“Poor Paddy-Land!”—I—6th Oct. 1894.
Six weeks ago, when I was considering where I should go for my autumn holiday, some remarks of yours decided me “to give poor Paddy-land a turn” (the phrase is not mine, but that of the first housemaid I came across in Dublin). When one has been talking and thinking for the last eight years of little else than that “distressful country,” it certainly seemed a fair suggestion that one might as well go and look at it when one got the chance. So I have scrambled round from Dublin to Kerry, and from Cork to the Giant’s Causeway, and can bear hearty witness to the soundness of your advice. For a flying visit of a few weeks, though insufficient for any serious study of a people or country, may greatly help one in judging both of them from one’s ordinary standpoint at home.
Of course, the first object of an Englishman who has not lost his head must be to ascertain whether the Irish people really long for a separate Parliament, and a severance of all connection with the rest of the Empire. Well, sir, I was prepared to find that the men in the street—car-drivers, boatmen, waiters, and fellow-travellers on the railways—would, to a great extent, adapt their opinions to whatever they might think would please their questioner, but certainly was quite unprepared for the absolute unanimity with which I was assured that Home Rule is dead. It is only the American-Irish, and especially the “Biddys of New York,” so my informants protested, “who want to break up the Union.” I was warned, however, as to the man in the street. “You must remember that our people are full of imagination, and you must take off a large discount from all they tell you; but you’ll always find a groundwork of fact at the bottom of their stories.” A good piece of advice, which a professional friend in Dublin started me with, and which I found to be true enough, except that where local politics or the land came in, the groundwork of fact was apt to be too minute to be easily discerned. Take, as an example, a story which was told me on the spot by a thoroughly trustworthy witness. Towards the end of Mr. Forster’s Chief-Secretaryship a sensation message was flashed to New York that a Government stronghold had been taken by the Invincibles, the garrison having surrendered with all the guns and stores. This announcement produced a liberal response in dollars from the other side, particularly from “the Biddys of New York.” Now for the “groundwork of fact” underlying this superstructure. The Government have, it seems, on their hands a number of Martello towers on the southern coast which are useless for military purposes. A band of some dozen “bhoys,” headed by a notorious Invincible, came out of Cork one summer evening and summoned the garrison of one of these Martello towers. The garrison (an elderly pensioner), who was at tea with his wife and children, wisely surrendered at discretion; whereupon the patriots took possession of the single cannon and some old muskets and ammunition, which latter they carried off next morning, when they abandoned the tower and cannon on the approach of the police. But though the groundwork of fact as to the condition of the Home Rule agitation may be infinitesimal, there is very serious apprehension still on the Land Question, upon which I found it difficult to draw the man in the street. I was fortunate enough, however, to come across several resident landlords and professional men, both Catholic and Protestant, who, one and all, look with the gravest distrust at the operation of recent land legislation. The Commissioners who administer these Acts have, unfortunately, the strongest interest in prolonging the present state of uncertainty. Their appointments will end with the cessation of appeals by tenants for further reductions of rent, which, under the circumstances, does not seem likely to come about before the landlords’ interest has been pared down bit by bit till it touches prairie-value. The present utter confusion and uncertainty is at any rate a striking object-lesson as to the dangers of meddling with freedom of contract by Acts of Parliament.
When I landed in Ireland, I was under the impression—for which I think you, sir, and perhaps the late Lord Beaconsfield, with his dictum about the “melancholy ocean,” were responsible—that there is a note of sadness underlying the superficial gaiety of the Irish character, as is the case with most Celts. Well, whether it be from natural incapacity, and that each observer only brings with him a limited power of seeing below the surface in such matters, in any case I wholly failed to discern any such characteristic in Central or South Ireland, though there may be a trace of it perhaps in the North, where, by the way, they are not Celts. On the contrary, the remark of a friendly and communicative Killarney carman, “Shure, sir, we always try to get on the sunny side of the bush, like the little birds,” seemed to me transparently true. And next to this desire for the sunny side of the bush, a happy-go-lucky, hand-to-mouth temper struck me as the prevailing characteristic, as Sir Walter saw it when he wrote “Sultan Solomon’s Search after Happiness.” Look at the national vehicle, the outside car—far more national and popular than our hansom. Did any race ever invent a conveyance so easy to mount and dismount from, or which offers the same chances of being shot off at every street corner or turn in the road? If any reader doubts, let him go over to the next horse-show at Dublin, and watch the crowd breaking up at the end of the show. The roads into the city are certainly unusually broad, but the sight of a dozen jaunting-cars coming along, two or three abreast, as hard as their horses can trot, the driver lolling carelessly, with a loose rein, on one side, and a couple of Irishmen on the other, is a sight to make the Saxon “sit up,” though he may be accustomed to the fastest and most reckless West End hansoms. Like one of your recent correspondents, I could distinguish natives from visitors, as each of the latter had a tight hold of the bar—a precaution which the native scorned. I managed to extract from an enthusiastic admirer—a young Irish subaltern who had ridden on them all his life—the confession that he had left a car involuntarily (or, Anglid, had been shot out) three times in the last eighteen months; but then, as he explained, he always fell on his feet! I was touched again and again by the almost pathetic craving for English appreciation,—quite as strong, I think, as, and certainly much pleasanter than, that of our American cousins. I was exploring the Killarney Lakes, in the first-rate four-oared boat of a cadet of the MacGrillicuddy family, who, with his English wife, exercises a very delightful hospitality almost under the shadow of “The Reeks,” which bear his name. It was a perfect day, the changing lights and tints on mountains and woods and lakes being more delicately lovely than any I could recall, except, perhaps, at the head of the Lake of Geneva. We had been talking of the Scotch lakes, and I could not help saying, “Why, this beats Loch Katrine and Ellen’s Isle out of the field.”
“Ah,” said our host, with a sigh, “if only Sir Walter Scott had been an Irishman!” and then he went on to speak of the neglect of Ireland by the Royal Family and English governing people—e.g. Lord Beaconsfield had never set foot in her, and Mr. Gladstone only once, for an hour or two, to receive the freedom of Dublin. But why had the Queen made her favourite home in Scotland, and left poor Ireland out in the cold? Why did the English flock to Scotch rivers and moors and golf-links in crowds every autumn when only a stray sportsman or tourist found his way to Killarney or Connemara or Donegal? It was all owing to the Wizard of the North, who had made Scotland enchanted ground.
Without ignoring other and deeper causes, I think one cannot but feel what a difference it would have made if Sir Walter had been Irish. The Siege of Derry is a more heroic and pathetic story than any in Scotch annals of the struggle for the Stuarts, and the genius which has made us intimate friends of the Baron of Bradwardine and Dugald Dalgetty, of Dandie Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Cuddie and Mause Headrigg, and a dozen other Scotch men and women, would surely have found as good materials for character-painting among the Irish peasantry. But the speculation, though interesting, is too big to deal with at the end of a paper.
“Poor Paddy-Land!”—II
I suppose every one expects to find Ireland the land of the unlooked-for. I did, at any rate, but was by no means prepared for several of the surprises which greeted me. For instance, the best arranged, and for its size and scope the most interesting, National Gallery I have ever seen. It is only forty years old (incorporated in 1854), a date since which one would have thought it scarcely possible to get together genuine specimens of all the great schools of art, from the well “picked-over” marts of England and the Continent. But the feat has been accomplished, mainly, I believe, by the entire devotion and fine taste and judgment of the late director, Mr. Henry E. Doyle. His untimely death in the spring of this year has left a blank, social and artistic, which it will be hard to fill; but happily his great work for Irish art was done, and all that his successors will have to do will be to follow his lead faithfully. Irish Art owes much to his family, for he was the son of H. B., and the younger brother of the immortal “Dicky,” while, I believe, Mr. Conan Doyle is his nephew.
But it is not the general collection of pictures, remarkable as that is, which differentiates the Irish from other national galleries known to me. It is the happy arrangement which has set apart a fourth of the whole space for a collection of portraits, and authentic historical pictorial records, comprising not only the portraits of eminent Irishmen and Irishwomen, but also of statesmen and others who were politically or socially connected with Ireland, or whose lives serve in any way to illustrate her history, or throw light on her social or literary or artistic records. I think I may safely venture the assertion—for I spent the greater part of two afternoons in this historical and portrait department—that there is Scarcely a man or woman, from the time of Elizabeth to that of O’Connell and Lord Melbourne, of whom one would be glad to know more, with whom one does not leave it, feeling far better acquainted. And then they are so admirably and often pathetically grouped, e.g. Charles I., Cromwell, and R. Cromwell, on a line, all full of character, and Strafford hard by, with the look of “thorough” on his brow and mouth as no other portrait I have ever seen has given. Then there are “Erin’s High Ormonde,” Sir Walter Raleigh, by Zuccaro, painted between his two imprisonments, and coming down later, Lords Wellesley and Hastings, and groups of great nobles and Lords-Lieutenant. For fighting men, William III. as a boy; Walker, the defender of Derry; the Duke, the Lawrences, Lord Gough, and a score of other gallant Irishmen. The terrible Dean stands out amongst the literary men, and near him Sir R. Steele and Sterne, and (longo intervallo, except on shelves) Tom Moore, Croker, Lever, etc. Then come the “patriots” of all schools: Lord E. Fitzgerald, and Grattan, and E. Hudson, Secretary of the United Irishmen in 1784; Wolfe Tone, and Daniel O’Connell; half a dozen Ponsonbys of different ranks, and several pictures of Burke, one of which especially (said to be by Angelica Kauffmann) is, to my mind, quite invaluable. Burke stands upright, his side-face towards you, sublime, as he looked, I am sure, when he was making his immortal speech at Bristol. By his side, at right angles, so that you get his full face, is Charles Fox, one hand on Burke’s shoulder, the other on a table on which he is leaning. You can hear him saying as plainly as if you were there one hundred years ago, “Now, my dear Edmund, if you say that in the House, you’ll upset the coach.” Fox has evidently dined well, and Burke is fasting from all but indignation. The portraits of women are as interesting, such as Miss Farren, afterwards Lady Derby; Mrs. Norton, by Watts, which is worth a visit to Dublin to see, etc. But I must not run on, and will only note one lesson I carried away. There are two portraits, and three engravings from portraits, by N. Hone, R.A., an Irishman, but one of our original Royal Academicians. You will remember what Peter Pindar says of that painter in his Odes to the Royal Academicians”:—
And as for Mr. Nathan Hone,
In portraits he’s as much alone
As in his landscape stands the unrivalled Claude.
Of pictures I have seen enough,
Vile, tawdry, execrable stuff,
But none so bad as thine, I vow to God.
I have always till now maintained that Peter, with all his cynicism, was the best art critic, the Ruskin, shall we say, of his time. Now I give him up. N. Hone was no doubt quarrelsome and disagreeable, but he was a very considerable portrait-painter.
I had noted Derry as one of the places to be seen on account of the siege, and accordingly went there, to get another startling sensation. Like most other folk, I suppose, I had always looked on the story as interesting and heroic, and had wondered in a vague way how some 30,000 men, commanded by a distinguished French soldier, and a considerable part of them at any rate well-equipped regular troops, could have been kept at bay for ten months by a mere handful of regulars, backed by the ’prentice boys of the town and neighbourhood. Religious zeal was no doubt a strong factor on the side of the town, and Parson Walker, a born leader of men, “with a bugle in his throat,” like “Bobs.” But when one remembers that no provision had been made for a siege, that many of the leading men were for opening the gates, and indeed that the French officers and James’s deputy were actually within 300 yards in their boats, to accept the surrender, when the ’prentices rushed down and shut and manned the gates, and then looks at the scene on the spot, one is really dumbfounded, and wanders back in thought to King Hezekiah and Jerusalem. From the Cathedral, which dominates the city, you can trace distinctly the line of the old walls, and can hardly believe your eyes. The space enclosed cannot be more than a quarter of a mile in length, by some 300 yards in breadth (I could not get exact measurements), and in it, including garrison and the country folk who had flocked in, were more than 30,000 people. It was bombarded for eight months, during at least the last four of which famine and pestilence were raging. No wonder that the parish registers tell of more than 9000 burials in consecrated ground, while “the practice of burial in the backyards became unavoidable!” Where can such another story be found in authentic history? Parson Walker, let us say, fairly earned his monument.
I must own to grievous disappointment as to the farming in Ulster. All through the South and Centre I had seen the hay in the fields in small cocks in September, and the splendid ripe crops of oats and barley uncut, or, if cut, left in sheaf, or being carried in a leisurely fashion, which was quite provoking, while tall, yellow ragweed was growing in most of the pastures in ominous abundance. That will all be altered, I thought, when I cross “Boyne Water.” Not a bit of it! Here and there, indeed, I saw a good rick-yard and clean fields, but scarcely oftener than about Cork or Killarney, and no one seemed to mind any more than the pure southern Celts. One man said, when I mourned over the ragweed three feet or four feet high, that he did not mind it, as it showed the land was good! As to leaving hay in cock, well that was the custom—they would get it into stack after harvest, any way before Christmas; as to dawdling over cutting and carrying, well, with prices at present rates, what use in hurrying? There was a comic song called “Clear the Kitchen,” popular half a century ago, which ran—
I saw an old man come riding by.
Says I, “Old man, your horse will die”;
Says he, “If he dies I’ll tan his skin,
And if he lives I’ll ride him agin.”
It fits the Irish temper, North and South, pleasant enough to travel amongst, but bad, I should think, to live with.
“Panem et Circenses”, Rome, 21 st April 1895.
I have been asking myself at least a dozen times a day during the last fortnight, why Rome should be (to me, at any rate) the city of surprises, far more than Athens or Constantine, for instance, or any other city or scene of world-wide interest in Europe or America. Jerusalem and the Nile cities I have never seen (and fear I never shall now). Surely, to what I take to be the majority of your readers, who have gone through, as I have, the orthodox educational mill—public school and college—precisely the contrary should be true. We spent no small part of from six to ten years of the most impressionable time of our lives in studying the story of the Mistress of the Old World, from Romulus and Remus to the Anto-nines. Even the idlest and most careless of us could scarcely have passed his “greats” without knowing his geography well enough to point out on the map the position of each of the seven hills, the Forum, the Janiculum, the Appian Way, the Arch of Titus, the Colosseum, etc., and must have formed some kind of notion in his own mind of what each of them looked like. At any rate, I had no excuse for not knowing my ancient Rome better than I knew any modern city, both as to its geography and the politics, beliefs, and habits of its citizens; for I was for two years in the pupil-room of a teacher (Bishop Cotton) who spared no pains, not only on the texts of Livy, Horace, Sallust, and Juvenal, and the geography, but in making the Rome of the last years of the Republic and the first Caesars live again for us. For instance, he would collect for us all the best engravings then to be had (it was before the days of photographs) of Rome, and show us what remained of the old buildings and monuments, and where the Papal city had encroached and superseded them; and again, would take infinite pains to explain the changes in the ordinary life of the Roman citizen, which had been creeping on since the end of the third Punic war, when her last formidable rival went down, and the struggle between patrician and plebeian had time and opportunity to develop and work itself out, till it ended in the Augustan age, when the will of the Cæsar remained the sole ultimate law, in Rome, and over the whole Empire. Of course the explanation of the phrase “Panem et circenses,” and the growth of the system, in the shape of public feastings, shows, baths, and other entertainments, with which each successful Tribune or General, as he came to the front, and the Cæsars after them, tried to bribe and sway the mob of the Forum, formed no small part of this instruction. One item of the list will best illustrate my text—that of public baths—which came most directly home to me, as I was devoted to swimming in those days, and so had great sympathy with the poor citizen of Imperial Rome who desired to have baths in the best form and without payment.
I do not know that there is any trustworthy evidence as to the public baths of Rome before Imperial times, but we can estimate pretty accurately how the case stood for the poor Roman in the first and second centuries A.D. The best preserved of these are the Baths of Caracalla, in which sixteen hundred bathers could be accommodated at once. The enclosed area was 360 yards square, or considerably larger than Lincoln’s Inn Fields; but this included a course for foot-races, in which, I suppose, the younger bathers contended when fresh from the delights of hot and cold baths, while their elders looked on from the porticoes adjoining. The bathing establishment proper, however, was 240 yards in length, by 124 yards in width, in which the divisions of the “tepidaria,” “calidaria,” and “frigidaria,” are still confidently pointed out in Baedeker, and attested by guides if you like to hire them. But the part which interested me most, apart from the huge masses of wall still standing, was the depression in the floor, which is said to have been the swimming-bath, and which is at least twice as large as those of the Holborn and Lambeth baths, the two largest in London in my time, put together.
The remains of the walls are just astounding, eight feet and ten feet thick, and (I should say) in several places fifty feet high; the thin Roman bricks, and the mortar in which they are built, as hard as they were in the second century. I wish I could feel any confidence that any of our London brickwork would show as well even a century hence. When the floors were all covered with mosaic pavement, of which small pieces now carefully preserved still remain, and the brickwork of the walls was faced with marble, and the statues which have been found here and removed to museums, still stood round the central fountain and in the courts, my imagination quite fails to picture what the baths must have looked like. But the Baths of Caracalla, though best preserved, are not by any means the largest. Those of Diocletian, on the Quirinal and partly facing the railway station, were almost twice as big, for the circumference of the bath buildings was about 2000 yards, or half as large again as the Baths of Caracalla, while they would accommodate (it is said) three thousand bathers at once. It is even more impossible, however, to reconstruct these baths in one’s fancy than those of Caracalla, for the church of St. Bernardo occupies one domed corner of the area, and a prison another corner; while a convent, with the Church of St. Maria degli Angeli attached—built by Michael Angelo by order of Pius IV.—stands over what was the “tepidarium.” There is still, however, space enough left for the large square, as big as Bedford Square, and surrounded by cloisters said to be also the work of Michael Angelo, in which stand a number of the most interesting statues and busts, and architectural fragments lately exhumed.
I have by no means exhausted the opportunities enjoyed by the Roman citizen under the Antonines for getting a satisfactory, not to say a luxurious, wash in the Roman summer, but must turn aside for a minute to tell you of an interesting little scene which I saw outside on leaving the Baths of Diocletian. Along the bottom of the old ruined wall still standing, and looking as firm as that of Caracalla, for about fifty yards, earth and rubbish has been allowed to accumulate to the height of twelve or fourteen feet. This dirt-heap covers some twenty feet of the open space between the old wall and the footway, and, the face of it having been trampled hard, forms a steep slope, of which the Roman urchin of to-day seems to have taken possession, and thereon thoroughly to enjoy himself after his own fashion. This is a very different way from that of our street-boys, if I may judge by what I saw in passing. A group of some dozen little ragged urchins—four with bare feet—were at high jinks as I came up; and this was their pastime. The biggest of them, a sturdy boy of (perhaps) eleven or twelve, stood at the bottom of the steep slope, facing the wall, with his feet firmly set, and his arms wide open. The rest, who were at the top of the slope, against the wall, ran down one after another and threw themselves into his arms, clasping him round the neck, and getting a good hug before he dropped them. The object seemed to be (so far as I could see) to throw him over backwards, but he stood his ground firmly, only staggering a little once or twice during the two rounds which I was able to watch. I was obliged then to leave, wondering, and debating in my mind what would be the result of such a game if tried by our street boys in a London suburb.
To go back to the Baths, there are remains of three more which must have been no unworthy rivals of Caracalla’s and Diocletian’s—viz. those of Constantine, Agrippa, and Titus. The first were also on the Quirinal, and are said to have occupied the greater part of the present Piazza del Quirinale, including the site of the Royal Palace. But as all that is left of them is a fragment of the old boundary-wall here and there, one can form no notion of their size or shape. One may, however, judge of their character by magnificent colossal marble statues of the “Horse-tamers,” which are known to have stood one on each side of the principal entrance, and are believed to remain almost in the place where they stand to-day. The Baths of Agrippa lay behind the Pantheon, but a fluted column and ruined dome are all that remain of them in the neighbouring streets, “Pumbella” and “Cumbella.” Lastly, there were the Baths of Titus, begun by him in A.D. 80, on the Esquiline, which included the sites of Mæcenas’ Villa and the Golden Palace of Nero, which (I suppose) he must have demolished to make room for them; but the tradition as to these ruins seems even more vague than that of any of the other baths. I think you must allow that so far I have proved my case, that Rome is the city of surprises.
Ever since my “Roman baths’ round,” the contrast of Imperial Rome and our London has been popping up. Why have not we, at any rate, one or two public baths on something like the old Roman scale? Did they really let any Roman citizen bathe free of charge? Could we possibly do that? and how? Well, after all, it only wants a Cæsar to work the “panem et circenses” trick astutely. And have not we got at last our equivalent for Nero or Titus in our County Council? True, our many-headed Cæsar has not the tribute of a conquered world to draw on, or an unlimited supply of prisoners of war, slaves, and poor Christians to set to the work. But has not he the rates of London at his mercy—not a bad equivalent—and the Collectivist Trade-Unionist, who may possibly be relied on to do as fair a day’s work at the scale-wages as the unpaid slave or Christian did for Titus? Well, I do not know that I should protest vigorously—only I am no longer a London ratepayer.
Rome—Easter Day
We get our London papers here as regularly as you do, only forty-eight hours later, and I see that readers at home have been able to follow the course of the services in St. Peter’s and the Roman Churches during Passion Week about as well as we who are on the spot, and so to appreciate the thoroughness which the priesthood, from cardinals downwards, for I am sorry to say the Pope is still unable to take his usual part, throw into the attempt to reproduce the supreme drama of our race, so far as this can be done, day by day, almost hour by hour. I have not, however, noticed any mention of the “Tenebræ” at St. John Lateran, a service of rather more than an hour, from 4.30 to 5.30, on the afternoon of Good Friday, when the last words have fallen from the cross, and Joseph of Arimathæa, with the faithful women, has borne away the scarred and bleeding body of the Lord of Life to his own grave, in which no man has yet lain—
All the toil, the sorrow done,
All the battle fought and won,
as Arthur Stanley says, in one of the noblest hymns in the English language. We had the good fortune the day before to meet one of the Monsignori, an old friend, formerly a hard-working and successful London incumbent, who suggested that we should go, and to whom I shall always feel grateful for the advice. We accordingly were at the door of that splendid, but to my mind too sumptuously decorated church, punctually at 4.30. The procession had already reached the chancel, and were taking their allotted places. Most of your readers will probably be familiar with the church, but for those who are not, I may say that the chancel is wider, I think, than that in any of our cathedrals, and that the whole space from the high altar to the solid marble rails—about three and a half feet high, which divide the chancel from the rest of the church—is open, with the sole exception of the row of stalls which run along each sidewall, and which are reserved for, and were now filled by, priests. For this particular service, however (and for this only, as I was told), a row of chairs was placed just within the chancel-rails, for the Monsignori and other priests of the Pope’s household, who were already seated, all in deep black, with their faces to the altar and their backs to the congregation. They remained seated during the whole service (though several of the priests from the side-stalls stepped down at intervals and took part in the service), thus, it seemed to me, emphasising the division between priests and people, and impressing on us beyond chancel-rails, the fact that we were there rather as sightseers, spectators of a solemn ceremony, than joint-sharers in an act of worship.
When we arrived the service had scarcely commenced, though the organ was pealing solemnly through the vast church; but the whole of the space in front of the chancel-rails was already filled by a dense crowd. Many of those who were in front, close to the chancel-rails, knelt, leaning on the rails, but by no means all, and the rest stood—a noteworthy assembly. For there were at least as many men as women, and of all classes. It is not easy nowadays to recognise rank by dress or bearing; but there were certainly a considerable minority of well-dressed, well-to-do people, mixed with soldiers in half a dozen different uniforms (as I was glad to see), artisans, peasants, men and women in force, the latter generally leading a child or two by the hand, with a sprinkling of young men, preparing, I suppose by their dress, for priests’ orders, who for the most part had books in which they followed the service attentively,—no easy task under the surrounding conditions. For though the front ranks, two or three deep next the chancel-rails, were for the most part stationary, the great mass behind was constantly moving about and talking in low tones,—not irreverently, but rather as they would be in England at any large gathering where they could take no part themselves in the performance, but felt that it was the right thing to be there, and that they must not interfere with the minority, who seemed to understand and appreciate what was going on. I was not one of these latter, as I do not understand music, and had no book of the words; though I was quite sensible that the pathos, chequered with occasional bursts of triumph, and rendered by exquisite tenors and boys’ voices, was equal to any music I had ever heard. Moreover, the sight of the splendidly dressed priests, moving frequently about before the altar, without any reason so far as I could see, and the swinging of censers, the clouds of incense, and gestures to which I could attach no meaning, inclined me to get out of the crowd. With this view I looked about for my companion, who, I found, had managed to reach the altar-rails. So in order that we might be sure to meet at the end of the service, I got quietly back to the door by which we had entered, where I could hear the music and voices perfectly, though out of sight of the chancel. Here I resolved to wait, and at once became much interested in the people who were constantly passing in or leaving the church. Soon I remarked that almost all of the former, especially the peasant men and women with children, turned to the right and disappeared for a minute or two before going on to join the crowd in front of the chancel. So I followed, and can scarcely say how much I was impressed by what I saw. In a small side-chapel, near the entrance, which was their destination, dimly lighted, a crucifix with a life-sized figure of our Lord upon it was lying on a stone couch raised some two feet from the floor. There was no priest in charge, only two bright little choristers (I suppose) in their white gowns; and perfect silence reigned in the chapel by the entrance of which I stood and saw several men and women kneeling. They got up one by one, and approaching the figure dropped again on their knees, and, stooping, kissed, some the nail-prints in the hands or feet, some the spear-wound in the side, but none the face. The most touching sight was the fathers or mothers when they rose from their knees lifting the children and teaching them to kiss the wounds. I stood there for at least twenty minutes, until the end of the service in fact, and must have seen at least a hundred men, women, and children enter. Of these, three only failed to kneel and kiss the cross, the first, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman, leading a restless small lap-dog, which pulled and whined whenever his mistress was not attending to him; the others, two young girls—but quite old enough to have known better—who marched in amongst the kneeling figures, open guide-book in hand, noticed something in the chapel to which it referred, and then marched out. They passed close enough for me to catch a word or two of their talk, which I am glad to say was not English.
As I stood there and watched and listened, the distant voices seemed to be chanting that grand old monk’s-Latin hymn, the “Dies Iræ,” and I fancied (I am afraid it was pure fancy) I could hear:—
Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redeinisti crucem passas,
Tantus labor non sit cassus!
More than once I was haunted by the wish to enter and kneel and kiss the cross, by the side of some poor Italian woman and her child. I wish now that I had, but hope it was a genuine Protestant instinct which hindered me. At any rate I shall never have another chance. This crucifix is only brought out once a year—on Good Friday—and I shall never again be in St. John’s Lateran on that day for the “Tenebræ” service.
JOHN TO JONATHAN
An Address delivered in the Music Hall, Boston, on the 11th of October 1870
This Address is printed precisely as it was spoken, at the request of friends who had read extracts in our newspapers. I am quite aware how superficial it must seem to English readers, and would only remind them that I had no Parliamentary debates, or other documents, to which to refer. I am thankful myself to find that, while there are startling gaps in it, there are no gross blunders as to facts or dates. The kindliness with which it was listened to by the audience, and discussed in the American press, allows me to hope that the time has come when any effort to put an end to the unhappy differences between the two countries will be looked upon favourably in the United States. The true men and women on both sides of the Atlantic feel, with Mr. Forster, that a war between America and England would be a civil war, and believe with him that we have seen the last of civil war between English-speaking men. Both nations are, I hope and believe, for a hearty reconciliation, and it only remains for the Governments to do their part.
Thomas Hughes.
It is with a heavy sense of responsibility, my friends, and no little anxiety, that I am here to-night to address you on this subject. I have been in this country now some two months, and from the day I crossed your frontier I have received, from one end of the land to the other, from men and women whom I had never seen in my life, and on whom I had no shadow of a claim that I could discover, nothing but the most generous, graceful, and unobtrusive hospitality. I am not referring to this city and its neighbourhood, in which all Englishmen are supposed to feel very like home, and in which most of us have some old and dear friend or two. I speak of your States from New York to Iowa and Missouri, from the Canadian border to Washington. Everywhere I have been carried about to places of interest in the neighbourhood, lodged, boarded, and cared for as if I had been a dear relative returning from long absence. However demoralised an Englishman may become in his own country, there is always one plank in his social morals which he clings to with the utmost tenacity, and that is paying his own postage stamps. My hold even on this last straw is sadly relaxed. I am obliged to keep vigilant watch on my letters to hinder their being stamped and posted for me by invisible hands. I never before have so fully realised the truth of those remarks of your learned and pious fellow-citizen, Rev. Homer Wilbur, whose lucubrations have been a source of much delight to me for many years, when he says somewhere, “I think I could go near to be a perfect Christian if I were always a visitor at the house of some hospitable friend. I can show a great deal of self-denial where the best of everything is urged upon me with friendly importunity. It is not so very hard to turn the other cheek for a kiss.” I should be simply a brute if I were not equally touched and abashed by the kindness I have received while amongst you. I can never hope to repay it, but the memory of it will always be amongst my most precious possessions, and I can, at least, publicly acknowledge it, as I do here this evening.
But, my friends, I must turn to the other side of the picture. There is nothing—at any rate, no kind of pleasure, I suppose—which is unmixed. From the deepest and purest fountains some bitter thing is sure to rise, and I have not been able, even in the New World, to escape the common lot of mankind in the Old. Everywhere I have found, when I have sounded the reason for all this kindness, that it was offered to me personally, because, to use the words of some whom I hope I may now look on as dear friends, “We feel that you are one of us.” The moment the name of my country was mentioned a shade came over the kindest faces. I cannot conceal from myself that the feeling towards England in this country is one which must be deeply painful to every Englishman.
It was for this reason that I chose the subject of this lecture. I cannot bear to remain amongst you under any false pretences, or to leave you with any false impressions. I am not “one of you,” in the sense of preferring your institutions to those of my own country. I am before all things an Englishman—a John Bull, if you will—loving old England and feeling proud of her. I am jealous of her fair fame, and pained more than I can say to find what I honestly believe to be a very serious misunderstanding here, as to the events which more than anything else have caused this alienation. You, who have proved your readiness as a people to pour out ease, wealth, life itself, as water, that no shame or harm should come to your country’s flag or name, should be the last to wish the citizen of any other country to be false to his own. My respect and love for your nation and your institutions should be worth nothing to you, if I were not true to those of my own country, and did not love them better. For this reason, then, and in the hope of proving to you that you have misjudged the England of to-day—that she is no longer, at any rate, if she ever was, the haughty, imperious power her enemies have loved to paint her, interfering in every quarrel, subsidising and hectoring over friends, and holding down foes with a brutal and heavy hand, careless of all law except that of her own making, and bent above all things on heaping up wealth—I have consented to appear here tonight. I had hoped to be allowed to be amongst you simply as a listener and a learner. Since my destiny and your kindness have ordered it otherwise, I can only speak to you of that which is uppermost in my thoughts, of which my heart is full. If I say things which are hard for you to hear, I am sure you will pardon me as you would a spoilt child. You are responsible for having taught me to open my heart and to speak my mind to you, and will take it in good part if you do not find that heart and mind just what you had assumed them to be.
I propose then, to-night, to state the case of my country so far as regards her conduct while your great rebellion was raging. In a fight for life, and for principles dearer than life, no men can be fair to those who are outside. The time comes when they can weigh both sides of the case impartially. I trust that that time has now arrived, and that I can safely appeal to the calm judgment of a great people.
It is absolutely necessary, in order to appreciate what took place in England during your great struggle, to bear in mind, in the first place, that it agitated our social and political life almost as deeply as it did yours. I am scarcely old enough to remember the fierce collisions of party during the first Reform agitation, but I have taken a deep interest, and during the last twenty years an active part, in every great struggle since that time; and I say without hesitation, that not even in the crisis of the Free-trade movement were English people more deeply stirred than by that grapple between freedom and law on the one hand, and slavery and privilege on the other, which was so sternly battled through, and brought to so glorious and triumphant a decision, in your great rebellion. There can be, I repeat, no greater mistake than to suppose that there was anything like indifference on our side of the water, and no one can understand the question who makes it. There was plenty of ignorance, plenty of fierce partisanship, plenty of bewildered hesitation and vacillation amongst great masses of honest, well-meaning people, who could find no steady ground on the shifting sand of statement and counter-statement with which they were deluged by those who did know their own minds, and felt by instinct from the first that here was a battle for life or death; but there was, I repeat again, no indifference. Our political struggles do not, as a rule, affect our social life, but during your war the antagonism between your friends and the friends of the rebel States often grew into personal hostility. I know old friendships which were sorely tried by it, to put it no higher. I heard, over and over again, men refuse to meet those who were conspicuous on the other side. Any of you who had time to glance at our papers will not need to be told how fiercely the battle was fought in our press.
It is a mistake, also, to suppose that any section of our people were on one side or the other. Let me say a few words in explanation of this part of the subject. And first, of our aristocracy. I do not mean for a moment to deny that a great majority of them took sides with the Confederates, and desired to see them successful, and the great Republic broken up into two jealous and hostile nations. What else could you expect? Could you fairly look for sympathy in that quarter? Your whole history has been a determined protest against privilege, and in favour of equal rights for all men; and you have never been careful, in speech or conduct, to conciliate your adversaries. For years your papers and the speeches of your public men had rung with denunciations (many of them very unfair) of them and their caste. They are not much in the habit of allowing their sentiments to find public expression, but they know what is going on in the world, and have long memories. It would be well if many of us Liberals at home, as well as you on this side, would remember that in this matter they cannot help themselves. A man in England may be born a Howard, or a Cavendish, or a Cecil, without any fault of his own, and is apt to “rear up,” as you say, when this accident is spoken of as though it were an act of voluntary malignity on his part, and to resent the doctrine that his class is a nuisance that should be summarily abated. So, as a rule, they sided with the rebellion; but that rule has notable exceptions.
There were no warmer or wiser friends of the Union than the Duke of Argyll, Lord Carlisle, and others; and it should be remembered that although the class made no secret of their leanings, and many of them, I believe, subscribed largely to the Confederate loan, no motion hostile to the Union was ever even discussed in the House of Lords. They have lost their money and seen the defeat of the cause which they favoured—a defeat so thorough, I trust, that that cause will never again be able to raise its head on this continent. I believe they have learnt much from the lesson, and that partly from the teaching of your war, partly from other causes to which I have no time to refer, they are far more in sympathy at this time with the nation than they have ever yet been.
Of course, those who hang round and depend upon the aristocracy went with them—far too large a class, I am sorry to say, in our country, and one whose voice is too apt to be heard in clubs and society. But Pall Mall and Mayfair, and the journals and periodicals which echo the voices of Pall Mall, do not mean much in England, though they are apt to talk as though they did, and are sometimes taken at their word.
The great mercantile world comes next in order, and here, too, there was a decided preponderance against you. The natural hatred of disturbances, which dominates those whose main object in life is making money, probably swayed the better men amongst them, who forgot altogether that for that disturbance you were not responsible. The worse were carried away by the hopes of gain, to be made out of the sore need of the States in rebellion, and in defiance of the laws of their own country. But amongst the most eminent, as well as in the rank and file of this class, you had many warm friends, such as T. Baring and Kirkman Hodgson; and the Union and Emancipation Societies, of which I shall speak presently, found a number of their staunch supporters in their ranks. The manufacturers of England were far more generous in their sympathies, as my friend Mr. Mundella, who is present here to-night and was himself a staunch friend, can witness. Cobden, Bright, and Forster were their representatives, as well as the representatives of the great bulk of our nation. I have no need to speak of them, for their names are honoured here as they are at home.
Now, before I speak of your friends, let me first remind you that it is precisely with that portion of the English nation of which I have been speaking that your people come in contact when they are in our country. An American generally has introductions which bring him into relations more or less intimate with some sections of that society to which our aristocracy gives its tone; or he is amongst us for business purposes, and comes chiefly across our mercantile classes. I cannot but believe that this fact goes far to explain the (to me) extraordinary prevalence of the belief here, that the English nation was on the side of the rebellion. That belief has, I hope and believe, changed considerably since the waves of your mighty storm have begun to calm down, and I am not without hopes that I may be able to change it yet somewhat more, with some at least of those who have the patience and kindness to listen to me this evening.
And now let me turn to those who were the staunch friends of the North from the very outset. They were gathered from all ranks and all parts of the kingdom. They were brought in by all sorts of motives. Some few had studied your history, and knew that these Southern men had been the only real enemies of their country on American soil since the War of Independence. Many followed their old anti-slavery traditions faithfully, and cast their lot at once against the slave-owners, careless of the reiterated assertions, both on your side of the Atlantic and ours, that the Union and not abolition was the issue. Many came because they had learned to look upon your land as the great home for the poor of all nations, and to love her institutions and rejoice in her greatness as though they in some sort belonged to themselves. All felt the tremendous significance of the struggle, and that the future of their own country was almost as deeply involved as the future of America. To all of them the noble words of one of your greatest poets and staunchest patriots, which rang out in the darkest moments of the first year of the war, struck a chord very deep in their hearts, and expressed in undying words that which they were trying to utter:—
O strange New World, thet yit wast never young,
Whose youth from thee by gripin’ need was wrung,
Brown foundlin’ o’ the woods, whose baby-bed
Was prowled roun’ by the Injun’s cracklin’ tread,
An’ who grew’st strong thru shifts an’ wants an’ pains,
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains,
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain
With each hard hand a vassal ocean’s mane,
Thou, skilled by Freedom an’ by gret events
To pitch new States ez Old-World men pitch tents,
Thou, taught by Fate to know Jehovah’s plan
Thet man’s devices can’t unmake a man,
An’ whose free latch-string never was drawed in
Against the poorest child of Adam’s kin,—
The grave’s not dug where traitor hands shall lay
In fearful haste thy murdered corse away!
It was in this faith that we took our stand, with a firm resolution that no effort of ours should be spared to help your people shake themselves clear of the dead weight of slavery, and to preserve that vast inheritance of which God has made you the guardians and trustees for all the nations of the earth, unbroken, and free from the standing armies, disputed boundaries, and wretched heart-burnings and dissensions of the Old World. It was little enough that we could do in any case, but that little was done with all our hearts, and on looking back I cannot but think was well done.
There was no need at first for any organisation. Until after the battle of Manassas Junction in 1861, there was scarcely any public expression of sympathy with the rebellion. The Times and that portion of the press which follows its lead, and is always ready to go in for the side they think will win, were lecturing on the wickedness of the war and the absurdity of the rebel States in supposing that they could resist for a month the strength of the North. The news of that first defeat arrived, and this portion of our press swung round, and the strong feeling in favour of the rebellion which leavened society and the commercial world began to manifest itself. The unlucky Trent business, and your continued want of success in the field, made matters worse. We were silenced for the moment; for though, putting ourselves in your places, we could feel how bitter the surrender of the two archrebels must have been, we could not but admit that our Government was bound to insist upon it, and that the demand had not been made in an arrogant or offensive manner. If you will re-read the official documents now, I think that you too will acknowledge that this was so. Then came Mr. Mason’s residence in London, where his house became the familiar resort of all the leading sympathisers with the rebellion. The newspaper which he started, The Index, was full, week after week, of false and malignant attacks on your Government. The most bitter of them to us was the constant insistance, backed by quotations from Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward, that the war had nothing to do with slavery, that emancipation was far more likely to come from the rebels than from you.
“The lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,” and we felt the truth of that wonderful saying. This had been our great difficulty from the first. Our generation had been reared on anti-slavery principles. We remembered as children how the great battle was won in England, how even in our nurseries we gave up sugar lest we might be tasting the accursed thing, and subscribed our pennies that the chains might be struck from all human limbs. Emancipation had been the crowning glory of England in our eyes. But we found that this great force was not with us, was even slipping away and drifting to the other side. It was not only Mr. Mason’s paper, and the backing he got in our press, which was undermining it. The vehement protests of those who had been for years looked on by us as the foremost soldiers in the great cause on your side told in the same direction. I well remember the consternation and almost despair with which I read in Mr. Phillips’ speech in this hall on 20th June 1861, “The Republicans, led by Seward, offer to surrender anything to save the Union. Their gospel is the constitution, and the slave clause their sermon on the mount. They think that at the judgment day the blacker the sins they have committed to save the Union the clearer will be their title to heaven.”
Something must be done to counteract this, to put the case clearly before our people. Mr. Mason and his friends were already establishing a Confederate States Aid Association; it must be met by something similar on the right side. So in 1862 the Emancipation and the Union and Emancipation Societies were started in London and in Manchester, and in good time came Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation to strengthen our hands. The original manifesto of the Emancipation Society said—“To make it clear by the force of indisputable testimony that the South is fighting for slavery, while the North is fully committed to the destruction of slavery, is the principal object for which this society is organised. Its promoters do not believe that English anti-slavery sentiment is dead or enfeebled. They are confident that when the demands and designs of the South are made clear, there will be no danger of England being enticed into complicity with them.” We pledged ourselves to test the opinion of the country everywhere by public meetings, and challenged the Confederate States Aid Association to accept that test. They did so; but I never could hear of any even quasi public meeting but one which they held in England. That meeting was at Mr. Mason’s house, and was, I believe, attended by some fifty persons.
The first step of our societies was to hold meetings for passing an address of congratulation to your President on the publication of the Emancipation proclamation. It was New Year’s Eve 1862. Our address said: “We have watched with the warmest interest the steady advance of your policy along the path of emancipation; and on this eve of the day on which your proclamation takes effect we pray God to strengthen your hands, to confirm your noble purpose, and to hasten the restoration of that lawful authority which engages, in peace or war, by compensation or by force of arms, to realise the glorious principle on which your constitution is founded—the brotherhood, freedom, and equality of all men.” The address was enthusiastically adopted by a large meeting, chiefly composed of working men. It was clear at once that there was a grand force behind us, for we became objects of furious attack. The Times called us impostors, and said we got our funds for the agitation from American sources—the fact being that we always refused contributions from this side. The Saturday Review declared, in one of its bitterest articles, that if anything could be calculated upon as likely to defer indefinitely the gradual extinction of slavery, it would be Mr. Lincoln’s fictitious abolition of it. We were meddlesome fanatics, insignificant nobodies, mischievous agitators. This was satisfactory and encouraging. We felt sure that we had taken the right course, and not a moment too soon. Then came the test of public meetings, which you at least are surely bound to accept as a fair gauge of what a people thinks and wills.
Our first was held on the 29th of January 1863. We took Exeter Hall, the largest and most central hall in London. We did nothing but simply advertise widely that such a meeting would be held, inviting all who cared to come, foes as well as friends. Prudent and timid people shook their heads and looked grave. The cotton famine was at its worst, and tens of thousands of our workpeople were “clemming” as they call it, starving as you might say. Your prospects looked as black as they had ever done; it was almost the darkest moment of the whole war. Even friends warned us that we should fail in our object, and only do harm by showing our weakness; that the Confederate States Aid Association would spare no pains or money to break up the meeting, and a hundred roughs sent there by them might turn it into a triumph for the rebellion. However, on we went,—we knew our own people too well to fear the result. The night came, and familiar as I am with this kind of thing, I have never seen in my time anything approaching this scene. Remember, there was nothing to attract people; no well-known orators, for we always thought it best to keep our Parliament men to their own ground; no great success to rejoice in, for you were just reeling under the recoil of your gallant army from the blood-stained heights of Fredericksburg; no attack on our own Government; no appeal to political or social hates or prejudices; only doors thrown wide open, with the invitation, “Now let Englishmen come forward and show on which side their sympathies really are in this war.” Notwithstanding all these disadvantages the great hall was densely crowded, so that there was no standing room, and the Strand and the neighbouring streets blocked with a crowd of thousands who could find no place, long before the doors were open. We were obliged to organise a number of meetings on the spur of the moment in the lower halls, and even in the open streets. In the great hall—where two clergymen, the Hon. Baptist Noel and Mr. Newman Hall, and I myself, were the chief speakers—as well as in every one of the other meetings, we carried, not only without opposition, but, so far as I remember, without a single hand being held up on the other side, resolutions in favour of your Government, of the Union, and of emancipation. The success was so complete that in London our work was done.
Then followed similar meetings at Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Leeds, in all the great centres of population, with precisely the same result. I don’t remember that the enemy ever even attempted to divide a meeting. The country was carried by acclamation. Our friends in Liverpool wrote with some anxiety as to the state of feeling there, and asked me to go down and deliver an address. I went, and the meeting carried the same resolutions by a very large majority; and those who, it was supposed, came to disturb the proceedings, thought better of it when they saw the temper of the audience, and were quiet. Without troubling you with any further details of our work, I may just add, as a proof of how those who profess to be the most astute worshippers of public opinion changed their minds in consequence of the answer of the country to our appeals, that in August 1863 the Times supported our demand on the Government for the stoppage of the steam-rams.
In addition to this political movement, we instituted also a number of freedmen’s aid associations, in order that those abolitionists in England who were still unable to put faith in your Government might have an opportunity of helping in their own way. These associations entered into correspondence with those on your side, and sent over a good many thousand pounds’ worth of clothing and other supplies, besides money. I forget the exact amount. It was a mere drop in the ocean of your magnificent war charities, but it came from thousands who had little enough to spare in those hard times, and I trust has had the effect of a peace-offering with those of your people who are conversant with the facts, and are ready to judge by their actual doings even those against whom they think they have fair cause of complaint.
So much for what I may call the unofficial, or extraparliamentary, struggle in England during your war. And now let me turn to the action of our Government and of Parliament. I might fairly have rested my case entirely upon this ground. In the case of nations blessed as America and England are with perfect freedom of speech and action within the limits of law—where men may say the thing they will freely, and without any check but the civil courts—no one in my judgment has a right to make the nation responsible for anything except what its Government says and does. But I know how deeply the conduct and speech of English society has outraged your people, and still rankles in their minds, and I wished by some rough analysis, and by the statement of facts within my own knowledge, and of doings in which I personally took an active part, to show you that you have done us very scant justice. The dress suit, and the stomach and digestive apparatus, of England were hostile to you, and you have taken them for the nation: the brain and heart and muscle of England were on your side, and these you have ignored and forgotten.
Now, for our Government and Parliament. I will admit at once, if you please, that Lord Palmerston and the principal members of his Cabinet were not friendly to you, and would have been glad to have seen your Republic broken up. I am by no means sure that it was so; but let that pass. I was not in their counsels, and have no more means of judging of them than are open to all of you. Your first accusation against us is, that the Queen’s proclamation of neutrality, which was signed and published on the 13th of May 1861, was premature, and an act of discourtesy to your Government, inasmuch as your new Minister, Mr. Adams, only arrived in England on that very day. Well, looking back from this distance of time, I quite admit that it would have been far better to have delayed the publication of the proclamation till after he had arrived in London. But at the time the case was very different. You must remember that news of the President’s proclamation of the blockade reached London on 3rd May. Of course, from that moment the danger of collision between our vessels and yours, and of the fitting out of privateers in our harbours, arose at once. In fact, your first capture of a British vessel, the General Parkhill of Liverpool, was made on 12th May. But if the publication of the proclamation of neutrality was a mistake, it was made by our Government at the earnest solicitation of Mr. Forster and other warm friends of yours, who pressed it forward entirely, as they supposed, in your interest. They wanted to stop letters of marque and to legitimise the captures made by your blockading squadron. The Government acted at their instance; so, whether a blunder or not, the proclamation was not an unfriendly act. Besides, remember what it amounted to. Simply and solely to a recognition of the fact that you had a serious war on hand. Mr. Seward had already admitted this in an official paper of the 4th of May, and your Supreme Court decided, in the case of the Amy Warwick, that the proclamation of blockade was in itself conclusive evidence that a state of war existed at the time. If we had ever gone a step further—if we had recognised the independence of the rebel States, as our Government was strongly urged to do by their envoys, by members of our Parliament, and lastly by the Emperor of the French—you would have had good ground of offence. But this was precisely what we never would do; and when they found this out, the Confederate Government cut off all intercourse with England, and expelled our consuls from their towns. So one side blamed us for doing too much, and the other for doing too little—the frequent fate of neutrals, as you yourselves are finding at this moment in the case of the war between Prussia and France.
Then came the first public effort of the sympathisers with the rebellion. After several preliminary skirmishes, which were defeated by Mr. Forster (who had what we lawyers should call the watching brief, with Cobden and Bright behind him as leading counsel, and who used to go round the lobbies in those anxious days with his pockets bulging out with documents to prove how effective the blockade was, and how many ships of our merchants you were capturing every day), Mr. Gregory put a motion on the paper. He was well chosen for the purpose, as a member of great experience and ability, sitting on our side of the House, so that weak-kneed Liberals would have an excuse for following him, and though not himself in office, supposed to be on intimate terms with the Premier and other members of the Cabinet. His motion was simply “to call the attention of the House to the expediency of prompt recognition of the Southern Confederacy.”
It was set down for 7th June 1861, and I tell you we were all pretty nervous about the result. The Spectator, Daily News, Star, and other staunch papers opened fire, and we all did what we could in the way of canvassing; but until the Government had declared itself no Union man could feel safe. Well, Lord John Russell, as the Foreign Minister, got up, snubbed the motion altogether, said that the Government had no intention whatever of agreeing to it, and recommended its withdrawal. So Mr. Gregory and his friends took their motion off the paper without a debate, and did not venture to try any other during the session of 1861. In the late autumn came the unlucky Trent affair, to which I have already sufficiently alluded. Belying on the feeling which had been roused by it, and cheered on by the Mason club in Piccadilly and the Index newspaper fulminations, and by the severe checks of the Union armies, they took the field again in 1862. This time their tactics were bolder. They no longer confined themselves to asking the opinion of the House deferentially. Mr. Lindsay, the great shipowner, who it was said had a small fleet of blockade-runners, was chosen as the spokesman. He gave notice of motion, “That in the opinion of this House, the States which have seceded from the Union have so long maintained themselves, and given such proofs of determination and ability to support independence, that the propriety of offering mediation with a view to terminating hostilities is worthy of the serious and immediate attention of Her Majesty’s Government.” Again we trembled for the result, and again the Government came out with a square refusal on the 18th of July, and this motion shared the fate of its predecessor, and was withdrawn by its own promoters.
Then came the escape of the Alabama. Upon this I have no word to say. My private opinion has been expressed over and over again in Parliament (where in my first year, 1866, I think I was the first man to urge open arbitration on our Government) as well as on the platform and in the press. But I stand here to-night as an Englishman, and say that at this moment I have no cause to be ashamed of the attitude of my country. Two Governments in succession, Tory and Liberal, through Lords Stanley and Clarendon, have admitted (as Mr. Fish states himself in his last despatch on the subject) the principle of comprehensive arbitration on all questions between Governments. This is all that a nation can do. England is ready to have the case in all its bearings referred to impartial arbitration, and to pay whatever damages may be assessed against her without a murmur. She has also agreed (and again I use the language of Mr. Fish) “to discuss the important changes in the rules of public law, the desirableness of which has been demonstrated by the incidents of the last few years, and which, in view of the maritime prominence of Great Britain and the United States, it would befit them to mature and propose to the other states of Christendom.” She has, in fact, surrendered her old position as untenable, and agreed to the terms proposed by your own Government. What more can you ask of a nation of your own blood, as proud and sensitive as yourselves on all points where national honour is in question?
But here I must remind you of one fact which you seem never to have realised. The Alabama was the only one of the rebel cruisers of whose character our Government had any notice, which escaped from our harbours. The Shenandoah was a merchant vessel, employed in the Indian trade as the Sea King. Her conversion into a rebel cruiser was never heard of till long after she had left England. The Georgia was actually reported by the surveyor of the Board of Trade as a merchant ship, and to be “rather crank.” She was fitted out on the French coast, and left the port of Cherbourg for her first cruise. The Florida was fitted out in Mobile. She was actually detained at Nassau on suspicion, and only discharged by the Admiralty Court there on failure of evidence. On the other hand, our Government stopped the Rappahannock, the Alexandra, and the Pampero, and seized Mr. Laird’s celebrated rams at Liverpool, and Captain Osborne’s Chinese flotilla, for which last exercise of vigilance the nation had to pay £100,000.