to the earnest student, in supplementing the meager outlines of this volume with the abundance of personal detail and wealth of dramatic incident which give life and action to history.

The appendix should not be overlooked. Its selections from authentic speeches, letters, dispatches, and other writings bring the reader into touch with the men who made England great.

One word more. Our "Ten" are not necessarily "THE Ten." They are the men whose lives lay in line with the writer's plan. If they serve to accentuate the leading features of the history we are not disposed to argue with those who would present other candidates for the honor of inclusion in the list.

James Richard Joy

Plainfield, N.J., June 4, 1902.

INTRODUCTION

ENGLAND IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The opening of the nineteenth century found England in the midst of a great foreign war, which for almost a generation absorbed the thought and energy of the nation, and postponed for the time the vital questions of economic and political reform which clamored for settlement.

THE STRUGGLE WITH NAPOLEON

The war began in 1793, when the French nation, having overturned its ancient throne, and revolutionized its social and political institutions, set out on a democratic crusade for "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," which involved it in a conflict with the governments of Europe. William Pitt, who had been Prime Minister of George III. since 1783, had twice banded the European states against the French republican armies; but while the English fleets remained masters of the seas, the enthusiasm of the French soldiers, and the genius of their young generals, had thus far proved too strong for the mercenary battalions of despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to May, 1803) was but a delusion. England greeted it with joy and hope, but soon discovered its unreality. From the renewal of hostilities, in May, 1803, until the final triumph of the allies, in 1815, the war resolved itself into a struggle between Napoleon and England. This young Corsican lieutenant had raised himself by sheer force of genius and unscrupulous ambition to absolute power. His scheme for the subjugation of Europe beat down every obstacle except the steady and unbending opposition of England. Pitt, who had withdrawn from the government because of the stupid King's refusal to honor his Minister's pledges of equal rights to the Irish Catholics, was recalled by the universal voice ot the nation to organize the resistance. Napoleon had assembled immense armaments upon the Channel coast of France for a descent on England, and had created a vast flotilla to transport the force to Kent. Great Britain trembled with excited apprehension. Three hundred thousand volunteers offered their services to the government. But, as often in the past, Britain's best defense was her wooden walls, and the sagacity, seamanship, and valor of her sailors, who out- manoeuvered the combined fleets of France and Spain, crushed their power at Trafalgar (October, 1805), and secured the Channel against the invader. Pitt's gold had called into existence a third coalition (England, Russia. Austria, and Sweden), only to see Napoleon hurl it to the ground on the field of Austerlitz (December, 1805). England's isolation seemed as complete as the Emperor's victory. Russia, Austria, and Prussia made humiliating peace with the victor, who carved his conquests into new states and kingdoms. Pitt, who, at the news of Austerlitz, had pointed to the map of Europe with the words "Roll up that map, there will be no use for it these ten years," survived the calamity scarcely a month.

Unable to meet, as yet, the English troops in battle on the land as he had met and defeated those of the Continent, and unequal to England on the seas, Napoleon devised a more insidious plan of campaign. Believing that a "nation of shop-keepers" might be attacked through its trade, he issued from the Prussian capital, in 1806, the famous Berlin Decree, which was the first note of that "Continental System," which was intended to close the ports of Europe to British goods. The British government met this boycott by its "Orders in Council," which placed a blockade upon French ports, and authorized the capture of neutral vessels endeavoring to trade with them. This inconclusive commercial warfare lasted several years, but was far from being successful in its object of ruining England. Indeed, it is said that the most stringent enforcement of the "Decrees" and "Orders" did not prevent the Napoleonic armies from wearing uniforms of English cloth and carrying English steel in their scabbards.

England first began to make head against the French conqueror when that far-sighted minister George Canning sent Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal to take command of the British forces in the Peninsula. Wellesley had recently returned from India, where he had achieved a brilliant reputation for thoroughness of organization, precision of manoeuver, and unvarying success, qualities which at that time were lamentably rare among British generals. In Portugal first, and later in Spain, the sterling qualities of the new commander steadily gained ground for England, driving out the French marshals, and carrying this Peninsular War to a triumphant conclusion by the invasion of France (1814). Created Duke of Wellington for his successes in the Peninsula, Wellesley held command of the allied forces on the Belgian frontier when, on the 18th of June, 1815, they met and routed the French at Waterloo. That day made Napoleon an exile, and "the Iron Duke" the idol of the English lands in which he continued to be the most conspicuous personage for nearly half a century.

THE RESETTLEMENT OF EUROPE

Waterloo brought England into new relations with the nations of Europe. The Congress of Vienna, in which the victors endeavored to restore the damage wrought by the Corsican intruder, added Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and a few less important islands, to the growing colonial empire of Great Britain. The Holy Alliance, which had been suggested by the Czar in 1815, at the friendly meeting of the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian sovereigns at Paris, was in theory a compact between these powerful rulers—"an intimate union on the basis of morality and religion"—but it soon degenerated into an unholy league for the mutual protection of these three despotic dynasties against the dormant forces of constitutional liberty, which began to stir again in every European state as soon as the Napoleonic specter had been laid. The French Revolution had given currency to opinions which no congress of sovereigns could wholly repress, and now the policy of the "Alliance," to strangle all constitutional aspirations and rivet the chains of Bourbonism upon limbs that had once known the bliss of freedom, led to fierce intellectual revolt, and sometimes to physical violence. England had made common cause with Turk and Christian, Kaiser and King, against Napoleon, and for a time her statesmen viewed with complacency the Holy Alliance, so reassuring in its name and so pure in its professions; but when it became evident that this mighty league was to be thrown against every liberty-loving people in the Old World and the New, George Canning broke the irksome bond, and put the land of parliaments and constitutional liberty in its rightful place as the friend of freedom and the foe to the oppressor. It was the spirit if not the voice of Canning which was powerful to save Portugal from the Bourbon, to recognize the independence of the revolted American colonies of Spain, and to restrain the enemies of freedom from handing insurgent Greece back to the Turk. His predecessors had been accustomed to sink the interests and desires of England in regard for what the continental power called "the good of Europe." He was the first statesman of his generation who dared to take an independent position on "European" questions—"to write 'England,'" as he phrased it, "where it had been the custom to write 'Europe.'" The policy which he inaugurated marks a turning- point in the history of British foreign affairs.

Catholic Emancipation

George IV., who had been regent since his father's illness in 1812, reigned in his own name from 1820 to 1830, though his voice in the affairs of state was small indeed. His Ministers, Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, and Wellington, were confronted by serious problems of domestic policy which had sprung up during the long period of foreign wars and partly in direct consequence of those disturbing conditions. The one recurrent question which found definite settlement in this reign was that of Catholic emancipation. The penal laws against Roman Catholics had disgraced the English statute-books for two centuries. On the first of January, 1801, the Legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland had gone into effect under the name of the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament, which had met in Dublin since 1782, went out of existence, and in the place of "Home Rule" Ireland was represented in both houses of the Imperial Parliament at Westminster. Pitt had promised the numerous Catholics of Ireland that the laws which made them ineligible to represent their country in Parliament should be repealed, and had abandoned office in disgust when George III. refused to sanction his project of Catholic emancipation. In 1807 the Whig ministry espoused the same cause, and in turn resigned because of the opposition of the Crown. In Daniel O'Connell the cause at length found a spokesman whose eloquence, wit, and talent for "agitation" soon combined his Irish partisans into "The Catholic Association." Working in conjunction with the Whigs of England, O'Connell's followers formed a body which could not be neglected. Soon after Canning's untimely death the Duke of Wellington had taken office. He was a Tory, with all the prejudices of that political faith deepened by his birth and training as an Irish Protestant, but the agitation had reached such proportions that he saw in it a menace of civil war, to avoid which he was willing to abandon his most cherished opinions on the Catholic question. Accordingly, in 1829, the Iron Duke faced about and brought in the bill which, becoming a law by Whig and Canningite votes, admitted Roman Catholics to Parliament, and to civil rights only a little short of complete. But instead of removing the Irish question from politics, it was only prepared for more strenuous presentation in a new guise, for O'Connell was returned to Parliament at the head of some fifty Catholic members to agitate for Irish independence.

RAILWAYS

The perfection of the steam locomotive and the inception and marvelous development of the system of steam railway transportation marked the second quarter of the century. The name of the Stephensons, father and son, is inseparably connected with this work which has affected so deeply the economic and social life of the nation, and has contributed in a thousand indirect ways to the expansion and consolidation of the empire. It has been said that in 1825 the traveler from London to Rome went no faster than the courier of the Caesars, eighteen hundred years before. Thanks to George Stephenson's inventive genius, the traveler of today consumes scarcely more time between London and Peking.

THE REFORM OF PARLIAMENT

The reform of Parliament was the next question to come up for settlement. In 1830 representation in the House of Commons still remained upon a basis which had been established centuries before. Meantime the distribution of the voting population had been totally transformed. The most populous shires had no more seats than the least of all. There were decayed boroughs which had dwindled in population until but a handful of voters remained, yet these "rotten" boroughs retained their right to choose one or more members of Parliament, while the great modern manufacturing towns and seaports were totally unrepresented. The agitation for parliamentary reform, which rose in the middle of the eighteenth century, was directed against the sale of seats in the rotten boroughs, and the shameless bribery. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham had predicted reform or revolution. His son, the younger Pitt, had proposed remedies, but the deluge which overwhelmed the government of France in the closing years of the century stiffened English conservatism for a century against any radical political change. Meanwhile the rapid industrial expansion of the kingdom, with its unprecedented increase of population, and the sudden growth of insignificant hamlets into teeming factory towns, had emphasized the injustice of existing arrangements. Earl Grey, who had been an advocate of reform for forty years, and Lord John Russell, who had championed the cause for a decade, were united in the Whig ministry which succeeded Wellington in 1830. Supported by a tremendous popular demand which seemed to stir the nation to its depths they brought in their first bill in 1831. It prevailed in the Commons by a bare majority, but the Tory House of Lords threw it out. This action by the privileged class was a signal for an indignant outburst from the nation. The "Radicals," as the advanced Whigs were already beginning to be called, did not conceal their lack of respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House with new peers created expressly to vote for reform. The threat sufficed. Wellington and the most stern and unbending Tories absented themselves from the decisive division, and allowed the Reform Bill to become a law in June, 1832.

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORMS

Great things were expected of the first Parliament which was chosen on the basis of the new law. The seats gained by the disfranchisement of the small and corrupt boroughs were distributed to new constituencies in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, and the other modern cities. The more populous counties were subdivided into districts, and the divisions received additional representation. The franchise had also been extended and based upon a moderate property qualification. The result was, that the center of political power passed from the nobility and landed gentry, with whom it had resided for centuries, and came to the farmers and shop-keepers, the so-called middle class, lying between the ancient aristocracy of birth and landed possessions and the still unenfranchised masses of mill operatives and agricultural laborers. That the new Parliament would show a new temper and be dominated by new ideas was but natural. But those who inferred from the bitterness of the struggle for reform that the nation was on the verge of an abyss into which the Lords and the Crown should shortly topple, greatly deceived themselves.

THE POOR LAWS

The reformed Parliaments devoted themselves to certain long- deferred and intensely practical reforms which were social and economic in their nature, leaving the constitution alone for the next twenty years. In these Parliaments and ministries for the next forty years the Whig party usually had the upper hand. In 1834 Parliament revolutionized the system of public relief to the needy which had existed for fifty years, to the extreme demoralization of the poorer working-classes and the frustration of really benevolent purpose. The old law had assumed that each parish owed every native a living. A sliding scale was accordingly provided by which, as the rate of wages declined, the parish should pay to the workman enough to bring his receipts up to the standard amount. Employers took advantage of this system cut wages to a minimum, the parish making up the difference. Another mischievous clause increased the pauper's dole in proportion to the number of his children, with the direct result of early and improvident marriages. To put it bluntly, children were bred for the bounty. The number of persons receiving parish aid was enormously increased. The self-respect of the poor was destroyed, and the poor-rate became a burden of millions of pounds annually upon the treasury. The act of 1834 put an end to these abuses by restricting outdoor relief to the aged and destitute, and requiring all other paupers to go to the union workhouse. Within two years the poor-rate was diminished fully one-third.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY

In 1834 slavery was abolished throughout the British dominions. The earnest labors of the Abolitionists, Clarkson, Wilberforce, Macaulay, and others, had secured the abolition of the slave trade thirty years before (1807), but the united opposition of the colonial planters to a reform which would deprive them of the services of their chattel laborers postponed the consummation of the humanitarian measure. The reformed Parliament proved less sensitive to the planters' arguments. It destroyed the system forever, making a cash compensation to the owners.

A third question, on which Earl Grey's ministry took high moral ground, was a redress of another of the ancient wrongs of Ireland. The Church of England was by law established in that most distressful country, and the people, though mostly Roman Catholics, were under the necessity of paying tithes for the support of a church which they detested, and which indeed, in a large part of the island, had no existence except for purposes of taxation. The Irish protest, as has often been the case, took the form of violence and outrage, the so-called "Tithe War," which postponed rather than hastened the redress of their grievance. But in 1835 the ministry of Lord Melbourne relieved the peasants of this part of their many burdens.

ACCESSION OF VICTORIA

The name of Lord Melbourne has been kept green not only by the Australasian metropolis, but by the fact that it was his duty as Prime Minister to announce to the Princess Alexandrina Victoria the fact—to her so momentous—that her uncle, William IV., was dead (June 20, 1837), and that she, a girl of eighteen, was Queen of England. Victoria, as she was known thenceforward, lived to see the dawn of the twentieth century, to witness the enormous development of the British empire in population, wealth, and power, and it is perhaps not too much to say, to win all hearts among her subjects by the simplicity, purity, and strength of her character. Had she displayed the stubborn stupidity of her grandfather, George III., or the immorality of some of his sons, it is not rash to believe that the tide of radicalism might have thrown down all barriers and swept away the throne on the flood of democracy. By grace of character she was a model constitutional sovereign, and her benign reign, the longest in English annals, contributed more than the policy of any of her ministers to make the monarchy popular and permanent.

The first decade of the Victorian era witnessed three great agitations, two of which ended in fiasco and the third in a triumph which wrought tremendous changes in the kingdom. "Chartism," "Repeal," and "Free Trade" were the three topics on which the thought of multitudes was engaged.

CHARTISM

Chartism was the name applied to the agitation in favor of a statement of principles called "The People's Charter." The six points of Chartism were: (l) annual Parliaments, (2) salaries for members, (3) universal suffrage, (4) vole by ballot, (5) abolition of property qualification for membership in the House of Commons, and (6) equal electoral districts. The demand came from the workingmen, who were dissatisfied because the Reform Bill of 1832 had stopped short of their political stratum. The Chartists copied the method of agitation which O'Connell had employed in extorting Catholic emancipation. Monster meetings, mile-long petitions, copious effusions of printer's ink and oratory, and a National Charter Association were a part of the machinery. In 1848, when the prevalent hard times increased the restless discontent of the masses, the movement culminated in a vast assembly on Kennington Common. A respectful half-million were to march to Westminster and lay their demands, the six points backed by six million signatures, before the Commons. The year 1848 was one of widespread discontent, the revolution year of the century, and the authorities took pains to guard the peace of London with especial care, even Wellington being called into service to direct the military. But nine-tenths of the mob failed to put in appearance, and the monster petition turned out to be a monstrous and clumsy fraud. Nothing came of it at the moment. The return of better times took the heart out of the agitation, and the progress of orderly political development gradually incorporated three of the Chartist points in the law of the land without seriously affecting the constitution.

O'CONNELL AND REPEAL

The second popular war cry was "Repeal." In this agitation, again O'Connell's was the chief personage, and his eloquence the chief factor. It was in effect another phase of the Irish demand for Home Rule. Since the first day of the new century Ireland had been, for legislative purposes, a part of the United Kingdom. It was the act which had established this "Legislative Union" and abolished the Irish Parliament which O'Connell was determined to repeal. All that monster meetings, soul-moving oratory, secret associations, printer's ink, could do to influence the government by parliamentary manoeuver, demonstration of popular feeling, intimidation, and threats of insurrection was done. As a member of Parliament, and the dictator to his "tail" of half a hundred Irish members, the silver-tongued "Irish tribune" exerted a considerable political power so long as parties were somewhat evenly divided so as to make his support desirable. But when, in 1841, the Tories came back into office under Sir Robert Peel, backed by a strong majority, this influence declined. The arrest of O'Connell, in 1843, for treasonable utterances, discredited him with his following, which soon fell apart-the more determined section to carry Ireland's cause to the extreme of violent outbreak, the milder partisans to await a more opportune moment to press their agitation for Home Rule.

THE REPEAL OF THE CORN LAWS

The names of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden are indissolubly connected with the legislation which repealed the "Corn Laws" and placed English commerce upon the basis of free trade—Cobden as the theorist and untiring agitator, whose splendid talents were unsparingly devoted to preparing public opinion for the economic revolution, and Peel as the protectionist Prime Minister, who was open-minded enough to become convinced of his error in persisting in the policy in which he had been trained. The necessity for a change of commercial policy grew out of the altered conditions in the nation. The agricultural England of the eighteenth century had in a generation been transformed into a hive of manufacturing industry. The rapid adoption of steam power and improved machinery in England on the one hand, and the paralysis of industry on the Continent during the Napoleonic wars, had wrought the change, while the commercial marine, guarded by her powerful navy, had brought the carrying trade of the world under her flag. The weakest point in the English system was the protective tariff, which lay heaviest on imports of grain—or "corn," to use the insular term. The Corn Laws were a body of legislation enacted from time to time by Parliaments which were controlled by the great land-owning interests. The land-owner, whose income was derived chiefly from rents upon agricultural lands, consistently favored a scale of tariffs which would maintain the price of cereal grains at the highest figure. At the close of the great war (1815) the nation was confronted with business disaster. "War prices" for grain fell rapidly, the markets were stocked with more manufactured goods than impoverished Europe could absorb, while the English labor market was glutted by the influx of several hundred thousand able-bodied soldiers and sailors in quest of industrial employment. As early as 1821 Mr. Huskisson, a cabinet colleague of Mr. Canning, had endeavored to lighten the burden of British manufactures by reducing the import duties upon the raw material used by the English looms. He was for getting at the root of the matter and disposing of the Corn Laws, so as to provide "free food" as well as "free raw materials," but his Tory companions believed that such legislation would vote the bread out of their own mouths. In 1838 an Anti-Corn Law Association was formed at Manchester. Under the direction of Richard Cobden, a young and successful manufacturer, who had become the most ardent of free traders, a league of similar clubs was organized throughout the country, and through it an agitation unsurpassed in the history of politics was prosecuted until its object was attained. In Parliament he became one of the most effective orators, and the chief target of his argument was Peel, the leader of the protectionists. In 1845-46 a more powerful argument than Cobden's was thrown into the scale. The failure of the Irish potato crop, the sole food supply of that unhappy island, "forced Peel's hand." In the face of two-thirds of his own party, in opposition to his own life-long political creed, he gave notice as Prime Minister that he should introduce a bill for the immediate reduction and ultimate repeal of the laws which were responsible for the high price of food. He had become a convert to free trade, and was ready to carry it into practice. The young Disraeli as the representative of the Protectionist element of his party, lashed the premier in the speech which first gave him a following in the Parliament that he was soon to control. But enough Peelites followed their leader into the camp of the free traders to carry the bill. The Corn Laws disappeared from the statute-book.

HUMANITARIAN LEGISLATION

The sudden and enormous expansion of English industry in the early part of the century brought special hardship to several classes in the community. The substitution of the factory system for cottage industry destroyed home life for thousands of families, and the pressure of poverty and the greed of manufacturers ground the poor mill operatives between the upper and nether millstones. To Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, more than to any other is due the persistent investigation and disclosure which aroused the public mind to the prevailing conditions in mine and factory where hours of labor were excessive, and where women and children were subjected to degrading tasks and brutal treatment. The Factory Law and kindred legislation since 1830 are the fruits of the beneficent and untiring labors of the Earl.

PALMERSTON AND FOREIGN RELATIONS

The era which had been marked by such political, social, and economic reforms and agitations came to a close in the middle of the century. The Whigs came into power in Parliament in 1846 for a long term. Foreign affairs supplied the most notable topics for the next twenty years. The foreign minister during much of this time was Lord Palmerston. He it was who piloted the nation without disaster through the rocks of 1848-51, when thrones were toppling in every European kingdom, and England was being appealed to for help against despot and democrat.

THE EASTERN QUESTION

The "Eastern Question" now came up. The Czar of Russia, an object of suspicion to England, because of his rivalry with her for the possession of India, endeavored to secure from the Sultan of Turkey official recognition of his government as the legitimate protector of Christians in the Ottoman empire. Such a responsibility would have afforded many opportunities for interfering in Turkish affairs. France opposed the demand, and Palmerston placed England on the side of Napoleon III., against the Czar, who had invaded Turkey in pursuance of his design to annex a large part of her European provinces, and advance his position toward Constantinople. The Crimean War which followed (1854-56) at least checked Russia for the time. It was the only European war in which England had borne arms since Waterloo. But in Asia and Africa the Queen's troops had found almost continual employment along the frontiers of the now vastly extended empire. In 1857 Persia had to be chastised for edging toward India by way of the Afghan possessions. Russia had been at the Shah's elbow. In 1856, and repeatedly until 1860, the British fleets were battering open the ports of China and extorting trade concessions. But the most memorable war in the imperial history of these years was within the borders of the empire, though in a distant land. This was the Sepoy Rebellion or Indian mutiny of 1857.

THE GREAT SEPOY MUTINY

The British possessions in India had been more than doubled in extent since the opening of the century. In 1833 the trade monopoly of the East India Company had been broken, but its civil and military servants continued to administer the government. Their ability was displayed especially in the rapidity with which they were extending British authority over the native states when the outbreak came. A conspiracy was laid among the Sepoys, the native soldiers in the regiments of "John Company." as the great corporation was called in Asia. To their private grievances was added the false report that the company intended to force them into Christianity by serving out to them cartridges which would defile them, neat's tallow for the Hindoo venerator of the sacred cow, and hog's lard for the Mohammedan hater of swine! In May, 1857, the mutiny burst into flame. The Sepoys slaughtered their officers and many other Europeans, and restored the heir of the ancient race of kings to the throne of his fathers at Delhi. Here and there, at Cawnpore and Lucknow, a few British troops defended themselves and the refugees against the hordes of bloodthirsty rebels. The "Massacre of Cawnpore" and "the Relief of Lucknow," phrases which have passed into history, suggest the fate of the two beleaguered garrisons. The rebellion was over in a twelve- month, smothered in its own blood. Close upon its suppression came the death of the East India Company, abolished by act of Parliament in 1858. Since that year the crown has ruled the Indian realm through a Secretary of State for India, residing in London, and a Viceroy holding court at Calcutta. From the defeat of the mutineers, in 1859, to his own death, in 1865, Lord Palmerston managed to save the nation from being embroiled to the fighting-point in the perpetual quarrels of Europe. Italy fought and won her liberty from the Austrian; Poland rose against the Russian; Denmark had her damaging Schleswig-Holstein War with Prussia and Austria. English sympathies were strongly enlisted in all these troubles, but Palmerston would not allow her to proceed to the point of breaking the peace. From 1861 to 1865, while the Civil War was being fought out in America, his government was prompt to recognize the belligerent status of the Confederacy, and to favor the South by allowing privateers like the "Alabama" to be built and manned in English ports. But the actual break with Mr. Lincoln's government did not come, and the old Whig statesman lived to see the South overpowered.

Through the middle reaches of the century the political power in England remained for the most part in the hands of the Whig, latterly called Liberal, ministries. The impulse for reform— political, economic, and social—had spent itself before 1850, and the older statesmen who guided the public policies had no sympathy with the demands for radical legislation, church disestablishment, universal suffrage, and what not, which came up from many parts of the nation. With the death of Palmerston, and the retirement of Russell, a new era was inaugurated, and new actors stepped to the front of the stage.

GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI

At the head of the Liberals was William Ewart Gladstone, who in his younger days had followed his master, Peel, out of the old Tory lines into the camp of the free traders, and had been Russell's chief lieutenant, and Palmerston's financial minister for the last half-dozen years. He was a man of splendid intellectual power, sterling morality, an adept at parliamentary management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep conviction that it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what he conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and overcame by political moves which were little short of genius, the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have transformed Conservatism, giving it a new rallying cry, and inscribing great achievements upon its banner.

LIBERAL REFORMS

"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings," Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's direction which he would have accounted passing strange. Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst abuses in the army by abolishing the purchase system, under which a junior officer was accustomed to buy his promotion by compensating his seniors, a practice which had closed the higher grades to men of small means. The extension of the suffrage to the agricultural laborers was finally reached by his Reform Bill of 1884, the last class being thus admitted to the body politic.

THE CAUSE OF IRELAND

But it was to the grievances of Ireland that Gladstone bent the readiest ear, and it was upon that reef that his political career made shipwreck at the last. In his first ministry he undertook and carried the disestablishment of the Irish Church, by which the Irish Catholics were relieved of an odious burden. His Irish Land Act of 1870 aimed to give the tenant-farmer certain valuable rights in the land which he rented. The result was rather to redouble the cry against "landlordism," with its corollary of agrarian crime. A second Land Act (1881) provided a land court for adjusting rents. Instead of quieting the disorders this indulgent legislation was the signal for a fresh outburst of crime. The Irish Land League was organized to secure the abolition of landlordism, and when the Irish leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, was imprisoned he exhorted the tenants to cease paying rent altogether until the government should grant all their demands. The Liberals were forced for the moment to use strong measures to restore order to Ireland, but the Home Rule party in Parliament, skillfully led by Mr. Parnell, continued to embarrass legislation and obstruct the ordinary functions of government. In April, 1886, Mr, Gladstone, having become Prime Minister for the third time, asked Parliament to grant home rule to Ireland through an Irish Parliament sitting at Dublin. Parnell and his following supported the measure, but the Liberal party was rent in twain. Lord Hartington, Joseph Chamberlain, John Bright, and others of less note, deserted their old chief. Enough of these "Liberal Unionists" seceded to defeat the bill. In August, 1892, the aged Liberal chieftain again carried the elections and took the seals of office for the fourth time. Home Rule was again the principal plank in his platform, and all the energies of the "Grand Old Man" were mustered to carry a new law differing somewhat from the bill of 1886. Though it passed the Commons (301 to 267) it was thrown out by the Lords by 419 to 41, and his successor, Lord Rosebery, had no mind to renew the contest.

The Gladstonian foreign policy was such as might have been expected from a leader whose motto was "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform." It was never aggressive, and in the opinion of many, it was lacking in the assertion of British rights. Thus, in 1871, when Russia refused to be bound longer by the treaty stipulations forbidding her to maintain a war fleet on the Euxine, Mr. Gladstone did not hold her to her engagement. In England it was thought to be a sign of weakness in his government to allow the "Alabama" and "San Juan Boundary" questions to be settled by arbitrators instead of by diplomacy or a show of force. In 1881, when the Boers of the Transvaal had worsted the British at Majuba Hill, they received from Gladstone an honorable peace instead of extermination. The abandonment of the Egyptian Soudan, in 1883, which carried with it the massacre of General Gordon, at Khartoum, was perhaps the heaviest load that the Gladstonian foreign policy ever had to bear.

DISRAELI AND IMPERIALISM

Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman, "the first was the conception of England as an imperial world- power, interested in European politics, but still more interested in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses." In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark," in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers, and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy, instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888, making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt in 1888.

It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War (1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had contributed so effectively.

AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS

The century closes upon another England than that which was struggling against Napoleon at its dawn. Instead of the "right little tight little island," a compact and self-contained nation, it is now the head of an empire comparable in extent and population with no other since the Rome of Augustus. Canada, Federal Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa form a Greater Britain, while the subject lands and islands dot the globe. The problem which confronts the English at the end of the century is not whether they can hold their own against a foreign power as in the days of Waterloo, but whether all these British commonwealths can be made to work together in some sort of federal union, or whether the present ties are to dissolve or snap asunder and girdle the globe with independent states like the American republic, where each may be free to develop under its peculiar conditions the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race.

QUESTIONS FOR REVIEW

1. How was England situated at the opening of the nineteenth century? 2. What did the names Hohenlinden, Trafalgar, and Austerlitz mean to England? 3. Sum up briefly the career of Wellesley. 4. How did Canning's policy mark a turning-point in British foreign affairs? 5. What was the result of the Catholic agitation? 6. How did the locomotive influence England's empire? 7. How was Parliament changed by the Reform Bill? 8. What changes in the Poor Laws were at once undertaken? 9. What action regarding slavery and Irish taxation? 10. What was the Chartist agitation? 11. Describe the agitation for "repeal." 12. Why did the Corn Laws become intolerable? 13. What reforms were wrought through the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury? 14. Through what foreign complications did England pass under Palmerston? 15. What important abuses were corrected under Gladstone's leadership? 16. Describe his dealings with the Irish question. 17. How were certain great foreign matters dealt with by his government? 18. What brilliant foreign achievements were accomplished by Disraeli? 19. What is England's problem in the twentieth century?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HISTORY OF ENGLAND DURING THE THIRTY YEARS' PEACE. By Harriet
Martineau.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND SINCE 1815. By Spencer Walpole.
THE HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES. By Justin McCarthy.
ENGLAND IN THE XIXTH CENTURY. By Elizabeth Wormely Latimer.
THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS. Edited by Henry Reeve.
HISTORY OF THE CHARTIST MOVEMENT. By R. G. Gammage.
THE REIGN OF QUEEN VICTORIA. Edited by T. Humphrey Ward.
HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By W. N. Molesworth.