became almost guilty of partisanship in espousing the popular cause. The air was indeed full of such schemes, and it is hardly a breach of confidence now to say that but for the risk of incurring the reproach of infecting England with German ideas, the Court would have marched in advance of its advisers. It was generally believed at this time that the Queen and Prince Albert were first struck with the inadequacy of the provision made in England to mitigate the painful chancefulness of life among the artisan classes. It has been, in fact, supposed that it was in a special sense for her Majesty’s perusal that the late Dr. Farr then investigated the problem, from a point of view which was as essentially German as it was antagonistic to the ideas of the English laissez faire school. Our Poor Law, Dr. Farr argued, is really a great scheme for insuring every man’s life against the risk of starvation. In those days to die from starvation was an accident in England. In the countries which were swept by the Revolution, however, to be succoured from death by starvation was the accident. The Poor Law had, therefore, with other influences, saved Society in England. Whether, in these circumstances, it might not be well to develop the beneficent idea underlying it, was a question often thoughtfully pondered in the Royal Family.

For this reason it may not be amiss to call attention to what Dr. Farr laid down for the guidance of those who at this anxious time had the destinies of the people in their hands. He pointed out that “Society without a legal system of relief for destitution can be scarcely said to exist, as it leaves the protection of life against the most imminent calamity unprovided for.”[113] Insecurity of life among the masses, he contended, naturally weakens their instinctive conservatism. It drives them into communism and anarchy, which are the rank and unwholesome outgrowths of a state in which Property is too selfish to appropriate a small portion of its profits as a life insurance premium for Labour—and where the State has not yet discovered that the insurance of the life of all is the insurance of the property of all. The Poor Law to a certain extent made this appropriation. But the objection to it was its cast-iron administration; its indiscriminating application to the good and the bad, the industrious and the idle, the worthy and the worthless. Was it not, then, possible to make Poor Law Relief bear some proportion to the ratepayer’s previous contributions to the Insurance fund against destitution? Could not the whole country be converted into a gigantic Friendly Society, of which the rich should be, so to speak, honorary members, but capable without the least shame or humiliation of becoming benefiting members, should sudden misfortune hurl them from the heights of opulence to the depths of destitution? Many philanthropic firms of employers co-operated at this time with their workmen in founding benefit societies for the purpose of insurance against sickness or accident. Why, it was asked, could they not develop this idea, and insure their workpeople against the consequences of that infirmity which is the result of old age? In other words, could not the Friendly Society be also made a Pension Club? The practical difficulty obviously lay in the complicated account-keeping which was necessary for the success of such schemes, and which private firms could hardly be expected to undertake. It was, however, shown by Dr. Farr, in the letter which has been quoted, and which is one of the most curious and characteristic products of a time of social turmoil, that the Government could alone with advantage receive small deposits of money in the early life of a generation, invest them at compound interest, and pay the accumulated amounts at short intervals to the aged and infirm survivors. Each establishment might, according to Dr. Farr’s idea, organise three insurance funds—a Pension Fund, a Health Fund, and a Life Fund—the premiums to be paid to the Government, who should conduct the whole business for the parties interested on fair and easy terms.

It is curious that though the Chartists and a large number of the Tories—notably the remnants of the “Young England” Party, led by Mr. Disraeli and Lord John Manners—sympathised with these ideas, they were coldly frowned down by the Whigs and the Manchester School of Radicals. The argument against the social reformers was that employers did enough for their “hands” when they bought their labour and paid for it in the open market. It was for the workpeople to spend their money as they pleased—if in insurance against sickness and old age, so much the better; if not, so much the worse. But even in the last case no real harm, it was urged, could come to them, for there was always “the parish” to fall back upon. In a word, Capital argued that it did enough for Labour when it paid wages and poor rates. On the other hand, it might be retorted, that by helping on schemes for promoting the permanent comfort of his workpeople the employer is only paying wages in the way which pays all parties best in the long-run. Such an employer, it might be said, gets the strongest command of the labour market, and the best and most efficient service from his men. His prestige becomes lustrous like that of a general who refuses to desert his wounded on the field where he wins his victorious laurels, or of a conquering king who refuses to let the veterans perish, whose valour has widened the range of his dominion. Often did the Queen and Prince Albert ponder these things in their hearts. Hence their eagerness to seize every opportunity, not of pressing schemes such as these on a Society whose economic prejudices were antipathetic to them, but for stimulating the upper and middle classes in such voluntary movements for ameliorating the lot of Labour, as were possible and practicable in these “bad old times.” It was in this spirit that they even studied the barren statistics of Pauperism, and that their discovery, in 1849, of the fact that the great majority of the poor people in London workhouses had been domestic servants, prompted Prince Albert to stimulate the Servants’ Provident and Benevolent Society to find a remedy for such a distressing state of things. “The appalling pauperism of this class,” as the Prince described it in a memorable speech, he strove to arrest by inducing servants to invest their savings under the Deferred Annuities Act, through the agency of the Society.[114]

On the 18th of March the Princess Louise was born, and on the 13th of May she was baptised in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, being

named after Prince Albert’s mother and the Queen of the Belgians. The Prince himself adapted the music of a chorale he had composed for the Baptismal Service. “The Royal christening,” writes Bishop Wilberforce to Miss Noel, “was a very beautiful sight in its highest sense of that word beauty; the Queen, with the five Royal children around her, the Prince of Wales and Princess Royal hand-in-hand, all kneeling down quietly and meekly at every prayer, and the little Princess Helena alone just standing and looking round with the blue eyes of gazing innocence.” This was the little Princess a peep at whom, Lady Lyttelton says, always cheered her, for she was then “an image of life”—it is to be presumed Lady Lyttelton means child-life—in its prime, with “cheeks like full-blown roses, and her nose like a bud.” This month of May was ostensibly a merry one at Court, though from the correspondence that passed between the Queen and her half-sister, it is quite evident that her Majesty went through the festal pageant of Court balls and Royal birthday fêtes with her heart heavy from the anxieties of the times.

In July the Royal circle was broken up by the departure of Prince

Albert to open the great Agricultural Show at York, where his speech, identifying himself closely with the farming interest, gave the country gentry and husbandmen of England the keenest delight. The Queen again wrote to Stockmar and the King of the Belgians, expressing her personal satisfaction with the Prince’s speeches at York, and her pleasure at seeing him develop high gifts of oratory. The rest of the summer her Majesty and her family spent at Osborne—a little anxious on account of the feeble health of Prince Alfred (Duke of Edinburgh), whose removal to the keen mountain air of the Highlands had been strongly pressed on them by Sir James Clark. Her Majesty then came to town on the 5th of September to prorogue Parliament. The present House of Lords was on that occasion used for the first time, and this fact, together with the interest excited by the appearance before her Senate of almost the only great European Sovereign who at this time dared appear in public, caused enormous crowds to assemble. The Queen was received by the mob who lined the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in a delirium of enthusiastic loyalty, and that she felt grateful for their greeting was evident from the emotion with which she delivered those passages of her Address, in which she referred to the mutual affection and trust that linked Queen and country together in England.

No sooner had this function been discharged than the Royal Family made haste to proceed to the Aberdeenshire Highlands, where, on the recommendation of Sir James Clark, Prince Albert had leased the Balmoral estate from the Earl of Aberdeen. Mountain air, at once dry and keen, was, in Clark’s opinion, essential for the health of the Royal Family, and Balmoral was the driest place in Deeside. Nobody has described this romantic retreat better than the Queen herself. From the hill above the house the view, she says, is charming. “To the left you look to the beautiful hills surrounding Lochnagar, and to the right towards Ballater, to the glen or valley along which the Dee winds, with beautiful wooded hills, which reminded us very much of the Thuringian Forest. It was so calm and so solitary, it did one good as one gazed around, and the pure mountain air was most refreshing. All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils. The scenery is wild and yet not desolate; and everything looks much more prosperous and cultivated than at Laggan.”[115]

The journey northward was made by sea to Aberdeen, and from thence to Balmoral her Majesty met at every stage of the road with the warmest of Highland welcomes. Balmoral has changed much since those days, when it was the loveliest of mountain solitudes. The little whitewashed castle, with its pepper-box turrets, reminded one of the feats of those old Scottish architects who flourished at the period when the baronial wars had ceased, but when the builders had not learnt to adapt their art to peaceful or domestic purposes. It was not till after the fee-simple of the property was bought by the Prince in 1852, that it became transformed and transfigured by “improvements.” The Queen devoted herself to holiday-making after the free and informal fashion that made desolate Ardverikie a terrestrial Paradise. Her winning ways charmed the cottagers and the peasantry, to whom she soon became a veritable Lady Bountiful. As for Prince Albert, sport lightened the anxieties of politics. The vast panorama of mountain, glen, and forest which unfolds itself from the summit of dark Lochnagar invited him to resume the geological studies which in his youth he had pursued with ardour, and the greatest modern master of the science, Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Lyell,[116] was his guest and guide. A pleasing and graphic sketch is given by Sir Charles Lyell of the Royal Family in their Highland home. “At Balmoral, the day I went to dine there,” he writes, “Saturday last, I had first a long walk—Sir James Clark and I—with Mr. Birch and his pupil,[117] a pleasing, lively boy, whose animated description of the Conjurer, or ‘Wizard of the North,’[118] whom they had seen a few days before, was very amusing. ‘He (the Wizard) had cut to pieces mamma’s pocket-handkerchief, then darned it and ironed it, so that it was as entire as ever; he had fired a pistol and caused five or six watches to go through Gibb’s (one of their footmen) head, and all were tied to a chair on Gibb’s other side,’ and so forth; ‘but papa (Prince Albert) knows how all these things are done, and had the watches really gone through Gibb’s head he would hardly have looked so well, though he was confounded.’ Sometimes I walked alone with the child, who asked me the names of plants, and to let him see spiders, &c., through my magnifying-glass; sometimes with the tutor, whom I continue to like the more as I become better acquainted. After our ramble of two hours and a half through some wild scenery, I was sent for to join another party; where I found the Queen, Prince, and Lord John by a deep pool on the river Dee, fishing for trout and salmon. After the Queen had entered the Castle the Prince kept me so long, and we kept one another so late, talking on all kinds of subjects, that a messenger came from her Majesty, saying it was only a quarter of an hour to dinner-time. After the ladies had gone to the drawing-room we had much lively talk, which the Prince promoted greatly, telling some amusing stories himself, and encouraging others by laughing at theirs. Next day I went to church. The prayer for the parish magistracy, Queen, and Royal Family, judges, ministers of religion, Parliament, and the whole nation, was just such as you would have liked, and in excellent taste, with nothing which a Republican, jealous of equality, could, I think, have objected to, and which, I believe, our Sovereign and her husband could thoroughly appreciate the simplicity of. They shoved the box,[119] on the end of a long pole, to the Queen and Prince, and maids of honour, as to all the rest of the congregation, and each dropped in their piece of coin. After church I had much conversation alone with Prince Albert, whose mind is in full activity on a variety of grave subjects, while he is invigorating his body with field sports.” Lyell, who was a very observant man, and an astute judge of character, conceived a very high opinion of the Prince from his conversations with him. After his death, according to Sir Theodore Martin, he wrote a long letter to Mr. John Murray, criticising the Prince’s abilities, and expressing his hope that justice would be done to him in an éloge in the Quarterly.

On the 28th of October the Queen and her retinue left Balmoral for Osborne. On the 9th they left Osborne for London, and when crossing the Solent they saw a boat full of women who had relatives on board the Grampus frigate, then coming into Portsmouth after a cruise in the Pacific, capsized in a squall. Prince Albert gave the alarm, and the Queen writes:—“I rushed out of the pavilion, and saw a man sitting on something which proved to be the keel of a boat. The next moment Albert called out in a horrified voice, ‘Oh, dear, there are more!’ which quite overcame me.” Her Majesty stopped her yacht at once. A boat was lowered, and three women—one still alive—were

rescued. But the sea ran so heavily that Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence refused to let the yacht lie to any longer, and the Queen had to yield to his determination to proceed without waiting for the return of the boat. “It was,” she writes, “a dreadful moment too horrible to describe.... It is a terrible thing, and haunts me continually.”

One more triumph over insular prejudice won by the Court during the year of Revolution remains to be recorded. Prince Albert, very soon after his election as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, alarmed the Colleges by indicating that he had no intention of being merely an ornamental official. His first demand to be supplied with a sketch of the plan of academic study at Cambridge was ominous of interference. At Cambridge everything was at this time sacrificed to mathematical studies, and an idea of the state of mind in which University reformers approached the Prince with suggestions may be found in Dr. Whewell’s liberal proposal, that a century should pass before new discoveries could be admitted into the academic curriculum. Nominally philosophy, literature, and science were included in that curriculum, as the

table of studies prepared by Dr. Philpott for the Prince showed. But there was no denying the truth of his Royal Highness’s trenchant criticism on this document in his letter to Lord John Russell, in which he said that all the activity in these departments was “on paper,” and even if it had been real, the scheme was incomplete. After a long and laborious correspondence with the best authorities on the subject, the Prince succeeded in persuading the University to thoroughly modernise its course of instruction, and his revised plan of studies was triumphantly carried on the 1st of November, 1848. As Punch in a clever cartoon put it, H.R.H. Field-Marshal Chancellor Prince Albert took the pons asinorum after the manner of Napoleon at Arcola.

As winter drew on, the state of Ireland became increasingly distressful, and the confusion on the Continent more and more ominous. In England some faint signs of reviving trade were discernible, but only just discernible. The death of Lord Melbourne, however, on the 24th of November, painfully affected the Queen, whose affection for her first guide in statecraft had never abated. “Truly and sincerely,” she writes in her Diary, “do I deplore the loss of one who was a most kind and disinterested friend of mine, and most sincerely attached to me. He was indeed for the first two years and a half of my reign almost the only friend I had, except Stockmar and Lehzen.” Her last letter to the aged Minister, expressed in terms of simple but touching solicitude, according to his sister, Lady Palmerston, did much to lift from his wearied spirit the cloud of melancholy that had settled on it. Melbourne’s character was rather misunderstood, for his whole life was a conceited protest against affectation. He was one of those who get great amusement out of life by treating it as a comedy, in which even in withered age they persist in playing the rôle of the jeune premier. He toiled hard to persuade Society that he was an elegant idler, and masked his vaulting ambition under the guise of a cynical indifference to worldly pomp and power. His tastes were a little coarse—otherwise his imposture would have been complete, and he would have perhaps realised the “grandly simple ideal” of a perfect aristocratic character, which the Earl of March imputed to George Selwyn. Melbourne’s first impulse was usually to frivolity. But when he saw that business must be attended to, no man could work harder or bring to bear on affairs of State a keener intellect, a more astute judgment, or a craftier scheme of strategy. His handsome person and his charm of manner rendered him in his old age a persona grata at the Court of the Queen, who treated him with filial affection and respect. In him one often fancied the characters of Walpole and Bolingbroke met in combination, and there is a passage in his speech on the Indemnity Bill (11th of March, 1818) which may be cited as strangely appropriate to his career. It is that in which, after expatiating on the advantages which a soldier has whose exploits are performed in the light of day, before his comrades and his foes, and so publicly, that his valour and his virtues cannot be denied or disputed before a world in which they receive bold advertisement, he proceeds to show that it is far otherwise with the politician. “Not so the services of the Minister,” exclaimed Melbourne, with a little sub-acid cynicism; “they lie not so much in acting in great crises, as in preventing those crises from arising; therefore they are often obscure and unknown, subject to every species of misrepresentation, and effected amidst obloquy, attack, and condemnation, whilst in reality—entitled to the approbation and gratitude of the country—how frequently are such services lost in the tranquillity which they have been the means of preserving, and amidst the prosperity which they have themselves created.”

Another stout political chieftain had passed away on the 21st of September, when Lord George Bentinck died suddenly of heart disease. His leadership of the Protectionists had latterly been imprudent and unpopular, and he had indeed thrown it up during the Session, when it was no longer possible to conceal the dissatisfaction which it created among his followers. Lord George Bentinck was an able man, but like Achilles, “iracundus, inexorabilis, acer.” Discredit has recently been cast on his career on the turf, which too late in life he deserted for politics. His indignation at “being sold,” as he phrased it, when Peel abandoned Protection, flung him headlong into the civil strife of the times, with all his prejudices thick upon him, and with a mind ill-equipped by study or training for political controversy or the practice of statecraft. Fury and rancour, and a strange confusion of mind in marshalling his arguments, marked his harangues, and in strategy his impulsiveness and his arrogance often led him into serious errors. Yet he was popular on the whole in the House of Commons, for he was a man of dauntless courage, and was supposed to be guided by honesty of purpose in defending the interests of his order. If he had not been a little too much given to trumpeting his personal integrity, his zeal and self-sacrifice would have been better appreciated by his contemporaries, who till his death did him less than justice.

CHAPTER XX.

DISCONTENTED DEPENDENCIES.

When Parliament met on the 2nd of February, 1849, the condition of England may be described as negatively good. It was not prosperous. It was not prostrate. The commercial and manufacturing interests were rallying, but had not yet recovered from the blows of panic in 1847 and revolution in 1848. The small investors were uneasy about the management of the great railway enterprises which had absorbed their savings. The landed gentry were in a state of feverish apprehension as to the effect of Sir Robert Peel’s fiscal policy, which would come into full operation in 1849. Ireland was still a distressful country—the Poor Law having inflicted a severe blow on Property, without at the same time relieving Pauperism. More legislation, it was felt, was needed to succour the starving Irish, and the sullen discontent of the people, which followed the suppressed rebellion, irritated Englishmen and put the House of Commons in the worst possible temper for initiating remedial

legislation for Ireland. But the Party of Violence in England and Scotland was effectually crushed, and though some sympathy was felt for its misguided leaders, yet everybody rejoiced that the cause of Social Order had triumphed in 1848, and that 1849 found England profoundly tranquil.

The Queen’s Speech referred to the disturbances on the Continent, and to the steps which the British Government, in conjunction with France, had taken to produce a permanent settlement of affairs in Sicily. It touched on the recrudescence of rebellion in the Punjab, suggested a modification in the Navigation Laws, congratulated the country on escaping the shock of revolution, and on signs of returning prosperity. It pointed to an amendment of the Irish Poor Law, and closed with a proud allusion to the devotion of the English people in maintaining the great institutions of their country “during a period of commercial difficulty, deficient production of food, and political revolution.”

Naturally the country Party attacked those portions of the Speech which implied approval of Sir Robert Peel’s Free Trade policy. In both Houses the arguments were that the Government exaggerated the prosperity of the country, that their foreign policy had left them without allies, that the outlook

abroad in Ireland and in India was troublous, and did not justify the large reductions in the estimates which were foreshadowed. The Irish Party in the House of Commons scoffed at the Royal allusions to Ireland, and contended that the insurrection which had been suppressed was a sham one, “got up,” said Mr. Grattan, “to put down Repeal.” Radicals like Mr. Hume attacked the Colonial policy of the Government, and clamoured for the removal of Lord Grey from the Colonial Office, because of certain arbitrary proceedings which he had sanctioned in British Guiana and Ceylon. It was felt that the real object of the Opposition was to inveigle Parliament into giving a hostile vote against Free Trade and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, one paragraph in the Amendment to the Address affirming that the worst Protectionist predictions had been verified. It was also admitted that the policy of the Government had been right in its aim, which was to keep the country out of war, and that this had been attained, in spite of Lord Palmerston’s turbulent methods of diplomacy. The Amendment to the Address was rejected only by a majority of two in the House of Lords, but in the House of Commons Mr. Disraeli was fain to withdraw it. On the 3rd of February, when the Address to the Crown was adopted, Lord John Russell proposed and carried certain Resolutions for facilitating the despatch of public business—to wit, that Bills be read a first time without debate, that when a Bill in Committee was ordered by the House to be taken up again on a particular day, then when that day came the Speaker should leave the Chair without putting any question, and let the House go into Committee without delay; that the amendments on a Bill, reported from Committee of the whole House, should be received without debate. Mr. Milner Gibson vainly endeavoured to induce the House to add another resolution limiting speakers to one hour each, with an exception in favour of Members introducing Bills and Ministers of the Crown replying to attacks. Lord John Russell gave some faint signs of sympathising with this restriction on Parliamentary garrulity, and Mr. Cobden supported the proposal vehemently. But Sir Robert Peel carried the House against it, and Mr. Gibson’s motion was accordingly lost by a vote of 96 to 64.

In the Session of 1848 Ministers were unable to apply their Free Trade policy to the Shipping Trade, owing to Protectionist obstruction. On the 14th of February, 1849, they, however, proposed to repeal the Navigation Laws, which restricted “the free carriage of goods by sea to and from the United Kingdom and the British Possessions abroad.” Power, however, was reserved to the Queen to re-enact the restrictive laws against countries that adopted a commercial policy hostile to British interests. The monopoly of the coasting trade, however, was not completely abandoned. The President of the Board of Trade, Mr. Labouchere, did not venture to propose that foreign ships might trade from port to port as freely as our own. All he said was, that a foreign ship sailing from a British port might in the course of her voyage to foreign parts touch at and trade freely in British ports en route. The Resolution was carried, and a Bill founded on it was brought in on the 9th of March, when it was vigorously opposed by Mr. Herries. The case of the monopolists was sadly damaged by Mr. Gladstone, who showed that with every relaxation of restrictions the English Shipping Trade had increased. The fact was, however, that the question was felt to be no longer arguable. The Navigation Laws were meant to protect the monopoly of English shipowners. Having stripped every other class of Protection, it was absurd to obstruct the perfect working of Free Trade by maintaining Protection for the benefit of the shipowners alone. Moreover, it was necessary to establish a free shipping trade in Canada, to compensate her for the loss of the protective duty on corn. Mr. Labouchere ultimately struck out the clauses relating to the coasting trade for purely fiscal reasons, and a masterly speech from Sir James Graham, on the 23rd of October, carried the third reading of the measure, which crowned the edifice of Free Trade. In the House of Lords the narrow majorities in favour of the Government rendered the last dying struggle of the Protectionists rather exciting. They declared that the Bishops carried the Bill, and the Earl of Winchelsea warned the Prelates that if they voted on secular questions in such a fashion they would be allowed to send only “a chosen few to the Upper House, who would be permitted to speak and vote solely on religious questions. Though the Protectionists were defeated, they were not daunted. Organised under the active and restless leadership of Mr. Disraeli, they harassed the Government at every point. But their grand attack was made on the 8th of March, when Mr. Disraeli brought forward a resolution proposing to throw a portion of local burdens on the Imperial taxation of the country. This proposal he defended as a fair compensation to the agricultural interest for the loss of Protective duties on Corn. Finance was never Mr. Disraeli’s strong point, and, as Mr. Hume observed, it was not easy to see how the farmers would profit by an arrangement, which, by Mr. Disraeli’s own showing, would impose on them an additional income-tax of £6,000,000. Moreover, it was only too obvious that if any relief were granted to the farmers, it would be speedily appropriated by the landlords in the shape of increased rent.

Ireland was quiet, but sullen and disaffected. Though there was no open rebellion in the country, the secret organisation of revolt still existed, and the Home Secretary felt that it would be necessary to renew the Bill suspending the Habeas Corpus Act. Sir George Grey brought forward a motion to this effect on the 6th of February, defending the proposal on the ground that it was purely a precautionary one, and that Lord Clarendon, who thought it necessary, could be trusted to use his powers with discretion. The weakness of the Government lay in their opposition to the Coercion Bill of 1846. Then they turned out Sir Robert Peel by refusing to vote for Coercion unaccompanied by remedial measures. “Where,” asked the Peelites, sneeringly, “are the remedial measures which should accompany this Whig Bill?” Nevertheless, Peel generously supported the Ministry, ostensibly or the ground that Ireland must not be made the battle-ground of Party, really because he was determined, at all costs, to maintain in power a Ministry that would give his fiscal policy a fair trial, as against a Protectionist Ministry, whose primary aim would be to wreck it.

Yet a remedial measure had been introduced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the 7th of February, in a proposal to grant from the Imperial Exchequer £50,000 to thirty distressed Irish Poor Law Unions, of which twenty-one were utterly bankrupt. Most pitiful was the picture which Sir Charles Wood drew of Ireland in moving the grant. The potato crop had again failed. Pauperism had again increased. Ireland was being depopulated, not so much by an emigration, as by an exodus. The landlords were sinking under the poor rates, and their estates, deserted by tenants who ran away without paying rent whenever they disposed of their crops,[120] were in many

places lying waste and desolate. Mr. Hume protested against the never-ending system of grants in aid, but the Government carried their vote in its original form.

On the 1st of March Lord John Russell brought forward another Irish scheme. The Report of the Committee on the Irish Poor Law recommended that each Union should, by a sixpenny rate, raise a general fund for the relief of the poor in Ireland, which should be banked in the name of the Irish Paymaster of the Civil Service, and held at the disposal of Parliament. Lord John moved that the House go into Committee on this proposal on the 1st of March. A project to impose a new national tax on Ireland for

local purposes, without imposing the same in England, was an eccentric one to come from statesmen who regarded the Union as a reality, and not a sham. Logically it was unjust to tax the industry of Ulster in order to provide local grants in aid for Ireland, while the industry of the United Kingdom generally escaped taxation. The proposal was obstructed in various ways, the Ministerial defence being that Imperial taxation fell more lightly on Ireland than on England and Scotland. Money must be found for the relief of Irish pauperism somehow, and if not by this plan, then by an extension of the Income Tax to Ireland, which would be still less popular. The Peelites even were not at one, Lord Lincoln advocating the extension of the Income Tax to Ireland, and Peel himself supporting the rate-in-aid scheme, not because he liked it, but because he believed that after what had been done for her, Ireland ought to make some special exertion to help herself, which would also have the effect of inducing England to co-operate with her in pushing on regenerative measures. Mr. Bright defended the grant-in-aid scheme, declaring, however, that the incurable evils of Ireland were traceable to her misgovernment by her landlords. But it is quite clear that Peel was the only politician on either side of the House who at this crisis had the penetration to see that the ills of Ireland were too desperate to be remedied by a pettifogging system of English doles and grants in aid. He stood alone in seeing that nothing less than a reform going to the root of Irish rural economy, would be of the slightest use, and in his speech he suggested that the best remedy would be to increase facilities for the transfer of land. From his ambiguous language one gathers that he had in contemplation some scheme by which the State should buy up the poverty-stricken tracts and plant them with solvent colonists, the plantations being managed by a Government Commission. As for the people, those who were not needed as labourers might be induced by the Commission to emigrate. Had he combined this project for one to give Ireland tenant-right, and had he persuaded Parliament to accept his ideas, there would probably have been no “Irish problem” to perplex us in the jubilee year of the Queen’s reign. After wearisome debates the proposal of the Ministry was carried in both Houses, Government having made an advance of £100,000 to the impecunious Unions in anticipation of the Bill passing the Lords.

The next Irish measure was Sir John Romilly’s Encumbered Estates Bill, introduced on the 26th of April. The Bill of the preceding Session had failed to work because its machinery—that is, the Court of Chancery—was too cumbrous. Romilly’s idea was to substitute for the Court a Commission, which should conduct the business of land transfer unfettered by the clumsy procedure or the heavy fees of Chancery. His speech was a masterpiece of exposition, and Mr. Bright expressed the prevailing opinion when he said he accepted the Bill as the harbinger of better legislation for Ireland. It passed both Houses without serious opposition.

It has been said that the sudden pressure of the Poor Law on the mortgaged estates of Ireland nearly ruined the Irish gentry. The Queen and Prince Albert were deeply distressed by painful accounts of the sufferings of this class which reached them. The Prince, indeed, drew up a memorandum for Sir George Grey, pointing out very sensibly the injustice of the existing law. A good landlord spent his substance in improving his estate, and in finding or making work for his labourers. A bad landlord kept his money in his pocket, and when his labourers, unable to earn wages, began to starve, he threw them on the rates. But both landlords paid the same poor rate, so that the good landlord not only taxed himself through his improvements to keep his own workmen from idleness, but was taxed through the Union, to support the unemployed workmen of the bad and non-improving landlord. The idea of the Queen and her husband was that the pressure of the rate should be eased on good landlords who made sacrifices to keep their labourers in work and wages. Sir George Grey submitted the project to the Cabinet, and then told Prince Albert that it would have to be abandoned, for nobody could embody it in a practical Bill. This did not show that the idea was bad, but merely that Whig constructive statesmanship at that time was feeble, not to say incompetent. But the glaring fact remained that the application of the Elizabethan Poor Law to Ireland was bringing ruin to the rich, and doing but little to fend off starvation from the poor. Property was simply unable to support the mass of pauperism that was suddenly cast on it for maintenance. Some modifications in the law must be proposed, if the whole system—upheld as it was solely by grants in aid from England—was not to break down completely. Lord John Russell accordingly proposed, on the 26th of April, a Bill to limit the liability of Irish land for poor rates, by fixing a maximum beyond which the rate could not be increased. The proposal was carried in the Commons, but in the House of Lords the maximum rate clause was struck out. This was an infringement of the privileges of the Lower House, for the Peers have no right to alter a Bill sent up by the Commons fixing rates or taxes. Yet it was almost impossible for the Peers to handle any Poor Law Bill without trenching on this privilege, and hence it was proposed that the House of Commons should formally waive its privileges in regard to this Bill in order to let it be set down for reconsideration.[121] Precedents existed in favour of this course, but Sir James Graham very cogently observed that it was bad public policy to be perpetually adding to precedents, waiving the absolute and exclusive right of the Commons to control fiscal legislation, and he ingeniously suggested another way out of the difficulty. This was to throw the Bill out in the meantime, and re-introduce it afresh with the Lords’ Amendments embodied in it. The suggestion was negatived, and the Bill reconsidered, the Lords’ Amendments being for the most part adopted. The failure of the Government to provide a guarantee for meeting any deficit that might exist after a maximum rate had been levied, had proved fatal to the maximum rate clause.

On the 4th of May Ireland again came before the country as the incorrigible mendicant of Parliament. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, having prefaced his proposals with the usual commonplace that “the present desideratum in Ireland was employment,” moved that further advances should be made under the Land Improvement Act to enable employers to provide work for the people. In addition to what still remained to be disbursed by former advances, Sir C. Wood proposed that £300,000 be granted, thus bringing the total available subsidy to £1,252,000. Besides this sum, he proposed to advance £200,000 for the further development of arterial drainage. A feeble protest was made against this fresh development of an eleemosynary policy. The system of permitting Government loans to be jobbed away by the Department of Public Works in Ireland had, it was said, caused a large proportion of the money voted to be absorbed in extravagant official estimates.

But all objections were over-ruled, and Sir C. Wood’s proposal was accepted in the long-run.

Next to Ireland, the burning question of the Session was that of Colonial policy. Most Englishmen were profoundly ignorant about their Colonies. A strong school of politicians, headed by Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden, and after them by Professor Goldwin Smith, taught that the best thing that could be done with a Colony was to get rid of it, as a costly encumbrance, so that Englishmen who were not ignorant were somewhat indifferent about Colonial policy. The result was naturally that the Colonial Office was free to blunder in its Administration without running any great risk of detection or punishment—and it had made affluent use of this privilege. Suddenly, in 1849, England became keenly interested in her distant possessions. Debates on emigration, and the demand for financial retrenchment, had alike stimulated

this interest, and it began to dawn upon the House of Commons that a bad Colonial policy might mean bad Budgets. The first sign of this feeling was given by Mr. Bailie, who in February brought forward a motion for an inquiry into the conduct of the Governments of Ceylon and Guiana. His attack was general as well as particular. In brief, he declared that the Colonial Office oppressed the Colonies and wasted their revenues in extravagant expenditure, and he urged that the time had come for Colonial autonomy. Lord Torrington’s fiscal eccentricities had driven Ceylon to rebellion, which had been suppressed with shocking barbarity. The Colonial Office—in other words, Lord Grey—by opposing financial reforms in Demerara, had rendered it discontented. A feeble Amendment, moved by Mr. Ricardo, extending the scope of the proposed investigation into the means by which the Colonies might best meet the difficulties of the transition from Protection to Free Trade, was all the opposition Mr. Bailie encountered. The attempt to defend the financial maladministration of the Colonies by declaring that it was a corollary of Free Trade failed, and Mr. Bailie’s Committee was appointed. Just before Parliament was prorogued, Mr. Hume drew the attention of the House to the evidence it had then accumulated as to Guiana, and moved that the expenditure of the Colony be reduced, and some measure of autonomy granted to it. The fault with the administration of Demerara was this:—for ten years it had been carried on extravagantly in direct opposition to the views of the elected representatives of the Colonists, who were for a policy of financial retrenchment. The motion was negatived, but the debate on it did good. It is perhaps right to say that the agitation for retrenchment in these Colonies was considerably stimulated by the abolition of Protection. Free Trade cut down the profits of the planters. They in turn angrily demanded that the salaries of Colonial officials should also be docked.

Early in May the Queen was grievously annoyed to learn that the turbulent Canadians were again threatening to rebel. Parliament, therefore, soon found itself discussing a Canadian question.

After the rebellion in Canada, which ended in 1838, a Bill was passed giving compensation to loyal sufferers in Upper Canada. A similar measure was demanded for Lower Canada—the French province—which had been the seat of the insurrection. As it was argued that much, if not most, of the compensation would find its way into rebel hands, the claim was resisted by “the British Party” in the province. But in 1848 the Ministry—a Tory, or “British” Ministry—was ejected. The Governor-General (Lord Elgin) then formed another Cabinet out of the “French Party,” who, of course, brought in and passed an Indemnity Bill for the Lower Province. When Lord Elgin went to the House of Assembly, in Montreal, on the 25th of April, 1849, to give this Bill his sanction, the “British” mob rose in its wrath, and stoned him as he was leaving the building. They then set fire to the House of Assembly itself, and burned it to the ground in a frenzy of loyalty to British interests. Troops were promptly called out, and the disaffected accordingly adopted the less violent course of petitioning the Queen to recall Lord Elgin and veto the obnoxious Bill. The “British Party” gradually cooled down, but throughout the year they remained very sulky, vainly endeavouring to persuade themselves to secede to the United States. The condition of the Colony was, in truth, not such as to stimulate its loyalty. It had lost the benefit which it had enjoyed from privileged access to a protected English market. Its finances were disordered. Its stagnation and decay were in startling contrast to the prosperity and progress of the New England States of the American Republic. The form of its provincial Government was cumbrous, inciting to political feuds; and then—worst of all—in the mother country, Manchester Radicals persistently incited the Canadians to secede, by promulgating the doctrine that British Colonies not only benefited by independence, but were, whilst in the dependent state, a source of trouble and expense to the English taxpayer.

The whole question came before the House of Commons more than once. On the 14th of June the Rebellion Losses Bill was fiercely attacked by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons as a measure for rewarding rebels. Some years afterwards Mr. Gladstone made a kind of apology for his onslaught; but even then he quite misunderstood the true meaning and bearing of Lord Elgin’s policy.[122] Mr. Herries moved an Address calling on the Queen to veto the Bill. For two nights it was attacked; but Sir Robert Peel’s intervention routed the opposition, for he pointed out that the measure could not possibly give compensation, as Mr. Gladstone alleged, to any one who was shown to be a rebel, and that it was only, as Lord Elgin said, the logical sequence of other measures of the sort, which had been passed without opposition. His strongest point, however, was that to reject the Bill would be taken as an insult to the Colony, and an encroachment on its right of self-government. Mr. Herries lost his motion by a majority of 141. In the House of Lords, however, the attack was renewed by Lord Brougham, and but for the timely aid of three proxies the Government would have been beaten by him. The curious thing to note is the calmative influence of this firm, and resolute attitude of the Government and Parliament on the Colony. The Tory Party in Canada up till then had strained every effort, Lord Elgin writes in one of his letters, to drive him to a coup d’état. They had breathed nothing but rebellion and slaughter for months. The moment Parliament gently snubbed them, however, they were quieted as if by magic, and their organs began to write articles declaiming against the practice of abusing the French, with whom, in the long-run, the Tory or English Party were bound to live in amity.

During this crisis nothing could be worthier of the occasion than the courage, the coolness, the dignity, and resolute forbearance of Lord Elgin. As he says in one of his letters, he stood literally alone. He was accused of cowardice because he did not quench the revolt in blood; and even Lord John Russell and Lord Grey, though they defended him, thought the logic of the case was against him. He was, they argued, either right or wrong. If the latter, he ought to be recalled; if the former, he ought to avenge by force of arms the insult offered to the Queen in his person. But Elgin’s policy was justified by the result. This was that 700,000 rebellious French subjects of the Queen were reconciled to her Government, not because they were bribed by compensation grants, for no actual rebel got any, but because they had a striking proof given to them that to “be just and fear not” was the keynote of the British Governor-General’s policy and administration.