reduced taxation, did not apparently know that a cunning trap had been set for them by Russia. Before Parliament rose there were rumours afloat that the policy of the Indian Government was becoming restless and disquieting. Lord Lytton had put the vernacular Press under a harsh censorship. The native Princes were threatened, or they expected to be threatened, with a demand for the reduction of their armies. A frontier policy of perilous adventure was mooted, greatly to the alarm of experienced Indian officials like Lord Lawrence.

It has been already stated that Lord Salisbury, when Secretary of State for India, had a scheme in view for covering Afghanistan with European residents, and that Lord Northbrook resigned office rather than further it. In 1878 Lord Lytton found an opportunity made for him by Russia for developing this scheme, and he hastened to seize it. He had already estranged Shere Ali, the Afghan Ameer, by his menaces, and this prince was perhaps not indisposed to intrigue with a rival Power. When Lord Beaconsfield brought the Indian troops to Malta, Russia not only made secret preparations for the invasion of India, but sent a Mission to Cabul for the purpose of securing the co-operation of the Afghans. It does not appear that Shere Ali entered into any bargain with the Russian Envoys, whom he sent away as soon as he could, because whilst they were in Cabul he seems to have been very nervous about their safety. But the Indian Government, hearing of what was going on, demanded that they too should send an Embassy to Cabul, urging that the reception of the Russian Mission showed that Shere Ali’s apprehensions as to the safety of Europeans in his capital were groundless. A Mahometan official of rank, the Nawab Gholeim Hasan Khan, was entrusted with the task of conveying the demand to Shere Ali, and he did his work honestly, and with great tact and skill. The Nawab, on the 30th of August, left Peshawur, where the British Envoy, Sir Neville Chamberlain, and his escort of a thousand troops were waiting for the Ameer’s reply. The Nawab apparently did not see Shere Ali till the 12th of September, who told him that he did not like the idea of the Mission being forced on him. The advice of the Nawab, who appears in these transactions as the only diplomatist who correctly appreciated the situation, was to delay the Mission, “otherwise some harm will come.” By “some harm” Gholeim Hasan Khan meant an Afghan war, at all times a dire calamity for India, whether it ended in victory or defeat. The Nawab, as the result of further negotiations, reported that Shere Ali was willing to send for the British Mission, and clear up any misunderstanding that might have arisen about his reception of the Russian Envoys, if the Indian Government would give him time. The Russians had come to Cabul uninvited, and they had all been sent away, save some who were ill, and who were to be sent back whenever they recovered. As the Nawab sensibly said, Shere Ali did not want his people to suspect that the British Mission was thrust on him. “If Mission,” said the Nawab, “will await Ameer’s permission, everything will be arranged, God willing, in the best manner, and no room will be left for complaint in future.”[136] But during September all these details—afterwards revealed in the Blue-books—were concealed from the British people. The Indian Government primed the correspondents of the Press with mendacious accounts of Shere Ali’s insulting refusal to receive a British Envoy, whereas he had not only invited a Russian Mission to Cabul in violation of his pledges to us, but was loading them with attentions, whilst Sir Neville Chamberlain was kept ignominiously waiting his pleasure at Peshawur. British prestige, it was said, rendered it necessary to coerce the Ameer, and so Sir Neville Chamberlain was ordered to enter Afghan territory without the Ameer’s permission, with a force “too large,” as Lord Carnarvon said, “for a mission, and too small for an army.” When the advance guard of the Mission came to the fort of Ali Musjid the Commandant stopped it. At the time the country was told in the inspired telegrams in the newspapers that the Commandant, Faiz Muhammed Khan, was violent and insulting, and threatened to shoot Major Cavagnari. When the Blue-book appeared with Major Cavagnari’s account of the affair it showed that the Khan behaved with the greatest courtesy, and though he said he must, in obedience to orders, oppose the advance of the Mission, he had actually prevented his troops from firing on Cavagnari and his men. What need to expand the story? The Mission returned. A pretext for a quarrel with Shere Ali, which Lord Salisbury had instructed Lord Lytton to find, was at last discovered. War was declared on Afghanistan, and Parliament was summoned on the 5th of December to hear the news.

Of course Parliament was called into consultation too late. The Viceroy of India had deliberately put himself into a position to invite and receive a blow in the face from a semi-barbarous Asiatic prince. The Government were therefore compelled either to recall Lord Lytton, and treat the whole affair as a blunder, or avenge the rebuff which he had received by war. They chose the latter alternative, and the hearts of Liberal wirepullers were lifted up, because manifestly even Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration could not survive such an escapade as a third Afghan war. The debates on the policy of the Government were dismal reading for those who knew what Afghan campaigns meant. The Government shrank from resting their case on the transactions which caused the war. It could not be concealed that on the 19th of August Lord Salisbury asked Russia to withdraw her mission from Cabul, and that on the 18th of September he received a scoffing reply informing him that the Mission was only a temporary one of courtesy. As Sir Charles Dilke put it, Lord Salisbury was naturally dissatisfied with this reply, but being “afraid to hit Russia, yet determined to hit somebody,” he “hit Shere Ali.” Ministers, however, took up a broader ground of defence. They said that the Russian advances in Asia rendered it necessary for England to secure the independence of Afghanistan. All Indian statesmen were agreed that this could be done by guaranteeing his throne to Shere Ali, he on his side giving the Indian Government control over his policy. Shere Ali had been always willing to accept the guarantee and the pledge to defend him against foreign and domestic foes. But he would never consent to pay for it by putting his country under a diplomatic or military protectorate. On no consideration would he permit European agents to be stationed at Cabul, though he had no objection to receive Mussulman agents, and neither Lord Mayo nor Lord Northbrook thought it wise to press him on the point. They confined themselves to a promise of aid, reserving to themselves the right of determining when they should give it. Shere Ali was not satisfied with this arrangement, but he had to make the best of it. In 1875 Lord Salisbury urged Lord Northbrook to find some pretext for forcing European residents on the Ameer. Lord Northbrook refused and resigned. Lord Lytton took his place. Lord Lytton roused Shere Ali’s suspicions at the outset by occupying Quetta. At a conference at Peshawur in 1876, between Sir Lewis Pelly and Shere Ali’s representative, Mir Akbor, menaces were exchanged for persuasion, and even the conditional promise of support given by Lord Mayo and Lord Northbrook to Shere Ali was withdrawn. This aggravated Shere Ali’s suspicions, and it was while he was in this frame of mind that Lord Lytton attempted to force a British Mission upon him. The theory of the Government was that as diplomacy had failed to make the Ameer accept our protectorate, resort must be had to coercion. This had led to war, it was true. But war must end in victory, and victory in the occupation of the southern part of Afghanistan, which, as Lord Beaconsfield said, would give India a “scientific frontier.” The objection to his idea was that to push our outposts farther north was to put ourselves at a disadvantage in defending India. Not only would the occupation of Afghanistan be ruinously costly, but it would lengthen and attenuate the line of our communications with our base—a line, moreover, which would run through the lands of wild and fanatical hill-tribes. The debates in both Houses perhaps served to render the war unpopular. But it had begun, and it was absurd to refuse supplies to carry it on, because such a refusal merely exposed British troops to disaster in the field. However, it was notorious that in the majorities who supported the Government were many who, like Lord Derby, felt forced to support in action a policy which in opinion they disapproved.

During the Session of 1878 only one matter personally affecting the interests of the Queen came up for discussion. On the 25th she sent to both Houses a Message announcing the approaching marriage of the Duke of Connaught with the Princess Louise, third daughter of Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia, the celebrated cavalry leader, popularly known as “The Red Prince.” He was a man of large private fortune, and his daughter was described by Lord Beaconsfield as “distinguished for her intelligence and accomplishments, and her winning simplicity of thought and manner.” As for the Duke of Connaught, Lord Napier of Magdala bore testimony to his efficiency as a soldier. In the House of Commons an addition of £10,000 a year was voted to the Duke’s income, thus raising it to £25,000, of which £6,000 a year was to be settled on his wife in the event of her surviving him. The vote was passed without a division, the only protest made coming from Sir Charles Dilke, who asserted that no good precedent could be cited for such a provision for a Prince, when it was not manifestly a provision for succession to the Crown.

The only great public function of the year in which the Queen took part

was the Review of the Fleet at Spithead on the 13th of August. The spectacle was marred by the storm of wind and rain, which too often spoils naval reviews, but it was one which had a special interest. It was designed to show the country what kind of naval defence could be organised on short notice, amidst rumours of war, when the Channel Fleet was absent in foreign waters. It represented a naval force which, but for its ordnance which was utterly obsolete and inefficient, would have been equal in strength to the navy of any of the Continental Powers, and the Queen saw for the first time the manœuvring of two malevolent-looking little torpedo boats, which astonished her by dashing about in all directions at the rate of twenty-one knots an hour. At noon the ships were dressed. At half-past three the Royal Yacht with the Queen on deck passed down the lines. Salutes were fired, and yards manned, and her Majesty, accompanied by the Prince and Princess of Wales, Princess Beatrice, and the Lords of the Admiralty, was enthusiastically cheered. When the Queen’s vessel emerged from the lines it was followed by a gay flotilla of yachts. Those that were sailing craft luffed their wind and, headed by Mr. Brassey’s Sunbeam, went round by starboard, the steamers going round by port, and with the Royal Yacht in the centre the brilliant pleasure fleet came back with the Squadron. All evolutions were countermanded on account of the weather, but at night the Fleet was illuminated.

At Paris, on the 12th of June, there died George V., ex-King of Hanover, Duke of Cumberland, grandson of George III. of England and first cousin of the Queen. Court mourning was ordered for him, though it was not very generally displayed. The old jealousy with which the people regarded English Princes, who had interests separate from England, accounted for their indifference to his death. Nor was there any strong family sentiment at Court to counteract this feeling. On the contrary, the sentiment of the Queen’s family was as anti-Hanoverian as that of the nation. She had not forgiven the treasonable intrigues which his father, her uncle, King Ernest Augustus of Hanover—the most universally hated of all the sons of George III.—carried on with the Orange Tories to set up Salic law in England, and usurp her throne. She had unpleasant memories of his arrogance in persistently conferring the Guelphic Order on Englishmen, not only without asking her permission, but in defiance of her prohibition, as if in suggestive assertion of an unsurrendered hereditary right of English sovereignty. More recently the Queen had been still further offended by the pretensions of his son, her cousin George V., to sanction or veto the marriages of English princes and princesses, as male head of the House of Brunswick-Sonneberg. His attempt to treat the marriage of the Duchess of Teck (the Princess Mary of Cambridge) as a mere morganatic connection, and his refusal to let the Duke of Teck sit beside the Duchess at dinner, had also strained the relations between the Queen and her cousin. Still, in 1866, she had, in response to his appeal, used her influence on his behalf with the German Emperor. She had even pressed Lord Derby and Lord Stanley to save Hanover from Prussian annexation, and though they refused, she had induced them to mediate on his behalf in order to secure for him a comfortable personal position as a dethroned monarch. His misfortunes roused her sympathies, and when he died, so far as the Queen was concerned, all feuds with the Hanoverian branch of the Royal Family were buried in his grave.

But the end of the year brought a more bitter sorrow to the Queen than the death of George V. The Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, died in extremely touching circumstances. She had spent the summer months with her children at Eastbourne, where she had endeared herself to the people by her sweetness of disposition, and by the personal interest she manifested in the poor of the town. She was usually to be seen visiting the cottages of the sick in the fishing quarter. She had taken a keen interest in studying the management of certain charitable institutions, evidently with a view to making use of her knowledge when she returned to Darmstadt, and a charming visit to Osborne completed a holiday that was for her full of happiness. Her life was uneventful at Darmstadt till the 8th of November, when her daughter, the Princess Victoria, was smitten with diphtheria. The Grand Duchess was herself a skilled and scientifically-trained nurse, and she tended her child personally. She was the first to detect the appearance of the diphtheritic membrane in the little Princess’s throat, and she promptly attacked it with inhalations of chlorate of potash. In spite of careful isolation, the whole family, including the Grand Duke, with the exception of the Princess Elizabeth, caught the disease, and it need hardly be said that the strength of the Grand Duchess soon began to give way under the strain of mental anxiety and bodily fatigue. The Princess May died, but on the 25th of November the Grand Duke recovered. On the 7th of December the Grand Duchess went to the railway station to see the Duchess of Edinburgh, and next day she too was prostrate with diphtheria. Lord Beaconsfield, in his speech of condolence in the House of Lords on the 16th of December, described her, with ornate rhetoric, as receiving “the kiss of death” from one of her children, and he recommended the tragic incident as fit to be commemorated by the painter, the sculptor, or the artist in gems. There was no foundation for this histrionic flight. Nobody knew how the Princess caught the contagion, but her biographer states “it is supposed that she must have taken the infection when one day, in her grief and despair, she had laid her head on her sick husband’s pillow.”[137] Her sufferings were severe and protracted, and on the 13th of December it was seen that she must die. Still she lingered on. In the afternoon she welcomed her husband with great joy. She saw her lady-in-waiting, and even read two letters, the last one being from the Queen, her mother. Then she fell asleep and never woke again. At half-past eight on the morning of the 14th, the anniversary of her father’s death, she passed away, quietly murmuring to herself these words: “From Friday to Saturday, four weeks—May—dear papa!” All through her life she had worshipped her father’s memory with passionate devotion, and in death his name was the last on her lips.

The grief of the Queen was only equalled by that of the Prince of Wales, who seems to have regarded the Grand Duchess as his favourite sister. As for the English people, they mourned for her with simple-minded sincerity. The character of the Princess Alice—so full of sense and enterprise, and high-spirited self-helpfulness—had been to them peculiarly attractive. She had won their gratitude by her devotion to her mother in the first hours of her widowhood, and to the Heir Apparent, when in 1871 his life hung in the balance. That her daily existence was clouded with sordid cares due to straitened means was not known to her countrymen till after her death. But they were well aware that much domestic sorrow had entered into her life. Her efforts to raise the condition of her sex in Germany procured for her many enemies in a country where it is deemed desirable to reduce the house-mothers to the position of upper servants in their families, who, however, do their work without claiming wages. Sticklers for Court etiquette were shocked by the unconventional activity manifested by the Princess in furthering the organisation of charitable and educational movements. Even the poor in most instances viewed her visits to their homes—visits which she ultimately found prudent to make incognito—with suspicious hostility. She had the character in fact of being bent on revolutionising the domestic and social life of Darmstadt by English ideas. She loved learning, and delighted in the society of men of letters and artists, who were always her most favoured guests. Hence it was bruited about that she was an infidel, and a foe to religion. Undoubtedly at one time, when she cultivated close relations with Friedrich Strauss, under whom she studied the works of Voltaire, her theological views ceased to be orthodox. But her musings on the mystery of life, the problem of duty, the conflict between Will and Law in the world, reveal a profoundly reverent and eagerly upstriving spirit, ever struggling towards the light. Some day the story of the spiritual conflict that went on in the still depths of this pure and gentle soul may be told. Here it is enough to say that personal influences played a great part in bringing it to a happy issue. Some time after her philosophical conclusions had crumbled away like dust, one of her most intimate relatives writes, “She told me herself, in the most simple and touching manner, how this change had come about. I could not listen to her story without tears. The Princess told me she owed it all to her child’s death, and to the influence of a Scotch gentleman, a friend of the Grand Duke’s and Grand Duchess’s,” who was residing with his family at Darmstadt.[138] “I owe all

to this kind friend,” she said, “who exercised such a beneficial influence on my religious views; yet people say so much that is cruel and unjust of him, and of my acquaintance with him.”[139] In Germany, her biographer[140] admits “her life and work were not easy,” and she had not the intrepid intellect, the ardent temperament, the caustic wit and the soaring ambition, which enabled her sister, the Crown Princess, to conquer for herself a position of dominant influence in the midst of an unsympathetic Court, and an antipathetic Society. Perhaps this explains why through life she had every year been drawn more closely to the land of her birth, where her worth was more justly appreciated than in the land of her exile. “How deep was her feeling in this respect,” writes the Princess Christian in her touching preface to her sister’s memoirs, “was testified by a request which she made to her husband, in anticipation of her death, that an English flag might be laid on her coffin; accompanying the wish with a modest expression of a hope that no one in the land of her adoption would take umbrage at her desire to be borne to her rest with the old English colours above her.”

CHAPTER XXII.

PEACE WHERE THERE IS NO PEACE.

From the bye-elections it was clear, when the New Year (1879) opened, that the prestige of the Ministry was waning. The spangled robe and gaudy diadem of Asiatic Imperialism began to sit uneasily on Constitutional England. The Treaty of Berlin had not brought Englishmen much “honour.” But it had not even brought Europe “peace.” Austria had to make good her hold of Bosnia and Herzegovina by war. Albania was in the hands of a rebel League that executed “Jetdart justice” on Turkish Pashas of the highest rank. Bulgaria and Thrace were only saved from anarchy by the Russian army of occupation. Eastern Roumelia was the scene of daily conflicts between the Turkish troops, and the people of Greece were clamorous to know when Turkey would respond to the invitation of the Conference, and rectify the Hellenic frontier. The discovery that Cyprus was a poor pestilential island, infinitely less valuable than most of the Ionian group, which Englishmen had given to Greece as a gift, was a profound disappointment to popular hopes, and led to an undue and exaggerated depreciation of its value as a place of arms. The Anglo-Turkish Convention was already seen to be a farce. The Sultan, after the resources of diplomatic menace had been well-nigh exhausted, conceded to the agents of England in Asia Minor a few illusory rights of surveillance. But he set on foot no reforms, and he made it plain that he would resist to the death any attempt to “open up” his Asiatic provinces under a British Protectorate to the enterprise of the British projector and pioneer. The Afghan War was unpopular, and though victory did not prove, as was feared, inconstant to our arms, the people seemed convinced, from the history of the first and second Afghan Wars, that a triumph would be almost as disastrous in its cost to India as a defeat. It was impossible now to conceal the fact that when the Indian troops were brought to Malta, the country was placed in a position of far greater peril than had been imagined. While Ministers were wasting their energies in protecting more or less imaginary interests in Eastern Europe, they were apparently quite ignorant that their policy had exposed the vital interests of the Empire to attack in Asia. Nay, it was seen that their policy of irritating and menacing the Afghan Ameer, and of terrifying the Native Princes with enforced disarmament, had rendered it easy for Russia, without doing more than giving our enemies and discontented feudatories merely some unofficial support, to shake the fabric of Indian Empire to its very centre. To put the Imperial Crown of India down among the stakes in Lord Beaconsfield’s game with Russia in Europe was magnificent. But men of sense and prudence now began to suspect that it was not good business or good diplomacy. Never was England less restful or less easy in mind. Abroad Lord Beaconsfield, as was said, had created a situation which was neither peace with its security, nor war with its happy chances. At home the classes were groaning over the collapse of their most remunerative investments, and the masses writhing under a fall of wages, which, in many trades, amounted to fifty per cent. To complete the popular feeling of depression, it was plain that the Government were fast drifting into another Kaffir War. On the 3rd of February, 1879, in fact, it was officially announced that hostilities with the Zulus had begun.

There is no difficulty in understanding the causes of the Zulu War. The Zulu king (Cetewayo) had ever been a staunch ally of England. But he had a blood-feud with the Boers of the Transvaal, and he claimed part of their territory as having been originally stolen by them from his race. When England in an evil moment annexed the Transvaal, she found that she took over with it the quarrel of the Boers with the Zulus. Cetewayo pressed his claims all the more confidently that a friendly Power now held the land which had been taken from him. In every colony there is a clique of land-speculators, who also, as a rule, form the War Party, and, by a singular coincidence, net most of the profits that are to be derived from a colonial war waged at the expense of the British taxpayer. This Party in Natal ridiculed the notion of giving Cetewayo his land. They also stirred up a war panic, vowing that the Zulus were only waiting for a favourable opportunity to pounce upon Natal and exterminate the Europeans. Sir Bartle Frere—“a prancing pro-consul,” as Sir William Harcourt called him—was High Commissioner at the Cape, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces there was Lord Chelmsford. A more ominous combination could hardly be imagined. Sir Bartle Frere even in India had been a hot annexationist. He had the restless brain to devise schemes of conquest, whilst his military colleague had neither the brain nor nerve to carry them out. The Blue-books indicate that Sir Bartle Frere had been preparing beforehand a grand project of conquest in South Africa.[141] Unfortunately, Sir M. Hicks-Beach was not sharp enough to detect and blight this scheme in the bud, and it is doubtful if he even suspected its existence till he was galvanised into vigilance by the startling ultimatum which Sir Bartle Frere suddenly sent to the Zulu king. The award of the British Boundary Commissioners on the dispute between the Zulus and the Boers had been in favour of the Zulus. It was given in June, 1878. Yet it had been kept back by Sir Bartle Frere, apparently to stimulate the War Party among the Zulus with the provocation of delay. Then when it was communicated to King Cetewayo, there was tacked on to it an irrelevant and menacing demand that King Cetewayo should immediately disband his whole army. “To make the case our own,” wrote Lord Blachford, one of the highest living authorities on Colonial Policy, “it is as if the Emperor of Germany, in concluding with us a Treaty of Commerce, suddenly annexed a notice that he would make war on us in six weeks unless before the expiration of that time we burnt our Navy.”[142] And the ultimatum was not only a crime, but a hideous blunder. To annihilate instead of utilising the Zulu power was to relieve the Boers of the Transvaal from the pressure on their flank that alone prevented them from throwing off the British yoke. But it was of no use to argue the case on the grounds of justice or common sense. “The men who had been in the country”—who always come forward to defend every act of folly that is about to be perpetrated in a distant colony—dinned their defence of Sir Bartle Frere into the ears of Englishmen, who were at last half persuaded that it must be the duty of England to exterminate the Zulus, when a satrap like Sir Bartle Frere was eager to annihilate them in the interests of Christianity. Moreover, as in the case of the Afghan War, the people were kept in utter ignorance of the arrogant ultimatum by which Frere had gone out of his way to fix a quarrel on King Cetewayo.

But if the crime was rank, the retribution by which it was avenged was swift and stern. Chelmsford’s advance guard crossed the Tugela on the 12th of January. A petty success was recorded at Ekowe on the 7th, and then on the 22nd of January the English column at Isandhlwana was smitten as with the sword of Gideon. Our troops were beaten not only in the actual conflict, but they were out-manœuvred and out-generalled. The barbarians under Cetewayo had fought like lions, and they had inflicted on a British army a defeat so disgraceful that the history of half a century supplies no parallel to it. Frere, like a reckless gambler, had staked everything on this cast of the die. Neither he nor Chelmsford had made provision for a disaster, and the result was that the rout of Isandhlwana left the whole colony of Natal, even then discounting the spoils of victory, open to invasion. Nothing, in fact, stood between the Europeans in Natal and extermination, save the little post of Rorke’s Drift. There Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, with a handful of men, stemmed the tide of invasion, and redeemed the honour of England which had been smirched by the political incapacity of Frere, and the military failure of Chelmsford. In vain did the Queen and the Duke of

Cambridge send sympathetic messages to the seat of war. It was reinforcements that were needed, if the English in South-East Africa were not to be driven into the sea. Parliament, when it met on the 8th of February, was as wrathful as the country. The Government had let Sir Bartle Frere drag the country into a war, which in a few days the disaster of Isandhlwana showed they were incompetent to conduct with credit to the Empire. If Ministers were not able to emerge, without ignominy, from a conflict with the Zulu king, what must have happened had they been allowed to challenge the Czar of Muscovy to mortal combat? Criticism was felt to be futile, in view of the pressing need to retrieve the disgrace of a defeat, none the less ignominious that the Government and their agents had courted it. But a stern demand was heard on all sides for the recall of Frere and Chelmsford, a demand which, like a vote of censure that was proposed in the House of Lords by Lord Lansdowne on the 25th, and in the Commons by Sir Charles Dilke on the 11th of March, Ministers evaded by administering a strong rebuke to the High Commissioner. As a man of spirit, Frere would have naturally resigned after this rebuke. But he held on to his place, and this was so discreditable, that to account for his conduct a strange theory was mooted. It was said that private letters were sent to him by high personages, some of them connected with the Government, assuring him that the censure of the Secretary of State was not meant to be taken as real, but had been penned merely to save Ministers from a Parliamentary defeat.[143] Sir M. Hicks-Beach’s despatch with the censure ended with these words: “But I have no desire to withdraw the confidence hitherto reposed in you.” Such was the feeble manner in which the Government dealt with a satrap who had virtually usurped the prerogative of the Sovereign to declare war. Soon after the Ministry had warded off the vote of censure in Parliament, the country was again agitated by tidings of further reverses in Zululand, and it was not till the 21st of April that the Government could announce that Pearson’s column, which had been locked up at Ekowe since the outbreak of the war, had been able to save itself by retreat. The indignation of the country grew apace, and at last it was found necessary to allay it by superseding Sir Bartle Frere’s authority in Natal and the Transvaal. Sir Garnet Wolseley was accordingly sent to take supreme command at the scene of action. Ere he could arrive Chelmsford, stimulated into action by Colonel Evelyn Wood, had however taken a decisive step. He gave the Zulus battle at Ulundi on the 3rd of July, and won a victory which put an end to the war. Cetewayo was taken prisoner on the 28th of August, and, despite the efforts made by Sir Garnet Wolseley and others to set up another Government for the one which had been destroyed, Zululand lapsed into the confusion and anarchy in which it has since remained.

The Afghan War had been more skilfully managed. The British invaders overcame all resistance, and when Parliament assembled General Stewart was in possession of Candahar, and Shere Ali had fled from Cabul. Soon afterwards he died, and his heir, Yakoob, came with his submission to the British camp at Gundamuk. There, on the 25th of May, he signed a Treaty which bound the Indian Government to give him a subsidy of £60,000 a year and defend him against his enemies, in return for which he ceded the “scientific frontier,” and agreed to manage his foreign policy in accordance with the advice of a British Resident who was to be received in Cabul. This gleam of success neutralised the effect of the reverses in South Africa, and both Houses voted their thanks to the Indian Viceroy and to the Generals who had carried out the expedition. The Government had no difficulty in persuading Parliament to sanction a loan of £2,000,000 without interest to India, to enable her to pay the expenses of the campaign. In fact, when the Session closed Ministers were jubilant at having upset the predictions of the experienced Anglo-Indians, who had declared that it was impossible to keep a British Resident at Cabul. They assured the nation not only that the British Resident was there, but that the Cabulees were delighted to receive him.

The severe winter of 1879 aggravated the distress which had settled like a blight on the labouring and trading classes, and the existence of which Ministers attempted to ignore. They were, indeed, so ill-advised as to propose a grant of money for the relief of the Turks, who were enduring great sufferings in the Rhodope district. But some of the Tory borough Members threatened to rebel if this project were persisted in, and it was withdrawn. The programme of domestic legislation was long and ambitious, and Ministers very properly began the Session by an attempt to guard against obstruction. They carried a rule which prevented any amendment from being made to the motion that the Speaker of the House of Commons leave the Chair on going into Committee of Supply on Monday nights. This enabled a Minister who came to explain his Estimates to do so at once, because it prevented private Members from interposing, between him and the Committee, with long and irrelevant debates on real and imaginary grievances. The chief measure of the Session was a Bill to consolidate the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War—a measure which still further extended the Parliamentary control of the Army by incorporating these Articles into an Act of Parliament. It was read a second time on the 7th of April; but when it went into Committee it attracted the attention of Mr. Parnell and his followers.

Mr. Parnell now appeared in the character of a British patriot and philanthropist who took an absorbing interest in perfecting the discipline of the Army and in ameliorating the condition of the private soldier. As in

the case of the Prisons Bill, he had mastered every detail of the subject, only he had become a much more formidable personage than he had been in 1877. He had deposed Mr. Butt from the leadership of the Irish party, and, for all practical purposes, he had taken his place.[144] He had shown Ireland that he had been able to procure for her, by one short year’s obstruction in 1877, not only the endowment of her secondary education, but even the release of several Fenian convicts in 1878—a year, said the Times, marked by the cessation of obstruction, and the good relations which obtained between the Government and the Home Rulers. In March he had discussed the Army Estimates with an ability and knowledge which even the Minister for War recognised; and when the Army Discipline Bill was sent before the House in Committee Mr. Parnell was conspicuous for his cleverness in exposing its anomalies, its obsolete applications of the principles of martial law, and its prevailing bias in favour of the officers and against the rank-and-file. When the 44th clause was reached, Mr. Parnell and his friends made a stand against the continuance of flogging in the Army, and at this stage Liberals vied with Ministerialists in denouncing their obstructive tactics. But Mr. Parnell persisted. He had foreseen that he was raising a popular cry. A General Election was at hand, and he knew that the moment it was discovered that he had touched the heart of the constituencies, it would be a question with the Liberals and Conservatives who were then storming at him as to who should be the first to fall into line with him. Mr. Parnell’s cynical prevision was justified by events.

Both parties, to do them justice, held out manfully night after night against the pressure of this appeal to the sordid side of their political character. But the longer the game of obstruction on the flogging question was played, the stronger grew the feeling among the populace against flogging, and night after night Mr. Parnell was at his post with cold malice giving an additional turn to the electoral screw. The first to succumb to the torture was Mr. Chamberlain, and something like a faded smile flitted across Mr. Parnell’s stony visage when that successful and practical politician scurried into his camp. Mr. Chamberlain’s unexpected speech against flogging fell like a bombshell in the House of Commons, where it was understood that Englishmen of all parties had entered into an honourable understanding to meet Mr. Parnell’s obstructive policy with a firm and united resistance. It was a speech which, as Sir Robert Peel very justly said, “entirely upset the calculations of the Government,”[145] a fact which was forgotten or concealed by those critics of Lord Beaconsfield’s Administration who afterwards vilipended them for their weak and vacillating attitude to this question. No sooner had Mr. Chamberlain deserted to the Irish ranks than he found himself the object of unsparing obloquy which Liberals and Conservatives impartially bestowed on him. Of course other Radicals, if they desired to save their seats in a General Election, were forced to follow him, and as soon as Mr. Parnell found that he had lured nearly the whole Radical party into his net, he and the Irish Members suddenly vanished from the scene as leaders in the struggle. They were never absent from their posts, and they never failed to support the cause they had espoused by their votes. But they thrust the work of obstruction and of speaking on the Liberal and Radical Members who had tardily become their allies. The advantage they gained was soon apparent. Mr. Chamberlain speedily lost his temper, and not only publicly quarrelled with Lord Hartington, but one evening he even insulted him amidst furious cries of protest from the Liberal benches, by describing him as “the late Leader of the Liberal Party.”[146] Nothing could be more complete than the disintegration of the Liberal Party which Mr. Chamberlain thus produced, unless it were the perplexity of the Ministry. The Tories did not dare to stand by the lash as a British institution unless they got what they had been promised—the loyal support of the Opposition. Yet under Mr. Chamberlain’s obstructive agitation, and under popular pressure from the constituencies, it was clear that the Opposition was going over piecemeal to the opponents of flogging. What wonder, then, that Colonel Stanley, the Minister of War, temporised, when Mr. Chamberlain extorted from him a damaging schedule, giving a list of the offences for which a soldier could be flogged?

Debates instinct with a strange kind of fierce frivolity raged as to the sort of “cat” that should be used in flogging a soldier. Infinite time was wasted in discussing whether the word “lashes” should be used instead of “stripes” in the Act, Mr. Chamberlain being beaten in his effort to get the word “stripes” inserted. Endless discussions arose as to the maximum number of lashes that should be sanctioned. When there was any sign of hesitancy Irish obstructionists were always ready to join in the fray, and not only screw Mr. Chamberlain up to the “sticking point,” but ironically suggest that Liberal and Conservative leaders would alike find it profitable to go to the country in the coming election, with a “new cat and an old Constitution,” as a taking “cry.” Colonel Stanley at last gave way, and offered to reduce the maximum number of lashes from fifty to twenty-five, whereupon Mr. Chamberlain showed that he was as dangerous to run away from as Mr. Parnell. Indeed, all through these debates Mr. Chamberlain fought the battle of obstruction with an amount of courage and fertility of resource that placed him in the front rank of Parliamentary gladiators. Friends and foes alike admitted that but for his asperity of temper he might have disputed the palm of success even with Mr. Parnell himself. The fight was virtually won when Colonel Stanley proposed to reduce the number of lashes from fifty to twenty-five. Even Lord Hartington then made haste to go over to Mr. Chamberlain whilst it was yet time, just as Mr. Chamberlain had made haste to desert to Mr. Parnell.

On the 17th of July Lord Hartington accordingly proposed that corporal punishment should be abolished for all military offences. Though on a division he was beaten by a majority of 106, it was felt that the “cat-o’-nine-tails” was doomed whenever a Liberal Government came into power. It was foreseen that at the next election many Conservative Members would be driven from their seats, because they had been forced to vote in the majority, and the Ministerialists denounced Lord Hartington’s surrender to Mr. Parnell and Mr. Chamberlain with exceeding bitterness. As Lord Salisbury said in addressing a Tory meeting in the City of London, Lord Hartington was like the Sultan, because, though he had a group of political Bashi-Bazouks in his party, whom he could not control, and whose conduct he politely deprecated, yet his motion showed he would not hesitate to profit by their misdeeds, when the conflict of parties was fought out at the polls. As it was, the Government were only able to obtain their majority by agreeing to restrict corporal punishment to those offences which were then punishable by death.

The only other Bill of importance passed during the Session was one dealing with Irish University education. It abolished the Queen’s University, and substituted for it the Royal University of Ireland, an examining body like the University of London, empowered to grant degrees, except in Theology, to all qualified students who might present themselves.

The Budget, as might be expected, was by no means a popular one. Since 1878 extraordinary expenditure, incurred on account of an adventurous Foreign Policy, had simply been treated as a deferred liability. On the 3rd of April Sir Stafford Northcote, in explaining his Budget, admitted that the revenue, which he had estimated at £83,230,000, had fallen short of that sum by £110,000. As for his expenditure, it had exceeded his estimate by £4,388,000. He had therefore no money in hand with which to meet the deferred liabilities of 1878-79; in fact, he was face to face with a fresh deficit. Comparing his actual revenue with his actual expenditure, the deficit was seen to amount to £2,291,000. The position, then, was this. In 1878 he had paid off £2,750,000 by bills, which he thought he would have been able to meet in 1879. Now he found he could not meet them. These he reserved