appointment of Dr. Tait, then Bishop of London. Dr. Jackson, Bishop of Lincoln, was in turn appointed to the see of London, to which Wilberforce had the strongest claim. To the see of Lincoln, Archdeacon Wordsworth, a nephew of the poet, and a theological antiquarian of great repute among the High Churchmen, was preferred. The selection of Dr. Tait procured for Mr. Disraeli the cordial congratulations of all parties, and it was admitted even by the Radicals that it immensely increased the popularity of a moribund Ministry. As a matter of fact, however, the credit was really due to the Queen, and not to the Minister. During November Wilberforce was at Blenheim, and in his Diary he records a conversation which he had with the Duke of Marlborough on this subject. “The Duke,” writes Bishop Wilberforce, “told me of Disraeli’s excitement when he came out of the royal closet. Some struggle about the Primacy. Lord Malmesbury also said that when he spoke to Disraeli he said, ‘Don’t bring any more bothers before me; I have enough already to drive a man mad.’” Then a few days later (18th November) Dr. Wilberforce had a conversation at Windsor with Dean Wellesley, an ecclesiastic deep in Court secrets, who said to him, with reference to the struggle for the Primacy, “The Church does not know what it owes to the Queen. Disraeli has been utterly ignorant, utterly unprincipled: he rode the Protestant horse one day; then got frightened that he had gone too far, and was injuring the county elections, so he went right round and proposed names never heard of. Nothing he would not have done; but throughout he was most hostile to you [Wilberforce]; he alone prevented London being offered to you. The Queen looked for Tait,[288] but would have agreed to you.... Disraeli recommended[289] ... for Canterbury!! The Queen would not have him; then Disraeli agreed, most reluctantly and with passion, to Tait. Disraeli then proposed Wordsworth for London. The Queen objected strongly; no experience; passing over bishops, &c.; then she suggested Jackson and two others, not you [Wilberforce], because of Disraeli’s expressed hostility, and Disraeli chose Jackson.... Disraeli opposed Leighton with all his strength on every separate occasion. The Queen would have greatly liked him, but Disraeli would not hear of him. You cannot conceive the appointments he proposed and retracted or was over-ruled in; he pressed Champneys for Peterborough;[290] he had no other thought than the votes of the moment; he showed an ignorance about all Church matters, men, opinions, that was astonishing, making propositions one way and the other, riding the Protestant horse to gain the boroughs, and then when he thought he had gone so far to endanger the counties, turning round and appointing Bright and Gregory; thoroughly unprincipled fellow. I trust we may never have such a man again.”[291] The importance of Dr. Tait’s appointment to the Primacy could hardly be exaggerated. In the great Church controversies he had distinguished himself by his intrepid and masculine good sense. His orthodoxy was unimpeachable, but whenever a heretic was being prosecuted his voice was always loud in demanding fair play and in pleading for toleration. He had congratulated the Church on being able to utilise Professor Jowett’s irrepressible “love of truth” and Dr. Pusey’s “personal holiness.” In short, he represented the national principle of comprehension—the national desire to include within the State Church all good men, no matter what their theological views might be, who recognised the divinity of Christ, and were prepared to abide by the legal ritual of the Reformed Anglican Communion.

On the 3rd of October the infant son of the Princess Mary of Teck was christened in the dining-room of Kensington Palace, among the sponsors being the Queen and the Princess of Wales. On the 21st the Crown Princess of Prussia, travelling as the Countess Lingen, visited England, and was very warmly greeted wherever she went. Most of her time was spent at St. Leonards-on-Sea.

On the 5th of December the Queen was informed that Mr. George Peabody had presented £100,000 to the poor of London. This was his second gift, so that his whole donation came to £350,000. It was felt that it was somewhat unfortunate that it had been left to a foreigner to point the path of duty out to English millionaires. On the other hand, there were critics who tried to depreciate the practical value of Mr. Peabody’s charity. The money was to be expended in housing the poor. “But,” said these critics when the first blocks of Peabody Buildings were built, “it was not the poor who were housed in them, for clerks and young middle-class people took the new rooms.” It was apparently not noticed that the clerks must, in that case, leave their dwellings empty for others, so that the housing of the poor would in any case be facilitated by reduced pressure on house accommodation.

The 14th of December was the seventh anniversary of the Prince Consort’s death. Accordingly the Queen and her family proceeded to the Mausoleum at Frogmore, which had now been completed, and where a special service was held. It was a matter of great regret that the Princess Louis of Hesse had been unable to be present, and she gives expression to that feeling in one of her letters (20th of November). But she was recovering from her accouchement, and it was impossible for her to leave her home.

As the year ended, the mind of the country was disturbed by tales of impending war. The Princess Louis of Hesse and the Crown Prince of Prussia both warned the Queen of the dangers which menaced Europe. France had arranged to withdraw her troops from Rome in order to attack Germany, and a Spanish garrison was to be substituted as the Pope’s guard. From the letters of the Princess, it is plain that the Queen comforted her relatives by assuring them that, from her information, it was clear there would be no war. Napoleon’s scheme for garrisoning Rome by Spanish troops was upset by the sudden outbreak of a revolution in Spain, provoked partly by the reactionary policy, but mainly by the personal misconduct of the Queen Isabella. Violent measures of repression were adopted to crush the conspiracy. On the 18th of September a revolt broke out at Cadiz, and the Queen and her dynasty were dethroned. General Prim and Marshal Serrano formed a Provisional Government, which, however, relegated to the Cortes the task of determining the destinies of the nation. Much more serious was the sudden rupture between Greece and Turkey at the end of the year. It was remembered that Lord Clarendon—who had been appointed Foreign Secretary in deference to the Queen’s partiality for him—was the Minister

under whose guidance England had drifted into the Crimean War. The re-opening of the Eastern Question immediately after he took office was considered to be ominous of mischief. For two years there had been friction between Greece and Turkey, the cause being that the Greeks had been assisting the Cretan insurgents both with men and money. The Sultan at last, in a fit of impatience, sent an Ultimatum to Greece threatening war unless the Government made reparation to Turkey for the support which it had given to the Cretan rebellion. The Great Powers obtained for Greece an extension of time for her reply to the 17th of December, and on that date the Athenian Government rejected the Ultimatum. But the rise of Germany had altered all the conditions under which Russia as patron of Greece could attack Constantinople, and it rendered the Anglo-French alliance no longer desirable. Still a Conference was proposed by Count Bismarck in the closing days of 1868 to prevent war, whilst the Greeks were arming in hot haste, and Hobart Pasha was blockading Syria. The great danger lay in Clarendon’s possible adherence to Palmerstonian traditions. If he declared for war in defence of Turkey with France as an ally, the prospect was dismal. Such a policy meant that England would have to face the combination of Germany, and perchance Italy with Russia, and it is certain that the Queen, like the nation, would have resisted it to the last. The Conference did its work well—as might have been expected. It had been proposed by Bismarck, who had a reputation for never associating his name with failures, and the event proved that he had judged rightly of the exigencies of the nations.

CHAPTER XIV.

A HOPEFUL YEAR.

Hopefulness was the prevailing feeling with which the year 1869 was hailed by everybody. Politically the country was in a state of tranquillity. The democracy had won a great victory at the polls, and a new and brilliant ministry had been called to power to give effect to the will of the people. Trade, it is true, was still suffering from the shock of 1866. The supply of raw cotton was scarce, and high prices lessened the demand for the manufactured article. The policy of the Trades Unions aggravated the uneasiness of the mercantile community. Superficial observers began to declare that the Unionists, by hampering their employers at home, were driving trade abroad, and a demand for Protection, under the guise of Reciprocity, was heard, though as yet but faintly, amid the din of controversy. Some of the leading men in great commercial centres like Manchester were so impressed with the manifest ignorance of economic principles exhibited in these controversies that they started a series of evening lectures for working men on political economy, Professor Stanley Jevons undertaking to deliver the course.[292] On the other hand, the country was free from all difficulties as to foreign affairs—even the dispute with the United States as to the Alabama claims was supposed to be in a fair way of settlement under the flattering unction of the American Minister’s post-prandial rhetoric. The first weeks of the year were enlivened by the trials of election petitions, and the new tribunal of judges appointed to try on the spot cases of corrupt practices, on the whole, gave general satisfaction, It was felt that if the new court was a judge without a jury, the old one—a committee of the House of Commons—was a jury without a judge, and that in respect of consistency in interpreting the law and logical application of principles, the new court was a vast improvement on the old one.

Though everybody knew that the Irish Church Question must overshadow all others, the utterances of Ministers were eagerly scanned for indications of policy. The spirit of economy, it soon appeared, would reign supreme in the administration, for not only did Mr. Goschen at the Poor Law Board issue orders prohibiting the guardians of the poor in London from giving relief to the able-bodied poor except under conditions of task-work, but the Admiralty issued a circular instructing naval officers to forbid unremunerative and profitless work, and save coals and stores as much as possible. In his speeches to his constituents in Renfrewshire, the Home Secretary, Mr. Austin Bruce, proclaimed his conversion to the ballot; but Mr. Lowe, at Gloucester, seemed to limit himself to rather stale denunciations of the Tory Party. On the 11th of February Ministers dined with the Fishmongers’ Company in the City, but even there their reticence was remarkable. Mr. Gladstone significantly intimated that the Ministry were encouraged in pursuing their Irish policy of conciliation, not only by the verdict of the country, but by “the constitutional character of that Sovereign whose delight it is to associate herself both with the interests and convictions of her people.”[293] Mr. Lowe spoke in a caustic saturnine vein about the difficulty of forcing economy on the servants of the Crown in public departments: they resented an order to save stores as savouring of meanness. And then the House of Commons was always too ready to force up expenditure in detail, whilst clamouring for its reduction in mass. Mr. Bright observed that the Board of Trade was merely a department that sent recommendations to people who rarely paid attention to them, and then launched into an attack on bishops and archbishops, who were, he said, overpaid, owing to the credulity, if not the liberality, of the people. His Grace of York had a few days before claimed that the Episcopal Bench supplied a Liberal element to the House of Lords, and this seems to have tempted Mr. Bright into his display of spleen. Altogether, the first impression produced by the Ministerial speeches was that the Government, though full of good intentions, meant to carry them out in an arrogant and irritating manner. In the meantime a change had taken place in the leadership of the Tory Party in the House of Lords, Lord Malmesbury retiring in favour of Lord Cairns.

On the 16th of February Parliament was opened by Commission, the Royal Speech being read by the Lord Chancellor. As the Queen did not attend, it was decided by the Cabinet to propose that Parliament should wait upon her, and present their Address in reply to the Royal Speech, to her personally—a somewhat unusual, though not unprecedented, proceeding when the Queen is herself absent from the opening of Parliament. The Speech was in style a little flabby, especially where it touched on the Irish Church Question. No measure of Disestablishment was definitely promised, but it was announced that Parliament must take in hand the task of “the adjustment of the ecclesiastical arrangements of Ireland.” The Speech promised reduced estimates,[294] hinted at the restoration of Habeas Corpus to Ireland, and it embodied Mr. Austin Bruce’s pledges in Renfrewshire to bring in a Scottish Education Bill. Perhaps it was because Ministers strove after brevity that they omitted from the Speech many measures to which it was generally known they were committed, e.g., Mr. Bruce’s Bill for dealing with Habitual Criminals, Mr. Goschen’s Poor Law Bill, Mr. Forster’s Middle Class Education Bill, the Bill abolishing University Tests, a Bill to establish Municipal Government in Counties, and a Bill abolishing Imprisonment for Debt. The Address was moved in the House of Commons by Mr. Cowper, selected as a compliment to the Whigs, and Mr. Mundella, who was chosen to please the Radical artisans. The debate on the Address was a tame business. The leaders of the Opposition, desirous of posing as magnanimous adversaries in defeat, offered no serious criticism. The Government leaders had, therefore, virtually nothing to reply to. Previous to the moving of the Address Mr. Gladstone gave notice in the House of Commons that on the 1st of March he should move that the Acts relating to the Irish Church establishment, and to the Maynooth Grant, and also the Resolutions of the House of Commons of 1868 be read; that the House should resolve itself into Committee to consider these Acts and Resolutions. Mr. Forster, too, gave notice of his Middle Class Education Bill. The Attorney-General gave notice of a Bankruptcy Bill; Mr. Goschen announced Bills amending the law assessing Occupiers Holding for short terms, and equalising the Assessment of Metropolitan Property; and the Home Secretary announced his Bill for the more effectual Prevention of Crime. Whatever might be said of the Ministry, it was obviously bent on making its mark on the Statute book. The House of Lords, indeed, began to take alarm at the extreme activity of the Commons. They complained that they were not entrusted with work till after Easter, when the Commons sent them their Bills to revise in the dog days, and Lord Salisbury angrily threatened to obstruct Bills if they were not sent up to the Peers in time for full discussion; but the fault was really that of their Lordships. As Lord Russell put it, to initiate Liberal Bills in the Upper House is to secure their rejection; to bring them there after they have been accepted by large majorities of the House of Commons, gives them a chance of being passed into law.

When the Committee on the Address brought up their report Mr. Gladstone moved that the Address be presented by the whole House to the Queen in person. The Queen’s absence from the opening of a new reformed Parliament had been taken by various Opposition organs as a proof that she was inclined to obstruct the policy of the Ministry. That her Majesty was, as a matter of fact, opposed to Mr. Gladstone’s policy of Disestablishment is apparent from the Diary of Bishop Wilberforce, where, under date 20th March, one finds the following entry:—“Back to Windsor Castle and prepared sermon. Dined with the Queen. A great deal of talk with the Princess Louise; clever and very agreeable. The Queen very affable. So sorry Mr. Gladstone started this about Irish Church, and he is a great friend of yours,” &c. But a still more authoritative disclosure of the Queen’s personal objections to Mr. Gladstone’s plans is given in a letter from the Princess Louis of Hesse. Writing on the 25th of April, in reply to a communication on the subject from the Queen, the Princess says:—“The Irish Church Question, I quite feel with you, will neither be solved nor settled in this way; and instead of doing something which would bring the Catholics more under the authority of the State, they will, I fear, be more powerful.”[295] The Queen’s consent to come to London and receive the Address in reply to the Royal Speech in person was accordingly obtained by Mr. Gladstone for the purpose of taking the sting out of statements which had gone round the Tory Press as to her Majesty’s opposition to his Irish policy. It hardly tended to reconcile the Queen to the views of the Cabinet that her consent to receive the Address was asked in a manner that precluded the possibility of refusal, save at the risk of insulting the Legislature. But in this affair Mr. Gladstone was doomed to disappointment. Before the Address could be presented her Majesty said she must abandon the idea of coming to town to receive it. Prince Leopold suddenly fell ill, and as the Queen was reluctant to leave him, the Address was delivered to her in the usual manner, and answered by her in the stereotyped terms. Thus it came to pass that the first meeting of the reformed Parliament was not honoured with any special mark of personal recognition by the Chief of the State.

From the 1st of March to the end of July, however, the affairs of Ireland completely absorbed public attention. As an earnest of their conciliatory policy, Ministers had allowed the Act suspending Habeas Corpus in Ireland to expire. In February they pardoned forty-nine of the Fenian prisoners, selecting the objects of the Queen’s clemency from those who were dupes as distinguished from ringleaders. This still left eighty-one prisoners under sentence, and whilst it did not satisfy Irish hopes, it encouraged a belief that it was comparatively safe to play at treason in Ireland. As Lady Clanricarde said in a letter to Mr. Hayward, “the released Fenians are now [April 13] socially, financially, and in character, in a better position than they were at any other time of their lives.”[296] The popular notion in Ireland was that they had cowed the Government. Nor was the Church Question the only one which was agitating the Irish mind. Shrewd observers had, indeed, warned Ministers in the autumn of 1868 that the Irish people were even more eager for Land Reform than the Disestablishment of the Church. Writing to Mr. Chichester Fortescue on 15th of October, 1868, Mr. Hayward says, “Froude, who has been two months in Ireland, mostly near Kenmare, says, that so far as he saw, the Irish Church Question is little thought of in comparison with the Land Question, and he knows of nothing that could be proposed in the way of compromise, as the proprietors want to get rid of their small tenants, and the small tenants want to get rid of the landlords. Lord Lansdowne’s manager told him that he could make £25,000 a year out of the property by clearing out the cottiers.”[297] It was, therefore, creditable to Ministers that, when questioned on the subject in both Houses, they declared that whenever the Church Question was disposed of, they would try and solve the Irish agrarian problem.

On the 1st of March Mr. Gladstone rose in an eager and crowded House and moved that the Irish Church Resolutions be read. After that ceremony, he moved that the House go into Committee to consider them. This being done, he then proceeded to unfold his plan, in a speech which was a masterpiece of artistic exposition. Technically speaking, he proposed to disendow the Irish Church absolutely from the passing of the Act, because he vested all its property in a Commission, appointed for ten years. But the Church was to be disestablished at a date fixed by him as the 1st of January, 1871. Whenever the Act passed the Church would be quite free to take collective action for its future management, and whenever it could present the Crown with a scheme of organisation the Queen would be advised to incorporate it as a Free Church. The Commission, of course, was to pay the life incomes of the clergy. But these life incomes under the Bill might be commuted for a fixed sum, to be handed over to the new Church Corporation. Private gifts made to the Church since 1660, and all ecclesiastical fabrics, would remain in the hands of the disestablished clergy. Similar methods for dealing with the State subsidies to Presbyterian clergymen and professors were proposed, and the trustees for the Presbyterians and for Maynooth College were to have fourteen times their annual subvention given to them in full satisfaction of all claims. The tithe charge was to be sold to the landlords for twenty-two and a half years’ purchase, the money to be vested in the Commission. As for the surplus property, or “spoil,” as it was called, it was to be devoted to keeping up pauper lunatic asylums, infirmaries, and hospitals for the poor, and asylums for idiots, institutions which were then chargeable on the country.[298] The leading idea disposing of the surplus for the benefit of the poor, was generally admitted to be an ingenious way of meeting the cry of sacrilegious spoliation.[299] Lord Westbury was, however, said to have remarked that in taking endowments from the Irish clergy whose intellects were warped, and giving it to lunatics and idiots who had no intellects at all, Mr. Gladstone had followed a natural law of association, and had exhibited a nicely discriminating sense of the relative value of competing claims on his compassion.

But the country was impervious to all sarcasms of this sort, and it was lavish in praise of a measure so obviously characterised by breadth of view as to its ends, and minute completeness and efficiency of detail, as to its means. The strategic value of Mr. Gladstone’s policy in passing the Suspensory Bill in 1868 was now apparent to everybody. The discussions it provoked had armed him at every point, and from the almost embarrassing returns of dates and materials with which it furnished him he was able to draw up a measure which was felt to be complete and symmetrical. He reduced its weak points to a minimum—in fact, if the principle of the Bill were accepted, it would be very difficult for the most unscrupulous opposition to wreck it on details. Mr. Disraeli’s criticism was very mild. He said Mr. Gladstone “had not wasted a word,” but despite his statement, the Opposition must still “look on Disestablishment as a great political error,” and on Disendowment as “sheer confiscation.” Whether intentionally or not, his tone conveyed an impression that, so far as he was concerned, he would have been glad, after the verdict of the General Election, to throw over the Church. But Sir Stafford Northcote a few days afterwards told a meeting of Middlesex

Conservatives that the Bill was a combination of robbery and bribery, and Sir J. Pakington significantly thanked Providence for the House of Lords. Mr. Disraeli felt that his resignation before Parliament met, implied an acceptance of the verdict of the country. To him and to many others, including the Bishop of Oxford, the Bishop of Peterborough (Dr. Magee), the two Archbishops, Lord Salisbury, Lord Nelson, “our best Churchman,” according to Wilberforce, Lord Carnarvon, and the Duke of Richmond, it seemed unwise to divide the Houses of Parliament against the principle of a national decision, to which the leaders of the Opposition bowed when they resigned. They would have preferred to accept the Bill in principle, and in Committee to have extorted from the Government the best possible terms for the Church. But the advice of extreme men prevailed, and so the Tory leaders decided to oppose the Second Reading of the measure. On the 18th of March Mr. Disraeli moved its rejection, in a speech remarkable for its brilliancy and the skill with which he laid bare the weak points of Mr. Gladstone’s plans.

Yet his followers heard his epigrammatic assault with unconcealed dismay, and after it was delivered condoled with each other because it was a fiasco. The fault of the orator was that he gave his Party no position or counter-scheme behind which they could entrench themselves. He ignored the cardinal fact of the controversy, that the Irish people were smarting under a sense of injustice, because their own national church had been robbed to enrich the ministers of an alien creed. He conjured up terrible but imaginary revolutionary catastrophes as the results of the Bill. He dwelt on the value of the Irish Established Church as a body bound by law to receive the religious pariahs of the country, an argument that made the blood of most of his lieutenants, who were pious Churchmen, run cold. Three discontented priesthoods instead of one, said he, would make themselves organs of Irish discontent; ignoring the fact that the one priesthood which would not be smarting was five times as numerous and potent as the other two put together. But the debate as a whole was unreal and academic. It was more like a bout with foils than a duel à outrance. The speakers who were chiefly affected by the religious side of the question thought it expedient to represent the Bill as an alarming attack on property. The champions of property, on the contrary, represented the Bill as an impious attack on religion. Three speeches alone maintained the reputation of the House—those of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and Sir R. Palmer. They each spoke as if they had a heart and a conscience, and were personally responsible for the moral and political results of their votes. Mr. Gladstone rested his case on the absolute necessity of redressing a wrong done by a strong nation to a weak one in an age when might was right. The Empire as a whole had a moral right in national interests to prevail over any of its parts. But Ireland, he said, had a right to be governed so that it might be known to all men that her life was not hostile but supplementary to that of the Empire. Mr. Bright’s speech was full of intense Christian feeling. He expressed, in words vibrating with genuine emotion, his horror at a system which associated any Christian church with a policy of conquest. As for the charges of robbery, he disposed of them in the splendid peroration in which he declared that the plan for disposing of the Church surplus realised his highest ideal of Christian statesmanship. It applied funds which were misused in stimulating barren sectarian controversies and enmities, to beneficent purposes untainted by doctrinal partisanship or dogmatic preferences. Sir Roundell Palmer surprised every one by his candid admission that a large measure of disendowment in Ireland was a moral necessity. All establishment revenues, such as those attached to episcopal sees, the capitular revenues of cathedrals, and funds for preaching Protestantism in places where there were no Protestants, he admitted could not justly be appropriated by a small alien sect in the name of the Irish nation. But then, he argued with subtlety and power, it was equally unjust to alienate parochial endowments, which were locally of parochial use in promoting the objects which they were instituted to further. Sir Roundell Palmer’s speech, in fact, revealed what would have been a possible compromise had it not come too late. He suggested that which Mr. Disraeli had failed to discover—an alternative policy—when he issued his electoral manifesto staking the fortunes of the Irish Church on the cry of “No Surrender.” The Second Reading of the Bill was carried, after a week’s debate, by a majority of 118.[300] Paucis carior est fides quam pecunia. Hence, after this division, the Churchmen thought there was nothing left to fight for save the money which the Irish clergy should be allowed to carry with them into the desert of Disendowment. On Wednesday, the 14th of April, Mr. Disraeli called the Tory Party together at Lord Lonsdale’s house, and the meeting agreed not to press private amendments, but to support Mr. Disraeli’s own proposals which he submitted to the House of Commons next night. He proposed that the Church, though disendowed, should remain under the discipline and patronage of the Crown. [301]

He demanded a year’s reprieve from disestablishment. He proposed to compensate permanent curates, to pay over to the Church a capital sum of four times its net annual revenue, also a sum equal to fourteen times the annual charges for repairs; and he demanded that the Church should be allowed to hold all private property ever given to it, whether in Catholic or Protestant times. He insisted on compensation for life interests on a more extravagant scale than the Bill sanctioned, and his proposal as to tithes was amusingly unscrupulous. One of the great points in his speech on the Second Reading was, that the Bill, whilst it confiscated the property of the Church, offered a conciliatory bribe to the landlords. The tithe rent-charge was sold at twenty-two-and-a-half years’ purchase to the landlords, on condition that they made it yield the State four and a half per cent. on its capital value. But to accommodate them Mr. Gladstone said that if they wished to buy up the tithe but could not pay the money down for a twenty-two-and-a-half years’ purchase, they could borrow it from the State, and refund it by paying three per cent. on it for forty-five years. In other words, Mr. Gladstone charged them three per cent. for interest, and kept the other one and a half per cent. of the tithe yield for forty-five years as a sinking fund to wipe out the original advance. Mr. Disraeli, however, proposed to sell the tithe rent-charge to the landlords at an average price struck from the records of the Landed Estates Courts during the past ten years. As rent-charges sold in the Landed Estates Courts were not sold under the security of the Government, the price at which landlords would have bought up these charges under Mr. Disraeli’s amendment would have been about twenty-five per cent. under that demanded by Mr. Gladstone. The case of the “permanent curates” seemed to excite much sympathy in the House. Mr. Gladstone was also at first inclined to yield to, though he ultimately rejected, an appeal from one of his supporters, Mr. Wykeham Martin, who desired to let the clergy of the Irish Church keep their glebe houses when free from building debt, without paying ten years’ purchase for the site as the Bill provided.

In truth, it was soon seen that it was hopeless to attack the Bill in Committee. Mr. Gladstone was master of every detail—legal, historical, and archæological. He showed himself an expert among the experts, and it appeared that he had foreseen every objection and forestalled every counter-plan. Mr. Disraeli—who had left much of the work of Opposition to Mr. Hardy and Dr. Ball—soon grew sick of the discussion, and used his influence to quicken the progress of the measure, the Third Reading of which was fixed for May 31st, when it passed by a majority of 114. On the Queen’s birthday the leading Conservative Peers held a meeting, at which strong efforts were made to reject the Second Reading of the Bill in the House of Lords. The ablest peers were, however, in favour of timely surrender, in the hope that they might extort better terms of compensation for the Church. That was also the view of the Episcopal Bench. On the other hand, the Irish Bishops said frankly that feeling ran so high among their flocks that they did not dare to let the Second Reading pass unchallenged. To do so, would sacrifice all their moral and personal influence in the Irish Church. The English Bishops admitted that they must do whatever their Irish colleagues did, and thus it came to pass that whilst Dr. Magee, the Bishop of Peterborough, privately argued in favour of accepting the principle of the Bill, and then making the best possible terms for disendowment, he delivered in the House of Lords by far the most eloquent and powerful speech denouncing its principle from a moral point of view. At another meeting of Tory Peers held at the Duke of Marlborough’s house, Lord Cairns and Lord Derby unfortunately induced the majority to sanction the policy of moving the rejection of the Bill. The debate in the House of Lords lasted all through the week, beginning on the 14th of June, and it was remarkable for sustained eloquence and intellectual power. The Bishops, especially Dr. Magee, carried off the honours of the fray. The Archbishop of Canterbury produced a strong impression against rejecting the Second Reading, for the burden of his argument was that the State should establish a church in order to keep it from becoming fanatical, and then maintain it only as long as it could do so without defying the will of the people. The Liberal Peers were timid and feeble, and the case for passing the Second Reading was really made out by Lord Carnarvon, Lord Salisbury, the Bishop of St. David’s, the Duke of Richmond, and Lord Stanhope. Perhaps the most striking point in the discussion was the clear indication it gave that the Peers, with the exception of Lords Salisbury and Carnarvon, were at heart partisans of concurrent endowment, and it was in this direction that most of the Amendments they proposed pointed, after the Second Reading had been carried by a majority of 33.[302] Lord Grey, for example, desired to cut out of the preamble of the Bill the clause forbidding the application of the Church surplus to religious uses, and Lord Russell wanted to authorise the purchase, out of the surplus, of churches, parsonages, and graveyards for all the sects in Ireland.

On going into Committee the Peers forced several amendments on the Bill. The date at which the Bill was to take effect was changed from 1871 to 1872. Existing Irish Bishops were to hold their seats in the House of Lords till they died out one by one. Curates’ salaries were not to be deducted from life interests—an alteration that increased the compensation to the Church by about £300,000. Life interests were to be taken at fourteen years’ purchase—the capital value to be paid to the Church, which would pay the annuities, a clear gain of about £2,000,000 to the Church. Glebes and glebe-houses were

to be handed over to the Irish Church, but when the Duke of Cleveland proposed that the same provision should be made for the clergy of other churches in Ireland, he was defeated by a combination of Ministerialists and Orangemen, who thereby destroyed the principle of religious equality on which the Bill was founded.[303] On no single amendment, save one, did the Bishops vote for the Government, and on that one—the amendment delaying the division of the surplus sine die—the only Bishop who voted for the Ministry was Wilberforce. “Some one,” writes Lord Malmesbury, “observing him going out with them [Ministers] in the division, said, ‘The Bishop of Oxford is going the wrong way.’ ‘No,’ observed Lord Chelmsford, ‘it is the road to Winchester.’”[304] After the Third Reading of the Bill the Lords, however, accepted a re-amendment by Lord Devon that Irish Bishops should cease to sit in the Upper House, and Lord Stanhope carried another restoring the principle of religious equality by granting residences and glebes to Catholics and Presbyterians. The House of Commons rejected all the important amendments of the Lords, Mr. Gladstone contemptuously observing that the Peers seemed to judge affairs from a balloon. A bitter and protracted struggle between the two Houses was averted by Lord Cairns, who privately negotiated a compromise with Lord Granville. Its main point was that in return for the concession of an additional 5 per cent. on the commutation of life interests (making it 12½ per cent.), the Tory Peers would let the Bill pass. In plain English, Lord Granville bought off the opposition of the Peers by a re-endowment of £500,000 for the Free Protestant Church of Ireland, and the Act received the Royal Assent by Commission on the 26th of July. It was understood that the Queen was prepared to use her influence to bring about a compromise less humiliating to the House of Lords. But the matter was taken out of her hands. Lord Malmesbury says, “Lord Cairns settled it with Lord Granville, taking the whole responsibility upon himself, for he never consulted any of his party, and a great many are much displeased. Lord Derby was so angry that he left the House.”

Great interest attached this Session to Mr. Lowe’s first Budget. Mr. Ward Hunt had been mistaken in his estimate of income, for while he anticipated a revenue of £73,180,000, only £72,591,991 had been received. But a saving in expenditure of £511,000 almost balanced this loss of revenue. Mr. Lowe estimated his expenditure for the coming year at £68,223,000, and, as taxes then stood, his income at £72,855,000, so that he had a surplus to handle of £4,632,000. Unfortunately, the cost of the Abyssinian War had been sadly under-estimated by Mr. Disraeli’s Government, and £4,600,000 of Lord Napier’s bill was still outstanding. Mr. Lowe’s plan for replenishing reduced balances and meeting unexpected liabilities whilst still remitting taxes was at once original and ingenious. Long credit is given for taxes in England. By abolishing this credit and exacting the full tax within the financial year—that is to say, by collecting in 1869-70 the half of the tax that in ordinary circumstances stood over to 1870-71—Mr. Lowe estimated he would have what he called “windfalls” of £600,000 on assessed taxes, £950,000 on the land and house tax, and £1,800,000 on income tax, which gave him £3,350,000. Applying this to the reduction of the Abyssinian War debt he left of it only £500,000 standing. But the estimated surplus was £4,632,000, so that even after deducting the Abyssinian debt, he still had in hand £4,100,000 for remission of taxes, and the replenishment of the Exchequer balances which Mr. Ward Hunt’s policy had exhausted. Mr. Lowe therefore remitted the shilling duty on corn, the duty on fire insurances, the hair powder tax, the duty on tea licences, and a penny of income tax. The carriage duty he simplified and reduced. The duty on horses he reduced—an announcement that gave infinite satisfaction to the House of Commons—and he abolished the special duty on post-horses. He said that as he could not take off the duty on armorial bearings, “it appeared to him the best thing he could do was to increase it.” The perplexing and complex discussion which the scheme provoked, and the indignation of the small traders at being called upon to pay all their taxes in full instead of in two half-yearly instalments obscured the real issue. The real point to consider, however, was whether it was worth while to pay the April quarter’s taxes in January, in order to get the remissions which Mr. Lowe promised. The House thought that the gain was commensurate with the sacrifice, and so the Budget passed without serious opposition.[305]

That the new House of Commons was leavened by a spirit of reform was manifest from the record of its legislative achievements. In March Mr. Forster introduced his Endowed Schools Bill, the gist of which was the appointment of a Commission, empowered, if need be, to reorganise compulsorily old endowed schools, and to adapt them to modern requirements. One curious feature in it marked the growth of opinion on the education of women. Girls, as well as boys, were to have a fair share of these endowments. Mr. Austin Bruce, the Home Secretary, passed an Habitual Criminals Act, in deference to the growing feeling of the people that the large class who lived by crime were far too gently treated by the authorities. It put habitual criminals, or persons twice convicted of crime, under police supervision for seven years, and in cases of fresh charges threw on them and on receivers of stolen goods the burden of proving their innocence, a burden that heretofore was laid on Society. Lord Hartington’s Bill for purchasing the telegraphs carried out a bad bargain, to which Mr. Ward Hunt had committed the nation.[306] But all other legislation of importance was wrecked by the House of Lords. For example, the Commons in 1869 passed a Bill giving married women control over their own property; the Lords threw it out. The Commons affirmed the principle of abolishing University Tests; the Lords again stopped the way. The Commons passed a Bill abolishing the law of primogeniture; the Lords rejected it. The Commons accepted a Bill rating all Scottish landowners for the support of a universal unsectarian compulsory system of education in Scotland; the Lords quashed the project, which was denounced even by so Liberal a newspaper as the Daily Telegraph because it was “too revolutionary, too full of compulsion, and too Scotch.” The Commons passed a Bill legalising marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; here again the Lords undid the work of the Commons. The questions relating to purity of election, forced on the country by the revelations made at trials of election petitions during the recess, were by the Commons referred to a Select Committee, on the understanding that it would report, as it did report, in favour of the ballot; but the Lords did not disguise their hostility to that project either. The first Parliament that met under household suffrage therefore demonstrated alike the intense devotion of the Commons and the intense hostility of the Lords to all progressive legislation.

And yet any shrewd observer could see that the Ministry, despite its reforming zeal, was not gaining strength in a reforming House of Commons. The belief in Mr. Gladstone’s ability and earnestness had not decayed; but his colleagues were busy accumulating a baneful crop of private hatreds. Mr. Cardwell and Mr. Childers cut down expenditure in the army and navy, and Mr. Baxter, as Secretary to the Admiralty, insisted on buying stores for the public on the economical business-like principles that guide private firms. Mr. Childers found the Admiralty in a state of chaos. When anything went wrong everybody was generally responsible, but nobody in particular could be punished. Mr. Childers fixed responsibility for patronage and discipline, for building and equipping ships, and for finance on three subordinates. To reduce the redundant officers he offered to give them a lump sum down, instead of half-pay, if they would retire. He, or rather Mr. Baxter, laid down the rule that it was better to buy stores in the open market instead of contracting for them. As to the fleet, he introduced the principle of reducing it as much as possible at foreign stations, where it was difficult to control, and concentrating it as much as possible at home, where it was easily within reach of his arm. In ship-building he insisted on concentrating expenditure, not on repair, but on construction, and on building, not a great many ships of a semi-obsolete type, but a few heavily-armed and armoured swift vessels, which would be guaranteed to beat any craft afloat. The Tory Opposition somewhat unpatriotically joined in the “hue and cry” which every incompetent official and every useless clerk who was shelved by these reforms raised against Mr. Childers. The dockyard men actually assaulted Sir C. Wingfield, Member for Gravesend, because he defended reductions. The words and deeds of Mr. Childers and Mr. Baxter were misrepresented by Tory partisans,